Barbarolexis: Medieval Literature and Sexuality
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, December 1989, 272 p.
Translated by Kate M. Cooper.
Michigan Quartely Review Article
Literature and Theology Article
Journal of Medieval Studies Article
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Barbarolexis came into the scholarly world - represented here by conversation around the publisher's exhibits at conferences - with a reputation as a book that could, with its theoretical bent, reshape some of the ways medieval studies are done. That is the rationale for this review, of a highly theoretical book on the Latin and vernacular literature of medieval and renaissance France, by a Chaucerian old enough to have picked up most of his theory after graduate school. The rationale is perhaps a peculiar one, because Leupin hardly addresses a general audience either in approach or rhetoric. His notes are few and his stance is combative: "The old philological school", he begins, "had much to do with turning the Middle Ages into a cadaver drained of lifer"(2).
Although the subtitle makes other claims, Leupin's subject as he reads a series of texts ranging from La Vie de Saint Alexis to Montaigne's Essais (in chronology) and from Geoffrey de Vinsauf's Poetria Nova to Gautier le Leu's Du C . (in subject) is consistently propriety: in grammar, in naming, in ownership, in sexual relations, and - always - in language and its efforts to establish or contest that propriety. He begins with two claims that few will dispute: that language cannot name God properly, and that it further cannot name any desire, especially sexual desire, properly. But the poet, says Leupin, grounds composition in those failures: "Babel and the Fall are the writer's opportunity to create a language corresponding to his individual desire, a language that would also account for his desire to those who read his text" (16). Leupin takes barbarolexis - bad latinity, a grammatical flaw - as the sign of a writer taking that opponunity. Barbarolexis, or shaggy discourse, is the "idiogram" (6) of poetic composition.
Given that definition, the Poetria Nova makes a curious staning point, since it wants explicitly to provide " pecten, quosint pexa relucent / Carmina " ("a comb to make writing shine smoothly"; quoted on 34). But since Geoffrey begins by explaining how writting in proper meter and naming his dedicatee are mutually exclusive, Leupin argues that the Poetria Nova embodies writing's self-reflexivity; necessarily dissociated from the external, the text subordinates pedagogical concerns to a thoroughgoing evaluation of novelty in writing. Medieval novelty transforms the past through the trope of transsumptio, which creates meaning by denying ownership of that meaning to either the ancient or the new text. Thus innovation is not "conceived as rupture: at every turn the old is rejuvenated within the new and the new is the incessant transformation of a textual 'already there"' (22). In such specularity, the old - the other - is reflected as the inevitable object of textual appropriation, so that the mirror's "vacuity allows objects. to reveal what is radically other in each of them" (35).
The absence of an originary status (assumed for the Poetria Nova) becomes the basis of Leupin's discussion of La Vie de St. Alexis. Supposedly based on a lost original (translated from an earlier Latin text), preceded by a prologue which seems to usurp (Ici cumencet) the beginning of the poem, and attempting in typical medieval fashion to establish God as the origin of true language, St. Alexis defaults on each of its promises of origin as it is written. The legend stumbles between Alexis (on one hand), whose name and silence enact a-lexity, word-lessness, the absence of speech, and (on the other) his supposed point of origin, his father Eufemien, whose falsified pledge of his son to the service of God enacts the euphemism, the misdirected speech which his name implies. Any other, more proper speech, remains undefined.
The book's four middle chapters constitute the subtitle's investigation of sexuality in medieval writing as a Lacanian critique of the .'master-signifier," the phallus. The Middle Ages considered homosexuality and femininity marginal; Leupin accordingly considers those topics in Chapters Three and Six. the margins of his discussion of medieval sexuality. He first dismantles Alain de Lille's notion of a natural, rational language which supports De planctu Naturae. Alain's prosimetrum describes as un-Natural whatever is seen as improper: and impropriety is conceived in terms of correct Latinity. "So the sexual pervert is a barbarian - he forgets the arts of fine speech and destroys rhetoric in a fundamentally vicious figure, something exceeding even the limits of metaphorical translation" (63). Alain personifies Nature and posits a Naturally normative grammar of language and sexuality, which is opposed to "falsigraphy," the hennaphroditic interchanging of subject and predicate. Falsigraphy is embodied in De planctu as Sport, the product of Venus's adultery, and, given the dreamstate in which it is conducted, the whole text exudes that falsigraphy: Sport "stamps his morbid print on all textual moments" (78).
A "radical dysymmetry [sic] is set up between masculine and feminine forms of love" (173) in Richard de Fournival's Bestiaires d' amours and the feminine voice of the anonymous Response to that text. The Bestiaires uses an atypical allegory , but its articulation of the fin' amors tradition is not unusual, especially in the "figure of the omnipotent courtly lady who not only has the power of castration / death. but also of its transcendence-resurrection" (161). But in the Response, the lady reads the masculine Bestiaires as "a sign of hatred rather than love" (171), defining instead a feminine "essence that is not reducible to the narcissism of fin' amors, a radically different other who escapes mimetic domination" (175). Leupin finds this alternative illusory also, although a feminist might read in the form of the lady's argument - only those animals and allegorizations defined in the Bestiaire appear in the Response - less an attempt to define feminine desire than a demonstration of the inadequacy of phallocentric language to do so.
The two chapters at the book's center take up the fabliaux. Tracing many of the arguments made in R. Howard Bloch's The Scandal of the Fabliaux, Leupin emphasizes that the fabliaux simultaneously re-affirm (on the surface) social norms while revealing (textually) their contingency. One class of fabliaux, including Les quatre souhaits de Saint Martin, La dame escouillée, and Bérenger au lonc cuI, addresses itself to the function of the phallus in sexual relations. "With surprising consistency, these texts show that male reaffirmation of phallic rule often occurs in a usurpation that makes full use of the forces of fiction. Since it is gained by illusory means, then, phallic dominion announces its own dubiety" (104). A large number of fabliaux focus on priests in their role as imitatores Christi and regularly threaten them with castration for confusing "sacred image and pure simulacrum" (111). Leupin thus defines the difference between the fabliaux and theological discourse: "Fictional representation is then a cult that addresses absence by hiding its own tragic essence in the histrionics of fiction" (117).
That point is perhaps sharpened in the next chapter's discussion of Gautier le Leu's Du C ., a little known, farcical allegorization of the vagina. Inevitably, given such a subject matter, "Du C . runs up against the disparity between the word and the nothing, against the constitutive impropriety of language in its confrontation with the real" (129) Since the Old French con is grammatically masculine, moreover, the text is inescapably ambivalent in its nomination of the reputed "cause and finality of everything that has been written in the past" (131). The disparity between the textual masculine and the feminine it purpons to represent is pervasive. But to the extent that the vagina is nominated and described in masculine terms, the impotence which afflicts the phallus infects it as well; consequently Leupin argues that "what grounds speech here is neither a 'masculine' nor a 'feminine' share of discourse (both of which are devoured), but a neuter that survives them as their mutual absence" (142-43). Leupin's most engaging analysis is reserved for the last two chapters. The general absence of Lacanian analysis may account for some of my pleasure in them, but these are also the arguments in which the book's approach finds its readiest material. In La farce de Maitre Pathelin, propriety is externalized as propeny, and language is explicitly organized as an attack on the proprietors of the proper. In pursuit of their ends, thieves reduce language to onomatopoetic monosyllables and innate it into panlinguistic babble: Leupin at points needs little more than quotation to make his argument. But he does more, especially with the medieval notion of writing as appropriation of old texts: stealing and retelling old stories. Michel de Montaigne's Essais provoke a completely different argument, but one similarly linked to the explicit concerns of the matter at hand: language, postulated as "the locus of ceremony's constitution and the individual's disintegration" (206), is still Montaigne's only vehicle for self-definition. Actually (I am pleased to report), Leupin backs away from that definition of language, arguing that Montaigne, in his lapses from pure French, inevitably inscribes himself in what he writes and then chooses (albeit unwillfully) to do so: "Et défaillir à mon escient, cela m'est si ordinaire que je ne faux guere d'autre façon: je ne faux jamais fortuitement" (quoted on 224). Montaigne's language both frustrates his desire to realize himself and ineluctably reveals him, and Leupin's discussion explains both processes clearly and effectively.
If this summary has worked, Barbarolexis will appear as a disparate (sometimes disconnected), challenging (occasionally baffling), brilliant (once in a while bombastic) discussion energized by theory (yet hampered in turns by a poverty and excess in its deployment). You may weigh my sentence and my parenthetical glosses in whatever proportions seem suitable. My experience with scholars more theoretical than I has led me to read or listen to them as attentively as I can, expecting to discard a lot that seems nonsensical or obscure, but ready for the moments of illumination, of new understanding and new possibilities for understanding. I suppose I have chosen my theoreticians, but I have not yet been disappointed in the expectation of those insights. So it is with Barbarolexis. Leupin's theoretical spectrum is quite narrow, and more than once the texts seemed to cry out for an alternative to the deconstructive or psychological-deconstructive strategies which Leupin insists on: more from the feminist angle noted above or a dialogical approach to the Bestiaires, whose treatment seems more strained than any other, would be nice. But perhaps this is my unfair expectation that Leupin should try to bring all of post-structuralism to medieval studies. Granting his chosen approach, he scores well on St. Alexis, the Poetria Nova and Alain de Lille, and particularly so on Maitre Pathelin and Montaigne. Coming after Bloch's book, his arguments on the fabliaux seem a little stale, but they are still valuable. Even his attack on the philological tradition is buttressed with a specific and inarguable complaint about the overly convenient (and uninterrogated) disappearance of original texts ("Why do originals always seem to be lost?" [41]) and the falsification of medieval texts with varied fonts and unmedieval principles of lineation in modern editions (20; 43-44)
But in some moods, I remain an "unregenerate philologist" (Judson Allen's phrase, I think) and Leupin's argument often enough makes that part of me querulous. Faced with a traditional disjunction between barbarismus and metaplasmus (the former a vice, the latter an ornament in poetry), he discounts it: "I do not abide by this distinction" because "it is impossible to determine whether barbarolexis emerges as a conscious aesthetic effect. or a lapsus " (15) The argument is familiar, but unpersuasive. Given that Hugh of St Victor made the distinction, as Jan Ziolkowski shows in a philological work on De Planctu Naturae not noted by Leupin, we might suspect that Alain knew it and abided by it. And surely the non-standard forms of the non-standardized vernacular in St Alexis are unlikely to be a "conscious aesthetic effect", since they are recognizable as non-standard only with the hindsight conferred by later standardization. Leupin's non servian about the distinction echoes Montaigne's (described above), and helps justify the latter's presence in the book; still, Montaigne's agreement with Leupin hardly authorize an automatic extension of that attitude toward medieval texts.
The consistent reliance on Lacan is likely to be a larger stumbling block for non- or minimal theorists. Like all psychological approaches to literature, Lacan's has never seemed very interesting to me, but of course that is a personal bias. For Leupin they are the logical "theoretical prism" to complement his other textual strategies: "psychoanalysis is now the only discipline permitting us to deal critically with the inspection of desire in language, or to understand the contradiction between the unrepresentable and the law that emerges when a writer sets out to write." (5) Within the structure of his argument he uses those strategies (so far as I can judge) productively. I am struck, however, by the way those strategies construct the fabliaux as the center of his argument. The fabliaux invite Leupin's Lacanian analysis because "they expose so insistently the scandal of their own production" (Bloch 35); thus they further Leupin's argument that much medieval writing is produced out of the poverty of phallocentrism. Consequently, Leupin draws heavily on the many fabliaux which divide the metaphorical word from the sexual "thing".
But there are other texts crucial to any understanding of "medieval writing" and sexuality in which sexual nomination is less binary. Most obvious is Reason's critique of the dreamer's courtly fastidiousness in Le Roman de la Rose . Not claiming that vit and coilles are "proper" names (in Leupin's sense) for the male genitalia, she nevertheless argues that they are.
Specular Moments: Women And Western European Culture
Michigan Quaterly Review
Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West. By Margaret R. Miles. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. Pp. xv + 254.
Students of earlier Western European culture have recently begun to take gender into account in their work, and their revisionist history is one of the most exciting collective scholarly endeavors in the field. Two of its products are Peter Brown's latest book on The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity; and Elaine Pagels's effort, in Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, to lay bare the political agenda behind Augustine's interpretation of the story in Genesis i-iii- an interpretation important because it wielded (and still wields) great influence over the way people imagine the nature of and relation between men and women. For more modern periods, Caroline Walker Bynum's studies of late medieval spirituality, especially in Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, exemplify the best work showing the importance of gender for both intellectual and social history. While of course the various studies that take account of gender differ from one another, the result has generally been an enormously productive cross-fertilization rather than internecine warfare. The collective effort to write the history of the body-that is, how historical peoples have understood and used cultural and social accounts of a basic condition of humanity, that we are all embodied - can be of great interest, not only to classicists anti-medievalists, but also to students of more modern and contemporary cultures.
The two books I review here add to this effort. One is by a feminist theologian who specializes in early Christianity (Miles); the other is by a medievalist who specializes in French literature (Leupin). Neither book is the best place to start one's education in the historical account of gender, each for a different reason. Miles's Carnal Knowing is explicitly about historical representations of the female body, and hence fits neatly into the topic of this special issue; but it is an example of how not to do interdisciplinary cultural history. The only bodies in Leupin's avowedly ahistorical Barbarolexis are textual ones, and his book thus touches only tangentially on the topic at issue here; a result of my own context of reviewing, then, will be a certain inevitable distortion in my account of it. It is much the better book: indeed it is brilliant at times; but it is also idiosyncratic, and will present difficulties to readers who lack conversance with both medieval literature and culture - who cannot supply the historical context themselves - and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory.
Carnal Knowing begins with the epic of Gilgamesh and Kenneth Clark's famous distinction between the naked and the nude in the visual arts. After describing Gilgamesh and the main line of Western literary tradition as the story of male social and personal development, Miles asks the quite reasonable question, to which in various forms she returns throughout the study, "Where is the epic of Siduri?" (Siduri is one of the female figures who tries to teach Gilgamesh; the question is also posed about Calypso). Using written texts and visual arts, Miles frames the problem she addresses through the concept of "carnal knowing": if subjectivity is defined and developed as "embodied self-understanding," then Western cultures have historically denied women even the possibility of subjectivity because women have had no access to a public and collective voice. Because men have been the writers and painters, they have produced the dominant cultural representations by which both genders understand women; hence, Miles argues, female self-knowledge in such a context cannot be taken as genuine subjectivity, since representations tend to replace the represented object. Representations of female nakedness from theological, literary, and visual works become her windows onto the way people conceived of women in Christianity from the fourth century through the seventeenth century, after which, Miles asserts, "religious meaning no longer provided the primary interpretive framework for depictions of nakedness."
Well aware of both the difficulties and excitement of such inter-disciplinary exploration, Miles is less wary of the pitfalls of a study that also spans fourteen centuries (more if one considers the twentieth-century focus of the final chapter). The first part covers the role of the body in fourth-century baptismal practices, patristic theological texts prescribing behavior and social roles for Christian women, and the early Christian martyrdoms, For the early Christians, the body became the site in and through which they could appropriate and redefine the dominant secular culture of the Roman Empire; through the consecration of the body, they were reborn as Christian and spiritual selves, Martyrs like Perpetua could wrest their compelled nakedness from its negative secular associations with shame and prostitution, and redefine it as a part of their sacred agon; the secular shame of their publicly exposed bodies thus made them not less, but more, spiritually whole.
Because Miles is attentive to the complex ways in which people - particularly members of cohesive groups - can and did resist cultural hegemony precisely by appropriating and redefining dominant cultural symbolism, she can do justice to her topic in the first section. She can hear the sometimes discordant voices beneath what has often been taken as a homogeneous body of texts; and she perceives the possibility in fourth-century Christianity of what she describes in her own case as "disobedient reading". Carnal Knowing is written to make feminist scholarship available to the general reader, and it breaks little new ground. Rather, it consists of what might be called "vacuum-cleaning": sucking up what others have written and putting it all together in the same bag; it rarely engages the sometimes-massive differences among those whose work is synthesized. Still, Miles's ear for counter-cultural possibility in the book's first section is genuinely refreshing.
But when she shifts to later periods - and from texts to visual representations - she arrogates the capacity for disobedient reading to herself alone. Once Christianity itself becomes the dominant culture, and perpetuates all that has interfered with women's capacities to define themselves and make their voices heard, Miles loses her attentive sympathy and capacity for critical analysis. The sections on representations of women during medieval and early modern times are tendentious; her selection of evidence seems determined by the polemical argument she wishes to make about the problems of self-representation faced by contemporary women. That polemic deserves a hearing; but it won't do to confuse it with a responsible history of earlier peoples' cultural attitudes and responses, which, in the Middle Ages as well as in patristic times, were much less monolithic than is commonly supposed. They too were capable of resistant readings. In her chapter on the grotesque, for instance (largely dependent on Geoffrey Harpham's On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature), Miles writes as if only representations of women could be grotesque. This is not true; and she would have known it had she read, for example, some of the fabliaux Leupin treats in Barbarolexis. In this genre, fragmented male body parts, particularly sexual organs, proliferate just as commonly as female body parts. This suggests a fundamental problem with Miles's conception of her topic: the restriction of meaning in representations of the female body to the religious variety. Long before the seventeenth century non-religious usages of the body were available, and potentially counter-cultural; but you have to look in the right places.
A typifying example of tendentiousness is the treatment of Rembrandt's 1647 painting of Susanna and the Elders. Miles uses it to assert the existence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries "of a visual culture in which it was impossible to paint a naked female body in such a way that it symbolized innocence" - innocence being the heart of the apocryphal Susanna narrative. Instead, naked female figures could communicate only "sin, sex, and evil". But to support such a statement, Miles must choose her evidence very carefully; and she made a mistake in choosing representations of Susanna in general and Rembrandt's 1647 Susanna in particular. Here Susanna impales the viewer with a gaze both challenging and appealing; in a pictorial rhetoric of entrapment, the painting puts its viewers on trial: will we prove ourselves unjust judges, believing the elders instead of Susanna? or will we - as the painting clearly exhorts us to do - recognize Susanna's innocence in the face of the elders' skulking iniquity, and thus prove ourselves just judges? Certainly "sin, sex, and evil" are at issue here; but they are associated with the elder who measures Susanna with his hands and gaze. My own reading of Susanna's innocence is not simply a competing response from another twentieth-century viewer; had Miles been concerned to do genuinely interdisciplinary history, she would not have imposed this argument on Susanna. In the Protestant drama of the 16th and 17th centuries, Susanna ranked second only to Judith in number of texts and (insofar as one can judge from extant records) productions. Both women stood for the innocent, righteous, heroic Protestant put upon by and ultimately victorious over the Catholic enemy. And Susanna did have her own voice, which she used to mount her own defense.1 The Protestant figure of Susanna may still do nothing to achieve female subjectivity; I don't know, and this is in any case an argument for Miles to make. I do know that, by silencing the substantial body of evidence from the dramatic literature, Miles misrepresents polemic as history.
An anecdote related by Houbraken suggests what is missing from the second part of Carnal Knowing. A pupil of Rembrandt was closeted with a naked female model in one of the private cubicles into which Rembrandt divided his studio. The day was hot, and the pupil took off his own clothes, saying: "Here we are. naked like Adam and Eve in the Garden." Rembrandt overheard him, spied on the pair, then knocked on the door and shouted, "But because you are aware that you are naked you must come out of the Garden of Eden" 2 The story records a complex interplay of seriousness and play (not to mention Rembrandt's outrageous arrogation of God's role!); in this section, Miles cannot account for the process of appropriation and redefinition characteristic of play but available in serious cultural practices as well. The history of women's positions in Western culture is often not pretty; but it isn't as unrelentingly bleak as Miles implies. It is entirely possible to take the filters of cultural hegemony into account and yet hear the voices of resistance too.
Playfulness is the shining excellence of Leupin's Barbarolexis , in which it is sometimes impossible to tell the dancer from the dance. Leupin admirably negotiates the delicate task of interposing medieval theological and rhetorical discourses with contemporary psychoanalytic discourse, without ever collapsing one into another. Instead they cross-illuminate one another, sometimes from eccentric angles; partly because he carefully limits and directs the claims he makes, his approach attains occasionally stunning explanatory power. Its problems are not fundamental ones.
Leupin begins with the proposition that in medieval theological discourse it was impossible to refer to or predicate God with any sufficiency; post-Babel human language, with its fragmentation and deviation from the original language of Adam, made a degree of impropriety inevitable in naming God. In subsequent chapters, this pole of medieval language theory becomes the impossible "Cratylist dream" of adequation - the desire for an essential (rather than an arbitrary and social) link between word and thing. Next to the first proposition Leupin sets a second, that is equally impossible properly to name the object of any desire, especially that of female climax, The language of the second proposition is motivated less by medieval poetic practice than by Lacanian theory; Leupin does not acknowledge how arbitrary it is to specify either God or female sexual desire in an intellectual culture (theological and rhetorical) that recognized all human language as fundamentally improper - that is, metaphorical. And the first proposition narrows all medieval theology into but one of its threads, the negative theology influenced by pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, In fact there was a large body of theological discourse that used the communicative axis of language more heavily than the semantics of reference; this theology stressed the redemption, incarnation, and so forth, as metaphors that successfully linked the human and the divine, however "improper" these metaphors may have been in strictly semantic terms. 3
But Leupin never allows medieval and modern discourses to supplant one another, and his specification (however arbitrary) of God and female sexual desire as peculiarly resistant to proper reference does give him a principle by which to choose his texts. In the rest of the book he ranges through French and Latin works from the 11th-century beginnings of French vernacular texts through Montaigne's essays, demonstrating (to my mind very successfully) his third principle: that poets, appropriating the disabling limits negative theology placed on human language, instead turned improper metaphoric language into a gloriously positive resource for affirming the poetic imagination and the desire to write. Leupin, that is, understands how members of a culture can turn its dominant symbolism inside out.
The texts he scrutinizes (focusing particularly on specular moments at which they affirm or deny their own points of origin) include, from the 11th century, the vernacular hagiography La vie de Saint Alexis and Alain de Lille's Latin polemic against sexual and linguistic perversity, De planctu Naturae (whence he derives his term "barbarolexis" for language and desire that deviate from the proper); Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova (ca, 1200); fabliaux and related texts from the 12th and 13th centuries, including Richard de Fournival's Bestiaires d'amours and the much-debated Response to it; and La farce de Maitre Pathelin from the 15th century. Until the last two chapters there is surprisingly little about the role of the vernacular itself in the capacity of poets to appropriate "barbarolexis" for their own purposes; I would have thought a book about the effects and opportunities of Babel a wonderful chance to explore this most exciting development in late medieval culture. Although the thread is sometimes picked up and more often suggested, the argument about the vernacular is not explicitly made.
The best chapter is on Geoffrey of Vinsauf's proclamation of modernity, the Poetria nova; it provides not only a new and provocative reading of this rhetorical text, but also a better user's guide to Barbarolexis than any I could suggest. Everything Leupin says about the Poetria nova can and should be applied to his own critical practice; his homage of imitation, paid to a writer too often slighted or misrepresented, is what I mean by playfulness. Leupin describes how Geoffrey's text (on how to write poems) blurs any distinction between form and content - and also does it himself; and he describes how Geoffrey seeks to revivify the ancient texts he imitates, according to classic rhetorical tradition, by making them live again in the present. This too is precisely what Leupin aims to do in Barbarolexis; his project might be termed a Critica nova for its effort to bring this fascinating literature to life again for contemporary readers. And because, according to Geoffrey's rhetorical theory, the imitator affects the imitated, I am inclined to excuse the occasionally distorting selectivity and missed opportunities of Leupin's avowedly ahistorical work. I would have liked to see more historical situation; it would have made the book more accessible to readers who don't already know the literary and cultural history so lightly assumed here; and it would in most cases have interacted productively with Leupin's arguments about the appropriation of vernacular metaphor and the treatment of bodies and sexuality in the central chapters on the fabliaux and the Bestiaires d'amours.
Much of the material on the fabliaux has been treated recently and from a similar point of view by R. Howard Bloch in The Scandal of the Fabliaux. There are some differences, and Leupin is more persuasive in suggesting the potential for the fabliaux (which Bloch describes as socially conservative) to express the anxieties, fantasies, and nightmares of their authors and audiences about both male and female sexuality; while many do end by affirming the hegemonic feudal order that also validated super - and subordination in the relations between the sexes, others expose this hegemony as a cultural imaginary that works only because characters within (and audiences outside) the stories believe it works. This, along with the brilliant way in which Leupin traces the relationship between the fabliau and the conventions of lyric and romance (equally fantastic and imaginary), makes his argument potentially historicizing; but he does not actually return the fabliaux to history because, in past fabliau scholarship, this move has always reduced them to naive, "realistic" reflectors of their societies. Leupin shows us the fabliau as dream-world.
The chapter on the Bestiaires d'amours and its Response (of dubious authorship) is nearly as good as that on the Poetria nova, possibly because the works share the same technique of imitative appropriation of previous texts. The Response, which creates a rhetorically feminine "I" to answer the rhetorically masculine "I" of the Bestiaires, is a model of cultural and poetic appropriation; superficially it seems to respect and imitate the arguments and images of the Bestiaires, but this is an illusory covering to hide radical departure. Instead, the Response absorbs, "pirates" and deviates by borrowing, to further ends not defined by the Bestiaires. Leupin describes it as "a discourse irreducible to any masculine form of writing"; in its apparent obedience to the superiority of the prior, masculine text, the Response "finds resources for a demystifying reading of the Bestiaires." Although real gendered human beings do not generally find their way into Leupin's book, his reading of the Bestiaires and its textually feminine Response provides a more genuine way of writing the history of the body than does Carnal Knowing.
NOTES
1 Paul F. Casey, in The Susanna Theme in German Literature: Variations of the Biblical Drama, Abhandlungen zur Kunst-, Musik- und Literaturwissenschaft, 214 (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundrnann, 1976), provides appendices listing the Susanna dramas (as well as other literary forms) of the 16th and 17th centuries in German-speaking territories; most of the twenty known plays from this period are still extant. He also lists dramas from other areas, including six Dutch plays. Paul Rebhun's 1535 Susanna drama is apparently the earliest in which (contrary to the apocryphal narrative) Susanna speaks in her own defense. There were also many works on Susanna in English. I thank Celeste Brusati for help with the visual evidence.
2 I paraphrase and quote from Svetlana Alpers here; see Rembrandt's Enterprise: the Studio and the Market (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 46-47. She in turn paraphrases from Arnold Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der tederlontsche konstschilder.f en schilderessen, 3 vols., Amsterdam, 1718-21, rpt. from the Hague edition of 1753 (Amsterdam: B. M. Israel, 1976), I, p. 257.
3 For a brilliant discussion of the kind of theological discourse Leupin leaves out- essentially a poetics of theology -see Giuseppe Mazzotta, "Teologia ed esegesi biblica Par. III-V):' in Dante e la bibbia: At ti del convegno internazionale promo&ro do 'Biblia,"ed. Giovanni Barb!an (Florence: Olschki, 1988), pp. 95-112.
The Medieval Woman, Women behave midwives, Tom Shippey, November 1989
(...) This last statement would almost repudiated, or viewed with indulgent scorn, by Professor Alexandre Leupin, whose Barbarolexis is very much the odd one out of the works reviewed here. Leupin sees at the start a distinction between "document" and "monument", and has little or no time for the former (i.e. for the merely historical document). He is also quick to point out the "impoverishment", the "complacent positivism" of the "old philological school". He, in short, is a member of the theoretical school which insists that in essence everything, including Nature, is "first and foremost a text", and that texts are to be read until they reveal their true "specularity", the fact that they are all about the activity of reading or recovering text. It is easy to be blunt or dismissive about these views, especially for one trained in the pragmatic school of Anglo-Saxon philology, and especially after the experience of reading other works of Medieval studies so clearly about non-textual matters, like Wack's or Blumenfeld-Koskinski's. Yet it has to be said that Leupin, with all the odds against him, does make out a strong case, and even a strong linguistic case.
What does it mean, for instance, in the Vie de Saint Alexis , that Alexis's father is called Eufemien? Could this have anything to do with the literary trop of euphemia or euphemism? One would think not, but then it is at least odd that the name of the saint himself is Alexis, which can be constructed as a + lexis , the letter meaning "word, god's word", the former an intensifier for "very strong". The non-saintly father, then shuns the word, the saintly son avoids it in speech, remaining totally silent and "alexic" for years, but then communicates in writing - the skill which his father indeed had had him learn, though not for saintly purposes. Leupin draws a point even from the romance's different forms for "father", père, pedre and pedra . The second, he admits, could be one of those earlier or intermediate forms beloved of philologists. But what of the latter? Does it not have some connection with pedra or perdition, the fate to which the father is tending and to which he would like to drag his son?
The moral of this vernacular beginning to the glories of French literature, Leupin suggests, is that "the paradise uniting all fictional protagonists is not a heavenly kingdom conceived by theology, but an infinitely more improper eternity created by the French language". I do not believe this - and if I did it would be chauvinistically tempting to explore the possibility of Alexis as an English work - but Barbarolexis does not convey the seduction of such ideas better than almost any competition. It is amusing to find the tale of "L'Enfant qui remis au soleil", used not long ago in these pages, documentary-style, as proof of treatment of foundlings, cited instead in the version of Geoffroi de Vinsauf (another Englishman) as an example of the mise en abyme of the search for origins in a "blank and founding emptiness". It is more than amusing, remarkable, to see quite how many of the French fabliaux revolve around questions of language or of euphemism. There is a dame qui ne peut pooit oîr parler de foutre , but who is of course extremely avid at seizing the thing without the name. There are the repeated stories of ladies who have to call various parts of the anatomy "squirrels" or "piglet", but who then insist on feeding their animals until their partners run out of wheat or nuts altogether. And there is the repeated play on the words ne. rien , which mean that a taboo-object can be both "thing" and "nothing", depending on how the hearer chooses to take it. Are all these cases to be covered by the "complacent critical discourse" of "realism" pointed up by stylistic differentiation, Leupin asks; and it does in fact seem increasingly like an unambitious answer.
Moreover, as the eight chapters here move through their eight separate works, from Vinsauf to Montaigne, their embedded thesis about sexuality and language does (and this is not very common in radical surveys) gain a cumulative force. There is no doubt that Alan of Lille does talk about homosexuality in terms of grammar, complaining how discordant it is that one should be at the same time "subject and predicate", actor and acted upon, the sodomite here extending "too far the laws of grammar". Conversely, there is no doubt that Montaigne talks about French in terms of sex, complaining: Si vous allez tendu, vous sentez souvent qu'il languit soubs vous et fleschit - it "grows limp and gives way under way", so that you have to resort to the greater masculinity of Latin or Greek. The continuous connection at least is clear, and Leupin has an elaborate theory to explain it - namely, that a language cannot name God, the object of desire, for theological reasons; nor the desire of climax (female climax, it seems), for either social or linguistic reasons, as in the fabliaux ; so it has to turn from these two impossibilities to "affirmation of the desire to write", falling back on itself for want of ability to break out of its own fictional space. All this may or may not prove convincing as the theory of psyche. It does focus attention on the more doubtful frontier of language, making it impossible to write "Barbarolexis" off as mere obscenity, euphemism or solecism.
Yet one might which that Leupin, in Anglo-Saxon style, were a little more interested in things. At one point, he gives an account of viper's mode of conception, female biting off male's head at the moment of ejaculation and then giving birth through her own side, observing it is a perfect allegory of the birth of fiction. Women facing the midwife's razor might have thought it was more immediate than that. Some of them, no doubt, would have liked to bite their partners' head off too, preferably before the moment of ejaculation. There is another meaning, too, in the fabliau of la dame escouillée , in which a man subjects his dominating mother-in-law to a feigned castration, pretending to pull out from her behind the coillons au tor , the bull's testicles which have made her so masculine. There is no feigning, however, about the rasoir with which the surgeon/ serjon /sergeant makes his half-foot incision; or, Leupin might say, there is, because the whole thing remains a fiction. It does. But some events must have happened outside a text, however Anglo-Saxon it is to say so. And in view of what some of them were, the "specularity" of fiction seems less cosily secure. Cutting women open to get them to shut up: dear God, one reflects, there was an "interpretive community" somewhere, somwhen, that actually used to laugh at this?
Article in Literature and Theology, Volume 5 N3 - November 1991
Before I received my review copy of this book, I puzzled over the strange title word, "barbarolexis", and I invented definitions for it: "wild language", or "rebellious speech". After reading Barbarolexis, I am pleased to think I was not too far wrong. The word means "poetic license", but there is a wildness to it, for "barbarolexis" refers to the outrageous, sly, obscene language of many medieval texts, language which appears when God/desire is to be spoken, but, of course, cannot be. Barbaro- lexis demonstrates how sin, sexual differentiation and loss of linguistic propriety form the same intricate web veiled absences in thc intersected theological and rhetorical discourse of medieval writing as in Lacanian theories of the psyche. As Leupin says, "rigorously structured by a theocentric civilization, the writing of the Middle Ages nevertheless had to account for a desire that could not be reduced to church discourse" (14). The universality of that unnameable desire answers the fundamental question of Barbarolexis: "why is it that works of art separated from us by so many centuries still speak to us today in such a compelling and vital way?" (5).
Leupin presents his approach in the Introduction, which is the only orientation offered the reader. The succeeding and self-contained chapters take up individual medieval texts, each the unique scene of a theological and rhetorical drama of desire. Chapter One discusses the absolute reflexivity of Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova. Chapter Two looks at La vie de Saint Alexis, noting that the historical loss of the original manuscript replicates the metaphysics of medieval writing - it denies the possibility of pure originary presence and uses that loss as the excuse for an excess of meaning. Alan of Lille's De planctu Naturae (Chapter Three) shows how homosexuality jeopardizes the natural order of grammar and logic as, at the same time, pederasty becomes a metaphor in its own right. The poet who "falsifies" the natural order makes barbarolexis an endorsement. Similarly, the delirium of the fabliaux (Chapter Four) is a metaphorical mask intending to foil the inability of language to name the sexual relation. The female sexual organ is the metonymic central "character" in Gautier le Leu's Du C. (Chapter Five), while Richard de Fournival's Bestiaires d' amours composes the feminine through a series of allegories in which the lady is constructed as a phallic mother who has power over castration and resurrection, and yet who also turns out to be an imaginary site, "no more than an invention of the book's scene of writing" (161). Thus, the "Bestiare entire textuality begs for some sort of answer to the enigma of difference" ([66). Closing Chapters Seven and Eight discuss La Farce de Maitre Pathelin, and Michel de Montaigne's Essais.
It is regrettable that there is no conclusion or reflection from the author on the proceding chapters. The material is intense and exacting, and it does not help that we are often plunged into each chapter without preamble or context. Although Leupin is not writing a history of his texts, he could have been more considerate of the wider reading audience implied by his topic and his approach. Strangely abrupt in places, frustratingly opaque in others, Barbarolexis is an original and interesting book, well worth serious consideration by persons interested in the intersection of literature, theology and human sexuality.
Ann-Janine Morey
Southern lIIinois University
Article in Journal of Medieval Studies, April 1992
In his introduction to Barbarolexis Alexandre Leupin points to the lack of agreement, even among modern medievalists, about the notion of "literature" that underlies their scholarly and critical endeavors. This "conceptual indecision" is a consequence, as Leupin reminds us, of the fact that there was no medieval notion that coincided at all closely with modern notions of literature. Leupin believes that this intercultural blur "prevents clarity and progress in critical debate" (p. 2).
Leupin's response to this cultural discontinuity is to address three thoroughly medieval concerns: first, whether, from a theological point of view, human language is inadequate to name God as object of desire; second, the possible inadequacy of naming any object of desire, especially when that object is a woman; third, the possibility that writing "turns this double lack into the resources of its own production: the literary text transforms a dual impossibility into the desire to write" (pp. 6-7). Put differently, if "monumentality" can be seen as a function of writing as grammatica, writing as product can be seen ceaselessly to monumentalize itself as a productivity. Whether or not one accepts such premises as a basis for modern critical interpretations, Leupin pursues his critical enterprise with a clarity that might serve as an example for all who would define their own purposes. Leupin's range, in any case, provides an expansive testing ground for his notions. He ranges from "La vie de Saint Alexis" to Montaigne, with forays into the fabliaux, into the Farce de MaItre Pathelin, and into the Bestiaires d'amour by Richard de Fournival.
It is worth noting that Leupin's notion of medieval "literature" is an extension of that which he articulated in his earlier work, Le graal et la littérature (Lausanne and Paris, 1982). There he considered the medieval literary text as a "monument" enjoying a radical autonomy; now Leupin seems more inclined to consider the text both as monument and document. But document of what? Not of some external referentiality, but, as we have already discovered, of those "linguistic and communicative laws informing it" (p. 2). Since the intellectual horizon in which medieval secular literature appeared was a metaphysical one, both rhetoric and theology are prominent in Leupin's analyses ''as major symbolic systems" whose understanding will help us to "isolate or clarify the specific language of writers and texts" (p. 5). To see how, in Leupin's eyes, this very special notion of "document" determines the literary performance, one has only to see how he invokes the rhetorical term barbarolexis (which signifies an exception from or infraction of some rhetorical norm) to make of it a fundamental principle of what he means by "literature". Such "poetic license" is what distinguishes literary discourse from other discourses, especially to the degree it subsumes what Quintilian called "pleasure" (voluptas) : this, indeed, is the sole aim of literature, according to Leupin (p. 15).
The "perversion" that constitutes literary activity is precisely what Alan of Lille condemned in the name of the "falsigraphic poet" in his De planctu naturae, a text that Leupin studies minutely in his third chapter: "The falsigraphic poet, far from deploring his improper (vitiosus) use of language, revels in it: he turns linguistic defect or Babelized confusion into his writing's endorsement and makes barbarolexis the jubilant fount of his poetics. In other words, he enshrines barbarousness as his only law; license then turns into licentiousness, an absolute vice with no other reference but its own (im)proper and profoundly damnable rule" (p. 67). It should be clear by now that the title of Leupin's book, though compelling, is something of a misnomer: not sexuality, but desire is the subject of this book.
Another aspect of literature closely related to barbarolexis, and one that Leupin favors in his analyses, is the "reflexivity" of a literary text. This notion held an important place in Leupin's Le graal et la littérature; in Barbarolexis it is the object of his first chapter, entitled "Absolute Reflexivity: Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova ". What Vinsauf's treatise brilliantly illustrates (for Leupin) is the idea that medieval writing never ceases to assert itself as a labyrinth of mirrors ("enfilade de miroirs," Graal, p. 14). (Leupin affirms, here, his intellectual affinity with his former mentor, Roger Dragonetti.) For Leupin, the Poetria nova calls into question the medieval notion of speculum, which implied the exteriority of the reflecting (or reflexive) discourse. But we are dealing here with a notion of specularity which implies, according to Leupin, "the absent locus of the transformational power and autonomy of poetic language" (p. 36).
Leupin's powerful analyses are grounded in his special notion of the autonomy of the literary text. Few medievalists - or few nonmedievalists, for that matter - read as closely as Leupin the texts that they elect as the basis of their arguments. As one will observe from the frequency of his quotations from the works he studies, Leupin is clearly concerned to show what poetic language reveals about itself. However, Leupin's predilections, one may note, are singularly remote from those of medievalists (whose ranks are swelling) who are above all concerned to situate medieval "literature" in a cultural horizon of a sort where "literature" is seen as a discourse in constant interference with other socially consequential discourses.
Essential, moreover, to an understanding of Barbarolexis is Leupin's idea that a literary text proffers itself always as "a space for the play of desire" (p. 4). This desire, however, "cannot be reduced to whatever represents it. The text thus implies and simultaneously veils the unrepresentable, the indescribable alterity of desire" (p. 4, Leupin's italics). If this proposition makes the literary object "evanescent", Leupin firmly believes that psychoanalysis (by this, he means Lacanian psychoanalysis) is "the only discipline" (p. 5) that is adequate to deal critically with the inscription of desire into language. Not all medievalists equally concerned with the way desire marks literary texts will insist so categorically on Lacan's theories. Nor will some medievalists fail to see an essentially male structure of desire at work in Lacan's (and Leupin's) models of interpretation. However, all biases of gender aside, American and English medievalists have been slow to recognize to what extent Lacanian theories have inspired new and perceptive readings of medieval texts. The names of Charles Mela and Jean-Charles Huchet come to mind, along with that of Leupin, different though their individual voices remain. Moreover, these resourceful medievalists do not hesitate to call attention to the centrality of desire to any literary process, medieval or otherwise. For this reason, American medievalists can only be grateful for Leupin's decision to publish his book first in English. If Leupin is a masterly writer of French critical prose, he has found in Kate M. Cooper his equal as a translator.
In short, American medievalists and nonmedievalists alike have the chance to encounter for the first time in English an example of a critical strain that has profoundly vitalized medieval critical discourse in France and Switzerland and - again, by way of translation - in Italy. The publication of this book is an important occasion for American and English medievalists, who can only gain from understanding (even if thev resist it) this seminal book.
Denyse Delcourt, University of Washington
Article in The Heythrop Journal - Jan 1992 - Vol 33 N1
"Translation, then," Leupin writes, summarizing Montaigne "is also a correctional, regulating operation that turns thce first text's barbarisms into a language suitable for polite company." Would that this were true of this book, translated from French into a language tortuous with words like "textuality", "literality", "perenniality", "the grapheme of specificity", "originary space" -all taken from the first twenty pages. The book is about language, and the theme which is said to link the chapters is the inadequacy of language for the naming of God or for the relation between the sexes, Barbarolexis, ww are told, means poetic licence.
Each chapter studies a single work, beginning with Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria Nova, on "reflexivity" in poctry, and La vie de Saint Alexis, on the renunciation of language to encompass God -and of formal rhetoric in favour of the newborn Freench vernacular writing. The homosexual violation of nature denounced in Alan of Lille's De planctu naturae is extended, by analogy from pen to phallus, to denounce the adulteration of language by barbarism in grammar. The analysis of the Fabliaux begins with the equation of fornicatiom with idolatry in St Paul (the Old Testament is ignored), and follows the association through Tertullian and St Augustine. It then encases in linguistic analysis a set of tales which, if reproduced in the same vernacular detail in the prints in clandestine circulation among phallus fetishists today, would be branded as lewd and obscene. What is brought out is "the impossible dream that there can be a proper name for the relation between the sexes".
Gautier le Leu's Du C. is expounded as an essay in "rhetorical subversion", in which female dominates male: in her orgasm shw "devours the signified",exhausting to extinction that which she has raised. From this is extracted somehow a battle between masculine and feminine genders in declension. The theme is pursued in "Composing the Feminine", a reflection upon Richard de Fournival's Bestiaires d'amours and a feminine response to it. From La farce de maître Pathelin is extracted "not only a figuration of writing as theft and mask of dcsire, but also an ethic of reading", "two vectors of a single relation to the sign". The chapter on barbarism in Montaigne -his defence of the provincial against the stylish -finds in him a nominalism, a distinclion between title and person, name and thing, and a realism, his identifying his work with himself in that he is both father and mother of his own writing.
There may well be a public for this sort of study; one, indeed, which may understand some of the sentences. But one wonders what the original authors would have made of it all
G.R.D.
Réactions - Reactions: Barbarolexis
Cornell University, 4 April 2004
Dear Professor Leupin,
I've just finished writing a review of your Fiction and Incarnation. I had dipped into the French version, but never really appreciated the strenght of the larger argument until now. I'm writing just to say how much I admire the book and your work generally. For years, I've been making my grad students work through the early chapters of Barbarolexis, and I only wish I had been able to read it in the pre-theoretical days when I myself was first trying to express my sense that Martianus, Bernardus Silvestris, Alain, and Geoffrey were wonderful writers.
My thanks for your fine criticism, and all good wishes
Yours sincerely,
Winthrop Wetherbee
***
Paris, le 28 juin 90
Retardé, cher Alexandre, par de gros dossiers
dont une réforme de l'orthographe, (après plus d'un siècle
d'immobilisme!), je me suis mis seulement à lire ton Barbarolexis
, qui est un très beau livre, et qui m'a permis de relire
en particulier, ta magistrale étude du Saint Alexis.
Tous mes remerciements et félicitations, donc, à toi cher
Alexandre et à la traductrice!
Avec ma fidèle amitié,
Bernard (Cerquiglini)
* * *
Gainesville, January 27, 1990
Dear Alexandre,
I have just finished reading Barbarolexis .
Congratulations on a splendid achievement. (.)
Yours,
Al Shoaf
* * *
Genève, le 14.2.90 jour de la Saint-Valentin
Mon cher Alexandre,
(.) Merci de tout cour de ta Barbarolexie : un grand livre, qui va te
mettre # 1 au hit parade - ce qui me réjouit infiniment, car
tu le mérites.
Tibi,
Lucien (Daellenbach)
* * *
Académie française, le 12.03.90
(.) Merci de cour, cher ami, pour votre excellent livre.
Très cordialement,
Georges Duby