St. Erkenwald on the Caracter

Abstract

This chapter proposes that the anonymous poem St. Erkenwald should be recognized as a riddle, generated from a withheld word that is everywhere recognizable within it. The poem is engineered so as to set up, by formal means, a thought experiment that represents an intervention into some permanently and essentially unresolvable problems in the theory of signification: those of the theurgical and baptismal “characters.” Eluding scholarly attempts to reduce it to its supposed historical, political, or aesthetic stakes, Erkenwald would attain to the status of a properly literary work insofar as it constitutes in this manner a trap for interpretation.