If we pursued this reading using psychoanalysis we could argue that Narcisus is actually pre-Oedipal, that he is replicating in this drama the story of his own parents: his hunter-self (the paternal model) pursues and attacks his hunted-self (the raped mother). He is thus both caught in the snare of maternal love from which he has no paternal threat to save him and caught in the imaginary, the mirrored fantasy of plenitude represented by the mother to whom he has brought the phallus. I would like, rather, to emphasize that he has been forced into this confrontation with the image, prematurely perhaps, through the intervention of others’ desires. Rather than express complicity with the indictment of Narcisus that one finds in most of these texts, I want to argue that, like Perceval in the preceding chapter, he has been used as a pawn by others to their own ends: in this case the punitive instantiation of heterosexuality.
Furthermore, we could read Narcisus’ identification in more strictly Freudian terms. In his essay, “On Narcissism,” Freud discusses the sub- ject who is not able to give up a satisfaction that he once enjoyed: “He is not willing to forego the narcissistic perfection of his childhood; and when, as he grows up, he is disturbed by the admonitions of others and by the awakening of his own critical judgment, so that he can no longer retain that perfection, he seeks to recover it in the new form of an ego ideal. What he projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal.”23 Freud goes on to distinguish between sublimation, in which the subject directs itselftoward an aim as a way of deflecting sexual satisfaction, and idealization, in which the subject idealizes an object in a kind of sexual overvalua- tion. We could take Perceval and Guigemar as two figures subject to these strategies: Perceval, who sees in the shining vision of knighthood at the beginning of the Conte du graal an ideal in which to sublimate sexuality, and Narcisus, who sees in the reflected object (image) an ideal in which to invest sexual energy. In other words, they simply represent two resolutions to the same dilemma, two possible paths. My only prob- lem with this analysis is that when viewed through a heteronormative prism, one is pathologized (Narcisus) and the other is at least nominally celebrated (Perceval), a move that denies their inherent similarity while still culpabilizing Perceval for an unnamed sin. According to Freud, “the formation of an ideal . . . is the most powerful factor favoring repres- sion; sublimation is a way out, a way by which those demands can be met without involving repression.”24 But certainly it is the ideologi- cal framework within which that subject idealizes and sublimates that determines whether repression is necessary, whether it leads to death, or whether the object to which sexuality is sublimated (homosocial activities) is considered appropriate, and therefore “a way out.”
Our twelfth-century Narcisus is so susceptible to Dane´ largely because she already represents a first step toward this ego ideal. She is a proleptic vision of his own double, and therefore, unsettling. He is, after all, her equal in beauty (“Ne sui gaires mains biaux de toi” [134, 684]) and it is remarked that the express importance of his suffering is to ensure that he will understand her suffering: “Or sen je bien com lor estoit” (Now I understand what it was like for them [694–695]); “Car quant je ri, je li voi rire, / Quant je sospir, ele souspire, / Et quant je plor, ele autretel” (For when I laugh, I see her laugh, when I sigh she sighs; and when I cry, she does the same [134, 705–707]). This exaggerated reciprocity is a parody of love and of the rhetoric of the “Other self ” that we find in monastic writings and in Cicero. As the poet beats on the drum of difference, Narcisus castigates himself, bitterly denouncing the imaginary state in which he has become entrapped: “En moi est tot quanque je vueil / Et si ne sai dont je me doeul . . . je sui ce que je tant desir . . . Por quoi n’en fa ge mon talen?” (In me is everything I want and yet I don’t know why I suffer so . . . I am myself what I so desire . . . so why do I not do what I need to do to satisfy my desire?[144, 905–907, 910]). By the end of his monologue, Narcisus has con- cluded, as intended, that he is himself to blame for his suffering. Guilty of not having listened to Dane´, guilty of not having acted on her ini- tiative, he imagines that the inevitable conclusion foisted upon him is original to him: he deserves to die (“Bien me devoit maus avenir . . . quoi qu’il parole et il se blasme, / Li cuers li faut,. iii. fois se pasme” [It is only right that evil befall me . . . as he speaks and blames himself, his heart fails and three times he loses consciousness] [146, 943, 961–962]).
Narcisus’ behavior is usually equated with selfishness, apathy, lack of empathy; but how his behavior differs from that of others who are in love is not clear. As Steven Brahm has shown, such readings are an attempt:
to efface the homoerotic by discounting Narcissus as delusional; to efface the homoerotic by transforming Narcissus into a woman; to efface the homoerotic by promoting it as the necessary other against which heterosexuality can be invented: these are the markers of the historically diachronic Narcissus that have rendered him pathetic, delusional, and so very useful.25
Has Narcisus really acted any differently than one would expect? Would not true lovers of any kind or persuasion be too caught up in their beloved to accept an offer like Dane´’s? And is not Dane´’s infatuation with Narcisus every bit as imaginary, delusional, and self-replicating as his love for the image? These questions bring us back to Guigemar, a text unmistakably haunted by the figure of Narcisus.
There is one expression at the end of the incriminating passage cited above in which Guigemar is explicitly marked by his difference. Marie says that Guigemar is thought to be “a peri” (67) and claims that all who have seen him recognize this. This is the very same term used by Dane´ in the Narcisus to signal her distress and psychological imbalance after Narcisus’ refusal: “Venus, qui m’a traie, / Ensanble qu diu d’amors ton fil, / Giete me hors de cest peril / Et de celui prende´s vengance / Por cui je muir sans esperance” (130, 612–616). “A peri” can be translated most nearly as “in danger, in peril,” yet none of the translations that I have consulted has rendered it this way. Instead, we read that: “this refusal was reproached as a black mark against him by foreigners and friends alike”;26 that “both friends and foes gave him up for lost.”27 Marieconcurs with Dane´ and her text could not be clearer: erotic attachments are extremely dangerous when they do not conform to cultural norms. Guigemar’s difference attracts the community’s attention to a degree that puts his life at risk.
What is this mark, clearly visible even to strangers, that will occa- sion Guigemar’s complete transformation? Marie began the passage by attributing the blame for his being remarkable, or different, either to Nature or to his own flawed will, and in terms that recall, albeit some- what ambiguously, Alain de Lille’s De planctu naturae. Though contem- porary (De planctu is usually dated to 1155–60), Alain’s text does not seem to have been widely known in the twelfth century. It does, however, find some echo here; perhaps only because Alain and Marie de France were both in the sway of some of the same literary and scientific discourses then current in Plantagenet intellectual circles. Both authors are thought to have had some attachment to the court of Henry II and Eleanore of Aquitaine and this court seems to have had a particular interest in sorting out and refiguring the historical, monastic, and rhetorical connotations of sodomy, especially as they claimed descent from the Trojan line.28
As in Alain’s De planctu, Nature is blamed for Guigemar’s “defect,” but Nature is herself flawed as well. As the apparition explains to the nar- rator in the De planctu, men are ultimately responsible for their own behavior, even when Nature has been negligent in the exercise of the divine plan. This somewhat schizoid analysis – that Nature is at fault but men must still do penance – is still evoked in Dante over a century later and in Papal doctrine to the present day.29 Alain certainly, and often Marie, too, have been seen as supporting a heterosexist presumption in their writing, but there is a case to be made that neither is as absolutist as might appear, or at least that the heterosexu
ality to which they refer is a much more fluid field than the nineteenth- and twentieth-century model to which it gave birth. Alain’s condemnation of sodomy is done in such a wildly extravagant rhetorical form, and couched in such out- landish grammatical claims, that critics have sometimes taken at face value what needs to be seen as potentially ironic; and, at any rate, it is never clear that the only alternative to the sodomite for today’s readers is the modern heterosexual. In between those two extremes would lie a vast field ranging from celibacy to those who reproduce without pleasure. Beyond the evident condemnation of forced marriage and pleading forconsensual heterosexual pairings that one finds in the Lais, Marie is also attentive to the subtle allusions to same-sex desire she might have found in the Celtic material from which she worked and to contempo- rary literary models such as the Eneas.30 Her real interests seem to be intertextual as much as moral; rhetorical and anthropological as much as didactic.
The Celts, after all, were associated throughout the classical period with deviant sexual practices. This does not necessarily mean that these accounts are in any way true, but if they were based on evidence, how- ever misinterpreted, the conservative oral folk tradition of the Celts might also have preserved echoes of these homoerotic practices in the warrior class into the twelfth century.31 Marie’s interest in these some- times morally ambiguous tales (at least from a Christian viewpoint) suggests that she saw in them material that she could develop for her own purposes which would also interest and instruct the court. That marriage, social and sexual identity, and erotic love should be so overtly at stake is not surprising given the climate at the Plantagenet court (the support for troubadour song, the rise of romance, the abundant use of Ovidian themes, the accusations of queer sexual doings directed at Eleanore, Richard Lionheart and Henry’s ancestry) and Marie’s own position as a twelfth-century anomaly, a highly literate woman writing in open competition with men. If the Lais are meant to stand together, linked in an intricate architectural and semiotic whole, as many have surmised, then these are the themes which tie one lai to another.32
I am therefore going to outline a series of potential “queer” readings of a select group of Marie’s lais, all of which go against the grain of much of the idealizing terms in which courtly literature has often been read.33
If we loosen our grip on contemporary, normative notions of gender and sexuality, and begin to look at courtly literature as a set of potentially normalizing ideological tracts, a force for cultural conservatism, I believe we can better appreciate Marie’s own injunction to read her tales like detective stories, attentive to subtle shadings and covert messages.34 It is, after all, Marie herself who, in the aim of preserving something that is in danger of extinction, invites these queer readings. The sexuality of single young men is problematized in most of these lais, in one way or another, but especially in Lanval, Equitan, Guigemar, Chaitivel, Les deux amants, Bisclavret, and Yonec; and even a cursory reading of Eliduc, inwhich an abandoned wife and her husband’s new young lover bond and retreat to a convent, leaving the unfaithful to save his own soul, must be read as a critique of heterosexuality as well as marriage.35 We are encouraged to empathize with poor Lanval even before Guinevere has let fly her cowardly accusation of sodomy and to identify with the plights of the victimized knights in Chaitivel, Bisclavret, and Guigemar. While all would agree that Marie’s principal interest is in marriage practices and the fate of imprisoned mal mari´ees, she does problematize male sexuality within the larger thematics of marriage and erotics in a way that sets her apart from most of her contemporaries.36 In Chaitivel, for example, she deconstructs chivalric discourse and overturns gendered notions of desire; and in Eliduc she stretches considerably the parameters of fin’amor topoi. In so doing, she alerts us to pre-Christian readings lurking beneath the surface of her tales and justifies her likening of reading to a process of excavation. Though she recognizes that her undertaking is dangerous, even insinuating that she, like her characters, might soon find herself “a peri,” she continues her investigation into the Breton past by insisting that such stories might well instruct the future.37
The young men and women protagonists of the Lais are often victim- ized by their society or their elders. Marie’s young men suffer under the pressures of chivalric knighthood and her young women must overcome their inscription as cultural commodities. In both cases, the protago- nists are incarcerated within discursive structures that threaten to undo them. Though my topic here is principally the status of somehow tainted young men, it is impossible to separate out completely the experiences of the male from female protagonists as they are largely interdepen- dent. Young women characters are gendered in relation to their use and exchange value within a male hierarchy, but these young women emerge from the horror of their plights more resilient, paradoxically freer from the most virulent aspects of the social and psychological scripts that delimit the young men’s choices. Marie presents their incarceration as the result of men’s fears of women’s sexuality, of women’s ability to evade patriarchal scripts; but she also seems to recognize that it is pre- cisely because of their imprisonment within those patriarchal restraints that they are more immune to the killing effects of mirroring which destroy the young men. As a general rule the young female protagonists do not identify with their captors or capitulate to them, as the menmost certainly do. Guigemar must suffer to be like other men; Lanval is isolated for his difference from his fellow knights; the imitative game of Equitan and his seneschal ends in a spectacular show-down; the mal- heureux suitors die from murderous competition; the young amant dies trying to be the man other men want him to be; Milon and his son, in another confrontation of the self and the double, almost kill each other in single combat.
The women, on the other hand, and with the notable exceptions of the mother of Fresne and wife of Bisclavret, find wisdom and conso- lation among other women. Marie distinguishes a double dichotomy in the Lais, not just one of gender but also of age. She seems intent on revealing how cultural formations victimize youth at the expense of older generations’ attempts to justify their society’s practices. Using Celtic sources, perhaps as her shield, she evokes her century’s anxieties over rapid social change and offers a series of alternate morals in what could be seen as a largely didactic collection of tales, socially if not sexu- ally. Courtly in her insistence on triangular love and a moral code based on purity of intention, she is not above deconstructing her own (courtly) rhetoric when it can be shown to have contributed to the unhappy ends of her characters.
It is in the grouping of four of the most “supernatural” Lais that Marie most openly confronts these topics, and most notably in Guigemar.38
In the passage cited earlier, in which the young knight is identified as a marked man, Marie is careful not to identify him as anything other than different. He is not necessarily a sodomite, not even, as in Ovid, an object of desire to other men. He is just not appropriately heterosexual. Like Narcissus, he stops short of following his culture’s most imperative dictum: marry and procreate. For this reason alone he, like Lanval, is stigmatized, disciplined, taught to toe the line. Had he simply engaged in sexual acts with men, in fact, it is unlikely that his behavior would have attracted much notice – provided, of course, that he also married and had children. According to the literary logic of 1160, accusations of sodomy invariably mean that the marked man will be proven not guilty of having performed such acts. As Simon Gaunt has pointed out, the homophobic discourse we read is intended primarily to enforce general adherence to a code of obligatory heterosexuality rather than to stigmatize individuals with same-sex desires.39 In both Lanval andEneas, to take the most prominent examples, the heroes are impressively cleared of their charges without our having learned anything specific about their sexual activities or desires other than that they are loved by women/fairies. Their acquittal could signify simply that they have rejected an identity as sodomite, a preference for same-gender sex or/and that their culture will henceforth focus e
xclusively on their public role in procreation, foundation-building and empire-construction, rather than on their private lives. The acquittal serves as a performative speech act marking only their full integration into masculinist chivalric dis- course and a sign that they will henceforth be seen only within the terms of that discourse. Any transgressions against that discourse will henceforth be invisible, for to acknowledge any breach would require as well a re-evaluation of the Law itself. As Eve Sedgwick demonstrated so convincingly, cultural m´econnaissance is a means of keeping secrets, secrets that support and maintain privilege and the status quo.40
An example taken from a completely different setting is pertinent to this discussion. Tanya Luhrmann’s study of the Parsis, an ethnic minor- ity of Persian origin within India, takes as its point of departure the rash of accusations within the community, since the end of the Second World War, that the majority of its young men are homosexual.41 Her conclusion, based on extensive field work, is that cultures whose com- munal identity has been undermined by colonialism, or whose cultural models have been destroyed in a postcolonial climate, frequently express their pessimism regarding the future through a sort of “urban myth” that stigmatizes young men as feminized, less virile than their forebears.42 In the case of the Parsis, it was the end of the colonial era and the departure of the British that led to a crisis of identity which found expression in the truism that most of their male children were gay. Luhrmann shows that this myth has little relation to any real phenomenon and that it works only as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Her research showed that some young Parsis are gay, while most are not; that same-sex relations are no more prevalent among the Parsis than amongst any other community. Normative gender roles, on the other hand, always and already highly dependent upon cultural construction, can be among the first to show signs of transformation in relation to any number of social stimuli. They serve as lightning rods and attract attention to supposedly deeper phenomena. Masculinity is particularly prone to misperception in suchperiods of rapid change and the first male dissenters from cultural norms are often stigmatized as effeminate, homosexual, dangerous. Luhrmann found such a mechanism at work amongst the Parsis: blame is laid on these stigmatized individuals rather than on the more perplexing and intangible notion of cultural change. Guigemar, Lanval, and many other courtly or Arthurian tales seem to share in the type of cultural hysteria that Luhrmann has described, and the whole phenomenon of Arthurian literature in the Plantagenet court could be reread productively in this light. The institution of chivalry, the disruption of the early crusades, the growth of monasticism, all of which required the seclusion or absence of men, seem to have fed into a climate in which rigid codes of mas- culinity were both ratified and called into question. The literature of the mid-twelfth century sometimes appears to be complicit with attempts to impose strict gender codes, purportedly along traditional lines, in which masculinity is figured through strong male bonds, heroism, and spectacle. In fact, such codes subtly rework earlier literary models, and can themselves be seen as both innovative and repressive.43
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