Clothing and Art
Despite the text’s criticism of vainglory, the narrator of the De planctu pays an extraordinary amount of attention to hair and dress. The major allegorical figures (Nature, Genius, Truth) come in for extensive fashion commentary that also doubles as the outline of an aesthetic theory. If for Plato the work of art was already three steps from the “natural,” Alain insists on an even further remove from the divine model. Each of these figures is clothed in magnificent robes onto which are embroi- dered, or projected, intricately detailed illusions of the bounties of the natural world. The narrator is fascinated by such display and, after intro- ducing the figures, spends most of his time “reading” these ekphrastic images for his audience. This aspect of the text has led commenta- tors to suggest that it might even have been written with pedagogy in mind. Ziolkowski, for instance, claims that the insistence on grammat- ical metaphors betrays Alain’s didactic intent and that Nature’s dress allowed him a way to map out the workings of the trivium and explainits terminology.21 If the text is to be taken as a manual of instruction, though, it is hard to imagine why Alain would take sodomy as the pretext for such instruction. Ziolkowski argued that “the metaphors enabled Alan to skirt outright discussion of topics such as sexual orien- tation which he deemed too risque´ for open discussion,” but I remain unconvinced.22 The metaphors are certainly clear enough to be com- prehensible once the grammar has been taught; and they would, even before then, have incited an awful lot of unwanted curiosity.23 If, on the other hand, it was meant as a serious moral allegory, then it would appear that Alain was a loyal Derridean: in the De planctu writing pre- cedes speech. What his characters wear is more important than what they say, and what they say depends for interpretation upon a prior reading of their garments. This interplay of text (speech, core meaning) and commentary (dress, frame) is not unique to Alain either. It is part of a larger aesthetic of manuscript interpretation that takes seriously textual play between frame and image, periphery and center, even when the peripheral commentary seems disruptive.24
Alain’s disruption of the ordering of these hierarchies is more radi- cal than most of his contemporaries and prefigures similar postmodern practices associated with Derrida, Butor, or Duane Michals.25 Not only does the signifier (his frame: the pictorial image of the dress) take tem- poral precedence over the signified (the topic, the meaning) but it also almost completely obscures what it pretends to illuminate (the body beneath the dress) by merging with it. The metonymic dress (as in “the skirt that done him wrong”) as commentary is, in turn, subordinated to the narrator’s own interpretive reading practice whereby what Nature wears and what she says is filtered through him.26 Let us begin then by running this film backwards so as to subvert whatever supposed pro- gression toward truth emerges through the ordering of appearances in the text.27 Truth makes an appearance as a character only at the very end of the final prose section (no. 9), just before the narrator tells us that everything recounted thus far was but a forgotten dream. She is tellingly identified only as the “offspring of the generative kiss of Nature and her son” (217), born when the eternal Idea greeted Hyle (chaos) to beg for the mirror of forms.28 With that heady introduction, the narrator moves right on to what really interests him most about her – her dress.It is the last described and is particularly significant for the way in which it prepares his conclusion. Unlike all the other garments described to this point, Truth’s garment clings. Using his favored rhetorical ter- minology, Alain tells us that there is no dieresis (or separation) between the dress and the body beneath it.29 While the gap in Nature’s dress promised a tantalizing view of something within or behind, the body of Truth is partially visible to the viewer: “Other garments, like additions to nature and appendages to those previously mentioned, now offered a glimpse to the viewer, now stole away from the eyes’ pursuit” (218).30
The body appears substantial, suggests that there is something there beneath the covering, when in fact all we see is the body adorned, skin as dress, or dress as skin. Alain was clearly familiar with literary theories that suggested that the text is always an integumentum, an attraction to the eye that must be pierced or removed before the astute reader can arrive at the truth behind representation. Nature had earlier warned the dreamer that poets “cover falsehood... so that the outer layer... can be discarded and the reader find the sweeter kernel of truth hidden within” (139).31
Whether Alain shares Nature’s faith is, however, debatable. He delights throughout the De planctu in calling attention to the ephemeral nature of his integumenta and rarely does his narrator get beyond the flashy clothing to show us anything more substantial. His conclusion even suggests that the text we have read is but another of these marvelous screens onto which have been projected the insubstantial musings of a febrile dreamer: “Accordingly, when the mirror with these images and visions was withdrawn, I awoke from my dream and ecstasy and the previous vision of the mystic apparition left me” (221).32 Any medieval reader would know better than to trust a mirror. Furthermore, if the vision of the mystic apparition really was revoked, gone with the mirror which contained it, what have we just read? Is truth really just the enve- lope which makes us believe in the letter, a fantasy that subtends an unsubstantial symbolic?33
Genius, the son of Nature, and father of Truth, wears several dresses during his two brief appearances at the end of the narrative. In fact, it is almost impossible to count his many outfits since they transform continuously as the narrator observes him. He arrives on the scene quite suddenly and with little fanfare after Nature has made a first pledge toeradicate those who perpetuate vice. On the first occasion, he wears what looks to be a modest, rather coarse gown, but which almost instantly transmutes into a much finer woven dress. Both bear images of marriage that have faded with age under the black deposits of time. The narrator nonetheless picks out a book within one of the images and in that book he can make out “in faint outline” a socially and religiously sanctioned portrait of marriage practices, from the betrothal to the nuptials and the party after (197–198).34 That is to say, within the art object before us, here a written text, we find the verbal representation of a dress and on that dress there is an image and within that image there is a book and that book contains within it other images. This is mise-en-abˆime on a grand scale, six times removed from the Platonic or divine form.
In his second appearance, Genius’ dress is even more amazing. It changes color continually, from purple to hyacinth, scarlet to white. The images that appear on it fade almost instantly, too quickly even to be apprehended by the viewer. Alain is stressing not only the passing of time but, more importantly, the ephemeral nature of visual representation and the instability of interpretation. How can anyone get beyond the image (the dress) to the truth (the body) when the process of representation is so accelerated? And who is to say that the body beneath is not changing along with it? If the image of marriage is meant to suggest the true and original reproductive bond in Nature’s plan, then why insist on its being a two-dimensional representation almost hidden under the grime of time? It may work for the allegory to say that marriage has been obscured by man’s negligence but it hardly works as a didactic tool. Alain’s ambiguous portrayal actually plants the suggestion that marriage is nothing more than a social construct like so many others, subject to degradation in the sublunary world: a faded human representation rather than an abjected divine model.
In fact, originals of any kind are conspicuously absent from Alain’s text. All is representation or rhetoric, usually interchangeable. Nature asks the narrator why he “clothes” his interrogation about classical poetry and homoeroticism in the garment of inquiry (139) and refers to her own answers as “drawing the cloud of silence” (141) and “unfolding the light of truthful narrative” (141).35 The “artisan” (“opifex,” “artifex”) of the universe “clothed all things in the outward aspect befitting their natures”(145).36 Genius, the scribe, draws images of things “that kept c
hanging from the shadowy outline of a picture to the realism of their actual being” (216).37 As all proceeds from representation, reality is simply a matter of believing what you see. Thus, on Generosity’s dress we find a picture “unreal but credible by reason of the sophistic delusion inherent in painting” (203). Humility and Chastity are also “inscribed” with “invented stories” (198, 204).38 If we are not to believe the “sophistic delusion” and “invented” stories of these dresses, why then should we believe that the book of marriage or anything else inscribed on the dress is any more original or authoritative?
As one would imagine, Nature’s dress is the most extensively described and the most problematic. Her dress is not the world as we know it but a select representation of that world, even an imperfect one, since it has already been ripped. Elaborately decorated, it serves as a selective encyclopedia of natural history; yet some of these illustrations raise more questions than one would expect from forms emanating from God. Nature’s dress swarms with deviants and profligates: the beaver, a self-castrator; the bear, who gives birth through her nose; the ram, whose “plurality of wives robbed marriage of its dignity”;39 and the lion, who lights the spark of life in his child by murmuring in his ear. Nature’s shoes are more akin to boots than sandals; her underwear contains a smiling picture of herbs and trees bringing forth buds, or so the narrator must surmise since he dares not ask and cannot see through the one hole in the fabric. The whole presentation is compared to a “stage-production offering representations of animals” (104).40
Among the birds, the nightingale laments her loss of chastity, the meadow pipit takes as her own the offspring of the cuckoo, the bat is a hermaphrodite (92–94). Others are thieves, bullies, shameful, violent, disloyal and so filthy it would seem “that nature was drowsy when she fashioned [them]” (85–94).41 To include the fish within the edifice, the dress gives the impression of color reflected on water, and the fish themselves, “exquisitely imprinted on the mantle like a painting” (98), only appear to be swimming.42
Her diadem as well, is self-consciously mimetic. In the very first stone, the narrator can pick out “the pleasantly deceptive picture [that] showed the image of an image of a lion” (78).43 In the first stone of the secondrow he sees the “impression” of tears and of “imaginary weeping” (79); in the second, Capricorn wears “a tunic of faked fleece of goat-hair.” On the third row there is a “vision of roses” and Pisces swims in another imaginary river.44 Ziolkowski suggests that we shouldn’t make too much of all this since “animals, as irrational creatures, cannot be faulted for the irrational conduct which is their lot.”45 Still, we are being invited to make something of these figures, to find some meaning in them. Alain has deliberately chosen to illustrate Nature’s dress with images of a profligate and largely uncontrollable creation.
To return to our opening discussion, Nature explains the rip in her dress as the effect of men’s violence, acts which have “stripped [her] of . . . clothes to go like a harlot to a brothel.”46 But Nature is certainly not stripped of her clothes when we meet her and would surely be overdressed for a brothel. Her dress’s spellbinding illusions are essential to her message, though we later learn that the entire vision has been nothing more than a mirror reflection. Mark Jordan improves on that description,47 calling it instead a “trompe-l’oeil tapestry” that hides, or pretends to hide, a deeper and different truth. In fact, Alain uses the topos of the integumentum, or literary covering, to construct a two- dimensional stage-set that is to represent what we call reality. But the attention paid to his technique alerts us, perhaps deliberately, that this reality is a plane of signifiers with no signifieds, an antimetaphysical utopia like the Japan once imagined by Roland Barthes.48 And if there is something behind the robe that remains unseen, might not it be a simple effect of the screen, something that can only ever be seen in relation to that representational field?
Grammar and Rhetoric
For all that Alain’s grammatical and rhetorical schemes are brilliant and playful, they are also, like Nature’s encyclopedic dress, more pleasing as poetry than as logic. In such pairings as “indiscreet discretion” and “indirect direction,” we see how rhetorical excess is foregrounded. This narrator sounds like he learned to speak at Nature’s own knee. She, after all, presents herself as a figure for Lady Grammar, instructing and disciplining her pupils; and she regularly speaks in florid figures. Incongruity inevitably follows. Take, as an example, her own account ofthe training of Venus, her assistant and replacement. In telling us how she warned Venus against excessive rhetoric, she continues to indulge, heavily:
Just as I decided to excommunicate from the school of Venus certain practices of Grammar and Dialectic as inroads of the most ill-disposed enemy, so too I banned from the Cyprian’s workshop the use of words by the rhetors in metonymy which mother Rhetoric clasps to her ample bosom and breathes great beauty on her orations, lest, if she embark on too harsh a trope and transfer the predicate from its loudly protesting subject to something else, cleverness would turn into a blemish, refinement into boorishness, a figure of speech into a defect and excessive embellishment into disfigurement.49 (162)
Nature does justify some use of ornamentation to avoid talking dirty, “to vulgarize the vulgar with vulgar neologisms” (143). Instead she vows to “gild things immodest” so that:50
the dross of . . . the vices will be beautiful with golden phrases and the stench of vice will be balsam-scented with the perfume of honey- sweet words lest the great dunghill stench should spread too far on the breezes that carry it and . . . induce . . . a vomiting from the sickening indignation.”51 (143)
It has been said Alain is distinguishing between tropes (tropus) and vices (vitium) in these passages, tropes being allowable while vices are not since they represent an “unpardonable aberration in aim, i.e., in the author’s purpose in writing.”52 If so, the distinctions are not all that clear and both Nature and the narrator seem caught between the two. Nature explicitly condemns some figures as metaphors of unnatural sexual practices, especially metaplasmus (highly irregular grammatical change), barbarismus (mistakes in forms of words, such as gender), and syneresis (contracting two syllables into one) since they suggest the muta- bility of all language and coupling. Yet she freely acknowledges using anthiphrasis and oxymora (meter 5, 150), rhetorical figures which, one could argue, also subvert the natural order she claims extends even to grammar.53 To justify this latter point, she attempts to straitjacket gram- mar, instructing Venus to concentrate exclusively on the natural union of masculine and feminine gender since “the plan of nature gave spe- cific recognition, as the evidence of grammar confirms, to two genders”(156).54 Yet she also goes on to admit that some men could actually be classified as of a neutral gender (156), and implicitly admits that without an exception there can be no rule.55
This aside about a third neutral gender might sound like a joke, but it also calls attention to Nature’s own violation of what she calls a natural order in using neuter-gendered nouns in her speech. Venus is instructed that her conjugations must be transitive: not stationary, intransitive, circuitous, reflexive, passive, or deponent.56 She can deliver straight- faced a dictum such that male is to female as adjective is to noun57 while avoiding any mention of the contradictory counterpart to her idealized relation of adjective to noun: both must be of the same gender. She insists on the conjunction of difference (as in superjacent male adjective and subjacent female noun) and calls any other conjugation an unpardonable solecism, yet then declares that “like things should be produced from like” (145) while also claiming elsewhere that Nature abhors like with like.58 Her thinking is hopelessly muddled and almost certainly comic. Both she and her narrator revel in the very verbal constructions she says were forbidden to Venus when responsibility for creation was handed over.
This particular contradiction was not lost on readers of the De planctu and this might support the idea that Alain’s argument did not originate with him but was part
of a body of topoi in circulation which were understood to deprecate same-sex eroticism. Alain, like others, might simply have been incorporating currently fashionable arguments into his text. Several other contemporary texts note that despite Nature’s dictum that she approves only of difference, adjectives and nouns agree by gender: masculine with masculine and feminine with feminine is the rule. In the Altercatio Ganimedis et Helene, for example, Ganymede uses just that argument in defending same-sex eroticism:
Impar omen dissidet, recte par cum pari. / Eleganti copula mas aptatur mari; / Si nescis: articulos debet observari; / Hic et hic gramatice debent copulari!59
[Every unlike thing causes discord; like thing with like, that is what is proper. A male is joined to a male in an elegant copula. Perhaps you do not know your grammar, but the rule of articles must be observed: hic and hic must be joined together in grammar.]This particular poem is, according to whom one reads, either a source for Alain’s De planctu,a response to it, or another work by Alain himself.60 In any case, it bears an intertextual link with the De planctu and offers a refreshing antidote to the glib contradictions of Lady Nature. Two other ecclesiastical authors condemn sodomy in the same terms as Lady Nature while at least acknowledging the contradiction. Gautier de Coincy claims in “Seinte Le´ocade” that grammar is not a reflection of divine law (as Alain suggests it is):
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