Transforming Tales: Rewriting Metamorphosis in Medieval French Literature 019968698X, 9780199686988

Table of contents :
Cover
Transforming Tales: Rewriting Metamorphosis in Medieval French Literature
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Contents
Abbreviations
Introduction: Rewriting Metamorphosis
YONEC: THE FEATHER’S TRACES
OBSCURE WORDS AND BODIES: INHERITING TRANSFORMATION
THINKING THROUGH METAMORPHOSIS
APPROACHES TO THE BODY
STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK
1: Dismembering Ovid
RARIFICAT NEBULAS, INTEGUMENTA CANIT: VEILED LANGUAGE
DIVISÉ PAR L’EFFET DE LANGAGE: PENTHEUS, ACTAEON, AND SHADES OF DISMEMBERMENT
REMEMBERING CHRISTIANITY
CONCLUSION: HEARING MARSYAS
2: Reflecting on Echo
LOOKING FOR ECHO IN THEORY AND TRANSLATION
ECHO AND QUOTATION IN THE TWELFTH AND THIRTEENTH CENTURIES
ECHO RESONABILIS: EXEMPLARITY AND CONTINGENCY IN THE ROMAN DE LA ROSE
CONCLUSION: LISTENING TO ECHO
3: The Beast Without
DERRIDA, AGAMBEN, AND THE WEREWOLF
THE SKIN BENEATH THE SKIN
QUI SUIS-JE?: THE KNIGHT’S ANIMAL BODY
CONCLUSION: ARTHUR’S HYBRIDITY AND ALEXANDRINE’S PRAYER
4: Sex and the Serpent
SERPENTINE SECRETS: TIRESIAS’S KNOWLEDGE AND THE SIBYL’S PARADISE
WHAT RAYMONDIN SAW: MÉLUSINE, THE ABJECT, AND THE NATURAL WOMAN
LOOKING AT MEDUSA: ‘LA CHAIR QU’ON NE VOIT JAMAIS’
SCULPTING NATURE: PYGMALION IN THE ROSE AND THE OVIDE MORALISÉ
CONCLUSION: THE STATUE’S BLUSHES
5: Now You See Him . . .: The Metamorphoses of Merlin
SEEING DEMONS: AIR AND ANAMORPHOSIS
FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE: EMBODIED VOICE
ESCAPING GENDER
CONCLUSION: INKY LADIES
Conclusion: The Stuff that Dreams Are Made On
THANKING MORPHEUS: THE IMPOSSIBLE STATUE
PLACES OF TRANSFORMATION: THE FOUNTAIN, THE DESK, AND THE BED
Bibliography
PRIMARY TEXTS
SECONDARY TEXTS
Index

Citation preview

T R AN S F O R M I N G T A L E S

Transforming Tales Rewriting Metamorphosis in Medieval French Literature M I R AN D A G R I F F I N

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries # Miranda Griffin 2015 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First edition published in 2015 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2014959966 ISBN 978–0–19–968698–8 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

For Andrew, Beatrice, and Florence Sederman

Acknowledgements Writing a book is itself a transformative process, and it is my pleasure to thank here many of the people who have supported, advised, and accompanied me during that process. Sarah Kay and Simon Gaunt continue to be inspiring and sage mentors to me, as well as challenging interlocutors, and I am immensely grateful to them both for all their advice and support during the writing of this book. I count myself as ridiculously fortunate in being part of a community of interesting, dynamic, and wise medievalist scholars in the UK and the US. Among these scholars, Emma Campbell and Luke Sunderland have been my most constant friends and readers: both of them have read and made wonderfully helpful suggestions on several parts of this book; it is certainly much better for their kind and rigorous attention. It has also benefited from my discussions with Bill Burgwinkle, Jane Gilbert, Marilynn Desmond (often over marathon tea-breaks in that hallowed place of wisdom, the tea room of the Cambridge University Library); Rosalind Brown-Grant, Laura Campbell, Emma Cayley, Anne Cobby, Susan Crane, Philippe Frieden, Noah Guynn, Ruth Harvey, Thomas Hinton, Cary Howie, Sylvia Huot, Catherine Keen, Catherine Léglu, Peggy McCracken, Sophie Marnette, Robert Mills, Jonathan Morton, Linda Paterson, Jim Simpson, Zrinka Stahuljak, Alex Stuart, and Andreea Weisl-Shaw. It has been my great privilege to teach a number of brilliant students during the writing of this book; many of our discussions in seminars and supervisions have helped to shape my ideas. In particular, I would like to thank Melissa Berrill and Blake Gutt, who have read large portions of this book, and given perceptive and detailed feedback. My conversations with Matthew Lampitt and Jane Sinnett-Smith have also been tremendously stimulating and useful. It would take far too long to thank every student whose insight and enthusiasm have contributed to my thinking about medieval transformation, so I hope that those I haven’t mentioned here won’t mind if I simply say this: if I have taught you in the last eight years and you are reading this, then I thank you warmly. I am also grateful to my colleagues at St Catharine’s College for their fellowship and wisdom: in particular, Abigail Brundin and Hester LeesJeffries, who are dazzlingly scholarly interlocutors as well as extraordinarily supportive colleagues. I would also like to acknowledge the generous support afforded to me by the College in funding several of my research

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activities. In addition, part of the research for this book was funded by a fellowship from the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. Closer to home, I thank my fellow members of the Over Women’s Literary Society for their friendship and for stimulating discussions. My family have been endlessly patient with me while this book was written. I am hugely grateful to my parents-in-law, Elizabeth and Derek Sederman, for enabling me to use their house as a writing retreat: it may be unconventional to thank a house, but the tranquillity and beauty of the landscape around Tyn Rhos Bach make it worthy of gratitude. My own parents, Sue and Rod Griffin, have given me more support—practical and otherwise—than I can possibly describe here; and my magnificent sister, Rosalind, has been, as ever, a source of sensible advice and distractingly hilarious anecdotes. My greatest thanks, however, go to my husband and daughters: Andy Sederman, whose steadfastness and constancy give me comfort and strength; and Beatrice and Florence Sederman, whose own transformations and rate of change never fail to astonish and delight me. This book is dedicated to the three of them, with love.

Contents Abbreviations

Introduction: Rewriting Metamorphosis

xi 1

1. Dismembering Ovid

31

2. Reflecting on Echo

68

3. The Beast Without

102

4. Sex and the Serpent

137

5. Now You See Him . . . : The Metamorphoses of Merlin

176

Conclusion: The Stuff that Dreams Are Made On

211

Bibliography Index

237 263

Abbreviations GP GW JA M

Guillaume de Palerne, ed. Alexandre Micha (Geneva: Droz, 1990). Freud, Sigmund, Gesammelte Werke (London: Imago, 1940–52), 18 vols. Jean d’Arras, Mélusine (Paris: Livre de Poche, 2003). Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA; London: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press). OM Ovide moralisé: Poème du commencement du quatorzième siècle, ed. C de Boer and others. Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschapaen te Amsterdam, Afdeeling Letterkunde 15 (1915) (Books 1–3), 21 (1920) (Books 4–6), 30 (1931) (Books 7–9), 37 (1936) (Books 10–13), 43 (1938) (Books 14–15 and appendices). PF Les Premiers faits du roi Arthur, in Le Livre du Graal, ed. Daniel Poirion, directed by Philippe Walter, with the collaboration of Anne Berthelot, Robert Deschaux, Irene Freire-Nunes, and Gerard Gros (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 3 vols, I, 807–1662. Phil. Philomène, in Chrétien de Troyes Romans, ed. M. Zink (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1994). Rose Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Félix Lecoy (Paris: Champion, 1966–70), 3 vols.

Introduction Rewriting Metamorphosis Tales of metamorphosis abound in medieval French literature. This book addresses texts about transformation which imagine human characters who become animals, plants, rocks, gods, or other humans. Many of the stories they relate are so alluring and extraordinary that they survive to be retold and reworked long after the Middle Ages; but this book proposes that a study of literary representations of transformation is crucial for understanding a wide range of canonical work in medieval French literature. From the lais and Arthurian romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, through the Roman de la Rose and its widespread influence, to the translation of Ovid into French in the fourteenth century and the long prose cycles of the late Middle Ages, metamorphosis is a recurrent theme, resulting in some of the best-known and most powerful literature of the era. Narratives woven around these shifting bodies are composed and written down from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries; and these tales themselves are reshaped as they are appropriated, retold, and reimagined. In this book, I shall argue that physical transformation is a useful way to read and to think about the essential mutability of the medieval text. Transformation is a motif which brings together a wide range of concerns involving humanity and embodiment. It expresses anxiety about the fragility of the human body; the postulated superiority of the human mind; the difficulty of envisaging a divine reality beyond human physicality; and the power of human language to circumscribe and control the strange things that bodies do. These concerns underpin each chapter of this book, often exploring a specific configuration of these ideas via a particular figure—such as the werewolf, the serpent, the disembodied voice, the statue, or the demon. The central figure in this introductory chapter, however, is the bird—an animal who flits between earth and heaven, often changes its plumage, and whose feathers supply the implement with which medieval texts are transcribed: the ‘plume’, the quill. I shall begin with a reading of a twelfth-century lai, a very short text which

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nevertheless manages to concentrate in an inviting and intriguing way many of a number of suggestive reflections on the depiction and significance of bodily transformation in medieval French literature, reflections which I shall extend and explore in the rest of this chapter.

YONEC: THE FEATHER’S TRACES In the twelfth-century lai Yonec, attributed to Marie de France, an unhappily married lady bemoans her lot. With good reason, since she has been imprisoned in a castle by her much older and very jealous husband, and is guarded by his sister, her only companion. Voicing her wish for love, the lady reminisces about the tales she has heard about supernatural lovers who appear to mortals: Mut ai sovent oï cunter Que l’em suleit jadis trover Aventures en cest païs, Ki rehaitouent les pensis: Chevalers trovoënt puceles A lur talent gentes e beles, E dames truvoënt amanz Beaus e curteis, (pruz) e vaillanz, Si que blamees n’en esteient, Ne nul fors eles nes veeient. Si ceo peot estrë e ceo fu, Si unc a nul est avenu, Deu, ki de tut ad poësté, Il en face ma volenté! (Yonec, 91–104) [I have often heard it related that in this country adventures used to be found which cheered those who were careworn: knights found noble and beautiful maidens to their liking; and ladies found lovers so fair, courteous, brave, and valiant that they were never condemned for it; nor could anyone but the ladies see them. If this could be the case, or if it were—if it ever happened to anyone—may all-powerful God grant my desire!]

Two lines later, the lady sees the shadow of a bird: this turns out to be a hawk, which enters her chamber. Before her eyes, an extraordinary transformation occurs: ‘E ele l’ot bien esgardé, | Chevaliers bels et genz devint.’ [She looked hard at it; it became a handsome, noble knight] (114–15). The parataxis of the Anglo-Norman octosyllables is such that we can only surmise that there is a connection between the lady’s ardent gaze and the subsequent metamorphosis. In order to assuage her fears, the knight (whose name is Muldumarec) declares that he has come to be her lover,

Introduction

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and was waiting only for her to request his arrival. He reassures her that he is a Christian, and not a shape-shifting demon, proposing that he perform a supplementary transformation: Se vus de ceo ne me creez, Vostre chapelain demandez, Dites ke mals vus ad susprise, Si volez aveir le servise Que Deus ad el mund establi, Dunt li pecheür sunt gari. La semblance de vus prendrai, Le cors Damedeu recevrai, Ma creance vus dirai tute: Ja mar de ceo serez en dute! (155–64) [If you do not believe me, ask for your chaplain, and say that you have been taken ill and that you wish to have the ritual which God established on earth, by which sinners are healed. I will take your appearance and receive the body of the Lord. I will tell you all about my faith: you will never doubt me!]

Her doubts banished, the lady agrees to be Muldumarec’s lover. Their affair is discovered, however, when, in a more subtle yet no less significant metamorphosis, the lady’s happiness restores her beauty and her sly sisterin-law betrays her to her husband. The husband fits sharp bars to the window of the lady’s chamber, which fatally wound Muldumarec upon his next visit. The lady manages to follow her lover to his fairy country, where he tells her that she is carrying his child, the eponymous Yonec, who will one day avenge his death; and indeed this comes to pass many years later. Several kinds of bodily transformations are effected in this short tale. For a start, Muldumarec undergoes two metamorphoses in rapid succession: from bird to man and then from man to woman. In other words, he makes two consecutive transitions between categories which are conventionally understood in the medieval and modern world as inimical. He undergoes these metamorphoses in order to participate in a story of a relationship which could be described as ‘courtly love’—a love which is both risky and adulterous on the one hand, and familiar and decorous on the other. While the lady is startled by the metamorphosis from hawk to handsome knight, her earlier lamentations suggest that she is not entirely unfamiliar with such occurrences; Muldumarec announces that he has appeared at the lady’s window in response to her summons, voiced in terms of the ‘Aventures’ of which she has often heard tell, in which supernatural beings visit their mortal lovers in secret. Indeed, Marie de France, the author of this lai, declares that she has selected this particular one to relate from the ‘aventures que j’en sai’ [the adventures of lais that I know]: stories of shape-shifting are apparently rife in the Celtic setting of

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the lais, and are used by their characters to articulate their experiences and desires.1 Perhaps some of the stories to which Yonec’s mother refers are ones which I have included in this book. Although the lais, composed around 1170, are among the earliest texts in French I consider here, many of them, like the lais themselves, have roots in earlier traditions, written and oral, which may have been known and circulated in the second half of the twelfth century. It is tempting to wonder whether Muldumarec’s beloved was familiar with the tale of another shape-shifter, Merlin, who was conceived when a demon managed to infiltrate the bed and body of a pious virgin. Having heard that kind of ‘aventure’ might well lead the lady to cover her head in alarm at the sight of a shadowy bird entering her room, and to require Muldumarec’s demonstration of his Christianity.2 Perhaps she was—as Marie was—familiar with Ovid’s Metamorphoses;3 she may have heard tell of men and women turning into birds in the lai of Philomène translated in the last quarter of the twelfth century from the Metamorphoses by someone calling himself ‘Crestiens’. She might well have taken some comfort during her pregnancy by her dead fairy-lover in recalling tales that she had heard associated with historical nobles: Godefroy de Bouillon, the Crusade hero; or the Lusignan dynasty, whose fabled descent from shape-shifters and fairies added to their prowess and lustre. The forms in which many of these stories would have been known in the second half of the twelfth century no longer survive, if they were ever written down, but it is quite possible that Yonec’s mother, and (to be just a little less fanciful) Marie de France and her audience, would have been aware of them. Eager to prove that he does not stem from tales of rapist incubi, Muldumarec unequivocally declares himself a Christian: he asserts his belief in the Christian God in order to ensure the lady’s belief in him. His ‘Jeo crei’ [I believe] (149) has both the form and content of the Christian creed; and his second transformation is effected precisely in order to convince his beloved that he is worthy of taking communion. Yet this is a complicated move, since it introduces the problem of locating identity within the body: it is hard to tell what the priest sees when he enters the room to administer the Eucharist: are there two bodies, two ladies here?4 Further, medieval Christian teaching emphasized the See Sturges, ‘Texts and Readers’. On Muldumarec as a demon, see Elliott, Fallen Bodies, p. 59. 3 See Brightenback, ‘The Metamorphoses and Narrative Conjointure’. 4 See Kinoshita and McCracken, Marie de France, p. 148; Howie, Claustrophilia, p. 127; Bruckner, ‘Speaking Through Animals’, p. 181. 1 2

Introduction

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importance of the faith and purity of intention of the receiver as well as the giver of the Eucharist;5 and a supernatural being who has temporarily changed sex to assume the form of a human so that he can embark on an adulterous affair with that human is quite a dubious identity for the recipient of the body of Christ.6 The Eucharist itself, however, is also a transformation, which is central to Christian belief and practice: unseen as such by the eyes of mortals, the Host is the body of Christ. It undergoes a mystical metamorphosis in the moment of transubstantiation, whereby the divine body exists wholly in the Host given to each recipient. The complex relationship between Muldumarec’s appearance and his identity, and his ability to appear as several bodies, resonates with the mysteries of divine embodiment which so preoccupied medieval theologians. Literature is not theology; and I would argue that literature can offer a space in which to explore ideas about embodiment and humanity which are at odds with, or at least take a different approach to, theological texts. In this I disagree with Laurence Harf-Lancner, whose comprehensive article on metamorphosis proposes that medieval tales of transformation are only superficially opposed to theological teaching on the subject.7 I contend that Biblical tales and motifs are often incorporated into, the better to be scrutinized within, literary works; Muldumarec’s story is shot through with resonances with the life of Christ.8 His shadow, his injunctions to his lover that she be not afraid, and his later prophecy of his son’s birth and vengeance, recall the Annunciation;9 his wounds and death recall the Crucifixion. In several ways, then, this Breton legend is couched in terms which bring to mind the divine Incarnation, and the transitions between states of being and appearances that these invoke. This dialogue between vernacular supernatural fictional tales and Christian doctrine is crucial to many texts I consider in this book: literature provides a means of imagining, and often of interrogating, the wondrous possibilities of divine embodiment, via a displacement of Biblical bodies and stories into tales 5 See Macy, ‘Theology of the Eucharist’, pp. 379–92; Macy, The Theologies of the Eucharist, pp. 73–105. 6 See Verderber, ‘Refiguring the Veil’, p. 94; and Campbell, ‘Political Animals’, p. 102. 7 ‘Dans la littérature narrative affleure la même interprétation que dans la littérature apologétique’ (‘La Métamorphose illusoire’, p. 217). 8 Jacques Ribard reads Yonec as a Christian allegory in ‘Le Lai d’Yonec est-il une allégorie chrétienne?’ (his answer is broadly ‘yes’); but I concur more with Verderber’s more nuanced account: ‘Yonec may invite a typical Christian gloss to account for its scriptural allusions, but I propose that this invitation is a lure. Yonec poses not as a “veil” for salvation history, but rather its double’ (‘Refiguring the Veil’, p. 89, original emphasis). For another reading, see Nichols, ‘Deflections of the Body’, pp. 36–9. 9 Verderber, ‘Refiguring the Veil’ gives an excellent reading of Yonec’s reflection of the Annunciation. See also Johnson, ‘Christian Allusion’.

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told in the more magical idiom of the merveilleux, the term given by critics to the extraordinary enchantments often encountered in medieval romance.10 We might interpret Muldumarec’s miraculous appearance at the lady’s window as another mutation of the literary tradition the lady wistfully cites in her solitude: a refiguring of the Virgin’s reading at the Annunciation,11 this is a literary, secular instance of word becoming flesh, and being inscribed in and by feathers.12 The specific animal shape taken by Muldumarec is also significant: he reassures his beloved of his credentials by stressing that his animal form is that of a ‘Gentil oisel’ [noble bird] (122).13 His claim implies a hierarchy of nobility among animals, that other animal forms would have been less noble: in other words, the standards of cultivated courtly culture are inscribed on to animal bodies, despite the conventional medieval understanding that animals are devoid of civilization, and that what marks the difference between the animal and the human is that the human has the reason, intelligence, and sensibility to participate in culture, while the animal does not.14 Muldumarec’s reassurance chimes with the depiction of animals in the medieval Bestiary tradition, in which animal behaviour (often the kind of behaviour—and the kind of animal—never actually found in the animal kingdom) is glossed in order to reflect upon the correct behaviour for medieval Christians. Despite the moral ambiguity associated with his transformation from animal to human, then, human moral rectitude can be read into Muldumarec’s animal shape. Even more specifically, the particular kind of hawk Muldumarec initially embodies is a goshawk who has undergone ‘cinc mues [ . . . ] u [ . . . ] sis’ [five or six moultings] (111). Having undergone this many cycles of moultings means that this is an experienced bird, one who would be an asset on a hunt: birds who have moulted several times are desirable prizes in the twelfth-century romances Erec et Enide and Le Bel Inconnu.15 We might also detect here a play on the word ‘mue’, a particularly resonant word in medieval French tales of transformation, since, as well as denoting the process of moulting, it is also a part of the verb ‘muer’ [to transform].16 10 On the merveilleux in medieval French literature, see Poirion, Le Merveilleux. Related categories of characters, places or phenomena which provoke wonder are examined in Dubost, Aspects fantastiques and Guyénot, La mort féérique. 11 Verderber, ‘Refiguring the Veil’, p. 82. 12 See Delcourt, ‘Oiseaux, ombre, désir’. 13 On the significance of this hawk, see McCash, ‘The Hawk-Lover’; Verderber, ‘Refiguring the Veil’; and Bruckner, ‘Speaking Through Animals’. 14 See Salisbury, The Beast Within, pp. 3–6; de Leemans and Klemm, ‘Animals and Anthropology’; and Cohen, ‘Animals in Medieval Perceptions’. 15 Renaud de Beaujeu, Le Bel Inconnu, 1583; Chrétien de Troyes, Erec et Enide, 568. 16 See the later discussion of terms for transformation in medieval French.

Introduction

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‘Mue’ is also the feminine form of the adjective ‘mu’ [mute]: many a character in the stories I discuss in this book finds him or herself metamorphosed into a ‘beste mue’ [dumb beast]. Félix Lecoy has traced the development of this locution, which, as he points out, is rather misleading, since the beasts to which it is applied are only rarely silent: rather they are wordless.17 Muldumarec’s avian avatar may, then, be a particularly revealing instance of transformation, since it draws our attention to the way in which a word which indicates the alteration of appearance in a bird’s natural life cycle can also refer to the process of metamorphosis. This ambiguity is highlighted in a lyric by Chrétien de Troyes, composing at around the same time as Marie de France. Chrétien uses the moulting hawk as a figure to express the tension between change and stability. D’Amors ne sai nule issue, Ne ja nus ne la me die! Muër puet en ceste mue Ma plume tote ma vie: Mes cuers ne muërat mie; S’ai en celi m’atendue Que je dout que ne m’ocie: Ne por ceu cuers ne remue.18 [I don’t know any way out of Love, and let no one tell me what it is! My plumage/ pen can moult/mutate all my life long in this mews /prison: my heart will not mutate there, and I have my hope set on one whom I fear might kill me, yet a heart does not move because of this.]

Using the annual moulting of the hawk as a metaphor for change which in fact reinforces identity, the poetic persona declares that his feathers or pen may change, but his heart, the kernel of his identity and loyalty to his love, will not. To underline the ambiguity of the verb ‘muer’, it is mirrored at the end of the third line of this stanza by ‘mue’, meaning both the action of and the location for moulting. Chrétien extends his wordplay to the word ‘plume’, meaning pen or the feather from which the medieval scribe’s pen was made. The authors of Thinking Through Chrétien de Troyes name the chapter which discusses this lyric ‘The “Changeful Pen”’ after the play on words inherent in the lines ‘Muër puet en ceste mue | Ma plume tote ma vie’ [My plumage/pen can moult/mutate all my life long in this mews/prison].19

17 18 19

Lecoy, ‘Ancien français beste mue’. Chrétien de Troyes, ‘Amors tençon et bataille’, in Romans, pp. 1216–18. Stahuljak et al., Thinking Through Chrétien de Troyes, pp. 15–39.

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The principal author of this chapter, Sarah Kay, points out in another article the intimate connection to the animal world experienced by those who composed and copied literary works in the Middle Ages: The act of writing comprises the touch of human skin on animal skin, goose feather pen in hand, oak gall ink in a horn inkwell close by; and reading involves renewing this contact of skin on skin, as the feather’s traces are deciphered.20

Changing one’s feathers or one’s skin, then, is more than an abstract metaphor for rewriting, since feathers and skin are part of the everyday medieval paraphernalia of writing.21 When Muldumarec changes his feathers for human skin, he is doing so in response to texts which have been written with the feather on skin, and his story is written down in the same way to be transmitted to future generations and reinterpreted by them. The processes of transmission and reinterpretation are, as I shall explore in this book, manifested in several ways: as translation from one language to another; as the redeployment of particular motifs; as the adaptation of a tale; or as a moralizing commentary on an earlier work—all processes which come under the heading of translatio in the Middle Ages and scholarship on them.22 Medieval authors often exploit the inherent ambiguity of language when addressing the change and continuation inherent in tales of metamorphosis. I shall return to this exploitation of ambiguity throughout this study, so now is probably a good time for me to labour the pun in the title I have given to this book: Transforming Tales is an account not just of texts which deal with metamorphosis, but also of the way in which the stories they tell are themselves transformed. In the next section, I shall turn to the tales of another bird-knight in order to discuss the means by which tales of transformation are inherited by the Middle Ages. I shall then consider the motif of transformation as a fruitful way of exploring metaphors for physical identity, textual production, and the production of metaphor itself. I then give an outline of the theoretical approach I take in this book, and I close the Introduction with a brief description of each of the chapters.

Kay, ‘Legible Skin’, p. 13. On the materiality of manuscripts as animal skin, see also Holsinger, ‘Of Pigs and Parchment’. 22 See Kelly, ‘Translatio Studii’. 20 21

Introduction

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OBSCURE WORDS AND BODIES: INHERITING TRANSFORMATION Yonec is a tale of lineage and legitimacy: its eponymous hero is not born until over three-quarters of the way through the lai, but its opening lines make clear this lai’s purpose. The narrator declares that she will tell us, ‘Dunt il fu nez, e de sun pere | Cum il vint primes a sa mere’ [who engendered him, and about how his father first came to his mother] (7–8). Although Yonec grows up as the son of his mother’s jealous old husband, his true paternity is revealed when the three of them find themselves at Muldumarec’s tomb. The truth of his paternity therefore relies completely on his mother’s relation of her own ‘aventure’,23 a tale which edits out the more supernatural circumstances surrounding Yonec’s conception. The opposite operation is at work in the avian secret which lies in the ancestry of a well-known real-life medieval hero, the Crusade knight Godefroy de Bouillon (c. 1060–1100). From a reference to Godefroy being a ‘chevalier au cygne’ stems a legend that he is descended from knights who metamorphosed into swans.24 The history of the First Crusade is related in the sequence of texts known as the Crusade Cycle, whose early stages recount Godefroy’s ancestry in terms which are more reminiscent of lai or romance, despite being composed in the assonating laisses of early chansons de geste.25 The first text of the Crusade Cycle exists in three distinct traditions: each gives a different name to the swan-knight’s mother. These differing names have become used as the titles for the differing versions: Beatrix, Elioxe, and Isomberte.26 In each version, a nobleman (in Beatrix and Elioxe a king; in Isomberte a count) marries a beautiful and pious young woman, who gives birth to septuplets—one girl and six boys. The children are born with, or acquire via a fairy (Beatrix) or an angel (Isomberte), a gold or silver chain around their necks: if this chain is removed, they metamorphose into swans. The nobleman’s mother plots to destroy the children and discredit their mother, taking advantage of the belief that multiple births are only possible if the mother has had multiple sexual partners, and tells Delcourt, ‘Oiseaux, ombre, désir’, p. 819; Griffin, ‘Gender and Authority’, pp. 52–3. Lecouteux cites a letter from Guy de Bazoches written 1175–80 as the earliest witness for this tale; William of Tyre mentions it in 1184 (Mélusine, p. 109). 25 See Sinclair, ‘Suppression, Sacrifice, Subversion’, p. 33. 26 Beatrix and Elioxe are given in volume one of The Old French Crusade Cycle. For detailed comparisons and evaluations of the versions, see Lods, ‘L’Utilisation’; ‘L’art de la composition’; ‘Encore la légende’. For readings of this tradition, see Sinclair, Milk and Blood, pp. 71–7; and McCracken, ‘Nursing Animals’. 23 24

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her son that his wife has given birth to animals (dogs in Beatrix and Isomberte; serpents in Elioxe). The children are sent to be killed but instead they are abandoned in a wood, where they are found and looked after by a hermit. Some time later, the chains are stolen from all but one of the children (in Elioxe it is the girl who remains in human form; in Beatrix and Isomberte it is one of the boys). Eventually, all the children but one are transformed back into human form and go on to forge noble careers for themselves, which feed into the historic-literary action of the Cycle. The tales of Yonec and the swan-knight ancestors of Godefroy both situate a shape-shifting bird-man as the origin of a cultured, powerful knight. With a sweep of the feather pen on skin-parchment, feathers are rewritten to form the shape of man, and the animal is transformed into the aristocratic. Yonec would appear to unite the fairy and mortal realms in his rule, and certainly Godefroy’s military might is far from diminished by his alleged fairy ancestry—indeed, David A. Trotter suggests that it is increased.27 Just as Yonec and Godefroy are cast by these tales as inheriting a magical past involving shape-shifting animals, so medieval French literature itself inherits tales, either writing them down for the first time, or translating them from another language: in either case, the tales are transformed by the forms in which they are told. Cristina Noacco provides a full account of the traditions and influences which come together from the twelfth century onwards in literature written in French to produce such a rich and varied array of texts dealing with metamorphosis.28 These can be categorized roughly as those that are written (from Greek and Latin sources) and those that are described under the much less satisfactory heading of ‘folkloric’—tales which feature the supernatural merveilleux,29 and which are only belatedly written down, having been told, retold, remembered, forgotten, and cross-pollinated so much that one original tale may have produced several widely divergent ones, or several traditions may have merged into one tale. The prologue to the twelve lais attributed to Marie de France is one of the most frequently cited expositions of this aesthetic of literary inheritance and rewriting: it portrays the Classical literary works the Middle Ages inherits, in what is often called the translatio studii topos, as summoning a response from its medieval readers.30 Custume fu as ancïens, Ceo testimoine Precïens,

28 Trotter, ‘L’Ascendance’, p. 109. Noacco, La Métamorphose, pp. 25–72. See Pairet, Les Mutacions, pp. 55–96. 30 On the Prologue as a work which elicits intertextual involvement, see Griffin, ‘Gender and Authority’; Kinoshita and McCracken, Marie de France, pp. 22–6. 27 29

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Es livres ke jadis feseient, Assez oscurement diseient Pur ceus ki a venir esteient E ki aprendre les deveient, K’i peüssent gloser la lettre E de lur sen le surplus mettre. (Prologue, 9–16) [As Priscian attests, it was the custom of the ancients, in the books that they made long ago, to speak somewhat obscurely for the benefit of those who were to come after them, and had to learn them, that they might interpret their texts and add additional material from their own learning.]

Whether this is indeed an accurate reflection of the writings of the author Priscian has been a matter of scrutiny for many scholars of medieval French literature;31 it remains a suggestive summary of the way in which medieval authors, including the authors of the works I discuss in this book, understand their relationship to the authors of previous works.32 It also resonates with the reassuring words spoken by Muldumarec in the seventh lai in the collection prefaced by the Prologue, in four lines which, remarkably, reiterate the same rhyme: ‘Dame,’ fet il, ‘neiez poür: Gentil oisel ad en ostur! Si li segrei vus sunt oscur, Gardez ke seiez a seür, Si fetes de mei vostre ami!’ (Yonec, 121–5) [‘Lady,’ he says, ‘be not afraid: the hawk is a noble bird! If these secrets are obscure to you, be assured that you are safe, and make me your beloved!’]

It is not the hawk’s words which are ‘oscur’ to the lady, but his body; yet he glosses it in a way which adds his own surplus—almost literally, since his is an excessive body, being bird, man, and woman—and incorporating the body of Christ, in the space of a few lines. For all the allure that her outline of medieval literary practice has for later scholars, the author of the Prologue in fact goes on to reject the project this would entail. Instead, she declares that she has turned to the Breton lais she has heard, and undertakes to record them for posterity. These lais are also told ‘oscurement’, but their obscurity lies not in their wording but in their form: orally transmitted songs and/or stories composed in a Celtic language.33 As critics have observed, Marie de France may reject Latin 31 Spitzer, ‘The Prologue’; Donavan, ‘Priscian’; Hunt, ‘Glossing Marie de France’; Zanoni, ‘Ceo Testimoine Precïens’. 32 For a detailed reading of this passage and all its permutations, see Stahuljak, Bloodless Genealogies, pp. 162–71. 33 See Mikhailova, ‘À l’ombre de la lettre’. On Marie’s representation of the Breton lais, see Baum, Recherches, pp. 29–41 and 117–92.

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sources in favour of Celtic, orally transmitted ones, but references to the Latin poetry of Ovid abound in her work.34 Marie is certainly not alone: so influential was the work of Ovid on the literary sensibilities of the European Middle Ages that, since Ludwig Traube described the twelfth century as an ‘aetas Ovidiana’ [age of Ovidiana],35 scholars have both refined and broadened this classification.36 Ovid’s Metamorphoses became widely known by French clergy in the late twelfth century; and it quickly became the subject of a significant tradition of commentary and exegesis.37 Many of the entwining tales Ovid recounts provide explanations for the current state of the natural world: in a manner prefiguring Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Just So’ stories, Ovid’s tales of humans who become animals, plants, or rocks often purport to give the reasons behind their appearance or behaviour.38 So the sap that the myrrh tree weeps are the tears of remorse wept by Myrrha, as she repents eternally for her desire for, and subsequent pregnancy by, her father (M, 10.499–502); the halcyon days of summer are so named because Alcyone, turned into a kingfisher, nests on the calm waters as consolation for the tempest which killed her husband (11.745–8); and Mount Atlas was once a giant, turned to stone when Perseus brandished Medusa’s head at him (4.655–62). In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, some episodes from the Metamorphoses were translated into French, often very freely, such that they became quite different tales: these are often referred to as ‘Ovidian lais’, since their brevity and subject matter often resonates with the lais whose source material is ostensibly Celtic. Two of them, Pirame et Tisbé and Narcisus et Dané, are transmitted by manuscripts which also contain other short narratives, including lais.39 The captivating, racy stories related in the Metamorphoses were a kind of compendium of sources for medieval authors: Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun both mined it for tales which illustrated the perils of desire and creativity in arresting, engaging ways in their Le Roman de la Rose. Unavoidable for anyone discussing practically any subject in later medieval French literature, the Rose has some particularly rich and suggestive things to say about metamorphosis and its representation. Articulated as a dream populated by personifications who 34 See Edwards, ‘Marie de France and Le Livre Ovide’; Brightenback, ‘The Metamorphoses and Narrative Conjointure’; Krueger, ‘The Wound, the Knot, and the Book’. 35 Traube, Vorlesungen und Abhandlungen, vol. 2, p. 113. 36 In particular, see Marilynn Desmond, ‘Introduction’; and Hexter, Ovid and Medieval Schooling, pp. 2–3. 37 See Pairet, Les Mutacions, p. 17; Coulson, ‘Ovid’s Metamorphoses’; ‘Ovid’s transformations’; The ‘Vulgate’ Commentary’. 38 See Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh. 39 They are both found in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, manuscripts f. fr. 837 and 19152.

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help or hinder the first-person narrator in his union with the object of his desire, the eponymous rose, the Rose recounts a number of tales appropriated from the Metamorphoses in order to illustrate particular aspects of love and desire. The fourteenth-century translation and allegoresis of the Metamorphoses, the anonymously authored Ovide moralisé, quickly became the source through which later medieval authors knew Ovid’s poem: the work of Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and Christine de Pizan shows these ingenious authors refracting Ovidian motifs through the lenses of the Rose and the Ovide moralisé.40 The combination of the dream-setting and the reworking of Ovidian tales and characters becomes a defining characteristic of the late medieval dit amoureux, and also creates rich possibilities to envisage bodily metamorphosis as a means of self-consciously reflecting on literary adaptation. St Augustine was so exercised by the stories of transformation he had encountered that he felt obliged to dedicate a whole chapter of his City of God to the credibility of this phenomenon.41 Indeed, he starts this chapter with what sounds like a rather weary concession to his demanding readers: Sed de ista tanta ludificatione daemonum nos quid dicamus, qui haec legent, fortassis expectent.42 [Perhaps our readers expect us to say something about this great delusion wrought by the demons.]

Much of the response to tales of metamorphosis articulated by medieval theology stems from Augustine’s exposition.43 Like Marie de France seven centuries later, he has encountered both written, Latin texts (he cites tales of transformation related by Varro and Apuleius) and oral tales (he reminisces about some extraordinary tales he heard when travelling in Italy).44 Augustine dismisses stories about people who change shape as incredible, arguing that they owe their existence to illusions wrought by demons (with, inevitably, the permission of God) who exploit the ‘phantasticum hominis’ [phantasm of a man]—a ghostly image of a person rather than their body—as well as the perceptions of those who view this phantasm.45 Commentaries on Marie de France’s Prologue suggest that 40 See Armstrong and Kay, Knowing Poetry, pp. 80–8; Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Reading Myth, p. 136; Cerquiglini-Toulet, « Un engin si soutil », pp. 153–5; Rosenfeld, Ethics and Enjoyment, pp. 74–106. 41 On this passage, see Harf-Lancner, ‘De la métamorphose au Moyen Âge’, pp. 11–12; Noacco, La Métamorphose, pp. 37–9; and Pairet, Les Mutacions, pp. 31–6. 42 Augustine, De Civitate Dei, 18.18. 43 See Pairet, Les Mutacions, p. 31; and Harf-Lancner, ‘La Métamorphose illusoire’. 44 Augustine, De Civitate Dei, 18.17 and 18.18. 45 Augustine, De Civitate Dei, 18.18.

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she was familiar with Augustine’s works;46 it would appear that Muldumarec’s guarantees of his piety are aimed at countering claims that he might be this kind of phantasm. Indeed, this manipulation of human perception is precisely the power exploited by several illusionists encountered in medieval French literature: in the thirteenth-century prose Lancelot, a messenger sent by the Lady of the Lake rescues the young Lionel and Bohort from their wicked uncle, Claudas, by casting a spell which swaps their appearance with that of two hounds: Si jete son enchantement et fait resambler les .II. enfans as .II. levriers et li doi levrier orent la samblance as .II. enfans, che fu avis a tous chaus qui les veoient.47 [She cast her spell and made the two children look like two hounds and the two hounds had the appearance of the two children: this was how it seemed to everyone who saw them.]

In the slightly later Suite du Roman de Merlin, Morgan, Arthur’s wicked sister, immobilizes herself and her retinue, ‘si que se vous les veissiés, vous cuidissiés tout vraiement que il fuissent de pierre naïve’ [so that, had you seen them, you would have truly thought they were made of pure stone].48 And, in a transformation I shall examine in more detail in Chapter 3, the fairy queen Lydoire in the late medieval prose romance Perceforest amends not so much the body of Estonné, but rather his and others’ perceptions of it: he is ‘mué en semblance d’un ours a la veue de tous ceulx qui le regardoient, et luy mesme le cuida estre vrayement et eut en luy grant partie de la nature d’un ours’ [transformed into the appearance of a bear in the eyes of all those who looked at him, and he himself believed truly to be one, and he had in him much of the nature of a bear].49 The powers of these three sorceresses resonate with those of a witch from classical legend, Circe, who used a magic potion to transform some of Ulysses’s men into pigs; Augustine himself cites the tale of Circe as one of the strange tales of transformation which must not be believed despite their relation by otherwise trustworthy sources.50 In a text which Leonard Barkan calls ‘the real point of origin for [the medieval] allegorical approach to metamorphosis’,51 Consolatio Philosophiae, Boethius also invokes this

See Hunt, ‘Glossing Marie de France’; and Zanoni, ‘Ceo testimoine Precïens’. Lancelot, VII, 119. La Suite du Roman de Merlin, p. 361. 49 Perceforest, II, i, 322. On this transformation, see Delcourt, ‘Magie, fiction, et phantasme’. 50 Augustine, De Civitate Dei, 18.17. 51 Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh, p. 108. 46 47 48

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tale to reflect on the correct understanding of the relationship between the body and the mind in human nature. Lady Philosophy compares corrupt individuals to animals, declaring that vice transforms men to something subhuman. In her song, she relates the story of Circe’s enchantments, but emphasizes that the Greeks were only physically transfigured: their minds remained human: uoce, corpore perditis. Sola mens stabilis super monstra quae patitur gemit.52 [voices and bodies were lost. Only their minds remained to mourn the monstrosity they had suffered.]

This, Philosophy argues, stands in contrast to the transformations wrought by wickedness, which truly do rob men of their humanity: ‘Ita fit ut qui probitate deserta homo esse desierit, cum in diuinam condicionem transire non possit, uertatur in beluam’53 [Thus he who abandons goodness and ceases to be a man cannot rise to the status of a god, and so is transformed into a beast]. In other words, the tale of Circe is cited to illustrate the distinction between the mutations undergone by body and mind, and the respective effect each has on the definition of humanity. Metamorphosis is, in the deployment of this tale, used to insist upon the continuity of an essential humanity in the absence of a human body; it becomes a powerful and suggestive metaphor about the limits of humanity.

THINKING THROUGH METAMORPHOSIS The authors of Thinking Through Chrétien de Troyes draw attention via the wordplay of their title to the way in which the oeuvre of Chrétien both demands and enables consideration of various issues crucial to medieval textuality.54 Along the same lines, I shall argue here that metamorphosis can provide a kind of scaffolding for thought about bodily identity and textual production. Caroline Walker Bynum observes that Marie de France and Ovid use transformation as ‘the fundamental metaphor’:55 literature depicting 52

Boethius, Consolatio Philosophiae, 4.3.m 26–8. Boethius, Consolatio Philosophiae, 4.3.p 25. 54 Stahuljak et al., Thinking Through Chrétien de Troyes, p. 2. 55 In fact, she homogenizes these two very different authors in the somewhat vague category of ‘thinkers’: ‘thinkers such as Ovid or Marie de France, for whom metamorphosis provides the fundamental metaphor, tend to employ and find meaning in narrative and to plumb the possibilities and horrors of replacement-change’ (Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, p. 32). 53

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metamorphosis may enable its readers to reflect on processes of change in their own lives. Metamorphosis might be seen as a way of making literal metaphors employing nonhuman terms to describe humans (‘stonyfaced’, for example; or ‘a bear of a man’; or ‘a snake in the grass’). Bynum’s interpretation of medieval accounts of change and transformation argues that the idea of change itself underwent ‘a quite stunning shift of intellectual paradigms’ at the end of the twelfth century, from ideas of gradual alteration and development to complete replacement.56 She maps this shift on to what she sees as a change in literary taste, from epic to romance.57 While there is a huge amount to admire in Bynum’s work on the understanding of the body in medieval culture, this thesis seems too simplistic to ring true: romance and chanson de geste continued to be composed and consumed alongside one another in the thirteenth century, and, in the case of the Chevalier au Cygne, to cross-pollinate one another. Indeed, the substitution involved in metamorphosis does not represent a total replacement: a transformed body, like a rewritten text, very often retains sufficient traces of its original manifestation for it to be understood as a changed entity, rather than a completely new one. Instead, it is my contention in this book that transformation, translation, metaphor, and interpretation are all processes and terms which bleed and lead into one another in the literary works I am discussing. Accordingly, Christine de Pizan turns to Ovidian tales of transformation to consider her true, yet metaphorical, sex-change. Her 1403 poem, La Mutacion de Fortune, relates in allegorical form the transformation Christine had to undergo when her husband died and she was obliged to take charge of her household. As she describes Fortune’s transformation of her from a weak woman to a vigorous man, she relates, as supporting exempla, the tales of Circe (about whom we have just heard), Tiresias (about whom we will hear in Chapter 4), and Iphis, who was turned from a woman to a man just in time for her wedding to a woman (M 9.667–797). Christine insists on the truth of her transformation, yet she tells it in relation to tales drawn from a pagan source: it is not mendacious, she stresses, to speak through metaphor:58 Et si n’est mençonge, ne fable, A parler selon methafore Qui pas ne met verité fore. (1032–4)

56

Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, p. 25. Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, p. 23. 58 See Griffin, ‘Transforming Fortune’; Brownlee, ‘Ovide et le moi poétique’; Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Reading Myth, pp. 178–9. 57

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[And it is neither a lie nor a fairy tale to speak according to metaphor, which does not expose the truth openly.]

While Suzanne Conklin Akbari argues that Christine’s invocation of metaphor is an innovative connection between metaphor and metamorphosis,59 Barkan points out that this connection is widespread: ‘often the business of metamorphosis is [ . . . ] to make flesh of metaphors’.60 These two notions are often used to figure one another throughout the Middle Ages, since they both participate in the widespread aesthetic and ethic of translatio. Both Harf-Lancner and Ana Pairet start their analyses of narratives of metamorphosis in medieval French literature by observing that the word ‘métamorphose’ does not enter the French language until the end of the Middle Ages.61 Pairet gives a thorough catalogue of the words which were used to denote what we would now call metamorphosis: these include cognates of ‘muer’ (parts of which, as we have seen, are deployed in ambiguous ways), ‘transformer’, ‘transfigurer’, ‘alterer’, and ‘changier’. The Latin word ‘metamorphosis’ (itself an appropriation from the Greek) was glossed as ‘transmutacion’.62 Just as ‘metamorphosis’ and ‘transformation’ are simply Greek- and Latin-derived words for the same phenomenon, etymologically, ‘translation’ and ‘metaphor’ mean exactly the same thing: transferral.63 While translation is understood now to mean the transition from one language to another, and metaphor from a literal to a figurative meaning, in the Middle Ages both these senses were covered by the term translatio.64 This term also denoted a geographical transferral, such as the translation of saint’s relics to a place of worship; or, in the topoi of translatio studii and translatio imperii, to describe medieval European ideas about the migration of knowledge and power from Greece, via Rome, to England and France.65 Translation and metaphor (in their modern uses) involve substituting one thing for another: in the Middle Ages, they were themselves thought of as equivalents.66 Isidore of Seville defines metaphor as ‘translatio’;67 and Akbari, ‘Metaphor and Metamorphosis’. Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh, p. 23. 61 Harf-Lancner, ‘De la métamorphose au Moyen Âge’, p. 3; and Pairet, Les Mutacions, pp. 11–12. Christine de Pizan uses the word ‘Methamorphosëos’ at l. 3068 of her Mutacion, but this is precisely to name the ‘grant livre renommé’ [renowned great book] of Ovid. 62 Pairet, Les Mutacions, pp. 21–30. 63 See Curtius, European Literature, p. 128. 64 See Stahuljak, Bloodless Genealogies, pp. 178–85. Rita Copeland insists that these meanings were not conflated (Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, p. 235 n. 74). 65 See Curtius, European Literature, pp. 28–9; Kelly, ‘Translatio Studii’; Pickens, ‘Transmission et translatio’. 66 Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation, p. 106. 67 See Akbari, Seeing Through the Veil, p. 15. 59 60

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Zrinka Stahuljak, with reference to the Poetria Nova of Geoffroy of Vinsauf, observes that translatio is always represented through figures of substitution.68 The Poetria Nova was composed in 1210, almost 200 years before La Mutacion de Fortune, yet Geoffroy’s remarks on metaphor use corporeal terms resonant with tales of transformation: the metaphor he chooses to introduce his discussion of metaphor makes reference to physical appearance: Verbi prius inspice mentem Et demum faciem, cujus ne crede colori.69 [First examine the soul of the word, and then its face, whose outward show alone you should not trust.]

In other words, there may be a mismatch between appearance and soul, or identity, yet that identity remains evident through the incongruity of its appearance. As it could be for the men transformed by Circe, this could also be a description of what happens to our understanding of a person when he or she changes shape. Akbari emphasizes the importance of the recurrent reference to vision as a means to understanding metaphor;70 and Stahuljak argues that translatio, as metaphor, never appears as itself: ‘when a new face is superimposed, creating a new metaphor, what changes is the manner of signifying, not the signified’.71 Metamorphosis offers a way of contemplating the ways in which meaning is made: the transferral inherent in transformation means that linguistic topical invention is given a physical topos, a place in the world inhabited by bodies.72 The author of the Ovide moralisé seems to be aware of this intimate association between translation, transformation, and metaphor. Book 15 of the Ovide moralisé is unique in this work, since, rather than giving a translation of each episode followed by that episode’s moralization, it renders into French the whole of Ovid’s book in the first 2,308 lines, and then supplies the moralizations in the subsequent 5,200. A possible explanation for this is that the last book of the Metamorphoses is the least narrative, the hardest to break into episodic chunks to be moralized separately:73 about half of it is taken up with the sermon of Pythagoras, 68 Stahuljak, Bloodless Genealogies, pp. 143–4. Copeland suggests something similar by discussing some modes of translation as having a ‘metaphoric structure’ (Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation, p. 103). 69 Geoffroy of Vinsauf, Poetria Nova, ll. 744–5. 70 Akbari, Seeing Through the Veil, pp. 9–10. 71 Stahuljak, Bloodless Genealogies, p. 181. 72 On metaphor’s self-referentiality and obscurity, see also Williams, Deformed Discourse, pp. 40–2. 73 See Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Reading Myth, pp. 112–14.

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who, following from his doctrine of metempsychosis (the reincarnation of the soul in other creatures after death) advocates a respect for the sanctity of all life. The doctrine of metempsychosis might be seen as a rationalization of all the tales of metamorphosis Ovid’s reader has encountered thus far, or at least as an explanation of the place of these tales in the world.74 It explains the natural yet radical moments of change, birth, and death, as transitions between states, between embodiments: nec perit in toto quicquam, mihi credite, mundo, sed variat faciemque novat, nascique vocatur incipere esse aliud, quam quod fuit ante, morique desinere illud idem. cum sint huc forsitan illa, haec translata illuc, summa tamen omnia constant. (M, 15.254–8) [Believe me, nothing dies in the universe as a whole, but it varies and changes its aspect, and what we call ‘being born’ is a beginning to be, of something other than what was before, and ‘dying’ is, likewise, ending a former state. Though ‘that’ perhaps is transferred here, and ‘this’, there, the total sum is constant.]

Translating this extract, the Ovide moralisé renders the Latin ‘translata’ in the last line of the quotation above as two separate French verbs: ‘se transformer’ and ‘translater’. Et qu’est ‘nestre’? Comencier seulement à estre La chose autre qu’el n’iert eüe, Et ‘morir’ est quant el se mue Et lesse sa premiere forme: Ja soit ce qu’ele se transforme Et translate, elle ne muert pas. (OM, 15.705–11) [And what is birth? It is simply when one begins to be a thing other than before; and to die is to mutate, when the thing leaves its initial form. Although it may transform and translate, it does not die.]

The hendiadys of the Ovide moralisé’s translation of ‘translata’ implies that the notion of translatio involves not just the transferral between languages or locations, but also the movement between forms, ‘se transformer’. Pythagoras’s account of transformation is, then, at odds with the way it has been portrayed in the previous fourteen books: in the stories of people becoming animals, plants, rocks, or gods, transformation is surprising, upsetting, scandalous; Pythagoras describes it as the most natural thing in the world. In his sermon, metamorphosis becomes a way of contemplating

74 On the relation between Pythagoras and the rest of the Metamorphoses, see Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh, pp. 86–8.

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human change, a metaphor for the most inevitable, yet most alarming, aspects of mortality.75 Before embarking on his moralization of Pythagoras’s sermon, the Ovide moralisé author seems to pause and pray for the requisite ‘grace et savoir’ [grace and wisdom] (15.2503) to gloss ‘la grant predicacion | Que Pictagoras nous a faite’ [the great sermon that Pythagoras preached to us] (15.2506–7). It may be that the translator-moralizer feels the need for divine inspiration at this point because he finds himself enmeshed in numerous layers of translatio: he is, after all, about to moralize his translation of a metaphorical explanation of metamorphosis. As Stahuljak observes, ‘The translation of translatio by another metaphor, by a meaning alien to it, reveals that translation is, in its proper meaning, untranslatable, obscure.’76 The grace and wisdom the Ovide moralisé author derives from contemplating the mysteries of divine embodiment which underpin the central, singular truth of his Christianity are essential at this point if he is to impose his unifying vision on to Ovid’s polytheistic, polysemous, polymorphous, and perverse poem. Although he is writing specifically about the transformative adaptation of lyric poetry, Paul Zumthor’s fine description of literary mutation is applicable more generally to the medieval works I discuss in this book: ‘L’ « uvre » flotte, s’entoure moins de frontières que d’un halo où se produisent d’incessantes mutations’ [The ‘work’ floats, delineated less by boundaries than by a halo in which ceaseless mutations are produced].77 Zumthor’s work shows that the material transmission of medieval literature means that it is inevitably and constantly subject to mobility and variation. Where Zumthor’s idea of ‘mouvance’ focuses on the exchange between the oral and the written, there is some overlap between this term and the ideas of translatio discussed earlier. Both envisage the medieval text as existing in flux, and the processes of reading and transmission as necessarily involving mutation and transformation. The notion of a textual body whose outline is indefinite, and which pulsates with a multiplicity of possible forms, is one that has informed much of my thinking in this book. The representation of bodily metamorphosis is often, in the texts I examine here, a means of literary self-reflection, as

‘Devenue une métaphore de processus naturels ou une marque du surnaturel, la métamorphose sert à expliquer les origines et la diversité du monde’ [having become a metaphor for natural processes or a sign of the supernatural, metamorphosis provides an explanation for the origins and the diversity of the world] (Pairet, Les Mutacions, p. 14). On the Ovide moralisé’s treatment of this section, see also Possamaï-Pérez, L’Ovide moralisé, pp. 150–61. 76 Stahuljak, Bloodless Genealogies, p. 183. 77 Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale, p. 92. 75

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translatio and transformation figure one another. This use of metamorphosis as metaphor is a reminder that, for the Middle Ages, the body was itself part of the book of creation, to be read and interpreted using the requisite moral learning in order to better understand the mysteries of the divine: one kind of corpus was frequently read it terms of another. In turn, these mysteries were often figured with recourse to seemingly impossible bodies.

APPROACHES TO THE BODY Just as Yonec’s fairy father prefigured his birth in an echo of the Annunciation, so the supernatural mother of the swan-knights in the Elioxe version of La Naissance du Chevalier au Cygne foresees her future with their father, Lothaire: after an enjoyable wedding night they will have seven children, who must guard their gold chains carefully, but Elioxe herself will die in childbirth (249–74). Attempting to stave off this outcome, Lothaire articulates in a doomed prayer for his wife’s safe delivery an account of Christian history from the Creation to the Resurrection. His account of the Annunciation dwells on the way in which the word became flesh in the Virgin’s body: Dex, tu fesis ton fil en une feme entrer Par l’angle Gabriël, qui li vint aporter Ton message en orelle, et el le valt graer. La parole qu’il dist tu li fesis entrer Par l’orelle ens el cuer et del cuer encarner: Cele cars devint hom, ainc ne s’en pot vanter Hom qui a li peüst carnelement deliter. Çou fu contre nature. (Elioxe, 586–92) [God, you caused your son to enter a woman by the angel Gabriel, who came to bring her your message in her ear, which pleased her greatly. You made the words that he said enter her through her ear into her heart, and, from her heart, take on flesh. That flesh became man: never could a man boast that he had taken carnal pleasure with her. This was against nature.]

As it was in Yonec, a divine mutation of the natural order is called upon in a tale of human–animal metamorphosis. The extraordinary possibilities of divine embodiment, which are ‘contre nature’ [against nature] yet matters of faith, are invoked in order to highlight, and to guard against, the vulnerability of the human body. The folkloric supernatural elements within these tales of knights who become birds partake in the divine supernatural of the Christian God who, against nature, became man, was born of a virgin, and rose from the dead.

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That the Virgin Birth is ‘contre nature’ is emphasized in the Roman de la Rose, in which the allegorical figure of Nature is herself quite baffled as to how a virgin could give birth to a baby—she makes it perfectly clear that she played no part in this extraordinary event: Ainz fui trop formant esbahie Quant il de la Vierge Marie Fu por le chetif en char nez, Et puis panduz touz ancharnez; Car par moi ne peut ce pas estre Que riens puisse de vierge nestre. (Rose, 19127–32) [I was certainly quite astonished when he was born in flesh from the Virgin Mary to save the damned, and then, as flesh, crucified; for I certainly can’t cause anything to be born from a virgin.]

The laws of nature, then, can be bent or broken by God and in the person of the incarnated God. When God allows the laws of nature to be contravened in other situations, they are to be interpreted, according to St Augustine, as a manifestation of God’s power. Metamorphosis and deformity may result in creatures who appear to be monsters: referring to the well-worn derivation of ‘monster’ from ‘monstrare’ [to show], Augustine emphasizes that what these creatures demonstrate is not a particular event, but the unbounded power of God: ista, quae uelut contra naturam fiunt et contra naturam fieri [. . .] et monstra ostenta, portenta prodigia nuncupantur, hoc monstrare debent, hoc ostendere uel praeostendere, hoc praedicere, quod facturus sit Deus, quae de corporibus hominum se praenuntiauit esse facturum, nulla impediente difficultate, nulla praescribente lege naturae.78 [these things which happen contrary to nature, and are said to be contrary to nature [. . .], and are called monsters, phenomena, portents, prodigies, ought to demonstrate, portend, predict that God will bring to pass what He has foretold regarding the bodies of men, no difficulty preventing Him, no law of nature prescribing to Him His limit.]

As David Williams argues, the monstrous body (which can also include the distorted or animal body of a human) can be read as a demonstration of divine wisdom; he also reads monstrosity itself as a medieval figure for understanding, and its inevitable incompleteness in the face of the divine: By its symbolic representation of being as grounded in nonbeing and its origination of meaning in negation, the deformed makes possible understanding at the same time that it critiques it.79 78

Augustine, De Civitate Dei, 21.8.

79

Williams, Deformed Discourse, p. 59.

Introduction

23

To imagine metamorphosis is to meditate upon what it means to have a body; specifically what the human body means, in contradistinction to the animal body or divine body, or the inorganic matter, which might affect it or which it might become. Stories of metamorphosis are stories which enable us to consider the ways in which the body conditions one’s existence in the world, and informs others’ understanding of one’s identity. For the medieval Christian, the possession of a human body was poised between the exaltation of being formed in God’s image (Genesis 1.27) and the ignominy of being marked with sin as the consequence of the Fall. Numerous scholars have explored the implications of this fraught conception of the human body: Eric Jager cites Augustine’s first commentary on Genesis, in which he claims that Adam and Eve, before the Fall, did not have mortal, fleshly bodies, but heavenly ones which were able to understand God’s words in a complete, unmediated way—one now totally lost to fallen humanity;80 John Fyler explores what medieval theologians understood as the consequences for the human body having been made in God’s image but subsequently fallen and transformed through sin;81 and Dyan Elliott shows that, despite the shadow of dualism the notion casts over otherwise orthodox theology, carnality is understood by several medieval commentators as the result of the Fall.82 If the flesh and fallibility of the human body were understood as signs of sin, then at least medieval Christians generally understood themselves, their bodies, and their minds to be superior to those of animals. Karl Steel interrogates the structures which underpin this assumption of human superiority, making a convincing argument for the distinction between animal and human as being a contingent, discursive one: ‘the human tries to distinguish itself from other animals by laying claim to the sole possession of reflective language, reason, culture, and above all an immortal soul and resurrectable body’.83 These claims are staked via the violent subjugation of animals, argues Steel, such that ‘the category of human is a retroactive and relative effect of domination’.84 Although Steel’s examples and focus are medieval, he makes it plain that his argument is directed at the modern world as well as the Middle Ages. Humanity, in other words, is shown in every era to define itself against the animal, which it represents as inhuman, uncultured, and in need of control.

80 82 83 84

81 See Jager, Tempter’s Voice, pp. 43–4. Fyler, Language, pp. 7–10. See Elliott, Fallen Bodies and ‘Rubber Soul’. Steel, How to Make a Human, p. 21. Steel, How to Make a Human, p. 21.

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Steel’s book is part of a recent movement in medieval cultural studies and literary criticism which is influenced by the fields in critical theory of the ‘animal turn’ and ‘posthumanism’. This approach starts from an ethical position which challenges the boundaries between the categories of ‘animal’ and ‘human’, pointing out that they are relative and fragile: the consequence of this position is to understand animals in their individual specificity, rather than as a homogenized clump of entities which is designated as nonhuman. Concomitantly, it also situates and scrutinizes humans as animals alongside dogs, or monkeys, or ticks, perceiving structures comprehensible as ethics, language, and culture among nonhuman animals. The ‘posthuman’ incorporates not just nonhuman animals into its perspective on the ethical agency of that which is not human, but also envisages the affective energy and potential of the entire ecology, including plants and rocks. It also understands the human as a complex relation of the natural, the cultural, and the artificial. As Cary Wolfe, in What Is Posthumanism?, summarizes: It forces us to rethink our taken-for-granted modes of human experience, including the normal perceptual modes and affective states of Homo sapiens itself, by recontextualizing them in terms of the entire sensorium of other living beings and their own autopoietic ways of ‘bringing forth a world’— ways that are, since we ourselves are human animals, part of the evolutionary history and behavioral and psychological repertoire of the human itself. But it also insists that we attend to the specificity of the human—its ways of being in the world, its ways of knowing, observing, and describing—by (paradoxically for humanism) acknowledging that it is fundamentally a prosthetic creature that has coevolved with various forms of technicity and materiality, forms that are radically ‘not-human’ and yet have nevertheless made the human what it is.85

This theoretical approach to tales of metamorphosis is intriguing: many texts portray the nonhuman or socially inferior human element of any transformation as undesirable, humiliating, or damning. But if we think through these transitions between human and nonhuman (or subhuman) states as speaking to categories which are themselves contingent and mutable, these tales can be understood as participating in an ongoing reflection of what it means to be human. In a key text for Wolfe, L’Animal que donc je suis, Jacques Derrida argues that Western philosophy and theory—and in particular four of the most important interlocutors and influences of his own philosophical career, Kant, Levinas, Heidegger, and Lacan—have routinely called on 85

Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, p. xxv.

Introduction

25

animals to stand for mindlessness, a lack of reasoning, ethics, or awareness, without making any serious, rigorous enquiries into the interior life of particular animals. Yet, as Steel also points out,86 the theories of Jacques Lacan are valid and revealing for the study of medieval definitions of humanity, and in most of the chapters in this book I call on theories taken from, or which engage with, Lacanian psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis speaks about subjectivity as decentred: that is, what we think of as our ‘true self ’ is not easily accessible, nor is it consistent, nor can it be located entirely within the confines of our bodies. Consequently, psychoanalytic theory can be used to articulate the idea that the boundaries of the self are not coterminous with the contours of the body: we both feel that our identities are confined to the physical space inhabited by our bodies, but we also experience the intimation that our identity is not completely coincidental with our body. In the Middle Ages, this notion might be expressed by the ecstasy of mystics, who feel themselves transcend the earthly bonds of the physical; or, as I shall explore in this book, in tales of metamorphosis where the boundaries of the body are reconfigured and seem either to be at odds with, or entirely appropriate to, the self they delineate. Freud’s statement, ‘wo Es war, soll Ich werden’ [where it (the id) was, shall I (the ego) be],87 points to a central claim of psychoanalysis that the ego, the part of us which consciously says ‘I’, is constantly catching up with the id, the unconscious, the seat of our deepest desires and anxieties—which, as such, is impossible to express or perceive. To express a similar idea, Lacan coined the word ‘extimité’ (translated into English as ‘extimacy’) to describe the sense that what we feel to be our most intimate truths are formed and located externally. That Lacan articulates ‘ce lieu central, cette extériorité intime, cette extimité’ [this central place, this intimate exteriority, this extimacy],88 in the opening remarks of his seminar on the medieval phenomenon of ‘l’amour courtois’ [courtly love] indicates the debt owed to the literature of the Middle Ages by modern theory.89 This sense of identity taking place outside of ourselves via the processes of desire is also expressed in Lacan’s crucial formulation, the objet a.90 A fantasized object outlined by desire for the other (autre, which is what the a stands for), the objet a crystallizes the subject, yet stands outside of it, and can never be incorporated. Slavoj Žižek’s work focuses on the externality of the subject in Lacan’s writing, underlining its 86

87 Steel, How to Make a Human, p. 5. GW, 15, 86. 89 Lacan, Séminaire VII, p. 167. Lacan, Séminaire VII, pp. 167–84. 90 On the importance of the objet a in Lacanian theory, see Dolar, ‘ “I Shall Be With You” ’. 88

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formation not as an essence, but as a process of intersubjective exchange: subjects form and signify only in relation to others, and the subject is therefore as contingent, mutable, and relative as that process of exchange implies. Lacan often calls upon topology in order to think through the relations between subjects as nodes in a network, or as spaces created by discourse and desire. Frequently he refers to figures which seem to encompass impossible spaces: the Möbius strip, for example—a loop of paper which is twisted such that it seems to have only one surface, despite being made out of a two-sided strip; or the anamorphosis, a device in visual art where perspective is treated in an incongruous way, such that it seems to introduce a stretched space into our field of vision, suggesting that we are looking at something as it is seen from an unknown perspective. These impossible, illogical objects enable a kind of thought experiment involving the constitution of the subject beyond the boundaries of the subject, and, as such, are appealing figures for thinking about medieval metamorphosis. The work of Julia Kristeva also perceives the fragility of the borders of the self to be crucial for the understanding of the process by which individual identities are formed. Her concept of the abject, articulated in Pouvoirs de l’horreur, also describes subjectivity as a process, constantly striving to differentiate the self from that which lies at its limits. She insists on the way in which corporeal boundaries are envisaged as originating from the maternal body, a body which is consequently marked as abject, as repulsive, and needing to be rejected, but which always returns. As I show in more detail in Chapter 4, Kristeva’s work is criticized by Judith Butler, who accuses her of reifying the maternal body rather than understanding it as a construction, owing its power not to biology but to centuries of prurient and relentless circumscription of maternity. Butler’s own work insistently demonstrates that the body, identity, gender, and sexuality are products of culture and discourse. So much so, that in Bodies that Matter, a book explicitly presented as a follow-up to her groundbreaking Gender Trouble, Butler quotes a question which was put to her repeatedly after the publication of the earlier book: ‘“What about the materiality of the body?”’91 Her response in Bodies that Matter is to point out, in terms which resonate with posthumanist critics, that materiality itself cannot be thought of without the scaffolding and structure supplied by language and culture—whether that language and culture presents itself as artistic, philosophical, scientific, or political, it is always, necessarily, informed 91

Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. ix.

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by the history and power which produced it. ‘To claim that discourse is formative is not to claim that it originates, causes, or exhaustively composes that which it concedes,’ she writes, ‘rather, it is to claim that there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a further formation of that body.’92 The transforming tales I examine in this book testify to this: while they recount the stories of transformed bodies, they also shape and reshape them.

STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK This Introduction has touched on many of the texts I discuss in this book, from the lais of the second half of the twelfth century, to the allegorical, didactic poetry of Christine de Pizan at the beginning of the fifteenth. So varied are the texts I discuss, and written over such a long period of time and in such divergent circumstances, that it would be pointless to impose one theory or one reading on to the whole medieval French tradition of writing about metamorphosis. Instead, I have selected the texts and figures which seem most intriguing—the most revealing and the most obscure. This tension between revelation and obscurity persists throughout and between the chapters, as metamorphosis is read as a means of bodying forth an interpretation, of making a metaphor corporeal. Unlike the other chapters in this book, Chapter 1 largely focuses on a single text, the fourteenth-century translation, amplification, and moralization of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Ovide moralisé. This is a text which insists on glossing the prodigious and dazzling transformations Ovid describes in terms of the mysteries of divine embodiment. With reference to Lacan’s invocation of the figure of anamorphosis, I shall demonstrate that the Ovide moralisé strives for a position from which it can read Ovid’s poem from an angle which reveals metamorphosis as a means of understanding the whole truth about Christian history and doctrine. I stay with Ovidian characters in Chapter 2, but narrow my focus to one story, which, appropriately enough, was overwhelmingly alluring to medieval authors, especially those writing about courtly love: the tale of Narcissus and Echo. While Narcissus, the young man for whom Echo pines away to nothing but voice, is a much more visible presence in both medieval literature and scholarship on it, Echo’s metamorphosis is, I argue, a productive means of exploring poetic production in French in the Middle Ages. Using Lacanian formulations of the voice as a figure for the objet a, the impossible 92

Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. 10.

28

Transforming Tales

object of desire, I trace in this chapter the suppression and substitution of Echo as her myth is rewritten from twelfth-century romance, the thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose, fourteenth-century dits amoureux, and fifteenth-century lyric and didactic poetry. Chapters 3 and 4 explore transformations between human and animal, and are broadly split along gender lines: whereas Chapter 3 looks at what the animal bodies of men, specifically knights, might mean, Chapter 4 scrutinizes the way in which medieval (and modern) ideas about women are bodied forth in stories of metamorphosis. While many accounts of the relation between the human and the animal in the Middle Ages and beyond seem to propose an animal inside a human—savage nature threatening to emerge from the imposition of the containment of human culture—in Chapter 3, ‘The Beast Without’, I examine a number of episodes and texts which invert this picture of inside and outside. I use the animal-focused work of Giorgio Agamben and Derrida to read the twelfth- and thirteenth-century werewolf tales, Bisclavret, Mélion, and Guillaume de Palerne, as well as a knowing rewriting of them in an episode from the late medieval romance cycle, Perceforest, in which a knight is transformed into a bear. Reading animal skin as a Möbius strip, I argue that the animal is more likely to be on the outside in these tales, rather than being contained within an unreliable human body—but is always understood as subordinate to (and supportive of) human identity. If men become wolves and bears, then the animal most turned to in tales of women’s transformation is the snake, the subject of Chapter 4. I explore the numerous associations which link the feminine to the serpentine, using both Kristeva and Butler’s criticism of her. If the repulsive serpent stands (or slithers) at one end of the spectrum informed by medieval misogyny, then at the other presides the fantasized figure of female perfection outlined by Pygmalion’s statue; these figures are connected by Medusa, whose beauty and ugliness stand for one another and are always petrifying. In Chapter 5, I turn to a character who seems to embody metamorphosis and whose body encompasses extremes: able to transform his own and others’ appearances, endowed with omniscience about the past and future, yet cursed with the inability to prevent his foreseen death, Merlin is synonymous with transformation and hybridity throughout the Arthurian texts and cycles which feature him from the early thirteenth century. The son of a devil and a holy virgin, he is the result of precisely the kind of encounter Yonec’s mother fears; however, as a voice detached from a body but not entirely disembodied, Merlin becomes the voice of prophecy, and is difficult to distinguish from the texts which transmit his words and actions.

Introduction

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In my conclusion, I bring together many of the strands I have pursued in the book by focusing on another seemingly impossible figure, a statue of Morpheus, a god who, like Merlin, has no shape of his own and is never recognized from one of his appearances to the next. By focusing on the representation of metamorphosis in visual art, I shall explore metamorphosis as a figure for literary creativity, reflecting on the ways in which these divergent authors and texts seek to make something rich and strange.

1 Dismembering Ovid Keine Übersetzung möglich wäre, wenn sie Ähnlichkeit mit dem Original ihrem letzten Wesen nach anstreben würde. Denn in seinem Fortleben, das so nicht heißen dürfte wenn es nicht Wandlung und Erneuerung des Lebendigen wäre, ändert sich das Original.1 [No translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original. For in its afterlife—which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living—the original undergoes a change.] quod numen in isto corpore sit, dubito; sed corpore numen in isto est! [What divinity is in that mortal body I know not; but assuredly a divinity is therein!] (Metamorphoses, 3.611–12)

The Ovide moralisé weaves together in a particularly striking way the processes of transformation and translatio which inform the argument of this book. Not only is it the first translation of the whole of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into French, it also effects an intralingual translation, transforming each transformation into an allegorical reading. Tales of pre-Christian transformation are translated to produce a Christian text about the unnatural, inconceivable manifestations of the human body as divine. In fact, each transformation can produce a series of readings, as the author relates the tales he translates to tenets of Christianity, Biblical stories, or exempla of human behaviour. He also proposes readings which seek to explain Ovid’s tales as misremembered or exaggerated retellings of actual historical events. This means of understanding pagan texts is known as euhemerism, after Euhemerus, a Greek sage of the third century bc, who interpreted the myths of Greek gods and heroes as elaborations and alterations of feasible historical events and figures.2 Euhemerist readings of the Metamorphoses were popular throughout the 1

Benjamin, ‘Die Aufgabe’, p. 60.

2

Cooke, ‘Euhemerism’.

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Middle Ages, providing a means for medieval interpreters to read these pagan tales as themselves transformations and transmutations of actual occurrences into fantastical fables. It is a euhemerist reading to which the anonymous author of the Ovide moralisé turns in a reading of the story of Phaeton in book 2 of the Metamorphoses, which cautions clerics with insufficient learning against undertaking demanding tasks. Phaeton, who steals his father’s celestial chariot and has to be killed by Jupiter, is understood as an astronomer who did not study his books properly; in this reading, Jupiter is interpreted as a more learned sage who confounded his overconfident rival. From this, the moralizer informs his readers, we learn not to be so arrogant as to take on a task which is too difficult. Par le cas Pheton puet entendre, Qui bien i veult example prendre, Qui nulz ne se doit orgueillir De trop grant emprise acueillir, Mes chacuns se maint a mesure, Lonc son pooir et sa nature. Trop est folz qui d’orgueil se charge, Et qui sor soi prent si grant charge Qu’il n’en puet la paine endurer. (OM, 2.689–97) [Whoever wishes to take Phaeton’s case as an example can understand that no one should be so proud as to undertake too great a task, but that everyone should conduct themselves appropriately, according to their capability and nature. It is foolish to weigh oneself down with pride and take on a burden so great that one cannot bear its suffering.]

Moralizing another tale of transgression later in book 2, the Ovide moralisé author once more suggests that he is aware that he has undertaken an immensely daunting task. Orychoë, the clairvoyant daughter of the centaur, Chiron, indiscreetly foretells the extraordinary destiny of the newborn Aesculapius, as well as that of her father and herself. Her pronouncements and ensuing metamorphosis into a mare are compared by the Ovide moralisé author to those who use divine inspiration unwisely. In a rime équivoque playing on the homophone ‘mort’, meaning both ‘bite’ and ‘death’, the author likens overambitious clerics to horses who have been bitten by the bug of pride and have swelled as a result of this infection: ‘Mes tant poi pensent a la mort, | Que de la mousche qui les mort’ [But they think as little of death as they do of the fly which bites them] (OM, 2.3279–80).3 3

For other examples of this motif, see Noacco, ‘L’Orgueil’.

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Although Pairet remarks that the Ovide moralisé author is ‘insensible à l’exemplarité du mythe de Phaéton’ [insensitive to the exemplarity of the myth of Phaeton],4 he in fact shows himself to be alert to the possible pitfalls of the task upon which he has embarked.5 In the first book, he entreats his readers to correct him if he should offer an erroneous reading: Proi tous ceulz qui liront cest livre, Que, se je mespreng a escrire Ou a dire que je ne doie, Corrigent moi. Bien le vaudroie, Et je sui prest, se Dieu m’ament, De croire leur corrigement. (OM, 1.61–6) [I beg that all those who read this book, will correct me, if I make a slip of the pen, or say what I shouldn’t. I wish this wholeheartedly, and I’m ready, if God aids me, to believe their correction.]

He offers his own interpretation of the Metamorphoses for interpretation, reminding his readers that, while his extensive work proposes the Ovide moralisé as a corrective to the Metamorphoses, it cannot be definitive. Eager to avoid the fate of the moralized Phaeton or Orychoë, the author emphasizes his humility, indexing his sagacity and virtue as he claims to doubt them, and cementing his words as he offers them up for potential rewriting. The detailed, linguistically nimble moralizations of Phaeton and Orychoë contrast their author’s deft learning with their subjects’ imperfect scholarship. Later in the Ovide moralisé, the author compares his skill in understanding Homer with that of Benoît de Sainte-Maure, the author of the twelfth-century Roman de Troie.6 Benoît, the fourteenth-century author claims, selected Dares as his source text rather than Homer, because Homer’s writing was too subtle for Benoît to understand: Quar trop iert Homers de grant pris, Mes il parla par metaphore. Por ce li clers de Sainte More, Qui n’entendoit qu’il voloit dire, Li redargua sa matire. (OM, 12.1732–6)

4

Pairet, Les Mutacions, p. 107. Indeed, the translator-moralizer calls himself, with what David Hult suspects is a certain irony, ‘le maindre des menors’ [the least of the minors] (15.7432) (Hult, ‘Allégories’, p. 54). See Possamaï-Pérez, L’Ovide moralisé, pp. 749–86 for a different interpretation of this line. For a reading of the Ovide moralisé ’s author’s self-reflexivity, see Armstrong and Kay, Knowing Poetry, pp. 80–90. 6 See Croizy-Naquet, ‘L’Ovide moralisé ’, pp. 45–6; Demats, Fabula, p. 98; PossamaïPérez, L’Ovide moralisé, p. 188; Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Reading Myth, pp. 133–4. 5

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Transforming Tales

[For Homer was most worthy, but he spoke in metaphors. Therefore the clerk of Sainte-Maure, who did not understand what he meant, rejected his material.]

The Ovide moralisé author makes it clear that he is much more attuned than Benoît to the practice of reading and interpreting metaphors, emphasizing to his readers that we do not take Ovid ‘a la letre’, but instead understand that ‘sous la fable gist couverte | La sentence plus profitable’ [beneath the fable the more profitable meaning lies covered] (OM, 15.2536–7). Indeed, he points out that it is not only in pre-Christian literature that we find material that demands careful reading and wellinformed interpretation: Bon sens et acordable à voir Puet l’en en ceste fable metre, Qui bien set exposer la letre. Ensi est la Sainte Escripture En plusiors leus trouble et obscure, Et samble fable purement. (OM, 15.2546–51) [He who knows how to interpret writing can place into this fable good sense, which is pleasing to see. Similarly, holy Scripture is obscure and difficult to understand in several places, and appears to be nothing but stories.]

This resonates with comments on Scriptural obscurity in De doctrina christiana: ‘ita obscure dicta quaedam densissimam caliginem obducunt’ [Some of the expressions are so obscure as to shroud the meaning in the thickest darkness].7 Augustine argues that such obscurity is deliberately placed in the Bible in order to solicit the work of interpretation. Early medieval exegetical writing used the word ‘fabula’ to speak about the veil of myth which needed to be removed for Christian truth to be discerned.8 Whether what a text recounts is or is not a ‘fable’, then, lies less in its source than in the piety and wisdom used in order to read it,9 as the author suggests in the very first lines of the Ovide moralisé: Se l’escripture ne ment, Tout est pour nostre enseignement Quanqu’il a es livres escript, Soient bon ou mal li escript. (OM, 1.1–4) [If Scripture does not lie, everything is for our instruction when it is written in books, whether the writing is good or bad.]

7

8 Augustine, De doctrina christiana, 2.6. Copeland and Melville, p. 170. See Blumenfeld-Kosisinski, Reading Myth, pp. 102–8; Douchet, ‘Genèse’, p. 67; and Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation, pp. 125–6. 9

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While everything (‘Tout’) can be interpreted, it is only via study of, and faith in, holy Scripture that we can understand this (‘Se l’escripture ne ment’); and it is the Christian truth propounded by Scripture that we will be able to glean via interpretative scholarship. Even a book written before the advent of Christianity, and which recounts tales of transformation regularly featuring incest, rape, murder, mutilation, and illegitimate birth, can yield divine revelation.10 It is not only reading which needs to be informed with ingenuity in order to facilitate revelation: the written word in which this revelation is articulated must also display learning and virtue;11 and in these opening lines, as throughout his oeuvre, the Ovide moralisé author draws attention to his artistry. In the rather quirky rhyme of the first couplet, the author juxtaposes mendacity and instruction; and, in opening with a rime léonine followed by a rime équivoque, he indicates to his readership that they are to admire his poetic skill. Adrian Armstrong and Sarah Kay remark that ‘The Ovide moralisé’s poetic qualities are often not remarked on by modern critics, but they were clearly appreciated by medieval readers’:12 as we shall see, when modern critics do remark on these qualities, they rarely do so in approving tones. If ‘Tout’—all creation, but especially all literature—can be read as enabling understanding of the divine, then language itself, and the way in which it is foregrounded and manipulated by a poetic translation, can be seen as part of this scheme.13 In the first section of this chapter, I explore the use of wordplay in the Ovide moralisé as a poetic strategy 10 Hult remarks on ‘les images tactiles et sensuelles, voire érotiques, qui pullulent dans l’Ovide moralisé, mais qui sont censées désigner leur contraire, des idées abstraites et incorporelles’ [the tactile, sensual, even erotic images which abound in the Ovide moralisé, but which are supposed to denote their opposite: abstract, bodiless ideas] (Hult, ‘Allégories’, p. 67). 11 See Hexter, ‘Medieval Articulations’. 12 Armstrong and Kay, Knowing Poetry, p. 81. 13 As Possamaï-Pérez eloquently puts it, ‘Cette extension de la lecture allégorique à toute uvre littéraire vient du fait que le langage est révélateur de toute une vision du monde, et pour le Moyen Âge particulièrement, l’allégorie va reposer sur un paraléllisme entre le monde naturel, matériel, et le monde abstrait, spirituel: l’allégorie ne sera plus seulement un « ornement difficile » de rhétorique, mais une vision du monde, ne reposera plus seulement sur une analogie superficielle entre l’image et l’idée, mais sur une relation profonde, métaphysique, entre tous les événements historiques et tous les niveaux de la nature: l’univers sera vu comme un inépuisable allégorie’ [This extension of allegorical reading to all literary works stems from the fact that language reveals a whole vision of the world; in particular for the Middle Ages, allegory relied upon a parallelism between the natural, material world, and the abstract, spiritual world: allegory is no longer a ‘difficult ornament’ of rhetoric, but a vision of the world; it no longer rests only on a superficial analogy between image and idea, but on a profound, metaphysical relation between all events of history and all levels of nature: the universe is seen as an inexhaustible allegory] (L’Ovide moralisé, pp. 315–16).

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that works with, rather than against, the moralizer’s pious programme, as he exploits the inevitable ambiguity of human language (as opposed to the Word of God). Many moralizations are triggered by the use of homophones and puns, such that the inevitable equivocality of fallen, human language is highlighted as a means by which the author derives Christian truths from pagan tales of shape-shifting. Several of these puns involve plays on veiling and unveiling; and I argue that recurrent references to clothing and nakedness in the Ovide moralisé can be read as meditations on medieval allegory’s use of the integumentum, a covering or veil which conceals a deeper meaning. If the integument is the figure of choice for medieval commentators performing and writing about the Christian allegoresis of pre-Christian tales, then it might be argued that anamorphosis is a figure to which modern critics return when considering the Ovide moralisé. Lacan discusses anamorphosis in his Séminaires VII and XI, using it to intimate an uncanny feeling of the perspective of the big Other, an unthinkable position from which the subject is viewed as incomplete, and in relation to which the subject’s language is imperfect. Anamorphosis is seen as a foreign body introduced into a work of art which functions as a reminder of the artificiality of the perspective proposed by that work: Il s’agit, d’une façon analogique, ou anamorphique, de réindiquer que ce que nous cherchons dans l’illusion est quelque chose où l’illusion elle-même se transcende en quelque sorte, se détruit, en montrant qu’elle n’est là qu’en tant que signifiante.14 [At issue, in an analogical or anamorphic form, is the effort to point once again to the fact that what we seek in the illusion is something in which the illusion as such in some way transcends itself, destroys itself, by demonstrating that it is only there as a signifier.]

As Jane Gilbert observes, it is ‘conceived as a means of projecting this haunting other dimension, reminding audiences that the reality within which they live is contingent’.15 Lacan cites in both seminars the anamorphosis in Hans Holbein’s 1533 painting, The Ambassadors, in which a distorted shape floats menacingly in the foreground, only seen as a skull from a sideways glance. It is the gradual or momentary discernment of a legible object which gives the anamorphosis its allure: ‘Le plaisir consiste à la voir surgir d’une forme indéchiffrable’ [The pleasure is found in seeing its emergence from an indecipherable form].16 Both James R. Simpson and Sarah Kay invoke the figure of anamorphosis in order to understand 14 16

Lacan, Séminaire VII, p. 163. Lacan, Séminaire VII, p. 161.

15

Gilbert, Living Death, p. 12.

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the Ovide moralisé’s structural relation between the pre-Christian text and the Christian truth the moralizer uncovers within it. Kay calls upon anamorphosis to envisage the ‘form thanks to which individual entities both exist as such and have the potential to meet in community’ in the Ovide moralisé.17 Simpson, on the other hand, hears in the cries issuing from several characters as they are afflicted with metamorphosis and/or death, an ‘anamorphic glimpse of the Real of enjoyment’.18 Catherine Croizy-Naquet refers to anamorphosis in the title of her article, and in her closing remarks she argues that the poetry of the Ovide moralisé becomes ‘une perpétuelle anamorphose’ [a perpetual anamorphosis], flickering between the retelling of myth and its moralization.19 Using Lacan’s own analogy between the mortifying anamorphic gaze of the Other and the story of Actaeon, I will, in the second section of this chapter, suggest yet another way of thinking about the Ovide moralisé in relation to anamorphosis: the moralizer is proposing his reading of the Metamorphoses as issuing from an a-chronological space of Christian understanding, able to discern within the Ovidian tales a truth which was not deliberately placed there by its pre-Christian author. Rita Copeland and Stephen Melville observe that the practice of reading a pagan text as a Christian allegory ‘imposes a new temporal and causal order between reader and text’,20 whereby the Christian allegorical meaning is, paradoxically, understood as pre-existing the pre-Christian text.21 Yet the Ovide moralisé’s practice of reading insists that that Christian truth is always-already there, viewed from a divine perspective outside of mortal space or time.22 It is from this position that the Metamorphoses itself is reread, reorganized, and interpolated with Christian interpretation: indeed, Kay observes that the Ovide moralisé author attempts to look ‘as though with the gaze of God’.23 Boethius’s Lady Philosophy gives an account of God’s perspective on human endeavour in a way which also stresses the timelessness of the divine gaze: ‘omnia quasi iam gerantur in sua simplici cognitione considerat’ [contemplates all that falls within its simple cognition as if it were taking place in the present].24 There is no before and after in God’s eyes; so from this point of view, fantasized and fleetingly appropriated by the Ovide moralisé author, 17

Kay, Place of Thought, p. 47. Simpson, Fantasy, Identity and Misrecognition, p. 135. 19 Croizy-Naquet, ‘L’Ovide moralisé’, p. 51. Pairet also describes the Ovide moralisé as ‘un texte en anamorphose’ (‘Les Formes’, p. 34). 20 Copeland and Melville, ‘Allegory and Allegoresis’, p. 171. 21 See Griffin, ‘Translation and Transformation’, pp. 43–8. 22 See Akbari, ‘Metaphor and Metamorphosis’, p. 87. 23 24 Kay, Place of Thought, p. 47. Boethius, Consolatio Philosophiae, 5.6.15. 18

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human literary history, Christian and pre-Christian, is enfolded into the ‘Tout’ which should be read for our edification. In her exhaustive study of the Ovide moralisé, Marylène Possamaï-Pérez speculates that the Ovide moralisé could be ‘un art de mémoire’ [an art of memory];25 yet memory is a difficult concept in the light of the divine synchronic vision from which Ovid’s work, and all human history, is viewed in the Ovide moralisé. In a reading of the stories of Pentheus, Marsyas, Pelops, and Philomena in the last section of this chapter I argue that Ovid’s text provides a corpus which is both remembered and dismembered by the author of the Ovide moralisé. Adaptations of these latter two tales have been claimed by another hugely influential author for medieval French literature, Chrétien de Troyes. I examine the way in which the Ovide moralisé uses these tales of transformation and incorporation in order to mediate between Christianity, Chrétien, and Ovid; and to align its readers’ understanding with a divine perspective from which all metamorphosis, mutation, and degradation can be seen and fully understood. Transforming these tales of transformation therefore enables in the Ovide moralisé’s readers a greater understanding of human and divine bodies; and human and divine language.

RARIFICAT NEBULAS, INTEGUMENTA CANIT: VEILED LANGUAGE Armand Strubel sums up the reaction of several critics when he describes the interpretative programme of the Ovide moralisé as resulting in ‘discontinuité, voire incohérence’.26 Certainly, the successive readings proposed by the author can be at odds with the ethical positions sketched out by the tales told by the Metamorphoses, and with those proposed from one moralization to the next. Rosemond Tuve objected to ‘the thoughtless multiplication of glib parallels’;27 and Paule Demats saw the multiple moralizations as encumbering Ovid’s original text.28 While Marc-René Jung allowed that ‘L’auteur de l’Ovide moralisé est un bon traducteur, sans aucun doute’ [the author of the Ovide moralisé is, without any doubt, a good translator], he objected to the way in which the author ‘manipule les récits ovidiens pour les intégrer dans la stratégie globale du texte’

25 26 27 28

Possamaï-Pérez, L’Ovide moralisé, p. 838. Strubel, Grant senefiance, p. 247. Tuve, Allegorical Imagery, p. 307. Fabula, p. 75.

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[manipulates the Ovidian tales in order to integrate them into the text’s global strategy].29 In addition to the contradictory, not to say perverse, moralizations imparted to Ovid’s tales (both Myrrha’s incestuous union with her father in book 10 and Caenis’s rape by Neptune in book 12, for instance, are moralized as representing the Virgin Birth30), the terms in which these are articulated are often targets for scholars’ disapproval: Demats deplores as ‘fade plaisanterie’ [bland facetiousness] the rime équivoque with which the Ovide moralisé author describes Leander’s death,31 in a tale which he interpolates into his translation of the Metamorphoses: Folz estoit il de trop amer, Quant plus amoit autre que soi. Ne morut pas en mer de soi. (OM, 4.3323–5) [He was foolish to love excessively, when he loved another than himself. He didn’t die of thirst in the sea.]

What Demats finds a jarring change in tone marked by the syllepsis of ‘soi’, is in fact preparing the ground for the first moralization of this tale, which understands Leander as the ‘Dissolution | D’ome qui met s’en tencion | En fole amour’ [Dissolution of the man who puts himself in the combat of unhinged love] (OM, 4.3590–2). However, just as the wordplay of the Ovide moralisé, according to Tuve, ‘regard[s] neither the decorum of the Ovidian story nor the decorum of the meaning imposed’,32 Ovid has also been criticized for the way in which his wit does not respect decorum, that is, the stylistic and emotional consistency of the text. As Garth Tissol observes, Ovid’s ‘sylleptic imagination’ can be seen in the wordplay which both forges connections and points out the disjuncture between the physical and the figurative in the Metamorphoses.33 Furthermore, Frank Coulson has pointed out that the tradition of medieval Latin commentary follows Ovid in discerning several meanings within one word, and anticipates the Ovide moralisé in using this plurality to articulate the moralization of a particular episode.34 Certainly, the author of the Ovide moralisé is as fond of wordplay as Ovid himself; he finds ample opportunity to implement it in the processes of translation and moralization—and, perhaps more importantly, the transitions

Jung, ‘Ovide, texte, translateur’, pp. 160–1. See Griffin, ‘Translation and Transformation’, pp. 57–9; Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Reading Myth, pp. 96–8. 31 32 Demats, Fabula, p. 78. Tuve, Allegorical Imagery, p. 305. 33 34 Tissol, Face of Nature, p. 20. Coulson, ‘Ovid’s Metamorphoses’, p. 55 n. 33. 29 30

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between them. Rather than seeing the pun as the lowest form of wit,35 then, I prefer to follow Jonathan Culler’s reflections: When one thinks of how puns characteristically demonstrate the applicability of a single signifying sequence to two different contexts, with quite different meanings, one can see how puns both evoke prior formulations, with the meanings they have deployed, and demonstrate their instability, the mutability of meaning, the production of meaning by linguistic motivation.36

By privileging the way in which a word flickers between (at least) two different meanings, the Ovide moralisé author draws attention to the mutability of the language he is using to translate and moralize these tales of bodily mutability.37 Words like ‘soi’ (in the tale of Leander) and ‘mort’ (in the tale of Orychoë) can be reiterated not to reinforce meaning, but to reveal its ambiguity, and thereby to open up avenues of interpretation and instruction. Indeed, as Copeland argues (and as much is evident from the title of her book), ‘medieval translation cannot be understood without reference to the traditional systems of rhetoric and hermeneutics which so much defined its practice’.38 To undertake the task of translating Ovid’s Latin into fourteenth-century French verse, then, is inevitably to manipulate the target language, and also to reflect on the equivocal nature of human language itself. Perhaps the most sustained and impressive example of this is the play (in a musical as well as a linguistic sense) on the word ‘corde’ in the translation and moralization in book 10 of Orpheus’s harp.39 As the Ovide moralisé translates the scene in which Orpheus begins his song beneath the shade of the cypress (itself the result of the metamorphosis of the youth Cyparissus), the morpheme is reiterated: Il sist ou mileu de la plaine, Qui de sauverine fu plaine, D’arbres et d’oisiaux ensement, S’atemproit ententivement Sa harpe et ses cordes acorde. Divers sons ot chascune corde, Mes toutes furent d’un acort, 35 With sparkling irony, Tissol asks his readers ‘to descend and peer downward at the lowest and most indecorous feature of Ovidian wit. In fact, I invite them to sink to the very depths and contemplate the pun’, Face of Nature, p. 4. 36 Culler, ‘The Call of the Phoneme’, p. 14. 37 For a discussion of Aristotle on wordplay and its illumination of metaphor, see Akbari, Seeing Through the Veil, pp. 9–10. 38 Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation, p. 3. 39 On Orpheus’s harp, see Kay, Place of Thought, pp. 64–5; Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire, pp. 316–21.

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Si qu’il n’i ot point de descort. Quant vit ses cordes acorder, Si prist en hault a recorder Les amours des grans dieux des cieulz Qui amerent les jovencieulz. (OM, 10.710–21) [He sat in the middle of the plain, which teemed with wild animals, trees, and birds, attentively tuning his harp and adjusting its strings. Each string had a different sound, but they were all attuned so that there was no discord between them. When he saw that he had tuned the strings, he took up his harp to relate the loves of the great gods in the heavens who loved young men.]

This morpheme is reprised in the moralization of the harp as the faith which unites all Christians.40 Sept cordes sonans d’un acort, Sans dissence et sans desacort, Quar tous soit les sons dessamblables Doit il estre ensamble acordables, Sans avoir discordance en soi. (OM, 10.2582–6) [Seven strings sounding in harmony, without dissonance or disharmony; for, while the sounds may be dissimilar, they must harmonize together, without discord between them.]

This resonant repetition prefaces a long, detailed moralization in which each string represents a virtue, and connects two pegs, which join it to the harp; in each pair of pegs, one signifies a moment in the life of Christ while the other stands for an office of the Church (the first string, chastity, for example, connects the pegs of God borne in the Virgin with marriage; the third string, once more returning to the refrain of ‘corde’, represents ‘misericorde’, and links the pegs of the baptism of Christ and the baptism of the individual Christian). The play on ‘corde’, then, draws attention to the way in which each string connects, via human virtue, the word of Scripture and the practice of the Church. In this sense, the moralization of Orpheus’s harp is a mise en abyme of the Ovide moralisé, since it interprets each detail of a mythological artefact in order to emphasize the importance of Christian learning as a means of creating analogies and forging connections, creating concord and accord between Latin and French, pagan and Christian: disparate aspects which coexist within one work, within one word.41 Indeed, the very first moralization is introduced with the couplet, 40

Perhaps as a reference to the depiction of Christ’s body as a cithara. See Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire, pp. 55–8. 41 Sébastien Douchet remarks on the central role of the notion of accord in the Ovide moralisé (‘Genèse’, p. 50).

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‘Or veuil espondre ceste fable | Qui a l’estoire est acordable’ [Now I wish to explain this fable, which corresponds to history] (1.341–2); and this couplet resonates with the reiterated introductory formula, ‘Autre sentence i puet avoir | Qui bien est acordable a voir’ [Another meaning is possible, which appears very fitting].42 The author’s repetition of ‘acordable’ emphasizes his desire to show that the fables he tells and the moralizations he gives them are in accord with one another. The insistent refrain on the word ‘corde’ in book 10 of the Ovide moralisé reveals the potential for Christian revelation in the fact that words can be read otherwise: their ambiguity is exploited in the service of the pious aim of the translator-moralizer, an aim which is to string together Christian reading practice and the Christian community.43 The uncertainty and ambiguity of human words, as opposed to the Word of God, are, then, performed and exploited in the moralizing and translating undertaken by the author of the Ovide moralisé. In this, the author follows the writings of Augustine, for whom the Fall was ‘an exile from the unmediated divine word into a region of semiotic difference, deferral, and displacement’.44 Fyler explores the response of Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun to the idea that, after the Fall, human language can only have veiled access to God’s Word, can only comprehend it through a glass darkly. He points out that ‘a defining symptom of language in the fallen world is equivocation, the fact that a word is capable of having multiple meanings’.45 Like the authors Fyler scrutinizes, the Ovide moralisé can also be seen to be taking ‘poetic delight, even revelling, in the centrifugal forces of multiplicity, and the difficulty of reining that multiplicity in, of reducing it to a single, unifying message—in effect of condensing the profusion of words to a single Word’.46 The Ovide moralisé might even be seen as transforming this delight into the pleasure of virtuous learning, as the multiple meanings within one word of flawed human language enable an insight into the divine truth of Christianity. Just as several meanings may be lurking within one word or syllable, so, in the transformative tales of the Metamorphoses, one form can conceal many bodies. The author highlights the analogies he sees and makes between, on the one hand, the metamorphosing Ovidian tales and, on the other, his own ethical and poetic programme, in his commentary on his translation of the very first line of Ovid’s poem, ‘In nova fert animus 42 A formula found, for instance, at 1.3095–6, 1.4261–2, 2.1209–10, 2.3301–2, 4.2282–3, 5.894–5. 43 It is this aim which leads Possamaï-Pérez to argue that each book of the Ovide moralisé is to be understood as a model for an individual sermon (L’Ovide moralisé, pp. 789–868). 44 Jager, Tempter’s Voice, p. 52. 45 46 Fyler, Language, p. 56. Fyler, Language, p. 52.

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mutatas dicere formas | corpora’ (M, 1.1–2). The ambiguity of Ovid’s language is also apparent from this first line, since the adjective ‘nova’ could be read as agreeing with either of the two nouns ‘formas’ or ‘corpora’.47 The Loeb edition of the Metamorphoses translates this sentence as ‘My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms’, but the author of the Ovide moralisé rejects this rendering: Ovides dist, ‘Mes cuers vieul dire Les formes qui muees furent En nouviaux cors.’ [ . . . ] (OM, 1.72–4) [Ovid said, ‘My heart wishes to speak of forms which were transformed into new bodies’.]

The alternative translation, declares the author, cannot be accurate, since it is theologically wrong: in the beginning, there was only God and his divine thought: form to which he gave body. From the very first line of his translation, then, the author makes it clear that in his moralization, the Ovidian metamorphoses are to be understood as subordinate to creation and the mysteries of divine embodiment, just as Ovid’s fables are subsumed to the Christian truth the author insistently reveals.48 The Ovide moralisé’s poetry may exploit linguistic ambiguity, then, but it does so from the unifying perspective of Christian allegoresis. The practice of reading Christian truths into pre-Christian literature is of course much older than the Ovide moralisé: when the moralizer promises his readers that ‘La veritez seroit aperte, | Qui sous les fables gist couverte’ [the truth, which lies covered beneath the fables, should be apparent] (1.45–6), he is drawing on a long-established trope of speaking about this kind of allegorical reading as a process of unveiling, drawing aside the integumentum or involucrum which covers the truth.49 Indeed, in his Integumenta Ovidii, John of Garland declares that his work: ‘Rarificat nebulas, integumenta canit’ [Disperses clouds and sings of veils].50 This might also be an apt description of the allegoresis performed by the Ovide moralisé, as the text sets up a tension between revelation and obscurity, often with reference to clouds or veils both as things featuring in the 47 See Kay, Place of Thought, pp. 47–50; Azzam, ‘Toute chose’, pp. 41–4; Pairet, Les Mutacions, pp. 119–20; Douchet, ‘Genèse’, pp. 52–3; and Griffin, ‘Translation and Transformation’, pp. 43–4. 48 As Simpson observes, ‘the Ovide moralisé ’s approach to adaptation is predicated on the idea that Ovid’s transgressive allure must not be mistaken for divine inspiration’ (Fantasy, Identity and Misrecognition, p. 173). 49 See Blumenfeld-Kosininski, Reading Myth, pp. 6–8; Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, p. 109; Hult, ‘Allégories’; and Strubel, Grant senefiance, pp. 82–7. 50 Giovanni di Garlandia, Integumenta Ovidii, v. 8.

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Ovidian tales it is rewriting and as figures for the kind of rewriting it is performing. Clouds and veils, along with cloaks and other garments, are depicted as substances which are opaque enough to hide a body (of a lovely naked nymph or goddess, a divine hero, or the truth of the Word of God) and yet penetrable enough to hint at the intriguing object lurking within. Strubel argues that, as this understanding of the interpretative process developed throughout the Middle Ages, and was adapted from Latin into French, the precise meanings of the terms associated with discerning significance within pagan texts shifted and became less specific.51 Coulson and Édouard Jeauneau observe that the very word integumentum itself comes to mean both the veil of pagan fable and the Christian truth which is revealed when it is pulled away by the act of virtuous reading.52 In this way, the rhetoric of revelation, used in order to allegorize the process of allegorical reading, uses the figure of the veil to stand both for the Word of God and the flawed human words which both obscure and suggest its presence. The Ovide moralisé recurrently moralizes tales involving veils, clothes, and covering as the revelation inherent in God’s response to the fallen, sinful nature of humanity: the Incarnation, in which the Word was made flesh. Christ is the embodiment of divinity as imperfect, human flesh; and this is necessarily expressed—in Scriptures, in the Ovide moralisé, in the ‘Tout’ of creation—through imperfect, fallen, human language. As Karma Lochrie observes, ‘One gains a knowledge of this Word through the continuous contemplation of the liber vitae, the Book of Life which is the life and death of the crucified Christ’:53 for the Ovide moralisé, the liber vitae encompasses the lives and shifting bodies of the characters from the Metamorphoses, and the embodied history of divinity which is the life of Christ. In book 9, Hercules falls in love with Iole, despite being married to Deianira. When Deianira learns of this, she sends Hercules a tunic soaked in the poisoned blood of the centaur Nessus, who had misleadingly told Deianira as he died that the tunic would remind Hercules of his love for his wife. However, when Hercules puts on the tunic it fuses to his skin, and he is stricken with such horrible pain that he prays to Juno for death. Jupiter intervenes and turns Hercules into a god. In the moralizer’s interpretation of this tale, Hercules represents God, who first took Judea (Deianira) in marriage, but then loved the Virgin (Iole): 51

Strubel, Grant senefiance, p. 87. Coulson, ‘Ovid’s Metamorphoses’, p. 61; Jeauneau, ‘L’Usage de la notion’, pp. 38–9. See also Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, p. 131. 53 Lochrie, ‘Language of Transgression’, p. 137. 52

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C’est la glorieuse pucele, Où Dieu pour humaine nature Vault prendre charnel vesteüre Et couvrir sa divinité De l’abit de charnalité (OM, 9.886–90) [It is the glorious virgin, in whom God, to attain human nature, wished to be veiled in flesh and cover his divinity in the habit of carnality.]

The fusion of corporeality and clothing of the blood-soaked tunic is reconfigured the ‘charnel vesteüre’ and ‘l’abit de charnalité’: the flesh with which God is robed in the figure of Christ. Similarly, the agonizing death Hercules suffers as a result of donning the garment his wife had given him, and his subsequent divine immortality, are rearranged and reassessed to be read as the Crucifixion and the Virgin Birth:54 En la Vierge fu la chemise Que Judee li presenta, Quant la Vierge mere enfanta, Dont Diex vault nestre charnelement Pour recevoir mort et torment. (OM, 9.948–53) [In the Virgin was the shirt which Judea presented to him, when the virgin mother gave birth, from whom God was born in flesh in order to receive death and torment.]

Via the interpretative programme of integumental reading, then, the veil of Ovidian fiction is swept aside to reveal the Christian truth of Christ’s Incarnation: however, both the fable and the Christian meaning are articulated in terms of clothing, covering, and bodies. Christ’s body is understood as a garment, an integument such that humans may understand the love of God in sending and sacrificing his son.55 The representation of divinity as clothing is not a particularly orthodox figure, since it might suggest that Christ was not simultaneously wholly man and wholly God, but one disguised as the other;56 nevertheless, this is literalized image of the Word made flesh, which recurs throughout the Ovide moralisé and elsewhere.57 Just as the Word is veiled by human flesh, so the Ovide moralisé figures as a veil the human flesh of the Incarnation, which redeems humanity following the Fall. The naked truth turns out to be another layer of integument and interpretation, exposing a Christian truth See Possamaï-Pérez, ‘Légendes’, pp. 225–6. For another reading of this episode, see Kay, ‘Original Skin’, pp. 41–2. On Cathar dualism’s use of the imagery of the body as a tunic, see Elliott, Fallen Bodies, pp. 145–6. 57 See Possamaï-Pérez, L’Ovide moralisé, pp. 600–1 and Lochrie, ‘Language of Transgression’, p. 118. 54 55 56

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which was always-already there, but which can only be expressed in veiled language.58 When the moralizer announces, ‘La veritez seroit aperte, | Qui sous les fables gist couverte’ [the truth, which lies covered beneath the fables, should be apparent] (OM, 1.45–6), he may be echoing the passage in the Rose in which Raison also uses the suggestive verb ‘gesir’ (which can connote lovers lying together) to indicate the truth lying waiting to be unveiled:59 Car en leur geus et en leur fables Gisent deliz mout profitables Souz cui leur pensees covrirent, Quant le voir des fables vestirent. (Rose, 7145–8) [For in their jests and in their fables lie very profitable delights, beneath which they covered their thoughts, when they were clothed in the truth of fables.]

Mary Frances Brown identifies the erotic ‘deliz’ which tinges Raison’s account of the ‘integumanz aus poetes’ [the poets’ integument] (7138) in the Rose;60 and the play between the integument and the naked truth it conceals is similarly eroticized in several stories in the Ovide moralisé. In book 5, the nymph Arethusa tells the tale of her metamorphosis, which began as she bathed on a hot day: ‘me despouillai toute nue’ [I undressed until I was completely naked] (OM, 5.3551). The lustful river-god Alpheus pursued her, and, as she fled, ‘Toute nue et sans vestement’ [completely nude and without clothing] (OM, 5.3567), Arethusa prayed to Diana, who hid her by enveloping her in a cloud: Dyane, de pitié meüe, Couvri moi d’une espesse nue Si que cil ne me pot veoir. (OM, 5.3608–10) [Diana, moved by pity, covered me in a thick cloud so that he could not see me.]

Moralizing this tale, the Ovide moralisé author exploits the pun in ‘nue’, which he has used in his translation as an adjective in the feminine to signify Arethusa’s nudity, and as a noun to signify her subsequent concealment by the cloud. The nymph’s bathing is interpreted as the purifying ablution of confession, which enables the Christian to ‘desnuer sa consciance | Et tout ses vices reveler’ [lay bare his conscience and reveal all 58 I therefore disagree with Pairet (Les Mutacions, pp. 116–17) and Possamaï-Pérez (L’Ovide moralisé, p. 677), when they argue that the Ovide moralisé uncovers the truth only to re-clothe it in allegory. 59 On the Ovide moralisé as a response to the Rose, see Huot, ‘Rival Voices’. 60 Brown, ‘Critique and Complicity’, p. 139. See Hult, ‘Allégories’, pp. 56–8 for a comparison of these passages in the Ovide moralisé and the Rose.

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his vices] (OM, 5.3691–2), and in which the soul is presented to the omniscient divine gaze as ‘Nete et nue, sans couverture | De tout pechié, de toute ordure’ [Pure and naked, without covering of any sin or corruption] (OM, 5.3710–11). Just as Diana hid Arethusa’s nudity in a cloud, God’s forgiveness covers the shame of sin in ‘la nue d’oblivion’ [the cloud of oblivion] (OM, 5.3736). In both translation and moralization, then, ‘nue’ is covered by ‘nue’: once more, covering and nakedness merge in the process of integumental interpretation. If ‘Tout’ exists for our enlightenment, then that includes puns: even the very languages in which Ovid’s work is written and into which the Ovide moralisé is translated—and the process of translation which renders one into the other—are open to an allegorical reading. The recurrent paronomasia of the translator-moralizer can thus be understood not as a tasteless rejection of decorum, nor simply as an imitation of Ovid’s own wordplay, but as a comment on the process of translation and revelation which he has undertaken. It indicates that language itself—the Latin of Ovid as well as the French of the Ovide moralisé—is itself an inevitably veiled version of the Word of God. The poetry of the Ovide moralisé is not just ‘highly successful at rendering the graceful sinuosity, narrative pace, and risqué eroticism of the Latin original’,61 but also a means of contemplating and performing the ambiguity of human language, what Culler calls the ‘mutability of meaning’. The punning and equivocation of the Ovide moralisé’s language reveals the way in which the ambiguity of post-lapsarian language can itself be the means to understanding the Word of God, as it invites reflection, scrutiny, and careful reading informed by virtue—not the slapdash hubris warned against in the moralizations of Phaeton and Orychoë.

DIVISÉ PAR L’EFFET DE LANGAGE: PENTHEUS, ACTAEON, AND SHADES OF DISMEMBERMENT The sight of the naked truth can be dangerous, however: several stories which offer Ovidian characters and their readers an encounter with an unclothed body also involve mutation and/or mutilation. This configuration of revelation, transformation, and violence is often read by the Ovide moralisé as offering insights into the mysteries of divine embodiment. A particularly rich instance of this is to be found in book 3, when Actaeon’s transformation and dismemberment as punishment for his 61

Armstrong and Kay, Knowing Poetry, p. 84.

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accidental glimpse of Diana bathing is interpreted as a vision of divinity and a means to understand the Trinity. Actaeon is, via a rhyme between the homonyms ‘serf ’ [serf] and ‘cerf ’ [stag], understood as Christ, whom God sent to earth humbly disguised in human form: Fist son chier fil dou ciel descendre Au monde, et char humaine prendre Et tapir souz forme de serf. Acteon fu muez en cerf. (OM, 3.627–30) [He had his dear son descend from heaven to earth, take human flesh and hide in the form of a serf. Actaeon was transformed into a stag.]

Diana, on the other hand, is read as: la Deïté Qui regnoit en la Trinité, Nue, sans humaine nature, Qu’Acteon vit sans couverture, C’est li filz Dieu, qui purement Vit a nu descouvertement La beneoite Trinité, Qui regnoit en eternité Sans comencement et sans fin. (OM, 3.635–43) [the Deity who reigned naked in the Trinity, without human nature, which Actaeon saw uncovered: he is the son of God, who saw purely, naked and uncovered, the blessed Trinity which reigned in eternity without beginning and without end.]

Once more, humanity is understood as a ‘couverture’, a covering which can be donned by God. The implication of this moralization is that it is so unbearable and incomprehensible a truth that it can only be contemplated by Christ, the son of God and person of the Trinity, whose condition of existence is death and mutilation: the antlers sprouted by Actaeon are understood as the ‘cornes’ [horns/thorns] (OM, 3.664) with which Christ was crowned at his Crucifixion. In this moralization, then, Actaeon’s metamorphosed and mutilated body is folded into Diana’s; in both the Ovidian tale and its allegoresis, Actaeon’s fate is understood as a signal of Diana’s omnipotent divinity.62 Just as Ovid’s readers get to glimpse the furious, blushing, naked goddess without fear of punishment,63 so the See Desmond, ‘The Goddess Diana’, p. 68. qui color infectis adversi solis ab ictu nubibus esse solet aut purpureae Aurorae, is fuit in vultu visae sine veste Dianae. (Metamorphoses, 3.183–5) [And red as the clouds which flush between the sun’s slant rays, red as the rosy dawn, were the cheeks of Diana as she stood there in view without her robes.] 62 63

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readers of the Ovide moralisé are, through translation and moralization, able to perceive the otherwise fatal and incomprehensible wonders of the Trinity.64 The ostentatiously equivocal language of the Ovide moralisé, then, offers its reader the chance to glimpse that which cannot be normally seen from a human perspective, that which is only perceptible from the divine point of view. This is the point of view of which Philosophy speaks in Boethius’s Consolatio: ‘uti uos uestro hoc temporario praesenti quaedam uidetis ita ille omnia suo cernit aeterno’ [just as you men see certain things in this temporal present of yours, so God sees all things in his eternal present].65 Just as human words are inevitably inferior to the divine Word, so the human gaze cannot normally hope to comprehend the synchronic sweep of God’s vision of human history: ‘language and time together characterize our fallen state’.66 The figure of anamorphosis, as it is used by Lacan, similarly points out the incomplete character of the subject’s vision and language in relation to the all-seeing, all-knowing inhuman perspective of the Other. Lacan’s references to the tale of Actaeon in his Seminar XI suggest that he too understood Ovid’s tale as an encounter with a desired yet dangerous truth.67 Actaeon’s simultaneous complete vision of Diana and physical mortification are invoked by Lacan in his analogy between this Ovidian tale and the subject’s devastating encounter with the gaze of the Other. This all-powerful gaze, emanating from the fantasized, terrifying, and unknowable realm of the symbolic, which dictates language and law to the subject at the price of his or her integrity, is seen by Lacan as ‘laissant entrevoir à l’horizon la chasse d’Artémis’ [providing a glimpse on the horizon of the hunt of Artemis].68 Later in the seminar, casting himself as Actaeon—and his audience, even less flatteringly, as his hounds— Lacan refers to this myth as he describes the subject’s mortifying search for truth in the Other of the symbolic. La vérité, en ce sens, c’est ce qui court après la vérité—et c’est là où je cours, où je vous emmène, tels les chiens d’Actéon, après moi. Quand j’aurai trouvé

64 As Desmond points out, the illustration of this episode in manuscript Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale 04 fol. 74v. represents Diana as ‘a highly gendered and sexualized figure’ (‘The Goddess Diana’, p. 69): in the illustrative programme of this Ovide moralisé manuscript, then, the naked goddess is revealed to readers. 65 Boethius, Consolatio Philosophiae, 5.6.20. 66 Fyler, Language, p. 23. 67 On Diana as one of the mythic naked women who are used to figure the elusive, desired nature of truth in a range of writing, see Crawford, ‘She’. 68 Lacan, Séminaire XI, p. 77.

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le gîte de la déesse, je me changerai sans doute en cerf, et vous pourrez me dévorer, mais nous avons encore un peu de temps avant nous.69 [The truth, in this sense, is that which runs after the truth—and it is there that I am running, where I am taking you, like Actaeon’s hounds, after me. When I have found the goddess’s hiding place, I will no doubt change into a stag, and you can devour me, but we still have a little time before us.]

The context for this is a passage in which Lacan weaves together his wish to take his audience with him on his pursuit of Freudian ideas, and the more general notion that the condition of the subject’s existence and desire is subjection to the Other of language, becoming ‘divisé par l’effet de langage’ [divided by the effect of language]. Lacan continues: Par l’effet de parole, le sujet se réalise toujours plus dans l’autre, mais il ne poursuit déjà plus là qu’un moitié de lui-même. Il ne trouvera son désir que toujours plus divisé, pulvérisé, dans la cernable métonymie de la parole.70 [Via the effect of speech, the subject always realizes himself more in the other, but still he pursues there but the half of himself. He will only find his desire always more divided, pulverized, in the discernible metonymy of speech.]

Just as the Ovide moralisé figures the mortal Actaeon as existing only within the sight and paradoxical embodiment of the all-powerful Diana, Lacan shows that the subject’s only hope of articulating his existence and desire depends upon the mortifying, fragmenting power of language.71 To exist in relation to this unbearable Other is to be marked with division: Lacan describes this with recourse to the figure of Diana, ‘dont la touche semble s’associer à ce moment de tragique défaillance où nous avons perdu celui qui parle’ [whose touch seems to be associated with this moment of tragic failure in which he who speaks is lost].72 Actaeon is lost as a speaking human precisely from the moment at which Diana simultaneously permits him to tell others of her nakedness and robs him of language by turning him into a stag. The Ovide moralisé reiterates verbs of power and permission to emphasize Actaeon’s linguistic impotence: ‘Di, s’il te loist, que toute nue M’as cilueques baignant veüe. Se tu pues, tu t’en vanteras Des dames, la ou tu seras, 69

70 Lacan, Séminaire XI, p. 172. Lacan, Séminaire XI, p. 172. Simpson observes that Lacan ‘uses the Actæon topos to remind his audience that the results will not always be something that one can hear or follow and remain unchanged’ (Fantasy, Identity and Misrecognition, p. 159). 72 Lacan, Séminaire XI, p. 77. 71

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Quar je t’en otroi le congié.’ Lors li a le col alongié, Si li fist la teste cornue; Le vis et tout le cors li mue; (OM, 3.453–60) [‘Say, if it’s possible for you, that you saw me bathing here, completely naked. If you can, you will be able to boast of it to the ladies who will be with you wherever you will be, for I give you leave to do so.’ Then she caused his neck to lengthen, his head to sprout horns: she transformed his face and his whole body.]

‘S’il te loist’, ‘Se tu pues’, and ‘je t’en otroi le congié’ can all be seen as translating the devastatingly succinct declaration, ‘si narrare poteris, licet’ [if you can speak of this, you may] (M, 3.193).73 Just as Diana gives leave to Actaeon to do something impossible—to speak of his sight of her nakedness—so, Lacan indicates, the subject’s desire to speak of himself can only be realized in fragments in the sight of the inhuman Other, which will always mean that the speaking subject is, paradoxically, ‘divisé par l’effet de langage’. The Ovide moralisé, however, offers a way of reading the Actaeon story precisely as the possibility of seeing and merging with the divine Other, rather than being irretrievably mortified by it. Actaeon’s hounds are moralized as the Jews who did not recognize Christ; and, as Sylvia Huot points out, ‘the Ovide moralisé reverses the point of Ovid’s story: it is not knowledge that is dangerous, but ignorance’.74 What is desired, advocated, and fleetingly provided here is an understanding and vision of the Word. The Trinity is also invoked in the opening and closing prayers of the Ovide moralisé: as he begins his work, the moralizer remarks that Ovid calls up several gods to help in his poetic project,75 but reminds his readers that we should believe in one triune God: ‘Uns seulz Crierres, qui cria | Tout’ (1.111–12), the entirety of creation which invites interpretation from the virtuous and learned. Each of the persons of the Trinity, the moralizer continues, underwent a transformation: the son became a man; the spirit became a dove; and the father was heard as a voice. The unity of these three persons, despite their mutability, is emphasized; this is what distinguishes the Trinity invoked by the Ovide moralisé author from the multiple gods invoked by Ovid:

73 On the significance of this line and this episode more generally, see Simpson, Fantasy, Identity and Misrecognition, pp. 158–64. 74 Huot, ‘Rival Voices’, p. 207. 75 ‘di, coeptis, (nam vos mustastis et illas) | adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi | ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen!’ [Ye gods, for you yourselves have wrought the changes, breathe on these my undertakings, and bring down my song in unbroken strains from the world’s very beginning even unto the present time] (Metamorphoses, 1.2–4).

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Sans deviser lor unité, Et sans muer lor deïté, Se muerent en un moment En trois guises sensiblement. Pour ce pot em pluralité L’autours prier la Trinité, Non pas pour ce que trois Dieus soient, Quar les trois un seul Dieu fesioent, Que font ore et toujours feront, Quar ja c’uns seulz Dieus ne seront. (OM, 1.137–46) [Without dividing their unity and without transforming their deity, they moved into one moment in three discernible appearances. This is why the author can invoke the plurality of the Trinity in prayer: not because it concerns three Gods, for the three make up one God, which they make now and will always make, for there will only be but one God.]

While the Ovide moralisé author’s invocation of the Trinity might be seen, then, as an imitation of Ovid’s plea, it is in fact an appeal to a superior notion of divine embodiment. The divine corporeality which is consistently presented as the truth, expressed through the tales of mutating pagan bodies in the Metamorphoses, has much more to do with stability and union than the riotous change of Ovid’s song.76 And yet if Lacan understands the anamorphic gaze of the Other as ‘non point un regard vu, mais un regard par moi imaginé au champ de l’Autre’ [not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other],77 then the Ovide moralisé precisely envisages this imagined gaze, rendering visible, through the processes of translation and moralization wrought upon Ovid’s text, the otherwise terrifyingly unknowable mysteries of divine embodiment. From the standpoint of what Boethius’s Philosophy calls God’s ‘eternal present’, the violence of the change imposed on to Actaeon’s body is interpreted as the sacrifice inherent in the Crucifixion, the son martyred in the sight of the Trinity. Pentheus invokes the tale of Actaeon later in book 3 of the Metamorphoses, in a passage which is not translated by the Ovide moralisé. As he attempts in vain to stop his mother and aunts from tearing him apart in a Bacchic frenzy, he begs for mercy: ‘moveant animos Actaeonis umbrae!’ illa, quis Actaeon, nescit dextramque precanti abstulit. (M, 3.720–2)

As Kay observes, ‘the moralist’s point is surely that the mutability (or capacity for metamorphosis) of the body is precisely what enables us to see the divinely bestowed identity of its form’ (Place of Thought, p. 49, original emphasis.) 77 Lacan, Séminaire XI, p. 79. 76

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[‘Let the ghost of Actaeon move your heart!’ She knows not who Actaeon is, and tears off the suppliant’s right arm.]

Like Actaeon’s, Pentheus’s dismemberment is also a punishment,78 and is also effected in the mistaken belief that he is the quarry of a hunt—in their madness, Agave, Autonoë, and Ino all think Pentheus is a wild boar, and show him no mercy: De nulle merci ne lor membre Tout l’ont desmembré membre a membre. (OM, 3.2511–12) [They remember no mercy: they have torn him limb from limb.]

Pentheus’s mother and aunts’ incomprehension of Pentheus’s invocation of Actaeon’s shade is replaced by their refusal to remember mercy, and their subsequent dismemberment of Pentheus. Once more the moralizer makes his point via wordplay, here reiterating ‘membre’, reminding the reader that the Ovide moralisé not only takes apart Ovid’s text but also reassembles it so that it can be properly remembered. Whereas Actaeon is transformed and dismembered because he glimpses a goddess, Pentheus suffers his fate because he denied a god, scoffing at Tiresias’s prophecies, and throwing Acoetes into prison rather than hearkening to his tale illustrating Bacchus’s divinity. The moralizations of this story are among those objected to by Strubel because of their contradictory approaches to divinity and belief.79 Certainly the readings of this tale continue the contradictory readings of Bacchus throughout this latter section of book 3: the moralizer veers between interpreting Bacchus as drunken debauchery to be shunned and Christ, the true Incarnation of divinity, whose blood is consumed in the wine of the Eucharist.80 Accordingly, while Ovid’s Pentheus is characterized by his scepticism in relation to a deity, the Ovide moralisé first allegorizes Pentheus as a religious man who shuns the debauched ways of the world (as Pentheus tried to dissuade the Bacchus-worshipping Thebans from their drunken frenzy). He is then, just as Actaeon was, likened to Christ, in that those who should have loved him killed him instead. Bacchus is understood as the Antichrist, who will make the world drunk, and family members will betray and kill one another. The next moralization is euhemeristic, and reads Bacchus as wine, which Acoetes uses to render his prison guards insensible so that he can escape; when Pentheus, his captor, pursues him, he is killed:

78 Desmond argues that the Ovide moralisé exculpates Actaeon from his ‘error’ (‘The Goddess Diana’, pp. 66–9). 79 80 Strubel, Grant senefiance, p. 247. See Kay, Place of Thought, p. 52.

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Si fu desmembrez membre a membre, Si com la fable le ramembre. (OM, 3.2739–40) [He was dismembered limb from limb just as the fable records it/remembers him/ reassembles him.]

The historical events surrounding the ‘actual’ fate of Pentheus (proposed in the euhemerist reading) are, like the body of Pentheus, rendered asunder so that they can be reassembled and remembered—‘ramembré’—in the ‘fable’.81 But as the moralizer seeks to impart a ‘sentence’ which will synthesize the whole story of Bacchus as it is told in book 3 of the Metamorphoses, Tiresias, who predicts the coming of Bacchus, is understood as a prophet of Christ’s advent; Bacchus therefore stands for Christ; the wine which was earlier associated with drunkenness is now assimilated to the Eucharist; and those who deny Christ’s divinity are condemned to hell and torn apart by demons. Book 3 of the Ovide moralisé closes with a couplet illustrating the ephemerality of worldly pleasures for these tormented souls: Et lor vaine joie et faillie Come ombre ou com fueille flestrie. (OM, 3. 2913–14) [And their vain, pointless joy like a shadow or a withered leaf.]

Here, the shade of Actaeon is displaced from Pentheus’s terrified entreaty in the Metamorphoses to the moralizer’s concluding comment on the misleading glories of the world: an ‘ombre’, a shadow, which should be recognized as such and shunned in favour of the immortal truth of Christianity, which is repeatedly proffered in the Ovide moralisé’s dissection and reconstruction of Ovid’s fables.

REMEMBERING CHRISTIANITY Book 6 of the Metamorphoses connects three consecutive tales of transformative dismemberment: those of Marsyas, Pelops, and Philomela. Not only do these tales reveal the human body as vulnerable to transformation, but they also suggest that transformation can involve or result from the body’s fragmentation. The Ovide moralisé treats this concatenation of episodes in a particularly revelatory way—especially since this book, 81 As Hult observes, the euhemerist operation in these commentaries ‘est une interprétation qui montre non seulement comment la fable est un récit à interpréter allégoriquement mais comment elle est déjà le résultat d’une opération interprétative’ [is an interpretation which shows not only that the fable is a tale to be interpreted allegorically, but also that it is already the result of an interpretative operation] (‘Allégories’, p. 63).

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starting with the weaving competition between Arachne and Athena, itself weaves together a group of stories which focus on the tension between the fragility of the human body and the way in which artistic creation can supplement or commemorate it. In all three instances, the Ovide moralisé author diverges from his usual fairly faithful translation of Ovid’s verse and, using other sources in French and Latin, amplifies the tales he finds there. The tales of Marsyas, Pelops, and Philomela are all told in the aftermath of Latona’s revenge on Niobe, whose children are killed, and who herself becomes a weeping mountain. I shall explore later the way in which the tales of Pelops and Marsyas are amplified by the Ovide moralisé, but, since the story of Philomela is treated in a very different way, by interpolating an earlier work, I shall start with the third of these ostentatiously elaborated tales of dismemberment. In this harrowing tale, Philomela, younger daughter of King Pandion of Athens, is raped by Tereus, who is married to her older sister, Procne. Tereus cuts out Philomela’s tongue to prevent her from telling what has happened to her, but she manages to convey her message to Procne via a tapestry; and together they kill Procne and Tereus’s son, Itys, cut up his body, cook it, and serve it to Tereus. When he realizes he has eaten his son, Tereus pursues the sisters, but they turn into birds as they flee, and Tereus is transformed into a hoopoe. Just as he turns to the pre-existing translation of the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe by ‘uns autres’ (OM, 4.227), the Ovide moralisé author declares that an excellent translation of the tale of Philomela already exists and he cannot possibly improve upon it. Mes ja ne descrirai le conte Fors si come Crestiens le conte, Qui bien en translata la letre. Sus lui ne m’en vueil entremetre. Tout son dit vous raconterai, Et l’alegorie en trairai. (OM, 6.2211–16) [But I shall only describe the tale as it is related by Crestiens, who translated the language well. I don’t wish to compete with him. I shall tell you the whole of his work, and draw out its allegory.]

The identity of ‘Crestiens’ has long been a matter for debate, with scholars more or less eager to identify him as Chrétien de Troyes. Unlike the lai of Pyrame et Thisbé, which survives independently in manuscripts which do not transmit the Ovide moralisé,82 Crestiens’ Philomène has as its only 82 However, ‘On considère généralement que la version de Pyrame et Thisbé donné par l’Ovide moralisé est meilleure que celle qui a été conservée à l’état autonome’ [It is generally considered that the version of Pyramus and Thisbe given by the Ovide moralisé is better than that which has been conserved in an independent state] (Philomena, ed. Baumgartner, p. 265).

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witnesses the surviving manuscripts of the Ovide moralisé: in other words, it has not survived in a source transmitted earlier than, or independently of, the fourteenth-century work. In the style of twelfth-century French authors, Crestiens names himself in the third person, at the exact midpoint of the work as the Ovide moralisé transmits it—however, he appears to give his name as ‘Crestiiens li Gois’ (OM, 6.2950; Phil., 734).83 This mysterious epithet has yet to be satisfactorily explained, try though several critics might to link it to the more famous, and more geographically specific, sobriquet, de Troyes.84 Whereas Philomène is supplied in the indeterminate space of the appendix to the 1994 Pochothèque edition of Chrétien de Troyes’s Romans,85 it is allotted a whole chapter in the 2005 Companion to Chrétien de Troyes.86 It is only briefly alluded to, however, in Thinking Through Chrétien de Troyes. This last work understands Chrétien less as a historical individual and more as a textual idea of authority, created by readings of texts attributed to him. Certainly, the temporary relinquishing of authority from the anonymous moralizer to Crestiens constructs the latter as an author in the context of the Ovide moralisé, and is perhaps reminiscent of the apparent handover of responsibility for the Charrette to Godefroy de Leigni.87 However, the firmest evidence that Chrétien de Troyes is responsible for the Philomela interpolation in the Ovide moralisé comes in the prologue to Cligès, in which the author names himself as Crestiens (l. 43), having already listed his greatest works to date: Cil qui fist d’Erec et d’Enide Et les commandemanz d’Ovide Et l’ars d’amors an romans mist, Et Le mort de l’espaule fist, Del roi Marc et de’Ysalt la blonde. Et de la hupe et de l’aronde Et del rossignol la muance, Un novel conte rancomance D’un vaslet qui an Grece fu Del linage le roi Artu.88

83

On the cut this introduces into the tale and the syntax, mirroring Philomela’s mutilation, see Azzam, ‘Le printemps’, p. 48 and Krueger, ‘Philomena’, p. 93. 84 See Possamaï-Pérez, L’Ovide moralisé, pp. 265–6. 85 Chrétien de Troyes, Romans, pp. 1225–67. 86 Krueger, ‘Philomena’. 87 Chrétien de Troyes, Charrette, 7102–12. On the relationship between Godefroy and Chrétien, see Kay, ‘Who Was Chrétien de Troyes?’ p. 34. 88 Chrétien de Troyes, Cligés, II. 1–10.

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[He who made the tale of Erec et Enide and put into French the commandments of Ovid, as well as the Art of Love; he who made the Shoulder Bite; the tale of Mark and Yseut the blonde; the metamorphosis of the hoopoe, the swallow and the nightingale, begins a new tale of a young man who was in Greece, of King Arthur’s lineage.]

While this prologue has been interpreted as a claim that Chrétien translated into French both Ovid’s Remedia Amoris and Ars Amatoria,89 Michelle Freeman posits that Chrétien’s claim that he ‘fist [ . . . ] les commandemanz d’Ovide’ could be interpreted as his declaration that he is acting in accordance with Ovid’s artistic inspiration, and has only translated the ‘ars d’amors’.90 In any case, it appears that Chrétien is claiming at this point in his career to have authored as many Ovidian works as Arthurian ones. The tale of the Shoulder Bite refers to that of Pelops, the tale immediately preceding that of Philomela in the Metamorphoses. Emmanuèle Baumgartner elegantly summarized the position of modern critics towards the author of Philomène: ‘nous l’appellerons désormais par commodité sinon par absolue conviction « Chrétien »’ [from now on, we shall call him ‘Chrétien’, out of utility if not absolute conviction].91 I shall, however, distinguish between Crestiens—the author of the Philomène—and Chrétien de Troyes. It is not my intention to resolve the thorny problem of the attribution of the Philomela section of the Ovide moralisé, but to explore the implications of the incorporation of an earlier work into the vast fourteenth-century text.92 Crestiens amplifies the tale of Philomela enormously—it is too tempting not to say that he embroiders this story as he retells it.93 In so doing, as many critics have noted, he shows an interest in and a facility for rhetorical debate, which is evident in the Arthurian works more solidly attributed to Chrétien de Troyes by modern scholarship. He also attributes this facility to Philomela: tant sot sagement parler Que solemant de sa parole Seüst ele tenir escole (OM, 6.2418–20; Phil., 202–4)

89 Cligés, ed. Micha, p. 228; Frappier, Chrétien de Troyes, p. 7; Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale, p. 477. 90 Freeman, Poetics, pp. 30–1. 91 Philomena, in Pyrame, ed. Baumgartner, p. 275. 92 On the attribution of Philomène to Chrétien de Troyes and the way in which this work anticipates its allegoresis by the Ovide moralisé, see Possamaï-Pérez, L’Ovide moralisé, pp. 264–93. 93 Indeed, where Ovid’s Philomela uses only purple thread, Chrétien’s tragic heroine uses red, yellow, and green as well.

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[she could speak so wisely that she would have been able, by her speech alone, to instruct others.]

Of course, this makes her savage mutilation by her brother-in-law all the more poignant,94 but it also enables Philomela to engage in the kind of exegesis the Ovide moralisé practises throughout its reading of the Metamorphoses. To reinforce the links between her eloquence and later enforced muteness, it is her father’s silence at Tereus’s initial request to take Philomela back to Thrace to visit Procne which is most minutely glossed, in an exchange which is interpolated into the Ovidian tale by its French, Christian translator. Philomela interprets this silence as signalling Pandion’s refusal: there is no point supplying a ‘glose’ [gloss], she says (OM, 6.2517; Phil., 300), but Tereus outmanoeuvres her, suggesting, ‘Autrement le poez espondre’ [you could interpret it otherwise] (OM, 6.2526; Phil., 210), in a locution which is almost identical to the formulae with which the Ovide moralisé introduces its own moralizations.95 Countering Tereus’s claim that Pandion’s silence means that he wants her to leave court, Philomela also employs terminology familiar from elsewhere in the Ovide moralisé: ‘N’est pas voire ceste sentence’ [this meaning is not true] (OM, 6.2533; Phil., 317).96 This apparent foreshadowing of the fourteenth-century text’s turn of phrase may suggest, as Possamaï-Pérez has argued, that, despite his protestations that ‘Sus lui ne m’en veuil entremetre’ [I do not wish to supersede him with my own work], the anonymous author of the Ovide moralisé has adapted Crestiens’ work as he interpolated it (indeed, it would be strange had he not).97 In addition, it functions as a reminder that the tradition of transmitting Ovid in the Middle Ages is so bound up with the tradition of commentary and gloss that to recount a tale from the Metamorphoses, even in French and as early as the twelfth century, could involve its insertion into a Christian discourse and its understanding as an opportunity for the discovery and articulation of Christian truth made possible only through virtuous learning. For all the emphasis the Philomène places on the pagan setting of this tale,98 these Krueger, ‘Philomela’, p. 94. We might compare it, for instance, to ‘Bien puet l’en espondre autrement’ [it might well be explained otherwise] (2.914) or ‘Si le puis autrement espondre’ [one can explain it otherwise] (5.763). 96 Here, we might compare ‘La quele sentence est plus voire’ [which is a more true meaning] (3.1021). 97 Possamaï-Pérez, L’Ovide moralisé, p. 293. 98 The incestuous, adulterous desire Tereus kindles for Philomela is rather oddly glossed by the Philomène: the narrator claims that the pagan gods and law allow people to do ‘Lor volenté et lor deduit’ [their desire and their pleasure] (OM, 6.2240; Phil., 224). Evidently 94 95

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Ovidian characters bring an interpretative strategy akin to the moralizing project of the Ovide moralisé to bear on the words—or rather the silence— of their fellow character. While Philomela is unable—with tragic consequences—to impose her own gloss of her father’s silence, the moralizing she carries out as a nightingale is much more convincing and definitive.99 Indeed, in a retrospective explanation of origins worthy of Ovid, Philomela’s condemnations of treacherous lovers who mistreat courtly young women are disseminated and perpetuated from the singular nightingale she becomes throughout all nightingales thereafter, right up to the present day: Encore, qui creroit son los, Seroient a honte trestuit Li desloial et destruit, Et li felon et li parjure, Et cil qui de joie n’ont cure, Et tuit cil qui font mesprison Et felonnie et traïçon Vers pucele sage et cortoise, Quar tant lor grieve et tant lor poise Que quant il vient au prin d’esté, Que tout l’iver avons passé, Pour les mauvés qu’ele tant het, Chante au plus doucement qu’el set Par le boschaige, ‘Oci! Oci!’ (OM, 6.3670–83; Phil., 1454–67) [Still, according to her, all those are shamed who are disloyal and ruined; the felons and the perjurers; those who have no care for joy; all those who mislead and undertake felony and treachery towards well-behaved and courtly maidens. For it so grieves her and saddens her that, when it comes to the beginning of summer, after the winter has completely passed, because of the bad men whom she hates so much, she sings in the woods as sweetly as she can, ‘Kill! Kill!’]

It could even be argued that the interpretative and moralizing activity carried out within the work attributed to Crestiens is more convincing and successful than that which the Ovide moralisé author performs upon this interpolated section of the fourteenth-century poem.100 Certainly, Gaston Paris disapproved so wholeheartedly of the way in which the promise that this does not hold for the rest of the narrative, in which Procne and Philomela’s revenge expresses their rage at the crimes Tereus has committed. See Krueger, ‘Philomena’, p. 95; and Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens, pp. 62–3. 99 On the nightingale’s song as a replacement for Philomela’s silenced voice, see Quéruel, ‘Silence et mort’. 100 On the moralization Chrétien performs in his translation and amplification, see Noacco, La Métamorphose, p. 80.

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‘l’alegorie en trairai’ [I shall draw the allegory from it] (OM, 6.2216) is fulfilled that he declared, ‘il est impossible d’être plus absurde’ [it is impossible to be more absurd];101 and it is undeniable that the allegory the Ovide moralisé author proposes is fairly surprising and obscure for modern readers. Pandion is understood as God, who sends his daughter, the soul (Procne), to marry the body (Tereus). Their offspring is the ‘bon fruit de sainte vie’ [good fruit of holy life] (6.3747). However, Procne, now understood as ‘nature humaine’ [human nature] (6.3751) wishes to be reunited with ‘Amour decevable et faillie’ [deceptive, flawed love] (6.3756); the body searches for this sinful love and ends up taking pleasure with it. This corrupts the fruit of holy life, and this corruption is associated with the hoopoe Tereus becomes: a bird ‘Plains de pullentie et d’ordure | Et de honie porreture [full of infection, filth and shameful putrefaction] (6.3837–8).102 Meanwhile, the vacuous, changeable pleasures of earthly love are figured as a nightingale: ‘Et li delit vain et muable | Devienent rousseignol volable’ [and vain, mutable pleasures become a flighty nightingale] (6.3839–40). In Crestiens’ tale, the nightingale’s song condemns those who do not take love seriously, perhaps anticipating the depiction of ‘courtly love’ which Chrétien de Troyes would go on to perfect in the twelfth century.103 In the fourteenth-century moralization, however, the fickle pleasures of earthly love are given body in a flighty little bird: this nightingale is far from being the archetypal symbol of exalted suffering in love as celebrated in troubadour poetry,104 Marie de France’s lai Laüstic, or even the Philomène immediately preceding this moralization.105 It is the French translation which names the birds whose bodies are taken by Procne (the swallow) and Philomela (the nightingale) (OM, 6.3668–9; Phil., 1452–3): Edith Joyce Benkov argues that the author of Philomène must have gleaned these details from Hyginus’s version of this tale.106 Similarly, if Chrétien de Troyes composed a text called the Mort de l’espaule, it must also have amplified Ovid’s original, since the Metamorphoses says nothing about anyone biting Pelops’s shoulder. Because of the amplification of both the stories of Philomela and Pelops in the Ovide moralisé, Possamaï-Pérez suggests that its author may have been using as his source manuscript one which transmitted not just the Philomène, but

Paris, ‘Chrétien Legouais’, p. 518, quoted in Krueger, ‘Philomena’, p. 90. In the Bestiary tradition, the hoopoe was often depicted as living in and among excrement. McCulloch, Mediaeval Latin and French Bestiaries, pp. 126–7. 103 Quéruel, ‘Silence et mort’, p. 80; Kay, ‘Who Was Chrétien de Troyes?’ p. 24. 104 See Huot, ‘Troubadour Lyric’; and Pfeffer, Change of Philomel, pp. 73–114. 105 See Quéruel, ‘Silence et mort’; and Pfeffer, Change of Philomel, pp. 139–40. 106 Benkov, ‘Hyginus’ Contribution’. 101 102

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also the Mort de l’espaule,107 although it is just as plausible that this is one of the numerous places in the Ovide moralisé at which the author amplifies or explains Ovid with recourse to other sources. The remarkable story of Pelops’s mutilation and resurrection is only briefly referred to in the Metamorphoses; and once more it is via the motif of clothing and revelation that the Ovide moralisé introduces subtle modifications into its translation and rearticulation of Ovid. Just as Procne rends her garments when she hears of Philomela’s death,108 Pelops, in his solitary grief for his sister Niobe, tears his robes. As he does so, his left shoulder is revealed to be made of ivory. Ovid remarks that it used to look the same as the right one: ‘concolor hic umerus nasceni tempore dextro | corporeusque fuit’ [This at the time of his birth had been of the same colour as his right, and of flesh] (M, 6.406–7). The reason for this prosthesis is swiftly and cryptically explained: Pelops’s father cut him up, but the gods reassembled him, using a piece of ivory to replace his left shoulder, which had gone missing. Probably using Hyginus’s more detailed version of the tale, the Ovide moralisé supplements Ovid’s version, filling in the missing details, as the gods completed Pelops’s mutilated body. The translation explains that Pelops’s avaricious father, Tantalus, invited the gods to dine with him. Just as Lycaon does in book 1 of the Metamorphoses, Tantalus wished to serve the gods a meal of human flesh; just as Tereus’s meal will do in the next story in book 6, it features his son as the principal ingredient.109 The reiterated juxtaposition of forms of ‘[des]trenchier’ and ‘mangier’ at the ends of lines forges resonances between Pelops’s mutilation and partial consumption, and the treatment Itys meets at the hands of his mother and aunt: [Tantalus] fist son enfant destrenchier Pour donner aux diex a mangier (OM, 6.2087–8) [He had his son chopped up to give to the gods to eat.]

‘N’est-il pas permis aussi de supposer que l’écrivain a pu avoir sous les yeux la version de Chrétien de Troyes pour une autre des « ovidiana » citées dans le prologue du Cligès et perdues aujourd’hui?’ [Might it be permitted also to suppose that the writer may have had before his eyes Chrétien de Troyes’ version of another of the ‘Ovidiana’ cited in the prologue to Cligès and lost today?] (L’Ovide moralisé, p. 293). 108 velamina Procne deripit ex umeris auro fulgentia lato induiturque atras vestes (6.566–8) [Procne tore from her shoulders the robe gleaming with a broad golden border and put on black weeds.] 109 Barkan observes that Tereus’s consumption of Itys, and Procne’s triumphant remarks as he does so, point to the centrality of real or metaphorical cannibalism in the Metamorphoses (The Gods Made Flesh, pp. 91–3). 107

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Il [Itys] avra la teste trenchiee, S’en donra son pere a mengier (OM, 6.3540–1; Phil., 1324–5) [He will have his head chopped off and it will be given to his father to eat.]

However, the Ovide moralisé tells us, only Ceres ate any of Pelops’s body, consuming his shoulder before the other gods reunited his dismembered body, replacing his shoulder with an ivory one. As well as supplementing Ovid’s rather sketchy story of Pelops’s shoulder, the author of the Ovide moralisé also changes a vital detail: where Ovid tells his reader that Pelops’s left shoulder used to be identical to his right, the Ovide moralisé author tells us that it still is identical: Egaulz et samblable a la destre, Ausi com s’ele i fust tel nee, Si n’estoit elle pas charnee. (OM, 6.2080–2) [Equal to and resembling the right, just as if it had been like that since birth, even though it was not flesh.]

In other words, the inserted, fabricated shoulder is both evident as Pelops rends his garments and indistinguishable from his flesh. Just as the stories of Pelops and Philomela both feature dismemberment and consumption, so the Ovide moralisé’s treatment of them draws attention to the introduction of a supplementary artefact into a reassembled corpus: the insertion of the ivory prosthesis into Pelops’s resurrected body; the tapestry substituted for Philomela’s lost voice;110 the interpolation of Crestiens’ Philomène into the Ovide moralisé. If Chrétien de Troyes did indeed compose Philomène and Le Mort de l’espaule, then perhaps what attracted him to these tales was not simply their juxtaposition in book 6, but the constellation of ideas about mutilation, incorporation, and substitution they deal with.111 And, to add yet another speculation, perhaps the Ovide moralisé author’s articulation of these stories can be read as responses to their pre-existing adaptations. The moralization of the tale of Pelops highlights the Christian perspective from which Ovid’s text is both dismembered and remembered: Pelops denote abiection De richesce et profession D’umble et de voire povreté, Cil qui voit la muableté Dou monde faulz et decevable Li cui bien sont brief et finable Et plain de vuide vanité. (OM, 6.2117–23) 110 111

See van Vleck, ‘Textiles as Testimony’; Kreuger, ‘Philomène’, p. 99. See Freeman, Poetics, p. 29.

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[Pelops denotes the abjection of riches and the profession of humble, true poverty; he who sees the mutability of the false, deceptive world, whose goods are shortlived and finite, and full of empty vanity.]

In the light of the changeable, brief nature of worldly pleasures, the moralizer advises his readers to seek help and pleasure from God, who will grant eternity to those who show humility. The tale of Pelops’s dismemberment and reassembly is read as the perspective from which the inherent mutability of the human condition can be perceived. From the divine, anamorphic perspective of ‘Cil qui voit la muableté | Dou monde’, it is apparent that the universal fate of humanity—indeed of the ‘Tout’ of creation—is to be remembered as having been dismembered, reworked in fallen, equivocal language. The Ovide moralisé assumes a timeless, changeless perspective in order to read Ovid as remembering Christianity, in the a-chronological logic of divine anamorphosis. As it does so, it incorporates a translation by someone who identified himself as Crestiens—a Christian, if not the Chrétien.

CONCLUSION: HEARING MARSYAS Coming, finally, to the story of Marsyas, the first tale of dismemberment encountered by the reader of book 6 of the Metamorphoses, it is noticeable that this tale is also amplified by the Ovide moralisé author. Just as the story of Pelops’s ivory shoulder is fleetingly referred to in the Metamorphoses, so Marsyas’s flaying is mentioned only in passing by Ovid, in the context of examples of divine vengeance similar to that meted out to Niobe. Latona’s son, Apollo, flayed Marsyas after vanquishing him in a musical competition; Marsyas died horribly, crying ‘quid me mihi detrahis?’ [Why do you tear me from myself?] (M, 6.385).112 The Ovide moralisé fills in the background to this hideous punishment, which, like that of Arachne at the beginning of book 6, followed a competition between a god and a mortal: Marsyas arrogantly claimed that his pipes were superior to Apollo’s harp, and was skinned alive, his blood becoming a river. For Didier Anzieu, part of the interest of the Marsyas myth lies in ‘le passage de l’enveloppe sonore (fournie par la musique) à l’enveloppe tactile (fournie par la peau)’ [the passage from the sonorous envelope (provided

112 On the Marsyas story in the Ovide moralisé as it is transmitted in manuscript Paris, Arsenal 5069, see Kay, ‘Original Skin’, pp. 36–7.

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by music) to the tactile envelope (provided by skin)];113 and Bruce Holsinger points out the way in which the exposed sinews of Marsyas’s flesh are reimagined as the strings of Apollo’s harp.114 Indeed, Holsinger calls the Metamorphoses ‘an intertextual cornucopia of melodious sadism’.115 Marsyas’s fate resonates with that met by Orpheus: at the very beginning of book 11, the poet is torn to pieces by the women he has scorned in favour of his harp. At first, their attack is harmless, since the very darts and stones they throw are so enchanted by the bard’s music that they refuse to hurt him. But the harp’s music is drowned out by other instruments: where Ovid lists these as ‘Berecyntia tibia cornu | tympanaque’ [Berecyntian flutes, drums, and horns] (M, 11.16–17), the Ovide moralisé simply mentions ‘buisines’ [pipes] (OM, 11.55). The poet is bludgeoned to death and torn limb from limb: ‘membra iacent diversa locis’ [members lay in many places] (M, 11.50); ‘En mains leuz, en diverses pars | Gisoient les membres espars’ [In many places, in various parts, the members lay scattered] (OM, 11.135–6). His lyre, still resonating, however, is borne away in the River Hebrus, along with his head, in which the lifeless tongue still sings. In the tales of Marsyas and Orpheus, then, music outlasts life; but while Marsyas dies when the harp triumphs over the pipes, the Ovide moralisé’s Orpheus is killed because the pipes drown out the harp. While Orpheus’s harp provides an opportunity for the Ovide moralisé author to play out a series of variations on ‘corde’, the moralization of the music of Marsyas’s pipes is reinterpreted as just so much hot air: La buisine, a droite sentence, Note vaine gloire et ventence. Cil souffle et corne en la buisine Qui dou sens dont Diex l’enlumine, De qui vient toute sapience, S’enfle, et coule en outrecuidance, Et fet son sens apercevoir Aus gens pour vaine gloire avoir. (OM, 6.1983–90) [The correct meaning of the pipes is that they denote vainglory and boastfulness. He who puffs himself up with the intelligence with which God, the source of all wisdom, illuminates him, blows and puffs on the pipes, and topples over into arrogance. He causes his intelligence to be seen by others as the possession of vainglory.]

113 114 115

Anzieu, Le Moi-peau, pp. 68–9. Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire, pp. 54–5. Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire, p. 53.

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Once more, the Ovide moralisé author interprets a tale as a warning against becoming inflated by pride, the puffing on the pipes echoing the puffedup mare bitten by the flies of pride in the moralization of the tale of Orychoë. This cautionary tale suggests that human artistic endeavour can never equate to divine creation. In a similar vein, an interpolation which features in some manuscripts of the Rose refers to Marsyas as a figure for crude music and (more generally) art, which competes with the refinement of Apollo (and, it is implied, of the Rose itself ).116 And yet the music for which Orpheus and Marsyas both die continues to resonate after their deaths. Marsyas’s dying words are ‘non est [ . . . ] tibia tanti’ [a flute is not worth such price] (M, 6.386), indicating that artistic creation can outlast human life and work. Certainly this is the hope of the Ovide moralisé author as he finishes his oeuvre and adapts Ovid’s epilogue. Where Ovid states that his work cannot be undone by Jupiter’s anger, fire, sword, or time (M, 15.871–2), the translator, despite his appeals in book 1 for later readers to correct him, prays that his book will endure: Et Dieus, par sa sainte merci, Doint tel grace à cest livre ci Que n’i ait riens qui li desplace Ne par droit à reprendre face, Et qu’il ne puisse estre effaciez, Ars ne perdus ne depeciez Par envie ou par enemis, Ne par viellesce en oubli mis, Ains soit publiez et leüz, Par tout le monde amenteüz, Tant com cis siecles durera. (OM, 15.7529–39) [And may God, in His holy mercy, give such grace to this book that there is nothing which displaces it, nor which causes it rightly to be taken back; let it not be effaced, burned, lost, or dismembered out of envy or by enemies; nor let it be forgotten through age, rather, may it be published and read, remembered by all as long as this world shall last.]

Whereas he has dismembered Ovid’s work in order to remember it, the Ovide moralisé author wishes his text to survive intact, and to be commemorated. He also expresses his desire for an afterlife of eternity as an inscription into God’s book, praying, ‘mes noms soit escripts ou Livre | Où Diex fait ses amis escrivre’ [may my name be inscribed in the Book in which God writes his friends] (OM, 15.7547–8). The Ovide moralisé’s 116

See Huot, Romance of the Rose, pp. 134–5.

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approach suggests, then, that artistic creation—Marsyas’s, Orpheus’s, Ovid’s, and his own—is both inferior to the work of the Christian God, yet also an ideal means of beholding it. At the other end of his work, as the translator-moralizer introduces his project, he announces: ce me plaist que je commans Traire de latin en romans Les fables de l’ancien temps (OM, 1.15–17) [it pleases me that I should begin to translate from Latin into French fables from ancient times]

His prefatory remarks to his project echo the account of translation given in the prologue to the lais attributed to Marie de France: Pur ceo començai a penser D’aucune bone estoire faire E de latin en romaunz traire. (Prologue, 28–30) [For this reason I began to think of making some good story, and of translating it from Latin into French.]

Both statements of intent, two centuries apart, use the verb ‘traire’ (literally translated as ‘to pull’ or ‘to draw out’), to express the way in which their authors will extract ‘romans’ from Latin in their translations. The Ovide moralisé author also uses this verb when referring to his practice of moralizing: as we have seen, when introducing Crestiens’ translation of the Philomela story, he states, ‘l’alegorie en trairai’ [I will draw out the allegory from it] (OM, 6.2216). Ovid’s text, then, is pulled from one language to another and the moralization is pulled out (as the integument is pulled away) in order to create a new work. This process of pulling one text from another resonates with Marsyas’s words, ‘quid me mihi detrahis?’ As Ovid’s text is drawn from itself by its fourteenth-century Christian translator, it is dismembered so that it can be remembered in a new articulation. As I have argued in this chapter, this new articulation stages a gaze on to Ovid’s pagan text from a timeless perspective which enables its readers to contemplate the mysteries of divine embodiment within the mutating bodies of the Metamorphoses. While Ovid claims his work as a ‘perpetuum carmen’ [perpetual song], the synchronic sweep of his appeal to the gods as he opens the Metamorphoses is folded into the divine perspective of Christian knowledge and virtue which the Ovide moralisé claims for itself. Humanity is necessarily an embodied state, which involves mortality, living through time. The Ovide moralisé’s readings of Ovidian ‘fables’, however, allow a glimpse of a divine conception of time which is not

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anchored in history, not anchored in a fallible body. And yet in order to articulate that reading, tales of transformation are transformed into icons of divine timelessness, bodies which precisely defy time and are ‘contre nature’. The Ovide moralisé insists on the bodily reality of humanity by envisaging, on the one hand, the shocking mutations of Ovid’s characters, and, on the other, the terrible beauty of God made flesh. In Chapter 2, I shall shift perspective from bodies which change shape or are revealed by the veil of meaning, to the role of sound, resonance, and voice in tales of transformation. Remaining in Ovidian territory, I shall explore the fate of Echo, the nymph in the Metamorphoses who loses her body to become language.

2 Reflecting on Echo In the first inserted ballade of his 1461 poem, Le Testament, François Villon muses on the fates of a number of women whose names have classical resonances: Dictes moy ou, n’en quel pays, Est Flora la belle Rommaine, Archipiades ne Thaïs, Qui fut sa cousine germaine, Echo parlant quant bruyt on maine Dessus riviere ou sus estan, Qui beaulté ot trop plus qu’humaine. Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?1 [Tell me where, or in which country, is Flora, the fair Roman; Archipiades or Thaïs, who was her close cousin; Echo, speaking whenever sound is made over river or lake, and whose beauty was more than human. But where are the snows of long ago?]

Villon’s ballade is based on the model of the Ubi sunt? genre, a poetic mode which depicts and laments the passing of time and human mortality. However, as Jane Taylor’s incisive reading of this poem remarks, the names of the lost, lamented ladies in this poem are chosen less for the associations they evoke, than for their euphony.2 It is fitting, then, that the last name is Echo, the nymph who mutated in Ovid’s Metamorphoses into repeating voice. In this chapter I shall explore a series of approaches to Villon’s question, asking where Echo is in the rewriting of the tale of Narcissus and Echo in medieval French literature. As Narcissan and narcissistic narratives are rewritten and transformed, I shall argue, it is Echo who can be seen as a figure for various manifestations of this rewriting and repetition. Whereas I focused in the previous chapter on the ambiguous sound of language as a means of exploring strange bodily

1

Villon, Testament, 329–36. Taylor, The Poetry of François Villon, pp. 58–85. See also Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Écho et Sibylle’, p. 88. 2

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transformations, in this chapter I want to investigate what happens to a character who loses her body altogether, and becomes nothing but voice, repetition, and rhyme. Ovid relates, in book 3 of the Metamorphoses, that Echo is originally a very talkative nymph, who keeps Juno talking while Jupiter is canoodling with other nymphs. When Hera realizes that she has been duped in this way, she curses Echo, making her able only to repeat the last syllables of others’ speech. Meanwhile, Liriope, the mother of a lovely young man called Narcissus, is told by the blind seer Tiresias that Narcissus will have a long life as long as he does not know himself. Narcissus is loved and wooed by many male and female admirers, but proudly rebuffs them all, preferring to go hunting. Like so many others, Echo falls in love with Narcissus and follows him through the woods, unable to declare her love in words other than those pronounced by Narcissus. Ovid’s poetry highlights the way in which Echo’s words repeat yet invert the meaning of Narcissus’s rejection: ille fugit fugiensque ‘manus conplexibus aufer! ante’ ait ‘emoriar, quam sit tibi copia nostri’ rettulit illa nihil nisi ‘sit tibi copia nostri!’ (M, 3.390–2) [He flees at her approach and, fleeing, says: ‘Hands off! Embrace me not! May I die before I give you power o’er me!’ ‘I give you power o’er me!’ she says, and nothing more.]

Spurned, Echo goes off into the woods and lives in lonely caves. She wastes away, at first bones and voice, and then, as her bones turn to stone, she lives on only in voice. Meanwhile, Narcissus bends to drink at a smooth pool and falls in love with the reflection in the water. He realizes too late that this is his reflection, lamenting, ‘iste ego sum’ (I am he) (M, 3.463), and Tiresias’s prediction is fulfilled. Rejecting the aural repetition he receives from Echo, Narcissus falls for another kind of repetition in his own reflection. Narcissus wastes away; naiads and dryads lament, and Echo echoes them. But when they look for his body, having prepared the funeral pyre, all they can find is a flower with a yellow centre and white petals. Both protagonists in this tale of misdirected desire, then, give their names to the object or phenomenon which they become. In this chapter, however, I focus less on Narcissus’s metamorphosis—if metamorphosis, rather than substitution,3 it is—than in the transformation wrought upon 3 ‘Nature a-t-elle créé la fleur, ou a-t-elle transformé Narcisse?’ [Did Nature create the flower, or did she transform Narcissus?] Possamaï-Pérez, L’Ovide moralisé, p. 40; see also Pairet, ‘Les Formes’, pp. 26–7.

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Echo. Narcissus is rarely represented at any length as a flower in medieval literature: he is primarily and ubiquitously used as a figure for unrequited love.4 Echo, on the other hand, is portrayed by Ovid as undergoing a slow transformative process from nymph to voice; and this process is particularly germane to the concerns of this book. Becoming a voice which repeats and recasts, Echo is a fitting and fruitful figure for the medieval practices of quotation, citation, and rewriting. Nevertheless, I shall start by focusing on Narcissus, and the profound and widespread effects his tale has not just on literary depictions of impossible love, but also on psychoanalytic understanding of love itself as fundamentally impossible. In concentrating on the impossible object of desire framed in the use of Narcissus by modern theory, I hope to shed light on Echo’s voice as a figure for this impossibility. In twentiethcentury psychoanalysis, both Freud and Lacan call on the image of the desiring subject captivated and condemned by that which the subject perceives as an image of himself as an other. Just as Narcissus is a central, crucial figure to many medieval formulations of love and desire, narcissism is a foundational theory for much psychoanalytic scrutiny of desire and the relationship between the subject and the object, between self and other. Of course, it is important to remember that the Narcissus of medieval literature and the narcissism of psychoanalysis address different concerns and different figures—indeed, this is impossible to forget, since it is a refrain of scholarship on the medieval Narcissus.5 The popular version of psychoanalytic narcissism is self-love; whereas Narcissus in the Middle Ages becomes a figure for unrequited, and therefore fatal, love. In neither the psychoanalytic nor the medieval context, however, is there a clear distinction between, on the one hand, reading Narcissus as a character who loves himself or, on the other, reading him as a character who does not realize that the other that he loves is himself and therefore unattainable. Agamben forges a link between medieval and modern uses of Narcissus, commenting that ‘The Freudian idea of the libido [ . . . ] appears in this perspective as a late but legitimate descendant of the medieval idea of love.’6 What both treatments of Narcissus reveal Vinge, Narcissus; Gilbert, ‘ “I am not he” ’; Frappier, ‘Variations’. Huot also reminds us that ‘for a medieval reader, Narcissus is a parodic inversion of the moral trope of selfknowledge as salvific’ (Dreams, p. 35). 5 Hult reminds us, ‘The fascination with Narcissus has continued unceasingly since classical times and [ . . . ] it is itself an example of modern cultural narcissism to think that only the twentieth century has adequately uncovered the import of the myth’ (Hult, SelfFulfilling Prophecies, p. 263). 6 Agamben, Stanzas, p. 116. 4

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is that, when it comes to love, the positions of self and other are interdependent and overlapping.7 I therefore want to realign the focus of readings of the Narcissus story precisely to account for the way in which Echo is proposed and rejected as a desiring subject and an object of desire. The argument of this chapter scrutinizes first the use of Narcissus in modern theory, and then moves on to answer Villon’s question, tracing the way in which medieval French literature anticipates it. The Ovide moralisé finds Echo in the voice of poetry, but also more fundamentally as language which connects and separates us. In the Lai de Narcisus et Dané, which Emmanuèle Baumgartner called ‘la plus ancienne version version française du récit d’Ovide et la plus infidèle’ [the oldest and the least faithful version of Ovid’s tale in French],8 Echo is absent; she does, however, find avatars in other female characters who are caught up in narratives of desire—and is also, I shall argue, to be found in the patterns of repetition, imitation, and quotation which characterize the use of the story of Narcissus and Echo in twelfth- and thirteenth-century courtly romance. I shall next turn to the Roman de la Rose, whose Narcissus is certainly the most glossed of his manifestations in medieval French literature. I trace the figure of Echo through her mention by Guillaume de Lorris’s Lover at the fountain, to her semi-successful appropriation by the allegorical personification of Raison [Reason]. Invoking the rhetoric of exemplarity, Raison proposes herself as an Echo who should be heard. This risky strategy does not pay off for Raison, but is more successful, as I shall show in the conclusion, for Christine de Pizan in her Epistre Othéa, a text which Rosalind Brown-Grant has called an ‘anti-Rose’.9 Villon concludes his ‘Ballade des dames du temps jadis’ with an envoi entreating his ‘Prince’ not to ask where all the ladies of long ago have gone, ‘Qu’a ce reffraing ne vous remaine: | Mais où sont les neiges d’anten?’ [Lest I bring this refrain back to you: but where are the snows of long ago?].10 All that remains of Echo is the sound of her voice, and all that remains of Villon’s poetry is his refrain: the snows of yesteryear have melted into the ‘riviere’ [river] and ‘estan’ [pool] over which Echo’s voice—and Villon’s— resonate. The ‘dames des temps jadis’ may be untraceable, and yet their traces can be heard in the rhyme and refrain of Villon’s verse, exemplified by Echo. 7 As Simon Gaunt observes, ‘the distinction between medieval and modern thinking on Narcissus is less stark than most commentators suggest’ (Love and Death, p. 172). 8 Baumgartner, ‘Narcisse à la fontaine’. 9 Brown-Grant, Christine de Pizan, p. 88. 10 Villon, Testament, 355–6.

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Freud’s 1914 article ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ initially addresses the idea of narcissism as an auto-erotic perversion, but soon moves on to theorize narcissism as a ground for normal psychic development, suggesting connections between narcissism, sublimation, idealization, and melancholy.11 For Freud, narcissism is a means of loving the self insofar as the ideal ego is detected in the other, in the beloved. This idea is developed and inverted by Lacan, whose thesis is that the ego is produced as a result of identification with others beyond the self; in other words, Lacan proposes that neither the ideal ego nor the ego can properly be thought to exist prior to the encounter with others, to whom the individual relates, and who reflect and thereby shape the individual.12 Lacan’s response to Freudian narcissism is his famous ‘mirror stage’.13 A baby sees her reflection as herself, joyfully misrecognizing this apparently united and complete image as her ego. Lacan universalizes this stage in personal development to encompass all intersubjective relations, just as Freud makes narcissism a vital stage for the achievement of ‘normal’ sexuality. Subjectivity is constantly conditioned by this ‘captation’—captivation and capture—of the subject in its imaginary other:14 because of the tension between the completeness proposed by the image and our own sense of lack, deathly, aggressive instincts can also be harboured towards the specular other. We find in other people—parents, lovers, others—our specular image, our imaginary identity, which reflects back to us the wholeness and perfection we fantasize, desire, and fear. This terrifying and longed-for completion is marked, in Lacanian theory, by the strange objet petit a. The ‘petit a’ stands for ‘autre’, the ‘little other’ as opposed to the capitalized Autre, known in Anglophone psychoanalytic theory as the ‘big Other’. Whereas the Other embodies the symbolic systems of meaning which condition our existence as communicating subjects, the other is a figure for the individual object of our desire. One of the most central, yet most tricky, concepts of Lacan’s psychoanalysis, the objet a is a means of expressing the object which is desired by the subject, and created by the subject’s desire. It is something 11

GW, 10, 137–70. ‘Lacan’s reading reverses Freud’s theory of narcissism by attributing the formation of the ego as a narcissistic structure to the process of identification with others outside the self ’ (Ragland-Sullivan, ‘Narcissism’, p. 273). 13 Lacan, ‘Le stade du miroir’, pp. 93–100. 14 Lacan, ‘Le stade du miroir’, p. 96. 12

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we fantasize as belonging to the object of our desire, but which has been imputed to our object of desire precisely by our desire. It is nothing made into something by the contours of desire, an empty space which nevertheless means the world.15 The paradox of the objet a is summed up in a pronouncement Lacan makes in Les Quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse: ‘Je t’aime, mais, parce qu’inexplicablement j’aime en toi quelque chose plus que toi—l’objet petit a, je te mutile’ [I love you, but because, inexplicably, I love in you something more than you—the objet a, I mutilate you].16 By imposing this impossible object on the object of our desire, the subject both exalts and mortifies his or her chosen other. As Mladen Dolar makes clear, the objet a, then, is not a physical object as such: [The] objet petit a [ . . . ] does not coincide with any existing thing, although it is always evoked only by bits of materiality, attached to them as an invisible, inaudible appendage, yet not amalgamated with them: it is both evoked and covered, enveloped by them, for ‘in itself ’ it is just a void.17

The voice and the gaze can both be understood as this immaterial connection with the material body: they mark a site outside of the subject where the encounter with the other takes place. However, that site is neither part of the other nor of the subject: it is a space in which the other sees, encounters, or addresses the subject, and which the subject can never apprehend or incorporate. As the editors of The Gaze and Voice As Love Objects put it, ‘the gaze and voice are love objects par excellence—not in the sense that we fall in love with a voice or gaze, but rather in the sense that they are a medium, a catalyst, that sets off love’.18 Ovid’s story of Echo and Narcissus is, then, precisely about the gaze and voice as love objects: objets a, which mortify and mutilate lover and beloved, which cause and manifest love, yet mark the impossibility of the sexual relation. In the Metamorphoses, Narcissus’s gaze crystallizes the objet a, as it forms an almost-tangible connection between himself and his reflection, which his gaze apprehends as the object of his desire, yet which is impossible to possess. Just as the gaze, according to Dolar, has eclipsed the voice in psychoanalytic enquiries into desire and subjectivity,19 Narcissus has eclipsed the importance of Echo in readings of the Metamorphoses from the Middle Ages to Freud. Dolar only gives a brief mention to the

15

See Evans, Introductory Dictionary, pp. 124–6. Lacan, Séminaire XI, p. 241. 17 18 Dolar, A Voice, p. 74. Salecl and Žižek, ‘Introduction’, p. 3. 19 Dolar, A Voice, p. 127. But see Lagaay, ‘Between Sound and Silence’, for a clear account of the voice in psychoanalysis. 16

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Metamorphoses,20 but I would argue that Ovid’s mythical explanation of the aural phenomenon of the echo encapsulates the voice as the objet a. As Dolar makes clear, voice as the objet a should be conceived of as distinct from language, meaning, and sense: it is ‘a non-signifying remainder resistant to the signifying operations’;21 it is the wordless, senseless, bodily aspect of speech (or silence) which marks what Lacan calls ‘l’altérité de ce qui se dit’ [the alterity of that which is said].22 There is something fitting about hearing Echo in the breath of a vowel used as an abbreviation: the syllable ‘a’ is even more pertinent since it is also a prefix used to denote negativity. The play between presence and absence can be heard in Lacan’s coinage, lalangue, the language of the unconscious, which ‘sert à toutes autres choses qu’à la communication’ [is used for things quite apart from communication]:23 language which is not language. In the same seminar, Lacan makes the infamous declaration that ‘il n’y a pas La femme’ [there is not The woman],24 playing once again on the homophone of the definite article and the negative prefix: these seminars were all delivered as an oral performance before they were transcribed and published, and Lacan’s audience would have heard both ‘l’afemme’ and ‘la femme’. Just as Echo can make Narcissus’s rejection sound like entreaty, so the syllable ‘a’ flits between affirmation and negation in Lacan’s discourse. Indeed, Echo might be seen as the woman whom Lacan infamously declared not to exist: the result of the metamorphosis described by Ovid is that she is characterized by her physical absence, lingering in language where her body has been abolished.25 A number of critics and theorists have echoed Villon in addressing the question of Echo’s whereabouts: Juliet Mitchell, Anne-Emmanuelle Berger, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak all interrogate from a feminist standpoint the psychoanalytic formulations of narcissism which write Echo out of the story.26 Spivak reads Echo as an indication that a woman’s voice can only echo the words of the patriarchal voice; according to Spivak’s article, the female voice is always an assumption of a voice which is always-already imposed because it is all that is available: Echo, unable to speak in the first person of her desire, is a

20

21 Dolar, A Voice, p. 40. Dolar, A Voice, p. 36. Lacan, Séminaire X, p. 318. 23 Lacan, Séminaire XX, p. 126. On lalangue, see Dolar, A Voice, pp. 143–9. 24 Lacan, Séminaire XX, p. 68. 25 Gély-Ghedira calls the tales of Echo in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Longus’s Daphnis et Chloe ‘Deux fables pour abolir un corps de femme’ [Two fables to abolish a woman’s body] (La nostalgie du moi, p. 30). 26 Mitchell, ‘Narcissism’; Berger, ‘Dernières nouvelles’; Spivak, ‘Echo’. 22

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convincing figure for this idea, and one to which I shall return later in this chapter. Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet explains the relative dearth of representations of Echo in medieval French literature by the supremacy accorded in the Middle Ages to sight over hearing.27 In literary criticism which sets out to find Echo, Echo’s voice is heard as the voice of poetic language itself, and especially rhyme. Thus, for Véronique Gély-Ghedira, ‘ce à quoi Junon condamne Écho n’est autre qu’une définition de la poésie’ [the fate to which Juno condemns Echo is none other but a definition of poetry];28 for Cerquiglini-Toulet herself, ‘la voix d’Echo n’est-elle pas la voix de la poésie même?’ [isn’t Echo’s voice the voice of poetry itself?];29 and for Christopher Lucken, ‘En effet, la rime n’est elle pas un des moyens privilégiés par lequel la langue, au moment même où elle se répète, se renouvelle [ . . . ]?’ [Indeed, is not rhyme one of the privileged ways in which language, at the very moment at which it repeats itself, also renews itself?].30 Rhyme sets up echoing patterns of anticipation and fulfilment from one line of poetry to another, and also functions as a reminder of the pre-existing linguistic and metrical constraints within which poetry is written. The Ovide moralisé certainly exploits the echoic quality of rhyme to its full potential in its portrayal of the confrontation between Echo and Narcissus.31 As I showed in Chapter 1, this work revels in the equivocation of poetic language, and, in the translation and moralization of the story of Echo and Narcissus, equivocal rhyme is repeatedly deployed in order to render the repetition of Ovid’s poetry. In this way, voce, ‘veni!’ magna clamat: vocat illa vocantem. (M, 3.382) [he shouts in a loud voice ‘Come!’ She calls as he calls.]

becomes: Et dist a haute vois, ‘Ça vien’. Echo respondi li a, ‘Vien’ (OM, 3.1413–14) [And he said in a loud voice, ‘Come’. Echo answered, ‘Come’]

Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Écho et Sibylle’, p. 85. Gély-Ghedira, La nostalgie du moi, pp. 33–4. Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Écho et Sibylle’, p. 87. 30 Lucken, ‘L’Écho du poème’, p. 49. 31 On the influence of the Roman de la Rose on the composition of this part of the Ovide moralisé, see Possamaï-Pérez, L’Ovide moralisé, p. 189; Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Reading Myth, p. 125; and Pairet, ‘Recasting the Metamorphoses’, p. 98. 27 28 29

Transforming Tales

76 And, in another example,

‘quid,’ inquit ‘me fugis?’ et totidem, quot dixit, verba recepit,’ (M, 3.382–3) [‘Why do you run from me?’ he says, and receives the same words as he speaks]

is translated as: Il crie et dist, ‘Pourquoi me fuis?’ Echo respont, ‘Pourquoi me fuis?’ (OM, 3.1419–20). [He shouts and says, ‘Why are you fleeing from me?’ Echo replies, ‘Why are you fleeing from me?’]

The very repetitious nature of the rimes équivoques in this section of the Ovide moralisé draws attention to the way in which an echo is a vocal performance that both repeats and alters. The fact that the context and connotations of the rhyme words in these rhymes are identical yet different triggers a series of reflections, comparisons, and distinctions, all of which add resonances to the rhyme: as Debra Fried points out, ‘Rhyme and pun are twins’.32 The poet uses rime équivoque to introduce echoes where none are found in the Latin, depicting (unlike Ovid) Narcissus as eager to see the owner of the voice: Si a grand faim de veoir cele Qui si li respont et se cele (OM, 3.1423–4) [He has a great hunger to see the woman who answers him and hides herself away]

That which Narcissus wishes to see (‘cele’) is precisely that which is hidden (‘se cele’); so much so that both words look and sound alike, creating an aural echo and a visual reflection. The feminine pronoun, ‘cele’ triggers desire, and yet it is doubled by the impossibility of properly encountering the woman for whom the pronoun stands, encapsulating the impossibility of reciprocity or fulfilment. Along the same lines, the couplet which immediately precedes this one perfectly sums up the dilemma and the tragedy of Echo: Cil oit la vois, qui li respont, D’Echo, qui el bois se respont, (OM, 3.1421–2) [He hears the voice, which answers him, of Echo, who replies to herself in the woods]

32

Fried, ‘Rhyme Puns’, p. 83.

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Although Narcissus believes he can hear Echo ‘qui li respont’, her answers are not in fact responses in the proper sense, since her voice, in its mindless repetition of the words of others, becomes self-referential (‘se respont’), closing off any dialogue with the paradoxical full stop of reiteration. Her speech points out the multiple meanings always lurking within language, as Claire Nouvet remarks: As soon as it appears, language ‘echoes’, that is, diffracts into a potentiality of alternative meanings without providing us with the means to decide on any true, proper meaning. Although presented as the ‘other side’ of a dialogue, Echo remarks in fact the original lateral sliding of language into contingent meanings.33

This is Narcissus’s problem in understanding Echo: he misunderstands her words as marking a separate sense from his own, not realizing that Echo epitomizes Lacan’s remark on the voice, ‘La voix répond à ce qui se dit, mais elle ne peut pas en répondre’ [The voice answers to what is said, but it cannot answer for it].34 Echo, in other words, answers Narcissus but cannot answer for what she says, since she is not speaking her own words.35 Echo does speak of her own desire, but in terms and with a voice which render that desire impossible.36 The exception in this passage to the use of rhyme words within the same couplet giving Narcissus’s speech and Echo’s response comes in the final and most devastating exchange: Et dist, ‘Je ne suis encore pas si vis Ne si abandonez encors, Ains perdrai la vie dou cors Que tu aies de moi copie.’ Quant cele a la raison oïe, Tant fu honteuse et plaine d’ire, Qu’el ne li pot onque mot dire Fors ‘Tu aies de moi copie.’ (OM, 3.1434–41) [And says, ‘I am not yet so vile nor yet so abandoned. I will lose the life from my body before you should be fully mine.’ When she had heard his words, she was so ashamed and filled with anger, that she could say no other word to him than ‘You should be fully mine.’]

34 Nouvet, ‘An Impossible Response’, p. 107. Lacan, Séminaire X, p. 318. For an analysis of the transformation of body into voice or air in the Ovide moralisé, see Possamaï-Pérez, L’Ovide moralisé, pp. 105–6. 36 ‘Un langage grammaticalement structuré devient un murmure, un soupir’ [A grammatically structured language becomes a murmur, a sigh] (Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Écho et Sibylle’, p. 87). 33 35

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Here ‘copie’ first rhymes, appropriately enough, with ‘oïe’ [heard] (3.1437–8), and, two couplets later, the rhyme in ‘ie’ is revived to articulate Echo’s despair. This reiterated use of ‘copie’ reworks the Latin original, in which Narcissus’s rebuff, ‘ante [ . . . ] emoriar, quam sit tibi copia nostri’ becomes in Echo’s words ‘sit tibi copia nostri!’ (M, 3.379–92). In the Loeb edition Frank Justus Miller translates this exchange as, ‘may I die before I give you power o’er me!’ and ‘I give you power o’er me!’, but a more literal translation would give, ‘may I die before our abundance should be yours’, and ‘our abundance should be yours’.37 The Old French ‘copie’ derives from the Latin ‘copia’ (abundance, plenty) and the meanings of this word include this sense, as well as that of reproduction or repetition.38 In the Ovide moralisé, Narcissus’s rejection is articulated as ‘Ains perdrai la vie dou cors | Que tu aies de moi copie’. Like his Latin model, Narcissus uses the subjunctive in the locution ‘ains . . . que’, meaning ‘before’, or ‘rather’. His snub can thus be translated as, ‘I will lose the life from my body before [i.e. I would rather die than] you have my abundance’, or ‘before you have repetition of me’. In other words, Narcissus’s refusal appears to seek both to forbid Echo from having full, complete union with him, and from repeating him. I have tried to render this in my translation of the quotation above. Of course, Echo’s response, two couplets later, does enable her to obtain ‘copie’ in that she repeats his words, but this very act of repetition signals her inability to achieve the abundance or plenitude of jouissance with Narcissus; her words, ‘Tu aies de moi copie’, recast his use of the subjunctive as a jussive, imploring and conjuring him to attain plenitude and union with her. Her pleading repetition of his words, then, signals precisely that she is unable to attain fully the object of her desire: what marks the discrepancy between ‘copie’ as joyful abundance (Ovid’s ‘copia’) and ‘copie’ as imitation is the impossibility of desire, and that impossibility is embodied by the objet a.39 As Spivak puts it (writing on the Metamorphoses rather than the Ovide moralisé):

On this translation, see Fischman, ‘Even As We Speak’. Tobler-Lommatzsch gives the meanings ‘Fülle’ [abundance], ‘Menge’ [quantity], and ‘Abschrift’ [copy]. 39 Ted Hughes’s version of this exchange also highlights this discrepancy. ‘No,’ he cried, ‘no, I would sooner be dead Than let you touch me.’ Echo collapsed in sobs, As her voice lurched among the mountains: ‘Touch me, touch me, touch me, touch me’. (Tales from Ovid, p. 77). Echo’s desperate repetitions show that copying Narcissus’s words, even in excess, only serves to deepen and emphasize the unattainability of union with the object of her love. 37 38

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[Echo’s response] has no identity proper to itself. It is obliged to be imperfectly and interceptively responsive to another’s desire, if only for the self-separation of speech. It is the catachresis of response as such.40

Echo’s words show that there can never be plenitude of meaning, only jarring, inadequate imitation, and Echo’s identity comes into focus in the gaps between the repeated words, standing for ‘l’altérité de ce qui se dit’. While Narcissus, according to the moralizing of the Ovide moralisé, stands for fools, ‘Qui se mirent et qui s’amusent | Aus faulz mireoirs de cest monde’ [who look at themselves and amuse themselves in the false mirrors of this world] (OM, 3.1908–9),41 Echo ‘Denote bone renomee’ [denotes good reputation] (OM, 3.1465): Echo fu en pur son muee, Quar son sans cors est renomee Nulz ne puet veoir bon renon, Quar ce n’est se parole non, Qui par la gent est puepliee. (OM, 3.1515–19)42 [Echo was transformed into pure sound, for sound without body is reputation. Nobody can see good reputation, for it is nothing but speech, embodied by the people.]

Echo mutates into voice without body, which is, according to the Ovide moralisé author, the definition of Renommee—which can be understood as reputation or rumour.43 In other words, what one person means to another person, for another person. Renommee is nothing but ‘parole’; it cannot be seen because it only exists within and between people. Echo, then, is interpreted as that which constitutes intersubjectivity, the network of hearsay and signification which makes up the Lacanian symbolic. Echo, in her state which is without body but not without physicality, is the perfect figure for connections within this network. As Lacan puts it: Si la voix au sens où nous l’entendons a une importance, ce n’est pas de résonner dans aucun vide spatial. La plus simple immixion de la voix dans ce qu’on appelle linguistiquement sa fonction phatique—que l’on croit être du 41 Spivak, ‘Echo’, p. 27. See Noacco, ‘L’Orgueil’, p. 108. Vinge (Narcissus, p. 97) points out that this interpretation of Echo as reputation modelled on the Latin glosses by Arnulphe of Orléans and John of Garland, but that the Ovide moralisé ’s version of this trope is more nuanced. 43 See Gauvard, ‘La Fama’. Renommee herself is revisited elsewhere in the Ovide moralisé: in book 9 she brings news of Hercules’s affair with Iole to his wife, Deianira, in terms which once more associate rumour with repetition: ‘Renommee, qui double et monte | Des nouveles ce qu’ele ot dire’ (OM, 9.600–1). And in book 12, Renommee is the translation of Fama in the description of Rumour’s house (M, 7.39–63; OM, 12.1583–1656). 40 42

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niveau de la simple prise en contact, alors qu’il s’agit de bien autre chose— résonne dans un vide qui est le vide de l’Autre comme tel.44 [If the voice in the sense in which we hear it has any importance, it is not in resonating in any spatial void. The simplest intermingling of the voice in what is called in Linguistics its phatic function—which is thought to be at the level of simply making contact, although it involves something quite different—resonates in a void which is the void of the Other as such.]

The resonances of the voice take place within and constitute the Other, the network of signification by which we understand one another. In the Ovide moralisé, then, Echo’s voice is presented as a ‘little other’ in the translation of her story, and as the ‘big Other’ in its moralization. Her story marks the difference between these two Lacanian concepts of otherness. As the story of Echo has shown in the Ovide moralisé, the ‘parole’ [speech] which passes between ‘la gent’ [the people] is dependent on voice, which can never convey any kind of complete meaning. The voice as objet a means that there is always something which escapes meaning, but which creates more meaning, more response, more poetry. Language is a network which holds individuals together and keeps them apart: as a voice and nothing more, Echo simultaneously represents that which connects individuals and cuts them off from one another, forcing them merely to copy one another when they desire to be fully united. Mutating into nothing but voice does not cause Echo to cease existing: far from it. As a disembodied voice, she is able to infiltrate and speak through everyone’s bodies, linking them together via speech, hearsay, and the ever-thwarted attempt to reach full interpretation of language and complete union with their beloved. ECHO AND QUOTATION IN THE TWELFTH AND THIRTEENTH CENTURIES While Echo is represented as the speech which runs through all of us in the fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé, the character is conspicuous by her absence from a number of twelfth- and thirteenth-century romances. These texts transpose Ovid’s narrative from the classical setting of woodlands haunted by nymphs to a medieval courtly setting.45 In this section, I shall focus on the twelfth-century lai which various editions entitle either 44

Lacan, Séminaire X, p. 318. ‘Rares sont les auteurs au Moyen Âge qui ont gardé les deux aspects de la légende, rares sont ceux, en fait, qui se sont intéressés à Écho pour elle-même’ [the authors who 45

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Narcisus or Narcisus et Dané;46 and two thirteenth-century romances: Robert de Blois’s Floris et Lyriopé; and the anonymous Cristal et Clarie. Whereas Echo is transformed into speech, rhyme, and phonic reiteration in the Ovide moralisé, in these earlier texts her name is absent, but her presence is felt in the way in which these romances deploy patterns of repetition and resemblance. If the fourteenth-century text shows an investment in the sounds of poetry, the aesthetic of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century romance is much more concerned with the adaptation and reconfiguration of pre-existing literary tropes and figures. I argue here that this adaptation and reconfiguration are themselves depicted in the echoes and reflections of the Narcissus story proposed by these romances. In Narcisus, the motifs of repetition garnered from the Ovidian tale are transposed into a rhetoric of courtly love which relies on resemblance; in Floris et Lyriopé, that resemblance is reinforced by playing on the device of twinship in a love relationship between two apparently identically beautiful women; in Cristal et Clarie, the repetition inherent in the figure of Echo is detected in the romance’s repeated quotation of previous romances. Villon’s question about Echo’s whereabouts might well be asked of Narcisus, where the echoing nymph, the woman who falls so fatally for Narcissus, is not Echo, but (as one of the lai’s given titles suggests) a very talkative princess named Dané.47 Dané declares her love to Narcissus, but is rejected just as Echo was. Narcissus goes on to fall in love with his own reflection, too late notices Dané, and they die in one another’s arms. In the Metamorphoses, Echo ends up in the paradoxical situation of having her voice taken from her, yet surviving only as voice. Echo cannot, as I argued earlier, properly be a subject in her speech; but in the French lai, Dané’s speech occupies more than one subject position. She is a very verbose character,48 to the extent that her love for Narcissus is expressed in a number of lengthy monologues. In fact, these monologues are more properly internal dialogues, since Dané becomes her own interlocutor, arguing with herself, reprimanding herself, and interrogating her feelings and desires. Whereas Echo needs another person to be able to speak at all, Dané asks and answers her own questions. She questions the source of her retained both aspects of the legend are rare; in fact, those who are interested in Echo on her own terms are rare] (Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Écho et Sibylle’, p. 84). 46 The two most recent editions are Narcisse in Pyrame et Thisbé, Narcisse, Philomena, ed. and trans. Baumgartner; and Narcisus et Dané, ed. and trans. Eley. Line reference are, unless stated otherwise, taken from the Eley edition. 47 Thiry-Stassin, in ‘Une autre source ovidienne’, posits Ovid’s Daphne as a source for this new character. See also Ferlampin-Acher, ‘Les métamorphoses en plantes’, p. 136. 48 See Jappé, ‘Adaptation et création’, pp. 155–67.

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speech (‘Dont te vient or ceste parole?’ [From where does this speech come to you?] (261)), and later asks herself, ‘Qu’es ce, Dané, que tu redis?’ [What is this, Dané, that you are repeating?] (375). Dané takes issue with herself, and with her own use of language, suggesting that, for all her loquacity, she is not dissimilar to Echo, in that she is not in control of the words she utters. Her speech, it is implied, has a source beyond her. Although Dané is not condemned to repeat whatever Narcissus says, she still seems to be compelled to speak words which are not her own.49 When she has been rejected by Narcissus, instead of wasting away to nothing but voice, Dané’s voices split to a sanity-threatening extent: Ne sai que faç, ne sai u sui. Qui sui je donc? Qui est mes pere? Li rois est ore. Et qui ma mere? Donc ne ses tu qui? La roïne. Mençongne est, ains sui orfeline: Je n’ai ami, je n’ai parent, Je n’ai conseil de boine gent. Par Diu, si as: tu es Dané! Ai je donques le sen dervé? Ja soloie je estre plus sage. Sui je devenue sauvage? (Narcisus, 594–604) [I don’t know what to do, not do I know where I am. Who am I then? Who is my Father? He is the King now. And who is my Mother? The Queen. That’s a lie: rather, I’m an orphan. I have no beloved, I have no family, I have no good people to advise me. By God, yes, you do: you are Dané! Have I lost my senses, then? I used to be wiser. Have I gone wild?]

She questions her identity, parentage, motivation, and soundness of mind, wondering whether the entity that has led her to this state is love or madness. Dané may have replaced Echo, but she also takes part in the deadly desire for reflection and reciprocation which is both triggered and thwarted by the gaze and the voice as love objects. Dané’s lovesickness is manifested in a loss of self, and the illusion that Narcissus can restore her to completeness. In other words, Dané is the first character in this lai to exhibit signs of narcissistic desire, both in the medieval sense of hopeless love, and in the modern sense of a desire for a reflection of the fantasized

Once more invoking the negating prefix, ‘a’, Spivak sees Echo as a founding figure of a-phonie, an assumed, parodic re-enactment of the patriarchal voice, which reveals that this is an assumption of a voice which is always-already imposed because it is all that is available. (‘Echo’, p. 28) 49

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perfect self.50 Stricken with passion for Narcissus, whom she has spotted from her tower, Dané muses that they are similar enough to be lovers, but not too similar for their relationship to be endogamous. She discusses their differences in rank in terms which suppress those differences: Assés somes d’une maniere, D’une biauté et d’un eage; Se nous ne soumes d’un parage, Il est assés de haute gent, Si ne soumes mie parent. (Narcisus, 342–6) [We are quite alike in manner, beauty, and age, and we are of the same social standing. He is of quite high parentage, but we are not related.]

When she meets and propositions Narcissus in the forest, Dané uses similar rhetoric to attempt to convince him of their compatibility: Car assés somes d’un aé D’une maniere de biauté.’ (Narcisus, 481–2) [For we are around the same age, and have the same manner and beauty.]

Narcissus is unconvinced by this argument, refusing to see himself in the image Dané offers him, just as the Narcissus of the Metamorphoses rejected the repetition proffered by Echo. Although he does not initially recognize his reflection as such when he looks into the ‘fontaine’ [fountain], Narcissus nevertheless echoes Dané’s rhetoric by pointing out that he and his reflection are similarly beautiful: ‘Ne sui gaires mains biaus de toi’ [I am hardly less beautiful than you] (Narcisus, 687). Just as Echo in the Metamorphoses tries to enforce resemblance and union by reiterating her beloved’s words, in the Narcisus, both Narcissus and Dané attempt to persuade the object of their affections that they are alike, and that likeness is an irrefutable basis for successful requited love. Echoes of Echo can also be heard in Narcissus’s misrecognition of his reflection. As he addresses his image in the water, he wonders whether what he can see is a nymph, fairy, or goddess: ‘Cose’, fait il, ‘que laiens voi, Ne sai coument nomer te doi,

50 ‘When we fall in love, we position the person who is the object of our love in the place of the ideal ego. We love this object because of the perfection that we have striven to reach for in our own ego. However, it is not only that the subject loves in the other the image it would like to inhabit him- or herself. The subject simultaneously positions the object of his or her love in the place of the ego-ideal, from which the subject would like to see him- or herself in a likeable way’ (Salecl, ‘I Can’t Love You’, p. 187).

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Se dois estre ninphe apelee, O se tu es duesse u fee.’ (Narcisus, 679–82) [‘Thing,’ he says, ‘which I see there, I don’t know what I am to call you, whether you should be called a nymph, or whether you’re a goddess or a fairy.’]

Narcissus’s misrecognition of a goddess or fairy is itself an echo of the narrative’s depiction of his earlier misidentification of Dané, whom he identifies initially as ‘diuesse u fee’ [goddess or fairy] (450). The iteration and reiteration of Echo in this lai which writes her out is to be found in Narcissus’s identification of his own reflection as a nymph. Another effect of the transformation of Narcissus and Echo into courtly romance protagonists is that they find themselves inserted into a version of sexuality, gender, and desire which is more rigidly normative than that portrayed in the Metamorphoses. This treatment of the Narcissus myth in courtly romance adds another stage to Narcissus’s love: in the Metamorphoses he is in love with a beautiful man, but in the lai he falls in love with a beautiful woman— it just so happens that this beautiful woman is in fact himself too.51 Such is the insistence on the rewriting of Narcissus in Floris et Lyriopé that this romance features not one but two characters called Narcissus. They are the father and the son of the eponymous Lyriopé; it is the younger who acts out the Ovidian drama of the proud young man who rejects all would-be lovers and instead falls in love with his own reflection. However, the woman who is bold enough to request his love is given no proper name in this romance, and is designated with a series of pronouns and epithets. We are told, ‘une le requist | D’amor’ [one asked for this love] (1526–7); this woman is then referred to as ‘cele’ [that one] (1529; 1535; 1541). Having kept her waiting until she realizes that he does not love her, Narcissus finally turns up, only to address her as ‘fole’ [fool], and to spell out quite clearly that he will never be hers (1539). Once the anonymous jilted lover has uttered her prayer that Narcissus be made to love ‘Tel chose don ne puist joïr’ [something from which he can take no pleasure] (1560), she disappears from the narrative altogether. If Floris et Lyriopé gives no name at all to the iteration of Echo in the version it recounts of Ovid’s tale, then it plays out the drama of echoes and resemblance between its protagonists, who, precisely as a result of this scenario, become Narcissus’s parents. Floris has an identical twin sister, Florie, who is the companion of Lyriopé, a proud princess who has little in common with the nymph of the Metamorphoses apart from her name. 51 See Vinge, Narcissus, p. 65. Simon Gaunt asks, ‘If Narcissus can take his reflection to be that of a girl, what does this in turn tell us about his masculinity?’ (Love and Death, p. 175).

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When Floris seems about to die of unrequited love for Lyriopé, Florie agrees to swap clothes with her brother so that he can take her place at Lyriopé’s side. After reading ‘Un romant’ [a romance] (Floris, 978) telling of Pyramus and Thisbe, Floris tells Lyriopé in hypothetical, conditional terms about how much he would love her if he were a literary hero like Pyramus: Dame, certes, se je estoie Piramus, je vos ameroie, Et se vos jur per toz les sains Que je ne vos ains mie moins Que cil fit la bele Tysbé. (Floris, 992–6) [Surely, lady, if I were Pyramus, I would love you, and I swear to you on all the saints that I do not love you any less than he loved the fair Thisbe.]

Flummoxed by these overtures from the person she believes to be her ladyin-waiting, Lyriopé’s response reveals her as another female character who has an uncertain relationship with the language of love and desire: ‘Ne sai [ . . . ] que je die’ [I don’t know what I’m saying] (Floris, 998). At the crucial moment, Lyriopé realizes that Florie is in fact Floris, and Narcissus is born of their union. In this romance, then, Narcissus is the result of the mistaken identification of a love object, but it is the inverse of the misrecognition in Narcisus. In Narcisus, Narcissus thinks that the object for which he has fallen is a woman, but it turns out to be the image of a man, himself. In Floris et Lyriopé, Lyriopé falls for someone she takes to be a woman, but who turns out to be a man.52 Gilbert explores a number of examples of characters who identify with Narcissus and then swiftly disavow that identification.53 This disavowal, Gilbert argues, actually confirms the subject’s identification with the figure of Narcissus, since it involves an illusory repudiation, a fantasy that it is possible to attain the beloved as completely as the lover desires. In other words, to identify fully with Narcissus, one has to mistake one’s identification for a misidentification: one has to misrecognize one’s misrecognition. And, of course, Lacan’s point is that there is only ever misrecognition. If the subject splits itself into the subject and the object of the gaze, as is the case with Narcissus, then the subject which recognizes can never quite be that which is recognized. This is summed up in what Spivak calls Narcissus’s ‘grammatically precarious’ exclamation in the Metamorphoses as he realizes that he is looking at his own reflection: ‘iste ego sum’ [I am that] (3.463).54 In his moment of anagnorisis, Narcissus is 52 54

53 See Gilbert, ‘Boys’, p. 53. Gilbert, ‘ “I am not he” ’. Spivak, ‘Echo’, p. 24. On this line, see also Huot, Dreams, pp. 36–7.

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split, the ‘iste’ and the ‘ego’ simultaneously placing him in two different subject positions. In his lament in Narcisus, Narcissus tries briefly to look on the bright side, observing that at least he is at one with the object of his desire; but here too grammar intervenes to emphasize the unspeakably difficult circumstances in which he find himself: Por quoi n’en fa ge mon talent? Ne sai, car j’aim et sou amés Et çou que j’ain me raimme assés, Et n’est pas en menor esfroi, Si n’en poons prendre conroi. Poons? Mes ‘puis’, car je sui sous, Et ciste amors n’est pas de dous. (Narcisus, 914–20) [Why do I not do as I wish? I do not know, for I love and am loved, and the one whom I love loves me very much, and is in no less turmoil: we can have no satisfaction from this. ‘We can?’ Rather, ‘I can’, for I am alone, and this is not love between two.]

Narcissus is very close to persuading himself that he is actually in the perfect position, until he realizes that he and his reflection are not two people and so cannot constitute a first-person plural, just as in Ovid he cannot be the agent and the object of the verb.55 In Narcisus, both Dané and Narcissus, then, create precarious spaces of speech in which they can become two different speakers, two different subjects. They reflect one another in refracting their subjectivities into multiple speaking positions: both characters in Narcisus take on the characteristics of the lovers from Ovid’s telling of the story of Narcissus and Echo, as both Narcissus and Dané become subject and object, articulating speech and echo. And in another layer of self-reflection and self-reflexivity, the thirteenth-century romance Cristal et Clarie borrows heavily via quotation from Narcisus. As Kay has pointed out in her study of troubadour quotation, to appropriate recognizable sections from one text to embed them into another is to draw attention to the ‘interplay between intersubjectivity, desire and knowledge’ at the heart of medieval practices of rewriting.56 Kay is writing about embedding lyric into romance, and the exchange between the genres which results, but Cristal et Clarie is a specific and unusual case of a romance which incorporates into its narrative lengthy extracts from earlier romances, including Yvain, Erec et Enide and Le Conte du Graal, as well as Partonopeus de Blois. In addition to Narcisus, it

55

See Gaunt, Love and Death, p. 177.

56

Kay, Parrots and Nightingales, p. 17.

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also quotes other lais such as the Lai du Conseil and the Lai de l’oiselet.57 Cristal et Clarie differs from other French texts which incorporate quotations from other works, such as Guillaume de Dole or La Chastelaine de Vergy, in that it does not signal when it is about to quote, and a smooth transition is effected between the quoting text and the quoted, such that they are more or less indistinguishable. This quotation of these previous texts also effects a citation of them:58 what is produced is an implicit reference to the tales, motifs, and characters of the earlier tales, such that they haunt the new narrative, proposing comparisons and contrasts between the well-known earlier narratives and the playful, knowing, new one. In the sense that quotation and citation of previous works set up chains of resonance in which the words quoted can be understood in a variety of ways, Echo would seem to be an attractive figure for this characteristically medieval practice of reiterating and reworking. However, Narcissus once more eclipses Echo as a representative for a literary practice in Antoine Compagnon’s study of the work of citation, La Seconde main. Compagnon cites Narcissus rather than Echo as one-half of a hybrid model for the subject of citation—the uncertain, flickering space from which a citation is enunciated: Le sujet de la citation est un personnage équivoque qui tient à la fois de Narcisse et de Pilate. C’est un indicateur, un vendu—il montre du doigt publiquement d’autres discours et d’autres sujets—, mais sa dénonciation, sa convocation sont aussi un appel et une sollicitation: une demande de reconnaissance.59 [The subject of the citation is an equivocal character who derives from both Narcissus and Pilate. He is an informer, a traitor—he points publicly to other discourses and other subjects—but his denunciation and his summons are also an appeal and a solicitation: a demand for recognition.]

Compagnon concentrates on the visual mode of citation rather than the vocal. To cite, he suggests, is at once to project and detect an image of oneself in the citation, but also to disavow it. Narcissus sees himself reflected in the surface of the new image, but Pilate troubles the waters by washing his hands of the authority the citation proposes. Concentrating on Echo as a figure for quotation, rather than Narcissus as a figure for 57 Reading Cristal et Clarie is described as a game of ‘spot the literary allusion’ by Eley et al., ‘Cristal et Clarie’, p. 331 n. In a similar vein, Keith Busby argues, ‘What we are dealing with in Cristal et Clarie is a virtuoso performance of quoting, as well as allusive and evocative intertextuality, all within the framework of an easy-flowing and well-paced narrative of substantial proportions’ (‘Cristal et Clarie’, p. 88). 58 See Kay, Parrots and Nightingales, pp. 2–3 on this distinction. 59 Compagnon, La Seconde main, p. 40.

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citation, draws attention to language as a matter of sound rather than sight, and also emphasizes the way in which the repetition inherent in quotation can also entail a reversal of connotation and denotation of that which is quoted.60 This process can be seen at work in Cristal et Clarie, as the romance quotes previous romances and its characters quote previous characters.61 Cristal et Clarie is an affectionately parodic thirteenth-century romp through the landscape and language familiar from twelfth-century romance. Cristal, a young knight, has a dream about a beautiful girl, falls in love with her without ever having seen her, and then sets off on a quest for her. After a number of adventures, including being propositioned by other maidens who fall for him, Cristal eventually finds Clarie; but she is initially too proud to love him, and spurns his suit. The narrative then borrows a rather off-colour piece from Partonopeus de Blois in which Cristal more or less forces himself on Clarie; thereafter Clarie realizes that she is in love with Cristal. After some rather more consensual sex between the protagonists, Clarie persuades her father that she will have to marry Cristal, and the romance concludes with the celebration of their nuptials. Cristal et Clarie appropriates Dané’s speech in which she wonders about her identity and the source of her words. This soliloquy is now voiced by Clarie, who, after her night with Cristal, realizes that she does indeed love him, and is tormented by this new feeling: Hé, chaitive, con je sui fole, Dont me revient ceste parole? Voel je par moi tel conseil prendre? Dont ne me vi[e]nt il mieus atendre, Que je par moi face folie, Dont je puisse perdre la vie? (Cristal, 8083–8) [Oh, I am wretched and foolish. From where does this speech come to me? Do I wish to decide for myself? Wouldn’t it be better to wait rather than do something foolish and perhaps die because of it?]

Clarie’s question, ‘Dont me revient ceste parole?’ is a very pertinent one in this context. This question articulates Dané’s—and then Clarie’s— inability to recognize herself in her own words, but also expresses both heroines’ descent from Echo. They recognize that they can only ever misrecognize themselves in the words of others, an expression of the

60 On citation and authority in medieval poetry, see Armstrong and Kay, Knowing Poetry, pp. 19–20. 61 See Griffin,‘Dont me revient ceste parole?’.

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dispossession and dissemination of voice that the Ovide moralisé will describe as speech which circulates among the people. Dané’s speech to Narcissus not only attempts to portray them as mirror images of one another, but also insists on Dané’s singularity and specificity: Mes cueurs est mout por toi destrois; Des ore mais est il bien drois Que tu aies de moi merci. Nel te mant pas, ains le te di; Je pri por moi, nient por autrui. Esgarde, saces qui je sui! Je qui ensi paroil a toi Sui fille ton seignor le roi. Por t’amor pens et jor et nuit; Amors m’a ça livré conduit, Amors me done hardement: N’i venisce pas autrement. Or ait merci, qui merci crie, Car en toi pent tote ma vie. Tu seus me peus santé doner: Mout nous poons bien entramer —Biaus sire, otroie moi t’amor, Rent moi santé, tol moi dolor!— Car assés somes d’un aé D’une maniere de biauté. (Narcisus, 463–82) [My heart is in disarray for you. From henceforth it is quite right that you should have mercy on me. I don’t send word, I ask you myself; I beg for me, not for others. Look, and know who I am! I, who speak to you in this way, am the daughter of your lord the king. I dwell on your love day and night; love has brought me here; love makes me bold: I wouldn’t come otherwise. Now let she who cries for mercy receive mercy, for my whole life depends on you. We could love each other very well—fair sir, grant me your love, give back my health, take away my pain—for we are around the same age, and have the same manner and beauty.]

In Cristal et Clarie, Dané’s doomed declaration is reiterated twice, by women who fall in love with Cristal during his adventures. Both the maiden at the Castle of the Trembling Bridge and a maiden who is the niece of a fairy (Cristal, 1351–70 and 2433–44) declare themselves to Cristal, voicing their desire in speeches which are collages of Dané’s entreaties. The maiden of the Castle of the Trembling Bridge echoes Dané verbatim in attempting to persuade Cristal that they are alike: ‘Car asés somes d’un eé, | D’une maniere de biauté’ [For we are around the same age, and have the same manner and beauty] (Cristal, 1369–70).

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But both maidens echo Dané in insisting on their royal status: ‘Jou qui sui qui parole a toi, | Saches que sui fille de roi’ [You should know that I, who speak to you in this way, am the daughter of a king] (Cristal, 1357–8 and 2441–2; cf. Narcisus, 469–70); and in stressing the fact that they are speaking for themselves, rather than sending a messenger to summon their beloved: ‘Nel te mans pas, ains le te di’ [I do not send word, I tell you myself] (Cristal, 1356 and 2438; cf. Narcisus, 466). In order to convince the object of their desire that their love is authentic and individual, all that these unrequited princesses can do, then, is to echo one another in quoting another unrequited princess, who is a successor to Echo, who could only ever quote Narcissus. Although she is absent from Narcisus and Cristal et Clarie, the resonances of Echo persist in both French texts. In this section, I have shown that Echo’s transformation also involves her becoming poetry: whereas in the Ovide moralisé she becomes rhyme, in these twelfthand thirteenth-century texts, she has metamorphosed into the patterns of reflection, repetition, quotation, and citation. ECHO RESONABILIS: EXEMPLARITY AND CONTINGENCY IN THE ROMAN DE LA ROSE One of the purposes of quoting or citing a tale is to position it as an exemplum, a model of behaviour which should be followed or avoided. The Narcisus and Floris et Lyriopé both propose themselves as exempla: in a prologue to Narcisus, we are told that both men and women should take pity on those of the opposite sex who fall in love with them (Narcisus, 18–32). Robert de Blois uses the negative example of Lyriopé, who rejected all suitors and then had to marry beneath her, in order to warn against pride in love (Floris, 1490–5). He both opens his romance with a warning against excessive vanity (Floris, 1–98), and returns to his condemnation of pride in love in the final couplet of Floris et Lyriopé: ‘Hé! orgoil, honis soies tu! | Tant mal sont per toi avenu’ [Oh, pride, you should be ashamed! So much evil has occurred because of you] (Floris, 1757–8).62 Although this axiom immediately follows the retelling of the Ovidian tale, it is equally applicable to both Narcissus and his mother as they have been represented in this romance, since both of them initially rejected those offering them love. Robert emphasizes that his

62 This is a common reading of the Narcissus myth in the Middle Ages. See Vinge, Narcissus, pp. 72–6.

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warning is equally applicable to male and female readers of the romance: ‘Ainz di a toz conmunement, | Dames et seignors ausimant’ [I say this to everyone altogether: ladies along with lords] (Floris, 15–16).63 But it is in the Roman de la Rose which we find the most imaginative and most influential presentation of Narcissus as an example to both men and women. Once more, a text which minimizes the importance of Echo as a trope nevertheless calls on a trope which is the defining characteristic of Echo: that of imperfect repetition.64 The complex appeals to exemplarity in the Rose add a linguistic sense of repetition to the recurrent references to mirrors in this lengthy allegorical poem, which at one point is renamed ‘Li Miroër aus Amoreus’ [The Lovers’ Mirror] by the God of Love as he anticipates its continuation by Jean de Meun (Rose, 10621).65 The story of Narcissus is the first embedded narrative within the Rose, featuring in the first section, attributed to Guillaume de Lorris. As the Lover-protagonist wanders through the Garden of Pleasure, he is spied by the God of Love, who stalks him as he stops at a fountain by a pine tree where, according to an inscription, Narcissus died. The inscription read by the Lover leads the narrator to recount the story of Echo and Narcissus. In this version, Echo is a noble lady whom Narcissus spurns.66 Echo is not an echo in the Rose: she is not cursed to repeat others’ words, and so she is able to voice the prayer that Narcissus’s lack of responsiveness and reciprocity be punished by his being made to experience similar agonizing unrequited love.67 Accordingly, Narcissus gazes into the fountain and dies of unrequited love. As this tale is moralized by the narrator, the genders of the protagonists are swapped from Ovid’s tale to its exemplary significance: Dames, cest essemple aprenez, Qui vers vos amis mesprenez, Car se vos les lessiez morir, Dex le vos savra bien merir. (Rose, 1505–8)

63

See Krueger, Women Readers, pp. 174–6. On citation and criticism in the Rose, see Guynn, Allegory and Sexual Ethics, pp. 137–70. 65 On mirrors in the Rose, see Nouvet, ‘A Reversing Mirror’; Heller-Roazen, Fortune’s Faces, pp. 100–31; Frappier, ‘Variations’. 66 Gui de Mori’s remaniement of Guillaume de Lorris’s section on Narcissus does not mention Echo at all. See Huot, Romance of the Rose, pp. 325–6. 67 In the Metamorphoses this demand for vengeance is articulated by a spurned male suitor, Echo being at this point in Ovid’s version unable to speak any words of her own. On the relationship between the Rose and the Metamorphoses, see Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Reading Myth, pp. 52–89; Vinge, Narcissus, pp. 78–87. 64

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[Ladies, learn this example, you who do your lovers wrong, for if you let them die, God will make you pay.]

Where Robert de Blois has to preface his retelling of the Narcissus tale with the tale of Narcissus’s mother’s pride in order to make it clear that his warning against pride should be heeded by women as much as (if not more than) men; and where the author of the Narcisus addresses men and women alike in his prologue, Guillaume de Lorris simply inverts the genders from the tale to its exemplary lesson.68 Within the frame of Guillaume’s moral, Narcissus is a figure not for the desperate, spurned male courtly lover, but for the cold haughty lady the male courtly persona tries to woo. If Narcissus stands for the unresponsive lady, then Guillaume’s Lover is likened to Echo. The moral seems to pre-empt much of the action of the Rose, in the sections authored by Guillaume and Jean, which follows the Lover’s encounter with Narcissus’s fountain, in that it is an entreaty to ladies, including, presumably, ‘cele qui [ . . . ] doit estre Rose clamee’ [she who should be called Rose] (Rose, 42–4), the ostensible addressee of the poem, not to be standoffish, but to yield to their suitors. If they do so, the exemplum implies, they will save those suitors from the sad fate with which Echo met. David Hult traces the implications of the affinity this moral constructs between the Lover and Echo: First, and most obvious, both Echo and the courtly Lover pursue an object of desire that in turn rejects or distances them. Echo and the Lover are both victims of Amor and yet, paradoxically, address themselves to him for help. Both love for the most part in isolation. And, finally, both are figurations for the human voice, which addresses but which is eventually a reflection, a disembodied sound.69

Neither the narrator nor his interdiegetic persona, the Lover, however, seem to notice that they are being placed in the position of Echo.70 Once the Lover has learned from the inscription on the fountain that this was the very spot where Narcissus died, he first draws back from the fountain, not daring to look in, but then persuades himself that he will not repeat Narcissus’s mistake. Gilbert argues that this rejection of Narcissus as a model confirms the Lover’s Narcissan identity from this point in the romance;71 certainly the Lover is more interested in either identifying 68 Kay compares the use of the Narcissus story as exemplum in the Rose and Narcisus in ‘Love in a Mirror’, pp. 273–4. See also Vinge, Narcissus, p. 84. 69 Hult, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies, p. 274. 70 On the way in which this moral redistributes subject positions based on the Ovidian tale, see Rosenfeld, Ethics and Enjoyment, p. 51. 71 Gilbert, ‘ “I am not he” ’, pp. 948–53.

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with or distinguishing himself from Narcissus than in his similarity with Echo. In this exemplum, then, the Lover is both like and not like both Narcissus and Echo: the two Ovidian figures and the positions in relation to love that each signifies are held up as possible models, but neither fits exactly the tale of erotic awakening and the quest for love which is orchestrated by the Rose. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski describes the genderinverting gloss of Guillaume’s retelling of the Narcissus story as a ‘surprise’, and suggests that the discrepancy between the exemplum and its lesson opens the story—and thereby the rest of the text—to a number of possible readings.72 Similarly, Hult argues that the lack of fit between the genders of the lovers in the tale and its moral draws the reader’s attention to the need for properly engaged reading and interpretation.73 It is the Rose’s characteristic openness to possibility and multiplicity which Daniel Heller-Roazen describes as contingency. He points out the crucial role of the poetry in which the Rose is composed: The definition that, in one way or another, functions to characterize the language of contingency, from Boethius to Abelard, Albert and Thomas, is also, in truth, a precise definition of poetic language as such: that speech that, while formally indistinguishable from speech in its canonical form, does not predicate, assert, or bear truth and falsity, and therefore is not, in any established sense, speech.74

Another way of putting this might be that contingency is ‘l’altérité de ce qui se dit’ [the otherness of that which is said]: in other words, the way of figuring that which in language does not convey meaning, yet indicates that another way of meaning is possible. In Ovid’s story, this is precisely what Echo does, as she repeats others’ words and transforms them into something else. The language of Ovid’s Echo is therefore ‘formally indistinguishable from speech’ and yet its problematic relationship to sense means that it ‘is not, in any established sense, speech’. Heller-Roazen argues that it is Fortune who functions as the exemplary figure of contingency in the Rose, since she ‘appears [ . . . ] as a figure capable of rendering all things different from themselves’.75 This notion of a figure which can change the appearances of that which is being represented is reminiscent of Stahuljak’s description of translatio as a means of representation which always alters the face of that which is being 72

Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Reading Myth, p. 57. Hult, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies, pp. 288–9. On the inversion of gender in this exemplum, see also Gaunt, Love and Death, pp. 177–80. 74 Heller-Roazen, Fortune’s Faces, p. 26, original emphasis. 75 Heller-Roazen, Fortune’s Faces, p. 63. 73

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represented;76 but I should like to suggest that we may also hear echoes of Echo in the affinity between the language of contingency and that of poetry. Both Echo and Fortune feature in the rambling discourses of the allegorical figure of Raison. Although Raison in the Rose does not echo anyone but herself (returning in Jean’s section, having already been dismissed by Guillaume’s Lover), her speech nonetheless bears traces of the linguistic contingency characteristic of Echo’s voice. Ovid describes his tragic nymph as ‘resonabilis Echo’ [resonating Echo] (M, 3.358), an epithet which is echoed in sound if not sense by the Rose’s assessment of her prayer as ‘resnable’ [reasonable] (1465).77 The Ovide moralisé describes Echo as a ‘pucele raisonnable’ [reasonable maiden] (OM, 3.1343). In the Ovide moralisé’s description of the House of Rumour in book 12, the resonant metal of which it is constructed is rendered as ‘arain, qui plaine est de raison’ [bronze, which is full of reason] (OM, 12.1600).78 The link between Echo and Reason, then, is made precisely via the contingency of language: as Lucken comments, in wordplay which works much better in French than in English, ‘Celle qui résonne est devenue celle qui raisonne’ [she who resonates has become she who reasons].79 Dolar remarks on the way in which the contingent echoing of words can produce new meaning: Words, quite contingently, sound alike, to a greater or lesser degree, which makes them liable to contamination; their mutual sound contacts can transform them, distort them, be it by retention, the inertia of certain sounds, their momentum by which they influence what follows, or by anticipation of certain sounds which influence what precedes them, or by various modes of substitution. In this contamination a new formation is born—a slip, which may sound like nonsense but produces the emergence of another sense.80

As the Rose’s Raison compares herself to Echo, while urging the Lover to mistrust the machinations of Fortune, this poem’s ethical and poetical contingency is brought to the forefront. Raison is encountered by the Lover in both Guillaume de Lorris’s and Jean de Meun’s sections of the Rose, and in both instances her words go unheeded by the Lover, who tells her in no uncertain terms that he is not interested in what she has to say. However, Raison proposes herself as the 76

Stahuljak, Bloodless Genealogies, pp. 103–4. See Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Reading Myth, p. 71. ‘Nos textes sont un peu comme la maison de Renommée’ [our texts are a little like the House of Rumour], says Possamaï-Pérez, in that they are riddled with misleading speech (L’Ovide moralisé, p. 207). 79 80 Lucken, ‘L’Écho du poème’, p. 37. Dolar, A Voice, p. 140. 77 78

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Lover’s amie, suggesting that he reject erotic love and instead make her the object of his rational love.81 She propositions him using imagery drawn from medieval references to Narcissus, inviting him to use her face as a mirror in which to reflect and marvel: ‘Regarde ci quele forme a | Et te mire en mon cler visage’ [Look here what form there is, and admire yourself in my clear face] (Rose, 5788–9).82 This invitation to look and reflect is not couched as the representation of impossible desire, but gives the lover the impression that the (allegorical) lady’s face upon which he gazes will show him a reciprocated desire. Raison underscores this Narcissan reference with a comparison between herself as a potentially spurned Lover and Echo: Trop sunt dolentes et confuses Puceles qui sunt refusees, Quant de prier ne sont usees, Si con tu meïsmes le prueves Par Echo, sanz querre autres preuves. (Rose, 5804–8)83 [Maidens who are refused are very sad and distraught if they are not used to begging, as you can prove yourself with Echo, without looking for other proofs.]

Raison attempts to inscribe herself into, and to invert, the myth of Echo and Narcissus as she offers herself to the Lover as his amie, referring to Echo’s plight. Blumenfeld-Kosinski summarizes Raison’s argument: ‘“Don’t make me a second Echo,” Raison seems to caution, “or you may well find yourself to be a second Narcissus.”’84 Blumenfeld-Kosinski points out that this mention of Echo constitutes a new reinterpretation of the story of Narcissus and Echo, contrasting with Guillaume de Lorris’s surprising gloss. With Raison’s reference to the Ovidian myth, the genders of the protagonists now match those of the characters in the poem to which they are being compared: spurned women are identified with Echo, rather than Narcissus standing for proud, unfeeling women. And yet the contingency of Raison’s speech means that the earlier alignment of genders still persists in her reference to this myth: if the Lover were to gaze into the mirror of Raison’s face, he might, following the logic of Guillaume’s ‘essample’, see himself reflected as Echo.

81 For details of interpolations into Raison’s speech, which nuance her presentation of love, see Huot, Romance of the Rose, pp. 164–71. 82 Fleming reads this injunction as a reminder to the Lover that he is made in the image of God (Reason and the Lover, p. 34). 83 These last two lines are not found in all Rose manuscripts: see Huot, Dreams, p. 53 n. 6. 84 Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Reading Myth, p. 71.

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As Raison’s speech draws to a close, she summarizes her advice to the Lover. She has, she tells him, made three distinct requests: C’est que tu me vuelles amer, Et que le dieu d’Amors despises Et que Fortune riens ne prises. (Rose, 6842–4) [It is that you should love me; and despise the God of Love; and set no value on Fortune.]

The second and third requests—that he abandon the God of Love, and that he give no value to Fortune—seem more in keeping with the personification of Reason. However, Raison acknowledges that the Lover may not be able to acquiesce to all that she asks, and she amends her demand: ‘Pren la prumiere seulement’ [Take the first one only] (Rose, 6849). At the last minute, then, Raison seems to turn her back on her demands based in reason; it appears that she is more interested in winning the Lover’s affection than in persuading him to act in a more rational fashion: as Simon Gaunt points out, Raison ‘is not a straightforward personification, representing alternatively Amant’s reason, then a woman who flirts with him’.85 The Lover, however, is unwilling to gaze at her face to see an image of himself; he remains steadfast to his master, the God of Love, who holds his heart in thrall and has promised him the Rose. Huot points out that when the Lover rejects Reason, he entrenches his identification with Narcissus;86 and as he rebuffs her words and her request for love, the Lover makes Raison, in spite of her warning, into another Echo. Raison resembles Ovid’s Echo both before and after she was cursed by Juno: she is certainly as troublingly verbose as the nymph who distracted the queen of the gods,87 but her desire is unrequited, and her words disregarded, just as Echo’s are when she attempts to woo Narcissus. Rejected by the lover, Raison’s invocation of Echo as a negative exemplum backfires, but this thwarting of exemplarity is itself problematic, since it occurs in the same text as (although by a different author from) the recommendation that lovers should not act like Narcissus, but should attend to their lovers’ entreaties: we might say that Jean’s Raison is counting too heavily on the Lover having understood the moral of Guillaume’s telling of the tale of Echo and Narcissus. The contingency underscored by the reiterated and inverted references to Echo as her tale is 85 Gaunt, ‘Bel Acueil’, p. 88n. On Jean Gerson’s disapproval of Raison as unreasonable, see Brown-Grant, Christine de Pizan, pp. 37–8. 86 Huot, Dreams, pp. 34–5. 87 Kay describes Raison as ‘the first real test of the reader’s patience’ and is surely not alone in ‘finding her boring’ (Romance of the Rose, p. 31).

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repeated in the mode of exemplarity from Guillaume to Jean point out that the moral lesson of these exempla could always be read otherwise. However, as Noah D. Guynn observes, ‘by opening rhetoric to dialectic and allegory to irony, Jean’s poem does not fully pluralize allegorical meaning or fully relativize opinions and values’:88 the message of both Guillaume’s moralizing of the fountain’s inscription and Raison’s failed invocation of Echo is that women’s voices are unlikely to be heeded in the Rose. CONCLUSION: LISTENING TO ECHO Responses to the Rose in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century French literature often revisit its treatment of the myth of Echo and Narcissus,89 and to conclude this chapter, I shall look at the way in which Echo is figured in texts by two authors: Jean Froissart and Christine de Pizan. Froissart’s treatment of Echo mutates as he revisits it from his Prison amoureuse to his Joli buisson de jonece, bringing together many of the strands of the myth and its reading that I have examined in this chapter. As he alters the story from one dit to the next, Froissart reminds us once more that to echo is to change and distort. Christine’s Epistre d’Othéa, on the other hand, is seen by Vinge as a unique reading of the myth of Echo and Narcissus,90 in that the nymph’s words are understood as a voice which should be heeded. Although they are only written within a year or so of one another (1372–3), Froissart’s dits amoureux, La Prison amoureuse and Le Joli buisson de jonece testify to the poet’s changing attitude towards his poetic work.91 Accordingly, the treatment of Narcissus and Echo is transformed: the tale is summarized at the beginning of the Prison as part of a list of those who failed to love properly and to please ladies: Et Narcisus que je vous nomme, Qui moult petit eut adagnié Equo, n’i a gaires gagnié, Car il enamoura son ombre. (Prison, 176–9) [And Narcissus, whom I name to you, who treated Echo with very little consideration, and hardly triumphed from this, since he fell in love with his reflection.]

Although the Prison’s narrator may be eager to serve Love, the end of the Joli buisson sees the poetic persona turn from erotic to spiritual love—perhaps 88

Guynn, Allegory and Sexual Ethics, p. 139. 90 Vinge, Narcissus, pp. 91–127. Vinge, Narcissus, p. 102. 91 See Huot, From Song to Book, pp. 311–23: the Joli buisson itself largely revisits and reworks Froissart’s earlier dit, L’Espinette amoureuse. See Kay, Place of Thought, pp. 123–49. 89

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the change the Rose’s Raison tries to impress upon the Lover.92 Earlier in the Joli buisson, however, Narcissus features once more in a list of famous lovers. But these figures are not to be dismissed as Narcissus is in the Prison, but are enumerated by the personification Désir to persuade the lover-narrator that he is not alone in feeling the fires of love.93 Désir relates a story which distorts and inverts many elements of the tale told in the Metamorphoses: in his version, Narcissus, a young prince, falls in love with a princess called Echo, who then dies at a young age. In a more faithfully Ovidian vein, the narrative continues to relate that Narcissus goes hunting, and stops to drink at a fountain. Although this fountain anticipates, in terms of the chronology of the tale in which it is embedded, the fountain in the garden of Pleasure in the Rose, it also imitates it, in that it becomes a space of remembrance and commemoration of a lost love. The memory of his dead beloved causes Narcissus to see his reflection as an image of Echo’s face: Narcisus s’abaisse pour boire Et l’yauwe, qui est clere et noire Et qui siet en lieu orbe et sombre, D’une personne li fait ombre. Quant Narcisus en voit le fourme, Ardeurs l’amonneste et enfourme Que briefment c’est Eqo s’amie Et que perdu il ne l’a mie. (Buisson, 3292–9) [Narcissus bends down to drink, and the water, which is clear and dark, sitting in an obscure, shadowy place, showed him a person’s reflection. When Narcissus saw the form, his ardour advised and informed him that it was none other than Echo, his beloved, and that he had not lost her at all.]

Narcissus hears an echo, but it is as a common rather than a proper noun: simply the sonic effect to which Echo gave her name. [ . . . ] volenté si le semont Que de criier envois, envois « Eqo! Eqo! » a clere vois. Li sons des bois respont sans faille Tout che que Narcisus li baille. (Buisson, 3301–5) [His desire urged him to cry again and again, ‘Echo! Echo!’ in a clear voice. The sound of the woods repeated without fail all that Narcissus granted it.]

92 Commenting on this text’s relation to the Rose, Kay comments that ‘Froissart upgrades the rose bush to a cosmic buisson’ (Place of Thought, p. 178). 93 See Lechat, ‘Dire par fiction’, pp. 331–4.

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Although this is evidently a very different telling and interpretation of the myth from its earlier manifestations in French, it is not without its similarities to these versions. Froissart’s Narcissus is reminiscent of the protagonist of the Narcisus in his misrecognition of his reflection for a nymph: both the twelfth- and the fourteenth-century Narcissus believe that they see Echo, whereas all they can do is hear her in their appeals for reciprocated love. Froissart’s Narcissus also echoes Ovid’s and his translation in the Ovide moralisé in initially believing that what he can see means that he no longer suffers from loss, but is complete: the negation of loss in ‘perdu il ne l’a mie’ [he has not lost her at all] resonates with the ‘copia’ and ‘copie’ of the Metamorphoses and its moralization, just as the rime riche repeats Echo in the reiterated sound of ‘amie’ and yet transforms the lover of the first rhyme word into the emphatic negative of the second. Similarly, the echoic quality of the repetitions in the lines which frame Narcissus’s words ‘envois, envois’; ‘« Eqo! Eqo! »’ reveal that Echo may once more have died, but she is still present in the lines of poetry which evoke and invoke her. Douglas Kelly suggests that the key to the widely differing versions of the story of Narcissus and Echo from the Prison to the Buisson lies in Froissart’s understanding of the function of the poet as being specifically an ‘unfaithful interpreter of source material’:94 once more, this description chimes with my reading of Echo—as she repeats, distorts, and thereby creates, Echo is an ‘unfaithful interpreter’ of the source material supplied to her in Narcissus’s rejections. If Froissart finds a new way of echoing Echo, then Christine de Pizan might be seen as more successful than the Rose’s Raison,95 as she systematically overturns the allegorical and exemplary programme of the Rose to propose Echo as a woman whose voice we should heed. Narcissus features in two of the one hundred didactic scenarios of which Christine’s Epistre d’Othéa is composed. The text is framed as a letter from the goddess Othea to the fifteen-year-old Hector, and each scenario, or histoire, is presented, with an accompanying illustration, as a verse texte, followed by a prose glose and a prose allegorie. In histoire 16, Narcissus is cited in order to warn knights against the sin of pride (Othéa, pp. 226–7).96 In histoire 86, however, Christine proposes Echo as a figure for that which should be heeded and those who deserve pity and compassion. The texte counsels,

94 95 96

Kelly, ‘Imitation’, p. 108. On Christine and Raison in the Rose, see Brown-Grant, Christine de Pizan, pp. 37–9. See Desmond and Sheingorn, Myth, p. 74.

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Gardes qu’Echo tu n’escondises Ne ses piteus plains ne desprises. (Othéa, p. 321) [Beware that you do not deny Echo, nor dismiss her piteous entreaties.]

And the gloss expands on this, giving a political reading to the story of Echo:97 La voix qui est demourée c’est que de gens souffraiteux est il assez demouré, ne ilz ne peuent parler fors aprés autrui c’est que ilz ne se peuent aydier d’eulx mesmes sans autrui ayde. (Othéa, p. 322) [The voice which remains shows that many suffering people remain, nor can they speak unless they do so after others, for they cannot help themselves without outside help.]

The Epistre is composed at the beginning of the century in which Villon will detect the sound of Echo in the poetry of ‘temps jadis’. In Christine’s prose, however, Echo is framed as a figure who should be heeded. And this reminds us that the voice as objet a, ‘l’alterité de ce qui se dit’ [the otherness of that which is said], should also be listened to, since it is the space in which new meanings are forged. In this chapter, I have argued that focusing on the rewriting and writing out of Echo’s character and metamorphosis in medieval French texts which relate the Ovidian tale can enable us to reflect on the crucial function in these texts of a number of tropes involving linguistic repetition. From the rimes équivoques and the appeal to Renommee in the Ovide moralisé, through the rhetorical reiteration and quotation in twelfth- and thirteenth-century courtly romance, to the entreaties to or rejection of imitation in the appeals to exemplarity voiced by the Roman de la Rose, my argument has presented a series of illustrations of the claim, in answer to Villon’s question, that the metamorphosis Echo has undergone involves her becoming poetry, which relies upon the patterns of repetition and reworking characteristic of Echo’s cursed speech. What Echo shows, time and again, is that there is a gap between any enunciation and its repetition. That gap can represent the disappointment and death of doomed desire, or it can open a space of play and pleasure. Both facets are represented by Echo’s transformations, as she incarnates the loss of love and the beauty of poetry. Echo’s metamorphosis can be read as a kind of translatio: becoming voice, she brings into sharp focus the transformative powers of language, ‘The glose instructs the reader to interrogate the courtly script’s preoccupation with romantic love and to view Echo as a sign of those in need of charity rather than as an unwelcome suitor’ (Desmond and Sheingorn, Myth, p. 76). On the Othéa’s glossing of Echo, see also Brown-Grant, Christine de Pizan, pp. 81–2. 97

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and the way in which language can be shifted and changed. The displacements of Echo’s body and story in the texts I have examined here draw closer attention to those shifts and changes as they are played out in poetry, a type of language which is particularly adept at showing ambiguity and mutation both in its form and content. Echo’s mutation into voice further underlines the sonorous characteristics of literary language, the parts of language which shape and affect meaning rather than directly conveying it. Echo’s story is a metamorphosis in which the body disappears, its presence becoming audible rather than visible, but never definitively non-physical. This movement into intangibility is a phenomenon to which I shall return in Chapter 5, where I deal with Merlin and his embodiment in voice. For the next two chapters, however, I shall scrutinize tales which depict characters whose metamorphosis magnifies their physicality, and explore stories of humans who are transformed into animals.

3 The Beast Without C’est un animal de lecture et de récriture.1 [It is an animal of writing and rewriting.]

The eponymous hero of the anonymous lai, Tyolet, is given a marvellous gift by a fairy: whenever he is out hunting, he has only to whistle, and animals will come to him, so that he can kill them and take them home to his widowed mother. One day, however, a stag fails to approach when whistled to, instead fixing Tyolet with his gaze before turning away: ‘Li cers l’oï, si regarda, | Ne l’atendi, ainz s’en ala’ [The stag heard him, and looked; it did not wait for him, but went away] (89–90). Tyolet follows the stag (‘e Tyolet tant li sevi’ [and Tyolet followed it so far] (92)) to a river, which it crosses. Tyolet then spots a doe and whistles to it: this animal behaves according to the fairy’s gift, and Tyolet kills it with his knife. As he removes the doe’s skin, the stag metamorphoses into a knight. Endementres qu’il escorcha, e li cers se transfigura qui outre l’eve s’estoit mis, ... e .I. chevalier resembloit tot armé sor l’eve s’estoit, sor .I. cheval detries comé, s’estoit come chevalier armé. Le vallet l’a aparceü, onques mes tel n’avoit veü; a merveilles l’a esgardé e longuement l’a avisé. (105–16) [While he was skinning it, the stag, which had crossed the river, transformed itself [ . . . ] and it resembled a knight: he was fully armed at the water’s edge. Mounted on a horse with a flowing mane, he sat like an armed knight. The young man saw him: he had never seen the like. He looked at him in wonder, and studied him for a long time.]2 1

Derrida, L’Animal, p. 62. The scribe of the sole manuscript of this lai (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, nouv. acq. fr. 1104) seems also a little staggered by this turn of events, since line 107 has no partner to 2

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The rhyme forges a connection between the action of skinning one beast (‘escorcha’ [skinned]) and the transformation of another (‘se transfigura’ [transformed itself]). The transformation of the stag into a knight upsets the previous hierarchy of hunter and hunted; and this upset is articulated to a great extent by the exchange of gazes between the animal and human. While the stag gazes impassively at Tyolet rather than responding to his call, Tyolet stares in astonishment, flabbergasted both by the process of transformation and by the new creature before his eyes. Like Chrétien’s Perceval,3 Tyolet, the son of a widow, has never seen a knight before. Whereas Perceval wonders whether the knights he encounters are gods,4 Tyolet asks of the knight who stands before him where once there was a stag, ‘quel beste chevalier estoit’ [what beast a knight was] (138). The answer, rather than correcting the naïve young man’s assumption that a knight is an animal of the same ilk as a stag, continues the motif of the knight as beast: Par foi, fet il, jel te dirai, que ja mot ne t’en mentirai. C’est une beste molt cremue, autres bestes prent et menjue, el bois converse molt souvent, e a plainne terre ensement. (139–44) [‘By my faith’, he said, ‘I will tell you, and not tell you a word of a lie. It is a very fearful beast: it captures and eats other beasts; it often frequents woods and also plains.’]

In these terms, chivalric practice and appearance sounds more savage than civilized, but (or perhaps therefore) Tyolet announces his fervent desire to become this kind of animal: ‘Car pleüst or Dieu a sa feste | que je fusse chevalier beste!’ [May it please God on his feast day that I should be a knight beast!] (217–18). Tyolet gets his wish, and becomes a knight, the animal that he had pursued. Tyolet provides a nexus of ideas about the dependence—punctuated by language, lack, and the interpretation of surfaces—of the human on the beast, which informs this chapter’s argument. The question he asks, ‘quel beste chevalier estoit’ is one of the questions I ask here, in an analysis of

make up a rhyming couplet. In their edition of Tyolet Glyn Burgess and Leslie Brook conjecture, reasonably enough, that the missing line should read, ‘La forme d’homme a tantost pris’ [he immediately took the form of a man]. 3 On the connections between Tyolet and Chrétien’s Conte du Graal, see Braet, ‘Tyolet/ Perceval’. 4 Conte du Graal, 168–75.

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a series of texts which explore the interdependence and distinction between these two figures. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen points out, chivalry is an intensely desirable state for the medieval male, offering the promise of perfection of both body and soul, yet it is a state which is intimately bound up with animal bodies and instincts, which it repeatedly needs to disavow.5 Cohen’s argument is informed by queer theory and the Deleuzian notion of ‘becoming-animal’, and insists on the fusion of the human and the inhuman: ‘This medieval assemblage decomposes the human to intermingle as dynamic pieces the inorganic and the animal’.6 The thesis of this chapter, however, focuses on the ways in which the human and animal are kept separate, despite their frequently dangerous resemblance. In other words, just because it is difficult to pinpoint the essential difference between the animal and the human does not mean that medieval and modern humans stop trying to do so, and it is this reiterated attempt to draw a sharp division between the human and animal which constitutes the human as such: as Steel points out, ‘the human is an effect rather than a cause of its domination of animals’.7 Transformation is a useful way of thinking about this insistence on the distinction between animal and human, because it draws attention to what precisely is at stake in the mutation from one category to another. The theoretical concepts which support my argument—Derrida’s punning ‘animot’ and ‘l’animal que donc je suis’; Agamben’s ‘intimate caesura’; and Lacan’s Möbius strip—are all figures which privilege surfaces and divisions, and the interplay between inside and outside. Although the characters which populate this chapter appear to embody a fusion between human and animal, these werewolves, chevaliers-bestes and disguised lovers in fact offer the medieval, and modern, audience a chance to contemplate insistently corporeal models for the separation between beast and human, even as that separation is shifted and troubled. I tend, therefore, to agree with Pairet when she states that ‘la métamorphose animale renforce plus qu’elle ne l’érode l’opposition entre l’humain et l’animal’ [animal metamorphosis reinforces more than it erodes the opposition between human and animal].8 And yet the Middle Ages did not deny that humans are animals: what an examination of texts which depict transformation can reveal is the way in which these categories are sometimes opposed, sometimes identical, and often overlapping.

5 6 7

In his essay, ‘Chevalerie’ (Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, pp. 35–77). Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, p. 38. 8 Steel, How to Make a Human, p. 19. Pairet, Les Mutacions, p. 67.

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As is the case for Tyolet, encounters with the wild often take place in medieval romance in the untamed space of the forest: knights, kings, and courtiers often find themselves in this familiarly unknown landscape because they are pursuing an animal, on the hunt either for a specific beast or engaging in an essentially courtly pastime.9 The hunt for the animal can become a defining trajectory, such that the pursued animal dictates its pursuer’s identity. In L’Animal que donc je suis [The Animal That I Therefore Am], Derrida plays on this relation (articulated in the pun on ‘suis’ [follow/am] in his title) between pursuing and being an animal. Derrida shows that the category of the animal is positioned in relation to the human such that it is understood as a primitive, simple form of life, which inevitably leads to humanity (so that ‘suis’ comes from ‘suivre’ [to follow]), while at the same time the idea of the animal stands at the very heart of what it means to be human (so that ‘suis’ comes from ‘être’ [to be]). Throughout L’Animal, Derrida plays on the verb ‘suivre’, and its associations with tracing, tracking, hunting, as well as articulating a logical argument—highlighted by the ‘donc’ [therefore], as he nods to the Cartesian formulation he unsettles and dismantles during this work. Just as Tyolet turns into—and, indeed, turns out to have alwaysalready been—the animal he follows, Derrida argues that as we follow (chronologically and logically) animals, they embody a truth of human identity.10 This aspect of ‘suivre’ is fundamental to Derrida’s treatment of the way in which animals are used as figures to think with, and yet not permitted any thoughts of their own, within the writing of Kant, Levinas, Heidegger, and Lacan. In all of these philosophers’ work, Derrida identifies a tendency to position animals within a particular narrative, to impose meaning upon them.11 It is this discrepancy which leads him to formulate a neologism, highlighting the way that, as I have been arguing in this book, the ambiguity of language can offer creative possibilities for imagining bodies: ‘Un mot chimérique en contravention avec la loi de la langue française, l’animot’ [A chimerical word in contravention of the law of the French language, the animot].12 A homonym of ‘animaux’ [animals], in its sound, ‘animot’ reminds us of the essential plurality of animals and their experience (as opposed to the monolithic ‘animal’ to which the equally monolithic ‘homme’ is often compared); in its spelling, ‘animot’ signals the way in which animals have

9 10 11

See Smets and van de Abeele, ‘Medieval Hunting’, p. 72. See Crane, Animal Encounters, pp. 50–2. 12 See Calarco, Zoographies, pp. 103–49. Derrida, L’Animal, p. 65.

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become transposed into discourse, language, ‘mots’ [words] in order to figure the non-linguistic or pre-linguistic basis of and antithesis to human civilization. The title of this chapter reverses the titles of two books on cultural understandings of the relationship between the animal and the human: it is of course a coincidence that both Adam Douglas and Joyce Salisbury chose The Beast Within as the title of their works. However, the notion to which this phrase speaks—that the animal is a force lurking inside the human—seems to me insufficient to account for the transformations in the texts I examine here.13 My argument is that the beast in medieval French literature of animal transformation is not simply within but also, and perhaps more importantly, without. The animal is often used as a category which is lacking in some way: the animal is understood as that which lacks reason, speech, clothing—the beast is without something crucial which defines humanity as such. As humanity tries to track down that crucial something, it becomes apparent that it is a human conceit, rather than a brute fact. In Derrida’s terms, following the animal reveals us to be ‘bêtes’ [beasts/stupid] all along. I begin this chapter with one of the most glossed transitions between human and animal in the medieval literary imagination: the werewolf. Indeed, Bynum speaks of a ‘werewolf renaissance of the late twelfth century’,14 referring to a constellation of stories in Latin and French. As I will show, it is hard to provide—either within medieval texts or critical readings of them—a precise definition of a werewolf, since each instance of this transformative tale brings a new detail or twist to the notion of a man becoming the most beastly of beasts.15 Agamben’s well-known reading of one of the best-known werewolf tales in medieval French has brought Bisclavret to the attention of a reading public more interested in modern critical theory than medieval literature, but I want to use another instance of Agamben’s meditations on the relation between the animal and the human, the ‘intimate caesura’, in order to reflect upon the beast within and without in Bisclavret and two other werewolf narratives: the anonymous lai, Mélion, and the longer verse romance, Guillaume de Palerne.

13 For Joyce Salisbury, werewolf tales point to an anxiety about the precarity of human rationality: ‘Belief in metamorphosis, and particularly in werewolves, reveals a fear of the beast inside overwhelming the human qualities of rationality and spirituality, leaving only the animal appetites of lust, hunger, and rage’ (Beast Within, p. 163). 14 Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, p. 94. 15 As Morton remarks, the wolf is the ‘beast par excellence’ in the Middle Ages (‘Wolves in Human Skin’, p. 978).

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In the last stage of this chapter, I will focus on instances of what might, following Tyolet, be called the ‘chevalier-beste’ in two late medieval prose romances: Estonné the bear-knight in Perceforest, and the uncanny ‘Poisson Chevalier’ who surfaces in both Perceforest and the much shorter and less disseminated Conte du Papegau. A monstrous hybrid body who makes manifest the troubling causality and ontology of Derrida’s ‘animal que donc je suis’, the ‘Poisson Chevalier’ incarnates the animality which is both the ground and foil to chivalric identity. All of these texts and theories, then, insist on the importance of distinguishing between the human and the animal and yet emphasize the precarity of that distinction. The animal figures they mobilize are, by definition, animots: discursive fabrications labelled as animal in order for their human authors, audience, and readers to reflect on their own humanity and beastliness. The argument of this chapter also centres on the legibility of human and animal skin, and the way in which the exchange between them in tales of transformation variously negotiates the boundary between within and without: the differences between the body inside clothes and the body without clothes; the difference between a body which should be wearing clothes and one that does not need to. In the Middle Ages, of course, those clothes would very often have been fashioned from the flayed skin of a nonhuman animal (I will examine later a medieval author’s imagining of the horrifying spectacle of a nonhuman animal wearing a human skin for warmth and protection). Derrida’s musing on the implications of his feelings of ‘pudeur’ [modesty] when his cat gazes upon his naked body is used here to examine the notion of nudity as a defining human ‘défaut’ [lack] resulting from the disavowal of the essential animal. Just as the troubling trigger for the transformation in Tyolet involves the transition from flaying to metamorphosis, as one animal skin is removed, another is revealed. DERRIDA, AGAMBEN, AND THE WEREWOLF In the lai Bisclavret, attributed to Marie de France, a noble baron becomes a beast for three days per week. When questioned by his suspicious wife, he reluctantly reveals his secret, as well as where he hides his clothes, without which he cannot change back to a man. Horrified by what she has heard, the wife approaches a knight who has previously expressed interest in her, and together they steal the husband’s clothes, claim the husband has died, and marry one another. A year later, the wolf is found by the king who is out hunting. The wolf acts so humbly in begging for mercy that he is adopted by the court. When his wife and her new husband come to

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court he attacks them both fiercely and bites off the wife’s nose. Under interrogation from the king, the wife produces her erstwhile husband’s clothes. The wolf is left in the king’s bedchamber, where the baron is then found, restored to human form, asleep on the king’s bed. Everyone rejoices, and the story ends with the curious detail that some of the faithless wife’s daughters were born without noses. The anonymous lai Mélion has essentially the same plot as Bisclavret, although it is located within the Arthurian world, whereas the king in Bisclavret is unnamed. Mélion’s transformation is effected by a magic ring: his wife transforms him at his suggestion, but then runs off to Ireland with his squire. Mélion stows away on a boat to Ireland, where he teams up with ten (real) wolves, and they proceed to lay waste to the countryside. The ten wolves are eventually killed, and Arthur comes to Ireland. As in Bisclavret, the wolf charms the court with his noble behaviour, the one exception to which is a furious attack on his former squire. Arthur forces the squire to reveal the truth and the wife to give up the ring; Mélion is finally restored to his human form. The respective dating of these two lais is difficult to judge: Prudence Tobin, in her edition of a selection of anonymous lais (that is, those not attributed to Marie de France), concludes that the author of Mélion must have known Bisclavret, but is not able to rival Marie de France in literary skill.16 However, Nathalie Koble and Mireille Séguy, in their recent edition, which presents together lais attributed to Marie de France alongside some anonymous lais, point out the circular logic present in a great deal of work on the relationship between the attributed and anonymous lais:17 dispensing with the notion that Marie de France must have founded the lai genre and that the anonymous lais are therefore poor, later, imitations, Koble and Séguy leave open the question of influence and dating. Amanda Hopkins, in her online edition of Mélion, follows George Lyman Kittredge in his assertion that Mélion and Bisclavret derive independently from an earlier version of the tale.18 Dated by its editor to the early thirteenth century,19 Guillaume de Palerne may be read as a slightly later participant in, and respondent to, the ‘werewolf renaissance’. Irene Pettit McKeehan has argued that 16

Lais anonymes, p. 292. ‘C’est de manière générale sans remettre en doute, mais sans démontrer non plus, la prééminence à la fois chronologique et littéraire (chronologique parce que littéraire) des Lais de Marie de France’ [it is generally accepted, without questioning it, but without demonstrating it either, that the Lais of Marie de France are preeminent both in terms of literature and chronologically (in chronological terms because of literary ones)] (Lais bretons, ed. Koble and Séguy, p. 56). On this question, see also Griffin, ‘Gender and Authority’. 18 19 Melion and Biclarel, p. 21. Guillaume de Palerne, p. 23. 17

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Guillaume de Palerne derives from Mélion, pointing out that Guillaume de Palerne tends to mimic episodes that are similar to those in Mélion.20 Overlaps are also evident, however, between Bisclavret and Guillaume de Palerne: it seems reasonable to conclude that the author of Guillaume de Palerne would have known both lais, and reworked some of their concerns and locutions. The werewolf plot of Guillaume de Palerne is complemented with a series of other animal guises and disguises. At the beginning of this romance, a four-year-old prince, Guillaume, is kidnapped by a wolf. Although his parents are devastated, we learn that Guillaume’s uncle had been plotting to kill him, so this kidnap is in fact a rescue. The wolf is himself a Spanish prince, Alphonse, who was transformed into a wolf by his wicked stepmother, Brande. Guillaume is brought up by peasants, but he is discovered one day by the Emperor of Rome, who is out hunting. Impressed by Guillaume’s noble appearance, the Emperor takes him back to court, where Guillaume and the Emperor’s daughter, Melior, soon fall for one another. In order to avoid Melior being married off to a Greek prince, the couple flee from the court disguised in white bearskins. Alphonse the wolf helps them to survive in the wild. Guillaume, Melior, and Alphonse end up in Palermo, Guillaume’s home, and Guillaume’s mother eventually recognizes him. The King of Spain, who has been besieging the castle of Palermo, deduces that the wolf must be his son, and the stepmother who transformed Alphonse is summoned to restore his human form. At the end of the romance, Guillaume and Melior are married, and so are Alphonse and Florence, Guillaume’s sister. Although many instances of the transition between human and wolf can be found in the literature of the Middle Ages, the precise nature, appearance, and meaning of this transition are themselves subject to slippage and shifting.21 The protagonists of Bisclavret and Mélion are understood by Philippe Ménard as ‘véritables loups-garous’ [true werewolves], since their bodies seem capable of regular mutation between human and animal. By contrast, Ménard classifies Alphonse as a ‘faux loup-garou’ [false werewolf],22 since his is an imposed transformation. Similarly, although his name is echoed in the affliction of lycanthropy, Ovid’s Lycaon is not strictly speaking a werewolf, in that his is a one-way

McKeehan, ‘Guillaume de Palerne’. For descriptions and definitions of medieval werewolves see Dubost, Aspects, pp. 540–68; Harf-Lancner, ‘La Métamorphose illusoire’, p. 220; Lecouteux, Fées; Ménard, ‘Les Histoires’; Pairet, Mutacions, pp. 60–8; Suard, ‘ “Bisclauret” ’. 22 Ménard, ‘Les Histoires’, p. 214 and pp. 219–22. See also Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, p. 95. 20 21

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transformation, enacted as a divine punishment.23 Rather than worrying about whether a particular instance of lycanthropy ticks all the appropriate boxes, however, I would like to focus on what the texts themselves have to say about the categories of transformation, and about the categories that these transformations blur and merge. The opening lines of Bisclavret appear to offer a definition of the werewolf, but in fact end up troubling the issue even further via the introduction of a translation which both mirrors and works against the account of transformation being presented here.24 Quant de lais faire m’entremet, Ne voil ublier Bisclavret; Bisclavret ad nun en bretan, Garwalf l’apelent li Norman. Jadis le poeit hume oïr E sovent suleit avenir, Humes plusur garval devindrent E es boscages meisun tindrent. Garvalf, ceo est beste salvage; Tant cum il est en cele rage, Hummes devure, grant mal fait, Es granz forez converse e vait. Cest afere les ore ester; Del Bisclavret vus voil cunter. (Bisclavret, 1–14) [Since I’m undertaking to tell these lays, I do not wish to forget Bisclavret. Bisclavret is its name in Breton; the Normans call it Garulf. Long ago you could hear tales (for back then it used to happen often) of men who turned into werewolves and set up house in the woods. A werewolf is a savage beast: when it is in this rage, it devours men and wreaks great evil, going into the forest to live there. Now I shall leave that story aside: I want to tell you about the bisclavret.]

Matilda Bruckner argues that this prologue simultaneously proposes an identity and a difference between the ‘garwalf ’ and the ‘bisclavret’, which seems initially to be a Breton equivalent for the Norman word.25 The narrator of Bisclavret seems to announce her intention of leaving the more savage ‘garwalf ’ to one side in order to press on with the story of a

23 ‘canities eadem est, eadem violentia vultus, | idem oculi lucent, eadem feritatis imago est’ [There is the same grey hair, the same fierce face, the same gleaming eyes, the same picture of beastly savagery] (M, 1.237–9). 24 See McCracken, ‘Translation and Animals’. 25 Bruckner, ‘Of Men and Beasts’, pp. 254–5. See also Wood, ‘The Werewolf ’; Crane, Animal Encounters, pp. 55–7; and the note to line 2 of Bisclavret in Lais Bretons, ed. Koble and Séguy, p. 309.

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‘bisclavret’, which, this break implies, might be a different beast altogether:26 certainly, the point of this story is that the wolf is not at all ‘salvage’ [wild]. In fact, it is only by analogy with the ‘garwalf ’—an analogy which this prologue both forges and troubles—that we understand the transformation undergone by the protagonist of this lai to be lupine. Throughout the lai, his animal form is simply labelled ‘beste’.27 So what kind of ‘beste’ does Bisclavret become? His shape has certainly shifted to become something beastly and unlike his human appearance for him to be unrecognizable to his king, fellow-courtiers, and wife, but in Bisclavret we find ourselves in what Susan Crane describes as a ‘space of imagination that can do without the clarifying dichotomy between man and wolf ’,28 and instead investigates the common ground between knight and beast. It is the theriomorphous shape-shifting of the knight which is being emphasized here, rather than the exact shape into which he has shifted. The most precise we can be about the beastly shape beheld by the other characters in this lai is that garwalf is etymologically cognate with the modern English ‘werewolf ’; and that the other werewolf stories produced in French at around the same time definitively designate their beastly protagonist as a wolf.29 Highlighting the importance of translation for the Marie de France lais, Peggy McCracken sees little difference between the ‘garwalf ’ and the ‘bisclavret’,30 and certainly the definition of the French term in Guillaume de Palerne proves to be just as delicate as that of the Breton one was in Bisclavret: Li leus warox dont je vos di N’iert mie beste par nature, Si com ranconte l’escriture, Ançois eert hom et fix a roi. (GP, 274–7) [The werewolf I am telling you about was not a beast by nature, according to the written source, but he was a man and the son of a king.]

Whereas the ‘garwalf ’ in Bisclavret is a ‘beste salvage’, this etymologically identical ‘warox’ is not a ‘beste par nature’.31 When Alphonse is transfigured by Brande,

26 See Dubost, Aspects, p. 556; Mikhaïlova, Le Présent, p. 180; Benkov, ‘Naked Beast’, p. 28; Kinoshita and McCracken, Marie de France, p. 169. 27 28 See Guynn, ‘Hybridity’, p. 162. Crane, Animal Encounters, p. 48. 29 On the vocabulary of lycanthropy in these tales, and the differences between them, see Small, ‘The Medieval Werewolf Model’, pp. 82–5. 30 ‘The werewolf of Marie’s story seems to be a fit descendant of his ancestors rather than radically different from them’ (McCracken, ‘Translation and Animals’, pp. 214–15). 31 On possible etymologies of ‘bisclavret’ and ‘garwalf ’, see Loth, ‘Le lai’; Chotzen, ‘Bisclavret’; Bailey, ‘Bisclavret’; Bloch, The Anonymous Marie de France, p. 82.

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Son estre et sa samblance mue, Que leus devint et beste mue. Leus fu warox de maintenant; Ce que de lui fu aparant A tout perdu, son essiënt. (GP, 301–9) [She transforms his being and his appearance so that he became a wolf and a dumb beast. He was now a werewolf; he has lost everything of that which he formerly was, it seems to him.]

The rime équivoque in ‘mue’ [she transforms/dumb] of 305–6 draws attention to Alphonse’s continuing identity despite his stepmother’s evil spell. The homophonic quality of these words reminds us of the essential difficulty, played on throughout this romance, of discerning the difference between animal and human: despite having been ‘mué’ into a ‘beste mue’,32 Alphonse retains many of his human, noble characteristics. Correspondingly, the two halves of line 309 contradict one another: he has not ‘tout perdu’ [lost everything] if he retains the ‘essiënt’ [knowledge] to think that he has. If Alphonse retains the ability to know, then he retains something of what this romance understands as human ‘nature’. Similarly, the narrator of Mélion specifies, ‘Mais neporqant, se leus estoit, | Sens et memoire d’ome avoit’ [But nevertheless, even though he was a wolf, he had the intelligence and memory of a man] (Mélion, 217–18). The king in Bisclavret exclaims at the beast’s rational behaviour, and summons witnesses: « Seignurs, » fet il, avant venez! Ceste merveillë esgardez, Cum ceste beste s’humilie! Ele ad sen d’hume, merci crie. Chacez mei tuz ces chiens arere, Si gardez quë hum ne la fiere! Ceste beste ad entente e sen. (Bisclavret, 151–7) [‘My lords,’ he said, ‘come forward! Look at this wonder, how this beast humbles itself. It has a man’s intelligence, it begs for mercy. Chase all the dogs away, and stop anyone from striking him! This beast has understanding and sense!’]

Guillaume uses similar vocabulary, describing his werewolf companion as possessing ‘raison et sens’ [reason and intelligence] (GP, 4368). What is at stake in these three medieval French werewolf narratives, then, is the

32 As McCracken has also pointed out, Sconduto’s mistranslation of this expression leads to some serious misreading (McCracken, ‘Skin and Sovereignty’, p. 364; Sconduto, Metamorphoses of the Werewolf, pp. 98–114).

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discernment of ‘sen de hume’ [man’s intelligence] within the beast.33 The bisclavret, garwalf, or warox embodies the fusion of the categories of beast and human, yet the descriptions of the werewolves provided by these texts suggest that the fusion is not complete: the beast is without in that it is evident from its furry pelt, but it is not without the defining human quality of reason.34 The reiterated gazes of the courtly characters upon the body of the beast dramatize the scrutiny needed in order to identify the difference within this body. As Emma Campbell points out, a decision is needed as to what kind of body and behaviour can be understood as human, and what will be excluded as animal: and if that decision is not straightforward (as it is not in this lai or in Yonec, the other lai Campbell discusses), then these categories, traversed by physical transformation, must be less than clear-cut.35 It is the authority necessary to make this decision which Agamben identifies in the dénouement of Bisclavret, which he recounts in order to illustrate his formulation of ‘bare life’.36 According to Agamben’s reading, which focuses on the moment in the lai at which the werewolf resumes his human form in the king’s bedchamber, the werewolf is the ‘homo sacer’ of his title: the obscure figure of archaic Roman law, a man who may be killed but not sacrificed, whose life has no meaning but bare life.37 In Homo Sacer, Agamben argues, against Foucault, that the categories of sovereign power and biopolitics, rather than being distinct categories, in fact depend upon and produce one another. Agamben reads the werewolf as marking and occupying the threshold between nature and politics, between animal and human.38 That the werewolf ’s rehabilitation into the human world takes place on the king’s bed indicates for Agamben the intimate role played by sovereign power in interacting with bare life and producing biopolitical life, by choosing to include or to exclude bare life. However, it is in a later work of Agamben’s, The Open: Man and Animal, that we can find a more revealing concept for this exploration of the beast without. In The Open, Agamben’s argument focuses on the 33 As Sharon Kinoshita and Peggy McCracken observe, ‘despite his form, Bisclavret is still governed by social relations, remaining the king’s “man” even when his shape is that of a “beast” ’ (Marie de France, p. 71). 34 See Dunton-Downer, ‘Wolf Man’, p. 206. 35 Campbell, ‘Political Animals’. 36 ‘In Bisclavret, one of Marie de France’s most beautiful lays, both the werewolf ’s particular nature as the threshold of passage between nature and politics, animal world and human world, and the werewolf ’s close tie to sovereign power are presented with extraordinary vividness’ (Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 107). For a reading of Agamben on Bisclavret, see Labbie, Lacan’s Medievalism, pp. 83–4. 37 38 Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 8–9. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 107.

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way in which the animal is often used as a means of figuring human origin, presenting the animal as a thought experiment in the pre-linguistic origins of humanity. The animal, as it is deployed to stand for the primal mess from which humanity emerged triumphant, is, argues Agamben, a retrospective production; a projection of the instincts and desires which cause so much anxiety on to a fantasized originary entity, the beast.39 And therefore the dividing line between the animal and the human is in fact always-already situated within the human: The division of life into vegetal and relational, organic and animal, animal and human, therefore passes first of all as a mobile border within living man, and without this intimate caesura the very decision of what is human and what is not would probably not be possible. It is possible to oppose man to other living things, and at the same time to organize the complex—and not always edifying—economy of relations between men and animals, only because something like an animal life has been separated within man, only because his distance and proximity to the animal have been measured and recognized first of all in the closest and most intimate place.40

Agamben uses the term ‘intimate caesura’ to describe the way in which the human situates within itself the difference between itself and the animal. Humanity generates the category of the animal with its attendant lacks and meanings, and then locates them outside the limits of the human, to be scrutinized and objectified. All three werewolves, then, are observed by the human characters to display behaviour which appears to be motivated by the same ‘sens’ the human characters use to deduce that the animals before them must have some human traits.41 Steel traces various medieval understandings of the human body as an inevitable reflection of human rationality,42 and it is hard not to share the ‘merveille’ [wonder] experienced by Tyolet and the kings in Mélion and Bisclavret as they behold an animal which does not seem to lack this uniquely human trait. However, the lack of reason in the animal is an argument which quickly becomes problematic. As Richard Sorabji shows, it is difficult to pin down a sustained definition of reason which is manifested solely by humans, to the complete exclusion of animals: ‘It all sounded rather grand’, he opines, ‘when Aristotle said

39 Bridget Behrmann also uses this section of Agamben’s theory in order to discuss werewolves, in ‘Quel beste’ (pp. 338–9), but she uses it to discuss the way in which the eponymous hero of Guillaume de Palerne is defined. 40 Agamben, The Open, pp. 15–16. 41 See de Leemans and Klemm, ‘Animals and Anthropology’. 42 Steel, How to Make a Human, pp. 44–60.

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that we have reason and they don’t’; but such distinctions are, he argues difficult to maintain.43 For both Derrida and Agamben, the category of animal is both empty and invented by humans to impose on that which they fairly arbitrarily designate as nonhuman. But whereas Agamben understands the difference between the categories of human and animal to reside in the constant attempts to separate them (with the aid of what he calls the ‘anthropological machine’44), for Derrida, humans are animals, and to insist otherwise just reinforces our ‘bêtise’ [stupidity/beastliness]. In L’Animal que donc je suis, Derrida points out that it is not so much what nonhuman animals lack that is important in the traditional philosophical representation of them, it is that they are essentially lacking—lacking whatever it is which is defined as ‘le propre de l’homme’. The problem is that ‘le propre de l’homme’ turns out never to be singular, but, like Mélion and his wolves, to hunt in packs. La liste des « propres de l’homme » forme toujours une configuration, dès le premier instant. Pour cette raison même, elle ne se limite jamais à un seul trait et elle n’est jamais close: par structure, elle peut aimanter un nombre non fini d’autres concepts, à commencer par le concept de concept.45 [The list of ‘what is proper to man’ always forms a configuration, from the very start. For this very reason, it can never be limited to a single characteristic and it is never complete: in its structure, it can attract an infinite number of other concepts, beginning with the concept of concept.]

However, by this stage in his argument Derrida has already introduced a possible interpretation of ‘le propre des bêtes’ [what is proper to beasts]. This thesis is ostensibly inspired by Derrida’s reaction to his cat looking at him while he (Derrida) is naked. Discomfited by the cat’s intense gaze, yet aware that the shame he feels is an entirely human product, rather than the result of the cat’s disapproval, Derrida muses on the significance of nudity for the nonhuman animal: Le propre des bêtes, et ce qui les distingue en dernière instance de l’homme, c’est d’être nus sans le savoir [ . . . ] Dès lors, nus sans le savoir, les animaux ne seraient pas, en vérité, nus.46 [That which is proper to beasts, and which distinguishes them in the last instance from man, is to be naked without knowing it. Consequently, naked without knowing it, animals would not, in truth, be naked.]

43 44 45

Sorabji, Animal Minds, p. 2. See also Steel, How to Make a Human, pp. 12–14. Agamben, The Open, p. 26. See Calarco, Zoographies, pp. 79–102. 46 Derrida, L’Animal, p. 19. Derrida, L’Animal, p. 19.

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In not being aware of their nudity, animals, projected by the human as the source of the unsettling, radically other gaze, are precisely lacking in that they are unaware that they are lacking. Beasts are without, then, in the sense that they do not know that they are without; Derrida’s analysis also suggests that it is humans who are beasts within, encased in clothing and obscure language. The distinction between nudity and the awareness of it is crucial in the understanding of the human within the beast in Bisclavret, Mélion, and Guillaume de Palerne. Mélion’s transformation is initiated by the magic ring, but it is not until he has taken off his clothes that he is a wolf: just before he does so, he issues his wife with the doomed instruction ‘ma despoille me gardés’ [guard my clothes for me] (Mélion, 168). The first reaction of the wife in Bisclavret to her husband’s revelation of his lycanthropy is to ask ‘S’il se despuille u vet vestu’ [if he takes off his clothes or if he goes dressed] (Bisclavret, 69).47 This werewolf is unable to change back into human form without changing back into his clothes.48 When his wife eventually reveals their whereabouts, the wolf shows a studied lack of interest in reclothing himself. A wise man explains this odd reaction: Cil ne fereit pur nule rien, Que devant vus ses dras reveste Ne mut la semblance de beste. Ne savez mie que ceo munte: Mut durement en ad grant hunte. (284–8) [He wouldn’t for anything put his clothes back on in front of you nor change his beastly shape. You don’t know what this shows: he is very ashamed.]

This ‘hunte’ [shame] resonates with the ‘pudeur’ [modesty] Derrida claims to feel when looked at, naked, by his cat. Nudity, as Adam and Eve realize when they’re looked at by the serpent, is not simply a state of being unclothed,49 but the consciousness that one is unclothed. 47

For readings of the removal of clothing as a metaphor for uncovering the truth in Bisclavret, see Freeman, ‘Dual Natures’ and Benkov, ‘Naked Beast’. 48 ‘Puisque les bêtes n’ont pas d’habits et que les vêtements sont le propre de l’homme, il suffit d’enlever ses vêtements dans un lieu écarté pour renoncer à la condition humaine et devenir un animal’ [Since beasts do not have garments and since clothes are that which is proper to man, it is enough that they take off their clothes in an isolated spot in order to renounce the human condition and become an animal] (Ménard, ‘Les Histoires’, p. 219). Petronius’s Satyricon states that the werewolf undresses and then urinates around his clothes during the process of transformation. Dubost, Aspects, pp. 541–2; Lecouteux, Fées, p. 134; Bacou, ‘De quelques loups-garous’, p. 46; Pairet, Mutacions, p. 61. 49 For more on the importance of the serpent in the understanding of the human body, see Chapter 4.

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Whereas Derrida’s cat is not naked because it does not know it is, Bisclavret would be naked if the court thought he was. This is the thinking which lies behind advice issued by Gauvain (in Mélion) and the wise man (in Bisclavret): En une chambre l’en menrés, Tot seul a seul priveement, Quë il n’ait honte de la gent. (Mélion, 540–2) [You shall lead him into a chamber, just the two of you, privately, so that he is not ashamed by the people.] En tes chambres le fai mener E la despoille od lui porter; Une grant piece l’i laissums. S’il devient hum, bien le verums. (Bisclavret, 289–92) [Have him taken into your chambers with his clothes. We’ll leave him there for a while. If he becomes a man, we’ll see it well.]

This last line is ambiguous, for of course the court will precisely not see the wolf becoming man: the transformation takes place in a separate, privileged space, away from the court’s prying eyes.50 What the court does see is the effect of the transformation having taken place. However, the transformation in Guillaume de Palerne offers us a possible glimpse of what the court might have seen if the beasts in Bisclavret and Mélion had become men in front of spectators. As she reverses her spell, Brande becomes a surrogate viewer for the romance’s audience and readers, as she is faced with a naked, mortified young man: Cil voit son samblant et son cors Qui tous sans dras et nus estoit Et devant lui la dame voit; Tel honte en a tos en tressue. La dame en est toute esperdue, A li l’apele, se li dist: « Sire, por Dieu qui tos nos fist, Ne te vergoigne pas de moi Se je tot nu, sans dras, te voi: N’a ci se nos seulement non. Ne voi en toi riens se bien non Ne chose qui estre n’i doie. » (GP, 7749–60) [He sees his appearance and his body which is all unclothed and nude. And before him he sees the lady. He is so ashamed that is utterly disconcerted. The lady is alarmed; she calls to him, saying, ‘Sir, by God who made us all, don’t be ashamed 50 Agamben’s point in citing this lai in Homo Sacer is precisely that ‘Bisclavret’s final transformation back into a human takes place on the very bed of the sovereign’ (p. 108).

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on my account, if I see you naked without any clothes. We’re the only ones here. I don’t see anything but good in you, nor can I see anything which shouldn’t be there.’]

The repetition of forms of the verb ‘voir’, and all the rhymes within and at the end of the lines which surround it in this scene, reinforce the importance of the gaze for the shame displayed by Alphonse, Bisclavret, and, potentially, Mélion. Brande’s solace sounds a little as if she is protesting too much, certainly her lengthy reassurance emphasizes Alphonse’s exposure: although she claims not to see anything which should not be there, surely the point of Alphonse’s reaction is that he should be wearing clothes, but is not. Bynum dismisses explanations which posit the cause of this shame as ‘merely [ . . . ] a comment on their “civilized” anxiety about nakedness’, but I would argue that what is at stake here is a profound and telling ‘hunte’ or ‘pudeur’, which functions as a reminder of the essential nakedness, the defining human ‘défaut’ [lack].51 As Derrida puts it, ‘ce propre de l’homme comme défaut de propriété’ [that which is proper to man as the lack of property] (L’animal, p. 70).52 The naked truth about nudity, as William Burgwinkle and Cary Howie have pointed out in relation to medieval hagiography, is that it is by no means unambiguous.53 Quite the opposite, human nudity is the sign of human lack: a lack which needs to be covered, yet is ever shifting. Agamben’s ‘intimate caesura’ draws attention to the way in which the division between what is categorized as human and what is categorized as animal runs through human behaviour, language, and bodies, a division on the inside where we would expect clear-cut external boundaries. Lucas Wood invokes another theoretical topological figure in which inside and outside seem to flip back and forth when he described the werewolf in Bisclavret (although this is equally pertinent to Mélion and Alphonse) as a ‘Möbius strip that turns the inner self into a surface and then retrojects that manifest identity onto the human being as its essential nature’.54 I want to bear this figure in mind as I shift my focus from the metamorphoses undergone by the werewolves in Bisclavret, Mélion, and Guillaume de Palerne in this section, to examine more closely the role of skins

51 As Mikhaïlova says of Bisclavret’s wife, ‘Le plus terrifiant pour la femme semble le détail des vêtements et de la nudité de son mari’ [the most terrifying aspect for the wife seems to be the detail of her husband’s clothes and nudity] (Le Présent, p. 182). 52 See Oliver, Animal Lessons, pp. 142–7. 53 Burgwinkle and Howie, Sanctity and Pornography, p. 2. 54 Wood, ‘The Werewolf ’, p. 5.

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(human nakedness, beastly furriness) in these texts’ attempts to distinguish between the categories of human and animal.

THE SKIN BENEATH THE SKIN Katie Walter argues that, ‘skin is understood as both that which shapes the human and that which makes it readable’.55 In this section, I shall explore what the implications are when human skin shifts shape, changes texture, and takes on a different cultural connotation to become the pelt of a beast. Anticipating Derrida by several centuries, Le Roman des romans, a twelfthcentury Anglo-Norman treatise, questions the logic by which the defining lack of anything proper—in the sense of property and propriety—is used to justify humanity’s dominance over animals. Exploring the depravity of all estates of human society, the anonymous author of Le Roman des romans observes that human beings are not only rotten morally, but their bodies are so pathetically fragile that they are alone in needing the skin of other animals to cover them. In order to defamiliarize this behaviour, the anonymous author inverts it, portraying the horrified reaction of both humans and animals to the idea that a human might be flayed and his skin worn by another species: Ki d’un mort home voldreit le quir oster Mult en porreit les vifs espoënter, Mais ne savez si vil beste nomer Ki s’en deignast pur besoin afubler.56 [Whoever would wish to take the skin off a dead man would greatly horrify the living, but I cannot name any beast vile enough to stoop to wrap itself in it out of necessity.]

The inversion of human and animal is rendered graphically physical here: this imagined animal clothed in human skin is a rather repellent image of the beast within, emphasizing that encasing the human body in animal skin both establishes the human body as superior and emphasizes its vulnerability, its nakedness, its ‘défaut’. The lining and layering of the skins of humans and nonhumans foregrounded and inverted by the Roman des romans represents another troubling of the fundamental relationship between inside and outside, and can be imagined as a Möbius strip. This counter-intuitive topological figure is a loop with a twist in the surface, so that if you start on the outside 55 56

Walter, ‘The Form of the Formless’, p. 121. Le Roman des romans, ed. Lecompte, 161–4.

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and follow a line all the way around, you end up on the inside. It is a threedimensional figure which seems only to have one side. Lacan refers at various points in his work to the Möbius strip in order to figure his reassessment of a series of binaries as continuous and linked rather than polarized. Specifically, he proposes this particular topological figure as a model for the paradox inherent in a subject’s wish not to desire: Le sujet sait que ne pas vouloir désirer a en soi quelque chose d’aussi irréfutable que cette bande de Mbius qui n’a pas d’envers, à savoir qu’à le parcourir, on reviendra mathématiquement à la surface qui serait supposée la doubler.57 [The subject knows that not to wish to desire has in itself something as irrefutable as that Möbius band which has no other side, such that when you trace over it, you end up mathematically on the surface which is supposed to be its double/lining.]

The subject understands that he can never fully understand himself from without: he can never desire the lack of desire because desire itself is founded on lack—it is nicely paradoxical that Lacan uses a figure of continuity to talk about the constitutive lack of desire and subjectivity. The depiction of theriomorphous transformation in werewolf narratives implies that the human and the animal ‘double[nt]’ [double/line] one another in Lacan’s terms: they function as doubles in the figure of the werewolf,58 but, as the figure of the Möbius strip indicates, they also function as the lining for one another.59 Discussing the way in which human status relies on the use of animal skins, from the ermine to the squirrel, the Roman des romans points out that, ‘La sabeline senz nul recuseür | Est de sa pel vestue a chascun jur’ [without any tailor, the sable is dressed in her skin every day] (Roman des romans, 153–4). Whereas the sable does not need to be sewn into its skin in Guillaume de Palerne, Guillaume and Melior do need to be sewn into theirs by Alexandrine, Melior’s cousin and confidante. Close attention is paid in the narrative to the process of layering and stitching as they don the bearskins over their clothes:

57

Lacan, Le Séminaire XI, p. 213. Lecouteux suggests that the werewolf ’s discarded clothes are themselves a double for his human body (Fées, pp. 134–5). 59 Cohen speaks of the body as a Möbius strip, but, once more, where he sees ‘motion cours[ing] constantly between inside and outside, undermining the utility of maintaining such frail distinctions’ (Of Giants, p. xvii), I would argue that this figure reminds us of the importance of the surface in medieval attempts to keep human and nonhuman separate. 58

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Cascuns a traite sa main nue Fors de la pel c’avoit vestue, Car cele qui es piax les mist A l’enkeudrë ensi le fist Que chascun puet sa main avoir Si com lui plaist, a son voloir. (GP, 3321–6) [They each stuck their naked hand out of the skin that they had put on, for she who had put them into the skin stitched it so that they could each have their hands as it pleased them, as they wished.]

The focus on the interface between the lovers and their disguises is highlighted by the rhyme of ‘nue’/‘vestue’, reflecting upon the relationship between identity and the various surfaces which are being placed under and over each other here. McCracken’s meticulous reading of this passage is illuminating: she comments on the rich interplay between human nakedness and its covering with bearskin in a romance written by hand on skin: Not only [ . . . ] is the skin a ground against which the human hand becomes newly visible in its possible relation to animal skin, but the reaching hand may also foreground the skin as a surface—the hand also makes the skin newly visible.60

Specifically, play is made on Melior’s name and the fact that the bearskin is placed over her best clothes: Par le commant au damoisel Sor Melior l’a estendue; Ensi comme ele estoit vestue De ses garnemens les millors L’a encousue en la piau d’ors. (GP, 3074–8) [At the young man’s command, she stretched the skin over Melior, just as she was dressed in her best clothes, she stitched her into the bearskin.]

Melior’s clothes, the layer between her own skin and the bearskin, are ‘millors’: they resonate with and represent her superior qualities as a romance heroine. Her aristocratic garments, then, are both the ‘double’ of her aristocratic status and the ‘doublure’, the lining, of the bearskin into which she is stitched.61 This supports E. Jane Burns’ observation that, in medieval romance, ‘clothes are seen as material objects balanced on the McCracken, ‘Skin and Sovereignty’, p. 366. For Pairet, the use of animal skins as disguise highlights ‘La symétrie entre l’homme et la bête’ [the symmetry of man and beast] (Mutacions, p. 65), and she describes Alphonse’s relationship to Guillaume as ‘son double, sinon sa doublure’ [his double, if not his lining] (p. 66). 60 61

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threshold between culture and nature’:62 they mark the boundary between the inside and outside, often via the use of animal skin. By the time Alphonse, Guillaume, and Melior arrive in Palermo, the lovers have had to change their bearskins for deerskins: as they change disguises, they notice that their fine courtly clothes are stained by the inside of the bear pelts, a reminder of the intimate layering of human skin, costly woven fabric, and animal skin. From the palace window, Queen Felice sees the disguised lovers, whose deerskin disguises have shrunk and split in the sun, so much, Que contreval par les coustures Lor saillent hors les vesteüres, Lor porpres indes et vermeilles. Molt vient la dame a grant merveilles, Quant les dras voit des piax issir. (GP, 5097–101) [That all along the seams emerged their garments, purple and red. The lady was amazed that she could see clothes appearing from the skins.]

This is an extraordinary image of skin parting just enough to reveal clothes underneath, rather than the reverse: we might think here of the threadbare and ragged dress in which Erec and the reader first see Enide in Chrétien de Troyes’s romance.63 The convention of lining or edging woven cloth with animal fur is reversed here, as the sumptuous fabrics of Melior’s clothes line the deerskin.64 Despite having come into contact with the underside of the various animal skins which have covered them, the clothes Felice glimpses poking from the split seams of the ill-fitting deerskins are still recognizably splendid: Melior is still distinguished by her ‘garnemens les millors’. Seemingly following her chaplain’s advice, Felice has herself sewn into a deerskin so that she can approach the lovers unsuspected. Felice’s disguise is convincing enough that Guillaume and Melior take her for a deer. Melior remarks that the deer does not seem to be frightened of them, and Guillaume’s reply is ironic in its erroneous assumption of the point of view of the other: ‘Bele, ele a droit | Ne nos cuide autres qu’ele voit’ [Fair one, she is right: she doesn’t think we are anything other than what she sees] (GP, 4199–200). Whereas Derrida is troubled by the animal’s gaze upon his naked body, Guillaume and Melior believe themselves to be covered and therefore opaque to the imagined animal gaze. In a scene which reworks the Edenic motifs of the garden, the male and female concealed 62 63 64

Burns, Courtly Love Undressed, p. 13. Erec et Enide, 402–10. On this passage see Wright, Weaving Narrative, pp. 56–7. On fur as lining, see Heller, Fashion, p. 177.

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bodies and a powerful interlocutor who sees through that concealment, it is not their nudity that Melior and Guillaume have covered, it is their clothing, as they try to present themselves as animals who are naked, by definition, without knowing it. Trying to reassure the startled lovers, Felice tells them ‘Si sui tex beste comme vos’ [I am the same beast as you] (GP, 5224), a statement which itself takes on a number of layers of revelation and concealment one way of understanding what Felice is saying here is that she is defining herself and the lovers as animals who pretend to be other animals by wearing their skin. It is suggested, then, that humans are both animals outside and inside their skins: this is evident in a line which is repeated verbatim in the sole surviving manuscript of the romance, used to refer first to Guillaume and then to Alphonse. As Guillaume and Melior listen to their trackers approach, Guillaume wishes that he had his armour with him so that his true identity as a knight would be apparent: Se j’avoie mes garnemens, Cheval, escu, espee et lance, Par tans verroient ma puissance, Saroient au commencier l’uevre Quel beste ceste piax acuevre. (GP, 4050–4) [If I had my garments, horse, shield, sword, and lance, in time they would see my strength. They would know at the beginning of their task what beast this skin covers.]

His chivalric equipment, Guillaume implies, would frame his body such that it would be understood as the correct kind of ‘beste’.65 It is worth noting that two of the chivalric necessities Guillaume laments involve nonhuman animals: the horse, without which, as Cohen has pointed out, it is impossible for a chevalier to be truly described as such; and the shield, which would have been made by stretching skin over a framework (in a similar way to the stretching of calfskin or sheepskin to make vellum, or, less obviously, the way in which the bearskin is stretched over Melior in her best clothes). In other words, Guillaume requires covering to expose his internal truth, and to show to those who are following him that he is a beast like them.66 This last line is echoed by Brande as she prepares to restore Alphonse to his human form: Mais or verron tot en apert, Ançois que je fenisse m’uevre, Quel beste ceste piax acuevre. (GP, 7690–2) 65 66

See Schiff, ‘Cross-Channel Becomings-Animal’, p. 432. See Behrmann, ‘Quel beste’; and McCracken, ‘Skin and Sovereignty’, pp. 373–4.

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[But now we will see completely clearly, before my work is done, what beast this skin covers.]

In both these examples, then, the ‘beste’ beneath the animal skin is a noble human, presently unrecognizable as such because he is covered in the wrong kind of skin.67 Once he is arrayed in ermine—a fur which, in the medieval ‘vocabulary of fur’,68 has a completely different meaning from wolfskin (or bearskin, or deerskin)—Alphonse is understood correctly by the joyful gaze of the court:69 Apresté sont li garnement, Merveilles riche et bon et bel, D’un siglaton frés et novel, Vert, a crois d’or estincelé, D’un blanc hermine tot forré; Et quanqu’estuet a chevalier Por bel son cors apareillier Par .I. vallet porter le font, Et il tot .IIII. aprés s’en vont. Li autre sont en grant desir Que le vallet puissent veïr. (GP, 7832–42) [The garments are made ready for him: they are wondrously rich and fine and handsome, made of a new, fresh green silk speckled with golden crosses, and white ermine fur, and whatever a knight needs to dress his body finely. They had all this brought by a young man, and he had four others following him. The others were all very eager to see the young man.]

In Susan Small’s words, ‘it is only the combination of his perfect human body and the sumptuous perfection of the clothing he is offered that restores his social skin’.70 Guillaume and Melior also get reclothed in the right kind of fur, so that the ‘happy ending’ in which everyone is married off to the right person is also underlined by the fact that everyone is wearing the right skin on top of their human nakedness. It is not just Alphonse who can be described as a versipellis, the Latin term for werewolf, meaning ‘skin-turning’: as Pairet points out, all the characters in this romance change their skin.71 This play between animal skins which mark human rank and pelts which conceal human identity points to the crucial role of clothing as a figure for the intimate caesura, the suture which divides and joins the animal and human, inside and outside. While 67 For Hartley R. Miller, Guillaume starts to aspire to his noble destiny when he is clothed in the mysteriously white bearskin (‘Hey! You Look Like a Prince!’, p. 355). 68 This phrase is taken from Abbott, ‘What Becomes a Legend Most?’, p. 6. 69 See Régnier-Bohler, ‘Le Corps’, p. 58. 70 71 Small, ‘The Medieval Werewolf Model’, p. 86. Pairet, Mutacions, p. 65.

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the exchange between skins and clothes takes place on the surface of the characters’ bodies in Guillaume de Palerne, I disagree with Small when she describes the changes that take place in this romance as ‘superficial’ in comparison with those in other werewolf narratives.72 Alphonse, Guillaume, and Melior may be ‘overclothed’ in skins taken from nonhuman animals, but this does not mean that this skin does not reveal a profound identity. Kay advocates ‘an ethics of medieval reading located on the surface as opposed to in the so-called depths of a text’,73 and these narratives of transformation precisely draw attention to the exchange between under and over, covering and nakedness, skin and flesh.

QUI SUIS-JE? : THE KNIGHT’S ANIMAL BODY Derrida reflects on the uncanny feeling of being ‘à poil devant un chat qui vous regarde sans bouger, juste pour voir’ [stark naked before a cat who looks at you without moving, just to see],74 and describes the power of this animal gaze: l’expérience originale, une et incomparable de cette malséance qu’il y aurait à paraître nu en vérité, devant le regard insistant de l’animal, un regard bienveillant ou sans pitié, étonné ou reconnaissant. Un regard de voyant, de visionnaire ou d’aveugle extra-lucide.75 [The single, incomparable, and original experience of the impropriety that would come from appearing in truth naked, before the insistent gaze of an animal, a benevolent or pitiless gaze; astonished or perceptive. A gaze of a seer, a visionary, or of the extraordinarily lucid blind.]

In Derrida’s description of his strange shame before his cat’s gaze—an uneasiness for which he combines ‘animal’ and ‘malséance’ and coins the neologism ‘animalséance’—the animal and the human exchange characteristics. While the cat is thought to be ‘bienveillant ou sans pitié, étonné ou reconnaissant’, Derrida presents his naked body as ‘à poil’ [literally ‘with (animal) hair’]—the idiomatic phrase for ‘nude’ which carries with it connotations of animal fur. Human nakedness, then, draws attention to the animality of the human body—an animality of which, unlike nonhuman animals, humans are ashamed. Perhaps if Bisclavret or Mélion were to approach their clothes in view of the court, they would be understood as ‘à poil’: they are wary of their furry pelts being reinterpreted as human nudity. In this section, I shall explore a series of examples from 72 74

73 Small, ‘The Medieval Werewolf Model’, p. 85. Kay, ‘Legible Skin’, p. 20. 75 Derrida, L’Animal, p. 18. Derrida, L’Animal, p. 18.

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late medieval prose romances which bring into focus this slippage between human and nonhuman skin specifically in relation to the body of the knight, coming back to the essential animality of chivalry articulated in Tyolet’s desire to become a ‘chevalier-beste’. The first of these late medieval prose romances is the lengthy, sprawling pseudo-history of Arthurian Britain, Perceforest;76 the second is the much shorter but no less action-packed Conte du Papegau, often seen as a degenerate member of the Arthurian corpus, unworthy of acclaim because of its shocking and parodic treatment of a number of Arthurian tropes and characters.77 These texts, then, self-consciously position themselves as inheritors to and commentators on earlier verse romance: one of the ways in which they set up this reflective stance involves a scrutiny of the chivalric identity and body. Exploring the origins of tropes which were, by this stage in medieval literature, well known, if not well worn, Perceforest and the Papegau both invoke animal imagery to delineate and define the knight. Although for Pairet, ‘La beste est devenue une métaphore du chevalier’ [the beste has become a metaphor for the knight],78 in these texts, the knight and the beast are two entities fused into one body. The narrative of Estonné’s transformation in Perceforest has many similarities with Bisclavret.79 Although Estonné is transformed into a bear rather than a wolf, and this transformation is as a unique result of a punishment by the fairy queen, Lydoire, rather than a regular occurrence, the similarity lies once more in the distinction between the courtly knight within and the animal body without.80 Estonné’s transformation also brings into sharper focus the difference between internal identity and external appearance, which is at play in the werewolf narratives I discussed earlier. Estonné becomes mué en semblance d’un ours a la veue de tous ceulx qui le regardoient, et luy mesme le cuida estre vrayement et eut en luy grant partie de la nature d’un ours. (II.i, 322) [transformed into the semblance of a bear in the eyes of all those who looked at him; he himself thought himself truly to be a bear and there was in him a large part of a bear’s nature.]

76

On the dating of this work, see Ferlampin-Acher, Perceforest et Zéphir. See Gaucher, ‘Le Chevalier au Papegau’; Lacy, ‘Convention and Innovation’; Berthelot, ‘Arthur’. 78 Pairet, Mutacions, p. 67. 79 See Delcourt, ‘Magie, fiction, et phantasme’, p. 168; and Huot, Postcolonial Fictions, p. 51–2. 80 See my article, ‘Animal Origins’. 77

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We might, using Agamben’s terminology, say that Lydoire has repositioned the intimate caesura so that what has been changed is the way that Estonné is perceived by others and by himself. Not entirely human, nor entirely bear, this beast has some ‘sens de hume’: plus de sens avoit que ce que elle fust beste naturelle, combien que l’enchantement de la royne luy en eust tollu la plus grant partie. (II.i, 325) [He had more intelligence than if he had been a natural beast, although the queen’s enchantment had taken most of it from him.]

Estonné’s body and ‘sens’ are marked by both the human and the animal. His identity is riven with the ‘intimate caesura’, the suture which divides and joins the animal and human, in a line which transects both body and soul, inside and outside. The bear is again described as being in possession of ‘sens’ when he almost loses it through rage at the sight of his three owners being attacked by evil, rapacious knights descended from the maleficent Darnant: ‘il fut si courroucié que a pou qu’il n’yssoit du sens’ [he was so angry that he nearly lost his mind] (II.i, 326). This near-departure from his ‘sens’ is triggered by a civilized, not to say chivalrous, response: that of a need to defend women from rape.81 His furious and fatal attack on the knights is all the more remarkable because he uses their own swords and shields against them. In a strange configuration of animal body and chivalric equipment, the bear is described as wielding a sword in ‘la dextre pate’ [his right paw] (II.i, 327). The king and queen are faced with the extraordinary sight of a beast using chivalric weapons to defeat knights who were in thrall to their base, brutal instincts: Sy en avoit le roy et la royne tresgrant merveille comment telle beste, qui est rude et pesant de sa nature, se puet ne scet si bien deffendre ne soy sçavoir si bien couvrir de l’escu ne ferir de l’espee. (II.i, 327) [The king and the queen were greatly amazed that such a beast, crude and lumbering in its nature, could, or even knew how to, defend itself, and that it knew how to protect itself with the shield and strike with the sword.]

Their reaction at the sight of a beast demonstrating chivalric attributes recalls the ‘merveille’ of the kings and princes in Bisclavret, Mélion, and Guillaume de Palerne, and that of the naïve young man in Tyolet. The bear—or the bear whom this knight now appears to be and believes himself to be—becomes the pet of a maiden at court, Priande, to whom he is in fact already betrothed. The change in Estonné’s body means that 81 For the significance of the prohibition of rape in the founding of the civilization in Perceforest, see Huot, Postcolonial Fictions, pp. 73–8.

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Priande does not recognize him; the change in his mind, or ‘nature’, means that he does not recognize her. Nevertheless, this occasions the bear’s new name: Mais sur toute riens l’ours sievoit Priande et avoit chier sa compaignie, dont tous ceulx de l’ostel l’appelloient Priant et a tel nom il venoit et non par autre. (II.i, 325) [But most of all the bear followed Priande and loved her company, so that all those in the lodging called him Priant: he answered to that name and no other.]

The animal that Estonné now is, is renamed because of the woman he now follows. Yet the story of the betrothal of Estonné and Priande, before Estonné’s ursine transformation, is also marked with this process of exchange between the animal and the human. Riding in the Scottish wilderness Estonné discovered some feral children, ‘tous nudz, fors qu’ilz estoient envelopez de peaulx de moutons’ [completely naked, apart from being wrapped in sheepskins] (II.i, 5)—we might say they are running around ‘à poil’. Estonné scoops up one of these children, and—in a gesture reminiscent of Guillaume de Palerne in its reframing of a human body’s rank via a new animal skin—substitutes his own cloak for her sheepskin garment. When he takes her back to Lydoire at court, the queen names the savage child as a reminder that the people of Scotland are descended from the sister of King Priam of Troy, yet themselves seem to have forgotten their illustrious heritage: ‘je l’ay appellee depuis Priande a la recommendacion de sa lignie, qui ne fait pas a oublier’ [I have since named her Priande to commemorate her lineage, which should not be forgotten] (II.i, 21).82 So Estonné, when he is turned into a bear, is renamed Priant—Priam—after a wild girl, whose civilized roots were signalled by her being named after the Trojan king. Priant is, of course, a much more suitable name for a knight than Estonné. The mutation between a heroic bear named after a Trojan king, and a knight with Trojan origins whose name refers to a rather undignified state of befuddlement, encapsulates the circularities of origin, cause, and effect which mark the relations between humans and animals in this cyclical text.83 In a manner of which Derrida would no doubt have approved, the Perceforest author plays on the knight’s name: an evil knight strikes the bear so hard, ‘que l’escu ala feindre sur la teste de l’ours si dur qu’il en fut tout estonné’ [that the shield struck the bear’s head with such force that he was completely stunned by it] (II.i, 327). The bear is ‘tout estonné’ in the 82 83

On colonization via naming, see Huot, Postcolonial Fictions, pp. 31–2. See Griffin, ‘Animal Origins’.

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sense that he is momentarily stunned by this assault, but also in the sense that he is acting entirely in the way that Estonné the knight would act: there is a strong echo here of the description of Estonné’s stunning performance at the tournament in the previous part of the romance: Et sachiez que Estonné, a qui le nom venoit de sa nature, se deffendoit si estonneement qu’il n’y regardoit ne sens ne catel, car il frappoit sur eulx sy habandonneement qu’il ne luy challoit ou. (I.i, 177) [And you should know that Estonné, whose name came from his nature, defended himself so stunningly that he had no thought of sense or wellbeing, for he struck them with such abandon that he did not care where he struck.]

‘Étonné’ is one of the attitudes Derrida projects on to his cat as he considers its inscrutable gaze; and here too this attribute crosses back and forth between the human and the nonhuman. As a knight, Estonné is characterized by a lack of control, a disregard of the ‘sens’ he has as a bear, where he wields his sword and shield with more apparent discrimination. Since name and ‘nature’ are explicitly connected in this description of nascent chivalric behaviour, it is quite appropriate that, when Estonné’s ‘nature’ changes during his transformation, his name follows suit.84 When Lydoire restores him to human appearance, Estonné believes himself to be waking from a dream, and as he comes round he wonders to himself, ‘Qui es tu? N’es tu pas Estonné?’ [Who are you? Are you not Estonné?] (II.i, 329). ‘Estonné’ could be read here as a proper noun or an adjective: Estonné reworks Tyolet’s question to express it in the first person. He might also wonder, as Derrida recurrently does in L’Animal, echoing Descartes, ‘Mais moi, qui suis-je?’ [But me, who am I/whom do I follow?].85 Who am I? What animal am I? And whom am I following?—in other words, on whom or what do I base my conception of myself? The answer to these questions, I would argue, can be found in the exchange between human and nonhuman in what Cohen calls the ‘chivalric circuit’.86 Estonné’s name is first articulated and explained in the Perceforest in the context of the very first tournament to be held in Britain.87 This most spectacular and reiterated performance of chivalric identity is an invention of none other than Alexander the Great, who arrives in Britain after being blown off course during a voyage to Babylon, to find it a savage place, the 84 On the possible etymology of Estonné’s name, see Ferlampin-Acher, Perceforest et Zéphir, pp. 22–3. 85 For example, Derrida, L’Animal, p. 77, p. 79. 86 See Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, pp. 45–71. 87 See Ferlampin-Acher, Perceforest et Zéphir, p. 102.

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valiant Trojan roots of its inhabitants having been forgotten and degraded.88 Alexander is inspired to initiate an ‘esbanoy qui fut puis nommé tournoy’ [entertainment which was then called a tournament] (I.i, 117) by the memory of his marine adventures, in which he observed fighting fish from his ingeniously crafted glass submarine. In Alexandre de Paris’s twelfth-century version the Roman d’Alexandre, the emperor witnesses the interspecies struggle for survival between fish, and gleans an analogical (and, for an emperor bent on conquering the known world, unsurprising) lesson from their behaviour, which he applies upon his return to dry land: ‘Qui bien se puet deffendre des autres est garis’ [He who can defend himself well against others is safe].89 The Alexander of the Perceforest rewrites this episode as he recalls it: 90 it is now claimed that the emperor observed some ‘chevaliers de mer’ [knights of the sea], who seemed to joust before Alexander’s eyes: il avoit veu une maniere de poissons que on appeloit chevaliers de mer, qui ont les testes façonnees a maniere de heaulme, et au dessus tenant une espee par le pumel, et par dessus le dos ung escu. La veyt le gentil roy ces poissons tournoier et batailler les ungs aux autres tant fort que merveilles estoit a veoir, en donnant l’un a l’autre grans coups d’espees et occioient aucunes foiz l’un l’autre. (I.i, 116) [he had seen a type of fish which are called knights of the sea: they have heads fashioned like a sort of helmet, holding on top a sword by its pommel, and a shield on the back. The noble king saw these fish tourneying and fighting one another so fiercely there that it was a wonder to see, as they exchanged great blows with their swords and sometimes killed one another.]

The question Estonné asks about his being can be amplified to encompass the state of knighthood in general. The answer reaches back into history (both in terms of literary history and world history as it is understood by the tradition into which Perceforest is inscribed) to a foundational encounter with an animal which seems nonhuman, yet incorporates recognizable human aspects into its body. Whereas Cohen sees the foundational fusion of man and horse as defining ‘chevalerie’, for late medieval romance the fish is the animal which seems to be fused with the human in order to shape knighthood and express its beastliness. But the knight is not human on the outside and beast within: once more we see the play of surfaces 88 In Postcolonial Fictions, Huot offers a meticulous reading of Perceforest as a postcolonial prehistorical fantasy, which both expands upon and justifies the Trojan roots of Britain proposed by Geoffrey of Monmouth. 89 Alexandre de Paris, Le Roman d’Alexandre, III, 464. 90 On the Alexander tradition in Perceforest, see Ferlampin-Acher, ‘Perceforest et le roman’.

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expressing the profound truth about the animality of a privileged human embodiment. Later in the romance, another knight, Bethidés, encounters these fishknights on their island home (III.ii, 273–85), where they display the seemingly human characteristics of speaking a language and obeying a king.91 If the inauguration of one of the most characteristic activities of the chivalric romance, the tournament, is predicated on Alexander’s protoscientific observations of the ‘chevaliers de mer’, then courtly language and hierarchy, it is implied, may also be markers of civilization which are copied from the animal kingdom. The use of the ‘chevaliers de mer’ as prototypes upon which human chivalry is modelled is a useful illustration of the way in which animality is deployed as that which both grounds, and yet is excluded from, rational humanity in medieval texts of encounters with the nonhuman: the knight, in other words, is an animal because he follows its behaviour. Le Conte du Papegau revisits and parodies a range of chivalric relations with nonhuman animals: its alternative title is Le Chevalier du Papegau,92 an epithet acquired by no less a character than King Arthur himself, who is known by this name after he wins a parrot in a contest along the lines of the sparrowhawk test in Erec et Enide. One of his most bizarre and grotesque opponents is a monstrous knight known as the Poisson Chevalier, who, despite his piscine name, does not resemble a fish so much as a giant, and whose horse ‘estoit bien aussi grant comme un olifant’ [was quite as big as an elephant] (Papegau, p. 100). As Arthur battles this gargantuan enemy, he notices a strange phenomenon: Et quant il le feroit en l’escu, il en veoit yssir le sanc vermeil et chaud, et de ce se merveilla moult le Chevalier du Papegau, car il ne luy estoit mie advis que son espee touchast ne fust ne fer. (pp. 102–4) [When he struck him on the shield, he saw red, hot blood spurt out, and the Knight of the Parrot wondered at this greatly, for it had not seemed to him that his sword had touched wood or iron.]

When he eventually kills the Poisson Chevalier, Arthur discovers the reason for the bleeding shield: he had not been striking wood or metal, but skin: Et quant il a tout regardé, si le preist parmy le heaulme pour veoir com il estoit legiers, pour ce qu’il le vist si grant, si le trouva chaut. Et aprés le cuida oster, mais il ne pot, si se merveilla moult pour quoy ce fu. Et quant il ot bien 91 See Huot, Postcolonial Fictions, pp. 59–63; Ferlampin-Acher, ‘Le monstre dans les romans’, p. 85; and Steel and McCracken, ‘Animal Turn’. 92 For the rationale behind these two titles, see Le Conte du Papegau, pp. 9–11.

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serchié, si trouva que il se tenoit en la teste et que tout estoit une chose, mais elle est faicte comme ung heaulme, tout ront, et le cuyr dehors estoit noir ainsi com le cuyr d’un serpent. (p. 106) [When he had looked at it all, he picked up the helmet to see how light it was, for he had never seen such a large one, and he found that it was warm. Then he thought he would take it off, but he could not, and he wondered greatly at how this could be. And when he had investigated fully, he found that it was joined to the head and that it was all one thing, but it was made like a helmet, completely round, and the skin on the outside was as black as a snake’s skin.]

It is not any particularly fishy feature, then, which has given the Poisson Chevalier in the Conte du Papegau his name—his scaly skin seems more reminiscent of a snake’s—but the fusion his body seems to present between human corporeality and chivalric accoutrements: like the ‘chevaliers de mer’ of the Perceforest, who ‘ont les testes façonnees a maniere de heaulme’ [had heads fashioned like a sort of helmet], the Poisson Chevalier’s helmet and head ‘tout estoit une chose’ [were all one thing].93 Rather than the layering and lining of animal and human skin we have seen in the werewolf tales I discussed earlier, this creature’s body presents no distinction between the human, animal, and inorganic elements of chivalry: he is a kind of chivalric Möbius strip, a fusion of fish and human as knights are revealed as beasts who follow the piscine warriors Alexander saw from his underwater vessel. The outside of the Poisson Chevalier is so remarkable to the other characters in the Conte du Papegau that Arthur’s amie, the Dame aux Cheveux Blonds, decides to display it as an object of wonder: Et lors commanda la dame a leur mareschal que il le face escourchier et porter le cuir en l’Amoureuse Cité et luy face mectre en tel lieu et porter ou il soit tousjours veu pour merveille; et il si fist quant la dame l’ot commandé. Et quant il l’ot fait escourchier, si ne trouva fors ung cuir du destrier et du chevalier. Et ce ne fu pas merveille, car c’estoit toute une chose. Car l’en trouve en livre qu’on appelle Mapemundi qu’il est ung monstre qui en mer a sa conversion que l’en clame Poisson Chevalier, qui semble avoir destrier, heaulme et haubert et lance et escu et espee, mais il est tout de luy mesmes, et tel estoit celluy. (p. 118)94

93 Invoking an image of stratification in the introduction to her edition of Le Conte du Papegau, Patricia Victorin states that ‘la création du Poisson Chevalier s’est effectuée par sédimentations mémorielles successives’ (p. 39). 94 Although there is no mention of the Poisson Chevalier in the Mappemonde tradition, Pierre de Beauvais briefly mentions Alexander’s travels in his Mappemonde (337–40).

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[And then the lady commanded to their marshal that he have the knight skinned and that he take the skin to the City of Love and that he have it placed so that it could always be seen as a wonder; and he did as the lady had commanded him. And when he had skinned it, he found only one skin of the charger and the knight. And this was no surprise, for it was all one thing. For we find in the book called the Mappamundi that there is a monster which dwells in the sea and which is called the Fish Knight, who seems to have horse, helmet, hauberk, lance, shield, and sword, but they are all part of him, and this was one of them.]

From the fish observed by Alexander, through the Perceforest, to the Papegau, the ‘chevaliers de mer’ have become ‘Poissons Chevaliers’ and incorporated more of the technology of chivalry. From the helmet, sword, and shield detailed in the Perceforest, the Poisson Chevalier in the Papegau has acquired a lance, a hauberk and, most remarkably of all, a horse, such that he now appears as a monstrous centaur, a hybrid not just of the human body and the prostheses it needs to be a knight, but a chevalier who has fused with his cheval. In this sense, it is indeed a wonder: even more wonderfully, this wonder can be displayed and contemplated through the simple action of flaying the Poisson Chevalier, in whose skin the ‘merveille’ is concentrated (there is no mention of what the flesh beneath looks like, although this too would presumably be quite a sight to behold).95 Kay points out the particular function of skin in relation to thinking through the body and the truth it hides and incarnates: The liminal nature of skin, which has an interface both with the external world and with whatever we conceive as lying inside it, lends it to this process of infinite regress, since it is always possible for skin to be imagined as an ‘outside’ and thus as containing a further ‘inside’ within it, which would then become an ‘outside’ in its turn, and so on, ad infinitum.96

The flaying of the Poisson Chevalier offers a fantasy that this regression might not be infinite, that it might be possible to strip down to one visible surface, capable of being displayed and wondered at, the truth of the complex of civilization and savagery which underpins human society. This impossible artefact is a means of imagining and envisaging the intimate caesura, the separation manufactured by humans between themselves and the bestiality projected on to nonhuman animals. That it is specifically a skin which is processed and reframed as an object of wonder also 95 Stephen Connor’s observation that skin is what makes a body recognizably a body may go some way to explaining this: ‘Unlike a member, or an organ, or a nail-clipping, the skin is not detachable in such a way that the detached part would remain recognizable or that the body left behind would be recognizably as body’ (The Book of Skin, p. 29). 96 Kay, ‘Flayed Skin’, p. 196.

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underscores the pronounced self-reflexivity and self-awareness of the Conte du Papegau. In presenting this skin as an object of wonder, the anonymous author of the Conte du Papegau may be reminding his readers of the status of his own text as an artefact inscribed on skin, visualizing the exchange between the human and the beast, and capable of eliciting amazement.97

CONCLUSION: ARTHUR’S HYBRIDITY AND ALEXANDRINE’S PRAYER ‘Flaying,’ writes Stephen Connor, is always, it seems, accompanied or followed by the possibility of a reassumption: either the assumption of another skin, or the resumption of one’s own skin (through healing). The skin therefore provides a model of the self preserved against change, and also reborn through change.98

As Tyolet flays the doe, the stag before him, which has so uncannily eyed him, changes into a knight; the other texts I have examined in this chapter also involve the exchange between the removal or revelation of skin and the transformation of the shape of that skin. The flaying of the Poisson Chevalier is not the last we hear of this marvellous creature: he returns at the end of the Papegau to haunt Arthur’s knightly body. Towards the end of his year-long journey, he finds himself on an island populated by wild beasts, a unicorn, a dwarf, and the dwarf ’s gigantic, and gigantically stupid, son, ‘le Jaiant sans Nom’ [the Giant with No Name]. This last character’s foolishness is most dangerously manifested in his inability to tell the difference between humans and other animals: he has to be repeatedly reminded by his exasperated father to bring home, rather than kill and eat, any humans who might visit the island.99 His reaction to Arthur is an excessive parody of the behaviour of the ‘nices’ [foolish] Tyolet and Perceval when they first lay eyes on the chivalric body. Like them, the nameless giant understands the knight to be an entirely different entity: Et quant il perceut le roy sur son destrier si bel et si hault seant, cuida que ce fu toute une beste, si ot paour de luy car oncques mais telle n’avoit veue. (p. 242) 97 As Kay says, ‘The only existence in these [medieval] texts is that of undulating, circulating skin—a surface that ultimately is not distinguishable from the material support of the text itself ’ (‘Legible Skin’, p. 26). 98 Connor, The Book of Skin, p. 31. 99 On medieval anthropophagy, see Steel, How to Make a Human, pp. 118–35.

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[And when he saw the king on his charger, so handsome and sitting so high in his saddle, he thought he was one whole beast, and he was afraid because he had never seen such a thing.]

The giant is the son of a human, but grew to his gigantic size because he was suckled by a unicorn.100 His gaze on Arthur’s armoured, mounted body understands him not to be a parrot-knight, but ‘toute une beste’, a monstrous hybrid akin to the Poisson Chevalier. The giant’s own lack of reason leads him to impute a bestial identity on to none other than the sovereign. If even King Arthur (albeit in a very late medieval and very parodic iteration, and by a very stupid giant) can be mistaken for a monstrous hybrid, then chivalry, the ideology and form underpinning Arthurian romance, is irretrievably riddled with beastliness. The werewolf narratives I have analysed in this chapter imagine scenarios in which the model of the savage nature within the civilized human are reversed, such that a furry, wild-looking wolf can act in a much more ethical, peaceable, and social way than the treacherous, violent humans who seek to oppress them. The process of transformation which takes the knight from the wolf and back again enables medieval and modern readers to perceive this paradox.101 As Derrida says, ‘L’animal nous regarde, et nous sommes nus devant lui. Et penser commence peut-être là’ [the animal looks at us/concerns us, and we are naked before it. And thinking begins there].102 The animal both looks at us and concerns us: the gaze of the beast (the cat, the stag, the wolf, the sable, or the ermine) functions as a call to ethics and a revelation of human nature. In this chapter, I have explored a series of tales of transformation which dramatize this troubling gaze, and the human nakedness and lack to which it draws attention. What the gaze privileges is the outside: the naked skin, which is visible to the naked eye, and which delineates our human body, is doubled by the animal skin, which encases the werewolf and bear, and clothed also by the armour and fur-lined garments which create human hierarchy. It is also a reminder of the vellum on which these texts were first written down, and of the images of layering and incorporation with which humanity defines itself.

100 On the humanity of giants, see Cohen, Of Giants; Dubost, Aspects, pp. 575–627. On the implications of humans fed the milk of nonhuman animals, see McCracken, ‘Nursing Animals’. 101 ‘For the problem of humanness is all the more vibrantly at stake when its nature is clearly understood to reside on the fragilities of a paradox.’ (Dunton-Downer, ‘Wolf Man’, p. 213). 102 Derrida, L’Animal, p. 50.

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These images are present in the prayer uttered in Guillaume de Palerne by Alexandrine, as Guillaume and Melior set off in their bearskins. The figures she invokes in her prayer both voice and assuage the anxiety triggered by these artificial bear–human hybrids. She prays for their safe delivery, invoking a number of instances of Biblical complex embodiments and incorporations: Biau sire Diex, si vraiement Com ciel et terre et tout formas Et en la vierge t’aombras Et preïs incarnation, Sire, par sainte anoncion, Et forme d’ome et char humaine Et garesis en la baleine Jonas qu’ele avoit englouti, Si voir, sire, par ta merci Ces .II. enfans gart et deffent D’anui, de mal et de torment Et remet en prosperité, Sire, par ta sainte bonté. (GP, 3132–44) [Fair lord God, as truly as you formed heaven, earth, and everything, and took shelter in the Virgin, and took on Incarnation, Lord, by the holy Annunciation, and took on the form of man with human flesh; and tended to Jonah inside the whale which had swallowed him, truly, Lord, by your mercy, protect and defend these two young people from sadness, evil, and torment and lead them back to prosperity, Lord, by your holy goodness.]

As she invokes the Virgin Birth, the Incarnation, and Jonah’s sojourn in the whale, Alexandrine reminds us that the layering of strange bodies is central to a medieval Christian understanding of ‘le propre de l’homme’. For the medieval Christian, the human body was saved from the kind of base animality at which the author of the Roman des romans hints by its likeness to God. But, as I argued in Chapter 1, that likeness is itself quite properly represented with recourse to beastly bodies and the transformations they undergo in strange tales of metamorphosis. In Chapter 4, I shall continue my investigation into transformations between human and beast, and carry on my focus on Alexandrine, as I turn to the way in which nonhuman animals can be used to figure gender.

4 Sex and the Serpent ‘Sire,’ fait il, ‘qu’est mere? Et s’on le mangera? Samble oisel u beste? Nel me celes vous ja.’ [‘Sir,’ he said, ‘what is a mother? Can you eat it? Does it look like a bird or a beast? Don’t keep this from me.’] (Elioxe, 747–8).

In Guillaume de Palerne, Alexandrine, the practical confidante to the fleeing lovers, initially plans to join Guillaume and Melior as they run away from court. Although her cousin quickly vetoes this suggestion, Alexandrine nevertheless appears to procure her own disguise as she finds the bearskins for the lovers: Et va droit as escorcheors Qui escorchoient cers et ors Et bestes molt d’autres manieres. .II. en choisist grans et plenieres De .II. blans ors et d’un serpent Que nus ne le perçoit noient A la chambre droit s’en repaire, Bien a esploitié son afaire. (GP, 3059–66) [And she goes straight to the skinners who flay stags and bears and beasts of many other kinds. She chose two large and capacious skins from white bears, and one from a snake: so that no one could see, she went straight back to the chamber. She has done her job well.]

The snakeskin is never mentioned again, so the reader never discovers how the otherwise sensible Alexandrine plans to use it. She carefully sews the lovers into their bearskins and wisely anticipates their need to feed themselves (Guillaume laughingly dismisses this foresight saying that he and Melior will live on love, grass, leaves, and flowers; only a few lines later he is complaining of hunger). The outfits Alexandrine fashions are at least a little more suited to life on the run than that furnished by a limbless serpent.

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This brief allusion to a snakeskin introduces another zoomorphic possibility into the realm of animal metamorphosis, and may also hint at the way in which metamorphosis can be read as a means of figuring, constructing, or commenting on gender. So freighted is the figure of the snake in the imagined history of human corporeality and fallibility that even this fleeting reference to a woman potentially disguising herself as a snake connotes references to the Fall, to original sin, and to the specific vice incarnated by women. Alexandrine is briefly envisaged as a potential Edenic serpent, tempting the lovers into lustful ways. In Chapter 3, I examined the masculine bodies of the werewolf and the chevalier-beste, but did not dwell on the role of the female characters in creating the animal identity of the protagonists of Bisclavret, Mélion, Guillaume de Palerne, and Perceforest; nor did I discuss the way in which these men’s animal bodies might be seen as commenting on the animality of their female counterparts. Yet, as several critics have amply shown,1 these tales of masculine transformation and feminine deception are susceptible to readings informed by gender theory. In short, while the man may take on a beastly appearance, this appearance can be read as a comment on the animal nature of the woman who inflicts it. As Kelly Oliver states, ‘the binary oppositions man/animal and man/ woman are so intimately linked that exploding the first has consequences for the second’.2 Although Agamben has little to say about gender in The Open, the processes of rejection and projection at work in his theory of the intimate caesura can be seen as analogous to those processes in the production and policing of cultural understandings of gender. Put another way, medieval misogyny can often be expressed by comparing women to animals, creatures without reason or morality, without the ‘sen de hume’ which characterizes werewolves. After all, Mélion concludes by warning of the dangers of believing women’s words: Ja ne faldra Que de tot sa feme kerra, Qu’en la fin ne soit malbaillis; Ne doit pas croire tos ses dis. (Mélion, 587–90) [It will never fail to be the case that he who believes his wife in everything will be eventually ruined: he should not believe all her words.]

1

See Noacco, La Métamorphose, pp. 108–11; Mikhaïlova, Le Présent, pp. 178–98; Bruckner, ‘Of Men and Beasts’; Guynn, ‘Hybridity’; Campbell, ‘Political Animals’; Freeman, ‘Dual Natures’; Burgwinkle, Sodomy, pp. 165–9. 2 Oliver, Animal Lessons, p. 132.

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And by the time that Bisclavret is written in to the fourteenth-century Renart le Contrefait (a late redaction of the Renart story cycle), the story is called Biclarel, and is used as an exemplum warning men not to talk to their wives.3 This explicit misogyny is clearly lurking behind the reasoning by which the courtiers in Bisclavret and Mélion arrive at the conclusion that the beast must be one of them. The duplicitous behaviour of the wives in Mélion and Bisclavret is portrayed in stark contrast with the courtly behaviour which marks their husbands as consistently human, despite their intermittently beastly appearance. For Erin Felicia Labbie, the wife in Bisclavret ‘is the animal who does speak, and Bisclavret is the human who does not’;4 and Noacco suggests that the dénouements of both Bisclavret and Mélion involve the knight and his wife changing places in the economy of human and animal.5 Crane, on the other hand, gives a compelling reading of the woman’s noselessness as a specifically human lack.6 In any case, critics agree that we encounter in these werewolf tales the misogynist presumption of feminine duplicity: the fact that the plots of Bisclavret, Mélion, and Guillaume de Palerne share so many similarities only serves to reinforce the type of the deceptive, evil woman, bent on the destruction of the valorous and valuable nobleman in order to achieve her own desires.7 According to this stereotype, women do not need to metamorphose to embody the animal, since their stereotyped duplicity inevitably casts them as subhuman, the inferior beings against which chivalric courtly society defines itself.8 R. Howard Bloch argues that a great deal of medieval misogyny stemmed from ‘a metaphysics that abhorred embodiment’.9 Women are associated with animals because they are understood in the Middle Ages as being more allied with the body, whereas men are more concerned with the mind.10 The thirteenth-century misogynist verse known as Le Blasme des femes uses a variety of nonhuman animals in order to describe women.11 Having stated quite clearly that women are ‘encontre reisun’ [opposed to

3 Hopkins, ‘Bisclavret to Biclarel’. On Mélion’s misogynist moral, see Guynn, ‘Hybridity’, pp. 175–7. 4 5 Labbie, Lacan’s Medievalism, p. 83. Noacco, La Métamorphose, p. 112. 6 Crane, Animal Encounters, pp. 64–5. 7 Williams observes that the werewolf is ‘always male’ (Deformed Discourse, p. 121). 8 See Kinoshita and McCracken, Marie de France, pp. 70–2. 9 Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, p. 37. 10 Bynum nuances this opposition in her examination of its treatment by women writing in the Middle Ages, ‘. . . And Woman His Humanity’. 11 In Fiero, Pfeffer, and Alain (eds.), Three Medieval Views, pp. 120–42.

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reason] (28), the author gives a catalogue of animals which embody the suspect aspects of feminine behaviour: Femme est aigne pur primes tundre, Femme est serpent par grefment poindre, Femme est lyuns pur seignurer, Femme est leopard pur devurer, Femme est goupille pur deceivre, Femme est urs pur coups receivre, Femme est chien pur aveir grant sens, Femme est chate pur mordre as denz, Femme est rate pur confundre, Femme est suriz pur sei repondre; Femme est dedens heriçuns, Defors simple cum colums [ . . . ] (69–80) [Woman is a lamb for fleecing at first; she is a snake who wounds grievously; she is a lion who dominates; she is a leopard who devours; she is a fox who deceives; she is a bear to be beaten; she is a wily dog; she is a biting cat; she is a cunning rat; she is a self-serving mouse. A woman is a hedgehog on the inside and a dove on the outside.]

Here, woman is characterized as animal—all and any animal. My response, then, to Burns’s question, ‘What happens to gender when we move beyond human bodies?’,12 is that these nonhuman bodies are often presented as figures which comment on the construction and understanding of human gender in the Middle Ages. However, in the texts I shall explore in this chapter, a particular form and genus of animal is recurrently associated with femininity, the second of the animals on the list above: the serpent. Indeed, the Blasme des femes stresses not only the metaphorical but the morphological similarity between women and serpents with reference to the Bible’s first, and formative, encounter between the woman and the snake, in the book of Genesis: Pur ceo qe femme out fieble sens L’enginnat primes li serpens; [ . . . ] Ensi la fist a son semblant, Sa fai lui tendi mentenant. [21–2; 31–2] [Because woman has weak intelligence, the snake first tricked her [ . . . ] it made her in his image, and now she renders homage to it.]

Far from having the ‘sens de hume’ of the werewolves, women’s ‘sens’ is feeble. And whereas God made man in his image, the serpent made the woman in his: indeed, the Edenic serpent is often depicted in medieval art 12

Burns, ‘Snake-Tailed Woman’, p. 187.

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as having a female face.13 The last pair of animals in the list above, however, stands as a reminder that this image is both fundamentally animal and also fundamentally deceptive: where women may appear as mild as a dove, they are in fact inside as spiky as hedgehogs. Whether this inside refers to an abstract interiority denoting the spiritual or mental, or to a physical inside, is unclear, and adds yet another element of misogynist horror to this portrait. At the heart of this horror is the fear that women may have been modelled after the snake, yet still appear gentle and lovely. Their physical shape is not the same as their form, which is constantly animal. In other words, where the men of the previous chapter remained knights despite their furry exteriors, this kind of misogynist imagery suggests that women are always snakes, no matter how beautiful they may look. Women’s serpentine truth is also hinted at in the rantings of Jean de Meun’s Genius, who employs an extended metaphor comparing women to ‘le mau sarpent refredissant’ [the evil, chilling serpent] (Rose, 16567) lurking in the grass ready to strike unsuspecting people who just want to gather flowers. Not only is the figure of the serpent associated with the sin it tempts the woman to perform and then embody, but it is also instrumental in constructing, or revealing, the physical differences between men and women—which then must be covered. In the book of Genesis, the immediate results of capitulation to the serpent are Adam and Eve’s awareness of, and shame at, their nakedness (Genesis 3:7). Derrida’s account of the Fall suggests that man and woman construct their knowledge of sexual difference in the face of the snake’s gaze, and understand their genitalia as both signs of that sexual difference and grounds for properly human shame.14 As Oliver reminds us, ‘An animal, the snake, “teaches” man that he is distinct from other animals and from woman’.15 The consequences of the serpent’s intervention in Eden, then, is that masculinity and femininity are understood in the perception of the male and female body; and also that the feminine becomes inextricably linked with both the serpent’s guile and the weakness which led Eve to fall for it. In the first section of this chapter, I compare the story of the Fall with another origin myth which associates the figure of the snake and a particular kind of knowledge about gender and sexuality. Tiresias, the sex-changing seer, is punished for his superior knowledge about gendered pleasure, knowledge made possible through reiterated encounters with Kelly, ‘Metamorphoses’; Flores, ‘ “Effigies Amicitiae” ’; and Burns, ‘Snake-Tailed Woman’, pp. 195–202. For a discussion of the medieval understanding of the gender of the serpent, see Jager, Tempter’s Voice, pp. 109–11. 14 15 Derrida, L’Animal, pp. 96–100. Oliver, Animal Lessons, p. 143. 13

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snakes. The best-known snake-woman in medieval French literature (in any case, the only one to have an adjective formed from her name) is Mélusine.16 Condemned by a curse from her mother to be a snake from the waist down every Saturday, and to keep this mutation a secret from everyone, especially her mortal husband, Mélusine is nevertheless the fêted founding mother of the Lusignan dynasty. This compelling combination of the maternal and the monstrous has been theorized as the abject by Kristeva in her influential 1980 work, Pouvoirs de l’horreur. The abject is rooted in the primary and conflicting feelings experienced towards ‘le maternel comme lieu impropre de la fusion’ [the maternal as an improper place of fusion].17 If Derrida claims that there is no ‘propre de l’homme’, then Kristeva shows that the woman, in these transforming tales, embodies the ‘impropre’. The boundary between the snake’s body and the woman’s body shifts in medieval tales of this troubling conjunction, such that where Mélusine is a serpent from the waist down on Saturdays, only a part of Medusa takes on serpentine form: her hair. Medusa has been invoked by French feminists in order to articulate the power of horror the female body can generate: in the second section of this chapter, I look at the figure of Medusa in the Ovide moralisé and in an interpolation into the Roman de la Rose. The sight of Medusa’s snaky head is literally petrifying to the onlooker, and in the last section of this chapter I trace an intimate exchange between the human female body and stone: I argue that the perfect statue crafted by Pygmalion and brought to life by Venus is the sublime opposite of the slippery bodies of Mélusine and Medusa. This image of the female body is a perfectly delineated whole generated as a fantasy informing these tales of menacing female metamorphosis. SERPENTINE SECRETS: TIRESIAS’S KNOWLEDGE AND THE SIBYL’S PARADISE Although she insists that the account of her own female-to-male sexchange, wrought by the goddess Fortune, ‘n’est pas fable’ [is not fiction] (Mutacion, 1391),18 Christine de Pizan invokes three Ovidian stories of metamorphosis in order to support it.19 The second of these tales is that See ‘Les contes mélusiniens’, Harf-Lancner, Les Fées, pp. 85–117. Kristeva, Pouvoirs, p. 124. 18 Christine de Pizan, La Mutacion de Fortune. 19 See Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Reading Myth, pp. 178–80; and Griffin, ‘Transforming Fortune’. 16 17

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of Tiresias, whose trajectory in the Metamorphoses is in many ways, if not a reflection, then a refraction of the destiny he foretells for Narcissus: where Narcissus mistakes what he can see, Tiresias both cannot see at all, having been blinded by Juno, and is certain about his vision, having been given the gift of prophecy by Jupiter. Where Narcissus’s desire for himself is sterile, deathly, and unconsummated, Tiresias experiences the pleasure of love as both a man and as a woman: it is after agreeing with Jupiter that women enjoy sex more than men that his sight is taken but his second sight is endowed (M, 3.316–38). For Christine, however, the crucial point of Tiresias’s story is his encounters with snakes, the mysterious catalyst for his sex-changes. Ovid recounts that Tiresias strikes mating snakes: nam duo magnorum viridi coeuntia silva corpora serpentum baculi violaverat ictu deque viro factus (mirabile) femina septem egerat autumnos (M, 3.324–7) [For once, with a huge blow of his staff he had outraged two huge serpents mating in the green forest; and, wonderful to relate, from man he was changed into a woman, and in that form spent seven years.]

Reiterating ‘mué’, Christine’s rhyme focuses on the transformative effect of this strike: Mais autre mal il n’en receut Fors qu’incontinent s’apperceut Que tout son corps fu transmué, En femme fu tantost mué (Mutacion, 1071–4) [But he suffered no other ill effect, apart from immediately perceiving that his whole body had been transformed and swiftly turned into a woman]

The intertwined bodies of the snakes figure both the imbricated gender identities inscribed on to Tiresias’s and Christine’s bodies, and the act of sex, whose pleasure even gods cannot fathom or agree upon. In both Christian and pre-Christian mythology, then, an encounter with the serpentine leads to the revelation of a secret about sexuality and the subsequent reinterpretation of bodies. In Genesis, Eve’s transgression has implications for her own body (‘in dolore paries filios’ [in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children] 3:16); shapes that of the serpent (‘super pectus tuum gradieris’ [upon thy belly thou shalt go] 3:14); and constructs an understanding of the shameful nudity of the human body (‘cognovissent esse se nudos’ [they knew that they were naked] 3:7). Many medieval commentators pointed to the putative reforming of the female body subsequent to the Fall as the explanation for what they saw as women’s bodily

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and moral weakness—including their excessive lustfulness.20 In the Metamorphoses, Tiresias’s transformations enable him to know both male and female pleasure, and to divulge not only to the king and queen of the gods, but also to Ovid’s readers, that female pleasure is the greater by far. This serpentine knowledge, eroticized and feminized, is the essence of sin in Genesis, the reason for the Fall; in the tradition of the Metamorphoses, it is both punishable by blindness but rewarded by prophecy. In the Ovide moralisé, the tale of Tiresias is first interpreted in terms of the humours which combine in order to create gendered bodies,21 and then revealed as an allegory of the Virgin Birth. Christ’s death and resurrection are figures for Tiresias’s blindness and second sight: C’est cil qui, par vertu devine, Perdi la corporel veüe, Qui au tiers jour li fu rendue, Mes, tant dis come il ne vit goute, L’enlumina Dieus, si, sans doute, Qu’il vit touz les devins secrez. (OM, 3.1256–61) [It is he who, by divine power, lost the physical sight, which was restored to him on the third day. But, all the while that he could see nothing, God provided illumination, so that he was able to see without any doubt all divine secrets.]

The erotic pleasure Tiresias experiences and defines for Jupiter and Juno is understood as the greater love Christ showed for the women to whom he appeared after his resurrection while men fled from him. While the Ovide moralisé recasts the secret Tiresias discovers and reveals as Christ’s divine love, the suspicion that women may be more lustful than men, and thus potentially more dangerous and duplicitous, is otherwise unmissable throughout medieval French literature. It is possible to see in the recurring images of the shifting configurations of female and serpentine body, in several traditions and texts, the influence of both Tiresias’s and Eve’s encounters with snakes: the notions of female desire and sin are entwined as inextricably as the snakes Tiresias attacks. They plait together to form a body of texts which offer a particular account of gendered identity, stemming from, yet constructed and positioned such that it appears to lead to, a binary picture of gender in which women are inferior—socially, morally, and physically—to men. Yet this inferiority is unstable, and this instability is frequently figured as a corporeal

20

See Elliott, Fallen Bodies, pp. 35–60; Cadden, Meanings, pp. 74–9; Jager, Tempter’s Voice, pp. 194–5. 21 On this theory more generally in medieval understandings of the differences between men and women, see Cadden, Meanings, pp. 183–8.

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mutability, as women repeatedly take the shape, either partially or wholly, of the animal which most figures, and is most associated with, their slipperiness and sin. The knowledge of desire these snake-women incarnate is also reconfigured to become a desire to know and possess them. This desire to know the secrets of women is expressed in the legends Antoine de La Sale recounts in Le Paradis de la Reine Sibylle, for the entertainment of Agnès of Burgundy, based on a journey he took in 1420 to the Appenine Mount Sibilla. La Sale relates several accounts of the supernatural realm in the mountain, which has both infernal and paradisiacal connotations. Although, as Michèle Perret and Karen Casebier have both pointed out,22 La Sale maintains a narrative stance which neither confirms nor denies the veracity of the tales he tells, he relates an account of a German knight and his squire, who managed to reach the subterranean court of the Reine Sibylle. Here, it is alleged, they were richly arrayed and entertained by a host of beautiful women: so great is the pleasure these women bestow (once the knight and squire have chosen the ones who best suit their desires), ‘que un jour ne lui estoit pas une heure’ [that one day seemed to him less than one hour] (Reine Sibylle, p. 27). When, however, the knight realizes their metamorphic truth, he is horrified and cannot leave to seek penance for his misdeeds soon enough: Et la estoient en chambres et en autres lieux ad ce ordonnez en estat de couleuvres e de serpens, toutes ensemble; et ainsi estoient jusques après la mienuit du samedi, que chascune retournoit a sa compaignie; et lendemain sembloit estre plus belle que jamais n’avoit esté. Car elles jamais n’en vieillissent, ne scevent que douleur est. (Reine Sibylle, p. 28) [And there in the chambers and in other places they had changed into the state of snakes and serpents, all together; and they were in this form until just after midnight on Saturday, when each returned to her companion; and the following day they seemed more beautiful than they had ever been. For they never aged, neither did they know pain.]

The erotic fantasy of an underground palace of beautiful, sexually available women is underpinned and undermined by a horror of female evil. Such closeness of beauty and monstrosity reinforces what Sarah Alison Miller calls ‘troubling suspicions that the female body exists precariously between beautiful moderation and revolting extremes’.23 These serpentine women are both perfect and unassailable but also diabolical.24 They do not know Perret, ‘L’insemblable vérité’; and Casebier, ‘History or Fiction?’. Miller, Medieval Monstrosity, p. 22. 24 As Francine Mora-Lebrun says, ‘L’ambivalence du symbole tient en effet à sa valeur sexuelle. Si le serpent symbolise le Mal, c’est parce qu’il est l’emblème de la luxure, forme dégradée de la fécondité qu’il incarnait jadis’ [the ambivalence of the symbol stems precisely 22 23

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the pain which is the curse of Eve, and yet incarnate the sin which the serpent incited Eve to commit: this is the terrifying secret which supports their immortality and ever-renewing beauty. WHAT RAYMONDIN SAW: MÉLUSINE, THE ABJECT, AND THE NATURAL WOMAN The corporeal combination of snake and woman triggers in these texts— and seems to be framed in order to elicit from their readers—a reaction which blends desire and horror. Kristeva’s theory of the abject is a productive perspective from which to read accounts of the serpentine feminine, since it not only ensures that the seemingly opposing emotions of desire and horror remain equally visible, but also highlights their intimate connections, their interdependent constructions. The abject plaits together ideas of pollution and prohibition, from a range of eclectic sources including the influential anthropologist Mary Douglas; Freud’s analysis of Little Hans’s phobia of horses;25 and the Biblical codes which are given to Moses in order to distinguish ‘inter sanctum et profanum inter pollutum et mundum’ [between holy and unholy, and between unclean and clean] (Leviticus 10:10). The abject, according to Kristeva, is that which needs to be repeatedly jettisoned from the subject and the community in order to define the ‘corps propre’—a formulation which implies cleanliness, property, and propriety both of the individual body and the community’s sense of self. The polarized reactions elicited by the abject stem from the individual’s and the community’s attempts to control and delineate clearly the boundaries between self and other, inside and outside, subject and object. On the boundary delimiting subjectivity, Kristeva states, ‘l’objet vacillant, fascinant, menaçant et dangereux, se profile comme non-être’ [the vacillating, fascinating, threatening, and dangerous object is outlined as non-being]: this flickering, uncertain matter represents ‘l’abjection dans laquelle l’être parlant s’engloutit en permanence’ [the abjection in which the speaking being is permanently engulfed].26 That which causes disgust and horror, and from which the subject must be separate, is particularly associated with the animal and maternal: from its sexual quality. If the serpent symbolizes Evil, this is because it is the emblem of lust, the degraded form of fertility, which it embodied previously] (‘Métamorphoses dans Le Paradis’, p. 294). 25 ‘Analyse der Phobie eines fünfjährigen Knaben’, GW, 7, 243–377. 26 Kristeva, Pouvoirs, p. 82.

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L’abject nous confronte, d’une part, à ces états fragiles où l’homme erre dans les territoires de l’animal. [ . . . ] L’abject nous confronte, d’autre part, et cette fois dans notre archéologie personnelle, à nos tentatives les plus anciennes de nous démarquer de l’entité maternelle avant même que d’ex-ister en dehors d’elle grâce à l’autonomie du langage.27 [The abject confronts us, from one side, with those fragile states in which humanity wanders in the territory of the animal. [ . . . ] The abject confronts us, from another side, and this time within our own personal archaeology, with our earliest attempts to distinguish ourselves from the maternal entity, even before we ex-ist outside of her through the autonomy of language.]

In other words, in order to become understood by ourselves and others as human subjects, we must repeatedly distinguish ourselves from that which is not human (but threatens to be) and that which is not our body (but was once). This logic of a constant need to separate off and control creatures who threaten a sense of power and uniqueness resonates with the processes Steel identifies in the medieval texts he studies in How to Make a Human, as I outlined in the Introduction. Of course, the principal difference between what Steel analyses and Kristeva’s theory is marked by gender: in rejecting the abject, it is not just the animal which is subjugated, but also the feminine. As we have seen, women are often marked with the inferiority and savagery which Steel sees as characterizing representations of animals as beneath contempt with lives which mean nothing. In the structures of the abject, as Kristeva outlines it, we need to identify a border between ourselves and the engulfing animal matter of the mother’s body, in order to sustain ourselves as exterior to it. By inserting the hyphen into ‘ex-ister’, Kristeva signals that to exist is necessarily to understand and maintain the boundary between what lies inside and outside of the self. Nevertheless, that boundary is inevitably permeable, hence the recurrence of ‘l’abomination que suscite le corps féminin fécondable ou fertile (les menstrues, l’enfantement)’ [the abomination engendered by the fertile or impregnatable feminine body (menstruation, childbirth)].28 The female body is particularly marked by the abject since understanding it as either actually or potentially a maternal body draws attention to the way in which its boundaries between inside and outside, self and other, are necessarily unstable. These boundaries are constructed and reinforced by the reiteration of prohibition: in the psychoanalytic discourse in which Kristeva writes, the father’s law proscribes the maternal 27

Kristeva, Pouvoirs, p. 20.

28

Kristeva, Pouvoirs, p. 119.

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body. Yet this proscription renders that which is proscribed all the more alluring, hence the desire for the mother, which is in tension with the disgust the law dictates as the appropriate reaction to it: taboo and transgression are constantly at odds, constantly heightening the paradoxical power of the abject. Pouvoirs de l’horreur is itself couched as an origin myth, and invokes the Genesis story in order to trace the logic of exclusion and fascination which characterize the abject.29 The maternal body and the animal are associated with this pre-linguistic state, produced by the narrative logic of the abject in order to stand as origins for subjectivity—origins whose reiterated rejection in fact reinforces their importance as founding fictions. As Oliver observes, however, Kristeva is often criticized by feminists for reifying the maternal, for rendering real and factual rather than potential and discursive that which is formulated as menacing so that it can be rejected by the speaking subject.30 Butler points out that the maternal body, which underpins much of Kristeva’s theory, is precisely a construct which enables her to figure a pre-linguistic, pre-cultural moment of bonding with the maternal, and accuses Kristeva of occluding this process of construction: What Kristeva claims to discover in the prediscursive maternal body is itself a production of a given historical discourse, an effect of culture rather than its secret and primary cause.31

The abject, in other words, is certainly posited as an origin: Kristeva’s critics reproach her for losing sight of it as a myth. Butler points out that the maternal body and the forbidden desire for it should be seen as productions of, rather than the reason for, the prohibitions which surround them. She cites Foucault’s argument that, The desire which is conceived as both original and repressed is the effect of the subjugating law itself. In consequence, the law produces the conceit of the repressed desire in order to rationalize its own self-amplifying strategies.32

Butler’s incisive criticism of Kristeva’s insistence on the abject as a cause (rather than recognizing it as a retrospectively generated one) is, as I shall explore later in this chapter, a useful concept for interrogating the notion of ‘the natural woman’.

29 ‘On se souviendra que c’est une tentation féminine et animale qui se dissimule derrière la première faute alimentaite’ [It should be noted that a feminine and animal temptation is concealed behind the first dietary transgression] (Kristeva, Pouvoirs, p. 115). 30 31 Oliver, Reading Kristeva, pp. 48–9. Butler, Gender Trouble, pp. 80–1. 32 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 65.

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The horror and fascination elicited by the abject is evident in the reaction of the knight who, until the midpoint of the thirteenth-century romance Le Bel Inconnu, as it exists in its single manuscript,33 goes by the rather unsatisfactory name of ‘Li Biaus Desconneüs’ [the Fair Unknown]. King Arthur has conferred this name on him, but it is not until after several action-packed adventures that, in sharp contrast to the regal surroundings in which he received his nickname, the knight learns both his true name (Guinglain) and the names of his parents (Gauvain and the fairy Blanchemal). This revelation takes place in a haunted castle where he encounters a horrifying yet eroticized ‘guivre’ [wyvern], a fabulous beast often represented as dragon-like or serpentine:34 it is ‘hidosse et grant’ [hideous and huge] (3136); but also ‘bouce ot tote vermelle’ [it has a completely red mouth] (3124). Repulsed by this creature, the knight is unable to kill it because, in behaviour reminiscent of the courtly werewolves in Chapter 3, it appears to bow before him. This show of submission enables the wyvern to get close enough to Guinglain to kiss him with its large red mouth: an event so remarkable that it becomes known as the ‘Fier Baiser’,35 and leaves the young knight (who has shown all the signs of fearless chivalry thus far in his tale) devastated and confused: ‘Dius, Sire,’ fet il, ‘que ferai Del Fier Baissier que fait i ai? Molt dolerous baisier ai fait; Or sui je traïs entresait. Li diables m’a encanté, Que j’ai baissié otre mon gré. Or pris je molt petit ma vie.’ (Bel Inconnu, 3205–11) [‘Lord God,’ he says, ‘what shall I do about the Proud Kiss that I have had? I have had a very grievous kiss; now I am completely undone. The devil has bewitched me, to make me kiss against my will. Now I value my life very low.’]

While he is in this perturbed state, a disembodied voice (which later turns out to be that of a fairy, with whom Guinglain had fallen in love earlier in the romance) reveals Guinglain’s true name, displacing Arthur’s authority (‘Li rois Artu mal te nomma’ [King Arthur named you wrongly] (3231)). The wyvern, meanwhile, turns out to be the enchanted form of the 33

Manuscript Chantilly, Musée Condé, 472. Craig Baker’s edition of the long version of the Bestiaire glosses ‘wivre’ as ‘vipère’ [viper] (p. 459). As Harf-Lancner observes, ‘la confusion règne dans le vocabulaire médiéval entre serpent et dragon, guivre et vipère’ [in medieval vocabulary, confusion reigns between serpent and dragon, wyvern and viper] (Les Fées, p. 166). On the myth of the ‘vipère’, see also Lecouteux, Mélusine, pp. 55–7; and Kelly, ‘Metamorphoses’, p. 307. 35 See Loomis, ‘The Fier Baiser’. 34

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beautiful queen Blonde Esmerée: its mesmerizing red lips are not difficult to interpret as displaced female genitalia, both in terms of their appearance and Guinglain’s reaction to the sight of them.36 They are revealed to be the vestiges of a disturbingly alluring female sexuality which haunts the repellent beast. Guinglain’s horror is also supported by the abject behaviour attributed to the wyvern in the long version of the French Bestiary: Phisiologes dit qu’ele est de tel nature qu’ele ne naist onques devant ce qu’ele a tué son pere et sa mere. Car la femele conchoit par sa bouche [de] la teste del malle en tel maniere que li malles li boute sa teste en la goule, et endeme[n]tiers que il se delite en sa goule la femele li trence tote la teste as dens et l’engloute, et de ce conchoit. Et li malles demore mors. Et quant che vient aprés et la wivre doit enfanter, si enfante par le costé et ensi le covient crever et morir.37 [Physiologus says that it has a nature such that it is only born once it has killed its father and its mother. For the female conceives through her mouth from the male’s head, in such a way that the male sticks his head into her mouth, and while he is enjoying himself in the female’s mouth, the female cuts off his head completely, and swallows it, and in this way she conceives. The male remains dead. And when later the wyvern has to give birth, she gives birth through her side and in this way she inevitably bursts and dies.]

Sex in the wyvern world is a terrifying prospect, and the fate met by the male resonates with the description I quoted earlier from the Blasme des femes representing women as being hedgehogs on the inside: both these images hint at the topos of the vagina dentata. Indeed, the female wyvern would appear not to have a vagina: her body offers an image of chaotic boundaries and apertures. Certainly the wyvern encountered by the Guinglain seems to merge in a threatening yet alluring way her genitalia and her mouth. Not only is this serpentine feminine body unstable in its shape (she will, immediately after this episode, regain her beautiful womanly form) but its body is disruptively organized. Guinglain has wandered into Kristeva’s ‘territoires de l’animal ’ but it is here that he learns the truth about himself, which he cannot find in the ordered human world of the court. This episode weaves together a frightening fusion of the feminine and the animal with a revelation of genealogical truth. This intimate and surprising connection between the monstrous feminine and legitimizing information about ancestry informs the composition of both surviving instances of the story of Mélusine in medieval 36

See Noacco, La Métamorphose, pp. 96–7.

37

Bestiaire, p. 148.

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French, which are dedicated to, and carefully trace Mélusine’s connection with, two branches of the family ostensibly descended from the fairy who founded the castle of Lusignan. Jean d’Arras composed his prose version in 1392 for Jean de Berry and his sister, Marie de Bar; and Coudrette’s early fifteenth-century verse version was commissioned by the Parthenay family. Mélusine is represented as the original, originating mother: her very name derives from her maternal importance, as both verse and prose versions propose the derivation of the name ‘Lusignan’ from a refiguring of ‘Mélusine’ as ‘Mère-Lusignan’.38 As the title of Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox’s volume of essays attests,39 both Jean’s and Coudrette’s versions of the Mélusine legends are founding fictions, relating the way in which Mélusine enables her husband-to-be, Raymondin, to acquire the territory which will ostensibly be named after her. Using a ruse also deployed by Dido in order to found Carthage,40 Mélusine advises him to ask the new Count of Poitiers for ‘autant de place en ceste roche et en ce desrubant comment un cuir de cerf pourra enclourre’ [as much space on this rock and escarpment as a deerskin can encircle] (JA, 176–8). The count agrees readily, thinking this is a small gift to grant. However, following Mélusine’s instructions, Raymondin has the deerskin cut into the thinnest of strips, so that it can encompass a piece of land ‘bien deux lieues de tour’ [a good two leagues in circumference] (JA, 184). The deerskin is thus transformed into another sense of surface; this reimagining and reconfiguring of skin as a demarcation between inside and outside at once establishes Raymondin as a powerful landowner and firmly places him in ‘les territoires de l’animal’. The territory belonging to the title of Lusignan is mapped according to the contours of an animal skin; and the powerful dynasty which emerges from this territory is similarly delineated by recourse to animal surfaces. Raymondin and Mélusine have ten sons, eight of whom have some kind of deformity, several of which have animal connotations. Antoine, for example, has a lion’s paw growing out of his left cheek; Fromont has a small hairy patch like moleskin on his nose; and Geoffroy has a huge tusk growing out of his mouth.41

38

As Jacques Le Goff observes, it is difficult to discern whether Mélusine’s name in fact derives from Lusignan or the other way around (Le Roy Ladurie and Le Goff ‘Mélusine maternelle et défricheuse’, p. 596). On Mélusine’s name, see Perret, ‘Attribution et utilisation’. 39 Mélusine de Lusignan: Founding Fictions in Late Medieval France. 40 Virgil, Aeneid, book 1, lines 367–8. For a comparison of Mélusine and Dido, see Lucken, ‘Roman de Mélusine’, pp. 150–1. 41 See Léglu, ‘Nourishing Lineage’, pp. 78–9 on the connotations of these marks.

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Melusine’s animality is marked in an insistent, overdetermined way: we see it in the bodies of her sons (although, as we will see later, these traits may also be understood as deriving from their father); and the illustrator of one of the manuscripts of Jean d’Arras’s text depicts her in three separate miniatures accompanied by a small dragon, like a familiar or pet, of which there is no mention in either text.42 This animality is part of a constellation of prohibitions, transgressions, and abnormalities, which bleed into and generate one another: so powerful is this mode of narrative that Jean d’Arras appears unable to begin his tale without first preparing the ground in a long prologue detailing other examples of human–supernatural couplings, drawn mostly from Gervais of Tilbury’s Otia imperialia and Gautier Map’s De nugis curialium (JA, 110–18).43 Such wonders are widespread and unfathomable, declares Jean; but they do give credence to the extraordinary tale he is about to relate:44 L’en trueve tant de merveilles, selon commune estimacion, et si nouvelles que humain entendement est contraint de dire les jugements de Dieu sont abisme sans fons et sans rive. Et sont ces choses merveilleuses et en tant de formes et manieres diverses, et en tant de paÿs selon leur diverse nature espandues, que, sauf meilleur jugement, je cuide qu’onques homme, se Adam non, n’ot parfaicte congnoissance des euvres invisibles de Dieu. (JA, 114) [We find so many marvels, according to popular opinion, and so many unheard-of phenomena, that human understanding is bound to say that the judgement of God is a bottomless, boundless abyss. And these wondrous things take so many diverse forms and aspects, and are so widespread in numerous manifestations across many lands, that, in the absence of any better opinion, I believe that no man but Adam has ever had perfect knowledge of the invisible works of God.]

Adam’s complete knowledge of the mysterious workings of God came to an abrupt end with the moment of the Fall; the wonders of which Jean, Gervais, and Gautier write hint at this divine understanding, but are nothing but remnants of it. Whereas no man since Adam has been able to understand the invisible, the taboos surrounding Mélusine and her lineage recurrently concern prohibited vision. Like the marriage between Raymondin and Mélusine, Mélusine’s parents’ union is one between a fairy, Présine, and a mortal, 42 Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, ms 3353, fols 4v, 184, and 22r. See Clier-Colombani, La Fée Mélusine, pp. 39–42. 43 See Sturm-Maddox, ‘Crossed Destinies’, pp. 12–13; and Le Roy Ladurie and Le Goff, ‘Mélusine maternelle et défricheuse’, pp. 587–92. 44 See Perret, ‘L’invraisembable vérité’, p. 30.

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King Elinas of Albany. Both marriages depend upon the maintenance of a taboo which is doomed to be broken. Elinas promises never to see Présine in child-bed. When Elinas breaks this promise, Présine leaves him. Upon learning the truth of their parents’ separation, Mélusine and her sisters wreak their revenge upon their father for his transgression, and imprison him in a mountain. In turn, Présine punishes her daughters for this act, cursing each of them to an eternity of supernatural life, rather than the mortality for which they all long: Melior becomes the guardian of a castle in which knights must watch over a sparrowhawk without falling asleep for three days and nights and must never ask for her love; Palestine must guard their father’s treasure in the mountain of Coingo. Mélusine’s curse (or gift) will only become complete if her husband discovers her shapeshifting secret: Mais, desormais, je te donne le don que tu seras tous les samedis serpente du nombril en aval. Mais, se tu trueves homme qui te veuille prendre a espouse, que il te convenance que jamais le samedy ne te verra, non qu’il descuevre, ne ne le die a personne, tu vivras cours naturel comme femme naturelle, et mourras naturelment. (JA, 134–6) [But from henceforth I endow you with the gift that you will be a serpent from the navel downwards on Saturdays. But, should you find a man who wishes to take you as a wife, who promises that he will never see you on a Saturday, nor discover your secret, nor tell it to anyone else, you shall live out a natural course like a natural woman, and you will die naturally.]

As the editor of Jean d’Arras’s Mélusine, Jean-Jacques Vincensini, points out in a footnote, the accretion of negatives in this curse makes it hard to translate (JA, 136); it is only when he has disobeyed all three of the prohibitions articulated by Présine that Raymondin loses his wife forever.45 The first transgression sets in train the chain of events which inevitably lead to the others. At the prompting of his brother, the Count of Forests, Raymondin spies on Mélusine in her Saturday bath, making a hole with his sword in the door of her chamber. But just what is it that Raymondin sees? A large proportion of manuscripts of both versions include images of Mélusine in her bath; but, as Françoise Clier-Colombani and Joanna Pavlevski have demonstrated, these vary subtly in their interpretation of this scene.46 And critics have also offered diverse readings of what Raymondin saw: as Denyse Delcourt points out in her fine article, 45 On Raymondin’s transgression and Mélusine’s Saturday incarnation, see Vincensini, ‘Samedi’. 46 Clier-Colombani, La Fée Mélusine, pp. 43–53; and Pavlevski, ‘Une esthétique’.

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Raymondin’s action ‘a pour effet de transformer le lecteur-auditeur de Mélusine lui-même en « voyeur » en lui permettant de partager—et cela impunément—une « connaissance » intime de la femme’ [has the effect of transforming the reader-listener of Mélusine himself into a voyeur, enabling him to share, with impunity, an intimate knowledge of the woman].47 Here is Jean d’Arras’s description: Jusques au nombril en figure de femme et pignoit ses cheveulx, et du nombril en aval estoit en forme de la queue d’un serpent, aussi grosse comme une tonne ou on met harenc, et longue durement, et debatoit de sa coue l’eaue tellement qu’elle la faisoit saillir jusques a la voulte de la chambre. (JA, 660) [Down to the navel she had the shape of a woman, and was combing her hair. And from the navel downwards she had the form of a serpent’s tail, as fat as a barrel where herring is stored, and hugely long, and she was beating the water with her tail such that she made it splash up to the ceiling of the chamber.]

And Coudrette’s: La regarde, si apperçoyt Mellusigne qui se baignoit; Jusqu’au nombril la voit si blanche Comme la nege sur la branche, Le corps bien fait, fricque et joly, Le visage fres e poli; Et a proprement parler d’elle, Oncque ne fut point de plus belle. Mais queue ot dessoubz de serpent, Grande et orrible vrayement: D’argent et d’asur fut burlee; Fort s’en debat, l’eaue a croulee. (Coudrette, 3065–76) [He looked at her and saw Mélusine bathing. Down to the navel he saw that she was as white as snow on a branch; her body was well-formed, fresh, and pretty, her face fresh and smooth; and, to speak properly, there was never any woman more beautiful. But below she had a serpent’s tail, truly huge and horrible: it was burnished with silver and blue; it was beating powerfully, the water had spilled.]

Kevin Brownlee reads Jean’s rather surprising simile (although he calls it a metaphor) as ‘de-eroticiz[ing]’ Mélusine’s body; he also suggests that it, along with the ‘playful splashing of the tail’, casts Mélusine as a ‘somewhat comical monster’.48 Rather than comical, however, I would argue that this comparison of her tail to a barrel of fish induces a reaction of squeamish 47 48

Delcourt, ‘Métamorphose’, p. 92. Brownlee, ‘Mélusine’s Hybrid Body’, p. 82.

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disgust more than amusement: yet another unattractive animal turns up to haunt Mélusine’s scaly body. In the same vein, the beating of the snake’s tail in the water seems more indicative of unfettered animality, connected to and yet, uncannily, apparently uncontrolled by the beautiful woman combing her hair.49 As Huot observes, Mélusine’s body ‘is an impossible joining of opposites’: the cultured courtly lady and the disorderly animal.50 My own interpretation of this scene concurs partially with Labbie’s, when she says ‘Raymond sees his wife as the abject, revolting, and threatening human who is also an animal’.51 However, Labbie describes this sight as ‘the empirical witnessing of her bodily form as the phallic mother’,52 and this is where our readings part company, for the abject maternal body and the phallic mother are quite different modes of conceiving of the proscribed desire for the maternal in psychoanalysis. Where the abject fuses horror and longing for that which has been forbidden, the phallic mother is a fantasy of completeness. Stephen G. Nichols also sees Mélusine in her bath as phallic: ‘a female torso terminating in a lithe and outsize phallus displaced as a fish’s tail’.53 I, too, have described the snake’s tail as phallic,54 but this assessment requires some rethinking: the snake’s tail may well be cylindrical and longer than it is wide, but this does not necessarily associate it automatically with the authority psychoanalysis inscribes in the form of the fantasized male genitals. As Jager points out, medieval commentators found the serpent’s body ‘a useful androgynous form that could be either phallic or enveloping, thrusting or alluring, masculine or feminine’.55 McCracken invokes the tradition of women’s bodies being particularly proscribed during the ablutions which are necessary during menstruation: she argues convincingly that, ‘the interdiction to see Mélusine’s bodily transformation may suggest or echo other prohibitions to see the functions of the female body’.56 Certainly, the prohibition against her husband’s seeing her semi-transformed body resonates with Présine’s forbidding her husband to see her in child-bed. Mélusine’s snake tail inevitably recalls the Biblical serpent, its tempting words, and Eve’s curse, which ensued from her capitulation to them: it recalls a particular interpretation of female physiology as flawed, fallen, and suspect. This association between childbirth and the serpentine is also 49 However, as Clier-Colombani points out, Mélusine is not depicted in any surviving illustrations of this frequently illustrated scene as combing her hair (La Fée Mélusine, p. 53). 50 Huot, ‘Dangerous Embodiments’, p. 412. 51 52 Labbie, Lacan’s Medievalism, p. 88. Labbie, Lacan’s Medievalism, p. 89. 53 Nichols, ‘Mélusine Between Myth and History’, p. 143. 54 Griffin, ‘The Beastly and the Courtly’, p. 147. 55 56 Jager, Tempter’s Voice, p. 110. McCracken, Curse, p. 83.

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recalled in Elioxe, in which Lothaire’s mother announces that Elioxe has given birth not to seven children, but seven serpents.57 Like the knight and the squire in the Paradis de la Reine Sibylle, Raymondin has glimpsed that which is inferred as being the true monstrosity of a desired woman’s body; like Actaeon he is punished for his sight of a proscribed woman’s body. Although Mélusine is all too aware that Raymondin has contravened her prohibition, she does not act until he reveals her secret before the court, enraged at the news of Fromont’s horrible death in a fire started by Geoffroy, who has burned down the abbey where Fromont has just become a monk. In Coudrette’s version, Raymondin places the blame for Geoffroy’s savage act on to Mélusine, and her serpentine secret, declaring, ‘Haä, serpente, ta lignie | Ne fera ja bien en sa vie!’ [Ah, serpent, your lineage will never do any good in its life!] (Coudrette, 3879–80). In Jean d’Arras’s version, Raymondin in his grief casts Mélusine no longer as a woman and a wife, but a monstrous matriarch of a diabolical dynasty: Par la foy que je doy a Dieu, je croy que ce ne soit que fantosme de ceste femme, ne ne croy pas que ja fruit qu’elle ait porté viengne a perfection de bien; elle n’a porté enfant qui n’ait apporté quelque estrange signe sur terre. (JA, 688) [By the faith I owe God, I believe that this is nothing but a phantom of a woman, and nor do I believe that any fruit she has borne may come to perfection: she has not borne any child which did not carry some kind of strange sign on earth.]

Raymondin presents a very partial picture of Mélusine’s morality and body here: he occludes the unblemished bodies of two of the couple’s children; he suppresses Mélusine’s instrumental role in establishing his territory and dynasty (it cannot be true that the lineage will never do any good, since both versions of the story are commissioned by aristocrats who purport to be of that lineage); and he edits out his own paternity and animality in the production of his sons. As several critics have observed, if Geoffroy’s disfigurement—the enormous tusk-like tooth which protrudes from his mouth—is to be read as stemming from a flaw in one of his parents, it surely functions much more as a reminder of Raymondin’s animal violence.58 When Raymondin first meets Mélusine, he has just 57 ‘si s’a delivré | De .VII. serpens qui ont tot son cors desciré’ [She has given birth to seven snakes who split apart her body] (Elioxe, 1527–8). 58 See Harf-Lancner, Les Fées, pp. 177–8; Roblin, ‘Le Sanglier’; Spiegel, ‘Maternity and Monstrosity’, p. 110; and de Looze, ‘ “La fourme” ’, p. 132; Griffin, ‘The Beastly and the Courtly’. Claude Lecouteux, by contrast, reads the boar as yet another avatar or familiar of Mélusine’s (‘Bilan et perspectives’, pp. 19–20).

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accidentally killed his uncle Aymery, the Count of Poitiers, while they were both engaged in a boar hunt. Mélusine saves him from the punishment which would certainly ensue from this manslaughter, by advising him to say nothing, and to wait for Aymery’s body to be found. This pact suits them both, then, since it enables them both to conceal the animality underpinning their identity: Mélusine’s weekly serpentine shape-shifting and Raymondin’s porcine violence.59 When he breaks this pact, Mélusine is doomed to embody the animal for ever more: she flies out of the window in the form of a dragon, returning only to comfort her children;60 and, much later, to warn that the castle of Lusignan is about to change hands. As Coudrette and Jean make abundantly clear, Mélusine is not simply a snake, and is far from the deceptive, demonic fairies with which Jean prefaces his tale. Nevertheless, Raymondin’s damning declaration (which he almost immediately regrets) calls upon a series of misogynist figures by which the woman, specifically the woman’s body, is constructed as animal, as the repository of the savage, brutal desires and instincts which characterize both men and women.61 This is precisely the logic of the abject, which depends upon the processes of displacement and inversion in order to defend the subject from the object of fear.62 Both Kristeva and Raymondin, then, construct narratives in which the maternal body is understood as beastly and threatens to overwhelm her offspring’s identity. Raymondin’s denunciation is the final transgression, which uncouples Mélusine from her potential mortality and her desired incarnation as a ‘femme naturelle’ [natural woman], as articulated in the terms of her mother’s curse. As Pairet observes, Mélusine inhabits an array of potential bodies: she is a snake–woman hybrid, a dragon, a mother, and a courtly lady.63 We might see her very mutability as both alarmingly supernatural and stereotypically feminine: while Mélusine shifts categories and forms depending on the time of the week, the bodies of women in general are often represented as only slightly less changeable—they bleed, change shape, produce other humans, and can elicit alarmingly uncontrollable urges and reactions in the minds and bodies of male onlookers. From this 59 As Lucken pithily puts it, ‘La queue de serpent ne cache-t-elle pas la dent du sanglier?’ [Doesn’t the snake’s tail hide the boar’s tooth?] (‘Roman de Mélusine’, p. 161). 60 In the Coudrette version, Mélusine breastfeeds her children; in Jean d’Arras she hires wet nurses. See Léglu, ‘Nourishing Lineage’. 61 Along similar lines, Dorothy Yamamoto argues, ‘For although Mélusine is a shapeshifter, a hybrid monster, she is more fundamentally the product of male ambivalence over women’s role within society’ (Boundaries of the Human, p. 224). 62 See Oliver, Animal Lessons, pp. 285–92. 63 See Pairet, ‘Mélusine’s double binds’, p. 83.

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point of view, then, what Raymondin sees is one interpretation of what it means to be a natural woman, a figure who turns out to be just as fictional and fantasized as the terrifying feminine serpent. At the point of leaving irrevocably her mortal shape and mortal world, Mélusine invokes the lost incarnation and death she could have attained: Las, mon amy, se tu ne m’eusse fausee je estoye gectee et exemptee de paine et de tourment. Et eusse vescu cours naturel comme femme naturelle et feusse morte naturelement et eu tous mes sacremens, et eusse esté ensevelie et enterree en l’eglise de Nostre Dame de Lusegnen, et eust on fait mon unniversaire bien et deuement. Or me ras tu embatue en la penance obscure ou j’avoye longtemps esté par ma mesaventure et ainsi la me fauldra porter et souffrir jusques au jour du Jugement et par ta faulseté. (JA, 694–6) [Alas, my beloved, if you had not been false I would have been saved and exempt from pain and torment. I would have lived out my natural life as a natural woman and I would have died naturally and had all the last rites; I would have been entombed and interred in the church of Our Lady of Lusignan and I would have been commemorated properly, as would have been my due. Now you have doomed me to the darkness of penance where I had been for a long while because of my wrongdoing; and thus I must bear and suffer there until the Day of Judgment all because of your falseness.]

Where Jean’s Mélusine elaborates the funeral and commemoration she would have had, Coudrette’s is more succinct: Se verité eusses tenue, Jusqu’a la mort m’eusses eüe Ainsi que femme naturelle, Feminine, femme mortelle. (Coudrette, 3951–4) [If you had been true to your word, you would have had me until death just as a natural woman; a feminine, mortal woman.]

Coudrette’s anaphora and rhyme underscore the mortal, natural femininity for which Mélusine yearns and which she will never attain; both authors have Mélusine reiterate the imperfect subjunctive in order to conjure up this impossible natural state. Butler points out the ‘discursive production of a nature and, indeed, a natural sex that postures as the unquestioned foundation of culture’.64 The idea of nature, especially nature as connected to sex, she demonstrates, is contingent on cultural norms and requirements; it is essentially an artificial product, articulated and positioned such that it appears to predate and give rise to cultural production. In a similar way, the ‘femme 64

Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 37.

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naturelle’ which Mélusine aspires to be is a product of her mother’s curse, which itself resonates with the curse of the original mother, Eve. The female body is delineated as cursed precisely by the production of an impossible, ideal body which has been lost via the sin of the Fall or the transgression of a taboo. In the Middle Ages, the most common incarnation of the impossibly perfect woman was the Virgin Mary, who redeems the sin of Eve:65 Mélusine does not even aspire to this pinnacle of feminine spotlessness (although she fantasizes about being buried in the church dedicated to her), but simply to the natural, fallen woman, who at least has an immortal soul and whose animality is not rendered quite so graphically on her body. Mélusine’s shifting body offers an alternative version of the ‘natural woman’: not a sublime figure towards which she and her sisters might aspire, but one which renders visible the sin, corruption, and punishment with which post-lapsarian women are indelibly, inescapably—yet sometimes imperceptibly—marked. In her discussions of the cultural construction of natural womanhood, Butler refers to the heartfelt aspiration voiced in Aretha Franklin’s ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’.66 Both Mélusine’s tale and Franklin’s song indicate the cultural processes by which this natural womanhood is created. As Butler says: Although Aretha appears to be all too glad to have her naturalness confirmed, she also seems fully and paradoxically minded that that confirmation is never guaranteed, that the effect of naturalness is only achieved as a consequence of that moment of heterosexual recognition.67

In Butler’s account of the song, it is only possible to feel ‘like’ a natural woman, to be able to identify a naturalness with which one can compare oneself, rather than incarnate. What it means to be a natural woman depends entirely on the other, the ‘you’ who is being addressed by the singer: ‘what if ’, Butler wonders, ‘Aretha were singing to me?’68 In other words, nature is not a fixed state from which bodily identifications (such as gender, humanity, or animality) inevitably progress, but a contingent notion which is imposed upon bodies in order to organize and figure them in culturally legible ways. Elizabeth Grosz observes that the body ‘is itself a cultural, the cultural, product’,69 and the invocations of nature when portraying the body as that which predates or resists cultural 65

See Elliott, Fallen Bodies, pp. 108–16. The song is mentioned in Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 22; and discussed more fully in Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Subordination’. 67 Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Subordination’, p. 133. 68 Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Subordination’, p. 134. 69 Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 23. 66

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interpretations are themselves manifestations of the process by which we construct the body as a cultural artefact. The terms of the curse, then, delineate the mortal nature which Mélusine desires and yet can never attain. This nature is also circumscribed in physical terms at the very moment of the metamorphosis which marks its irrevocable loss. As she leaps from the window, Jean d’Arras tells us, she leaves a footprint on the window sill: ‘Et sachiéz que la pierre sur quoy elle passa a la fenestre y est encores, et y est la fourme du pié tout escripte’ [and you should know that the stone over which she passed by the window is still there, and the shape of her foot is inscribed there] (JA, 704). At this instant of transition from woman to serpent, from earthbound to air-bound, from mortal to monster, Mélusine leaves in the fabric of the castle she caused to be built a memorial to the natural woman she could never have been.70 The addressee of the imperative ‘sachiéz’ could well be Jean de Berry, the occupant of Lusignan for whom Jean d’Arras was writing, and who would presumably have been able to see this memorial to Mélusine’s lost body whenever he was at the castle. The footprint commemorates Mélusine’s absence and continues its conspicuousness to the very time of Jean d’Arras’s writing: it is then, the foil to the dragon seen flying about Lusignan’s ramparts in the image for March in the Très Riches Heures created for Jean de Berry in the early fifteenth century.71 The concrete equivalent of the contrafactual articulation of the prophecy, the print outlines what Mélusine might have been but will never be. LOOKING AT MEDUSA: ‘LA CHAIR QU’ON NE VOIT JAMAIS’ The horrified yet entranced male gaze upon the abject, fantasized female body, of the kind we see in Guinglain’s reaction to his guivre or Raymondin’s to Mélusine’s hybridity, is of course, encountered in art, theory, and culture before, after, and beyond the Middle Ages in Western Europe. It is also present in Freud’s analysis of what Lacan calls ‘le rêve des rêves’ [the dream of dreams]:72 Freud’s own dream often termed ‘the dream of Irma’s injection’. Freud dreams that he persuades his friend and patient, Irma, to let him look into her mouth: de Looze argues that this is an autobiographical ‘corporeal inscription [which] bridges the distance between text and referent, between book in the world and book of the world, between literature and reality’ (‘ “La fourme” ’, p. 134). 71 72 Manuscript Chantilly, Musée Condé 65, f.3v. Lacan, Séminaire II, p. 204. 70

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Der Mund geht dann auch gut auf, und ich finde rechts einen grossen weissen Fleck, und anderwärts sehe ich an merkwürdigen krausen Gebilden, die offenbar den Nasenmuscheln nach gebildedet sind, ausgedehnte weissgraue Schorfe.73 [She then opened her mouth properly and on the right I found a big white patch; at another place I saw extensive whitish grey scabs upon some remarkable curly structures which were evidently modelled on the nasal muscles.]

In his dream, this sight alarms Freud, and three of his colleagues and friends join him in discussing what these symptoms might imply. In analysing the dream, Freud is reminded of another friend of his who ‘hat der Wissenschaft einige höchst merkwürdige Beziehungen der Nasenmuscheln zu den weiblichen Sexualorganen eröffnet’ [had drawn scientific attention to some very remarkable connections between the muscles of the nose and the female sex organs].74 Dreaming of looking into a woman’s mouth, then, Freud seems also to be looking at her nose and her genitalia. In his 1954–1955 Seminar, Lacan gives an account of this dream, precisely because its analysis seems to be so foundational for Freud’s work. His reading of Freud’s remembered dream rewrites what Freud sees in Irma’s mouth in much more graphically fleshly—and abject— terms: Il y a là une horrible découverte, celle de la chair qu’on ne voit jamais, le fond des choses, l’envers de la face, du visage, les secrétats par excellence, la chair dont tout sort, au plus profond même du mystère, la chair en tant qu’elle est souffrante, qu’elle est informe, que sa forme par soi-même est quelque chose qui provoque l’angoisse.75 [There is here a horrible discovery, that of the flesh which is never seen, the ground of things, the reverse of the face, the most secret of all secrets, the flesh from which everything issues, at the very heart of the mystery, the flesh as it suffers, as it is formless, as its form in itself is something which provokes anxiety.]

It is as if Lacan has joined the three Austrians in order to peer into the unfortunate Irma’s body and offer his own verdict. His litany of labels for what the dreaming doctor may have seen calls on a number of circumlocutions and euphemisms for the female genitalia: although rarely cautious about naming them elsewhere, here Lacan seems to waver between understanding this sight as formless and a form which elicits fear. Freud’s account of his dream, and Lacan’s retelling of it, are both characterized by displacement, as the investigating male self is projected 73

GW, 2, 111–12.

74

GW, 2, 122.

75

Lacan, Séminaire II, p. 214.

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into the investigated female body, which is itself reorganized such that mouth, nose, and genitalia are superimposed in this vision of ‘la chair qu’on ne voit jamais’ [the flesh that is never seen]. Readers of medieval literature might be reminded by this of the horrible fate of Bisclavret’s noseless wife. Certainly psychoanalytically inflected readings of this lai understand her mutilation as castration;76 or see her damaged face as repositioned female genitalia reimagined as a castration wound: JeanCharles Huchet, for instance, asks ‘l’arrachement du nez peut-il dès lors renvoyer à autre chose qu’à la béance du sexe?’ [can the amputation of the nose refer to anything else than the gaping genitals?].77 In a note made much later in his career, Freud explicitly connects the female face and the female genitalia with recourse to the figure (or, rather, the head) of Medusa.78 ‘Der Anblick des Medusenhaupts macht starr vor Schreck, verwandelt den Beschauer in Stein’ [The sight of Medusa’s head makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him to stone],79 writes Freud, evoking the imbricated reactions of terror and sexual arousal elicited by this vision of femininity. In book 4 of the Metamorphoses, Medusa is originally a beautiful young woman who was raped by Neptune in Athena’s temple; the victim rather than the rapist is punished by Athena for defiling the temple, and Medusa becomes so hideous to gaze upon that all those who see her are instantly turned into stone. Athena’s brother, Perseus, is able to kill Medusa because he looks only at her reflection in his polished shield. Perseus is then able to use the head as a weapon to turn his enemies into stone; Medusa’s power is such that even after her death her blood petrifies some seaweed—this becomes coral. What unites the tale of Medusa, the dream of Irma, and the tale of Mélusine is the emphasis placed in their narratives on the angle of the gaze which encounters their bodies.80 Mélusine and Irma are spied on, the male gaze intruding into a private space, either through a hole drilled in a door or a fantasized medical examination of an unwilling patient. Labbie points out that what Raymondin sees ‘embodies that which the voyeur’s imagination could expect to find’;81 yet all these voyeuristic tales imply that men who spy on women see a monstrous body which is both expected and unexpected. Its repellent aspect is expected because it is a confirmation of the misogynist archetype of the dissembling, sinful woman who conceals her corporeal hideousness; and unexpected because the body perceived is radically different from the 76 78 80

Labbie, Lacan’s Medievalism, p. 84. ‘Das Medusenhaupt’. GW, 17, 47–8. See Delcourt, ‘Métamorphose’, p. 96.

77

Huchet, ‘Nom de femme’, p. 419. GW, 47. Labbie, Lacan’s Medievalism, p. 89.

79

81

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anthropomorphic human body. Seen from this appalled, entranced, surreptitious angle, the female body may have genitalia instead of a head, a snake’s body instead of genitalia, or snakes growing out of her head. This is a body acting in an uncontrolled way, yet the shapes that it takes are circumscribed by the misogynist frame which construes women as ever unpredictable, mutating, duplicitous. In a sense, then, these women’s serpentine metamorphoses are not just seen, but also produced, by the line of sight which beholds them: in Delcourt’s words, they are, ‘le fruit des désirs, toujours ambivalents, de celui qui [les] regarde’ [the fruit of the ever ambivalent desires of he who looks at them].82 Just as Muldumarec becomes the ideal fairy-lover under the gaze of the lady in Yonec,83 Mélusine and Medusa are rendered horrifying via the transfixed gaze of the men who spy on them: the French word ‘méduser’ means, precisely, to transfix. As the knight and his squire and Raymondin spy on the snake-women who fascinate and repel them, as Perseus looks at Medusa’s reflection, as Freud and Lacan scrutinize Irma’s jumbled body, they are afforded a partial vision (in a mirror, or through a hole) which they nevertheless take as presenting to them the whole truth about womanhood. This predictably unpredictable body is mesmerizing in its horror; but it is also a transient, contingent figure, framed by the incomplete glance which conceives of itself as an all-seeing, omniscient gaze. Raymondin realizes his mistake too late, lamenting ‘J’ay fait le borgne!’ (JA, 662). Literally, this might be translated as ‘I acted as if I had one eye’; metaphorically, Raymondin is suggesting that he did not see the whole picture.84 Hélène Cixous reappropriates the figure of Medusa in her essays ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’ and ‘Le Sexe ou la tête’, proposing a gaze on the figure of Medusa which is not transfixed by the sight of a wound or a threat, but urges that we look at her fully: Il suffit qu’on regarde la Méduse en face pour la voir: et elle n’est pas mortelle. Elle est belle et elle rit.85 [We need simply to look Medusa in the face to see her: and she is not deadly. She is beautiful and she is laughing.]

From the new perspective proposed by Cixous, the horror engendered by Medusa is punctured and her petrifying effects are negated.86 This play 82 84 85 86

83 Delcourt, ‘Métamorphose’, p. 107. As we saw in the Introduction, p. 2. See Burns, ‘A Snake-Tailed Woman’, p. 202. Cixous, ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’, p. 54. See Bowers, ‘Medusa and the Female Gaze’, p. 220.

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with lines of sight recalls Butler’s insistence that nature and sex are contingent productions, generated from particular positions to justify and ground the ideology which directs them. The Ovide moralisé tells Medusa’s tale from its own angle. Ovid’s story of Perseus in book 4 begins with Perseus’s journey to rescue Andromeda from the sea monster (pausing only to drip blood from Medusa’s head into Libya, explaining the presence of snakes in this country; and then to turn the giant Atlas into a mountain); only later does Perseus relate how he killed Medusa, closing his account, and this book of the Metamorphoses, with the tale of Medusa’s initial defilement and disfigurement. The Ovide moralisé, by contrast, could be read as telling the story of Medusa, rather than that of Perseus: it first recounts Medusa’s rape and transformation; then her decapitation by Perseus and the birth of Pegasus; followed by Perseus’s transfiguration of Atlas and rescue of and marriage to Andromeda. It is as if author of the Ovide moralisé invites his readers to look at the tale of Medusa in the mirroring surface Perseus uses so that he can kill her. Her story may be given a linear chronological order,87 but even before she is decapitated, Medusa’s body is unsettlingly fragmented. This account starts by describing Medusa and her sisters as the daughters of Phorcys, who only had one eye between them: ‘un oeil seulement avoient, | Dont chascune usoit sa feïe’. [They only had one eye, which they used one at a time] (OM, 4.5679–80). However, the Metamorphoses originally mentions only two daughters of Phorcys, who share an eye, which Perseus steals as they pass it between them, and then sets off to find the Gorgons (M, 4.774–81).88 By allotting the shared eye to Medusa and her sisters, the Ovide moralisé reifies the petrifying gaze the Gorgon’s head will radiate even after death. In ‘Qui est Méduse?’, an essay in a volume written to accompany a 1998 exhibition of images of decapitation at the Musée du Louvre, Kristeva points out the reconfiguration and abjection of the female body inherent in the image of Medusa’s disembodied head: Vulve féminine, la tête de Méduse est un il glaireux, tuméfié, chassieux; trou noir dont l’iris immobile s’entoure de lambeaux-lèvres, plis, poils pubiens.89 [A female vulva, Medusa’s head is a mucous, swollen, rheumy eye, its motionless iris surrounded by rags-lips, folds, pubic hair.] 87

See Demats, Fabula, p. 74. See Possamaï-Pérez, L’Ovide moralisé, p. 42. The Ovide moralisé author is not completely off track, however, since Ovid calls Medusa Phorcynis at Metamorphoses 4.743 and 5.230. 89 Kristeva, Visions Capitales, p. 36. 88

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Like the Ovide moralisé’s Medusa, Kristeva’s abject vision has only one eye; and it is reminiscent of the repulsive sight Freud and Lacan see as they affect to scrutinize the female body. For the Ovide moralisé, this monstrous ugliness has as its cause and its foil the deceptive and confounding beauty of the historical original of the Medusa story: in a euhemerist reading it relates that Medusa was originally a beautiful yet promiscuous woman with gorgeous curly hair. This hair was cut off by Minerva when she found Medusa in her temple, and so Medusa wore false hairpieces: Et lors Meduse controuva A metre en son chief serpentiaux, Que ces fames claiment ‘borriaux’. (OM, 4.5737–9) [And then Medusa contrived to put in her hair little snakes which women call ‘rolls’.]

Medusa’s beauty is therefore artificial, yet nonetheless mesmerizing. In this explication, then, it is not the stunning hideousness of Medusa which turns people into stone, but her dazzling beauty: horror and attraction are so close in the tale of the Gorgon that they can be interchanged from ‘fable’ to moralization. The unsettling hybrid of beauty and monstrosity Raymondin sees when he spies Mélusine in her bath resonates with the conjuncture of this Ovidian tale and its pseudo-historical rationalization. Whereas Mélusine’s alluring womanly top half ‘pignoit ses cheveulx’ [was combing her hair] (JA, 660) while her serpent tail beats the water with animal abandon, Medusa’s attractive but unnatural hairstyle is understood as, and overwritten with, snakes. In both cases, abject animality is ostensibly revealed as the secret behind feminine beauty. Medusa can be briefly glimpsed in the ‘Medusa interpolation’, a fiftytwo-line addition to the Roman de la Rose transmitted by around ten surviving manuscripts.90 As Huot observes, one of the effects of the insertion of this section is that Perseus becomes a corrective image of Narcissus, looking into a mirror precisely so that he will not be transfixed and mortified by the reflected object of his gaze. Whereas Narcissus fails to recognize what he sees as a reflection, Perseus precisely depends upon the optics of the mirror in order not to have to look Médusa ‘en face’.91 The displacement performed upon the female body in the Rose is such that the beloved is figured as the eponymous rose (which, as numerous critics have 90 Langlois gives this interpolation in his edition of the Rose, vol. 5, 107–9. See Huot, ‘Medusa Interpolation’. 91 Huot observes that this is the kind of mirroring Raison is proposing to the Lover when she invites him to find his reflection in her ‘cler visage’ (‘Medusa Interpolation’, p. 874).

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pointed out, is described in terms which sometimes suggest male genitalia, sometimes female; and might represent the lady herself, her love, her chastity, or her vagina); towards the end of the poem, the beloved for which the Lover strives is described as an ‘ymage’, a statue, a simulacrum. The Medusa interpolation stresses the power of the ‘ymage’, declaring that it causes more miracles than Medusa ever did: Vers Medusa riens ne duroit, Car en roche transfiguroit, Tant faisoit felonesse euvre Par ses felons crins de couleuvres. (‘Medusa Interpolation’, 5–8) [Nothing lasted around Medusa, for she transformed everything into rock: she performed this wicked work with her wicked hair of snakes.]

The ‘ymage’ of the beloved in the Rose is superior to Medusa, and seems to connote the desirable, passive side of feminine beauty—yet the introduction of this interpolation in the ten surviving manuscripts means that the abject, terrifying figure of Medusa haunts this desirable ‘ymage’. The Ovide moralisé’s historical explanation of Medusa’s serpentine coiffure as false hair may well be a reference to the Rose, specifically the section in which La Vieille, a stereotypically dirty old woman,92 gives advice to Bel Acueil, the masculine personification of the welcoming aspect of the feminine beloved. Her speech enables the male audience of the Rose to eavesdrop on the duplicitous advice passed down from woman to woman,93 and thereby warns men against falling for such ruses. La Vieille’s beauty tips are themselves derived from the Ars Amatoria,94 and include what to do if her putative female listener should lose all her hair: Face tant que l’en li aporte Cheveus de quelque fame morte Ou de saie blonde borreaus. (Rose, 13263–5) [Have her brought the hair of some dead woman, or rolls of blonde silk.]

In other words, women need to cover and adorn themselves, to hide and enhance what nature has given them, so as to look like a natural woman to the men they try to trap. Whereas the sight of snake-haired Medusa petrified onlookers, the ‘ymage’ brings stone back to life. In the manuscripts which transmit the Medusa interpolation, the ‘ymage’ of the beloved is compared to Medusa, 92 93 94

See Miller, Medieval Monstrosity, pp. 28–9 and Ziolkowski, ‘The Obscenities’. Kay, ‘Women’s Body of Knowledge’, p. 217. On these, see Miller, Medieval Monstrosity, p. 24.

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a woman whose gaze turns men to stone, before it is compared to Pygmalion’s sculpture, a creation who becomes flesh under her male creator’s desiring gaze. Although this is a brief variant, then, the Rose’s Medusa interpolation emphasizes the ‘movement of petrifaction and depetrifaction’ within the other Ovidian intertexts this rich text deploys.95 In the next section of this chapter, I move from the snake to the statue as the form which fantasizes the fixing of feminine beauty in the face of its abject instability. SCULPTING NATURE: PYGMALION IN THE ROSE AND THE OVIDE MORALISÉ The metamorphosis undergone by Pygmalion’s statue is an anomalous one in the narratives I discuss in this book. Whereas the majority of the transformations I have considered in medieval French literature are from human to animal, vegetable, or mineral (and sometimes back again), the tale of Pygmalion depicts a transition from an inanimate, hard work of art to a soft, responsive, and perfectly beautiful female body. It may be this transformation’s very anomalous status that so captivated medieval authors: it is not difficult to see how the story of an artist whose work comes to life rather than simply simulating life would appeal to authors whose work is characterized by self-consciousness and self-reflection.96 It is clear from this tale’s treatment by late medieval authors, especially those writing in the dit tradition in the wake of the Rose, that what is at stake in this metamorphosis of statue into woman is the relationship between nature and art.97 Just as Pygmalion falls in love with his statue, so Jean de Meun renders the beloved of his lover-protagonist as an ‘ymage’—although this is as superior to Pygmalion’s statue as a lion is to a mouse (Rose, 20781–6). At the top of Jean’s hierarchy of artists, however, is the goddess Nature: Nature’s creations, Jean declares, are always better and truer than those made by Art. Although Art may strive to create figures, birds, beasts, or flowers, ‘ne les fera par eus aler, | vivre, mouvoir, santir, paler’ [she cannot make them walk by themselves, nor live, move, feel, or speak] (Rose, 16033–4). But this comparison between Nature and Art, apparently so favourable to Nature, nonetheless constructs Nature as an artist—a much Huot, ‘Medusa Interpolation’, p. 872. Poirion, ‘Narcisse et Pygmalion’; Huot, From Song to Book, pp. 96–9; Leushuis, ‘Pygmalion’s Folly’; Steinle, ‘Versions of Authority’. 97 Huot, From Song to Book, pp. 296–7; Lechat, ‘Dire par fiction’, pp. 150–3. 95 96

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more successful one than any human could be, certainly, as Jean repeatedly reminds us, but an artist from whom Art seeks to learn: ‘Si garde conment Nature euvre, | car mout voudroit fere autele euvre’ [she watches how Nature works, for she would very much like to produce similar work] (15999–16000). This equivocal rhyme, along with the ostentatious rhetorical beauty Jean deploys to evoke Art’s shortcomings in the face of Nature, draws attention to Jean’s own artistry and ability to enclose Nature within his own oeuvre, such that it is hard not to detect a touch of disingenuousness in his claim that he has found it utterly impossible to describe Nature’s beauty (16181–218). In the Metamorphoses, Pygmalion makes his statue in horrified response to the promiscuity of the Propoetides, who refused to worship Venus and as a result were condemned to prostitute their bodies.98 Ultimately, they turned to stone: Ovid comments that the change undergone by the Propoetides is ‘parvo’ [small] (M, 10.242); not much alters from their hardened human state to their lithic fate. Although Cohen claims that ‘rock seems as inhuman a substance as can be found’,99 it would seem that in this story—as, in fact, in a lot of medieval literature, stone is a common and useful metaphor for particular kinds of humanity: here, the hardness of immoral, debauched women.100 Indeed, the Ovide moralisé suppresses this minimal metamorphosis, such that the fable seems to merge with its possible euhemerizing understanding: women whom Ovid describes as stone are read as being as debased as stone, and are only compared to, rather than ultimately transformed into, ‘ymages’, inanimate figures: Tant furent vilz, ce fu la some, C’ausi come chascune fust Ymage de pierre ou de fust Perdi chascune toute honte. (OM, 10.925–8) [To sum up, they were so vile that each of them, as if she were a statue of stone or wood, lost all shame.]

The metamorphosis on which the Ovide moralisé focuses is the transition Venus forces the Propoetides to undergo as they become prostitutes: ‘Les fist putains habandonees’ [She made them wanton prostitutes] (OM, 10.920): their sexual incontinence is read as comparable to the euhemerized Medusa, who, we are told, ‘Putain fu sage et cavilleuse, | Decevable et malicieuse’ [She was a cunning, devious, deceitful, and malicious prostitute] (OM, 98

See Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh, pp. 75–6. Cohen, ‘Stories of Stone’, p. 58. 100 See Solodow, The World, pp. 1–2. In book 2 of Metamorphoses, Aglauros, immobilized by envy of her sister, becomes a rock (2.819–32). 99

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4.5742–3). But whereas Medusa’s desirability transfixed her onlookers, the Propoetides’ promiscuity renders them into metaphorical or literal statues. Medusa’s gaze has to be turned back on itself by Perseus’s shield in order for her petrifying powers to be neutralized; Kristeva interprets this moment as the necessity of fixing and containing abject female flesh, a process which is recurrently performed by the representation of women in works of art: Il faut décapiter Méduse pour que « ça » prenne forme, pour que l’informe menace devienne visible corail, pour que le gluant-mou-fluide-menaçantinvisible prenne enfin forme.101 [Medusa must be decapitated for ‘that’ to take shape, so that the formless threat becomes visible coral, so that the slimy-soft-fluid-threatening-invisible finally takes shape.]

The formless viscosity the abject writes on to the feminine is here figured by the seaweed which petrifies into coral as a result of contact with Medusa’s blood. Not even wholly expressible in language, the ‘ça’ becomes, after Medusa’s decapitation, fixed and visible, circumscribed by the legible boundaries of art. This stabilizing of the female form in relation to its feared unmanageability can be detected in both Venus’s punishment of the Propoetides and Pygmalion’s subsequent sculpture. These interdependent tales both involve the reimagining of female flesh as the hardened contours of statues: the power of Pygmalion’s story is that it articulates the fantasy that the ideal woman can be entirely shaped by man. In this way, the footprint Mélusine leaves on the windowsill of Lusignan castle is the negative image of Pygmalion’s statue: both attest to attempts by the plastic arts to reify the female body. Whereas the debauched bodies of Medusa and the Propoetides are transformed into stone to figure their hardened brazenness, Pygmalion turns to the radiant whiteness of ivory to sculpt his ideal woman: ‘Interea niveum mira feliciter arte | sculpsit ebur formamque dedit, qua femina nasci | nulla potest’ [Meanwhile, with wondrous art he successfully carves a figure out of snowy ivory, giving it beauty more perfect than that of any woman born] (M, 10.247–9).102 Jean de Meun stresses that Pygmalion’s skill lies not just in ivory-work: Pymalyon, uns antaillieres, Portreanz an fusz et en pierres, 101

Kristeva, Visions capitales, p. 40. The emphasis on the whiteness of the statue’s ivory form, recalled in the milky paleness of the woman it becomes, is probably the reason that the name ‘Galatea’ becomes attached to this character in later retellings of the Pygmalion myth. See Law, ‘The Name Galatea’. 102

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En metauz, en os et en cires Et en toutes autres matires Qu’an peut a tele euvre trouver, Por son grant angin esprouver, Car onc de lui nus ne l’ot meudre— Ausint con por grant los aqueudre, Se vost a portrere deduire. Si fist une ymage d’ivuire. (Rose, 20787–96) [Pygmalion, a sculptor, working in wood, stone, metal, bone, wax, and in all other materials which can be found to work with, wished, in order to prove his great skill (for there was none whose skill was greater), as well as to acquire a great reputation, to create a portrait. He made a statue in ivory.]

Ivory and bone were both used to create sculpted works of art in the Middle Ages, and sometimes both materials were used in the same artefact; although elephant ivory was of the highest quality, whalebone was also used.103 The use of bone-like material in order to fashion a woman who will incarnate all that is pure may well have had, for medieval readers of Ovid, connotations of a new Creation. Whereas Eve, created by God from a bone taken from Adam, succumbed to the serpent’s temptation and thereby became associated with the corruption of the flesh, Pygmalion’s statue is fashioned from a substance akin to bone as a corrective to that corruption. Being formed from Adam’s rib was often read in the Middle Ages as a reason for woman’s physical and moral feebleness;104 made from ivory, Pygmalion’s beloved is superior to any woman more conventionally brought into the world. The Ovide moralisé’s moralization of the Pygmalion story calls upon the book of Genesis as well as the redemption of humanity through Christ’s Crucifixion. In this reading, God is a ‘forgierres’ [smith] (10.3587), a Deus artifex: A sa forme et à sa figure Forga nostre humaine nature Par sa sapience divine, Si li dona forme eborine. La matire fu limonee, Cui Diex forme humaine a donee. Vilz fu la matire et despite, Où Diex mist forme tres eslite. (OM, 10.3590–7) [In his form and with his face he forged our human nature by his divine wisdom, and gave it ivory form. The matter was dust which God gave human form. The matter was vile and loathsome on to which God gave exclusive form.] 103

Williamson, Medieval Sculpture, p. 24.

104

Cadden, Meanings, p. 75.

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This interpretation fuses the creation stories told in chapters one and two of Genesis: God creates humans in his own image (Genesis 1:26), but creates them out of dust (Genesis 2:7). The form God imposes on the dust is the allegoresis of the ivory from which Pygmalion creates his statue: rather than woman being made from a man who is made from dust (the version of events in Genesis 2), what is apparently being proposed here is humanity (not specifically gendered) being made in the form of ivory from dust. Rather than woman being made from man’s bone, as at Genesis 2:22, ivory is form rather than matter—perhaps a reference to the smooth whiteness associated with a particular kind of idealized (often feminine) human flesh. If the rewriting of the tale of Pygmalion’s animated statue is a means for male creativity to be allied with divine Creation, then it is also, in the Rose, a source for female artifice. La Vieille reminds her listeners that they will be familiar with her advice from the song about ‘l’ymage Pimalion’ [Pygmalion’s statue] (13058).105 This reference to Pygmalion’s story as one of adornment prefigures the lengthy and often comical amplification of Ovid’s tale which Jean de Meun creates: whereas Ovid mentions that Pygmalion treats his statue as a real woman, giving her presents of clothes and jewels, Jean’s Pygmalion arrays his statue in a range of outfits and serenades it with a variety of musical entertainment.106 For all the elaborate clothing and embellishments the statue wears, she is superior to the imperfect women addressed by La Vieille, since she is just as beautiful naked as she is clothed. At the end of the virtuoso description (which surely Jean has included in order to display his own artistry), a peremptory couplet declares, N’el n’apert pas, quant ele est nue, Mains bele que s’ele est vestue. (Rose, 21075–6) [She doesn’t appear, when naked, any less beautiful than if she is clothed.]

This more or less corresponds to Ovid’s comment, ‘cuncta decent; nec nuda minus formosa videtur’ [All these are beautiful; but no less beautiful is the statue unadorned] (M, 10:266). In other words, naked art has no need of artificial adornment. In the Ovide moralisé’s moralization, however, human nature is even more beautiful when God has covered it with his gifts of clothing and adornment: Quant bon li ert, si la vestoit Et paroit de chiers vestemens

See Heller, ‘Fashioning’, p. 9. On the portrayal of femininity in this episode in the Rose, see Desmond and Sheingorn, Myth, pp. 76–81. 105 106

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[When he saw fit, he clothed and arrayed it in costly garments and rich adornments; clothed, it was very beautiful—at least as much, if not more, as it was when naked. Human nature was, it seems to me, beautiful when naked and without covering, before original sin, which then blemished its face. Humanity was more beautiful when God had wrapped it in his divinity and nature, and removed its stain.]

The adornment of the statue is rewritten as the aftermath of the Fall, the moment at which humans understand their nudity as shameful: only seemly and aesthetically pleasing when covered. In the Rose and the Ovide moralisé, the idea of Nature is constructed via the unnatural—via visual art and poetic artistry—as the fantasized state of completion forever lost to post-lapsarian humanity. The contrast between the way in which the Pygmalion myth is used in the Rose and the Ovide moralisé reveals the texts’ contrasting understandings of the nature/art binary. In the Rose, the tale articulates the ultimate fantasy that art just might generate life, rather than simply imitating it. The recurrent parallels Jean sets up between his own creative authority and Pygmalion’s artistry are symptomatic of the Rose’s self-conscious, self-reflexive structures and matter. The Ovide moralisé, on the other hand, rewrites both Ovid and the Rose in a more theologically conservative interpretation: its treatment of the Pygmalion myth makes humanity into God’s handiwork, and the artifice with which mortals (especially women) seek to cover and enhance their bodies as the necessary result of the Fall. For the Ovide moralisé author, the natural body is the creation of God (the goddess Nature is written out of this account): in the post-lapsarian world of incompleteness and shame, adornment and art are the inevitable consequence of the sin initiated by the fatal collusion between the woman and the serpent. Feminine purity is constructed as that which was lost at the moment of the fall, such that the woman is thenceforth forever marked with sin and shame.

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CONCLUSION: THE STATUE’S BLUSHES Although she may be seen as a corrective to Eve, Pygmalion’s statue is not a new Mary: her perfection lies not in her sinlessness or lack of sexuality, but precisely in her responsiveness to her creator’s advances. Moreover, the tale of Pygmalion is told in Orpheus’s song of unnatural desires (M, 10.152–4), which he sings in his grief-stricken renunciation of women following the death of his beloved wife, Eurydice. Whereas Orpheus’ grief-induced misogyny prompts him to turn from a desire of women to a desire of young men and playing on the harp, Pygmalion’s revulsion at female sexuality causes him to create an artificial version of the perfect woman. In both cases of Ovidian figures understood by medieval readers as models for the artist, their artistry is represented as stemming from a rejection of the abject embodiment of women.107 Venus reverses the transformation worked upon the Propoetides in response to Pygmalion’s prayer, bringing his statue to life. The woman who is thus created is much more acceptable and desirable than the Propoetides, indeed, than any woman born, and acts in the way a wooed woman should. Whereas the stony Propoetides had become unable to blush (‘utque pudor cessit, sanguisque induruit oris’ [and as their shame vanished and the blood of their faces hardened] (M, 10.241)), the animated statue blushes beneath Pygmalion’s ardent kisses: ‘oscula virgo | sensit et erubit’ [the maiden felt the kisses and blushed] (M, 10.292–3). Translating this awakening, the Ovide moralisé underlines that her reaction is that of maidenly shame—‘La pucele sent le besier; | Vergoigneuse fu, si rougist’ [the maiden felt the kiss; she was ashamed, and blushed] (OM, 10.1071–2)—precisely the ‘pudor’ that the Propoetides have lost, moving them further from human and nearer, not, as Derrida might argue, to the animal, but to stone. The seemly blushing of the statue is the marker of the artificially constructed notion of natural womanhood, a signal of shame which also (fortuitously) makes her more attractive to look at. The pseudo-Ovidian hero of the tale told by Flos, the writer-avatar in Froissart’s dit La Prison amoureuse, is an accretion of several Ovidian lovers.108 Like Pyramus, his beloved is devoured by a lion; like Orpheus, he determines to go to Hades to retrieve her; and, like Pygmalion, he creates a statue which is brought to life. Knowing that he can never see his 107

Huot, Dreams, pp. 80–1. Huot, From Song to Book, pp. 312–13; Lechat, ‘Dire par fiction’, p. 281; Kelly, ‘Les inventions ovidiennes’. 108

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beloved Nephistelé again, Pynoteüs, in this tale which is itself a knowing, witty mélange of tales from the Metamorphoses, decides that he will recreate her from a ‘mixtion’, rejecting the raw materials from which statues have been made in previous texts: Nephistelé ne rarai mes, Mes j’en ferai bien une tele. Ne sera de bois ne de tele Ne d’or ne d’argent ne de piere, Tant soit precieuse ne chiere, Ains sera d’autre mixtion Et fete par tele action Que de la fourme et de la taille (Je n’ai ja doubte que g’i faille) Nephistelé, ne plus ne mains. (Prison, 1659–68) [I will never have Nephistelé again, but I will make one like her. It will not be of wood or cloth, nor of gold, silver, or stone, however precious or costly it may be; rather it will be made of another mixture, and made by such acts that—and I have no doubt that I shall not fail in this—it will have the form and size of Nephistelé, no more nor less.]

It is Phoebus who brings the statue to life, following Pynoteus’s prayer invoking the god’s metamorphic feats recorded in the Metamorphoses;109 and, as Didier Lechat observes, it is not hard to understand the ‘mixtion’ from which the simulated Nephistelé is fashioned as a rich recipe of reading and writing.110 Just as Pygmalion’s statue blushes as she comes alive, the newly created Nephistelé is aware of her nudity, and, Eve-like, seeks to cover it as she emerges into a new state of consciousness: Ele sali sus, toute otele Comme une aultre femme mortele. De ses nues mains fist courdine: L’une mist desous sa boudine Et l’autre encontre sa poitrine. (Prison, 1924–8) [She leapt up, just like any other mortal woman. She made a screen with her bare hands: one she placed over her genitals, the other over her breasts.]

The sign that this transformation from statue to woman is successful and complete is that, just like any other ‘femme mortele’, Nephistelé seeks to cover her body, in a description whose terms and rhyme draw attention to the naked parts she seeks to shield from view. The description also underscores a construction of the cultural understanding of a mortal 109 110

See Rosenfeld, Ethics and Enjoyment, p. 95. Lechat, ‘Dire par fiction’, pp. 290–1.

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woman as one who is ashamed of her body, because she realizes that it is forever tainted with post-lapsarian, serpentine sin. The perfection of Pynoteus’s idealized courtly lady may seem a long way from the abject, serpentine bodies of Mélusine, Medusa, Guinglain’s wyvern, and the Reine Sibylle, but what connects these tales is a particular conception of female embodiment: a conception they either represent in all its alarming serpentine unruliness, or constrain in idealized ‘ymages’ that nevertheless recognize their essential inferiority to their male creators, and blush at their gaze. In this chapter, I have reread the ‘pudeur’ that Derrida reads as the ‘propre de l’homme’ as vital to women in a particular conception of the female body as both horrifying and desirable. Whereas the wolf-men in Chapter 3 wish to be hidden from view, the transformations of the snakewomen and statues in this chapter are repeatedly described in terms which present them to the reader’s gaze.111 The revelation of the naked human body is a motif which is often found in medieval tales of transformation: in the Ovide moralisé, as we saw in Chapter 1, it represents the revelation of Christian truth; in tales of werewolves nudity is both human and shameful; in tales of snakes and statues it draws attention to the female body as an object to be scrutinized and fixed in the face of its mutability. In Chapter 5, I shall turn to a metamorphic character who orchestrates the revelation of others’ bodies while keeping his own hidden: Merlin.

111

See Régnier-Bohler, ‘Le Corps’, pp. 53–4.

5 Now You See Him . . . The Metamorphoses of Merlin Conment puet ce estre que nule samblance d’ome puet estre muee a autre? (Merlin, 352) [How can it be that any man’s appearance can be changed to another?]

Whereas many other figures I have considered in this book tend to require an intervention from God, or a god, or some kind of supernatural force, in order for their transformation to be effected, Merlin can change his shape at will, and is often compared to the Classical shape-shifter, Proteus.1 His metamorphic powers derive from his demonic father: this infernal parentage makes Merlin a privileged figure of transformation, a unique body which flickers between the human and the inhuman, and shimmers between shapes. Merlin is also a fitting subject for the closing chapter of this book, since his bodily mutability is intimately bound up with his function as an embedded fictional author of his own tale. His knowledge of both past and future enables him to dictate and orchestrate (albeit in a mode incomprehensible to his fellow characters) the story of the Arthurian world, as well as ostensibly predicting events in European history. The texts I focus on in this chapter are mostly from the tradition of thirteenth-century prose romance.2 Critical debate is divided between identifying the original version of Merlin’s tale in Old French as, on the one hand, the prose version which is incorporated into a series of prose romance cycles, and, on the other, a verse version, which now only survives in one fragmentary manuscript. Both versions have been attributed, by different critics, to an author named Robert de Boron, whose 1

See Trachsler, Merlin l’enchanteur, pp. 17–25; Walter, Merlin, pp. 109–27. For fuller accounts of the medieval texts which feature Merlin, see Macdonald, The Figure; Griffith, ‘Merlin’; and Knight, Merlin, pp. 43–96. In the introduction to Merlin: A Casebook, Peter H. Goodrich describes texts from the Middle Ages to the present day. 2

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name is given in the manuscript of the verse version, and in only two manuscripts of the prose.3 Taking some inspiration from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s works Historia regum Britanniae and Vita Merlini,4 the earliest cyclic manifestation of the Merlin is as part of a trilogy, known as the Little Grail Cycle, where it is preceded by a pre-history of the Grail, known as the Joseph or the Estoire del Graal, and followed by the Perceval, sometimes titled, after one of the owners of the manuscript, as the DidotPerceval. The Merlin then becomes incorporated into the extremely popular and much longer Vulgate Cycle, where it follows a different Estoire del Saint Graal. Although both Alexandre Micha and, more recently, Corinne Füg-Pierreville have produced editions of the Merlin on its own,5 Merlin’s story is continued in the Vulgate Cycle by a section of narrative known variously as the Suite Vulgate [Vulgate Continuation], or the Suite historique [Historical Continuation];6 the Pléiade edition of the Cycle calls it Les Premiers faits du roi Artu, a title taken from the rubric of its base manuscript (Bonn, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek 526).7 I shall use this last title and edition, since Premiers faits makes the text which connects the Merlin to the Lancelot in manuscripts of the Vulgate Cycle easier to distinguish from another prose romance which recounts Merlin’s involvement in Arthur’s early kingship. This alternative continuation also goes by several titles (the post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin,8 the Suite romanesque, the Huth-Merlin9); and it has been edited by Gilles Roussineau as La Suite du Roman de Merlin. Where the Premiers faits focuses on the battles Arthur has to fight (with Merlin’s help) in order to establish his rule in its early days, the Suite is much more concerned with the conventional motifs of romance, interlacing tales of individual knights’ feats with an 3 See Trachsler, Merlin l’enchanteur, pp. 29–40 for the account, more commonly accepted, of the dérimage of the Robert’s verse version. Linda Gowans has argued that Robert in fact wrote the prose version, which was then rhymed (‘What Did Robert de Boron Really Write?’); and Corinne Füg-Pierreville, in the introduction to her edition of the prose Merlin, also argues that the prose version is the original—and superior—version, but appears to attribute the verse adaptation to Robert (Le Roman de Merlin en prose, pp. 32–40). 4 See Micha, Étude, pp. 30–58 on the sources of the Merlin. 5 Unless otherwise indicated, in this chapter I shall refer to Füg-Pierreville’s edition of the Merlin. 6 On this title, see Fabry-Tehranchi, ‘La “Suite Vulgate” ’. 7 Le Livre du Graal, vol. I, pp. 808–1662. The Pléiade edition gives the title Le Livre du Graal to what is more commonly known as the Vulgate Cycle or Lancelot-Grail Cycle. 8 This is the title used by Fanni Bogdanow, who proposed that this text was part of a post-Vulgate Cycle in a theory most comprehensively outlined in The Romance of the Grail. 9 Until 1945, the only known manuscript of this text was one which had been in the possession of Alfred Huth, and is now London, British Library manuscript Additional 38117. Another manuscript, now Cambridge, University Library, Additional 7071, was discovered by Eugène Vinaver in 1945. See Vinaver, ‘La Genèse’.

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account of Merlin’s fatal love for the woman who will eventually betray and kill him.10 While there are significant differences in the accounts given by various prose romances of Merlin’s conception,11 all concur that he is the offspring of a mortal woman and a devil, the result of the kind of encounter Yonec’s mother believes she is having in Marie de France’s lai. In the Merlin, Merlin’s mother is portrayed as a pious virgin who is sorely tested and tormented by devils who wish to create an Antichrist in reaction to Christ’s harrowing of hell. Her family dead or irredeemably corrupted, her livelihood ruined and her person threatened, the unfortunate young woman goes to bed without crossing herself; a demon enters her locked room and impregnates her. Upon awaking, she realizes what has happened and immediately rushes to her confessor, Blaise, who absolves her. It is this belated piety which disrupts the demons’ plans, and creates the conditions for Merlin’s unique and all-encompassing wisdom: Par ceste raisons sot il [Merlin] les choses faites et dites et alees, que il les a et tient de l’enemi, et sor plus qu’il sot des coses qui sont a avenir volt Nostre Sires qu’il les seüst contre les autres choses que il savoit por endroit de la soie partie. Or si se torne a la quele que il voldra, car s’il velt, il puet as diables rendre lor droit et Nostre Signour le suen. (Merlin, 166) [This is why Merlin knew all the things that were done, spoken and past: he had inherited them from the devil. In addition, he knew the things which are to come because God wished him to know them to counteract the knowledge he had from his own side. Now he may turn whichever way he wishes, for, if he wishes, he can render that which is rightly theirs to the devils and that which is His to Our Lord.]

In body and mind, then, Merlin is a hybrid (of devil and human), whose identity is manifested through a ceaseless series of metamorphoses. This coincidence of metamorphosis and hybridity makes Merlin a fruitful figure with which to counter the separation Bynum tries to enforce in Metamorphosis and Identity between metamorphosis and hybridity. Bynum—who never mentions Merlin—maps the distinction between these phenomena on to visibility and narrative: A hybrid is a double being, an entity of parts, two or more. It is an inherently visual form. We see what a hybrid is; it is a way of making two-ness, and the simultaneity of two-ness, visible. Metamorphosis goes from an entity that is one thing to an entity that is another. It is essentially narrative.12 10 On the various Suites, see Nathalie Koble’s introduction to her edited volume, Jeunesse et genèse. 11 12 See pp. 185–6. Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, p. 30.

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Yet Merlin’s hybridity precisely enables him to defy processes of understanding which rely on the senses, particularly sight. Where Bynum categorizes metamorphosis as narrative, for Pairet, it is essentially a visual phenomenon: Qu’est-ce en effet que la métamorphose, sinon la représentation visuelle d’un paradoxe, l’intervalle entre une forme et une autre, un moment de passage?13 [What is the effect of metamorphosis, if not the visual representation of a paradox, the interval between one moment and another, a moment of passing?]

Contradicting Bynum’s definition, we certainly cannot see what Merlin the hybrid is, for his very existence and appearance uncannily uncouples the conventional relationship between vision and knowledge. On the contrary, it is when Merlin metamorphoses that he becomes more visible to the reader, via the descriptions afforded by the texts. Far from being entirely separate phenomena, then, Merlin’s hybridity and metamorphic powers are interdependent: metamorphosis is both narrative and visual in these texts. In the Premiers faits, the frustrated Gauvain wonders ‘conment puet ce estre ne avenir que je l’ai veü en tant de manieres?’ [How can it be or happen that I have seen him in so many guises?] (PF, 1048). These different guises, products of what Zumthor calls ‘crises de protéisme’ [fits of protean transformation],14 are often described in detail by the various texts which portray them,15 but when Merlin is not in disguise we are usually told he is ‘en sa droite semblance’,16 or ‘en sa samblance vraie’ [in his true appearance] (Suite, 23). Only the Premiers faits gives any detail on what this ‘semblance’ might be, but even here the physical description is diverted into the more pressing issue of Merlin’s moral identity: Et sans faille il estoit plains de prouece et fors de cors et de membres. Mais bruns estoit et maigres et plus velus de poil sauvage que nus autres hom. Et gentix hom de par sa mere, mais de par son pere ne vous en dirai plus, car assés en avés oï cha en ariere que l’engendra. Mais nous ne trouvons pas lisant qu’il mesist onques main sor home pour mal faire. (PF, 1204–5) [He was without fail full of prowess and strong in both body and limb. But he was brown-skinned and thin and covered in hair like a wild animal much more than any other man. Because of his mother, he was a noble man, but I will say no more about his father, for you have heard enough earlier about

13

14 Pairet, Les Mutacions, p. 18. Zumthor, Merlin le prophète, p. 152. See Micha, Étude, p. 164. Anne Berthelot observes that the clothing Merlin wears in his various manifestations is described in unusual detail (‘Merlin, ou l’homme sauvage’). 16 L’Estoire de Merlin, ed. Micha, p. 222. 15

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who engendered him. But nowhere do we find it written that he put his hand to any man to do him harm.]

If there is a truth about Merlin’s body, then, it is that it is covered in ‘poil sauvage’: one of Merlin’s most frequent disguises, most likely a reference to the Celtic roots of this character, is a wild man living on the edge of civilization.17 Like Bisclavret, Alphonse, and Estonné, whom I discussed in Chapter 3, Merlin, then, appears to be a beast without, but is a vital part of courtly narrative. The animal associations with Merlin continue in the way in which he disappears from the action of the prose Perceval in the Little Grail Cycle: he tells Perceval and Blaise that he is going to make himself an esplumoir, a term usually identified as deriving from a moulting-cage:18 Atant s’en torna Merlins et fist son esplumoir, et entra dedens, ne onques puis au siecle ne fu veüs. (Perceval, 278) [At that, Merlin left and made his moulting-cage, entered into it, and was never seen again in the world.]

The eponymous hero of the thirteenth-century verse romance, Raoul de Houdenc’s Meraugis de Portlesguez, embarks on a quest for the esplumoir, which seems in this romance to stand for an improbable (if not impossible) goal. Where Chrétien de Troyes’s lover-persona retreats, in the lyric I discussed in the Introduction, to a ‘mue’ yet never changes his heart, Merlin disappears into another space which is associated with the changing of feathers, to be rewritten into other texts and other characters. Throughout the texts which feature him, Merlin is portrayed as dictating, commissioning, or eliciting the written word.19 The Merlin is punctuated with Merlin’s visits to Blaise, his mother’s confessor who becomes his scribe. To Blaise, Merlin dictates the events that have happened (the knowledge of which he has from the devil): reminders that ‘et par son livre les savons nos encore’ [and from his book we know these things still] (Merlin, 242) are a kind of refrain throughout this romance. The knowledge he has been granted by God—of events which are yet to come—is 17 See Dubost, Aspects, pp. 730–40; Noacco, La Métamorphose, pp. 186–90; Le Nan, ‘Les Séjours sylvestres’; Trachsler, Merlin l’enchanteur, pp. 88–9; Berthelot, ‘Merlin, ou l’homme sauvage’; Bernheimer, Wild Men, pp. 13–15. On hairy wild men, see Yamamoto, Boundaries of the Human, pp. 153–68. 18 Nitze, ‘The Esplumoir Merlin’, p. 72. Yves Vadé traces a rich network of associations between Merlin and hunting-birds (Pour un tombeau, pp. 81–123). 19 On Merlin as an author, see Crist, ‘Les Livres de Merlin’; Cooper, ‘Merlin Romancier’; Zumthor, Merlin le prophète, pp. 169–72; Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies, pp. 1–5. Christine Ferlampin-Acher points out the differences between the Suites’ representations of Merlin’s role as author in ‘Le Double’, pp. 44–52.

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articulated by Merlin in a much more cryptic fashion: although his prophecies are recorded for posterity, in a work the Merlin entitles the ‘Conte des Prophesies Merlin’ (Merlin, 282) they cannot be understood until they have been fulfilled: Et Merlins conmencha a dire les ocures paroles dont cis livres fu fais des prophecies que on ne puet connoistre jusques qu’eles soient avenues. (Merlin, 284) [And Merlin started to pronounce the obscure utterances of which that book of prophecies was composed, in such a fashion that they cannot be understood until after they have come about.]

As with the obscurely worded writing cited by Marie de France in the Prologue to her lais, Merlin’s gnomic utterances are understood as soliciting an essentially textual interaction: they are recorded, pondered, transmitted, and glossed by characters within the texts, as well as forming part of a tradition of historical exegesis which lasted well into the Early Modern period.20 Prophecy is a transformative way of talking about the world and the future, using symbols and metaphors, speaking in an obscure way which precisely is unrecognizable.21 Kings and knights mutate in Merlin’s predictions and interpretations into a symbolic Bestiary of lions and leopards; women become she-wolves or serpents.22 Merlin makes an explicit connection between his changing appearance and his cryptic words: ‘Et ausi con je serai oscurs fors devers cels ou je me voldrai esclairier, ensi sera tes livres celés’ [Just as I shall be unknown except to those to whom I wish to reveal myself, so shall your book be obscure] (Merlin, 190). His words, like his body, are hard to perceive and understand:23 they mutate as his stories unfold and are reread. The late thirteenth-century prose romance, Les Prophesies de Merlin, which Koble calls a ‘texte hybride’ [hybrid text],24 purports to transmit the prophecies Merlin utters: in half the surviving complete manuscripts, they are interlaced with romance episodes.25 The first section of this chapter will explore the problems presented by attempting to visualize and to see a character whose diabolical heritage means that he is constantly shifting shape. I shall return to the figure of anamorphosis, and explore the troubling idea that, in the Merlin texts, the See Southern, ‘Aspects’; Trachsler, Merlin l’enchanteur, p. 145. See Trachsler, ‘Moult oscure parleüre’. Southern notes that such obscurity could be read as a proof of a prophecy’s genuine nature (‘Aspects’, p. 162). 22 See Curley, ‘Animal Symbolism’. 23 24 See Denoyelle, ‘Le Prince’. Koble, Les Prophéties, p. 13. 25 For accounts of the manuscript traditions of this text, see the introduction to Paton’s edition, pp. 1–56; and Koble, Les Prophéties, pp. 91–151. 20 21

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all-seeing, timeless perspective which alone is capable of comprehending the entirety of Arthurian history is not God’s, but belongs to a half-devil. It is not just the gaze of God which Merlin appropriates in prose romance, however: he also takes on the divine narrative voice which dictates Arthurian pre-history at the beginning of the Vulgate Cycle. In the second section, I shall scrutinize the ways in which Merlin’s voice is at once a powerful narrative force and a marker of his dwindling power: like Echo, he is portrayed in many texts as becoming nothing but voice. His prophetic voice is passed on to a series of female avatars: it is striking that, while Merlin’s disguises are always gendered male, he teaches and transfers many of his powers to female characters, in particular a character called Niniane in the Premiers faits, Niviene in the Suite, and who becomes the Lady of the Lake in the Lancelot and the Prophesies. I suggest that this transmission of knowledge to women is connected to the ease with which Merlin is able to unmask characters who are masquerading as the opposite gender to that granted to them by ‘Nature’: in what is known as the ‘Grisandole’ section of the Premiers faits and the thirteenth-century verse Roman de Silence which derives some of its subject matter from the prose romance, Merlin reveals a knight to be a young woman. The key figures for my argument in the concluding section of this chapter are women whose bodies are overwritten in ink: like Merlin, they conflate transformations of body and text. SEEING DEMONS: AIR AND ANAMORPHOSIS If we can ever pronounce definitively on Merlin’s body, it is that his embodiment lies more in the notion that his body contains limitless possibilities, only one of which can ever be seen at any given moment in the narrative. While Merlin is a hybrid who cannot be fully seen, his sight—in the literal sense and the metaphorical sense of knowledge—is without equal.26 The very first revelation Merlin makes at a court uncovers ‘.II. grans dragons qui ne voient goute’ [two great dragons who cannot see a thing] (Merlin, 230) beneath Vortigern’s tower: the dragons’ blindness also indexes the ignorance of the clerks and of Vortigern himself as to their own fate and the identity of Merlin. These texts repeatedly emphasize the gulf between the omniscient perspective occupied by Merlin’s world view and the ignorance of the courtiers, peasants, clerics, and rulers to whom he occasionally and obscurely reveals his knowledge. Merlin’s knowledge enables him to stand outside of the time of the 26 On the intimate medieval association between vision and knowledge, see Akbari, Seeing Through the Veil, pp. 3–20; and Denery, Seeing and Being Seen, pp. 1–18.

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narrative he dictates and acts in, in order to view it completely.27 As Bloch observes, Merlin’s knowledge ‘poses the possibility of a vision that presents itself as comprehensive and of a system of meaning adequate to such an all-encompassing horizon’.28 Yet this is not God’s perspective on history which is referred to in the Ovide moralisé and which I discussed in Chapter 1. If Merlin’s vision can be understood in terms of anamorphosis, as coming from a fantasized perspective of omniscience, then the body from which this perspective apparently emanates is not, cannot be, consistently visible, and instead appears as an impossible, shifting blot on various texts’ field of vision, an objet a which is constructed by the frustrated gazes which try to fix it into one shape; he is ‘the anamorphotic object, a pure semblance that we can clearly perceive only by “looking awry”’.29 Indeed, Merlin’s physical appearance is so fluid that he is impossible to recognize.30 Uther and Pendragon, the sons of King Constant, send messengers to look for him, not understanding that the messengers precisely cannot possibly know Merlin when they see him, ‘car il ne savoient pas que Merlin peüst prendre altre samblance que la soie’ [for they did not know that Merlin could take on appearances different from his own] (Merlin, 248). Rather like the Grail whose adventures he prophesies and prepares, Merlin may be posited as the object of a quest, but can only be found at a moment of his choosing.31 He arrives at Pendragon’s court as a ‘molt biaus preudons’ [a very handsome nobleman] (Merlin, 254), and challenges the king’s messengers’ ability to discover Merlin (about whom at this point he is speaking in the third person). The messengers respond indignantly that, ‘se nos le veïssiemes, nos le connistriemes bien sa samblance’ [if we were to see him, we would certainly recognize his appearance] (Merlin, 254). The handsome nobleman and the king retire to a private room, where Merlin reveals his identity, and then takes on the form in which the messengers had previously seen him: Et quant il furent venu, si ot Merlin pris la samblance en coi il l’avoient veü. Et quant il le virent, si disent au roi: « Sire, certainment avés trové Merlin! »

27 Füg-Pierreville describes Merlin’s accounts of the Grail’s past and prophecies concerning its future as ‘donnant brièvement au lecteur l’impression de pouvoir embrasser tous les moments de l’histoire en un seul regard, comme Merlin lui-même’ [briefly giving the reader the impression of being able to include all moments in history within a single glance, like Merlin himself] (Merlin, p. 74). 28 29 Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies, p. 5. Žižek, Looking Awry, p. 12. 30 See Noacco, La Métamorphose, p. 184. 31 For an intriguing reading of Merlin as a Grail prophet, see Stahuljak, Bloodless Genealogies, pp. 79–111.

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Quant li rois l’oï, si s’en rist et dist: « Gardés que vos le connissiés bien! » Et il disent: « Nos disons por verité que c’est il. » (Merlin, 254–6) [When they returned, Merlin had taken the appearance in which they had seen him. And when they saw him, they said to the king, ‘Sir, you have surely found Merlin!’ When the king heard this, he laughed and said, ‘Make sure you know him properly!’ And they said, ‘we declare it is truly him.’]

Tobler and Lommatszch give ‘erkennen’ [to recognize] as a definition of ‘conoistre’: both knowledge (connaissance) and a visual expression of it, recognition (reconnaissance) rely on consistency of appearance. Pendragon’s laughter suggests that he has himself recognized the impossibility of recognizing a character who can alter his appearance. Merlin indicates in his remarks to the messengers that his metamorphic powers render him unknowable even to himself: ‘Signor, conment puet connoistre autrui qui mie ne connoist soi meïsme?’ [Lords, how can you know someone who does not know himself?] (Merlin, 254). Indeed, so unknowable is Merlin’s appearance that when Uther (now King Utherpendragon) learns that his advisor Ulfin has met ‘un home que il ne connissoit pas’ [a man he did not know] (Merlin, 342) and a blind hunchback in quick succession, both of whom possess privileged knowledge, the king is able to identify both of these individuals as avatars of Merlin, ‘qui ensi se gabe de nos et quant il voldra, il nos fera bien asavoir qui il est’ [who is mocking us in this way, and when he wishes, he will let us know truly who he is] (Merlin, 346). Merlin’s unknowability, in other words, becomes the only way of knowing him. The two surviving manuscripts of the Suite even disagree about the details of Merlin’s first appearance, in the form of a child, to Utherpendragon’s son, Arthur, in this text: Et en chou qu’il estoit si pensis, si vint Merlins devint lui en samblance d’un enfant de .XIIII. [.IIII.] ans. (Suite, 7) [And while he was thinking so hard about this, Merlin came before him, in the shape of a child of 14 [4] years.]

In the London manuscript, which Roussineau uses as his base, Merlin’s apparent age is given as four; in the Cambridge manuscript, he is fourteen: at this point Roussineau uses the Cambridge manuscript to correct his base manuscript, to make Merlin fourteen.32 Both fourteen-year-olds and four-year-olds could have been described as ‘enfant’ in a medieval French narrative,33 although a youth of fourteen may well have been well on his 32 On the relationship between the surviving manuscripts of the Suite, see Vinaver, ‘La Genèse’; and Roussineau’s introduction to his edition, pp. xli–lxii. 33 See Gaffney, Constructions of Childhood, pp. 23–56; Berkvam, ‘Nature and Norreture’, p. 166.

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way to knighthood. This precocious child tells Arthur not only every detail of his dream he (Arthur) dreamed the previous night, but also who Arthur’s parents are. Arthur reacts with alarmed incredulity: it might be argued that Arthur’s extreme reaction might be more explicable if he has just been faced with the uncanny knowledge of an apparently omniscient four-year-old; but what is at stake here is, once more, the impossibility of envisaging Merlin in his first appearance in this text. Merlin’s conception by an invisible incubus able to enter a locked room at night is also represented in two different ways in the Vulgate Cycle:34 Elspeth Kennedy convincingly suggested that this discrepancy could be explained by the Cycle’s development as the gradual accretion of different, separate prose romances, such that the Lancelot and the Merlin were themselves conceived as discrete texts recounting related but not necessarily consistent events, becoming connected as scribes responded to the growing popularity of long prose compositions telling the whole Arthurian story.35 Nevertheless, while other inconsistencies in the Arthurian stories tended to be ironed out by scribes,36 the contrast between the narratives of Merlin’s conception is particularly striking. Whereas the Merlin depicts Merlin’s mother as a pious young woman tormented by demons into a momentary lapse of virtue, in the Lancelot, she is a less praiseworthy woman who has vowed never to marry a man that she can see, and who welcomes nightly visits from an invisible devil: La damoisele le tasta, si senti que il avoit le cors moult gent et moult bien fait par samblant ; et neporquant diables n’a ne cors ne autre menbre que l’en puisse manoier, car espiriteus cose ne puet estre manoie et tout deable sont chose espiriteus ; mais deable entreprenent a le faire cose de l’aire, si qu’il samble a cheus qui les voient qu’il soient formé de car et d’os. Quant ele senti le deable au cors et as bras et as mains et es autres lieus, si li fu avis, a che que ele en pooit savoir par sentir, que moult estoit bien tailliés a estre biaus, si l’enama et fist outreement sa volentei. (Lancelot, 7.40–1) [The damsel felt him, and found that he had a very fine body, apparently very well put together; and yet a devil has no body nor other member which they can move, for a thing of the spirit cannot be moved, and all devils are things of the spirit. But the devils contrive to make a thing of air, so that it seems to those who see them that they are made of flesh and blood. When she felt the devil’s body, arms, hands, and other parts, it seemed to her, as far as she could make out by feel, that he was very well made and handsome; she fell in love with him and took her pleasure.]

34

On these differences, see Dubost, Aspects, pp. 719–20. See Kennedy, ‘The Scribe as Editor’; and Zumthor, Merlin le prophète, pp. 240–2. 36 See Kennedy, Lancelot and the Grail, pp. 308–9; Sunderland, Old French Narrative Cycles, pp. 95–100. 35

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This description of Merlin’s demon father resonates with Augustine’s pronouncements on the powers of demons to influence human perceptions rather than change their physical shape: this demon is a phantasm— it has no body or shape, simply the means by which to convince the young woman that he is particularly shapely. The exact nature of demons’ bodies—and whether demons had bodies at all—were topics of debate and enquiry in the Middle Ages. While Elliott argues that, by the thirteenth century, demons were held to have no bodies at all,37 she focuses on theological writing: it is evident that demonic embodiment was still being imagined at the time of these literary texts’ composition in the first half of the thirteenth century.38 The depictions of the bodies of Merlin’s father and of Merlin himself resonate with earlier representations of demons’ bodies as airy and intangible.39 Yet human bodies were also envisaged as a hybrid of substance and the insubstantial: as Agamben observes, the Middle Ages often had recourse to conceptions of the person as made up of air, the pneuma, which he describes as ‘the subtle body of the soul’.40 This spirit, often associated with the divine, was conceived of as running through human bodies and souls, combining the corporeal and the incorporeal: arising in the heart, it permeates the body.41 For Agamben, maintaining a focus on the pneuma is a way of accounting for the representations of and apparent belief in magical phenomena such as metamorphosis, which are explained as demonic manipulation of the spirit,42 such as the ones to which Augustine refers. It also suggests, rather troublingly, that the human and the inhuman may both partake in an embodiment which is more fleeting than fleshly; Merlin’s hybrid body brings this more clearly into focus. While demons are often portrayed with quite extraordinary bodies in illuminations in manuscripts of the Merlin, they are only briefly and enigmatically described by the narrative itself.43 When Merlin reveals his own paternity at his mother’s trial, he confirms that the demons who plotted and effected his conception ‘sont repairant en l’air’ [live in the air]; the base manuscript Micha uses for his edition suggests that its scribe envisaged demons as being made out of air, giving, ‘sont et repairent en l’air’ [are and live in the air].44 Whether the demons who plotted his creation are made of air or simply live in it, they pass on to their offspring 37 38 39 40 42 43 44

Elliott, Fallen Bodies, pp. 127–56. See Brucker, ‘Mentions’; Noacco, La Métamorphose, pp. 161–81. Russell, Lucifer, pp. 172–3; Smith, ‘How Thin Is a Demon?’; Otten, ‘Overshadowing’. 41 Agamben, Stanzas, p. 94. See Webb, The Medieval Heart, pp. 26–9. Agamben, Stanzas, p. 99. See Gros, ‘La conception’, pp. 54–5; and Hoffman, ‘Seeing the Seer’. Merlin, ed. Micha, p. 68.

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the bodily fluctuation and intellectual prodigiousness associated with their diabolical nature: despite the significant differences between the accounts of Merlin’s birth from the Merlin to the Lancelot, the Lancelot still specifies that the devil who fathered Merlin was a ‘cose de l’aire’ [a thing of the air]. The ability to shape-shift is itself associated with the bodily mutability and illusory power of demons:45 the plan hatched by the denizens of hell to create an Antichrist is based on the ability that some devils have to take human appearance: ‘il y a tel de nos qui bien puet prendre samblance d’ome et habiter a feme’ [there are some of our number who can easily take on the appearance of a man and lie with a woman] (Merlin, 132).46 Merlin’s prophetic powers are also consonant with this airy embodiment, since, according to demonology, their insubstantiality enabled demons to move so quickly that they appeared to know about an event before it had happened.47 Elliott describes demons as having a ‘strange voyeuristic relation to humanity’:48 they become little more than a point of view which sees past and present, cause and effect from a perspective inaccessible to human comprehension, at once insubstantial and allencompassing. Whereas the transformations described and glossed by the Ovide moralisé point always to divine embodiment, the immortality of the soul, and eschatological certainty, Merlin’s shape-shifting is a reminder that his omniscience is embodied as human and tainted by the demonic. He is reminiscent of what Žižek calls the ‘obscene knowing father’,49 a position just as illusory and fantasized as that of the divine big Other, yet which is caught up in the flaws and failings of humanity, ethically dubious and uncanny. While he never begets any offspring, Merlin’s association with fatherhood emphasizes the role he plays in the construction of the legendary lineage of Arthurian narrative—both in diegetic terms of organizing scenarios in which the correct characters can have sex in order to engender the next protagonist, and in extradiegetic terms which involve the perpetuation and recording of these tales. A similar function is served in the Perceforest by Zephir, a ‘luiton’, which is defined as ‘ung esperit que on ne puet veoir et se delicte a descepvoir les gens’ [a spirit which cannot be seen and takes delight in deceiving people] (Perceforest II.i.70).50 Zephir, whose name is itself a reminder of the insubstantial, fluctuating nature of his ‘subtle body’, shares many of Merlin’s qualities: he can change shape; finds amusement 45 46 47 49 50

Russell, Lucifer, pp. 180–3. See Elliott, Fallen Bodies, p. 32 on medieval theories of demonic impregnation. 48 See Smith, ‘How Thin is a Demon?’, p. 505. Elliott, Fallen Bodies, p. 135. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, p. 160. For a study of this figure, see Ferlampin-Acher, Perceforest et Zéphir, pp. 263–408.

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in the travails of the human characters he both torments and guides; and uses his omniscience to direct the text’s plot.51 Indeed, Zephir’s machinations set up the conditions which initiate the lineage of a large number of the main players in the Arthurian history related by the thirteenth-century prose cycles featuring Merlin, including Merlin himself.52 Among these are the descendants of Estonné, to whom Zephir explains that he was once an angel who, along with Lucifer himself, rebelled against God and suffered a terrible fate:53 Quant le Dieu qui puis a le monde creé veyt l’outraige que Lucifer avoit emprins par son orgueil, il, comme celluy qui avoit le plus bele angele fourmé de paradiz, l’ala transmuer en la plus laide creature qui puist estre, et en le transmuant l’ala tresbuschier au plus loing de luy quil peult, c’est en enfer qui siet en la moienne de la terre. (Perceforest, II.i.73–4) [When the God who went on to create the world saw the infraction Lucifer had caused by his great pride, he, who had formed the most beautiful angels in Paradise, transformed him into the ugliest creature there could ever be. In doing so he expelled him as far as he could—to hell, which is situated in the middle of the earth.]

As Zephir informs Estonné, his uncertain shape is a punishment from God:54 Je ne suy pas sy beau, dist Zephir, que j’ai esté, car je fuz jadiz si beau que homme terrien ne me peust esgarder nez que le petit doy. Or suy du tout au contraire. Et pour ce me convient transmuer en autre forme pour couvrir ma laideur quant je veuil estre familier a une personne. (Perceforest, II.i.178) [‘I am not as handsome,’ said Zephir, ‘as I was, for long ago I was so beautiful that no earthly man could look at so much as my little finger. Now I am the very opposite. And that is why I have to transform into other shapes in order to conceal my ugliness when I wish to get close to someone.’]

Although he claims that his present state is ‘tout au contraire’ to his earlier, angelic beauty, there is an important similarity between his diabolical ugliness and his lost radiance: neither of these states is bearable to the sight of man. Instead, Zephir takes on animal forms as he directs the action of Perceforest in a Merlin-like omniscient fashion: as a horse, he transports Estonné away from and towards Priande; he takes the shape of a See Ferlampin-Acher, Perceforest et Zéphir, pp. 317–30; Berthelot, ‘Zéphyr’. See Chardonnens and Wahlen, ‘Heurs et malheurs’, p. 270; Huot, Postcolonial Fictions, p. 49. 53 On the relation between the bodies of angels and demons, see Elliott, Fallen Bodies, pp. 128–35. 54 See Huot, Postcolonial Fictions, p. 91. 51 52

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bird to bring another knight to his beloved.55 Both excessive beauty and excessive ugliness are proposed as states which cannot be contemplated by human vision, yet can be envisaged by human imagination, once more using the figure of anamorphosis, which proposes an invisible perspective from which we are seen, but with which our mortal gaze can never coincide. Like Merlin, Zephir can hardly be seen in his ‘droite semblance’, although the descriptions of the metamorphoses between his various misleading, false appearances invite readers to imagine the possibility of an unmediated, true appearance, and the superhuman (divine or diabolical) viewpoint which would be able to perceive this truth as such. Himself the archetypal fatherless son,56 Merlin engineers Arthur’s birth in the Merlin so that the future king’s paternity is also cloaked in mystery. King Utherpendragon falls madly in love with Ygerne, the wife of his loyal vassal, the Duke of Tintagel. Merlin procures a herb: when Uther rubs it on his face, ‘si ot apertement la samblance del duc’ [he clearly had the duke’s appearance] (Merlin, 352). Uther’s faithful retainer and Merlin himself take on the appearance of the duke’s closest friends, and the three of them are able to gain access to the besieged castle of Tintagel, where Uther gets into bed with Ygerne: ‘La dame fist joie del roi, car ele quidoit bien que ce fust li dus ses sires qu’ele amoit molt’ [the lady took great pleasure with the king, for she believed that it was the duke her lord, whom she loved very much] (Merlin, 354). Meanwhile, however, the real Duke of Tintagel has been killed in battle, and soon afterwards Ygerne realizes that the man with whom she slept cannot possibly have been her husband, since he must have already been dead. The somewhat cruel efficacy of Merlin’s plan now becomes apparent, as do the resonances with his own birth: pregnant by an unknown shape-shifter, Ygerne is bound to accede to the deal brokered by Uther’s barons and marry Uther (whose advances she had strenuously rebuffed while the duke was alive). After their marriage, Uther feigns surprise at the advanced stage of Ygerne’s pregnancy; reassured by his disingenuous promise that he will not reject her, whatever she tells him, she confesses the truth as she understands it— ignorant that her husband in fact understands it better: Et ele li conte conment un home avoit jeü a li en semblance de son signor, et avoit .II. honmes avoec lui amenés en la samblance de .II. honmes del monde que ses sires plus amoit. (Merlin, 374)

55

See Ferlampin-Acher, Perceforest et Zéphir, pp. 270–2. See Stahuljak’s chapter, ‘The Fatherless Sons of Arthurian Romance’ in Bloodless Genealogies, pp. 79–111; Walter, Merlin, pp. 70–6; Dubost, Aspects, pp. 710–51; and the collection Fils sans père, ed. Denis Hüe. 56

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[And she told him how a man had lain with her in the shape of her husband, and that he had brought with him two men who looked like the two men that her husband loved most in the world.]

While the devils planned Merlin’s conception, then, Merlin plans Arthur’s, so that the great king at the centre of this legend is himself tainted with the suspicion of devilry and illegitimacy.57 Whereas I have emphasized the split in perspectives which anamorphosis makes manifest, Koble uses anamorphosis in her study of the Prophesies to figure the structure of this text which possesses ‘un esprit de cohésion qui dément l’apparente fragmentation de surface’ [a spirit of cohesion which belies the surface’s apparent fragmentation].58 Her chapter ‘Anamorphoses romanesques’ opens with an epigraph from a speech from Shakespeare’s Richard II,59 from which Žižek draws the title of Looking Awry.60 For Koble, the corporeal image of the anamorphosis presented by the Prophesies is to be found in a strange body made up only of extremities and enclosed in a cage, which is encountered towards the end of the Prophesies as it features in one of its surviving manuscripts.61 A nephew of Arthur’s tells the court they can expect the arrival of an extraordinary child before the day is out: Saciés que il n’a point de ventre ne de rains; il a bien mains, en non pas bras, il a bien piés, et non pas jambes, il a bien chief, et non pas chol. (Prophesies, 357) [You should know that he has no stomach or kidneys; he certainly has hands, but no arms; he certainly has feet, but no legs; he certainly has a head, but no neck.]

Sure enough, this unfortunate child arrives, in a cage (a ‘jaiole de fer’ [an iron jail] (Prophesies, 357)), accompanied by his mother. She tells the story of her disinheritance and rape by a knight called Gruin, concluding that she took her son to Merlin’s tomb, where the sage’s voice laughed and told her to come to Arthur’s court. A hermit arrives with a wedding ring, given to him by Gruin as he lay dying. He puts the ring on the lady’s finger, effecting a posthumous marriage with Gruin and retrospectively legitimizing the deformed child’s birth. This ceremony triggers an extraordinary metamorphosis: Et la viertus de Damediu le tout poiscant se mist desour l’enfant, si ke la piaus de son cors et li niers dont il estoit corbés s’estendirent errant, et devint 57 See Acher, ‘Préface’; Cooper, ‘Merlin Romancier’; Labbé, ‘De la difficulté’; and Berthelot, ‘Merlin and the Ladies of the Lake’. 58 59 Koble, Les Prophéties, p. 63. Koble, Les Prophéties, p. 35. 60 Žižek discusses this speech on pp. 9–12. 61 Koble, Les Prophéties, p. 483.

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illoec si biaus vallés et si plaisans que il n’avoit plus biel vallet de lui en toute la Grant Bretaigne. (Prophesies, 358) [And the virtue of all-powerful God was laid upon the child, stretching out the skin of his body and the sinews which had bent him over; and there he became such a handsome and attractive young man that there was no more handsome young man than him in the whole of Great Britain.]

As they have for Merlin, the circumstances of this child’s conception have had strange and significant implications for his body: where Merlin is hairy and metamorphic, the caged child is deformed and distorted. As he did for Arthur, Merlin is able to rewrite the circumstances of this child’s conception so that he is rendered legitimate. Merlin’s directions lead to the re-envisaging of the child’s body so that he can be seen as more than a horrifying outline, but as a handsome and legitimate child: the court’s gaze is redirected from the timeless position of the undead Merlin. As Philippe Walter observes, Merlin possesses ‘une capacité très particulière de déjouer le cycle traditionnel des âges de la vie et le cours du temps’ [a very particular capacity for disrupting the traditional cycle of the ages of life and the course of time],62 an idea which T. H. White tapped into in his popular version of the Arthurian story, in which his character Merlyn lives his life backwards.63 While Arthur may be the once and future king for Mallory and his successors, it is Merlin, in the French versions of these tales, who enables past, present, and future to exist coterminously in his anamorphotic gaze. His omniscience enables him both to foresee and to direct significant events in the Arthurian world, since his view of history comes from a point beyond its end, invisible to mortal eyes. In this sense, his death is but a minor hindrance to his interventions in these narratives. As we have seen, Bynum defines metamorphosis as ‘essentially narrative’, but from a perspective which does not see or experience human time, the stages of this narrative are not consecutive, but coincident. In the next section, I shall discuss the way in which Merlin’s metamorphoses continue after his death, when his airy body becomes a posthumous voice.

FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE: EMBODIED VOICE The women who attend to Merlin’s mother have no problem identifying Merlin as a demon: ‘Ce n’est pas enfes, ains est diables’ [this is no baby, but a devil] (Merlin, 170), they exclaim, reacting not only to his troublingly hairy body (which suggests both animality and an unnatural 62

Walter, Merlin, p. 69.

63

White, Sword in the Stone, pp. 53–4.

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maturity), but also to his voice—and his mother is so startled to hear him speak that she drops him. If Merlin’s voice is heard far too soon after his birth, it is also heard for a long time after his death: although Merlin disappears from the Arthurian narrative at quite an early stage, he persists as a voice which echoes throughout the landscape of Logres, predicting and commenting upon its unfolding history. The notion of echoing is salient, since many of the theoretical ideas pertaining to Echo’s voice which I explored in Chapter 2 are relevant here: Merlin survives as something more than himself, and in others, as an Arthurian objet petit a in both gaze and voice. In the context of the Vulgate Cycle, the Merlin follows (in terms of its positioning in cyclic manuscripts and the chronology of events it relates, rather than the dating of its composition) the Estoire del Saint Graal. The Estoire frames itself as the transcription of a book written by Christ and granted to the Estoire’s narrator in a vision by Christ himself, who tells him, ‘i sont mi secré ke je meïsmes escris de ma main’ [my secrets, which I wrote with my own hand, are within] (Estoire, 4). But once the young Merlin has established Blaise as his scribe, he dictates the events which have been recounted in the Estoire, ostensibly the words of Christ: Si li conmencha a conter les amors de Jhesu Crist et de Joseph d’Arimachie, tot ensi con eles avoient esté, et toute l’euvre si con ele avoit esté de Nascien et de ses conpaignons, et conment Joseph morut et se fu desaisis de son vaissel. (Merlin, 188–90) [Then he began to tell him about the love between Jesus Christ and Joseph of Arimathea, just as it happened, and the whole story, just as it happened, of Nascien and his companions, and how Joseph died and was dispossessed of the Vessel.]

What was presented in the opening folios of the Vulgate Cycle as a tale stemming from a privileged divine omniscience—and a divine hand—is now incorporated into the dictation of a character whose knowledge of the past, enduring because God granted it, still derives from his diabolical father.64 It is often implied that what Merlin can see from his privileged position of omniscience is the end to which we are all directed, in the face of which our existence seems all the more nonsensical. Indeed, the acknowledgement of the nonsensical seems to be the best strategy for characters faced with morally dubious shape-shifters. In Perceforest, Estonné, fed up with being led through mud and mire just for Zephir’s entertainment, asks his beloved for advice on how to avoid this kind of trickery in the future: 64

See Pickens, ‘Autobiography’; and Leupin, Le Graal et la littérature, pp. 35–43.

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Par ma foy, sire, dist elle, je ne sçay, car il se transforme en tant de manieres et change sa voix en tant de manieres de sons que je ne sçaroie donner conseil qui vaille. Et s’il vous deçoi une autre foiz, s’y n’en faictes que rire, c’est votre mieulx. (Perceforest, II.i.167) [‘By my faith, sir,’ she said, ‘I don’t know, for he transforms himself in so many ways and changes his voice into so many different sounds, that I don’t know what useful advice to give you. And if he deceives you again, just laugh: it’s the best you can do.’]

Laughter might be the most sensible reaction to Merlin too: where the mortal characters in his orbit might react with ‘merveille’ to his uncanny omniscience, Merlin often expresses it via laughter. Indeed, his first utterance, which so astonishes his mother, is accompanied by laughter. As Bloch observes in his article, this laughter is provoked by the superior knowledge Merlin possesses about the life—or, more often, the death—of the object of his amusement.65 Many of the episodes involving Merlin’s laughter have a fabliau-esque quality:66 seeing a peasant’s new shoes, for example, the young Merlin laughs, since he knows the peasant will be dead before he reaches home, let alone before he reaches the end of his planned pilgrimage (Merlin, 220); he laughs again when he sees a man mourning for what he believes to be his son, when in fact the priest officiating at the funeral is the child’s true father (Merlin, 222); he laughs in the Prophesies when he encounters the man made only of extremities, and when faced with a hypocrite for whom he predicts death by both water and fire (Prophesies, 243–4); Merlin even laughs when Niviene asks him to teach her all his magic, which he knows will bring about his own death (Suite, 277). For Bloch, this laugh signals Merlin’s identity as an author who perceives the fictional quality of his narrative, the double meaning of the ‘mot d’esprit’ [witticism; literally, ‘word of wit’] which betrays the ever-polyphonic, ever multiple nature of language.67 But Merlin does not laugh because he or anyone else has made a witty remark (consciously or otherwise): this is not a verbal reaction, yet it is a vocal one. According to Dolar, the voice of laughter is ‘a highly cultural product which looks like regression to animality’,68 which neatly sums up Merlin’s role as an apparently marginal figure (his laughter often emanates from his ‘semblances’ as a wild man or scruffy beggar) who nevertheless holds together the structures of the Arthurian universe. 65 See Bloch, ‘Le Rire de Merlin’, p. 40. On Merlin’s laughter, see also Thorpe, ‘Merlin’s Sardonic Laughter’; Zumthor, Merlin le prophète, pp. 45–7; Walter, Merlin, pp. 147–57; Micha, Étude, p. 179; Dubost, Aspects, pp. 720–1; Trachsler, Merlin l’enchanteur, pp. 84–6. 66 Zumthor, Merlin le prophète, p. 147. 67 68 Bloch, ‘Le Rire de Merlin’, p. 47. Dolar, A Voice, p. 29.

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The wordless voice of Merlin’s disturbing laughter points to the significance of Merlin’s voice in the tales of Arthurian destiny; and, more specifically, the way in which Merlin’s voice can become detached from his body and still embody him. This separation occurs at the moment of Merlin’s death, or at least his disappearance, which is represented in a variety of ways, each of them as enigmatic as the other, in the romances which feature him.69 Of these texts, the Perceval alone portrays Merlin as deliberately entering his esplumoir because the story has ended: in the other texts mentioned here, he withdraws from their action long before their conclusion, and before he has ceased to intervene in that action.70 In all of the texts, however, Merlin is aware of his coming downfall, just as he is aware of the downfall of all the Arthurian characters, and of the kingdom as a whole.71 In the Suite, he admits that his omniscience has a blind spot when it comes to his own death: Sai jou grant partie [des choses] qui n’apartienent a ma vie ne a ma mort. Mais des moies choses sui je si contrebatus par enchantements qui sont fait ne puis je desfaire se je ne voel m’arme perdre. (Suite, 289) [I know a great deal [of the things] which don’t pertain to my life or my death. But regarding my own circumstances I am hindered by the enchantments which have been made, nor can I undo them if I do not wish to lose my soul.]

For Merlin, his death is both a foregone conclusion and an unknowable outcome: although he knows she will be the end of him, Merlin seems to take a perverse delight in giving Niviene/Niniane the expertise to bring this about. In the Premiers faits, the Lady of the Lake imprisons Merlin in a delightful airy castle woven of hawthorn and a veil (PF, 1631–2); in the Suite and the Prophesies, she lures him into a tomb, which she then unbreakably seals. The story of an individual who knowingly embraces their destiny to be walled up alive in a tomb is also the story of Antigone, who, in Sophocles’s play, refuses to stop honouring her brother’s corpse, and is condemned to be shut up in his tomb. In his reading of this play, Lacan formulates the notion of the ‘zone de l’entre-deux-morts’ to describe Antigone’s

The following paragraphs draw upon my article, ‘The Space of Transformation’. The Perceval ends with Merlin’s departure; the explicit of both surviving manuscripts focus on Merlin as a protagonist, with Modena, Biblioteca Estense, E.39 concluding ‘Ici fine li romans de Merlin et del Graal’; and Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouvelles acquisitions françaises 4166 ending ‘Ci fenist le romanz des prophecies Merlin’ (Perceval, p. 279). 71 See Koble, ‘L’Illusion’. 69 70

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determined identification with her dead brother.72 Like Antigone, Merlin occupies an ambivalent position in relation to the flickering boundary between life and death. Lacan says of this boundary, ‘la limite où nous sommes ici situés est celle-là même où se situe la possibilité de la métamorphose’ [this limit where we have situated ourselves is the very limit where the possibility of metamorphosis is situated].73 This is a space of potential and creativity, where embodied identity becomes precarious and volatile. A subject in this space unhitches his or her identity from any fixed, living embodiment, introducing the possibility of a new incarnation, a new shape, a metamorphosis. The metamorphosis Merlin undergoes in his tombs exploits his ‘subtle body’ not by shifting into another shape, but by becoming something without shape. In a rather blood-curdling moment from the Prophesies, the Lady of the Lake checks that Merlin has died by asking him if he has rotted yet: ‘Sachiés vraiement que la dame del Lac fu illuec plus d’un mois, et puis demanda Mierlin se sa chars estoit pourie; et il dist que oïl’ [You should know truly that the Lady of the Lake was there for more than a month; then she asked Merlin if his flesh had rotted, and he said it had] (Prophesies, 59). That Merlin is able to respond suggests a new embodiment in voice, an instance of the impossible objet a speaking from the limit between life and death. In the Premiers faits, sometime after Merlin’s disappearance, Gauvain (who has at this point himself been temporarily transformed into a dwarf) encounters the site of Merlin’s prison. He hears Merlin’s voice, ‘Mais riens n’i voiet fors une fumee tout autresi come air, de outre ne pooit passer’ [But he saw nothing but a smoke which was like air, he could not pass it] (PF, 1651). Imprisoned in air, Merlin’s airy body can only escape as voice: both air and smoke take on a tangibility comparable to corporeality, acquiring qualities of an object—the impossible objet petit a. Dolar points out (with implicit reference to Derrida) that ‘the voice seems to embody a presence’, yet that embodiment and that presence are fleeting: ‘[t]o be sure, its positivity is extremely elusive—just the vibrations of air which vanish as soon as they are produced, a pure passing’.74 This ‘pure passing’ is a useful way to envisage Merlin as he is presented in medieval prose romance: a space which is filled by a series of passing more or less embodied manifestations, and which is never completely past, but

72

Lacan, Le Séminaire VII, pp. 285–333. For a much more thorough reading of Antigone and theoretical reactions to her in relation to medieval literature, see Gilbert, Living Death, pp. 18–28. 73 74 Lacan, Le Séminaire VII, p. 308. Dolar, A Voice, p. 36.

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constantly reiterating itself in breath, air, and voice after its physical outlines have been concealed and exceeded. In the Suite, the voice of the undead Merlin is transformed into a putative—yet impossible—tale. Baudemagus discovers the enchanter’s tomb but cannot penetrate it, although he can hear Merlin’s cries from within. As Baudemagus tries in vain to free the lamenting Merlin, the narrator intervenes to say that he is not going to relate Baudemagus’s adventures because they are dealt with in another text: the Conte del Brait: De ceste aventure que je vous devise chi ne parole pas chis livres pour chou que li contes del Brait le devise apertement. Et saichiés que li brais dont maistre Helies fait son livre fu li daerrains brais que Merlins gieta en la fosse ou il estoit del grant duel qu’il ot quant il aperchut toutes voies que il estoit livrés a mort par engien de feme et que sens de feme a le sien sens contrebatu. Et del brait dont je vous parole fu la vois oïe par tout le roiaume de Logres si grans et si lons coume il estoit, et en avinrent moult de mierveilles, si coume li branke le devise mot a mot. (Suite, 336) [This book does not speak of this adventure I am telling you about since the Tale of the Cry tells it clearly. And you should know that the cry about which master Hélie wrote his book was the last cry that Merlin gave in the grave he was in, because of the great suffering he endured when he saw that he was in all ways bound to die because of a woman’s trickery, and that a woman’s intelligence had confounded his own. And the voice of the cry I am speaking to you about was heard throughout the kingdom of Logres, as large and as wide as it was, and because of it many wonders occurred, just as this branch of the story recounts word by word.]

A non-existent text, fantasized by the Suite as a supplement which completes its narrative, the Conte del Brait could never be written, since it is nothing but Merlin’s wordless cry of despair.75 It is the opposite of his sardonic laughter, since it signals Merlin’s loss of control over his own destiny rather than his complete knowledge of that of others; yet it is, like his laughter, a wordless manifestation of voice which seems to embody Merlin’s essence. Other texts, however, represent Merlin’s voice as articulating prophecies or advice. Merlin continues to predict the future in the Prophesies even after he is dead;76 and to address passing knights in the Premiers faits. In Merlot, a tale from the thirteenth-century collection La Vie des Pères,77 Merlin is a very active character, despite featuring as nothing but voice. A miserable peasant is bemoaning his lot, when ‘une voiz oï pres de lui’

75 76

On the Conte del Brait, see Koble, ‘L’Illusion; Griffin, The Object, pp. 91–3. 77 See Koble, Les Prophéties, pp. 181–200. Ed. Lecoy, pp. 271–90.

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[he hears a voice near to him] (18414). Upon questioning, the voice declares, Un hom sui, qui a non Merlin, si te profeci et devin et feroie tel amistié, por ce que j’ai de toi pitié, que toz jorz mes riches seroies, se tu de cuer servir voloies Jhesucrist et sa povre gent. (18430–6) [I am a man, by the name of Merlin, and I prophesy mysteries for you, and will show you such friendship, because I have pity on you, that you will be rich for ever more, as long as you wish to serve Jesus Christ and his poor people with your heart.]

The voice tells the peasant where he can find buried treasure; a year later, the peasant asks Merlin to make him provost of his city. Merlin grants this wish, but the richer and more powerful the (now ex-) peasant becomes, the less he wishes to speak respectfully to Merlin. First shifting from the ‘vous’ address to a much more familiar tutoiement (‘Mellin, vien a moi parler’ [Merlin, come and speak to me] (18603), he commands the following year), the protagonist, egged on by his wife, eventually turns up at the usual time of year to tell the voice he has no more need of him, rudely addressing him as the diminutive ‘Mellot’ (18689) of the tale’s title. By the end of the tale, the peasant is a peasant once more, having lost all his money and been forced to take up his previous labour: unsurprisingly, the moral of the story is to teach us humility. Throughout Merlot, the voice which is now Merlin seems to have some kind of physical presence: it ‘vint’ [came] (18606 and 18702) when summoned by the peasant, and even, in a reference to movement along paths emphasized by the rhyme, seems to turn away: ‘La voiz atant se desvoia | qui le vilain en envoia’ [at this, the voice turned away, sending the peasant on his way] (18476–7). In the parodic fifteenth-century prose romance Le Conte du Papegau, Merlin’s voice turns up in an even less likely place, emanating from the beak of the eponymous parrot. This bird, who becomes the mascot for the young King Arthur, heralds the victory of his new master over the evil knight Lion sans Mercy as the fulfilment of a prophecy articulated by Merlin in an appropriately obscure idiom: « C’est celuy de qui Merlin parla tant en sa prophecie qu’il diest que le filz de la brebis devoit soubzmectre le Lion sans Mercy plain d’orgueil et de felonie et d’ire [ . . . ].» Et quant le papegaulx approucha du roy, il commença a dire si doulcement toutes les choses qui sont avenue du temps Merlin jusques a celle heure, si que le roy et tous les aultres se merveillent moult forment de ce qu’il disoit. (Papegau, 94)

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[‘It is he of whom Merlin spoke in his prophecy when he said that the son of the ewe would subjugate the arrogant, felonious and irascible Merciless Lion [ . . . ].’ And when the parrot drew near to the King, it started to recount so sweetly all the things that had happened from the time of Merlin until that hour, that the King and all the others wondered greatly at its words.]

This very late medieval mention of Merlin in French literature chimes with one of the earliest: a passing reference is made to ‘les temps Merlin’ in Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec et Enide, one of the source-texts for the Papegau:78 a costly cloth at Arthur’s court is said to date from this era (6685).79 In the thirteenth-century prose romance tradition, the ‘temps Merlin’ coincides with the first year of Arthur’s reign, which the Papegau purports to recount; but the Papegau refashions this era as one which sees Arthur embarking on a series of adventures which cite and rework those more familiar to readers of earlier verse romance. At either end of the Middle Ages’ production of French romance, then, Merlin is associated with a certain nostalgia for his lifetime, a time which is always-already lost. Throughout the medieval invocations of his name, Merlin’s existence is posited as past, and his influence is felt from beyond the grave, emphasizing once more the timelessness of his voice and gaze. Just as Merlin is able to perceive and comprehend the entirety of Arthurian chronology, so the parrot of the Papegau seems capable of articulating both past and future. What Danielle Régnier-Bohler calls the romance’s ‘double texture temporelle’ [double temporal texture] brings about a playful inversion of Arthurian time,80 as it inserts into the early stages of the Arthurian story tropes and characters who are familiar from earlier literary history and who will be revisited later in Arthurian chronology. More than simply parroting Merlin’s words, the parrot tells Arthur stories to help him sleep,81 one of which involves ‘une dame qui estoit emprisonnee a moult grant tort’ [a lady who was most wrongly imprisoned] (Papegau, 116), and in fact anticipates an event a few pages later, when Arthur is petitioned by a damsel on behalf of her mistress ‘qui est emprisonnee a moult grant tort’ [who is imprisoned most wrongly] (Papegau, 120). Like the romance which frames it, the parrot’s speech can be seen as repetition in the mode of anticipation, recalling Merlin’s own chronology-defying knowledge and narrative voice; like Merlin, the parrot seems to have already read his own tale and to be 78 On the sources of the Papegau, see Lacy, ‘Motif Transfer’ and ‘Convention and Innovation’. 79 See Trachsler, L’enchanteur, p. 17. 80 Régnier-Bohler, ‘Arthur en enfances’, p. 96. 81 On the parrot, see Victorin, ‘Psittacisme et captivité’; and Lawrence, ‘Comic Functions’.

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retelling it as and when he sees fit. If Merlin has retreated, according to some texts, into an esplumoir, the Papegau suggests that he changed his plume—in the sense of feather and pen—to transform into a parrot. In the previous section, I explored Merlin’s origins in the airy bodies of demons; in this section I have shown that his death and disappearance enable his insubstantial embodiment to persist in the subtle body of the voice as an objet a. However, if death is not the end for Merlin, neither is his birth a true beginning. From his perspective outside the textual time of the Arthurian world, Merlin complicates his own origins and conclusions, but is able to pronounce authoritatively on those of other characters in his orbit. In other words, Merlin’s bodily mutability stands in contrast to the definitive declarations he makes about the corporeal truths of characters he encounters. In the next section, I want to explore the way in which Merlin’s voice is embodied in a series of women, and the way in which this omniscient sage, whose wisdom can be incarnated in a number of female characters, is also able to divine an ostensible truth about the gender of other characters he encounters.

ESCAPING GENDER If Merlin recalls Antigone in his willing entry into a tomb, then in his escape from it via transformation he can be compared to a very different figure, the nineteenth-century escapologist, Harry Houdini. In Houdini’s Box, the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips uses Houdini as the central figure to explore the significance of the desire to escape and the fantasies of escapism. The trick that made Houdini’s name was called Metamorphosis: this involved Houdini being locked by his wife inside a series of containers; Mrs Houdini then seemed to vanish and to change places with Houdini: Where Houdini had been, there Mrs Houdini would be. Tied up in the dark, awaiting her release, which was not part of the show. It was the magic of his release that got the applause; his reappearance not her new predicament that was, apparently at least, the centre of attention (the audience might have been unwittingly applauding what he had done to his wife).82

Merlin enacts his own version of this trick, willingly entering a confined space from which there is apparently no escape and swapping places with a woman, or women. 82

Phillips, Houdini’s Box, pp. 12–13.

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While Merlin prophesies to, lectures, and generally bamboozles a succession of male rulers, his most intimate exchanges—personal and pedagogical—are with women. Although the Lady of the Lake is a very different character between the various Merlin texts, all the narratives agree that she acquires her magical power from Merlin’s teaching. The trope of the male sage undone by his desire for a woman is a well-worn one, both before and after the Middle Ages;83 in Merlin’s case, it would appear that he transmits part of his identity and role to his beautiful young pupil.84 In the Vulgate Cycle, the Lady of the Lake takes on much of the function of prescient stage-managing which Merlin fulfils in the Merlin and the Premiers faits: caring for Lancelot, beneath the lake; preparing him thoroughly for his entrance into Arthur’s court; and encouraging his relationship with Guenevere. After Merlin’s demise in the Suite, Niviene arrives at court when Arthur or his courtiers are in danger, taking the role of omniscient protector left vacant by her vanquishing of Merlin. Niviene also perpetuates Merlin’s ability to transform his appearance, echoing her erstwhile suitor by adding years to her age before appearing to Arthur: Et se fu si atornee par enchantement que li rois ne la conneust jamais en cele samblanche, car il vous samblast bien, se vous la veissiés, que elle eust passé .LX. ans et plus. (Suite, 388) [And she was so altered by magic that the King could never recognize her in that guise, for it would have certainly seemed to you, if you had seen her, that she was well into her sixties.]

Just as Merlin defied recognition when presenting himself at court, so Niviene cannot be known by recourse to her appearance: the reiteration of cognates of ‘sambler’ here reinforces the illusory power the Lady of the Lake has learned from the teacher she imprisoned. Many critics have commented on the complementarity and contrasts between Niviene/Niniane and Morgan, Arthur’s half-sister, as successors to Merlin’s authority.85 Both characters are depicted with recourse to wellworn tropes of female sexuality: Morgan is insatiably, diabolically lustful; Niviene uses her feminine wiles to persuade Merlin to teach her, but then rejects his advances, citing his diabolical paternity. While the art the Lady of the Lake learns from Merlin does nothing to diminish her beauty, in the Suite it disfigures Morgan. Initially the most beautiful woman in the kingdom, her appearance is altered when she learns dark magic: 83 Stéphane Marcotte reads the imprisonment of Merlin as a rewriting of the story of Samson and Delilah (‘Récritures’). 84 See Zumthor, Merlin le prophète, pp. 236–60. 85 See Berthelot, ‘Merlin and the Ladies of the Lake’; Harf-Lancner, Les Fées, pp. 308–15; Fries, ‘Female Heroes’; Larrington, King Arthur’s Enchantresses and ‘The Enchantress, the Knight and the Cleric’; Nunes, ‘Les Héritières’; and Milland-Bove, ‘« Retour »’.

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Mais puis que li anemis fu dedens li mis et elle fu aspiree et de luxure et de dyable, elle pierdi si otreement sa biaute que trop devint laide, ne puis ne fus nus qui a bele le tenist, s’il ne fu enchantés. (Suite, 20) [But since the devil had been put in her, and she was infused with both lust and devilry, she lost her beauty so completely that she became extremely ugly; from then on there was no one who could find her beautiful, unless he had been bewitched.]

In this text, Morgan is represented as a malign sorceress, so obsessed with her desire for the knight Accalon that she is willing to kill both her brother (Arthur) and her husband (Urien) to be with him. Her son, Yvain, cannot bring himself to kill his mother in punishment for the attempted murder of Urien, however, since this would in turn corrupt him with the sin of the devil with which he associates his mother: Et anemis et dyables et desloiaus estes, pour coi je devroie miex estre apielés fiex de dyable comme Merlins, car nus ne vit onques que li peres de Merlin fust dyables, mais je vous ai veut et dyable et anemi droit. Et se fu en vous concheus et de vous issi, de quoi je puis de voir affremer que je sui miex fiex de dyable que che ne soit Merlins. (Suite, 352) [You are a fiend and a devil and disloyal, therefore it is better that I should be called a son of a devil like Merlin, for nobody ever saw that Merlin’s father was a devil, but I have seen you as a true fiend and devil. And I was conceived in you and issued from you; therefore I can truly affirm that I am more a son of a devil than Merlin is.]

Morgan is more visibly a devil than Merlin’s airy father, making Yvain briefly Merlin’s double.86 Houdini’s trick may differ from Merlin’s in that he, rather than his wife, emerges from the prison, but both men escape in the place of women. Merlin’s voice and authority is not just split between Niviene and Morgan in the Suite, his prophetic power is reincarnated in the twelve women whom he has imprisoned on the Roche aux Pucelles, a large rock so smooth and perpendicular that no one can climb it without magical aid.87 Their conversations, overheard by various knights of the Round Table, continue Merlin’s prophetic utterances: Et sachés qu’elles ne parloient pas des choses trespasseses ne de celles qui estoient faictes, ains tenoient illec leur plait et leur conseil des choses qui estoient a advenir aussi bien comme s’elles feussent devinerresses de toutes les choses du monde. (Suite, 458)

86 87

See Berthelot, ‘Merlin et le chat’, pp. 58–9. For an excellent reading of this episode, see Wahlen, ‘Les Enchantements’.

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[And you should know that they did not speak of things which had happened, or those which had been done, but they conducted their laments and counsel about things which were to happen, just as well as if they had been diviners of everything in the world.]

When Meraugis reaches this rock in Raoul de Houdenc’s romance, he asks for help in finding Merlin’s esplumoir, only to be told by one of the women, ‘Vez ci l’Esplumeoir: g’i sui’ [here is the esplumoir, I am on it].88 She and her sisters are discovered in place of Merlin: one man imprisoned underground by Niviene metamorphoses into twelve women imprisoned up in the air by Merlin. Using Koble’s understanding of anamorphosis in relation to Merlin texts, we could say that Merlin’s being and body is fractured into a kaleidoscope of identities: by looking awry at the ladies of the lakes and the rocks, we perceive Merlin’s éclat. Against this background of an identity which can flicker between bodies and from one gender to another, it is illuminating to consider Merlin’s role in revealing gendered bodies behind the transvestite masquerade of other characters in two related tales: the story of Grisandole in the Premiers faits; and the Roman de Silence.89 Just as he is able in other episodes to unmask characters who try to outwit him by adopting their own disguises,90 Merlin reveals a truth behind others’ trickery, although in these tales that truth is problematic. In both tales, a young woman is living as a man at court (the imperial court of Julius Caesar in Rome in the Premiers faits; the royal court of Cornwall in Silence). Her disguise is so convincing that the queen/empress falls for her, propositions her, and, when rejected, alleges improper advances. When Merlin reveals the young woman’s identity, he also reveals the queen/ empress’s adultery: in the Premiers faits it transpires that her twelve ladies-inwaiting are men; in Silence, Merlin reveals that the queen’s close companion, a nun, is in fact her male lover. The empress and the queen in the respective texts are violently punished and the unmasked young woman is married to the king/emperor. Whereas Merlin’s body can physically mutate, these transvestites seek to change their identities through disguise: Merlin’s revelations underline this contrast, yet also suggest that the truth of any body behind a disguise is difficult to pin down, since the body is itself a site of debate and interpretation.

88

Meraugis de Portlesguez, l. 2668. On the relation between these two texts, see Hotchkiss, Clothes Make the Man, pp. 105–13; Berthelot, ‘Merlin and the Ladies of the Lake’; Roche-Mahdi, ‘A Reappraisal’; Perret, ‘Travesties’. 90 For instance, the baron who thinks he has caught Merlin out when he predicts three different deaths, but then goes on to die in a particularly complicated and gruesome way (Merlin, 272–84). 89

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Merlin enters the action of Silence only in the last thousand lines, as part of the ruse Queen Eufeme employs in order to wreak her revenge on what she believes to be the young man who spurned her. She tells her husband, King Ebain, about a wild man who lives in the forest, adding that only a woman can catch him: Mais il dist donc, ains qu’en alast Et que la tor adevalast, Qu’il seroit encor si salvages Et si fuitils par ces boscages, Ja n’estroit pris, n’ensi, n’ensi, C’est verité que jo vos di, Se ne fust par engien de feme. (Silence, 5798–803) [But then he said, before he went, and before he came down from the tower, that he would be so wild and so elusive in these woods that he would never be caught, unless, unless—I’m telling you the truth—he was caught by a woman’s cunning.]

Orchestrating her own (doomed) ‘engien de feme’, the queen thinks that she is sending the man who rejected her advances to his death. Silence, however, manages to lure Merlin, who is living as a hairy wild man in the forest, by roasting meat; the smell of it is so irresistible that he cannot help but come out of hiding. Grisandole (whose given, feminine, name is Avenable) uses a similar ruse on the advice of Merlin himself in the guise of a talking stag. In Silence, the protagonist is given the idea of cooking meat by a suspiciously well-informed old man; it could, then, be argued that it is not ‘engien de feme’ which traps Merlin in either text, but Merlin’s own ruse. The old man who advises Silence comments that ‘S’il a humanité en lui, | Il i venra, si com jo cui’ [if there is any humanity in him, he will come, I think] (Silence, 5954–5). This humanity is at stake in the debate conducted about Merlin by the allegorical figures Nature and Noreture [nature and nurture] who try to influence his response to the cooking meat.91 Noreture observes that Merlin has been ‘nori en bos’ [nurtured in the forest] (Silence, 6003) so much that he should have forsaken his ‘nature d’ome’ [human nature] (Silence, 6005) and therefore prefer eating herbs. In the opening pages of Etymologies and Genealogies, Bloch compares Merlin to the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss,92 and it would appear that Silence anticipates Lévi-Strauss’ theories on the raw and the cooked by several centuries: the thirteenth-century romance portrays the cooking and 91 For an account of these figures in a range of medieval texts, see Berkvam, ‘Nature and Norreture’. 92 Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies, pp. 6–9.

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preparation of meat as innate to and characteristic of civilized humanity.93 The argument between Nature and Noreture veers away from Merlin’s behaviour to consider the question of humanity more broadly, and especially whether Nature or Noreture is to blame for original sin. Noreture argues that it was because of Nature that Adam and Eve sinned; while Nature disagrees: Quanques Adans fist de rancure, Fu par toi, certes, Noreture. Car li diäbles le norri Par son malvais consel porri. (Silence, 6067–70) [Whatever evil Adam committed, was surely because of you, Nurture. For the devil nurtured him with his rotten, bad advice.]

Although Noreture, in this account, seems to be allied to the devil, Nature is still able to win Merlin over and attract him to eat the cooked meat. As well as arguing about Merlin’s actions, Nature and Noreture also disagree about Silence’s upbringing and choices. Silence’s creation by Nature is described in meticulous detail; after all her hard work, Nature is outraged by the way in which ‘Noreture me desguise’ [Nurture is transforming me] (Silence, 2275). Noreture is also associated with misleading appearances in her debate with Nature about Merlin’s behaviour. Nature alleges that Nature and Noreture are easy to confuse: whereas sinful behaviour may appear to be in the nature of some incorrigible individuals, it is all the fault of nurture: Tant si delitent li aliquant, Li honi, et li recreänt, Qu’il font alsi com par nature, Mais tolt lor vient de Noreture. (Silence, 6075–8) [Some people, the shameful and cowardly ones, sin so much that it is as if they do it naturally; but it all comes to them from Nurture.]

Nature and nurture, and their effects on the human person and body, are hard to distinguish; this is particularly true in these tales when it comes to sex and gender. ‘Nature’ in Old French can mean ‘sex’: Silence’s parents keep her attendants to a minimum in case she accidentally gives ‘Demostrement de sa nature’ [an indication of her sex] (Silence, 2248). As many critics have pointed out, the subterfuge (and its revelation) in these tales are structured by the relationship between sex (as an innate, biological

93

See Sturges, ‘The Raw and the Cooked’.

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essence) and gender (as the cultural meaning given to biological sex).94 When Silence and Grisandole choose the trappings of masculine nurture rather than their feminine nature, they are portrayed as overlaying the ‘wrong’ gender on to their sex: Merlin calls Grisandole a ‘creature desnaturee’ [denatured creature] (PF, 1234). In order to see through this deception, each tale stages a spectacle of revelation: the naked bodies of the transvestite characters are displayed as a way of perceiving the incontrovertible truth of their identities. Grisandole is instructed to strip the ‘damsels’: it is revealed that ‘il estoient fourmé de tous menbres autresi come li autre home sont’ [they were formed with all the body parts just as other men are] (PF, 1243). Then Grisandole is undressed: ‘Atant conmanda li empereres que Grisandoles fust desvestus et il si fu. Et trouverent que c’estoit une des plus beles puceles c’on trouvast en nule tere’ [at this, the emperor commanded that Grisandole should be stripped and he was. And they found that this was one of the most beautiful maidens that one might find in any land] (PF, 1248); much the same process happens in Silence. As we have seen in previous chapters, the naked body becomes a privileged figure for direct access to the unmediated truth, yet this access is troubled. ‘Le cors n’est mais fors sarpelliere’ [the body is nothing more than a rough garment] (Silence, 1845), observes the narrator of Silence, reminding us that a body does not necessarily offer the last word on a person’s identity or virtue.95 Just as we might have wondered what it was that the voyeuristic onlookers saw when they gazed upon Bisclavret, Alphonse, Mélusine, or Pygmalion’s statue, we might, like McCracken,96 also ask ourselves what it is that the court sees when Silence is disrobed, since it is not until three days after she has been revealed as a woman that Nature has completed her work in restoring Silence to her true feminine loveliness: Si prist Nature a repolir Par tolt le cors et a tolir Tolt quanque ot sor le cors de malle. (Silence, 6671–2) [Nature got to work refining her whole body and removing any trace of maleness from her body.]

94 For the best examples of this kind of reading, see McCracken, ‘ “The Boy Who Was a Girl” ’; Krueger, Women Readers, pp. 101–27; and Gaunt, ‘The Significance’. For an account of Silence and gender studies, see Psaki, ‘Un coup de foudre’. 95 See Victorin, ‘Le Nu et le vêtu’; Bouchet, ‘L’Écriture androgyne’. 96 McCracken, ‘ “The Boy Who Was a Girl” ’, p. 532.

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If this kind of intervention is necessary to eradicate any exterior signs of maleness, then the court must be able to detect these when Silence is undressed. Are the courtiers, then, seeing Nature and Noreture in collaboration on Silence’s naked body? Or are they perhaps seeing Noreture disguised as Nature, since, as Nature has warned, it is difficult to distinguish between them? Whereas Nature in the Rose is an artist to inspire mortals, in Silence she has to collaborate with Noreture in order for that which is natural to appear as such. Merlin’s function in Silence and the Grisandole episode is to reveal the way in which the idea of nature is constructed with recourse to nurture. Heldris de Cornoualle, the author-narrator of Silence, portrays feminine nature as essentially fickle and devious as he closes the romance: it is more important, he declares, to praise women when they behave well (like Silence herself) than to blame sinful ones (like the queen), because women are, by nature, much more likely to do wrong: Car feme a menor oquoison, Por que ele ait le liu ne l’aise, De l’estre bone que malvaise, S’ele ouevre bien contre nature. (6688–91) [For woman has less cause, even if she has the place or time to do so, to be good rather than bad; she acts for the good against her nature.]

In other words, it is natural for a woman to be deceptive: even the women who are categorized as virtuous, who end up replacing the adulteresses at the end of these tales, have reached that point by dissembling.97 As Roberta Krueger points out, Heldris’s words open discussion about feminine ‘nature’ rather than closing it down.98 Simon Gaunt and Caroline Jewers observe that it is remarkable for a text which has been so insistent on the primacy of Nature to praise women who battle against their own nature in order to have any chance of being virtuous.99 If all women (even those deemed virtuous enough to be married off at the end of a narrative) are naturally deceptive, then the transvestite masquerade of Silence and Grisandole might in fact be the most naturally feminine action imaginable. The distinction between Grisandole and Silence on the one hand, and the empress and the queen on the other, is similar to that between Morgan and the Lady of the Lake—not a division between a good woman and a bad woman, but between one woman who is unambiguously evil and Sharon Kinoshita observes that the implication here is that ‘the notion of a “good woman” is paradoxical’ (‘Heldris de Cournuälle’s Roman de Silence’, p. 406.) 98 Krueger, Women Readers, p. 104. 99 Gaunt, ‘The Significance’, p. 211; Jewers, ‘The Non-Existent Knight’, pp. 93–5. 97

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one who is ambiguously good. The implication is that women naturally have recourse to nurture in order to weave their disguises; Noreture, with her demonic associations, is more likely to keep company with women— and with Merlin. Like Merlin, women are unlikely to be straightforwardly legible. McCracken’s article on Silence, ‘The Boy Who Was a Girl’, is perceptive and convincing, but I disagree with her comment that ‘Merlin’s ability to change appearances undermines his authority to identify the truth behind an appearance’.100 My argument is that a reading of Merlin’s mutability across a range of texts which feature him makes it clear that it is precisely his mutable body and its timeless perspective which enable him to discern the truth about the mortals who surround him. Moreover, Merlin’s inconsistency and inherent mutability could be seen as allying him not simply with the enchantresses who inherit and perpetuate his powers, but also with a particular view of women in general. Misogynist stereotypes such as those cited by Heldris, and the ones I examined in Chapter 4, are deployed to argue that women are adept in manipulating their appearance, dissembling and dissimulating in order to captivate unsuspecting men. The implication is that constant vigilance is necessary in order to maintain gender distinctions—and if distinctions need policing and revealing with recourse to a magical shape-shifter, then they are precarious in the first place.101 Perhaps, then, at the end of Silence, when Queen Eufeme has been rejected in favour of Silence, Heldris, like Houdini, is inviting his audience to applaud what has been done to the wife. Silence, as she tells Merlin, is herself descended from the Duke of Cornwall, whose wife Merlin enabled Uther to wed after the death of her husband.102 Silence recalls the depiction in the Merlin of Arthur’s conception, and blames Merlin for the duke’s death: Merlin, assés le me tuas Quant Uterpandragon muas En le forme al duc mon a[n]cestre Et toi fesis altretel estre Com fu ses senescals avoec. (Silence, 6147–51) [Merlin, for me, you killed him when you transformed Utherpendragon into the shape of the duke, my ancestor and you appeared to be his seneschal accompanying him.] McCracken, ‘ “The Boy Who Was a Girl” ’, p. 533. See McCracken, ‘ “The Boy Who Was a Girl” ’, pp. 522–4. Hess, although she purports to disagree with McCracken, reaches a similar conclusion (Literary Hybrids, p. 123). 102 Heldris seems to have extended the duchy of Ygerne’s first husband to encompass all of Cornwall, rather than just Tintagel. 100 101

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Where Silence has replaced a faithless wife, her ancestor was replaced by a shape-shifting husband. The power of Houdini’s trick derives from the illusion that the wife has turned into the husband; its enjoyable spectacle relies on the audience’s belief that gender boundaries are firm, but also on a simultaneous suspicion that they might just be this easily transgressed. Similarly, Merlin reimposes a hierarchy and distinction between the genders in the tales of Silence and Grisandole, but the presence of his unreliable body troubles the easy reinstatement of blurred categories.

CONCLUSION: INKY LADIES Merlin’s impossible body stands in these texts both as the objet a and the anamorphotic position which sees the world as it truly is. In this sense, the readers of the Merlin texts have something significant in common with the characters in the story: we cannot see more than a brief glimpse of Merlin’s ‘droite samblance’, because he is the anamorphosis that looks at us from a perspective beyond our purview. His ever-mutating body is the objet a which is generated from the distortion of our gaze. Merlin’s bodily materiality is revealed throughout the texts which narrate his stories as being intangible, vital, and enigmatic. His demonic body is marked as such by being both airy and hairy: he is sometimes excessively animal or animalistic, appearing as a stag, a wild man or a precociously hirsute and garrulous baby; but he also becomes the nebulous object voice, pulsating through knowing laughter or wordless cries; he passes through various wise women and passes comment on the very nature of gender; and his words, where they are heard, are written down to be scrutinized by later generations. Merlin’s ultimate transformation, then, is into the written word, the literary text;103 just as his physical appearance is never the same from one glimpse of him to the next, his literary manifestation flickers mysteriously from one reading to the next, verse to prose, from one cycle to another, and even to texts which seem to belong to cycles but for whom no satisfactory cycle can be traced.104 As Koble notes, ‘Dans les Prophesies, le prophète sera donc sujet à une série de métamorphoses linguistiques, qui sont comme l’équivalent, dans l’ordre du discours, des transformations corporelles du personnage’ [In the Prophesies, the prophet will therefore be the subject of a series of linguistic metamorphoses, which are a kind of equivalent, in the order of discourse, of the character’s corporeal transformations] (Les Prophéties, p. 73). 104 Koble argues that the Prophesies produce an ‘effet de cycle’ [a cycle-effect] (Les Prophéties, p. 26). Others have argued that the Suite appears to propose a Post-Vulgate Cycle, but may in fact be participating in a similar ‘effet de cycle’: see Griffin, ‘The Space of 103

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Merlin’s repeated visits to Blaise and the recording of his prophecies at court mean that he leaves traces which endure long after his bodily disappearance. This is especially the case in the Prophesies, since Merlin dies and decomposes early in the text, but is remembered—and re-membered— through the prophetic words which are recalled, recorded, and interpreted throughout the narrative. But Merlin is not the only character to write himself into this story and to become a text: two of his female followers— one well known and one only briefly glimpsed—also become the site of inscription—one deliberately and the other accidentally. In the Lancelot, where the Lady of the Lake’s importance to Lancelot’s upbringing means that Merlin is cast in a more maleficent light than in other Merlin texts, she is represented as having escaped Merlin’s unwanted advances by inscribing secret words on to her body: metoit sour ses .II. aignes .II. nons de conjuremens, que ja tant com il i fussent ne la peust nus hons despucheler ne jesir a lui carnelment. (Lancelot, 7.42–3) [she put on either side of her groin two magical names: as long as they were there, no man could take her virginity or lie with her carnally.]

The Lady of the Lake becomes an embodied spell-book, writing herself out of a love story with Merlin and into the Lancelot. This may have been the intention behind the ruse hatched by a character who briefly appears in the final chapter of Koble’s edition of the Prophesies, ‘une dame noire comme arrement’ [a lady as black as ink] (Prophesies, 369). This lady was, the narrative recounts, once a beautiful fair lady, along the conventional lines of the pale-skinned romance heroine; and is another wily woman, in the same vein as Morgan and the Lady of the Lake, who ‘avoit estudié en l’art de clargie un grant tans’ [had studied the art of learning for a long time] (Prophesies, 369). However, unlike her more successful avatars, ‘ele n’avoit apris fors tant seulement a engignier les hommes’ [she had only learned to trick men] (Prophesies, 369)—a skill which both Silence and the Grisandole episode of the Premiers faits portray as being natural to women anyway. But even this learning is of no use to her when confronted with Merlin: determined to trick him with the aid of a bath of ink, Merlin’s spells instead plunge her into the ink, ‘u ele prist la noire coulour, que onques jour de sa vie ne changa’ [where she took on the black colouring, which never changed throughout her life] (Prophesies, 369). These inky bodies are also a reminder that medieval textuality itself involves the inscription of words Transformation’; Roussineau’s introduction to the Suite, p. xxxviii; and Moran, ‘Le meilleur des mondes’.

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on skin. Where Merlin changes his skin, his art is inscribed on the skin of the Lady of the Lake and the Inky Lady; in the fictional, interdiegetic manuscripts on which his accounts of his past and present are recorded; and on the manuscripts that transmit his tales from the Middle Ages to the present day. Just as Merlin’s hybridity enables him to perceive the past and the future, a text is bound to combine past, present, and future, whose meaning and destiny lie in the hands and the understanding of readers. And like Merlin, who comprises a nonhuman surface and superhuman knowledge, a medieval manuscript is a product of the fusion of the animal body with inspiration and reason ultimately, for medieval authors and readers, drawn from God. The point is not, then, that texts about shape-shifting and unreliable appearance are, in Bloch’s words, ‘essentially about the writer’s relation to writing’,105 but that both bodies and texts participate simultaneously in ideas about constancy and change. A body is a guarantee of presence and the continuity of identity; a text stands for the firmness of a tale and its authority. Yet both bodies and texts are, of course, subject to change: this is why rewriting and embodiment are such rich metaphors for one another as they both perform and undergo alteration and adaptation; and they are both susceptible to the effects of time. My intention in this chapter has been to show that Merlin is a particularly fruitful figure to explore in this regard, since not only do his body and his story go through their own transformations, but he is also seen as an author of his own text. To conclude this book, I shall explore the way in which transforming tales also draw attention to the problematic and plural figure of the author in the Middle Ages, and provide a figure for literary creativity.

105

Bloch, ‘Silence and Holes’, p. 93.

Conclusion The Stuff that Dreams Are Made On We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded in a sleep.1 Un mot pour un autre: telle est la formule de la métaphore, et si vous êtes poète, vous produirez, à vous faire un jeu, un jet continu, voire un tissu éblouissant de métaphores.2 [One word for another: that is the formula for the metaphor; and if you are a poet you will produce for your own delight a continuous stream, a dazzling tissue of metaphors.]

The chapters in this book have taken different approaches to tales of transformation and their rewriting in medieval French. I started my exploration of transforming tales with a monumental example of the rewriting of metamorphosis, and of the Metamorphoses: the Ovide moralisé. In Chapter 2, I focused on Echo, a figure from one story in the Metamorphoses, and traced her voice through poetic production in French throughout the Middle Ages. Next I looked at the way in which narratives about humans turning into nonhuman animals can show us a complex of relations between the human and nonhuman in the Middle Ages and the modern day; and Chapter 4 scrutinized stories of metamorphosis which offer a comment specifically on women’s bodies. Chapter 5 focused on one figure again, this time Merlin, a master of disguise. In this conclusion, I want to focus on a figure who reflects the specificity of the exchanges between bodily mutation and textual adaptation, Morpheus, the evermetamorphosing son of the God of Sleep. In particular, I shall investigate him as he appears in Guillaume de Machaut’s La Fontaine amoureuse, a text

1 2

Shakespeare, The Tempest, IV, i. Lacan, ‘L’Instance’, p. 507, original emphasis.

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which, according to Jessica Rosenfeld, offers the ‘insight that another name for shape-shifting sleep is poetry’.3 Before I turn to Morpheus, I want to summarize a number of common concerns which have emerged from the diverse approaches and texts in this study. My argument has been that an investigation of the way in which tales of transformation themselves shift shape and meaning is not simply a question of understanding one sort of change (bodily, fictional) in terms of another (literary, historical); it does not involve mapping transformation of bodies on to the unrelated practice of adapting stories in the hope of finding some analogy between these two types of change. Rather, I have used this double focus on physical and textual change in order to draw attention to the specificity of the interaction between metamorphosing bodies and shifting texts, an interaction I have argued is crucial to the medieval notion of translatio. Throughout the Middle Ages, bodies and texts are envisaged as images of, reflections of, one another. Writing, rewriting, reading, hearing, and appreciating literature in the Middle Ages involved the body: these processes involved the production of voice by the human body which was then heard, repeated, and recorded in manuscripts which were (as their name suggests) written by hand, on skin. The importance given to each of these stages differed between textual traditions, genres, and eras. Bodies—of humans and of other animals—were understood by those who participated in the transmission and enjoyment of literature, as themselves being part of creation which is to be read and interpreted as a means of gaining a fuller comprehension of something that can never be fully comprehended by mortals, the divine truth of God: as the Ovide moralisé stresses, ‘Tout est pour nostre enseigement’ [everything is for our education] (OM, 1.2). Christ’s body is a particularly privileged point of encounter between human corporeality and its divine understanding: it figures across these texts as a body which defies human nature and experience, from his exceptional conception and birth to his ultimate defiance of death. As such, Christ’s is a body which does not totally exist within human conceptions of time. The divine understanding which apprehends the whole of human time and can encompass in its gaze several versions of a body in metamorphosis at once is also a notion which has served to consider a variety of narratives about transformation. This is why I have found the Lacanian articulation of anamorphosis so fruitful on several occasions for thinking through metamorphosis. Similarly, the strange Lacanian objet a, a means of imagining an object which is intangible yet 3

Rosenfeld, Ethics and Enjoyment, p. 105.

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crucial, and is figured in both body and voice, has also been a recurrent theoretical notion which underpins my argument. While it is unsurprising that a book about metamorphosis and literature should return time and again to bodies, it is perhaps more noteworthy that another idea which is reiterated across the chapters is the inherent ambiguity and contingency of language. Transformation and translatio seem to have an affinity with puns. Just as one body can move between shapes (and meanings), so one word can, depending on the context in which we find it, take on more than one signification. This exploitation of the polyvalency of French (and its difference from and similarity to Latin) is, once more, manifested in a plethora of different ways across genres and ages in the Middle Ages, but it is often in poetry that authors are able to capture the possibilities and contingency of one iterated phoneme in order to reflect on the mutability of the human body and human language: the dit amoureux that I shall examine in this conclusion demonstrates this in a particularly dynamic way. This linguistic polyvalence is brought to the fore by another of my recurrent concerns in this book: the voice. As Huot points out, in the later Middle Ages ‘literature is at once more oral and more visual than a modern printed book’.4 In Chapter 2, I used the figure of Echo in order to privilege the aural aspect of the transformation inherent in poetry; and in Chapter 5, I argued that Merlin’s voice, echoing from within his tomb into the Arthurian landscape, takes on a kind of embodiment of its own, scripting the events to come and ensuring the immortality of the Arthurian story. The voice is what exploits and renders audible the competing meanings within one word, one syllable, or one phoneme. When we see a word written down, it is (sometimes) clearer what specific meaning is involved; but hearing a word which has one or more homonyms means that all of its potential meanings are present, suspended; we select the most appropriate one for our needs, but the others still hang in the air. Literature in general, but poetry in particular, exploits these haunting, multiple meanings, and the voice is used to transform one signification into another, while keeping both present as plural meanings in the ear and mind of the listener. Some of the characters I have discussed in this book seem to inhabit bodies which have a true state to which they return: the werewolves Alphonse, Bisclavret, and Mélion are among this group, as are Estonné, Muldumarec, the swan-knight and his siblings, and Blonde Esmerée, who is released from her wyvern shape by kissing the Fair Unknown. Others 4

Huot, From Song to Book, p. 1.

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take on a final state which ends up deciding their meaning: this is the case for most of the Ovidian characters I have examined—Echo and Narcissus; Philomela, Procne, and Tereus; Medusa; Pygmalion’s statue. Another group of characters, however, are able to maintain within their bodies a number of manifestations and shapes which haunt one another and present a plurality of shapes to the eye of the beholder in the same way that rhyme and echo maintain a plurality of meaning within one word. Mélusine, Merlin, and the figure I shall concentrate on in this conclusion, Morpheus, display themselves in these texts as constantly shifting and mesmerizing bodies, presenting innumerable aspects to the viewer, none of which incarnates the absolute truth or last word about their beings. This, too, seems to be a recurring concern of narratives about metamorphosis: these shifting bodies are difficult to envisage, yet present a challenge to the readers and listeners as they try to do so. Harf-Lancner contends that the kind of graphic descriptions of the process of metamorphosis that we find in Ovid are seldom seen in medieval literature because they were ‘trop choquants sans doute pour une conscience chrétienne’ [most likely too shocking for a Christian conscience],5 but, since these dynamics are described enthusiastically in what is the most Christian text of my corpus, the Ovide moralisé, this reasoning seems unconvincing. Rather, I would argue, it is via the effort, the attempt to visualize a human body becoming a plant or an animal or another human, and the attendant emotions, be those shock, enjoyment, fear, revulsion, or wonder, that the medieval and modern reader is prompted to think through his or her relation to embodiment and narrative. Our bodies and the stories we tell about ourselves are bound up with one another; this is the way in which both cultural and individual identity is created. I shall now give a reading of a poem which I see as demonstrating this in a particularly rich and intriguing fashion. THANKING MORPHEUS: THE IMPOSSIBLE STATUE Guillaume de Machaut’s dit amoureux, La Fontaine amoureuse (composed around 1360) is a fitting text to explore in the conclusion to this book, since it thematizes in a complex, self-conscious, and beguiling way the notion of literary adaptation and transformation, with references to stories of metamorphosis appropriated from Ovid and previous medieval interpretations of the Metamorphoses. It is a perfectly formed complex network 5

Harf-Lancner, ‘La Métamorphose illusoire’, p. 220.

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of textual echoes negotiated via images of metamorphosis.6 The figure of Morpheus is so important to Machaut in composing the Fontaine that, in his last dit, Le Voir dit, he refers to the Fontaine as his ‘Morpheus’;7 and some of the scribes who produced manuscripts of his work also gave it this title.8 For the characters within the dit (although within and without are relative terms here, since Machaut’s author-persona and characters slip frequently from diegetic to extra-diegetic spaces), Morpheus provides a way of achieving otherwise impossible communication between a lamenting lover and his distant (geographically and, at least to begin with, emotionally) lady. Machaut produced this poem for his then patron, Jean de Berry (who is also Jean d’Arras’s patron for his version of Mélusine). Both Guillaume and Jean find fictional counterparts in the dit,9 which tells the story of the relationship between a poet and a princely lover. After a meticulously constructed prologue, to which I shall return, the poem opens with the first-person narrator, who identifies himself as a clerk, being kept awake by a terrifying noise of groaning. When he has ascertained that this is not the sound of people coming to kill him, but is a lover lamenting his separation from his lady, he sets about transcribing the complainte: it turns out to be a lyric with one hundred different rhymes. The next morning, the clerk meets the lamenting lover, who turns out to be the perfect prince, and who asks him to write a poem for him, expressing his grief at being apart from his lover; the poet is only too happy to oblige, reaching into his satchel and producing the transcription. The two men then fall asleep next to the fontaine amoureuse [fountain of love], and dream similar dreams in which Venus appears, leading the prince’s lady, who speaks a lyric confort to him. The prince awakes consoled and thankful to Morpheus; and departs, singing, into exile across the sea. As Laurence de Looze observes, ‘the superabundance of narratives and poems is indicative of the Fonteinne amoureuse’s narcissistic, metaliterary concern with its own existence as narrative poetry’;10 and the functions of lament, entreaty, and consolation in this dit are articulated in terms of Ovidian tales, several of them involving transformation. During the lover’s lament, transcribed by the clerk, the lover expresses his desire for his lady See Lechat, ‘Dire par fiction’, pp. 175–8. Machaut, Le Livre du Voir Dit, pp. 126 and 186. Calin, Poet at the Fountain, p. 158; de Looze, ‘Guillaume de Machaut’; McGrady, Controlling Readers, pp. 85–6. 9 As Huot points out, this fortuitously creates another Guillaume/Jean pairing reminiscent of the authors of the Rose (Romance of the Rose, p. 242). 10 de Looze, ‘Guillaume de Machaut’, p. 150. 6 7 8

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to know the torment he is enduring in her absence by recounting a tale of Morpheus, Ceyx, and Alcyone from book 11 of the Metamorphoses. King Ceyx drowns at sea; Juno takes pity on his widow, Alcyone, and sends her messenger to the God of Sleep asking him to let Alcyone know what has become of her husband. The God of Sleep sends his son, Morpheus, to take Ceyx’s form and appear to Alcyone in a dream. Upon awaking, Alcyone, stricken with grief, finds her husband’s corpse at the shoreline, and the pair of them are transformed into halcyons (kingfishers), who are said to nest on the becalmed sea. In the Metamorphoses, the God of Sleep is portrayed as being surrounded by dreams: there are as many of them as ears of grain in a harvest, leaves on the trees, or grains of sand on the shore (M, 11.614–15). In the Fontaine, by contrast, the God of Sleep is surrounded by his children: Les mille fieus qui entour lui estoient, Et les filles aussi, se transmuoient A leur voloir, car les fourmes prenoient Des creatures Si qu’en dormant, par songes, se moustroient Diversement; pour ce les gens songeoient Et en songant meintes choses veöient, Douces ou sures. Les unes sons pongnans, les autres dures; L’une est clere, les autres sont obscures; De tous païs, langages et murmures Parler savoient; D’iaue, de feu, de toutes aventures, De fer, de fust, prenoient les figures. Autre mestier n’avoient, n’autres cures. Par tout aloient. (Fontaine, 635–50) [The thousand sons and daughters who surrounded him transformed themselves at will, for they took the forms of creatures, so that, during sleep, they manifested themselves in diverse ways: this is why people dream, and, while they are dreaming, see many sweet or bitter things. Some are spiky, others harsh, one is bright, the others dark. They know how to speak the language and murmurs of all countries. They take the shape of water, of fire, of iron, of wood, of all eventualities. They have no other occupation, no other care. They go everywhere.]

The bodies of the God of Sleep’s children have merged with the dreams that Ovid described: the God of Sleep’s children, then, are the stuff that dreams are made on. For a poet, and a genre, so enchanted with dreaming and dreamers, it is unsurprising that Machaut should amplify and adapt Ovid’s descriptions of dreams. Machaut personifies these dreams and embodies them; but the bodies he gives them have limitless potential:

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they can take the form of ‘toutes aventures’—all eventualities; but also, all adventures, all stories. The sole function of these dream-children is to mutate and shape-shift. They are brute reality, formless stuff, which is not organized or categorized into comprehensible shape. In Lacanian terms, they are the Real: the elements of reality that we imagine, or fantasize, or fear, or desire, which may lie behind and before the symbolic that controls and orders our existence. As the raw material of dreams, the God of Sleep’s children in the Fontaine suggest that there is a substance that comes before dreaming concocts its stories, warnings, and desires. Freud called this process of concoction the ‘die Traumarbeit’ [the dreamwork], and proposed that it worked through the processes of condensation and displacement. Lacan’s 1957 lecture, ‘L’Instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient ou la raison depuis Freud’ [‘The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud’], combines these Freudian ideas of dreamwork with his reading of Roman Jakobson’s work on linguistics to argue that, since the unconscious is structured like a language, the processes of condensation and displacement can be understood as analogous to metonymy and metaphor respectively. Both metonymy and metaphor involve substitution of one signifier for another,11 and interact with one another as meaning is created: L’étincelle créatrice de la métaphore ne jaillit pas de la mise en présence de deux images, c’est à dire de deux signifiants également actualisés. Elle jaillit entre deux signifiants dont l’un s’est substitué à l’autre en prenant sa place dans la chaîne signifiante, le signifiant occulté restant présent de sa connexion (métonymique) au reste de la chaîne.12 [The creative spark of the metaphor does not spring from the presentation of two images, that is, of two signifiers equally actualized. It flashes between two signifiers, one of which has taken the place of the other in the signifying chain, the occulted signifier remaining present through its (metonymic) connection with the rest of the chain.]

It is, then, the association between the disparate signifiers brought together in a metaphor which creates both meaning and allure for the resulting image: this image involves the play between both terms, between that which has been substituted and that which substitutes. To enter, in a dit amoureux, a house full of ever-shifting dream-bodies is to visualize the process of metaphor, the process of translatio whereby one 11 On Lacan’s adaptation of Jakobson and his understanding of metaphor, see Grigg, Lacan, Language, and Philosophy, pp. 151–69. 12 Lacan, ‘L’Instance’, p. 507.

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thing is expressed in terms of another. The God of Sleep’s children pulsate with different possible bodies: they ‘se moustroient | Diversement’ [manifested themselves in diverse ways]. And they are multilingual: they can speak not just the languages of all countries, but their ‘murmures’ too, giving voice to the non-verbal sounds of language in their endless capacity for transformation and translatio. As Machaut translates and adapts Ovid’s spellbinding description of the House of Sleep, he makes it his own storehouse of metaphor and dream, a place to create and recreate poetry, and himself as a poet. Morpheus, whose very name speaks of the shape-shifting he embodies, appears in Machaut’s poem as the figure who can bring about union of the lover with the distant object of his desire. The lover’s recounting of the story of Ceyx and Alcyone is a model for the way in which he wishes Morpheus would commune with his lady: Se Morpheüs devant li se transporte Cinc fois ou sis, et se bien li enorte En ma fourme qui est a moitié morte, Croire ne puis, Se bien li dit que trop me desconforte Et qu’il n’est riens en quoy je me deporte, Que ma dame soit si dure ou si forte Que Pité, l’uis De son franc cuer, qui de tous maus est vuis Et de tous biens li ruissiaus et li puis, De scens, de grace et d’onneur li dous fruis, N’euvre la porte A Dous Penser, qui si bien sera duis Qu’il li dira, et de jours et de nuis, Comment siens sui, et les mortels annuis Que pour li porte. (Fontaine, 715–30) [If Morpheus transports himself in my half-dead form before her five or six times, and urges her strongly, I can’t believe, if he tells her properly that I’m extremely miserable, and that there’s nothing which gives me pleasure, that my lady would be so hard or unwavering that Pity won’t open the door of her heart, which is devoid of any evil, and is the spring and source of all good, to admit Sweet Thought, who will be so well-trained that he’ll tell her, day and night, that I am hers, and of the terrible affliction I suffer for her.]

Although he will only be half-dead of love, rather than drowned at sea, the lover sees this as the only means by which he and his beloved can communicate; Morpheus will have to reverse the metamorphosis also, since this is the only way in which the lover will know that his lady returns his feelings. The lover’s articulation of his prayer to Morpheus

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casts the God of Sleep’s son as the fantasy which enables courtly love to work to the satisfaction of the lover: the extra ingredient necessary for the perfect transmission of the entreaty for love, and its perfect reciprocation: Elle verra les maus qu’elle me fait, Se Morpheüs a droit me contrefait, Et que je l’aim de loyal cuer parfait, Ferme et estable (Fontaine, 787–90) [She will see the evil she inflicts on me—if Morpheus imitates me properly—and that I love her with a loyal heart which is perfect, firm, and stable]

As the impossible object which is constructed as potentially being able to fulfil desire and unite self with other, Morpheus incarnates the objet a: like the voice and the gaze he is corporeal, but does not occupy any fixed body; he has no shape or physicality of his own, but ‘contrefait’ the lover. Žižek’s description of the objet a, as ‘nothing but the embodiment, the materialization of this very distortion, of this surplus of confusion and perturbation introduced by desire into so-called “objective reality”’,13 resonates with Machaut’s depiction of Morpheus. Like Merlin, although in a different literary mode and genre, Morpheus embodies the potential and plurality of metamorphosis. Composed earlier in the fourteenth century than the Fontaine, the Ovide moralisé also subtly adapts Ovid’s depiction of Morpheus. Ovid emphasizes that Morpheus is the only one of the God of Sleep’s sons who can take on human form, an artist who can create any shape he wishes: At pater e populo natorum mille suorum excitat artificem simulatoremque figurae Morphea: non illo quisquam sollertius alter exprimit incessus vultumque sonumque loquendi; adicit et vestes et consuetissima cuique verba; sed hic solos homines imitatur. (M, 11.633–8) [From a throng of a thousand sons, his father roused Morpheus, a master craftsman and simulator of human forms. No one else is as clever at expressing the movement, the features, and the sound of speech. He depicts the clothes and the usual accents. He alone imitates human beings.]

By contrast, the Ovide moralisé puts more emphasis on the ways in which Morpheus, who is described here as a ‘songe’ [dream], can imitate any human he wishes: Il y ot un fil qui prenoit Samblance d’umaine nature, 13

Žižek, Looking Awry, p. 12, original emphasis.

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Forme et façon et vesteüre, Samblant d’aler et de venir, De parler et de contenir De quelque home qu’il voloit. Li peres cest songe apeloit Morphëus. (OM, 11.3524–30) [He had a son who took the appearance of human nature: the form, shape, and clothing; the gait, the way of speaking and behaving of any man that he wished. The father called this dream Morpheus.]

Any reader of the Ovide moralisé expecting this son of a god, who takes on human form and clothing and who is sent to console, to be moralized as Christ will be disappointed, however: the Ovide moralisé author appears to omit Morpheus from the moralization of this section of the Metamorphoses, concentrating instead on the frame tale of Ceyx and Alcyone. In a lengthy exposition, the ship in which Ceyx sets sail is understood as the human body, to be guided by the senses, represented by the sailors, but beset with the tempests of sin and waves of ‘males fluctuations’ [evil fluctuations] (OM, 11.3844). Morpheus may, however, be detected in the moralization of this tale via an echo of the translation of Ovid’s description of the House of Sleep. In the Metamorphoses, dreams lie around the God of Sleep: hunc circa passim varias imitantia formas Somnia vana iacent (M, 11.613–14) [Around him, here and there, lie uncertain dreams, taking different forms]

The Ovide moralisé renders this as ‘Entour lui multiplietez | De songes et de vanitez’ [Around him multiple dreams and vanities] (OM, 11.3472–3): the ‘Somnia vana’ have been split into dreams and vain things. This reference to vanity is picked up and amplified in a moralization which reads Ceyx, blown about by the winds, as ‘li siecles’ [secular world] (OM, 11.4123), explaining that: Li siecles a la seignorie De toute vaine vanité. (OM, 11. 4127–8) [The secular world has as its domain all vain vanity.]

Moreover, this secular approach to life wishes to espouse the ‘delitableté’ [pleasure] (OM, 4129) of the world: Alcyone, then, becomes a figure for worldly delights. The moralizer expands on his theme: Vaine est la mondaine delice Et plaine de muableté (OM, 11.4133–4) [Worldly pleasure is vain and full of mutability]

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Although this moralization concentrates on Ceyx, these lines resonate with the ‘vanitez’ and multiple appearances of the children of the God of Sleep. The home of dreams, then, is fleetingly a figure of the secular world and its pleasures: this is precisely the inverse of the way in which the House of Sleep is conceived in the Fontaine, since it is to the realm of Morpheus that the lover looks, from his position in the unsatisfactory secular world, for consolation in his unrequited secular love. In the lines which immediately follow this implicit reference to Morpheus in the Ovide moralisé, the moralizer returns to Ceyx as the character whose affinity to earthly vanity is under discussion: Par sa grant variableté Puet l’en dire qu’il est oisiax. (OM, 11.4135–6) [Because of its great changeability, one can say that it [the secular world; but also Ceyx] is a bird.]

But since Morpheus was able to mimic so convincingly Ceyx in Alcyone’s dream, precisely because of his own ‘variableté’ (to rhyme with ‘muableté’), it might justifiably be stated that the moralizer still has Morpheus in mind. The bird here becomes the archetypal incarnation of mutability, which is also an apt characterization of Morpheus. This avian fickleness is then extended by the moralizer to encompass anyone who indulges in vain diversions: Ces dames et ces damoisiaux Et cil autre qui trop s’amusent En ces delis, dont il abusent, Et les embracent gloutement, Puet l’en dire oisiaux ensement. (OM, 11. 4137–41) [Those ladies and young men, and other people who enjoy these pleasures too much, which they abuse and greedily embrace, can also be said to be birds.]

Jean-Claude Mühlethaler reads this moralization as denigrating ‘une jeunesse insouciante et, par-delà, le monde de la courtoisie’ [a carefree youth and, more generally, the courtly world].14 This emphatic reading of birds as flighty, frivolous people echoes the moralization of the nightingale which Philomela turns into: she represents ‘li delit vain et muable’ [vain and changeable pleasure] (OM, 6.3839).15 Where the Ovide moralisé reads the tale of Morpheus, Ceyx, and Alcyone as a caution against the lure of courtly leisure, Machaut uses it precisely for courtly, secular ends. Similarly, Froissart, whose work often Mühlethaler, ‘Entre amour et politique’. For a further discussion of the tale of Philomela and its moralization, see Chapter 1, pp. 54–62. 14 15

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imitates and reconfigures Machaut’s (frequently in terms of their use of Ovidian tales and characters) invokes Morpheus at the beginning of his early dit, Le Paradis d’amour, praying to him, along with Juno and Aeolus to send him ‘les messages | De dormir’ [messengers of sleep] (Paradis, 17–18).16 The dream Froissart’s narrator then experiences is again an archetypally courtly scenario, familiar to readers of the Rose and dits amoureux, involving an idyllic outdoor setting complete with birdsong. It is brought to him by the son of the God of Sleep, not Morpheus—who in this text seems to have become conflated with his father—but the hitherto unknown ‘Enclinplostair’ (Paradis, 28), who has only to enter the room for the narrator to fall instantly asleep. Upon waking, the narrator is consoled, and expresses thanks not only to Morpheus but also to Orpheus: this rhyming pair of Ovidian figures have brought about the rich combination of dreaming and poetic know-how that is necessary for the creation of poetry which harnesses the power of metaphor to give both expression and fulfilment to the literary desire which is often known as courtly love. Lacan draws attention to the crucial place of metaphor in poetry as he forges his analogy between metaphor and the Freudian notion of condensation, in which dreams layer references to disparate things, people, and places: La Verdictung, condensation, c’est la structure de superposition des signifiants où prend son champ la métaphore, et dont le nom pour condenser en luimême la Dichtung, indique la connaturalité du mécanisme à la poésie, jusqu’au point où il enveloppe la fonction proprement traditionelle de celle-ci.17 [Verdichtung, condensation, is the structure of superimposition of signifiers, which metaphor takes as its field, and whose name, condensing in itself the word Dichtung, shows how the mechanism is connatural with poetry to the point that it envelops the traditional function proper to poetry.]

The ‘superposition des signifiants’ is a way of envisaging Morpheus’s everfluctuating appearance in the Fontaine: his shifting forms haunt one another and render visible (or at least potentially envisaged) the interrelated processes of metaphor, translatio, and transformation. It is via this figure that Machaut creates the ‘jet continu, voire un tissu éblouissant de métaphores’ Lacan evokes in the description I have used as an epigraph to this conclusion.

16

On the references to Morpheus in the Paradis, see Huot, From Song to Book, pp. 303–5; Mühlethaler, ‘Entre amour et politique’; and Rosenfeld, Ethics and Enjoyment, p. 93. 17 Lacan, ‘L’Instance’, p. 511.

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Awakening from the dream in which his lady appears and sings him a song of confort, the lover of the Fontaine is grateful to the deities who have orchestrated this feat of communication and consolation. He declares his intention of building temples to Venus and the God of Sleep; but he will commission a statue of Morpheus to stand in the temple to his father: Et l’image de Morpheüs, Dont longuement me suis teüs, Soutieument et par grant maistrie Y sera d’or fin entaillie, Sus un piler de fin argent Bien esmaillié, par quoy la gent Aient memoire et ramembrance De son scens et de sa puissance. (Fontaine, 2571–8) [And the image of Morpheus, of whom I haven’t spoken for a while, will be there, fashioned from fine gold with great craft and artistry, on a pillar of fine enamelled silver, so that people will remember and recall his wisdom and power.]

De Looze finds this vow to create an image of Morpheus ‘no surprise’;18 but it is worth exploring the implications of a statue of this ever-transforming figure: put simply, what would the statue look like? Morpheus, after all, is the form of formlessness, the essence of mutability. Machaut, through the lover’s description of the statue, hints that this work of art would be difficult to realize: Mais telement y sera faite Qu’en mil fourmes y ert pourtraite, Car bien croy qu’il fist mon message, En ma fourme, a la bonne et sage. (Fontaine, 2579–82) [But it will be constructed such that it will be made in a thousand shapes, for I do believe that he took my message, in my form, to the good and wise lady.]

In imagining Morpheus’s multiple embodiments captured in sculpted form, the lover articulates an unthinkable ekphrasis: would this statue in fact be 1,000 statues, each depicting a likeness assumed by Morpheus? Or are we to imagine a statue which itself mutates between forms, or superimposes forms over one another? Just as the moralizing translatio of the Ovide moralisé plays between the ‘variableté’ of both Morpheus and the bird which Ceyx becomes, so the Fontaine is able to propose a figure which flits between a series of forms. Among the thousand shapes that Morpheus’s statue would take, then, alongside (or superimposed upon) that of Morpheus’s most famous 18

de Looze, ‘Guillaume de Machaut’, p. 156.

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incarnation, Ceyx, would be that of the Fontaine’s lover, since Morpheus took on his appearance; another would be that of the lover’s lady. Yet another would be the form of the poet-narrator persona: as de Looze points out, the narrator mirrors Morpheus in this poem’s diegesis, since it is he who enables the lovers to communicate, creating the poems and dreams necessary for them to be briefly but consolingly united.19 Extradiegetically, Machaut plays this part also, providing an elegant and beautiful dit to his patron, Jean de Berry, about to embark for exile in England.20 Machaut’s poetic skill has, then, effected a transformation of Jean into a sorrowing, but creative and ultimately comforted lover, and himself into a poet who can commune with deities in order to bring succour to his prince. If we trace the thread of transformation from Jean to the interdiegetic lover and Machaut to the interdiegetic clerk, then both of these historical figures, as distinct from their fictional avatars, should also be portrayed among the forms of Morpheus. My point here is that to think through the patterns of fictional representation and metamorphosis triggered by the mention of the putative statue of Morpheus is to become quickly ensnared in the envisaging of a constantly mutating work of art no plastic artist could realize, yet which can be subtly evoked within the lines of a poem. However, Machaut does include in the landscape of this dit another extraordinary artefact and its legendary creator: Pygmalion. The sculpted artefact at the heart of the Fontaine is the fountain itself, which the poet and prince find situated in the middle of a ‘trop biau parc’ [very beautiful park] (Fontaine, 1293). Although now both awake, the poet and his patron seem to be wandering through landscape familiar from the Rose:21 the fountain itself is an ekphrastic echo of Guillaume de Lorris’s section of the Rose, a literary locus so overdetermined that we could well borrow Lacan’s phrase and call it a ‘jet continu’ of metaphor. Like Guillaume’s fountain, the fontaine amoureuse is decorated with scenes depicting the story of Narcissus: Car sus un grant pilier d’ivoire Estoit assisë, ou l’istoire De Narcisus fu entaillie Et si soutieument esmaillie Que par ma foy! y m’estoit vis, Quant je le vi, qu’il estoit vis. (Fontaine, 1307–12)

de Looze, ‘Guillaume de Machaut’, p. 156. ‘The poet mediates between the intellective and imaginative realm, where messages take poetic shape, and the material artifact in which they are embodied as successful communication’ (Huot, From Song to Book, p. 299). 21 Huot, From Song to Book, p. 296; and Brownlee, Poetic Identity, p. 197. 19 20

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[For it was mounted on a great ivory pillar, where the story of Narcissus was carved, and so subtly enamelled that, by my faith, it seemed to me when I saw him there, that he was alive.]

The stunning verisimilitude of the fountain is the result of its being Pygmalion’s handiwork: [ . . . ] Venus le marbre et l’ivoire Fist entaillier, c’est chose voire, Par Pymalion qui bien ouevre, Qui escheva toute ceste ouevre. (Fontaine, 1395–8) [It is true that Venus had the marble and ivory sculpted by the talented Pygmalion, who executed this entire work of art.]

The intricate rhyming in these four lines—a rime riche followed by a rime équivoque—demonstrates Machaut’s own skill as he works not with marble and ivory but with language, rhyme, and metre. Rhyming ‘ivoire’ and ‘voire’ points out the delicate balancing act that Machaut, like Pygmalion, is maintaining between the truth and carefully wrought artistry (a similar point is made in the rhyme between ‘ivoire’ and ‘istoire’ at lines 1307–8 quoted earlier). And just as Jean de Meun called on the rime équivoque in ‘euvre’ (Rose, 15999–16000) when slyly contrasting his own creative brilliance with that of Nature in the Rose,22 Machaut uses this same device in order to stake his own claim as a literary descendant of Jean de Meun and as a rival artist to Pygmalion. Not even Pygmalion, it is implied, would be able to produce the statue of Morpheus that the prince projects: it is fortunate indeed that the prince is the patron of a poet who, with the help of Morpheus himself, can evoke a sculpture at which even the legendary Ovidian artist would baulk. The fountain and the putative statue of Morpheus are set against one another in their echoing descriptions—both are ‘esmaillie’ [enamelled] and ‘entaillie’ [carved]— and the visual echo of the silver pillar of Morpheus’s statue with the ivory one on which Pygmalion carved the story of Narcissus. As we have seen, Morpheus is described as a craftsman or artist in the Metamorphoses.23 In the lover’s fantasy-prayer of the complainte, Morpheus is compared to Pygmalion: unsurprisingly, perhaps, Morpheus is proposed as the more successful artist; and the lover the happier suitor: Pymalion fist l’image d’ivoire Que moult pria et ama sans recroire, Mais il n’ot pas si tres noble victoire Ne tel eür 22

See Chapter 4, pp. 167–8.

23

See Rosenfeld, Ethics and Enjoyment, p. 89.

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Comme j’aray, se Morpheüs avoire Ce je tieng que sera chose voire. (Fontaine, 963–8) [Pygmalion made the image of ivory, which he wooed and loved indefatigably. But he did not have as noble a victory nor as good fortune as I shall, if Morpheus brings to pass that which I believe will be true.]

Again, the rhyme between ‘ivoire’ and ‘voire’ emphasizes this triumph over Pygmalion. A sculptor whose statue comes to life is not as impressive a mythical model for a lover or an artist as Morpheus. Indeed, Morpheus seems so successful at bringing about the goal of reciprocated desire that the practical (rather than decorative) function of the fountain itself seems slightly redundant. As the lover explains to the poet, those who drink from the water of the fountain will fall in love: although both characters courteously invite the other to drink the water, it transpires that neither wishes nor needs to do so, since they are both already in love. The carved story of Narcissus which winds around the pillar is appropriate to a fountain which mirrors the protagonists of this dit, who also mirror one another:24 although I have referred to the clerk character as the poet and the prince as the lover, in fact both, as we learn at the fountain, are in love; and both could be credited with the production of the tremendous poetic feat the complainte represents, since the prince dictated it and the clerk transcribed it.25 Both men’s artistic enterprise and voices, then, combine, in enjoining Morpheus to act for them, and in creating the poetry which manifests that action.26 PLACES OF TRANSFORMATION: THE FOUNTAIN, THE DESK, AND THE BED For all that the clerk (the fictional avatar of Machaut) credits the prince (the fictional avatar of Jean de Berry) with the production of the complainte, the circumstances, and the place in which he transcribes it, indicate that Machaut is once more cunningly demonstrating his skill, and his Morpheus-like superiority over Pygmalion. When he realizes that the groans he can hear are in fact a lover’s lament, the clerk happily assembles all of his writing paraphernalia: [ . . . ] je pris mon escriptoire Qui est entaillie d’ivoire 24 25 26

See Huot, Romance of the Rose, pp. 246–7. See Brownlee, Poetic Identity, p. 200. See Calin, Poet at the Fountain, p. 165.

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Et tous mes outils pour escrire La complainte, qu’il voloit dire. (Fontaine, 229–32) [I took my writing-desk, which is carved from ivory, and all my tools to write the lament, which he wished to say.]

The dit’s first mention of ‘ivoire’, then, does not rhyme with ‘istoire’ or ‘voire’, but with ‘escriptoire’, the characteristic accoutrement of the late medieval clerk. Ivory, the material for Pygmalion’s statue, is but the support for the creative process on which the clerk embarks. Although it is presented as a simple act of transcription rather than a feat of poetic composition, as the complainte nears its end its first-person narrator, ostensibly the prince-lover, draws attention to the artistry inherent in this piece: ‘Cent rimes ay mis dedens ceste rime’ [I have put a hundred rhymes into this rhyme] (Fontaine, 1021). This claim of having ‘mis’ the rhymes into the poem rather belies the scenario of an overheard lament, especially one which could be initially mistaken for threats of violence; but it does allow the clerk-narrator to exclaim in wonder when he sees (having checked thoroughly) exactly what it is that he has transcribed: ‘il y avoit, dont j’eus merveilles, | Cent rimes toutes despareilles’ [there were, which surprised me greatly, a hundred completely different rhymes] (Fontaine, 1051–2).27 Machaut also solicits the reader’s admiration in the very last line of this dit: ‘Dites moy, fu ce bien songié?’ [Tell me, was that well dreamed?] (Fontaine, 2848), he enquires, almost as a prelude to a resounding round of applause. Huot points out that the closing of the Fontaine is an intertextual reference to the Rose;28 and de Looze observes that the rhetorical question of the last line seems to come from a different level of literary action from the rest of the dit: Is this last line a metaliterary comment by the Implied Author on the dream within the work? Or the Implied Author commenting on the whole work as a piece of literature? Or is the whole story simply a dream which has taken place within the consciousness of the Narrator lying in bed? At what level of diegesis is the final question uttered?29

In other words, where are we to picture the narrator making this final triumphant demand? The opening folio of the Fontaine, as is depicted in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fonds français 1584 (fol. 154r), shows two iterations of the narrator and/or author: at the top left, a clerk

27 28 29

See Brownlee, Poetic Identity, p. 196. Huot, Romance of the Rose, pp. 243–4. de Looze, ‘Guillaume de Machaut’, p. 157.

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sits at his desk; at the bottom right, a man lies in a bed.30 Both of these positions, in the desk and the bed, writing and sleeping, are proposed as the Fontaine opens in this manuscript; it could be supposed that they are also both possible at the end of the poem. Both are privileged spaces of poetic production in the dit amoureux. In the complainte, the lover imagines his beloved musing on the dream Morpheus will convey to her, in which the god will depict the lover’s torments of desire. Simply dreaming about him will not be enough, he suggests: the lady will also need to think about her dream in order fully to understand her suitor’s anguish: Si me seroit chose trop profitable S’elle pensoit en lit ou en la table Et en tout lieu a penser convenable (Fontaine, 779–81) [It would be a very beneficial thing to me if she were thinking in bed or at the table, in all places which are suitable for thinking]

A bed, then, is a useful place to think: reasonably enough, it is where the lady is likely to contemplate her dream having experienced it as she slept. In what is perhaps a reference to this imagined place and process of recumbent dream-interpretation, the lover-narrator of Froissart’s Paradis d’amour wakes at the end of his dream and ponders it before he gets up: Se trouvai que j’estoie mis Dessus mon lit pour reposer, Se commenchai moult a penser Quel aventure et quel afaire M’avoit peüt ce songe faire. (Paradis, 1691–5) [I found that I had lain down on my bed to rest, and I began to think deeply about the adventure and situation this dream had given me.]

The Fontaine itself opens with insomnia: the manuscript image depicting the man in bed shows the narrator unable to sleep even before the terrible noise alarms him. He lies ‘En un lit ou pas ne dormoie | Einsois faisoie dorveille’ [in a bed where I was not sleeping, rather I was sleep-waking] (Fontaine, 62–3): the narrator helpfully glosses ‘dorveille’ as being ‘Com cils qui dort et encor veille’ [As he who sleeps yet wakes] (Fontaine, 64]. Machaut is playfully inverting Guillaume de Lorris’s introduction to his dream narrative here: unlike the narrator of the Rose, who ‘vi un songe en 30 On this manuscript, see Huot, From Song to Book, pp. 274–301; in particular 293–300 on the Fontaine. Huot points out that this second pose underscores the poet’s similarity to the God of Sleep, who is also shown in bed later in the manuscript (p. 293). For an account of critical opinions of Machaut’s involvement in the production of this manuscript, see McGrady, Controlling Readers, pp. 81–3.

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mon dormant’ [saw a dream as I slept] (Rose, 26), the narrator of the Fontaine is half awake, then fully awake in order to transcribe the words of another person who cannot sleep, but who articulates his lovesickness as an appeal to the son of the God of Sleep for a restorative dream.31 When poetry is so intimately concerned with dreaming—such that it depicts, analyses, and thematizes dreams—not to couch it as a dream is seen as a deliberate ploy. Even gods need comfortable beds. The narrator of the complainte promises that he will give the God of Sleep some thoughtful gifts if Morpheus fulfils his desires: Et pour ç’au dieu qui moult scet et moult vaut, Pour mieus dormir, un chapiau de pavaut Et un mol lit de plume de gerfaut Promés et doing. (Fontaine, 807–10) [And so I promise and give to the god who is so knowledgeable and worthy, so that he might sleep better, a crown of poppies and a soft bed of gyrfalcon feathers.]

Feathers are not only essential for the production, recording, and transmission of literature; they are also useful for a luxurious bed, which is the desirable situation both for the production and for the interpretation of dreams.32 Since dreaming and poetry are so intimately entwined in the dit amoureux genre,33 responding as it does to the creative dream-space of the Rose, it is entirely fitting that the God of Sleep should be given feathers in order to soothe his slumbers. It could, of course, be objected that the god has no need of these gifts: his bed in the Metamorphoses is already ‘plumeus’ [downy] (M, 11.611); in his description of the god’s slumber, Machaut has already signalled that the god has no need of ‘pavaut n’autre engien | Pour bien dormir’ [poppy or any other ruse to sleep well] (Fontaine, 612–13). And the feathers from a gyrfalcon, a large, high-status hunting bird, would be unlikely to be used as down for mattresses, which would more often come from ducks or geese.34 Like the potential statue to Morpheus, this offer is less a means of the fictional lover offering to thank

See Lechat, ‘Dire par fiction’, p. 150. ‘Sleep is not simply a physical necessity in the French dream vision, but a state conducive or necessary to exploring possible reparations for walking discontents’ (Rosenfeld, Ethics and Enjoyment, p. 97). Mühlethaler puts it more succinctly: ‘Pour Guillaume de Machaut, l’écriture est songe’ [For Guillaume de Machaut, writing is dreaming] (‘Entre amour et politique’). 33 ‘Les fonctions du songe et du poète tendent à se confondre’ [the functions of the dream and the poet tend to become confused] (Lechat, ‘Dire par fiction’, p. 149). 34 The gyrfalcon is the fourth allegorical bird to capture the heart of the narrator of Machaut’s early Dit de l’alerion. 31 32

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a classical deity, and more a way of Machaut drawing attention to his clever artistry, this time via the device of the ‘plume’. Alcyone acquires her feathers as she is overtaken by grief for her drowned husband: volabat percutiensque levem modo natis aera pennis stringebat summas ales miserabilis undas (M, 11.731–3) [she flew, and, beating the soft air on new-found wings, a sorrowing bird, she skimmed the surface of the waves]

Alcyone, like the protagonists of the story of Philomela, finds herself suddenly with wings: the Ovide moralisé depicts her developing ‘plume’ [feathers] (OM, 11.3760). In this she recalls Morpheus, who flies to Alcyone, but has to shed his wings as he morphs into Ceyx’s shape (M, 11.650–2). Machaut also gives wings to Juno’s messenger, Iris, who, in the Fontaine amoureuse, ‘Ses eles prent’ [she took her wings] (Fontaine, 588) in order to set off for the House of Sleep (in the Metamorphoses, she dons a ‘velamina mille colorum’ [thousand-coloured veil] (M, 11.589)). Machaut himself might also be described as taking his ‘eles’ in order to convey this tale: not wings, nor yet third-person feminine pronouns (the lady of this poem, like those of other dits amoureux, tends to get written out of the action), but the letter ‘l’. In a poem which invites its readers to marvel at its author’s inventive deployment of a hundred different rhymes, it is also surely worth paying attention to rhymes which resemble one another; and it is striking that the rhymes of the first thirty-two lines of the Fontaine use rimes riches or léonines involving this same letter: Pour moy deduire et soulacier Et pour ma pensee lacier En loial amour qui me lace En ses las, ou point ne me lasse, Car jamais ne seroie las D’estre y, ne n’en diroie ‘helas,’ Vueil commencier a chiere lie, En l’onneur ma dame jolie, Chose qui sera liement Veue, et joliement Faite de sentement joli Et de vray cuer, qui est a li. Or pri a ceuls qui le liront, Qui le bien dou mal esliront, S’il y est, qu’il vueillent au lire Laissier le mal, le bien eslire.

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Car quant la chose est bien eslite, Par raison homs plus s’i delite, Et dames et cils qui le lit Penre y doivent plus grant delit, Et cils dont il sera leus Soit ou nombre des esleus. Mais mettre n’i vueil chose laide, Car quant y tonne et il eslaide, Li temps est noirs, obscurs et lais, Mais assez est plus dous que lais Contre Mesdit, par sainte Helainne! Pour c’a toute chose villeinne Vueil renuncier, et la delay. Si commenceray sans delay, Mais qu’aie nomme a delivre Celui pour qui je fais ce livre, [ . . . ] (Fontaine, 1–32) [To entertain and comfort myself, and to entwine my thought with the loyal love which embraces me in its coils, such that I cannot release myself—for I will never tire of being there, nor of saying ‘alas!’—I wish to start, with a happy countenance, in honour of my pretty lady, something which will be cheerfully and fittingly perceived, made from pretty sentiments and a true heart which belongs to her. Now I ask those who will read it to leave the evil and select the good, for when something is well chosen, it is reasonable that people should delight in it more; the ladies and men who read it should take pleasure in it; and he who will read it should be among this select group. But I do not want to put anything ugly into it; for when the weather is bad and stormy, dark, obscure, and ugly, it is still sweeter than milk when compared to slander, by St Helen! That is why I wish to renounce and abandon all vile things. I shall start without delay, but not before I have named, in my way, the man for whom I am making this book [ . . . ]]

These ‘verbal pyrotechnics’, writes Brownlee, ‘call the reader’s attention, from the outset, to the poetic artifact as, above all, patterned language’.35 This is a virtuoso performance to open a complex, sophisticated, and ingenious poem: the rhymes seem to lead and tumble into one another, so that ‘lacier’ is broken down to ‘lace’/‘lasse’ and then ‘las’; while the rhyme in lines 7–8, ‘lie’, sets up a chain of echoes and alterations which last for another fourteen lines, many of which flit between forms of ‘lire’ [to read], ‘eslire’ [to select], and ‘delit’ [pleasure], and include a homonym of ‘lit’ [bed], a principal place for dreaming and contemplating—another fortuitous result of the bed’s being a privileged location is that it allows a play between the third-person singular of the verb ‘lire’ and the word for bed. 35

Brownlee, Poetic Identity, p. 190.

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Fittingly, and perhaps inevitably, this litany of ‘l’s culminates in a rhyme in ‘livre’, reminding us that this is a written artefact which also depends on the voice. This last couplet of l-rhymes also introduces the notion of naming, and prepares the way for the complicated way in which Machaut has sewn anagrams of his own name and the name of his patron into this prologue.36 In other words, Machaut asks his readers to attend in an especially vigilant way to the letters he selects to assemble his dit:37 it is not too much of a stretch, therefore, to feel compelled to admire Machaut’s repeated use of one letter in particular. Ovid’s Morpheus’s wings may be silent (‘Ille volat nullos strepitus facientibus alis’ [He flew on wings which made no sound] (M, 11.650)), but Machaut depends upon the sound of his ‘l’s on his own mission to console his patron, Jean de Berry. What is at stake here is Machaut’s ingenious depiction of himself as another Morpheus, transforming himself and the Ovidian tale, taking wing and giving pleasure and consolation in both the form and content of his poetry. Rather than the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone ‘simply provid[ing] a pretext for the poet to consider his own concerns’,38 then, this story is a means for Machaut and his readers to reflect on the processes of metamorphosis, translatio, dreaming, creation, and consolation which are at work within the Ovidian fable and, in subtly and ingeniously modified configurations, in the Fontaine. Ovid and Machaut make it clear that the transformation wrought upon Ceyx and Alcyone is the result of a consolatory impulse. Whereas Ovid tells us ‘tandem, superis miserantibus, ambo | alite mutantur’ [at last through the gods’ pity, both were transformed into birds] (M, 11.741–2), Machaut imputes the metamorphic act to Juno, as a sympathetic reaction to Alcyone’s grief: Mais de li pleins Fu, regretez et plourez longuement Par grans soupirs getez parfondement, Si que Juno y ouvra tellement Que pour ses plains En deus oisiaus mua leurs corps humains (Fontaine, 686–92) [But he was so lamented, missed, and mourned by her, heaving great, deep sighs, that, because of her lamentations, Juno undertook such work that she transformed their human bodies into two birds]

36

See Brownlee, Poetic Identity, p. 189. On Machaut’s anagrammatic naming, see de Looze, ‘ “Mon nom trouveras” ’; and Cerquiglini-Toulet, « Un engin si soutil », pp. 233–9. 38 Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid, p. 68. 37

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Like Machaut himself, Juno ‘ouvra’ [worked]: this verb draws attention to the transformation she effects as an artistic creation, akin to Pygmalion’s sculpture or Machaut’s writing. This portrayal of transformation as comfort to a widow is echoed in Christine de Pizan’s Mutacion de Fortune, in which Fortune transforms Christine into a man when her husband has died at sea. Christine depicts herself as almost emulating Alcyone in her precipitation into the sea which killed her husband: Hault m’en monte et en mer plungiee Je me fusse, et j’a n’y faillisse, Qui ne me tenait, je y saillisse, N’onc Alchyone ne sailli Plus tost en mer, quant lui failli Ceÿs, que tant souloit amer. (Mutacion, 1254–9) [I climbed up high and I would have dived into the sea; and I would have jumped in if I had not been held back. Even Alcyone did not jump more willingly into the sea when she lost Ceyx, whom she used to love so much.]

Where Christine’s mutation involves her becoming the man she is mourning, Ceyx and Alcyone’s transformation enables husband and wife to be reunited after death.39 In the Metamorphoses, this reunion gives a harmonious, calm conclusion to the traumatic tale of bereavement: tunc quoque mansit amor nec coniugiale solutum foedus in alitibus: coeunt fiuntque parentes, perque dies placidos hiberno tempore septem incubat Alcyone pendentibus aequore nidis. tunc iacet unda maris: ventos custodit et arcet Aeolus egressu praestatque nepotibus aequor. (M, 11.743–8) [Though they suffered the same fate, their love remained as well: and their bonds were not weakened by their feathered form. They mate and rear their young, and Alcyone broods on her nest, for seven calm days in the wintertime, floating on the water’s surface. Then the waves are stilled: Aeolus imprisons the winds and forbids their roaming, and controls his grandsons’ waves.]

But the Ovide moralisé puts more emphasis on to the winter weather which Aeolus becalms: En yver, par le temps felon, Vont voletant sor la marine.

39

See Mühlethaler, ‘Entre amour et politique’.

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Lor est folz qui par mer chemine Pour la tempeste et pour le vent. (OM, 11.3779–82) [In the winter, when the weather is bad, they flutter over the sea. Then whoever travels by sea is a fool, because of the storm and wind.]

This enables the moralizer to prepare the ground for the interpretation of this conclusion to the story of Ceyx and Alcyone. As Cornelius de Boer, who also edited the Ovide moralisé, showed, Machaut knew and was strongly influenced by the Ovide moralisé:40 clear evidence for this can be found in his adaptation of the story of Ceyx and Alcyone and his treatment of this description of the couple’s transformation and the signification of halcyons: Les maronniers qui en mer sont empreins, Quant d’eaus voient ces oiselés prochains, D’avoir fortune ou tempeste certeins Les font souvent. (Fontaine, 695–8)41 [Sailors who have set out to sea are often certain, when they see from the waves these birds nearby, of having good fortune or a storm.]

For Machaut’s sailors, then, sighting a kingfisher does not seem to be a particularly useful omen, since it could presage good luck or tragedy. But this ambivalence is a result of Machaut’s reading of the Ovidian tale through the lens of the Ovide moralisé: although the moralization is jettisoned from the dit amoureux, the translation has effected a transformation of its own to the tale. What we read in the Fontaine, then, is the result of Machaut’s transformation of the Ovide moralisé’s translatio. Rosenfeld’s claim that ‘another name for shape-shifting sleep is poetry’ is borne out by a scrutiny of the ways in which the story of shape-shifting sleep par excellence, that of Ceyx, Alcyone, and Morpheus, is itself transformed and reimagined (and redreamed) in the skein of literary production which responds to the Ovidian retellings of the Rose and the Ovide moralisé. This book began with a goshawk and ends with a pair of kingfishers. Birds are recurrent metaphors for transformation and rewriting, their ability to defy gravity and their provision of the ‘plumes’ with which these stories are inscribed frequently proving alluring images with which to imagine the intertwined processes of bodily and textual metamorphosis. In terms of both the material production of the text and its abstract imagination, then,

de Boer, ‘Guillaume de Machaut et l’Ovide moralisé ’. Mühlethaler traces the similarities of vocabulary and expression between the articulations of this tale in the Ovide moralisé and the Fontaine (‘Entre amour et politique’). 40 41

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birds are ready emblems for the self-reflexive representation of literary production. While the conditions of literary production change from religious institutional settings in the twelfth century to the private, courtly setting of the fourteenth (when a clerk keeps his portable desk with him in his bedroom), notable similarities remain between the ways in which author figures represent themselves and their creative process. Both Machaut and Marie de France, for example, represent their clerical personas as staying up at night: writing when others are dreaming; at their desks when others are in bed.42 In Yonec and the Fontaine, the transformation of the birds brings comfort: the companionship of a lover to Yonec’s mother; the reunion of devoted spouses in the tale of Alcyone and Ceyx; the promise of reciprocated love to a sorrowing lover. For the translator-moralizer of the Ovide moralisé, the twittering, flitting bodies of birds tend to represent the flightiness of people interested more in the vain frivolity of the world rather than the solemn joy of the union with God. Presumably the diversion of storytelling, recounting ‘fables’, is included in these lightweight secular pastimes. But, as the texts I have dealt with here show, as stories are rewritten and retold throughout the Middle Ages, the transformations they evoke and the transformations they undergo can make a number of beneficial and illuminating observations on our existence. They draw our attention to aspects of humanity which touch on the savage, the divine, and the diabolical; the physical and the spiritual; they console, alarm, divert, warn, and cheer; and they are a constant reminder of the power of literature to transform itself and its readers.

42 ‘Soventes fiez en ai veillié!’ [Many times have I stayed awake at night working on this!] (Prologue, 42), declares the narrator of the Prologue to Marie de France’s lais.

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Index Accalon, character in Suite du Roman de Merlin 201 Acoetes 53 Actaeon 37, 47–54, 156 Adam 23, 116, 141, 152, 170–1, 204 adultery 3–5, 202–3, 206 Aeolus 222, 233 Aesculapius 32 Agamben, Giorgio 28, 70, 104, 106, 113–15, 118, 127, 138, 186 anthropological machine 115 bare life 113 intimate caesura 104, 106, 114–15, 118, 127 Akbari, Suzanne Conklin 17–18 Alcyone 12, 215–16, 218, 220–2, 230–5 Alexander the Great 129–33 Alexandrine, character in Guillaume de Palerne 120–1, 136, 137–8 allegory 5, 36–7, 46, 55, 60, 91–7, 144 Alphonse, character in Guillaume de Palerne 109, 111–12, 118–19, 122–5, 180, 205, 213 anamorphosis 26, 27, 36–7, 49, 52, 63, 182–3, 189–91, 202, 208, 212–13 ancestry 4, 9–10, 128, 150–1, 156–7, 187–8, 207–8 Andromeda 164 Anglo-Norman 2, 119 Annunciation, the 5–6, 21, 136 Antichrist 53, 178, 187 Antigone 195, 199 Antoine, character in Mélusine 153 Antoine de la Sale, Le Paradis de la Reine Sibylle 145 Anzieu, Didier 63–4 Apollo 63–5 see also Phoebus Arethusa 46–7 Aristotle 40, 114 Armstrong, Adrian 35 art 55, 65–6, 140–1, 167–75, 206, 209–10, 219–20, 223–33 Arthur, King 14, 56–7, 108, 126, 131–5, 149, 177, 178, 184–5, 189–91, 197–9, 200–1, 207 Athena 55, 162 Augustine, St 13–14, 22, 23, 34, 42, 186 Aymery, Count of Poitou, character in Mélusine 157

Bacchus 53–4 Barkan, Leonard 14, 17, 61 Baudemagus, Knight of the Round Table 196 Baumgartner, Emmanuèle 57, 71 bear 14, 16, 28, 107, 109, 120–4, 126–9, 135, 136, 137, 140 bed 108, 113, 117, 178, 189, 226–9, 231, 235 Bel Inconnu, Le 6, 149, 213 Benkov, Edith Joyce 60 Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Roman de Troie 33–4 Berger, Anne-Emmanuelle 74 Bestiary 6, 60, 102, 149, 150, 181 Bethidés, character in Perceforest 131 Bible 23, 34, 140–1, 143–4, 146, 148, 170–1 Genesis 23, 140–1, 143–4, 148, 170–1 Leviticus 146 bird 1, 2–8, 9–11, 21, 40–1, 54–61, 137, 167, 189, 197–9, 221–3, 229–30, 232–5 see also feathers; goshawk; gyrfalcon; hawk; hoopoe; kingfisher; nightingale; parrot; sparrowhawk; swallow; swan birth 5, 9–10, 19, 21–22, 39, 45, 61–2, 136, 144, 147, 150, 152–3, 155–6, 164, 187, 189, 191, 199, 212 Blaise, character in Merlin 178, 180–1, 192, 209 Blanchemal, character in Le Bel Inconnu 149 Blasme des femes, Le 139–40, 150 blindness 144, 183 Bloch, R. Howard 183, 193–4, 204, 210 Blonde Esmeree, character in Le Bel Inconnu 150, 213 blood 44–5, 53, 63, 131, 162, 164, 169, 173 Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate 93, 95 blushing 48, 173–5 boar 53, 156–7 Boethius 14, 37, 49, 52, 93 Bohort, knight of the Round Table 14 bone 69, 170–1 Brande, character in Guillaume de Palerne 109, 111, 117–18, 123 Breton 5, 11, 110–11 Brown, Mary Frances 46

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Brown-Grant, Rosalind 71 Brownlee, Kevin 154, 231 Bruckner, Matilda 110 Burgwinkle, William 118 Butler, Judith 26, 28, 148, 158–9, 163–4 Bynum, Caroline Walker 15–16, 106, 118, 139, 179, 191 Campbell, Emma 113 cannibalism 61–2 Casebier, Karen 145 cat 107, 115–17, 125, 129, 135, 140 centaur 32, 44, 133 Cerquiglini-Toulet, Jacqueline 75 Ceyx 216, 218, 220–1, 223–4, 230, 232–5 chivalry 28, 102–5, 107, 111, 123–35, 139, 149 Chrétien de Troyes 7, 15, 38, 55–63, 103, 122, 180, 198 Cligès 56–7 Conte du Graal, Le 103 Erec et Enide 122, 198 Mort de l’espaule 60–2 Philomène 55–62 Yvain 86 see also Godefroy de Leigni Christ 5, 11, 41, 44–5, 48, 51, 53, 54, 144, 170, 178, 192, 197, 212, 220 Christine de Pizan 13, 16, 27, 71, 97, 99–100, 142–3, 233 Epistre Othéa 71, 97, 99–100 Mutacion de Fortune, La 16–17, 142–3, 233 Circe 14–15, 16, 18 citation 70, 87–90, 100 Cixous, Hélène 163–4 Clier-Colombani, Françoise 153 clothing 36, 44–7, 61–2, 85, 106–8, 116–25, 128, 135, 171–2, 205, 219–20 see also fur, lining, nudity clouds 43–4 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 104, 120, 123, 129, 130, 168 Compagnon, Antoine 87 confession 46 Constant, King, character in Merlin 183 Conte del Brait, Le 196 Conte du Papegau, Le 107, 126, 131–5, 197–9 Copeland, Rita 17, 18, 37, 40 coral 162, 169 Cornwall 202, 207 Coudrette, see Mélusine

Coulson, Frank 39, 44 courtliness 3, 6, 25, 27, 59–60, 80, 81, 92, 100, 105, 113, 131, 139, 149, 155, 157, 175, 180, 219, 221–2 Crane, Susan 111, 139 Cristal et Clarie 81, 86–90 Croizy-Naquet, Catherine 37 Crucifixion 5, 45, 48, 52, 170 Culler, Jonathan 40, 47 Cyparissus 40 Dané 71, 81–4, 86, 88–90 Dares 33 de Boer, Cornelius 234 de Looze, Laurence 71, 215, 223, 224, 227 death 3, 5, 19, 28, 32, 37, 39, 44–5, 48, 61, 64–5, 144, 156, 158, 162, 164, 173, 191–5, 202, 207, 212, 216, 218–19, 232–3 deer 122–4, 151 see also doe; stag deformity 22, 151, 156–7, 190–1 Deianira 44, 79 Delcourt, Denyse 153, 163 Deleuze, Gilles 104 Demats, Paule 38–9 demons 54, 157, 176, 178, 182, 185–8, 192, 208 Derrida, Jacques 24–5, 28, 102, 104–7, 115–19, 122, 125, 128–9, 135, 141, 142, 173, 175, 196 ‘animot’ 104–7 desk 226–8, 235 desire 2, 12–13, 25–6, 28, 50–1, 58, 69–74, 77–80, 81–2, 84, 85, 86, 89–90, 92, 95, 96, 98, 114, 120, 143, 144–5, 146–8, 155–7, 163, 173, 200, 201, 215, 217, 218–19, 222, 226, 228–9 Diana 46–7, 48–51 Dido 151 disguise 45, 48, 104, 109, 120–3, 137, 179–80, 202–7, 211 dismemberment 47–54, 55, 60–7 see also mutilation dit amoureux 13, 28, 97–9, 213–35 see also Christine de Pizan; Froissart, Jean; Machaut, Guillame de doe 102, 134 dog 10, 24, 112, 140 Dolar, Mladen 73–4, 94, 194, 195 Douglas, Adam 106 Douglas, Mary 146 dove 51, 140–1

Index dragon 149, 152, 157, 160, 183 dream 12–13, 88, 129, 160–2, 185, 211, 215–24, 227, 231, 234, 235 dwarf 134, 195 Ebain, character in Le Roman de Silence 203 Echo 27–8, 67, 68–101, 182, 192, 211, 213, 214 ecstasy 25 ekphrasis 223, 224 Elinas, King of Albany 153 Elioxe 9–10, 21, 137, 156 Elliott, Dyan 23, 186, 187 ermine 120, 124, 135 esplumoir 180, 194, 199, 202 Estoire del Graal, L’, branch of Little Grail Cycle 177 Estoire del Saint Graal, L’, branch of Vulgate Cycle 177, 192 Estonné, character in Perceforest 14, 107, 126–31, 180, 188–9, 193, 213 Eucharist 4–5, 53–4 Eufeme, character in Le Roman de Silence 203, 207 euhemerism 31–2, 53–4, 165, 168 Eurydice 173 Eve 23, 116, 141, 143–4, 146, 155, 159, 170, 173, 174, 204 exemplarity 31, 33, 71, 90–3, 96–7, 99, 100, 139 fairy 2–4, 9, 10, 14, 21, 83–4, 89, 102, 149, 151–2, 163 fantasy 37, 49, 72–3, 82–3, 85, 114, 130, 133, 142, 145, 155, 158, 159, 160, 162, 167, 169, 172, 183, 187, 196, 199, 217, 219, 225 feathers 1, 6–8, 10, 180, 199, 229–30, 233 femininity 28, 137–75, 201–3, 205–10 feminism 74, 142, 148 fish 130–3, 154–5 flaying 63, 107, 119, 133, 134, 137 Floris et Lyriopé 81, 84–5, 90–1 see also Robert de Blois Fortune, allegorical personification 16, 93–4, 96, 142, 233 Foucault, Michel 113, 148 fountain 71, 83, 91–2, 97, 98, 215, 224–6 fox 140 Franklin, Aretha 159 Freeman, Michelle 57 Freud, Sigmund 25, 70, 146, 160–2, 163, 165, 217, 222

265

dream of Irma’s injection 160–2, 163 libido 70 Little Hans 146 ‘Medusenhaupt, Das’ 162 narcissism 70, 72–3 Fried, Debra 76 Froissart, Jean 13, 97–9, 173–5, 221–2, 228 Joli buisson de jonece, Le 97–9 Paradis d’amour, Le 222, 228 Prison amoureuse, La 173–5 Fromont, character in Mélusine 151, 156 Füg-Peirreville, Corinne 177, 183 fur 113, 119, 122, 124, 125, 135, 141 Fyler, John 23, 42, 232 Gaunt, Simon 71, 84, 96, 206 Gautier Map 152 Gauvain, knight of the Round Table 117, 149, 179, 195 gaze 2, 37–8, 46–7, 49–52, 66–7, 73, 82, 85–6, 95–6, 102–3, 107, 113, 115–18, 122–4, 125, 129, 135, 141, 160–4, 165–7, 169, 175, 182–3, 189, 191–2, 198, 205, 208, 212, 219 Gély-Ghedira, Véronique 74, 75 genitalia 141, 150, 161–2, 163, 166 Genius, personification in Le Roman de la Rose 141 Geoffrey of Monmouth 89, 177 Geoffroy of Vinsauf 18 Geoffroy, character in Mélusine 151, 156 Gervais of Tilbury 152 giant 12, 131, 134–5, 164 Gilbert, Jane 36, 85, 92 Godefroy de Bouillon 4, 9–10 Godefroy de Leigni 87 goshawk 6, 234 Gowans, Linda 177 Grisandole, character in Les Premiers faits du roi Artu 182, 202–3, 205–6, 208, 209 Grosz, Elizabeth 159 Guillaume de Lorris 12, 71, 91–2, 94, 95, 224, 228 see also Le Roman de la Rose Guillaume de Palerne 28, 106, 108–9, 111–12, 116–18, 120–5, 127, 128, 136, 137–9, 180, 205, 213 Guynn, Noah D. 97 gyrfalcon 229 Hades 173 hair 110, 125, 142, 154–5, 164, 165–6, 180, 191, 208

266

Index

Harf-Lancner, Laurence 5, 17, 149, 214 harp 40–2, 63–4, 173 hawk 2–3, 6, 7, 11, 131, 153, 234 hedgehog 140–1, 150 Heldris de Cornoualle 206–7 hell 54, 178, 187, 188 Heller-Roazen, Daniel 93 Hercules 44–5, 79 Holbein, Hans, The Ambassadors 36 see also anamorphosis Holsinger, Bruce 64 Homer 33–4 hoopoe 55–7, 60 Hopkins, Amanda 108 Houdini, Harry 199–201, 208 Howie, Cary 118 Hughes, Ted 78 human nature 15, 44–5, 48, 60, 135, 170–2, 204, 212, 220 humanity 63, 66, 67, 104–7, 113–16, 119, 131, 135, 159, 168, 170, 171–2, 187, 203–4, 235 see also human nature hunting 6, 49, 53, 69, 98, 102–5, 107, 109, 157, 229 Huot, Sylvia 51, 70, 96, 130, 155, 165, 213, 215, 227, 228 hybridity 28, 107, 133, 134–6, 157, 160, 165, 179, 182, 186, 210 Hyginus 60–1 illegitimacy 190 Incarnation, the 5, 22, 44–5, 53, 136 incarnation 157–9, 195, 221, 224 ink 8, 182, 208–10 insomnia 228 integument 36, 38, 43–7, 66 invisibility 152, 169, 185–6 Iole 44, 79 Iphis 16 Iris 230 Isidore of Seville 17 Itys 55, 61–2 ivory 61–3, 169–71, 224–8 Jager, Eric 23, 155 Jakobson, Roman 217 Jean d’Arras, see Mélusine Jean de Berry 151, 160, 215, 224, 226, 232 Jean de Meun 12, 42, 91, 94–7, 141, 167–71, 225, see also Le Roman de la Rose Jeauneau, Édouard 44 Jewers, Caroline 206 John of Garland 43, 79 Jonah 136

Joseph 177 see also Estoire del Graal, L’; Little Grail Cycle Julius Caesar 202 Jung, Marc-René 38 Juno 44, 69, 75, 96, 143–4, 216, 222, 230, 232–3 Jupiter 32, 44, 69, 143–4 Kay, Sarah 8, 35–7, 76, 86, 96, 98, 125, 133–4 Kelly, Douglas 99 Kennedy, Elspeth 185 kingfisher 12, 216, 234 Kinoshita, Sharon 113, 206 Kipling, Rudyard 12 kiss 137, 149, 173, 213 Kittredge, George Lyman 108 Koble, Nathalie 108, 182, 190, 202, 208, 209 Kristeva, Julia 26, 28, 142, 146–8, 150, 157, 164–5, 169 Krueger, Roberta 206 Labbie, Erin Felicia 139, 155, 162 Lacan, Jacques 25–6, 27, 36–7, 49–52, 70, 72–4, 77, 79–80, 85, 104, 120, 160–3, 165, 195, 211, 212, 217, 222, 224 entre-deux-morts, l’ 195 extimité 25 imaginary 72 ‘Instance de la letter dans l’inconscient, L’’211, 218, 222, 224 lalangue 74 mirror stage 72 objet a 25, 27, 72–4, 79–80, 195, 212 Other 49–52, 80 Real 217 symbolic 49, 79 see also anamorphosis; desire; Möbius strip; topology Lady of the Lake 14, 182, 194–5, 200–2, 207, 209–10 see also Nivienne; Niniane lais 1, 2–7, 9, 10–12, 21, 27, 28, 55–61, 62, 66, 71, 80–4, 86–7, 89–90, 92, 99, 102–4, 106–19, 125–7, 129, 134, 138–9, 162, 163, 178, 180–1, 205, 213, 235 Biclarel 139 Bisclavret 28, 106, 107–19, 125, 126–7, 138–9, 162, 180, 205, 213 Conseil, Le Lai de 87

Index Laüstic 60 Mélion 28, 106, 108–19, 125, 127, 138–9, 213 Narcisus et Dané 12, 71, 80–4, 86, 89–90, 92, 99 L’Oiselet 87 Philomène 4, 55–61, 62, 221, 230 Pirame et Tisbé 12, 55 Prologue 10–12, 66, 181, 235 Tyolet 102–4, 105, 107, 114, 126, 127, 129, 134 Yonec 2–7, 9–11, 21, 28, 113, 163, 178, 235 lamb 140 Lancelot, knight of the Round Table 200, 209 Lancelot, thirteenth-century prose romance 14, 177, 182, 185–7, 209 Latin 10, 11–13, 17, 19, 39–44, 47, 55, 66, 75–9, 106, 124, 213 see also translation Latona 55, 63 laughter 184, 193–4, 196, 208 Leander 39, 40 Lechat, Didier 174 Lecoy, Félix 7 leopard 140, 181 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 204 lining 119–22, 132 lion 140, 151, 167, 173, 181, 198 Lionel, knight of the Round Table 14 Liriope, mother of Narcissus 69 see also Lyriopé Little Grail Cycle 177, 180 Lochrie, Karma 44 love 2–3, 7, 13, 25, 27, 39, 41, 44–5, 57, 59–60, 69–73, 81–6, 88–100, 137, 143–4, 149, 153, 166–7, 178, 186, 189, 209, 215, 218–19, 221–2, 226, 231, 233 see also courtliness; desire Lucken, Christopher 75, 94, 157 Lycaon 61, 109 lychanthropy, see werewolf Lydoire, character in Perceforest 14, 126–9 Lyriopé 69, 84–5 Machaut, Guillaume de 13, 211–12, 214–35 Fontaine amoureuse, La 211–12, 214–35 Voir dit, Le 215 manuscripts 8, 12, 49, 55–6, 60, 63, 65, 103, 123, 149, 152–3, 165–6, 177–8, 182, 184–5, 187, 190, 210, 215, 227–8 Mappemonde 132

267

Marie de Bar 151 Marie de France 2–4, 7, 10, 11–12, 13–14, 15, 60, 66, 107, 108, 111, 178, 181, 235 see also lais Marsyas 38, 54–5, 63–5, 66 masculinity 84, 138, 141, 155, 166, 202–3, 205 maternity 3–4, 9–10, 21, 26, 28, 45, 52–3, 61, 69, 82, 137, 142, 146–51, 155–7, 159, 178, 180, 185–7, 190–1, 192–3, 201 McCracken, Peggy 111, 112, 113, 121, 135, 155, 205, 207 McKeehan, Irene Pettit 108 Medusa 12, 28, 142, 160–9, 175, 214 Medusa interpolation, Roman de la Rose 165–6 Melior, character in Guillaume de Palerne 109, 120–5, 136, 137 Melior, character in Mélusine 153 Mélusine 142, 146, 151–60, 162, 163, 165, 169, 175, 205 Mélusine, prose version by Jean d’Arras 151–6, 157, 158, 160, 163, 165, 215 Mélusine, verse version by Coudrette 151, 154, 156, 157, 158 Melville, Stephen 37 Ménard, Philippe 109, 116 menstruation 147, 155 Meraugis de Portlesguez 180, 202 Merlin 4, 28, 29, 101, 175, 176–210, 213, 214, 219 Merlin 177–8, 181, 183, 187, 189–90, 192, 193 in prose 177–8, 181, 183, 187, 189–90, 192, 193 in verse 177 see also post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin; Premiers faits du roi Artu, Les; Suite du Roman de Merlin; Suite historique; Suite romanesque; Suite Vulgate Merlot 197 merveilleux, the 6, 10 metaphor 7, 8, 15–18, 20–1, 27, 33–4, 40, 126, 140, 141, 154, 168, 169, 181, 210, 211, 217–18, 222, 224, 234 metempsychosis 19 metonymy 50, 217 Micha, Alexandre 177, 187 Miller, Frank Justus 78 Miller, Hartley R. 124 Miller, Sarah Alison 145 mirror 72, 79, 91, 95, 163, 164–5 misogyny 28, 138–9, 173

268

Index

Mitchell, Juliet 74 Möbius strip 26, 28, 104, 118–20, 132 moralization 8, 18, 20, 27, 31–67, 75, 79–80, 91, 97, 99, 165, 171–2, 220–1, 223–4, 235 Morgan, King Arthur’s half-sister 14, 200–1, 207, 209 Morpheus 29, 211–35 monstrosity 15, 22, 107, 131–3, 135, 142, 150, 154, 156–7, 160, 162, 164, 165 moulting 6–7, 180 mouse 140, 167 mouth 149–50, 151, 156, 160–2 Mühlethaler, Jean-Claude 221, 229 Muldumarec, character in Yonec 2–9, 11, 14, 163, 213 music 40–2, 63–5, 171 mutilation 35, 47–8, 56–8, 61–2, 73, 162 see also dismemberment Myrrha 12, 39 Naissance du Chevalier du Cygne, La 9, 16, 21 Narcissus 27, 69–78, 81–7, 89–93, 95–9, 143, 165, 214, 224–5, 226 nature 14–15, 21–2, 28, 67, 111, 113, 118, 122, 126–9, 135, 153, 157–60, 164, 165–6, 167, 171–2, 173, 203–7, 209 see also human nature Nature, personification 22, 70, 167–8, 172, 182, 203–6, 225 Neptune 39, 162 Nichols, Stephen G. 155 nightingale 56–7, 59–60, 221 Niniane 182, 194, 200 see also Lady of the Lake; Niviene Niobe 55, 61, 63 Niviene 182, 193, 194, 200–1, 202 see also Lady of the Lake; Niniane Noacco, Cristina 10, 139 nose 108, 139, 151, 161–2 Nouvet, Claire 77 nudity 46–51, 107, 115–19, 121–5, 128, 135, 141, 143, 171–2, 174–5, 205–6 see also clothing Oliver, Kelly 138, 141, 148 Orpheus 40, 64–5, 173, 222 Orychoë 32, 33, 40, 47, 65 Ovid 1, 4, 12–13, 15, 16, 18–20, 27, 31–67, 68–71, 73–80, 81, 86, 90–6, 99–100, 109, 142, 143–4, 164, 166–7, 168–9, 173, 214–16, 218–20 Ars amatoria 57, 166

Metamorphoses 4, 12, 18–20, 27, 31–67, 68–71, 73–80, 81, 86, 90–6, 99–100, 109, 142, 143–4, 164, 168–9, 173–4, 211, 214, 215–16, 218–20, 225, 229–30, 232–3 Remdia amoris 57 Ovide moralisé 12–13, 18–20, 31–67, 71, 75–80, 81, 89, 90, 94, 99, 100, 142, 144, 164–5, 166, 168, 170–2, 175, 183, 187, 211, 212, 214, 219–21, 223, 230, 233–4 Pairet, Ana 17, 33, 46, 104, 121, 124, 126, 157, 179 Paris, Gaston 59–60 parrot 131, 135, 197–9 Partonopeus de Blois 86, 88 paternity 3–5, 9–10, 12, 21, 39, 84, 147–8, 150, 152, 156, 176, 178, 180, 185–91, 193, 201 Pavlevski, Joanna 153 Pegasus 164 Pelops 38, 54, 55, 57, 60–3 Pendragon, character in Merlin 183–4 Pentheus 38, 47, 52–4 Perceforest 14, 28, 107, 126–30, 132–3, 138, 188–9, 193 Perceval, knight of the Round Table 103, 134, 180 Perceval, prose romance 177, 180, 194 Perret, Michèle 145 Perseus 12, 162–5, 169 Phaeton 32–3, 47 Phillips, Adam 199 Philomela 54–61, 62, 66, 214, 221, 230 Phoebus 174 see also Apollo Phorcys, daughters of 164 pig 8, 14 Pilate 87 pipes 63–5 Poisson Chevalier 107, 131–4, 135 Possamaï-Pérez, Marylène 35, 38, 43, 46, 58, 60, 70, 94 post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin 178 see also Suite du Roman de Merlin; Suite romanesque posthuman 24, 26 Premiers faits du roi Artu, Les 177, 180, 194–6, 202–3, 205 see also Suite historique; Suite Vulgate Présine, character in Mélusine 152–3, 155 Priam, King of Troy 128 Priande, character in Perceforest 127–8, 189

Index Priscian 11 Procne 55, 58–61, 214 Propoetides 168–9, 173 prophecy 5, 28, 143–4, 160, 178, 181–2, 187–9, 192–4, 198, 200, 202 Prophesies de Merlin, Les 182 Proteus 176 psychoanalysis 25, 70, 72–4, 147, 155, 162, 199 see also Freud, Sigmund; Lacan, Jacques; Kristeva, Julia; Žižek, Slavoj pun 8, 36, 40, 47, 76, 104–5, 213 Pythagoras 18–20 quotation 70–1, 80, 86–90 Raison, allegorical personification of Reason in Le Roman de la Rose 46, 71, 94–7, 98, 99 Raoul de Houdenc 180, 202 rape 35, 39, 55, 88, 127, 162, 164, 191 rat 140 Raymondin, character in Mélusine 146, 151–8, 160, 162, 163, 165 Reason, see Raison Régnier-Bohler, Danielle 198 Renart le Contrefait 139 Resurrection 21, 61, 144 rhyme 11, 35, 48, 69, 71, 75–8, 81, 90, 99, 103, 118, 121, 143, 158, 168, 174, 197, 214, 215, 225–7, 230–2 rime équivoque 32, 35, 39, 76, 100, 112, 168, 225 rime léonine 35, 230 rime riche 99, 225, 230 Robert de Boron 177 see also Merlin Roche aux Pucelles, La 201–2 Roman des romans, Le 119–20, 136 Roman de la Rose, Le 1, 12–13, 22, 28, 46, 65, 71, 90–9, 100, 141, 142, 165–72, 206, 215, 222, 224, 225, 227, 228–9, 234 Bel Acueil 166 Vieille, La 166, 171 see also Guillame de Lorris; Jean de Meun Rosenfeld, Jessica 212, 229 Roussineau, Gilles 178, 185 rumour 79, 94 sable 120, 135 Salisbury, Joyce 106 Séguy, Mireille 108 serpent 1, 16, 28, 116, 132, 137–66, 172 Shakespeare, William 190, 211

269

Richard II 190 Tempest, The 211 shame 47, 115–18, 125, 141, 143, 168, 172–5 Silence, Le Roman de 182, 202–8, 209 simile 154 Simpson, James R. 36–7, 43, 50 skin 8, 10, 28, 44, 64, 102, 107, 119–25, 126, 128, 131–5, 151, 191, 210, 212 see also flaying sleep 198, 211–12, 216, 222, 228–9, 234 God of Sleep 211, 216–21, 223, 228, 229 see also insomnia Small, Susan 124–5 snake, see serpent Sophocles 195 Sorabji, Richard 114–15 soul 18, 19, 23, 47, 54, 60, 104, 127, 159, 186, 187, 194 sparrowhawk 131, 153 Spivak, Gayatri Chavravorty 74, 78, 82, 85 stag 48, 50, 102–3, 134, 135, 203, 208 Stahuljak, Zrinka 18, 20, 93 statue 1, 28, 29, 142, 166, 167–75, 205, 214, 223–7, 229 Steel, Karl 23, 25, 104, 114, 147 stone 12, 14, 64, 69, 142, 160, 162, 165–9, 170, 173, 174 Strubel, Armand 38, 44, 53 Suite du Roman de Merlin 14, 178, 184–5, 194, 196, 200–2 see also post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin; Suite romanesque Suite historique 177 see also Premiers faits du roi Artu, Les; Suite Vulgate Suite romanesque 178 see also post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin; Suite du Roman de Merlin Suite Vulgate 177 see also Premiers faits du roi Artu, Les; Suite historique swallow 57, 60 swan 9–10, 21, 213 Tantalus 61 tapestry 55, 62 Taylor, Jane 68 Tereus 55, 58–61, 214 Tintagel, Duke of 189, 207 Tiresias 16, 53, 54, 69, 141, 142–4 Tissol, Garth 39, 40 Tobin, Prudence Mary O’Hara 108 tomb 9, 158, 191, 195–6, 199, 213

270

Index

tongue 55, 64 topology 26 see also Möbius strip tournament 129–31 translatio 8, 10, 17–21, 31, 93, 100, 212–13, 217, 218, 222, 223, 232, 234 translation 1, 8, 13, 16–21, 27, 31, 33, 35, 39, 40, 42–3, 46–7, 49, 51, 52–3, 55–8, 60–1, 63–4, 66, 75–80, 99, 110–11, 220, 222, 234 transvestism 202–8 Traube, Ludwig 12 Trinity 48–9, 51–2 Trotter, David A. 10 Tuve, Rosamond 38, 39 Ulfin, character in Merlin 184 unicorn 134, 135 Urien, character in Suite du Roman de Merlin 201 Uther, character in Merlin 183–4, 189–90, 207 vagina dentata 150 veil 5, 34, 36, 38, 42–7, 67, 195, 230 Venus 142, 168–9, 173, 215, 223 Verderber, Suzanne M. 5 Vie des Pères, La 197 Villon, François 68, 71, 74, 81, 100 Vincensini, Jean-Jacques 153

Virgin Birth 6, 21–2, 39, 41, 44–5, 136, 144, 159 virginity 4, 28, 178, 209 see also Virgin Birth voice 62, 67, 68–71, 73–7, 78, 79–82, 88–90, 91–2, 94, 97–101, 149, 182, 191, 192–9, 201, 208, 211, 212, 213, 218, 219, 232 Vulgate Cycle 177, 182, 185, 192, 200 Walter, Katie 119 Walter, Philippe 191 werewolf 1, 28, 104, 106, 107–14, 116–19, 120, 124–5, 126, 132, 135, 138–40, 149, 175, 213 whale 136, 170 White, T. H. 191 Williams, David 22, 139 Wolfe, Cary 24 Wood, Lucas 118 wyvern 149–50, 175, 213 Yamamoto, Dorothy 157 Ygerne, mother of Arthur 189–90, 207 Yvain 201 see also Chrétien de Troyes Zephir, character in Perceforest 188–9, 193 Žižek, Slavoj 25, 187, 190, 219 Zumthor, Paul 20, 179 mouvance 20