Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature

by William Burgwinkle

  Fincher (Prod. 2000/Regency, TCF/Fox, 1999).

  131. “Tant qu’il y aura des hommes.. .,” Nouvel Observateur (November 4–10, 1999), pp. 60–61. To their statement I would have to add that if this is a gay fantasy it can only be so from within a heterosexual matrix.

  3 making p e r c e val: double-binding and si e` ges p e´ rilleux

  1. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), pp. 210–211. Originally published as Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975).

  2. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford

  University Press, 1977), p. 289.

  3. Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 8. Rose is citing Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation” (in From Max Weber: Essays inSociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills [London: Routledge, 1991], p. 78). A portion of this chapter appeared as an article entitled “Si`eges p´erilleux: Sodomy and Social Control in the Grail Legends,” in Romance Languages Annual 9 (1998), pp. 27–34.I thank the editors for their permission to include some of that material in this book.

  4. Gerbert de Montreuil, La continuation de Perceval, 3 vols., ed. Mary Williams (Paris: Honore´ Champion, 1922 [vol. 1 (series volume 28)], 1925 [vol. 2 (50)]); ed. Marguerite Oswald, vol. 3 (101) (Paris: Honore´ Champion, 1975).

  5. Curtius, European Literature, pp. 113–117.

  6. On Eneas, see Burgwinkle, “Knighting the Classical Hero”; Simon Gaunt, “From Epic to Romance”; Noah D. Guynn, “Eternal Flame: State-Building, Deviant Archi- tecture, and the Monumentality of Sexual Deviance in the Eneas,” GLQ 6, 2 (April

  2000), pp. 287–319; and Daniel Poirion, “De l’En´eide a` l’Eneas: mythologie et mor-

  alization,” Cahiers de Civilisation M´edi´evale 19, 3 (1976), pp. 213–229. On Marie de France see chapter 4. See lines 3535–3588 in Gautier de Tournay’s Histoire de Gille de Chyn. On Heldris de Cornouaille’s Roman de Silence, see Peter Allen, “The Ambiguity of Silence: Gender, Writing, and the Roman de Silence,” in Julian N. Wasserman and Lois Roney, eds., Sign, Sentence, Discourse: Language in Medieval Thought and Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1989); Simon Gaunt, “The Significance of Silence,” Paragraph 13, 2 (1990), pp. 202–216; Regina Psaki, ed., Le roman de Silence, ed. Lewis Thorpe (New York: Garland, 1991); and Sharon Kinoshita, “Heldris de Cornualle’s Roman de Silence and the Feudal Politics of Lineage,” PMLA 110, 3 (May 1995), pp. 397–409.

  7. In one scene of Gerbert de Montreuil’s Continuation de Perceval, e.g., Perceval wears around his neck a white shield with a red cross upon it, a clear allusion to holy orders of knighthood such as the Templars and Hospitallers (ll. 9375–9376).

  8. For the First Continuation, see Continuations of the Old French Perceval: The Second Continuation, vols. I-III, ed. W. Roach (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press/The American Philosophical Society, 1949–52) and the French translation in Premi`ere Continuation de Perceval, trans. Colette-Anne Van Coolput-Storms (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1993). For the second (Wauchier) and third (Manessier) Continu- ations, see vol. IV (1971) and V (1983) in the same series edited by Roach. For the Roman du graal, see Queste del saint graal, ed. Albert Pauphilet (Paris: Champion,

  1923), trans. as Quest of the Holy Grail, intro. P. M. Matarasso (London: Penguin,

  1969); and finally, for the Roman de l’Estoire dou graal, see Robert de Boron: Le Roman de l’Estoire dou graal, ed. William A. Nitze (Paris: Champion, 1983).

  9. On the spiritual reading, see M. Lot-Borodine, “Le Conte du graal de Chre´tien de Troyes et sa pre´sentation symbolique,” Romania 77 (1956), pp. 235–288, and H. Adolf, “Visio pacis,” in Holy City and Grail: An Attempt at an Inner History of the Grail Legend (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1960). On the Celtic reading, see Jean Marx, La L´egende arthurienne et le graal (Paris: PUF, 1952) and Roger S. Loomis, The Grail: From Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol (Cardiff and New York: Columbia University Press, 1963). For psychoanalytical readings, see Charles Me´la, La reine et le graal: la conjointure dans les romans du Graal de Chr´etiende Troyes au livre de Lancelot (Paris: Seuil, 1984) and Jean-Charles Huchet, “Le nom et l’image,” in Essais de clinique litt´eraire du texte m´edi´eval (Orle´ans: Paradigme,

  1998). For a social reading, see Brigitte Cazelles, The Unholy Grail: A Social Reading of Chr´etien de Troyes’s “Conte du Graal ” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) and for how Perceval is discussed as a masculine archetype by those with a Jungian bent, see Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men (Shaftesbury: Element, 1999) and Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (New York and London: Doubleday, 1989).

  10. See Elliott, “Pollution,” for an extended discussion of this issue as it pertains to involuntary sexual pleasure.

  11. See Girard’s Scapegoat, and Freud’s Moses and Monotheism and Totem and Taboo for its inspiration.

  12. Brigitte Cazelles’s canny and original reading in the Unholy Grail comes closest to pinpointing the sacrificial nature of Perceval’s quest. In this social interpretation, she identifies two opposing factions: one representing the territorial ambitions of the Arthurian court and another representing the family interests of Perceval. The young knight is asked, without ever understanding the political implications of his actions, to defend and demand retribution for his family’s interests (Grail castle, etc.) while serving as an Arthurian knight, i.e., serving the very interests which have decimated his family and inheritance.

  13. Miranda Griffin and Ben Ramm both take up this question in as yet unpublished dissertations from the University of Cambridge on the grail as objet a: as object and cause in Griffin’s case and as abject remainder in Ramm’s.

  14. The frequent ambiguous reminders that all but Perceval are cognizant of the crime/sin that has been committed suggests that it is not of his doing but more likely that of a member of his family. The dead father is one obvious candidate; the at least potentially incestuous mother is another. As Jacques Lacan says in dis- cussing his notion of the Symbolic: “I am one of its links. It is the discourse of my father, for instance, in so far as my father made mistakes which I am absolutely condemned to reproduce – that’s what we call the super-ego” (Jacques Lacan, The Seminar. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanaly- sis, 1954–1955, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli, notes John Forrester [New York: Norton,

  1988]; originally published as Le S´eminaire, Livre II: Le Moi dans la th´eorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller [Paris: Seuil, 1978]).

  15. Perceval only refers to his quest laconically and in terms that have been given to him by someone else. Thus, rather than say that he seeks to impose peace on the land, he says only that he must find the Fisher King and ask his questions. He thus acts out the utterances of those around him whose words make sense, retrospectively, of his experience and whose predictions “become the speech act by which an already operative necessity is confirmed” (Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death [New York: Columbia University Press, 2000], p. 64). Perceval is the prototype of the short-sighted man who claims always to be acting independently without every realizing that his acts are already inscribed within what is presented as an inevitable symbolic circuit (Lacan, Seminar Book II, p. 123).16. Foucault, Discipline, pp. 220–221.

  17. Ibid., 219.

  18. Ibid., 212.

  19. Ibid., 211.

  20. Foucault cites the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, with its institution of obligatory annual confession, as one of the key moments in the development of new techniques of subjection involving giving witness, accounting for the self: “For a long time, the individual had derived his sense of authenticity through reference to others and the manifestation of his links to others (family, allegiance, protection); but then he was validated by the discourse of truth through which he was able, and obliged, to acco
unt for himself. The avowal of truth was inscribed into the heart of processes of individualization through power” (The History of Sexuality, pp. 78–79).

  21. Le chevalier de la charette offers a parallel to these scenes, in which Lancelot and his “pechie´” are instantly known to one and all. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen put it: “Everyone he meets recognizes him at once as the Knight of the Cart. . . . How all the world beholds this one definitional gesture is left unexplained. The scopic regime that records his actions and registers its disapproval is ultimately the ghostly trace left by the author, as he forms a temporary subjectivity for the audience” (“Masoch/Lancelotism,” New Literary History 28 [1997], p. 241). This subjectivity, this positioning of the reader, is at once persecutory and masochistic, as we both participate in the inculpation of the young knight and learn to locate our own fatal failing.

  22. Foucault, Discipline, pp. 201–202.

  23. See the famous passage in Chre´tien (ll. 491–562) where the mother instructs Perceval in chivalry, Christianity, and heterosexuality as she bids him adieu. All citations from Le conte du graal are taken from Charles Me´la, Le conte du graal, in Chre´tien de Troyes, Romans, ed. Michel Zink (Paris: Livres de Poche, 1994).

  24. Perlesvaus (Le haut livre du graal), ed. W. A. Nitze and T. Atkinson Jenkins, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932–37).

  25. Gaunt, Gender and Genre, p. 26.

  26. Simon Gaunt (“Epic to Romance,” 26) rightly points out that this “dialogical” construction of masculinity – i.e. its dynamic “always under construction” quality – is complicated by the intense misogyny that characterizes almost all writing of the period, from the Church Fathers to romance. The Other with whom the masculine is in dialogue is already so fantastical or misrepresented that the dialogical nature of masculinity ends up being played out largely through interaction with other men.

  27. Gaunt, Gender and Genre, p. 28.

  28. This is Dylan Evans’ explanation of Lacan’s distinction between ego-ideal and ideal- ego (An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis [New York and London: Routledge, 1996], p. 52).

  29. This scene is echoed in the slightly later lai of Tyolet, where the eponymous knight, a homologue in every sense of Perceval, has this reaction upon first seeing a knight: “So tell me, knight/beast, for the love of God and his feast, if there are other beasts as beautiful as you” [Or me dites, chevalier beste, / por Deu e por la seue feste, /se il est duques de tiex bestes / ne de si beles con vos estes] (Alexandre Micha, Lais f´eeriques des XIIe et XIIIe si`ecles [Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1992], 192: ll. 190–193).

  30. See Girard (“Love and Hate in Yvain,” in B. Cazelles and C. Me´la, eds., Modernit´e au moyen aˆge: le d´efi du pass´e [Geneva: Droz, 1990], pp. 249–262) for more on this

  topic as it relates to the climactic battle between Yvain and Gauvain at the close of

  Chre´tien’s Le chevalier au lion.

  31. This is the castle in which Gauvain is imprisoned at the end of Chre´tien’s Roman and in which he is united with his female lineage. It is described very much like a secular convent, or women’s community, especially in the Second Continuation. There, the lady/abbess explains to Perceval that: “Ici nos somes assamblees, / Si somes totes d’un paraige, / D’une maniere et d’un aage. / Ici, tot sans mantir, avons / Qanque nos plaist et nos volons ... Ici fis fonder ce chastel,/... vos plevis/ C’onques mac¸ons n’i mist les mains.../ Ainz le firent les quatre pucelles / Cointes et avenanz et belles” (ll. 24620–24632).

  (Here we are assembled together, all of the same class, manners and age. Here, I tell you truly, we have everything we need and want. I founded the castle here... and I promise you that never did a mason set a hand to it; no, it was built by four beautiful, gracious and agreeable young women).

  32. Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1991).

  33. John Baldwin (Language of Sex, p. 233) points to Tiresias’s revelation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses that it is women who derive the greater pleasure from sex than men and to the Ars amatoria as proof that the question of female desire was not new to the Middle Ages. See also the fabliau, La dame qui aveine demanoit pour Morel sa provende avoir which offers an example of how female sexual desire was figured as omnivorous and destructive, with the woman as sexual aggressor (Contes pour rire? Fabliaux des XIIIe et XIVe si`ecles [Paris: 10/18, 1977], p. 176).

  34. An interesting example of this double vision is the requirement that knights who present themselves at the Castle of the Maidens must strike twice on the table with the hammer at the entry. Those who respect the silence of the inhabitants after the first blow leave unsatisfied. Those who persist and refuse to respect the first “no” are rewarded witha meal and night’s lodging–a paradoxical attitude, to say the least, in a text that also condemns rape (Second Continuation, ll. 24646–

  24657).

  35. “Et cil qui avoit desraisnie / Vers lui la terre a la pucele / Blancheflor, s’amie la bele, / Delez li s’aaise et delite, / Et si fust soe toute quite / La terre, si il li plau st / Que son coraige aillors n’au st. / Mais d’une [autre] molt plus li tient, / Que de sa mere li sovient / Que il vit pasmee cheoir” [(And he who had saved Blanchefleur, his beautiful amie, and her land, lay with her enjoying their pleasure, and all of her land would have been his if he had wanted it and agreed to leave his heart with her. But there is another who holds his heart more tightly, for at that moment he thinks of his mother whom he saw fall in a faint (ll. 2850–2859)].

  36. Gerbert includes in his narrative many of the elements found in Chre´tien’s origi- nal almost as if he were consciously rewriting it, and he refers to it specifically inll. 6984–6985 (“Ce nous dist Crestiens de Troie / Qui de Percheval comencha . . .”). His version includes the appearance of the vieille laide, of Gornemont and his train- ing of the young knight, of Perceval’s mother’s instructions, the hermit’s remonstra- tions, etc. He was clearly familiar with his model and likely had both it and the first two continuations before him as he wrote. Gerbert refers directly or indirectly to many other literary moments. Jongleurs and menestrals appear frequently at courts where they sing lais (Ch`evrefeuille is mentioned by name); Tristan appears and Ger- bert adds a continuation to his story as well. Interspersed in Perceval’s travels are lyric moments in which the knight appreciates the reverdi of nature, bird songs, love. Losengiers are criticized and menestrals lauded exactly as they might be in a trouv`ere song. The same sort of interpolations from other literary works, though to an even larger degree, can be found in his Roman de la violette (ed. D. L. Buffum [Paris: SATF (72), 1928]).

  37. “Que nus hom ne doit atouchier / A sa moillier fors saintement / Et par deus choses solement: / L’une si est por engenrer, / L’autre por pechie´ eschiver . . .” (For no man should touch his wife except in a holy manner, and for two reasons only: one is to have children, the other to avoid sin... [ll. 6888–6892]).

  38. See Crane, Gender and Romance; Gaunt, “Straight Minds/‘Queer’ Wishes”; and

  Dyan Elliott’s Spiritual Marriage.

  39. On Gauvain as a character across the whole range of Arthurian literature, see Keith

  Busby, Gauvain in Old French Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1980).

  40. Interpellation is the word used by Louis Althusser in his classic description of the process of hailing in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. B. Brewster (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971).

  41. Examples of popular culture’s fascination with stories of interpellation and victim- ization abound. Films like The Wizard of Oz and The Truman Show actually come closer to the claustrophobic ambience of the Grail than does a more self-conscious adaptation like The Fisher King.

  42. A similar episode occurs in the Guerehet episode that closes the First Continuation

  (ll. 8348–8496)
.

  43. Alexandre Leupin discusses these inscriptions and mysterious letters in terms of lack: “A plusieurs niveaux, l’e´criture du bref est comme troue´e, incomple`te, de´faillante, mettant en sce`ne le manque; tout d’abord, bien entendu, en re´clamant une impossi- ble vengeance . . .” (On several levels, the text of the letter is full of holes, incomplete, unable to sustain itself, stages its own lack; firstly, of course, in that it calls for an impossible vengeance [250–253]), in “La faille et l’e´criture dans les continuations du Perceval,” Moyen Age 88 (1982), pp. 237–269.

  44. Gerbert’s text is often called an interpolation between Wauchier de Denan’s Sec- ond Continuation and Manessier’s third. It is found in only two manuscripts (A: Paris, BN fr. 12576; and B: Paris, BN fr. 6614) but in just that position, though the second of the two contains only a fragment from the Manessier text. It is unlikely that Gerbert knew Manessier’s text, in fact they were probably being composed at the same time, but it does work to place Gerbert’s between the two even thoughManessier’s begins where Gerbert’s does, at the final lines of the Second Continuation. Manessier’s text appears in seven manuscripts, and there are twelve manuscripts con- taining the First and Second Continuations. The manuscripts are unusually coherent in that the continuations usually appear together with Chre´tien’s text, even when not all of the continuations are represented (Roach, ed., Continuations, vol. V, xv). In Leupin’s elegant formulation (“faille,” 260) Gerbert’s manuscript is the miss- ing piece which, inserted by Perceval into the chink in the sword, completes the cycle/sword, or at least allows one the illusion of completion.