Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature
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La grammaire hic a` hic acouple / Mais nature maldit la couple. / La mort perpetuel engenre / Cil qui aimme masculin genre / Plus que le femenin ne face / Et Diex de son livre l’efface: / Nature rit, si com moi sanble, / Quant hic et hec joignent ensanble; / Mais hic et hic chose est perdue, / Nature en est tot esperdue, / Ses poins debat et tort ses mains.
[Grammar couples hic and hic, but Nature curses this coupling. He who loves the masculine gender over the feminine will engender ever- lasting death and may God erase him from His book. Nature laughs, it seems to me, when hic and hec join together; but hic and hic is a lost cause, by which Nature is bewildered. She beats her fists and wrings her hands.]61
Walter of Chaˆtillon, a contemporary of Alain and influence on him, condemned sodomy as unproductive and “grammatically perverse” and Gilles de Corbeil, another contemporary and personal physician to Philippe Auguste, similarly complained that men claim to be able to justify their behavior during coitus on the basis of grammar but that “the syntax of grammar has nothing in common with that of the grammarians.”62
Gende r and Reproduction
A similarly double-edged argument is rehearsed in the discussion of man as microcosm. The human body, like the universe, has, according to Nature, “similarity in dissimilarity, equality in inequality, like in unlike, identity in diversity” (118–119).63 She can admit that the planets rotate in retrograde motion, contrary to the normal revolution of the stars (38) and can allow for such “contrary” behavior in a universe that reflectsdivine forms; yet she turns on mankind, blaming men themselves for what has already been acknowledged as a part of their mimetic nature: “Just as any of the planets fight against the accepted revolution of the heavens by going in a different direction, so in man there is found to be continual hostility between sensuousness and reason.”64 If man’s body is oxymoronic, as she herself described it (118–119), how can he be faulted for this perversity? The likening of his deviation from reason to the behavior of the planets is nonetheless attributed solely to an act of will, a “nonconformist withdrawal” (131) she calls it, and is likened, curiously enough, to a man stripping off the robes of chastity to expose himself as a male prostitute.65
While on the topic of cosmology, we might mention Bernardus Silvestris’ planetary explorations in the Cosmographia,a text well known to Alain and which served as one of his models. According to Winthrop Wetherbee, Bernardus modeled Nature’s discourse on a speech found in Claudian’s De raptu Proserpinae in which Jupiter reports that Nature had brought complaint against him for having disrupted the order of the Golden Age, leaving man to forage like a beast.66 In taking over that topos, Bernardus already operated a significant shift by dispensing with Jupiter and the classical hierarchy to focus entirely on Nature, conceived in a Neoplatonic sense. Wetherbee emphasizes the heterosexual frame- work within which Nature’s complaints were meant to be read. Nature speaks from a position of “slighted majesty,” a stance familiar to read- ers of twelfth-century romance.67 In the allegory of the Cosmographia, Nature’s desire for order is likened to matter’s desire for form, and both are assimilated to sexual union. Noys’ response to Nature is decidedly masculinist, despite her identity as the feminine principle of creation. She emphasizes that man is created in the image of Divine Wisdom and can therefore claim jurisdiction over Nature and the natural order as his proper domain.68 Possession and mastery are the terms within which man’s relation to Nature is figured. Man’s mastery of himself and of nature will alleviate dysfunction in the lower universe by righting the balance between body and soul, desire and reason.69 Bernardus’s Nature accepts the terms of this argument and goes on her way. Her complaints are only with the matter and form of the physical universe, not with the morals of men. She makes no claim to be able to pronounceon moral guidance. That major and problematic innovation belongs to
Alain alone.
In one of the most interesting scenes in the Cosmographia, Nature observes in the sphere of Mercury, as she travels through the upper uni- verse, the making of hermaphrodites.70 In Bernardus’s description we can hear how the imagery could have lent itself to Alain’s homophobi- cally charged reading:
Mercury travels around the orbit of the sun on a closely contiguous path. . . . Because of the law which governs his orbit, he rises at times above the sun, and sometimes lurks beneath him, compliant and indecisive. Mercury does not point to the coming of misfortune in the affairs which he governs. . . . Rather, his relations with other powers vindicate or corrupt him. Joined with the madness of Mars or the liberality of Jove, he determines his own activity by the character of his partner. Epicene and sexually promiscuous in his general behavior, he has learned to create hermaphrodites of bicorporeal shape.71 (103)
Venus, who passes close by, encompasses both Mercury and the sun at certain points in their orbits. She is described as able to maintain balance between extremes of heat (male) and moisture (female) while drawing forth, by the largesse of her generative impulses, the renewal of all creatures.72 Bernardus’s portrait of Venus would have seemed ambiguous on several levels to contemporary readers: hermaphrodite herself according to the theory of humors, she is also able to encompass both the sexually active sun and the sexually passive Mercury in her orbit. Voraciously and ambidextrously sexual, Venus is a part of Bernardus’s universe, not an aberration. In the morally neutral terms which he uses, she might be seen as the true figure of human sexuality: in Freudian terms, polymorphously perverse.
Alain’s Venus and Lady Nature are also somewhat ambiguously gen- dered, perhaps in response to Bernardus’s lead. In the opening sentence of the De planctu, the narrator complains that Venus has turned into a monster: warring with herself, turning “hes” into “shes,” unmanning men (67).73 Such a description would probably not have surprised a careful reader of the Cosmographia. Walter of Chaˆtillon was at the same time directing similar charges against the Anglo-Norman nobility who,in their leisure time, forgot women and cavorted with boys instead (“hic et hec cupido”).74 What might actually have surprised his audience more than Venus’s perversity or man’s bisexuality is Nature’s presumption. Who is this woman who is allowed to speak for God, charged as his handmaiden with policing power over creation and moral authority? No longer a simple source of raw goods, a producer, a middle manager, she has assumed priestly duties that might have surprised, outraged, or titil- lated readers. The transfer of power from the masculine to the feminine is, however, largely illusory. Nature still needs a supplement in certain areas for, being female, she is assumed to lack basic skills and require masculine guidance. Landing a dove-drawn chariot on earth appears to be one of those problem areas. During her descent to earth, in response to the narrator’s complaint, Nature is doubled by a male countenance that hovers above her head and guides her hand (108). In writing, as well, Nature apparently needs help: her writing-reed: “would instantly go off course if it were not guided by the finger of the superintendent” (146).75 Even her priestly functions, her incessant preaching notwith- standing, are finally handed over to Genius, her son and alter ego, who dons sacerdotal vestments to perform the office of excommunication in the final section. In all three cases then, Nature and her function are already bipolar, bi-sexed, hermaphroditic.
Yet, if we follow Alain’s logic, her masculine guardianship still cannot save her from divagation. Though her chariot arrives on earth with no problem, she has to admit that she has not always performed so suc- cessfully. After her abdication, for example, when she passes her creative duties on to Venus, her pen goes astray and her hammer likewise cannot be trusted. In another series of mind-boggling mises-en-abˆime, Nature is seen “calling up ... images on slate tablets” (108) and “inscribing on a sheet of paper” (206) her order of excommunication; nevertheless, fail- ure seems built into the enterprise of creation. The images on slate “fail to endure” (108) and Venus is even less successful than Nature once she has taken over full responsibility for the process of creation.76 Why Nature would ev
er abrogate so essential a duty as creation is never satisfactorily explained, but once she has done so definitively, things predictably go further awry. Re-enacting God’s original scene of investiture, she assigns to Venus, her stand-in, two hammers, a workshop, and anvils which she will not permit to “stray... in any form of deviation” (156).77 Venus isalso given a “powerful writing-pen” and suitable pages so that “she might not suffer the same pen to wander in the smallest degree . . . into the ways of pseudography” (156).78 Soon enough pseudography asserts itself: “many youths . . . intoxicated with thirst for money” convert “Venus’s hammers to the functions of anvils” (135); men hammer on anvils that bear no seeds and the poor hammer shudders “in horror of its anvil” (69).79 Venus herself ends up sentencing the “hammers of fellowship” to “counterfeit anvils” while the “natural anvils could be seen bewailing the loss of their own hammers” (163).80 As the accounts of monstrous deviation mount, one can only imagine what inspired all this rhetoric. Was every monastery rife with hot males hammering away on nubile anvils or is this really about Alain’s own hammer, his own practice of pseudography and polyvalent logic?81
The proliferation of signs of hermaphroditism, sterility, and same- sex eroticism in the text point to something more than, though not excluding, a social referent. James Sheridan, who spent years translating Alain’s works, says that “one can learn more about Alan, the man, from the Plaint than from the rest of his works combined”; that in it “one encounters a forcefulness, an enthusiasm and a ring of sincerity that is seldom, if ever, equaled in Alan” (33). Now why should this be? It is estimated that the De planctu was written when Alain was in his early thirties, a comparatively young age for an eminent theologian. Though there are over a hundred manuscript copies extant, not one of his contemporaries mentions it, even when listing Alain’s other important contributions to theology.82 It could be that the text was known only to a small coterie of intellectuals during Alain’s lifetime (only six of the manuscripts date from the thirteenth century) and that it was only after his death that it was copied and circulated across the Continent, perhaps in response to the fact that the topic had become more openly discussed and the acts more widely prosecuted. The De planctu is primarily a work of speculative moral fiction rather than a work of theology, and when it first appeared it might have been seen as a playful rhetorical exercise rather than a serious philosophical allegory. Others probably saw it as one of those texts that could not to be spoken of outside of a narrow circle of cognoscenti. Contemporary Penitentials frequently note that same-sex eroticism should never be talked about openly, even in condemnation, for fear of bringing to people’s attention what might otherwise haveremained unconscious.83 As Mark Jordan notes, such logic suggests that authorities had to admit that to at least some individuals such behavior would seem attractive rather than innately repulsive.84 Alain himself responds to potential criticism that he is inciting same-sex eroticism by saying that if his language seems immoderate, it is simply that his indignation causes him to “belch forth” such words in the hope of restraining others (137).85 This subtle admission that his text got away from him is nonetheless an opening into the myriad of aporias that structure the narrative.
Let us return for a moment to Alain’s recuperation and rewriting of Bernardus Silvestris’ model in the Cosmographia. The most striking change he effects is to reverse the gender of the protagonists. Instead of Bernardus’s wronged woman, holding forth like an Ovidian heroine or Courtly lady about the chaos of creation, Alain gives us a male poet, whining to a female about gender inversion. This poet’s first reaction, once in the persona of the dreamer, to Nature’s appearance is telling:
When I saw this kinswoman of mine close at hand I fell upon my face and stricken with mental stupor, I fainted; completely buried in the delirium of a trance, with the powers of my senses impeded, I was neither alive nor dead, and being neither, was afflicted with a state between the two. The maiden, kindly raising me up, strength- ened my reeling feet with the comforting aid of her sustaining hands. Entwining me in an embrace and sweetening my lips with chaste kisses, she cured me of my illness of stupor by the medicine of her honey-sweet discourse.86 (116)
Nature has come to comfort our poet in distress, but her relation with him, as with all of the major figures in the narration, is suspect.87 Why does he refer to her as his kinswoman? Perhaps because they both write, are both in their own way creators? Perhaps because he sees her as a comrade in moral guidance: capable, like him, of passing judgment and advocating excommunication? Nature later refers to herself as man’s mother but in terms that suggest that she has been raped by her son. This charge complicates any reading of the love trance and chaste kisses described above. Even after having been brought to his senses, it takes a while for the narrator to grow accustomed to her presence, an odd reaction for a kinsman.After her first instruction, the poet remains delirious, has trouble explaining his dramatic reaction to her presence: “as if by some healing potion, the stomach of my mind, as if nauseated, spewed forth all the dregs of phantasy” (126).88 Apologizing for not having received her with more pomp, he kisses her feet and explains: “I had been struck by her appearance as by the emergence of a phantom of something anomalous and monstrous and had been deprived of my senses by the counterfeit death of a trance” (127).89 The monstrousness of which Alain speaks is surprising in light of the descriptions that follow but, then again, Nature just may not be what he had imagined. First of all, she is hermaphroditic, possessing both a phallus (reed pen and hammer) and a womb (vellum and anvil). Secondly, we know that she and Genius, her son, are guilty of incest. They are the parents of Truth, and though their kisses are explained away in Neoplatonic terms, they still suggest illicit sexual relations. Man is accused of stirring up legal strife and civil war against his “queen” and “mother,” yet Nature’s own relations with the poet, with Venus, and with Genius show how problematic the conflation of those categories can be.90 First she is Lady Grammar, disciplining her charges; then the wronged lover, bemoaning man’s abdication of duty; then the patriarch, wielding her phallic reed.
It is not surprising then that her three interlocutors also suffer gender slippage. Venus wields hammers that often miss their mark: phallic female or impotent male. Genius is male but also slips into pseu- dography, akin to queer or non-reproductive sex. His gender needs defending by the narrator who describes him as having “no signs of feminine softness; rather the authority of manly dignity alone held sway . . .” (196).91 In a slightly later appearance his hair is said to be combed in such a way as to avoid the appearance of degeneration into “feminine softness” (197).92 Masculinity clearly depends here on a culturally sanctioned exclusion of the feminine, defined both as what is natural (i.e., before combing, before culture), and what is artificial (ornament, after culture, excessive shaving, tight sleeves [187]).93 Gender anxiety is everywhere: like the beavers and bats pictured on Nature’s robes, men are prone to gender switching, to falling back to a pre-cultural state of nature. As her creation turns toward irreparable decline, Nature blames the victim, ever in peril of slipping out of the flimsy shackles of the law:What remains safe when treachery arms even mothers against their offspring? . . . Without shame a man, no longer manlike, puts aside the practices of man. Degenerate, then, he adopts the degenerate way of an irrational animal. Thus he unmans himself and deserves to be unmanned by himself.94 (168)
Genius is a case in point: he is unmanned, as if against his will, in performing what are said to be his natural duties. Given the pen and the vellum on which to write, he begins composing with his right hand as his left holds the pelt. This is male rectitude at work and from his obedient pen come portraits of Helen, Turnus, Hercules, Cato, Cicero, Aristotle, and the gamut of classical figures known to educated men. When, however, Genius must switch hands for some reason, his left hand falters. “Limpingly withdrawing from the field of orthography to pseudography,” he produces less stellar figures such as the liars Paris,
Sinon, Ennius, and Pacuvius (217).95 His engagement with pseudog- raphy does not make Genius a sodomite but it does identify him as a poet; and as a poet, he is already a figure of some ambiguity. His loss of mastery by definition unmans him and associates him with the less than successful productions of Venus. Yet even before his decline into pseudography, there is a blurring of values: why is Helen of Troy etched from the right hand? Helen is described elsewhere by Nature as some- one deified with “godlike beauty... who... decline[d] to the abuse of harlotry when, sullying the covenant of her marriage-bed, she formed a disgraceful alliance with Paris”; and she is linked with such unsavory characters as Pasiphae, Myrrha, and Medea (135–136).96 One would not necessarily have expected to find her amongst the masculine elite.
Finally, we come to man and his relations with his “queen” and “mother.” Nature is said to seduce “the recruits in Venus’s army” (75) by offering her lips to be kissed and her arms to embrace; yet she is also said to be a virgin, never to have let Venus open the lock of her chastity.97
This virgin mother can only offer then a simulacrum of heterosexuality. While supposedly praising straight sex, we can actually find almost no trace of the heterosexual in the text, with the exception of Venus’s roundly condemned dalliance with Antigenius. Nature’s arrival on earth has in fact had an opposite effect, discouraging “proper” sexual relations. Flora comes to greet her, offering “the cotton night-gown that she hadworn for her husband to earn his embraces” (112). Proserpine disdains the marital bed and leaves her husband to return to her home (12). One of the metaphors of marriage chosen by Nature to explain the union of flesh and spirit is particularly telling: she congratulates herself on having found a way that “the husband might not be disgusted by the baseness of his partner and repudiate the espousals” (118).98 What begins then with the poet’s disgust with the homoerotic becomes a disgust with eroticism in general. Lust is a form of gluttony and, regardless of the object of desire, is also already a form of idolatry (170).99 Nowhere does Nature attempt to encourage proper hammering by making it look attractive. It is always hard work; always going bad; only worth doing for duty; and we hear virtually nothing about how reproduction is actually practiced among men, flora, or fauna.