Situational Poetics in Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid
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which he calls an “unhomely space and time” (54–55). The unheimlich chronotope of Henryson’s supplement14 is an important focus of Situational Poetics. However, so are the multiple articulations of the kind of work that, as Bhabha suggested, “give[s] narrative form to minority positions; the outside of the inside, the part in the whole” (Bhabha “Culture’s In-Between” 58). In Stuart Hall’s influential formulation, the word “articulation” conveys a useful double sense:

“Articulate” means to utter, to speak forth, to be articulate. It also carries that sense of language-ing, of expressing, etc. But we also speak of an “articulated” lorry: a lorry where the front (cab) and back (trailer) can, but need not necessarily, be connected to one another. The two parts are connected to each other through a specific linkage that can be broken. An articulation is thus the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessarily determined, absolute and essential for all time. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made? (Hall “Problem” 141).

The Testament is elaborately linked to Scottish as well as English literary culture. A hybrid deliberately situated within a space of “culture-sympathy and culture-clash,” but subject to subsequent evolutions in circumstances and conditions that contain or rebuff the Testament in ways Henryson could never have foreseen. He takes pains to stress cultural differences, but his work is less fiercely nationalistic than that of his contemporary Blind Hary and more broadly international in the linkages it forms with classical humanism and authorial paradigms.15 Henryson’s Scottish inflection of the Chaucer tradition established the contours of this unheimlich chronotope within English literature and outside of England, which the later makars Douglas and Lindsay can be seen adapting to changing conditions.

My approach is rooted in contemporary thought about place and situatedness as well as the dislocations and double consciousness of a minor literature bordering a major one. In the terms of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,