All we can conclude is that all creation is passive in the face of Nature’s hammering, despite the fact that passivity is condemned throughout the text as feminine and unseemly.100 When all creation is likened to a process of imprinting or penetration, then all men carry the imprint of their mother/lover, Nature.101 Alain returns to this metaphor in a poem which forms the text of a monophonic musical piece, found in the Magnus liber organi.102 There he asserts that God himself deluded logic when he made what should be passive (created things) active (God becoming man). This passivity is emphasized in scenes in which Nature plants her first kisses, on the dreamer/poet’s mouth, letting it grow into a honeycomb:
My life breath, concentrating entirely on my mouth, would go out to meet the kisses and would disport itself entirely on my lips so that I might thus expire and that, when dead myself, my other self [alter ego] might enjoy in her a fruitful life.103 (71)
The supposed masculine possession of the feminine begins to look more like a recuperation of the feminine within masculinity, a merging of identity, a fantasy of plentitude more than an act of straight sex.104
Genius, on Nature’s prodding, signs the excommunication of all those who “make an irregular exception to the rule of Venus,” adding that they should be “deprived of the seal of Venus” (220–221).105 But this threat is tautological, emblematic of the entire argument. For a maleto receive passively the seal of Venus is already an exception to the rule of Venus, according to the metaphors used by Alain’s narrator. Besides which, Venus is hardly to be counted on for meting out punishment. She, like everyone else who holds any authority in this text, has slipped up. The narrator explains away her inattention to duty by saying that the sameness of her work ended up boring her, and what a damning indictment of monogamous heterosex it is: “the frequent repetition of one and the same work bedeviled and disgusted the Cytherean and the effect of continuous toil removed the inclination to work” (163).106 So Venus lost interest, Genius lost control, not being ambidextrous, and Nature brought it all on when she withdrew from the lower universe to live in what she refers to as the delightful palace of the ethereal region (34). Even the narrator acknowledges that he cannot keep his tale straight, apologizing at one point for having “wandered off in jests and jokes... digressed a little into the trivial” (155).107 That sounds like an admission of pseudography to me. How could any of these figures be taken as authoritative when they are themselves guilty of the very excesses they pretend to despise? When the figures of sexual reproduction are so clearly incompetent, so quick to wander from the straight and narrow, how could their creation be otherwise?
That brings us to the essential question: why did Alain write this text, for whom and to what end? Several theories have been advanced: (a) Alain was a reformer and his text is a sincere polemic against sodomites in the Church. Attacks on sodomy thus reflect increased sexual activity between monks in monasteries in the mid-twelfth century;108 (b) this is an attack on a specific ecclesiastical figure known to be a sodomite or written on commission to castigate such prac- tices in a specific religious house;109 (c) Alain was really interested in grammar, not sodomites, and the piece is something of a showpiece for cognoscenti; (d) this is a true Menippean satire which emphasizes form over philosophy, humor over moralism;110 (e) this text is actually a cri- tique of a type of moral representation based on classical models then current in intellectual circles whose usefulness had run its course;111
Alain adumbrates the Church’s official condemnation of sodomy (1179) in this homophobic text but also recognizes the contingency of such a condemnation. As a proto-Foucauldian, he realizes that “the repression of homoeroticism is itself tinged with homoerotic desire.”112There is some truth to all of these accounts but no one of them should be taken as definitive. The last one cited, that of Scanlon, and especially as reformulated in the final sentence of his article (“This perhaps is Genius’s final lesson, one he still has to teach: sexual regulation is itself a species of desire” [p. 242]), is the most convincing and the most dazzlingly argued. Nonetheless, I find myself reading it in the light of an earlier statement in his essay and come away feeling unsatisfied:
My purpose in noting these slippages is not to “out” Alain de Lille – quite the contrary. The De Planctu, along with Alain’s other writings, and their historical context all make it clearly evident that Alain was a supporter and perhaps even an instigator of the twelfth-century Church’s repression of homosexuality. What I do want to suggest is that Alain was quite self-conscious and even deliberative in his homophobia – much more so than many of his twentieth-century counterparts.113
As Z izek might say, the truth is out there but it is never to be found where you look for it. Alain’s intent might well be to support a homo- phobic regime, to spark a broader outcry against sexual abuses in the Church, just as he took on the heretics in his later writings; but we can not know from where he speaks. Men who engage in sex acts with other men are often the most ferocious of critics of sodomy, homosex- uality, and gay identity. As Scanlon himself admits, Alain “pushes the dilemma of unspeakability to its most paradoxical limits.”114 Does he do this as part of a self-conscious poetics or in order to undermine his message? Is he speaking for himself or as the spokesman of another individual or entity? And does he do so in a manner that sets out his critique in clear terms without instigating a counter desire? After all, Alain’s attacks on the heretics are not delivered in the highly liter- ary, rhetorically tortured prosimetrum that he chose for De planctu.115
Though Scanlon’s assessment of Alain may well be right, and I will readily concede that neither he nor I will ever settle the question defini- tively, I want to return to his judicious conclusion that sexual regulation is already a form of sexual desire, that Alain’s own sexuality is impli- cated in his attack, and that the fantasy format in which he chose to clothe his argument betrays more than he could ever have realized or controlled.According to Z izek, fantasy “conceals the horror (of the Real, of death, of what is beyond symbolization), yet at the same time it creates what it purports to conceal, its ‘repressed’ point of reference.”116 In other words, Alain’s fantasy enacts the very transgression upon which the symbolic order depends, points to the hole around which it is orga- nized, signals the lack in the Other that it simultaneously pretends to obscure.117 The fantasies inherent in De planctu are myriad: the dream that narrates itself, a female figure of authority, talking apparitions, mov- ing images, cinematic dresses, a poet who can actually master language and induce interpretive closure, a transcendental morality, apocalyptic justice. When Alain’s narrator tries to explain his first reaction to the apparition of Nature, it is explicitly in terms of fantasy: “as if by some healing potion, the stomach of my mind, as if nauseated, spewed forth all the dregs of phantasy” (126). Having been faced with the fallibility of Law, the dreamer’s only response is to spew forth fantasies whose purpose it is to uphold Nature, and the Symbolic order that she person-
ifies. But, according to Z izek, these fantasies also “constitute... desire,
provide its coordinates, . . . a schema according to which certain positive objects in reality can function as objects of desire, filling in the empty places opened up by the formal symbolic structure.”118 Alain’s narrator seems to be trying awfully hard to do just that – fill in the empty spaces, close up the gaps so as to exclude once and for all anything that could jeopardize his fantasy of social order, especially illegitimate forms of sexual desire. In the end, he succeeds only in calling attention to those gaps and in making abjection look glamorous.
In speculating on why that is, I want to return to Sheridan’s observa- tion that there is more of Alain in the De planctu than in any of his other works. In Z izek’s reading of Lacan, the object of fantasy (or objet petit a)
is that “something in me more than myself” on account of which I per- ceive myself as “worthy of the Other’s desire.”119 If we postulate that Alain, however unconsciously, wrote himself
into the figure of Nature, saw himself as the figure who would uphold the Law, then we are seeing this mechanism at work. Lady Nature is that “she bigger than himself ” through whose discourse he becomes worthy, the needed supplement to his own rhetoric. Alain the ventriloquist attempts to solidify a tex- tual identity through the persona of Nature and the intersubjectiverelation formed with the dreamer. Though he has not yet shaken off his schoolboy training and still glories in his own cleverness, there is in the De planctu considerable evidence of his desire to please, and to be found pleasing in several, possibly contradictory, quarters.
The identification of Alain with his fictional voices is abundantly prepared for within the text. Nature, Genius, and Venus, like Alain, are writers, to one extent or another, in a period when such a status represented learning and prestige. No contemporary could have read this text without seeing in it some reflection of, or commentary on, the writer’s own persona. The text is structured as a dialogue or scene of instruction leading to mastery. Yet any expectation of finding here a standard rehearsal of doctrine or an address of consolation is quickly shattered. Alain may be evoking literary models but he is also invert- ing them through exaggeration. And when the dreamer is dissatisfied with Nature’s responses and pushes her to justify her contradictions, he is more a double agent than a loyal subject. When, for example, Nature condemns what she calls the “heteroclite class,” people who recline “with those of female gender in Winter and masculine gender in Summer,” those who follow a law of “interchangeability of subject and predicate” (136),120 the dreamer wonders aloud why similar charges are not directed against the gods who have also “limped around the same circle of aberration” (138).121 Jupiter provides one example, he who made “his wine-master by day . . . his subject in bed by night” (139). Bacchus and Apollo provide another, for they shared their father’s wantonness and taste for “turning boys into women” (139). Nature responds that Gods who stray beyond her way are nothing more than the falsehoods of poets, and then adds the curious statement, coming from a poet: “[and] in this respect the poet is not found to differ from the class that shares his characteristics” (140).122
This dialogue represents the point at which Nature most severely rebukes the dreamer for “clothing with the garment of inquiry a question which is not worthy to lay claim to the appearance of a doubt” (139).123
It is a crucial moment in the text because only then does Nature draw a line between poetry and theology, myth and dogma, the tales of the cradle and philosophy. Her Platonic rejection of poetry leads, however, into dangerously self-referential terrain. Alain is, of course, a poet andwe are reading a poem that is subject to just the critique that Nature has offered. She claims that:
the poetic lyre gives a false note on the outer bark of the composition but within tells the listeners a secret of deeper significance so that when the outer shell of falsehood has been discarded the reader finds the sweeter kernel of truth hidden within.124
This standard exegetical claim is also somewhat puzzling. Alain has Nature claim that “the dreams of Epicurus are now put to sleep, the insanity of Manichaeus healed, the subtleties of Aristotle made clear, the lies of Arrhius belied”: “reason proves the unique unity of God, the universe proclaims it, faith believes it, Scripture bears witness to it” (141).125 But this rejection of fiction and embrace of reason and doctrine occurs within a poetic, principally pagan, fiction. Furthermore, the suggestion that poets share the vices of their creations, is quite daring, coming, as it does, from Alain’s own pen. It is not so much that all poets are condemned: some, Nature acknowledges, combine “accounts of historical events and entertaining fables in a kind of elegant overlay so that . . . a more elegant picture may emerge” (140).126 But others “rave about a plurality of gods” and some of them “have passed beyond the discipline of Venus” and at that point “the shade of falsehood begins to appear” (140).127 This latter description sounds suspiciously like Alain’s own text: a proliferation of gods in what could be taken as a textbook of twelfth-century knowledge, and a protagonist claiming that most men have transgressed upon Nature’s reproductive plan.
Alain’s defense of the poet comes shortly later, when God is described as the “skilled artisan of an amazing work of art” (144).128 From that moment on, metaphors of art abound. Nature’s dress (creation itself, or the book of creation) is equated to a stage production and is lauded for its “skillfully deceptive art” (107);129 Venus, “destroying herself with the connections of grammar, perverting herself with the conversions of dialectic, discoloring herself with the colors of rhetoric ... kept turning her Art into a figure, and the figure into a defect” (164).130 Pseudography as Art begins at the top and the dividing line between real/straight poetry and pure illusion is never neat or easy to trace. The figure of the poet, clearly subsumed within these critiques, is further implicated as mirror metaphors multiply in the final pages of the text.131When Narcissus is first singled out from among the myriad of figures on Nature’s dress it is as a tragic figure: “reflected in a reflection, [he] believed himself to be a second self . . . involved in the destruction arising from himself loving himself ” (136).132 But this creature who seeks a second self, arguably the figure par excellence of the twelfth- century poet, is certainly just as apt a description of Alain and his interlocutor, Nature.133 It does not take psychoanalysis to argue that a figure in a dream is in some sense a figure of the self. Yet the poet goes on to condemn Narcissus as a figure of male prostitution. Nature first says that he fell in love with what he saw “reflected in a reflection” because “his shadow faked . . . a second self” (136). Then, in a huge leap, he is compared to “other youths” whose “thirst for money” leads them to convert “Venus’ hammers to the functions of anvils” (136).134
It is doubly surprising, then, to see Nature take up this same image as she characterizes her own link with Genius: “Since like, with disdain for unlike, rejoices in a bond of relationship with like, finding myself your alter ego by the likeness of Nature that is reflected in you as in a mirror . . .” (206).135 To hear Nature celebrating the bond of like with like, at the very close of the text, at the moment that she is about to advocate burning the sodomites with the brand of anathema, has to have struck readers of any age as anomalous.136 When, in the final passage, the mirror of the text dissolves before the sleeping narrator’s eyes, we are left to conclude that the entire exercise has been, as Jordan suggested, a deceit, a disturbance that brought with it no truth.137
A deceit no doubt, but not one that fails to instruct. Alain’s auto- deconstruction is a model of medieval reading practice. We are reminded that only the dress of truth is credited with a complete seal between signified and signifier, a fit which allows for no gap between fabric and body, surface and image. The same cannot be said for Nature or the poet. Winthrop Wetherbee once said that this text “expose[s] the inevitable failure of the aspiration implicit in the lover’s response to that female beauty of which Nature is the source and model.”138 He is right about the failure of aspiration but I am surprised that he would be surprised at the failure of the feminine to hold this poet’s attention. Oddly and yet fittingly, there is no “feminine” in the text capable of upholding the pretence of heterosexual orthodoxy. Though women’s beauty is superior to men’s, to the point that even Adonis and Narcissus must bow beforeit, the dreamer declares that woman’s person is despised in his time. The effect of their beauty on men is to render them impotent. When confronted with feminine beauty, Jupiter’s thunderbolt lies idle in his right hand, every string of Phoebus’ harp grows slack (70). In another of those startling contradictions, Hippolytus, heretofore immune to love, would sell his personal chastity to enjoy a woman’s love, i.e., behave like a sodomite.139
Nature is no lady; she is a surface, a reflection of Alain himself, and if we return to our opening quotation, Alain as much as says so: “I wonder why some parts of your tunic, which should approximate the interweave of a marriage, suffer a sep
aration at that part in their connection where the picture’s phantasy produces the image of man” (see n. 7). I take his imagery to mean just what it says. Beneath the rip in Nature’s dress there is no body, but the picture’s fantasy “image of man,” an imaginary remnant in which the subject recognizes himself, a self conceptualized only through the intermediary of this fantasy other. When he later imagines his death through union with Nature, he evokes again this “other self/alter ego” who, he says, “will enjoy in her a fruitful life” (71).140 Narcissus is the only other figure in the text who is said to have such an “alter ego,” and we know that his fantasy of union with the other led straight to death. The Narcissus figure thus seems to rule paradoxically over this whole encounter with the other, dialogue with the self, this bogus scene of instruction. Alain’s narrator, like Narcissus, awaits his imprint and the touch of the phallic-wielding master.
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