The King returns to the knight all of his property and drives the now noseless wife and her treacherous husband from the kingdom. She and all her female progeny will suffer for her offence and Marie closes the tale with assurances that all we have heard is true. This is a remark worth noting since it is the only one of the twelve Lais which ends with such a statement. Generally, Marie asserts that she has told the tale in a true manner, i.e., faithful to her source. Only in Bisclavret does she assertthat the aventure itself is true rather than her telling of it: “L’aventure qu’avez oie / Veraie fu, n’en dutez mie. / De Bisclavret fu fez li lais / Pur remembrance a tuz dis mais” (The story you have heard was a true one, have no doubts. The lai was composed about Bisclavret so that his story will be remembered forever more [132, 315–318]).77
What I find remarkable about Bisclavret is that though Marie never evokes sodomy, homoeroticism is omnipresent. If we read across the collected Lais, moreover, we can easily trace this topos of the man who does not want to marry right through to Bisclavret. I can easily imagine the werewolf as Tristan with his savior, the King, as Marc. He is, like Tristan, found in the forest, instantly becomes the favorite, and from the time of their meeting there is no hint of marriage on either man’s part. Bisclavret’s frequent absence from the foyer in his earlier human incarnation could be taken as a sign of an illicit sexual identity, the wolf as sexual adventurer. The young knight supposedly spent his “away” time running in a metaphorical underworld in which men devour other men and no one dares to tread. In fact, this terrifying forest turns out to be the royal hunting ground, the playground of the King. The King appears to be unmarried, or at least if he is married, the Queen merits no mention. Like all good kings, he sleeps among his men, again like Tristan and Marc, and status at court is determined by how close you get to him. This king cherishes his Beast like Marc did his nephew. His forest, like the Morois, is a site of sexual subversion. Hunting retains its dubious associations with sodomy, or at least non-productive chivalry, and it is in a forest meeting between the two men that the homosocial bond is renewed.
The parallels come to an end, however, at the moment that we must compose our own ending to the lai. Bisclavret is reinstated as a knight and landowner, but does he marry again? Does he leave the King’s side and their idyll of telepathic complicity? Any answer to that question must consider again the performative nature of knighthood78 with its two-pronged criteria of service: excellence at arms and devotion to a lady, one feeding the other. Can a knight who is neither in love with a lady, nor interested in being in love, nor up on his arms, continue to be known as a knight?79 Chre´tien de Troyes’s Erec is reduced to a bully as he tries to re-establish his reputation and Tristan becomes an outlaw and a threat to the very system he is meant to be serving.Bisclavret sees his identity disintegrate once he is distanced from his courtly attributes and Guigemar is sent off for “retraining.” Enforced absence from the courtly milieu is usually intended to be an initiatory period during which the heterosexual identity will “take,” as in the case of Guigemar. But Bisclavret only takes up the fragments of his former self when his wife has been banished; and that identity is by then so imbued with homosocial affection that it shows no signs of veering toward heteronormative knighthood. I would argue that Bisclavret opens a fissure in heterosexist discourse that is only contained by our prior reading, our own horizon of expectation. The homoeroticism so present in other romances is for once not written over with a heterosexual imperative. In Guigemar and Lanval we saw loners who spurned sexual relations but claimed as their defense the existence of fantasy female lovers. These lovers appear only when the protagonists absent themselves from the collective, in moments of solitude and secrecy, and they only actualize at the end of the tale, under pressure.
Bisclavret dispenses with such fantasy narratives. His absence in the forest produces no fairies but a king, his former supporter. There is no imperative to secrecy and no intrusion of women into the homosocial space. Apparently men can love their favorite beast without incurring censure. Instead of the rush to heteronormativity that mar(k)s Guigemar and Eneas, the last image of Bisclavret shows him in bed, with another man, rescued by his King’s kiss, richly rewarded. No other medieval tale offers such an overt escape from the controlling structures of gender. If, as Sharon Kinoshita has argued, Marie de France “imagines an outside to the feudal order that relegates women to the status of objects of exchange underpinning the patriarchal system,” then that outside allows not only for a space of feminine self-determination but also one of masculine identity beyond patriarchal definition.80 Lanval, Guigemar, and Bisclavret suffer, and may actually lose in the long run in their quest to redefine gender and sexual norms, but their struggle is recorded. Few medieval authors went so far in constructing a queer love story as did Marie de France.
Writing the Self: Alain de Lille’s De planctu naturae
It is the power apparatus itself which, in order to reproduce itself, has to have recourse to obscene eroticisation and phantasmatic investment . . . power relies on its “inherent transgression” . . . overi- dentifying with the explicit power discourse – ignoring this inherent obscene underside and simply taking the power discourse at its (pub- lic) word, acting as if it really means what it explicitly says (and promises) – can be the most effective way of disturbing its smooth functioning.1
What Hegel already hints at, and Lacan elaborates, is how this renun- ciation of the body, of bodily pleasures, produces a pleasure of its own ... the exercise of the Law itself becomes libidinally cathected . . .2
In an essay on Lacan, “From Reality to the Real,” Slavoj Z izek discusses a novel by Robert Heinlein, The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag, in which a private detective is hired to learn what happens to the said Mr. Hoag each day as he disappears into the non-existent thirteenth floor of a New York high-rise.3 Mr. Hoag, as it turns out, is a “plant” from another realm who has located, during his stay in New York, some minor defects in earthly creation. While these defects are being repaired, Mr. Hoag warns the private detective, the functioning of the world will be temporarily interrupted. Though the detective may circulate in his car just as he normally would, he is instructed never to open his window. Of course our hero succumbs to such irresistible temptation and there follows the description of the world beyond:
Outside the open window was no sunlight, no cops, no kids – nothing. Nothing but a grey and formless mist, pulsing slowly as if with inchoate life. They could see nothing of the city through it,not because it was too dense but because it was – empty. No sound came out of it; no movement showed in it.
For Z izek, this grey mist, emblematic of nothing, is the perfect analogue to the Lacanian Real, “the pulsing of the presymbolic substance in its abhorrent vitality.”4
This allegorical play of inside and outside, of surface and depth, recalls one of the most influential works of medieval fantasy, Alain de Lille’s infamous De planctu naturae. Alain’s fantasy begins in much the same way as Heinlein’s: like Mr. Hoag, the diegetic narrator takes it upon himself to diagnose the cause of Nature’s malfunction and to put things right. Nature herself appears to him, in the person of a noble lady, to concur with his diagnosis and explain away the imper- fections in her own handiwork. Through their combined reasoning, the reader, like the detective above, is counseled to stay within the diegetic construct of the text as Nature and the dreamer paper over, layer with imagery, the surface of any opening which would suggest a beyond to creation. Nature’s appearance highlights from the beginning the logical inconsistencies in Alain’s project. She is the creator of the world, in some way external to it, and yet contained within its imper- fection. Though she and the narrator single out sodomy as the principal source of natural corruption, it is clear that “sodomy,” “Nature,” and nature’s “creation” all remain within the same symbolic confines; and that “sodomy,” as a product (or subset) of creation, is, following Hegel’s notion of “negation of negation,” insuffi
cient to negate it. True negation can come only from outside the system, an “outside” that is hinted at only in the narrative construction of the text itself. First, there is the pre-dream prologue, in which the narrator decries sodomy; then there is the “within” of the dream, containing the dialogue of Nature and dreamer, and a brief post-dream epilogue; and finally, that beyond of narration, only vaguely alluded to as something behind the torn dress
of Nature, which has affinities with Heinlein and Z izek’s “grey mist of
nothingness.”5
This beyond of the dream construct comes up during one of the testier exchanges between Alain’s dreamer/narrator and Nature. The narrator has been given license to put to this lady any question, “without check or barrier” (142).6 Ignoring civilities, he zeroes in on a very visible flaw:I wonder why some parts of your tunic, which should approxi- mate the interweave of a marriage, suffer a separation at that part in their connection where the picture’s phantasy produces the image of man.7 (142)
Instead of implicating the questioner in the crime, he also being a man, Nature answers simply:
as we have said before, many men arm themselves with vices to injure their own mother and establish between her and them the chaos of ultimate dissension; in their violence they lay violent hands on me, tear my clothes in shreds to have pieces for themselves and, as far as in them lies, compel me, whom they should clothe in honor and reverence, to be stripped of my clothes and to go like a harlot to a brothel. This is the hidden meaning symbolized by this rent – that the vesture of my modesty suffers the insults of being torn off by injuries and insults from man alone.8
Nature’s claim that men have been attacking their mother in order to take a piece for themselves sounds both like incestuous rape and a relics raid on a saintly cadaver. But, as we shall see, this act of maternal rape is further conflated with sexual acts between men since, according to Nature’s argument, men who have sex with men are also simultaneously laying violent hands on their mother. In attacking her (as the represen- tative of Law), we are told that man “unmans” himself and becomes in the process a “she.”9 Thus the perpetrator is assimilated to a woman raping her mother, now figured as a male sex partner: a curious chiasmus indeed, since both sides of the figure are coterminous (a man attacking his mother is also a “she” attacking another male). It is no surprise then that the text is often discussed as one of the slipperiest of its age (c. 1155) and that no definitive interpretation has emerged.10 Given the widely diverging interpretations and the complexity of its own architecture, I propose to follow Alain’s own prescribed reading and writing practice: push the word to its allegorical and etymological limit, chart the text’s assaults on its own logic, and read it against the grain.
As a fantasy about a dream about an apparition, the De planctu does not lend itself easily to those seeking clarification of dogma. If Alain had intended to produce a purely didactic text, he must surely have realized that his curious rhetoric would ensure that it remained unreador misinterpreted beyond the confines of an enlightened cabal. His particular fantasy suggests rather a more personal vision – both in the sense of a dream or daydream, as in a correction of reality, and in the more abstruse psychoanalytic sense in which fantasy serves as the
underlying structure of reality.11 According to Z izek, a fantasy must
remain implicit rather than explicit; must “maintain a distance towards the explicit symbolic texture sustained by it, and . . . function as its inherent transgression.”12 It appears that one of the ways in which Alain’s narrator maintains such a distance toward the symbolic texture (or Law) that it sustains is precisely by staging a pseudo-abandonment of reason. Thus, what is revealed within the dream is claimed as support for the Law, while its transgressive underside is disavowed. The fantasy seems to be beyond the Law since it records the narrator’s encounter with the unconscious; yet the context and content of the fantasy are the very stuff from which that Law acquires its disciplinary force. The staged dream, in the form of inherent transgression, is just a ploy to reinforce that Law, is itself a form of the Law in anamorphosis, since, girded by reason, it concludes with a call to discipline transgressors.
Alain’s disciplinary fantasy is, however, far from watertight. The gaps and fissures it highlights between the dream and consciousness, the Symbolic (inside) and the Real (outside), death and life, sleep and wak- ing, heaven and earth, woman and man, are reinforced through ambi- guity and temporal shifts. In this sense, they are the key to locating authorial intention and perhaps even reception. Our attention is first focused on those gaps in the previous citation concerning the tear in Nature’s tunic, but they surface throughout the text as a chain of tran- scriptions. We begin with the vision of a dreamer (let us call this the unconscious), then the ordering of that vision by the narrator (the work of the conscious mind), and finally the act of inscription performed by the absent author (presumably Alain de Lille). Within, or behind, this text, we are led to imagine the body of Nature, a body clothed and given delineation by the garment or text, but never seen. This absent body, the dreamer’s fantasy of plenitude, which speaks as the support for the Law, is curiously absent. Where we look for Lady Nature behind the surface of textual description we find instead only Alain’s own fantasy: Alain as writer/preacher/defender of tradition/dispenser of discipline, speaking for and through her. Medieval texts frequently sexualize theacts of reading and writing by figuring the text as a (female) body and the allegorical dressing and undressing of that body as an act of mascu- line prerogative.13 Alain’s text is very much in that tradition, a tradition which, through his example, was given new impetus.14 But in the case of Alain, that female body serves as another layer of texture, masking the masculine subject. Such a reading clearly calls into question the teleology of the De planctu, the struggle it enacts between private and institutional discourse, Alain as man and as spokesman. Alain as Lady Nature in drag is hardly supported by his own writings on the topic either. He actually condemns cross-dressing in this scene from the Anticlaudianus, where Venus bemoans her progeny as she prepares to die:
Now my arms lie idle, my arms through which Achilles, counterfeiting a girl in his degenerate clothes, was once overcome and yielded. The descendant of Alceus, degenerate in arms, exchanges his staff for a distaff, his arrows for a day’s supply of wool, his quivers for a spindle and basely unsexed himself completely in womanish action.15 (211)
But this identification of Alain with Nature is also hard to argue against. The elaborately dressed and loquacious figure who comes to the aid of the poet/narrator as he is decrying improper grammati- cal and sexual couplings, surely acts as a support to his fantasy of purity and corruption and speaks as his double. But in the ensuing question-and-answer session, this identification is problematized as the dreamer/narrator seems keen to provoke his esteemed visitor with trick questions about desire and same-sex love in classically inspired texts.16
Only at the end of the text do we learn to what extent we have been drawn into a multilayered voyeuristic trap, a structuring device which undercuts the serious message Alain claims to have to been imparting. The dreamer peers beneath a gap or tear in Nature’s dress; his alter ego, the narrator/poet, watches on and inscribes himself in the act of gazing; and we, the unwitting voyeurs, are encouraged throughout to invest a sleeping man’s vision with a mantle of reality that is only lifted, rhetorically, in the final sentence. It is never even clear who is speaking, unless one chooses to accept Alain’s fiction entirely on its own terms. According to the logic of the text, it has no author. The narrator con- tends that he forgot his dream upon waking; but if that is so, who could have remembered it to tell? Is this retrospective imaging, the raving ofthe unconscious, or the intrusion of a third-party voyeur who speaks for the narrator? As the sole witness to the forgotten events, only the interlocutor could recount what has ensued, and that interlocutor, Lady Nature herself, must therefore also be the author, Alain de Lille. The dreamer, often conflate
d with the narrator and with Alain, is, in fact, more likely the text’s intended public, that every-man/monk for whose instruction it may have been intended.17
Before returning to these preliminary issues, I want to survey three major areas in which the gaps in Alain’s text are most evident. As Jan Ziolkowski has shown, Alain’s work, as original and even bizarre as it seems, is not the anomaly it was once thought to be.18 Alain clearly had familiar models from which to work, most notably Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia and the bulwark of Neoplatonic thought.19 It is therefore significant that he chose to stray from his models at key moments to include strikingly incongruous elements or to highlight rhetorical excess to the point that his text could appear absurd, obsessive, and/or ironic.20
Though these topics overlap and recur throughout the text, I want to isolate and discuss them separately as: clothing and art, grammar and rhetoric, gender and reproduction.
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