Guigemar’s story is emblematic of some of these tensions as it links anxiety over masculinity, in the figure of the paradoxically accomplished knight, with an initiatory regime intended to produce a heterosexual subject. If we remove the mythic overlay, in the form of otherworldly directives, we find that the tale resembles nothing more than a traditional initiation ritual. The destined outcome of such a ritual is to foist a dis- cursively induced state of manhood (conceived of in heterosexist terms) upon a hesitant youth by ritual means.44 It is a tale of capture, isolation, travel, conquest, and return: familiar components of rites of passage almost anywhere in the world. What particularizes it are the telling Celtic touches, some of which may even have been added by Marie to sustain her point that in upholding tradition she was also offering productive models of behavior for her own time.45 In other words, the Lais could be seen as an attempt to respond to the pessimism and sense of cultural crisis that reigned amongst the Anglo-Norman nobility.
Guigemar, model youth but for his one “flaw,” sets out on a hunt, is separated from his friends, and is confronted by a white deer/stag grazing with her fawn. Hunting, seemingly the epitome of model mas- culine pursuits, was, in the opinion of some, already a suspect activity.46
As practiced by the nobility, it can be construed as selfish, solitary,non-productive, and wasteful. John of Salisbury rails against it in his Policraticus as an activity that shares features with suspect sexual prac- tices, including sodomy, and for the troubadour Bertran de Born hunt- ing represents the ultimate decadence of the patron class. Hunters do not go to war, do not sustain an economy, do not engage with those dependent upon them, do not earn fame and glory. If men are going to go off on their own, in packs, they should do so as monks or knights. The solitary pursuits of hunters lead only to killing rather than worship, and their exploits better no one, as opposed to the ideals of knighthood. It therefore makes a kind of sense that it is in the course of hunting that Narcisus and Guigemar are revealed as anti-social and antipathetic, deserving of their fates.
The animal Guigemar encounters on his hunt is white and has attributes of both sexes: “Tute fu blanche cele beste; / perches de cerf out en la teste” (This animal was completely white and had atop her head the antlers of a stag [ll. 90–91]). His arrow hits her on the forehead and she falls stricken, but the arrow, ricocheting back from where it came, strikes the archer so deeply in the thigh that it traverses his flesh and pierces his mount. If we read the myth as it has usually been read, and as the text itself seems to dictate, we find ourselves witness to a symbolic initiation. The deer/stag could be seen as Guigemar’s former self, a mirror image of his own former queer nature: alone, hermaphroditic, marked as double and different, psychically bipolar – the sacrificial sodomite put to rest in the forest. This reading is only one of several possible, however, and not entirely satisfactory unless one wishes to endorse the myth’s patriarchal and heteronormative overtones.47
That the doe/stag is white is already in Celtic myth a sign of the otherworldly. Its appearance can thus be read either as a sign of divine intervention (but of what divinity, Christian or pagan?), as the trau- matic encounter with the Real (i.e., that which escapes the symbolically ordered social sphere – the terror and supreme pleasure of ultimate trans- gression), or, on the contrary, as the figure of ideological superimposition of a fantastical order of Law upon that Real. I see the doe/stag as the stand-in or straw man for the last of these possibilities, the imposition of the Lacanian “non/m” (the cut from above, the imposition of Law, initially in the form of language and gendered identity). The doe/stag is not alone: with him/her there is a fawn who merits no further attentionfrom the author. The fawn’s presence is required only to underscore the maternal and paternal functions of the beast. Recognition of difference is the crucial factor that might have averted the death of Narcisus and the lesson that Guigemar must supposedly learn, but for the hermaphroditic deer it carries no such positive valence. S/he has it all: attributes of both sexes, the ability to procreate (through autogamy?), wisdom, and psy- chic foresight. The murder of this animal is required within the logic of the myth only as a prerequisite to Guigemar’s own suffering, just as his suffering will announce that of another. Self-sufficiency in the doe/stag is erected as a negative model for young knights. S/he must die as a sacrifice to the culture’s imperative that young men assume a masculine identity from which all vestiges of the feminine have been banned.
Yet his/her intrusive presence, like the disproven charges of sodomy in other of the texts discussed in this book, lingers, leaving a stain on the surrounding story. For the doe/stag gives the lie to courtly rhetoric which denounces the delusion of self-sufficiency and the curse of sterility. S/he does procreate and does serve a function, albeit sacrificial. The animal’s queer nature is necessary to culture, both to reveal the existence of transgressive sexuality and to reinforce normative constraints through its elimination. S/he is evoked like the sodomite so as to institute and point others toward an unambiguously heterosexual realm which can claim originary status through the excision of its negative model. In this respect, the beast truly stands as a sign of the sodomite, a double of Guigemar himself, a pure negative in the eyes of the disciplinary order. The young knight must encounter, destroy, and move beyond this negative model as part of initiation into heterosexual adulthood, the only form of adulthood acceptable.48 It is not, as in the positive mythical reading, that Guigemar will turn his back on imaginary identification and the myth of self-sufficiency after his murder of the beast so as to take up the responsibilities of adulthood. Rather, it is that he will have recognized in the beast his own inevitable, if metaphorical, fate as sacrificial victim should he choose to ignore the cultural imperative to take up the phallus.49 The secret the beast tells him is the secret of every persecuting society: someone must suffer so that he can be saved. He is told that it is a woman who must suffer for him but this is just part of the patriarchal myth.50 It is the queer beast who must suffer so that the collective can retain its illusion of control. The adulthood to whichGuigemar accedes is decidedly post-lapsarian: he becomes a partial self, only what remains after the cut. His accession to adulthood is predicated upon the loss of an unidentifiable sexual identity that is perceived by the collective as a lack of sexuality, a lack of lack. Guigemar as pure negative cannot be tolerated; if lack is not felt it will be imposed. Once he is struck by his own rebounding arrow, he finds himself stretched out alongside the dying doe/stag who speaks to him and reveals his fate. His wound is clearly a form of castration but it paradoxically excises a “bad” lack that supposedly does not instantiate sexual desire so as to replace it with “good” lack which instantiates a form of culturally sanctioned desire. Thus, within patriarchal mythic terms, the thigh wound signifies genital maiming, a state of impotence and sterility that affects the whole land. Desire is marked as primarily social in that its fulfillment restores the social order and the legitimacy of Law more than any supposed gap in subjectivity.
The initiatory text which guides Guigemar’s path has as its aim his destruction and reconstruction by a heterosexist majority. Weakened, and in a state of physical and mental deterioration, he is led by mys- terious forces to the shoreline, where he finds a magnificent boat. He steps aboard, takes refuge in a magic bed, loses consciousness, and is transported to another land. We are told that the boat has no skipper, that a mysterious fate will henceforth direct Guigemar’s path. In other words, Guigemar’s foes are anonymous and invisible, a version of the mysterious chessboard from the Grail Continuations.51 To this point, he looks like Tristan, a sacrificial victim left to drift to his death. The young man survives this ordeal, however; but he emerges divested of power, divorced from family, stripped of identity (sexual and otherwise), and abandoned to the forces that now control him. Wounded and vulner- able, secured in solitary confinement, he is finally receptive to a new identity.52 He has undergone a coercive process of interpellation: the boat knows him, waits for him,
transports him toward a pre-existing identity that he has only to take up in fulfillment of destiny. In this new and restricted environment he becomes, at least if we read the myth at face value, what he imagines the Other desires.
What remains of Guigemar during this process? His body, presum- ably, but also his knightly status, noble blood, and breeding. Guigemar may show no signs of remembering, or missing, his former life; butfor the reader/listener he remains a handsome, rich, and accomplished knight. Our prior readings in romance inform us that this is but one of many trials and quests that he will endure. Thus, even as he lies, anonymous and powerless, in the magic bed, we remain confident that breeding will win out and he will emerge victorious. When his boat docks, a beautiful young mal mari´ee, a prisoner of her much older husband, comes aboard with her attendant to save the handsome victim with her touch. Genders reversed, the sleeping beauty is awakened by his savior and her handmaiden and nursed to health. He tells them that he has been kidnapped, “raped” (“ravie” [42, 330]) by the magic ship, and that he must find one lady who will suffer for him.53 Marie reverts at this point to the rhetoric of courtly sacrifice, the terms of which had only recently been codified in vernacular verse in the Eneas romance. The bandaging of his wounds and maternal care induce in him another malady – love; and, as prophesied, he emerges from his convalescence wounded more deeply from this new foe than from the piercing of the arrow. He falls almost immediately into a state of amnesia, forgetting everything about his former life, as he suffers all the symptoms of love sickness inherited from the Ovidian tradition. As he nears the point of death, or madness, he confronts the lady with his feelings. The consum- mation of their love is dealt with in just a few lines: “Ensemble gisent e parolent / e sovent baisent e acolent; / bien lur covienge del surplus, de ceo que li altre unt en us!” (52, 531–534) (Together they lie and talk, and kiss often and hug; as for the rest, and what others do in such cases, they seem to take to it very well).54
Marie’s reticence to discuss the sexual details is entirely characteristic of her times but her use of the word “surplus” is noteworthy. As she stated in her Prologue, the surplus is what we bring to a text rather than what is ostensibly already there. Sex, she seems to be saying, is more discourse than acts.55 It is a gloss we learn, a discursive formation. Moreover, the sex act is referred to in social terms, as what “others” do in such a moment, as something that is beyond, or extra. Guigemar is thus being taught about sex as it has been defined and taught by others. Obligatory heterosexuality is clearly the point of the lesson, and Marie implies that once divorced from his former identity, the young man is a quick learner. But if we are to believe in the success of the operation, as myth would have it, then the physical love story seemsa bit slight. Marie gives all her attention to the prelude to sex, to the self-centered expression of pain and suffering, and dispenses with their time together in two lines: “It seems to me that Guigemar was with her for a year and a half and their life was full of pleasure.”56 By the next line fate has intervened and discovery is imminent. The lady is obviously a stand-in on some level for the doe/stag, a corrected version, and with her shares the power of prediction. Knowing beforehand that they will be discovered, she ties Guigemar’s shirt in a knot and authorizes him to love only the one woman who can undo it. He, in turn, fashions a sort of chastity belt to assure her fidelity. She can only ever take as a lover the man who can free her.
Guigemar escapes the husband’s wrath on the same magic ship which brought him there, but the escape rings somehow false. The supposedly enraged husband had every right and opportunity to kill this interloper who had defiled his dream of total possession. When he and his three henchmen break into the lady’s chamber, Guigemar grabs hold of a heavy wooden curtain rod with which he threatens to leave them all “mahaigniez” (56, 600), the same word used to describe his own thigh wound and the infamous wound of the Fisher King in the Roman du graal. Though Guigemar, become phallic avenger, is outnumbered four to one, he fights off three swordsmen with his stick. The husband relents and sets him free on the waiting barge. As in the Conte du graal, the encounters seem staged and fixed, more like initiatory hurdles through which the young men must pass than real battles.
Welcomed back to his father’s kingdom, he falls into a deep depres- sion. Pressure to marry mounts but Guigemar announces that he will never take as wife any woman who cannot untie his shirt without rip- ping it. Women rush from all parts of the kingdom to try to “straighten out” (“despleier”) his shirt without “cutting it to pieces” (“depescier” [58,
649–650]). This knotted-shirt motif first appeared earlier in the telling. As he lay moaning in the forest after having been pierced by his own arrow, Guigemar bandaged his cut with his own shirt: “De sa chemise estreitement / bende sa plaie fermement” (32, 139–140). Later, at their first meeting, the lady again bandages his wounds and then chooses, significantly, as a token of their bond of love, his shirt tied in a knot: “Vostre chemise me livrez! / El pan desuz ferai un pleit” (54, 558–559). The possible word play on “plaie” (wound) and “pleit” (knot) suggeststhat the tie between wound and knot is deliberate.57 The shirt which once bound the knight’s wound will henceforth signify his inability to love. The shirt/bandage suggests throughout that there is something behind or beneath it when, in fact, it seems destined to create just that illusion. When the shirt is finally undone and the wound is allowed to reopen, Guigemar will again be open to love. This sounds superficially like desire springing from a Lacanian lack, but its primary purpose is to construct masculinity as sacrificial, equivalent to an open wound which can only be “cured” by a mother/nurse/lover, a perverse form of heterosexual desire.
The Lady, meanwhile, also escapes her seaside prison when she finds that Guigemar’s boat has conveniently returned for her. Though she has been a prisoner for years, no one has yet seemed concerned with rescuing her. Only when she can be of use in the heterosexualization of Guigemar does her salvation appear to matter, and then as an adjunct to his own. Curiously, though, the boat does not carry her to Guigemar’s side, as we might have expected. Instead she is deposited in the kingdom of his Breton rival, Meriaduc, who promptly claims her for his own. When he learns that she wears a mysterious belt that only one man will ever untie, he draws the astute conclusion that it is she who has tied Guigemar’s shirt and probably vice versa. He rips open her dress and attempts to undo the magic belt, but failing, calls on all the knights of his realm to try their luck. Meanwhile, Guigemar’s family sees to it that ladies line up to try their hand at his knot. These symbolic rapes, of both Guigemar and his lady, look suspiciously like public rituals intended to reinforce the links between compulsory heterosexuality and social success. Both Guigemar and the lady, in their mystery, are seen as holders of the phallus, sexually undifferentiated except as carefully delineated objects of desire to one sex or the other. Though we have been led to believe that Guigemar returns from his ordeal a devoted heterosexual, it can at best be called a closeted identity. To those friends and family members who previously found him strange and marked, his behavior must now appear almost completely unchanged. He remains unmarried and unmoved by women’s overtures, despite their avid attention, and on top of that, he is now figuratively impotent and deeply depressed. We have to wonder how convincing his story of a phantom lover must have sounded to the people around him, demanding an heir.Even the fairy-tale ending is subverted in Marie’s telling. When finally Guigemar is reunited with the Lady, after an absence of little more than two years, he is not even sure that he recognizes her. Only when she succeeds in untying his knot and he has felt the belt on her hips does he acknowledge her as the woman he has been seeking.58 The story ends on a high note, suggesting that when all is right with Guigemar justice reigns in Brittany. His enemies defeated, his lady returned to him, all of his problems are solved (“Ore a trespassee sa peine” [68, 882]). But we have to wonder. What we have witnessed is a queer young buck led to the heterosexual trough a
nd taught to drink. Courtly literature begins to look more like an instructional manual: how to convince your adolescent son, with a little force if necessary, that it is, after all, only a phase.
Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature Page 20