Triad 4 of 32 · 2026-09-27 · Difficulty 4 · Shared figure or motif, Oblique/structural, Conflict
The thread
A personification is a machine that turns many particulars into one speaking body. Breen describes the machine (medieval personifications as tools of thought, sorted by the universals debate into Platonic, Aristotelian/nominalist and ‘Prudentian’ types; ‘We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us’). Erasmus’s Folly is the machine taking the floor: an abstraction that refuses definition (‘a sketch which would be a mere shadow of myself when I am here before you’), mocks the ‘realists, nominalists, Thomists…’ whose quarrel Breen uses to classify her, and ends ‘forgetting who I am’. Michaux’s Plume runs it backwards: a particular ‘not imposing enough or universal enough to assume outright allegorical significance’ (Sieburth), whose name slides into initials (A., once ‘Eache’; G.; B.), and whose author concludes ‘SELF is but a point of equilibrium … An averaged “self,” a crowd movement.’ Traffic runs downward in Breen, sideways in Erasmus, upward in Michaux. Conflict: ‘I am myself wherever I am’ vs ‘There is no self.‘
The three books
- Machines of the Mind: Personification in Medieval Literature, Katharine Breen; 2021. The machine described: the theory of personification as a tool of thought, with a typology keyed to the universals debate that places the other two books.
- Praise of Folly, Desiderius Erasmus, Betty Radice (translator); 1511. The machine takes the floor: a personification delivering her own encomium, refusing definition, mocking the universals debate, and finally forgetting who she is.
- A Certain Plume, Henri Michaux, Richard Sieburth (translator); 1930. The machine run backwards: a particular who never becomes universal; the name thins into initials and the author declares the self an averaged persona.
Notebook
- Folly’s definition problem: let one of your abstractions (gesture, labyrinth, utterance) deliver a first-person encomium that refuses definition (‘a mere shadow of myself when I am here before you’, Folly pp. 12–13) and, like Folly, forgets who it is before the end (p. 134).
- Write an ‘Eache’: Michaux’s A. was first named ‘Eache’ (Notes). Write a prose piece whose protagonist is Every, Any or Some, under Breen’s rule that nominalist personifications ‘prompt readers to conceptualize’ universals (p. 24).
- The persona file: build a product-design persona sheet for John Roapes as Breen’s Ford engineers built ‘Antonella’ (pp. 1–3), against Michaux’s ‘an averaged “self,” a crowd movement’ (Postface); mark representative vs idiosyncratic details (p. 24) and what it does when it follows ‘its own internal logic’ (p. 4).
Rabbit holes
Links as checked on the day of the reading.
- Klima, ‘The Medieval Problem of Universals’, SEP https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/universals-medieval/
- Prudentius, Psychomachia, trans. H. J. Thomson (Loeb vol. 1), Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/prudentiuswithen01pruduoft
- Rummel & MacPhail, ‘Desiderius Erasmus’, SEP https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/erasmus/
- Holbein marginal drawings for the Praise of Folly (Kunstmuseum Basel), Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Praise_of_Folly_(Holbein)
- Poe, ‘The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether’, Poe Society of Baltimore https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/tarrb.htm
- NYRB, A Certain Plume https://www.nyrb.com/products/a-certain-plume
To carry
“In the name of the many, I sign this book.” — Henri Michaux, Postface to Plume (1938), in A Certain Plume, trans. Richard Sieburth
Themes
allegory as machine · folly · heteronym · mock encomium · names and initials · nominalism · persona · personification · prosopopoeia · Prudentius · self as crowd · universals
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