Tout se passe comme si la faute originelle, la faille qui marque, de fac¸on inde´le´bile, le re´cit de la naissance, avait induit une e´conomie narrative qui ne peut trouver de bute´e d’arreˆt; de vengeance en vengeance, de corps en corps, de re´cit en re´cit, la blessure initiale migre sans fin. (ll. 241–242)
[Everything happens as if the original transgression, which marks indelibly the story of the birth, had set in motion a narrative economy that can reach no end point: from vengeance to vengeance, from body to body, from story to story, the initial wound migrates, endlessly.]
Now, there are parallels to be drawn with the magic chair of the Fairy of Roche Menor. Perceval, like Caradoc, is led into a trap so that he can serve as a sacrificial victim, yet allow it to appear that he himself has sinned. The sin in this case is not adultery: it is sodomy. The lure is not decapitation in one fell blow but the capture of the secret of the Grail with its attendant fame and glory. Just as the decapitation motif is a set- up for Caradoc, Perceval’s sitting on the si`ege p´erilleux puts him in the dangerous position of having to atone for someone else’s sin. In putting his life at risk, Perceval saves his fellow knights from hell, but this is not the end of the cycle of violence: it is just the beginning. Because the stakes are set by magic, the cycle of family debt and atonement will not be ended by his saving the knights of Sodom any more than Eliavre´s’ recapitation repaid the debt of vengeance supposedly inaugurated by Caradoc’s blow.58 Caradoc’s subsequent actions enact a simulacrum of vengeance that only appears to settle accounts. Perceval’s freeing of the blackened knights is similar in that it is a staged liberation that obscures the true cycle of violence in which he has been caught.
Caradoc’s example forces us to look closer at the terms of Perceval’s victimization. If Perceval’s “sin” is no more real than Caradoc’s, yet heis asked to pay a real price, then whose “sin” is at stake here? Caradoc becomes a murderer to atone for adultery; Perceval becomes an avenger to compensate for an act of sodomy. The elision from one “sin” to the other is telling. According to the logic of the text, Eliavre´s is the adulterer who finds a victim to atone for him. Who is the “sodomite” who needs Perceval as his unwitting redeemer? Is it his deceased father, the former knight? His mysterious uncles, the Fisher King, or hermit? His dead brothers, knights all? King Arthur himself, or the knights of his Round Table? It is impossible to exclude any of these possibilities since, again according to Peter Damian’s influential logic, sodomy is a sin ever present, always lurking, impossible to prove, perhaps more rec- ognizable to the accuser than the accused. The knights who escape hell with Perceval’s unwitting liberation seem surprised to have found them- selves among the sodomites. Is this the famous lack of self-reflection of Dante’s sinners or do they really fall among the sodomites because that is the pit in which all men fall – sodomy as the Lacanian Real (what is excluded from symbolization), the pit around which masculinity con- structs itself?59 If, on the other hand, we follow the fairy’s logic, then sodomy is to be read as an original sin, an essential stain, and Perceval truly is the redeemer of all knights, at least from the perspective of ortho- dox paternal law.60 I suspect that the fairy and the clerks who composed much of the Grail material had this, and perhaps much more, in com- mon. To inculpate on the basis of an original, same-sex identification means not only that we are all guilty but that the foreclosed possibility of same-sex desire is always present, if occluded, and ever ready to sur- face. It means that the fairy and our authors understand that identity is based on repudiation and lack, that the very concept of stain is con- structed as a game of perspective (which is the foreground and which the background?), and that sin itself is essential to identity formation. As Judith Butler says, discussing Althusser’s notion of interpellation: “the very possibility of subject formation depends upon a passionate pursuit of a recognition which, within the terms of the religious example, is inseparable from a condemnation.”61
To return then to the passages cited from Gerbert’s text: the first offers a rather extraordinary, if crude, metaphor of anal penetration and elimi- nation (or ejaculation). Like Woody Allen as a hapless sperm, bracing for expulsion on the trip of his life,62 these young knights are plummetedinto a pit marked by darkness and heat where same-sex erotic attrac- tion is the only sin in town. When finally someone sits on the chair above them, the hole by which they entered their subterranean hangout reopens as if by magic and they are propelled from the pit, landing at the feet of the seated Perceval. Even the lightly disguised intestinal inferno is apparently not a sufficient deterrent to the other knights, so Arthur feels compelled to draw the lesson once again for those for whom it has been staged. He first remarks, as he looks at our six, presumably dirty survivors, that those down below are “entechie” with sin, “stained,” here a literal use of the most common medieval metaphor for the sinner. His next statement is curious. Why would the sinners down there be amazed to find themselves in sodomite’s hell and why is he so amazed when he learns about it? Is it the fact that such punishment exists, that there really is a hell? Are the supposed sinners unaware that what they did was wrong? That they got caught? That his own knights could be found among such company? That perhaps God made a mistake? Either we assume that the young pretenders to the Chair did indeed prefer men as sexual partners, or that an infallible God somehow got it wrong. If the former is true, then did they need a trip to hell to admit it? And if they did not share those preferences, then why is that all they can report? Is that all there is down there or is that just all they see? If Perceval is the liberator who will free all men from sin, like Christ opening the gates of hell, would his very first priority really be to save falsely accused knights from the pit of sodomy? Is it not more likely that the aim of those whose interests he represents is to save all knights from their “tendencies” by extirpating the entire category? If, as a further consequence of his liberat- ing campaign, he is to free the gaste terre from the scourge of sterility, then we should perhaps look more closely at that metaphor. Might not the barrenness of that wasted land be figured as a land of sodomites, Sodom and Gomorrah destroyed by fire, or the fiery plain of Dante’s Inferno 15 and 16?63
The true force of Arthur’s inquiry is carried by his next pronounce- ments, consisting of a series of performatives delivered before the assem- bled court: “Honis sera . . .” (Shame on he who . . .), “De mal fu soit” (May he be consumed by an evil flame . . .) and “Beneois soit . . .” (Blessed be he who . . .). It is in these enunciations that Arthur rejoins his predecessors in homophobic rhetoric (the Eneas women, Guinevere,Alain de Lille, Peter Damian, etc.), for the accusation of sodomy always acts within romance as a type of hate speech, and thus as a potential performative. That is, the accusation performs its own dirty work in the time of its enunciation, even as it claims that the true pains are yet to come. Arthur pretends to be shocked by what he has heard, and can thus pretend that what he is saying is original to him; but he speaks in a language that carries the force of tradition. According to Judith Butler’s recent work on this question, the citationality of performatives both increases their virulence and the responsibility of the speaker for the added force of the threat or blow.64 Arthur’s performatives are both illo- cutionary (in that they wound as they are uttered before the assembled court) and perlocutionary (because they promise future retribution). As in other cases of homophobic discourse, even from the twelfth century, under ideal conditions the speech act can actually constitute a subject through discourse or can have that as its intention as it is enunciated. Think of how the popular schoolyard epithet of “faggot” works: it makes the subject a faggot, i.e., different and despised, whether or not the sub- ject conforms in any way to the terms that define the category or even knows what the term means.
How are those ideal performative conditions met in this key scene? According to J. L. Austin’s classification, quite well.65 The king, as King, speaks in a conventional manner; his audience has certain expectations ab
out the force of his discourse; the utterance is performed correctly and completely (in that the blessing and condemnation are in line with the story just told by the knights returned from hell and kings are expected to bless and condemn). Furthermore, Arthur is very convincing in claiming that the words represent his own feelings, and there is every reason to believe that his word will be taken as law. The pronouncement gains in virulence precisely because it is not directed to any one figure at court but rather to a whole group of knights. It is through their eyes that we witness the si`ege p´erilleux, it is for their gaze that the whole scene was concocted, in order to constitute them, and the listeners and readers of romance, as Arthurian, ergo masculine, subjects.
Gerbert’s Continuation is so effective in linking the sodomy and si`ege p´erilleux topoi because it conjoins the haunting fear of failure that defines masculinity and the specter of same-sex relations that permeates anyall-male environment. In Gerbert’s schema the pit is always right there beneath the magic chair, and the magic chair must forever be at the head of that table, in accordance with Arthur’s oath. Just imagine how hollow the knights’ footsteps must ring after this scene and how the arbitrary incrimination of innocence and difference must echo throughout the ensuing quest. Ever present but unacknowledged, hinted at without being revealed, an active force of coercion rather than a passive force of repression, Sedgwick’s “open secret” acts as “a mechanism for regulat- ing the behavior of the many by the specific oppression of the few.”66
Perceval is driven to sit on that chair precisely because other knights cannot, and it is doing what they cannot do that makes him a man. The pride, presumption, and competitive spirit of knightly culture lead here to an ambiguously anal end. What are the options within masculinity if one were to follow the implications of this text? Sodomite or savior: the polarizing extremes of hypermasculinity. No actual sexual act or desire is required other than wanting to sit where other men have tried to sit, wanting to be what they might have been. And that one desire leads in this text to a series of sexualized metaphors: expulsion, inser- tion, ejaculation, and withdrawal. Whatever can these knights’ sin be but mimetic desire, same-sex modeling, seen through the lens of homo- phobia as leading inevitably, perhaps even instinctively, to the fearsome specter of same-sex love? Hence, the double-bind, the disciplinarian’s dream: knights must be like other knights, only better; yet wanting to be like other knights leaves one open to charges of sodomy. Where then does this leave heterosexuality? It seems so fragile here, almost invisi- ble, a shadowy alternative to the place where every knight is inevitably drawn – the fairy’s magic chair.67
By the time that the narrator of the roughly contemporaneous Queste del Saint Graal took up the topos of the si`ege p´erilleux, the roster of candidates had changed and the link with sodomy is no longer so openly evoked, but male sexuality is still central to the episode. Galahad, son of Lancelot, is “si bel enfant et si bien taillie´ de toz membres que a peines trovast len son pareil ou monde” (such a beautiful boy and so well formed in each part of his body that you would be hard-pressed to find his equal in the world [Queste, 2]). The magic chair is this time written upon so as to identify its role as arbiter of excellence. Lancelot,rightly concerned over his knightly cohorts’ sometimes excessive drive to better one another, decides that the inscription on the chair must be covered with a veil until the chosen one has arrived. The seat is explicitly called dangerous, presumably because it will exert its fatal attraction over knights willing to give up their lives to enhance their reputations in the eyes of other men. By the time that the knights arrive at the castle, however, the inscription has been altered. The new message states explicitly that this seat is for Galahad (“Ci est li sieges Galaad” [l. 8]), “a cui il n’en fut mescheu en aucune maniere ne mes a cestui” (where none but he has ever sat unscathed [l. 9]). Henceforth it is the virginity of Galahad that emerges as the major requirement of chair occupancy. Credentials as heterosexual lover no longer qualify, as Perceval and Lancelot learned earlier. They might get you the title but not the final prize. The polarity of masculinity is reinscribed, but differently: no longer the binary, heterosexuality or sodomy; the choice is now heterosexuality or chaste androgyny.
As R. Howard Bloch once noted, some medieval genres responded to societal dilemmas in much the same way that an innovative inqui- sitional judicial system responded to the faltering institutions of the feudal world. That is, we can speculate that romance gained in pop- ularity after 1160 first because it provided a means of conceptualizing complex social negotiations as the face of feudalism was transformed under a strengthened monarchy; and secondly because it offered repre- sentations of newly emerging social roles. The Grail texts exemplify this second order of representation in that they offer new models of mas- culinity, independent of the demands of marriage and war. Whereas in earlier romance texts sodomy was invoked so as to re-establish a het- erosexual imperative leading to the founding of genealogical lines and the clean transfer of power, Gerbert’s Continuation raises the specter of sodomy without ever really eradicating it or subsuming it under a socially sanctioned institution like marriage. Instead, the knights remain at their table, men among men, subject to the gazes of one another and a patriarchal order which can only invoke the voice of a fairy to justify its ends.
When the knights who have returned from the circle of sodomy tell Arthur that the chair was given to him by the “fe´e de Roche Menor,” it is to let all those stained with that vice know what awaits them in thenext world. It is as if the role of the chair has finally been revealed: not to identify the knight who will learn the Grail secrets but to keep the rest of them in line. In at least one sense, then, Gerbert is himself a fairy. It is his text which performs this function of setting up the discriminating criterion, not the embedded curse of a diegetic malefactor. When the returned knights tell the court that the fairy knew that one knight would appear to save them from the abyss, a knight whose “bonte´” and “vaillance” would also allow him to find the grail and lance, they are explicitly linking the liberation from sodomy to the liberation from the curse of the gaste terre. Suddenly, the world in which these characters wander begins to look like that spot of hell. To return to a point made earlier, the dry and accursed plains of the Fisher King’s land sound like the fiery plains of the biblical Sodom (Genesis 19), and this comparison is strengthened further along in Gerbert’s tale when Perceval surveys the destruction visited on the land by a knight whose shield bears the image of a fire-breathing dragon. Here is the description from Gerbert’s Continuation of Perceval’s entry into this land and his meeting with the woman dressed backwards:
Pensant est un val avalez, / Entrez est en gaste contree....
Il sambloit que dedens un re´ / Eu st este´ars ses amis, / Qui par dedens le char fu mis, / Que piez, jambes, quisses et ventre / Avoit ars, al mien escientre; / tresci par deseure le chaint / L’avait li fus ars et ataint: / Tains et noirs fu tot l’aparent. (ll. 8906–8907, 8920–8927)
[Deep in thought, he went into a deep valley: he had entered the Wasteland....
It looked like her friend/lover, who was laid out in the wagon [she was hauling] had been burned in an oven: his feet, legs, thighs and abdomen had all been charred, or so it seemed to me. The fire had reached right up to and just above his waist. Everything you could see of him was black and discolored.]
A later description of the Gaste Chit´e, as described by the devil, provides further details:
la terre si desertee, / une jornee tot entor / n’a vile, ne chastel, ne tor / ou demore´ ait un estruit / que n’aie fondu et destruit: / bien le verras en ceste voiage, / que tu morras de fain a rage / se tu maintiens plus ceste voie. (ll. 14452–14459)
[the land is so deserted, during a whole’s day travel you see no city, castle, tower, dwelling or building of any type which hasn’t been knocked down and destroyed. You’ll see this during your voyage for you’ll surely die of hunger or rage if you stay on this path.]
&
nbsp; These descriptions of the destruction and barrenness of the land recall both the consequences of feuds of vengeance (faides [l. 13600]) in a world of masculine privilege and the aftermath of divine punishment. The connection between the Fisher King’s genital wound and subsequent sterility, the state of perpetual warfare, the destruction of the land, and the pit of sodomy beneath it is established most explicitly in Gerbert’s text. It is at least implied that when Perceval saves the knights from the pit he saves all potential sodomites, i.e., all inhabitants of the land, from the same fate, and that sodomy is a scourge which is never far from the excesses of competitive violence. The grail and lance as sexual symbols of male and female genitalia, the lance as weeping phallus, begin to make more sense if we refigure the gaste terre as the plain of Sodom and the wound of the King as the curse of sexual transgression.
Gerbert encourages such a reading, however subtly. When Perceval stays up one night to learn how his enemies’ armies seem to come back each morning refreshed and renewed, with a limitless supply of men, he meets a mysterious old woman, the purveyor of a magic potion that brings the dead back to life. Perceval confronts her, since these are his enemies being resuscitated, and the woman recognizes him instantly. She tells him that he is aptly named, for it is thanks to him that the val will be perchiez: “et li lius frais et depechiez / Ou li basmes est enserrez” (the valley will be pierced and the spot where the balm is held will be broken and destroyed [ll. 5669–5671]). Her dire prediction, which goes on to link Perceval with rape and the sexual transgressions of his family, is a prelude to her explanation for her actions. She has been sent by the King of the Gaste Chit´e to keep up the assault on Gornemaut’s castle because it is he who made Perceval a knight. This king she refers to as li tyrans soudomites (l. 5716). He is later identified as Luciabiax and his domain is again called the Gaste Chit´e (l. 14451). Because of her service to this implacable foe, Perceval beheads her and takes possession of her barrels of magic potion. Her speech provides one more piece of evidence that someone is making connections between the sodomites beneath theearth, the plague on the land, and the sins of Perceval’s family.68 The sodomites are singled out above all others as those responsible for the sterility that is the source of the total destruction of the land. According to Mark Jordan, summarizing one current of medieval thought on this matter: “The [Church] law says that because of this crime there come about famine and plagues, and earthquakes. . . . Again Sodomites are the adversaries of God, and murderers and destroyers of humankind.”69
Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature Page 17