Word Outward: Medieval Perspectives on the Entry Into Language [Reprint ed.] 113898731X, 9781138987319, 0415936802, 9780415936804

Citation preview

W

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M e d ie v a l H istor y a n d Cult ure V ol u m e 4

M e d ie v a l H is t o r y

and

e d i t e d by

F r a n c i s G. G e n t r y

Professor of German Pennsylvania State University

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Se r

ie s

Cu l t u r e

O t h e r Book s i n T hi s Se r ie s 1. “A n d T h e n t h e En d W il l C o m e ”

Early Latin Christian Interpretations o f the Opening o f the Seven Seals Douglas W. Lumsden 2. T o po g r a ph ie s o f G e n d e r i n M i d d l e H i g h Ge r m a n Ar t h u r ia n Ro m a n c e

Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand 3. C h r i s t i a n , Sa r a c e n a n d G e n r e M ed ie v al F r e n c h Liter at ur e

in

Imagination and Cultural Interaction in the French Middle Ages Lynn Tarte Ramey

WORD OUTWARD Medieval Perspectives on the Entry into Language

Corey J. Marvin

Published 2001 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OXl 4 4RN 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 First issued in paperback 2018 Routledge is an imprint ofthe Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 2001 by Corey J. Marvin All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Marvin, Corey, 1965Word outward : medieval perspectives on the entry into language / Corey Marvin. p. cm. -- (Studies in medieval history and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-93680-2 1. Literature, Medieval -- History and criticism. 2. Self in literature. I. title. II. Series. PN682.S34 M37 2001 809'.93384--dc21 2001019495 ISBN 13: 978-1-138-98731-9 (pbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-93680-4 (hbk)

Series Editor Foreword

Far from providing just a musty whiff of yesteryear, research in Medieval Studies enters the new century as fresh and vigorous as never before. Scholars representing all disciplines and generations are consistently producing works of research of the highest caliber, utilizing new approaches and methodologies. Volumes in the Medieval History and Culture series will include studies on individual works and authors of Latin and vernacular literatures, historical personalities and events, theological and philosophical issues, and new critical approaches to medieval literature and culture. Momentous changes have occurred in Medieval Studies in the past thirty years in teaching as well as in scholarship. Thus the goal of the Medieval History and Culture series is to enhance research in the field by providing an outlet for monographs by scholars in the early stages of their careers on all topics related to the broad scope of Medieval Studies, while at the same time pointing to and highlighting new directions that will shape and define scholarly discourse in the future. Francis G. Gentry

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Contents

Preface Introduction

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Chapter 1 Entry into Language: Medieval Literature and the Poetics of Julia Kristeva

1

Chapter 2 Castration: Chaucer's Prioress's Tale and )ohn of Garland's Stella M aris

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Chapter 3 Mourning: Sem iram is of MS Paris B.N. lat 8121A and Robert Henryson's Orpheus and Eurydice

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Chapter 4 Ecstasy: the Wakefield Shepherd plays and Offering of the M agi

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Epilogue Concluding Remarks

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Bibliography

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Index

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Preface

It was quite a surprise to receive a letter from Routledge, almost five years after submitting my dissertation, that they wanted to look at a copy of it for their new series on history and culture in the Middle Ages. Like most graduate students who go on to get jobs outside the milieu of research-universities, I had filed my dissertation and promptly forgotten about it, figuring it was safely hidden, like Spielberg's Ark of the Covenant, in a prohibitivelylarge storage facility somewhere in the Midwest, never to be seen again by human eyes. Being a victim of the job slow-down in the mid-1990's I had in fact gone on to take a job in academia, just not in a place I would be using my dissertation. There were precisely nine medieval jobs the year I was ready to go on the job market, and although I received a couple of interviews, nothing was forthcoming beyond that. But with a wife and child in tow, gainful employment was not a luxury. And it was with great relief in 1996 that a small community college in the Mojave Desert-area of California took me under its wing, and I have been here ever since, very happily pursuing the slower pace of composition and literature instruction at the two-year school and getting to wear the many hats a small school affords one the chance to do. And then I get the letter from Routledge. I was surprised. I was flattered. Yes, I said, I would be happy to sign on. And so I returned to my dissertation during the winter break of 2000-01. What I immediately discovered was that the disk I had saved my project on was dead, totally non-responsive, so I had to re-type (“re-key” I quickly found out is the parlance of editors) the entire thing. But this was a blessing in disguise. For it allowed me to get much closer to the book than I might have otherwise and to re-see it literally sentence by sentence. I made two important discoveries. The first was that it was horrible in spots. The language of French psychoanalytic theorists is none too clear to

begin with, and in places I had apparently done nothing to help. It is inevitable, I suppose, to be tainted by that sort of style in the heat of the moment. But one of the most important lessons I've learned in teaching at the two-year school is that clarity is everything ... not just for students but teachers as well. If one can't explain a concept to a reasonably intelligent nineteen year-old, one probably doesn't know it well enough. I get up and say this in front of students semester after semester, and I believe it. So 1 spent some time thinning these areas out and making them (I hope) more accessible. Luckily, there were only a few. The second important discovery I made was that it was pretty good in spots. In my case, author's remorse went only so far. I felt I made my case clearly and that the insights on medieval subjectivity in the texts I chose were handled justly. If I had it to do over again, I would probably spend more time bringing the project together as a whole, paralleling the chapters better, and providing a better overall integration of the material. It now reads somewhat like three separate projects, but that's typical, I understand, of a dissertation and the difference between a dissertation and one's first book. But this is not a book, so it remains loosely integrated. I wish to thank many people for their help. But none more so than the late Dr. Frank Gardiner. Frank was more than an instructor or advisor. He was my great friend, though from a different era. As students we've all had the experience of that first class that opens up to us the glories of our profession—the first time it comes home that this is the promise of literature. That experience for me was in Frank's C anterbury Tales class, which was a required course for English majors at UC Santa Barbara. More than any other professor I've known, Frank had a way of teaching literature—whether it was Chaucer or Beowulf or Malory or even Faulkner or Hardy—in a way that brought out its humanism. I know that's not a popular perspective these days. I know we've been trained to be suspicious of such sentiments, to ask whose humanism? to dismantle the very idea, subject it to analysis. But for those students who were not going on to graduate careers in literature, for those taking their English majors and becoming brokers and lawyers and middle managers with it, Frank had a special way of speaking to them across the centuries about the human experience. Chaucer was certainly Chaucer, a product of the Middle Ages working within such unfamiliar constructs as the four humors and the Ptolemaic universe, but he was also us, as human as we, as fascinated by the human as we, more so. Frank's courses brought this out in every class meeting. He knew current methodologies—it was he who nurtured my interest in Kristeva—but it was the human side of literature that held him tight and fascinated him the most. More than anything, Frank taught me the value of teaching literature in a way that matters to people, not as a means to an end as it seems to have so unhappily become in recent years, but as a reflection—heightened and purified—of the risks and joys of what it means to be a human being in this world. Frank succumbed to a long illness in May 1997. And as it turns out, I was his last grad-

uate student. I didn't have any “Tuesdays with Morrie” with him in his final months—by that time I had gotten the job out of town—but I do have fond memories of our conversations together and have been profoundly changed by my friendship with him. And that's what happens with the best of teachers. 1still have all of his books. Additionally, I wish to acknowledge the help of L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, without whose assistance and connectedness to the profession the dissertation would be far less aware of currents of contemporary theory. And thanks also to Everett Zimmerman, who, although he is not a medievalist, kindly read the whole of the dissertation and provided helpful comments for clarity. Finally, 1wish to thank Carey Marvin and Margaret Rosemary Marvin for putting my graduate work in proper perspective and never allowing me to get swallowed up by it. It was for them, on account of them, and perhaps at times in spite of them that this entire project was undertaken and completed. My love goes out to them. Dr. Corey J. Marvin Cerro Coso Community College January 2001

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Introduction

In literature of the Middle Ages, subjectivity is inextricably bound up with language, and both are rooted firmly in the human body. Not only were the Middle Ages keenly aware of the materiality or embodiment of language— the rhythm of script on the eye, taste of words in the mouth—but they also knew that selfhood depended on language and speaking. The deployment of words and language as an indicator of developing self-awareness is a recurrent theme in medieval literature. Augustine's Confessions, for example, not only figures speaking in its title but also ends with an act of literary interpretation, an explication of the first chapter of Genesis. For Augustine, as for his successors, the unfolding of selfhood was inextricable from discourse and discursive performances. In addition, medieval poets, philosophers, and other thinkers about language placed a great emphasis on the materiality of texts. For them language took place in the body. To the question where is language? the Middle Ages would have answered in part, along the lips, the tongue, the throat, and in the vocal apparatus and diaphragm. In medieval education, for example, the standard textbooks on language for beginners, Donatus's Ars M inor and Priscian's In stitu tio n s Gram m aticae, both place pronunciation and rhythm second in position only to the alphabet, and before any issues of grammar, morphology, and syntax.1 These "secondary" elements were thought to emerge out of and depend upon the "musical" affects of pronunciation and rhythm: Closely connected with reading (which in medieval times was probably performed aloud) was the study of song; indeed it so dominated the elementary schools they were generally known to contemporaries as "song schools". "Song" meant plainsong such as the clergy used for reciting the psalms and hymns of the divine office, rather than any more elaborate polyphonic music. The importance of song in medieval schools is easily

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understood. It helped to teach a clear, correct pronunciation of words, instead of the mumble into which ordinary reading aloud is liable to deteriorate. "Without knowledge of music,” said William Horman, the early Tudor grammarian and schoolmaster, in 1519, "grammar cannot be perfect.”2

In introductory texts, the letters of the alphabet were classified into semivowels (l,m,n,r,f,s) and mutes (t,d,p,k,g) on the basis of their singability.3 In the area of music, words were long recognized to have a materiality all their own that was suitable for rhythm and melody. In the early Middle Ages, the poetry of hymns and lyrics, as well as of the Old English epics and Old French chansons, was consistently set to music. About 1300, music and words seem to have split, but all the more so to emphasize the "natural music” of words themselves.4At least one strain of medieval poetical theory (which includes John of Garland whose Miracle of the Virgin stories will be examined in Chapter 2) associated poetry with music rather than rhetoric.5As early as 900, theoretical works confirmed the parallel between the materiality of medieval musical syntax and that of grammatical syntax: What brought system into the writing about (songs) was the introduction of precepts about the syntax of language, by way of an analogy between the constituent hierarchy of language and that of melody: on the one side phonemes, syllables, words, phrases, sentences; on the other notes, neumes, phrases, and songs. Language was segmented into a hierarchy of sense units called commas, colons, and period; the punctuation signs received their names from the sense units of successively large scope that they marked off. This linguistic hierarchy had its musical counterpart in a hierarchy of melodic phrases articulated by tones of different degrees of finality and with particular affinities among themselves.6

But even in the area of rhetoric, the musicality of language and its capacity to give delight was a central concern. Geoffrey of Vinsauf (c. 1200) extols the praises of language properly "musical” and suggests a complex relation between sound and sense: "when meaning comes clad in such apparel, the sound of words is pleasant to the happy ear, and delight in what is unusual stimulates the mind."7Such statements abound in medieval discussions of language. They derive not only from the medieval idea that literature ought to delight as well as instruct, but also from the commonplace notion of the deliciousness of words, their palpability in the mouth. To William of St. Thierry, words which have been read are to be "chewed" again in meditation: "we regurgitate the sweet things stored within our memory, and chew them in our mouths like cud for the renewed and ceaseless work of our salvation."8 Such notions were supported by medieval sign theory, which held that words were things in themselves. Augustine's influential O n Christian Doctrine

begins its discussion of signs by stressing this aspect of words—that "every sign is also a thing" and that "some pertain to the sense of sight, more to the sense of hearing, and very few to the other senses."9Medieval sign theory was especially attentive to the materiality of sounds. It wrestled with the problem of classifying the full range of sounds that appear in any way to be signs—like the barking of dogs (latratus canis) or the inarticulate moaning of the sick (gem itus infirm orum ). Such questions led to the development of a complex system of classification (literata/illiterata, articulata/inarticulata) as well as to a consideration of such issues as intensional and extensional semantics and author's intentionality (e.g., "does the dog mean what it says or not?").10 Moreover, as participants in what was primarily a manuscript culture, medieval language-users were intensely aware of the impact that not only speaking had on the body but writing as well. Cassiodorus (c. 550) urged those of his students who made corrections to their Bibles to "form the added letters so beautifully that they may thought to be the product of scribes," for it is surely inappropriate "for anything unsightly to be found in this glorious work to offend the eyes of students hereafter." He goes on to urge them to contemplate "the nature of the cost entrusted to you (of guarding) the Church's treasure."11 But what he means by "Church's treasure"— whether the correct biblical text or the actual, physical book itself—is not clear. In many ways it didn't matter. Chaucer's famous lines on the fragility of "storyes" in the Legend of Good W om en shows to what extent the Middle Ages thought about writing and knowledge not as conveyed in books but as books themselves—as congeries of ink, parchment, wood, and animal skins liable to loss by disfiguration, fire, or flood: Thanne mote we to bokes that we fynde Thourgh whiche that olde thynges ben in mynde, And to the doctryne of these olde wyse Yeven credence, in every skylful wyse, And trowen on these olde aproved storyes Of holynesse, of regnes, of victoryes, Of love, of hate, of othere sondry thynges, Of which I may nat make rehersynges. And if that olde bokes were awaye, Yloren were of remembrance the keye.12

But such expressions about the vulnerability of books were just as ardently

matched by statements celebrating their permanence. A ninth-century poem by Rabanus Maurus compares letters in books to the tablets given to Moses: No work rises up that aged antiquity does not overcome Or that wicked time does not overturn. Letters alone escape ruin and ward off death, Letters alone in books renew the past. Indeed, God's finger carved letters on suitable rock When he gave the law to his people.13

The material aspects of manuscripts were understood to take their place in larger systems of meaning, including those of culture and society. According to Martin Irvine, the material form of the text in a manuscript culture cannot be dispensed with "without erasing essential cultural information": the text "is not a ghost, a disembodied verbal essence, but is at once a material and discursive event, the social significance of which is signaled and partly determined by the visual or nonverbal features of the signifiers."14 So acute was the medieval sense of the materiality of books that nature and the world itself, in a well-known and long-enduring image, was felt to be a collection of God's "other" books (the Bible being the first) in which one could study the divine ideas. In Paracelsus' phrases, "God himself wrote, made, and bound them and has hung them from the chains of his library."15 But just as it is true the Middle Ages thought deeply about the materiality of writing and speaking and about its place in the body, it is also true that they thought deeply about the connection between language and selfhood.16 Starting with Augustine, medieval conceptions of selfhood were interlaced with conceptions of discourse and discursive performances. In the area of philosophy, the will was long thought to be composed of "irascible," "concupiscible," and "rational" faculties, the last of which was especially connected to language.17 The De Nupt/is Philologiae et Mercurii of Martianus Capella, one of the most popular texts in the Middle Ages, celebrates the "marriage" of this rational faculty, represented by Philology, with "eloquence of speech" represented by Mercury.18This "myth" laid the foundations for an educational system based on the seven liberal arts, which system, even as it shifted emphasis from rhetoric to grammar to logic from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries, never lost sight of the role language plays in giving selves a way to talk about themselves and their place in a universe of things.19 In the area of theology, Augustine's Confessions stands as a monument to the intertwining of language and selfhood. But is not an isolated instance. According to Theresa Coletti, an extended medieval exegetical tradition

interpreted the story of Adam and Eve as a story about language: "Patristic and medieval writers looked to the Edenic myth for an account of the origins of speech and for an ideal of linguistic rectitude"; "the idea of an Adamic language meant a 'primary instance of signification' which was identified with a 'coincidence of words and things' against which the subsequent degeneration—or fall—of language could be measured."20To enter into selfhood in this "fallen” world was to do so within a precarious and uncertain linguistic construct. Self-awareness was reliant upon a set of systematic codes constantly in need of interpretation—codes that contained ambiguities and deceptions undermining interpretation and making direct knowledge impossible.21 This understanding of the relation between selfhood and language carried over into works of imaginative literature. In medieval "narratives of selfhood," the self was figured over and over again to emerge within a sort of matrix where it finds simultaneously created and caught, as if in a spider's web. This something is the precondition of emergence—there is no "self" without it—but it is too large for the emergent self to ever fully appropriate or get a conceptual hold of. It is not possible to "own" it, in other words, just participate in it. In the thought and literature of the Middle Ages, this something is displaced into many different constructions—the social contract, the sacred, history—yet it is language that holds the privileged place. This is so because language is simultaneously a structure of difference and our experience of that structure. That is, we can never fully know language in the sense of wrapping our minds around its entirety, but we can participate in it phenomenally. In text after text of medieval literature, what draws a self to an awareness of this matrix-something (which, to repeat, is not only language, but which language testifies to) is the materiality of embodied writing, speaking, or gesturing. For example, in the twelfth-century Latin play Daniel, it is the "writing on the wall." In the fourteenth-century Middle English Erkenwald, it is a foreign script engraved on a sarcophagus. In Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, it is the Aeneid carved into the window panes. All these acts of writing lead beyond themselves to larger meanings and to larger patterns of meaning—to networks of meanings not only surrounding the self and fixing it in place but also cutting it through and "unfixing" it as a unity. To become a "self" in literature of the Middle Ages—in stories as well as philosophy and theology—is to discover oneself entangled by material language. *

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It is precisely on this medieval understanding of the self's entry into the precarious and inconstant state of language that this dissertation focuses. The story of entry into language was a pervasive one in works of medieval literature. It is the purpose of this dissertation to show that works of medieval literature—drama and narrative poetry—portrayed selfhood as an event that took place in language, and that selfhood and language were tied firmly to the physical processes of the human body. At the material level of lan-

guage where the body is inseparable from words—that is, in auditory and visual rhythms, in rhymes, in melodies, in intonation—one finds the workings of a self both "fixed" and "unfixed." In text after text of medieval literature, narratives of entry into language have centrally concerned the place of the body and the physicality of material discourse. In such works, the body's carnality provides a common grounding for both a subjective sense of self and the contingent performances of speaking and writing.22 The challenge in discussing these issues has been finding a vocabulary suitably nuanced to talk about the medieval conceptions of the relation among language, the body, and a subjective sense of self. The work of Julia Kristeva has been indispensable in this regard. Located at the convergence of stylistics, linguistics, and psychoanalysis, her work brings together language understood both as a system of differences and as a congery of material affects—phonemic patterns, syntactic, and semantic slippages, pronomial instabilities—and the psychological processes underlying human behavior, psychology, and ethics. In developing her basic thesis that the defining moment of selfhood is the discovery of material language, she has elaborated a powerful and original vocabulary, and it is with a careful consideration of her work and of this vocabulary that this dissertation begins. Chapter 1 thus explains the triple relation of body, language, and a subjective sense of self in Kristeva's work—in the process defining the major terms and concepts that will inform the reading of medieval texts to follow. This theoretical introduction ends with the assertion that the entry into language cannot be labeled strictly positive or negative, good or bad. It is a complex event fraught with complex emotions and is simultaneously painful, joyous, bewildering, mournful, and exhilarating. Nor did the medievals see it as all good or bad. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 consider the entry into language as it is represented in seven works of medieval literature under three principal affective clusters, or "tropes." Chapter 2 examines the medieval view of selfhood as castrative—that is, terrifying, painful, and bewildering, a thing to be feared. Both Chaucer's Prioress’s Tale, in which the little clergeoun's introduction to grammar and symbolic meaning is the "cutting off” of his murder, and the Miracles of the Virgin stories in John of Garland's thirteenth-century Latin Stella M aris, in which devastating and painful losses are inflicted on the bodies of its principal characters, depict a selfhood occasioned by terror, distress, and pain. Chapter 3 examines the medieval view of selfhood as mournful: saddening, sorrowful, empty, a despairing grab for stability at the moment the self is most fragile. Tolumnius' struggle with the rules and protocols of his ritual incantation in the anonymous Latin Sem iram is of MS Paris B.N. lat 8121A and Orpheus' discovery of the modes, proportions, and formal elements within which his poetry finds its complex elaboration in Henryson's O rpheus and Eurydice trace a selfhood coming to terms with entry into language as lack, loss, and emptiness. Chapter 4 examines the medieval view of selfhood as ecstatic: delightful,

desirous, playful, the possibility of self-agency. In leaving their homelands and journeying to the place of the Christ child, the kings and shepherds of the Wakefield Cycle's nativity plays become subjects in a symbolic order, able to adopt the roles of others and so become persons—objects—to themselves. This doubling and convergence is ecstasy, pleasure in excess, and enables playful participation in the open combinatorial systems of language and the social contract. This identification of tropes is meant to develop an incipient vocabulary for talking about the presence of selfhood in medieval literature. As such, the texts represent a deliberately broad selection in both time period and social milieu. Thus Semiramis, which appears to have been written about the year 1000, is discussed alongside a poem of Robert Henryson, who lived in the second half of the fifteenth century. John of Garland's Stella M aris was written for the classroom, but the Wakefield plays were staged as part of public celebrations. In mapping the medieval conceptions of selfhood, one could conceivably proceeded synchronically by taking any single slice of time—the first quarter of the fifteenth century or the period 1380 to 1390— and looking at a broad range of texts, everything from works of imaginative literature to, say, medical treatises, wills, and city charters. This would help us understand the richness and complexity at any given time of medieval conceptions of self—i.e., that at any given time the Middle Ages held several different views of selfhood. A second could proceed by taking a diachronic approach—that is, by taking a single genre or other well-defined discourse and showing its consistencies and changes over time. This would help us understand the changing transformations of discourses of selfhood, especially as they get modified by social and historical contexts. This dissertation seeks to do a little of both: to take a wide variety of texts over a wide variety of times. The intent of this approach is to "cover the field," to stretch the carpet, as it were, into all corners of the room. It intends to show that selfhood—especially the triple relation among body, language, and a sense of self—was a consistent feature of medieval literature and a central fascination for medieval thinkers living at widely different times working in widely different circumstances and discourses. Texts were thus chosen with an eye for variety. Although not "historical" in itself, this approach does, however, pave the way for more historically-based research. That is, it provides a number of "insertion" points for specific research about what the Middle Ages did, at specific times and in specific milieus, with these tropes of selfhood. Consequently, the dissertation ends with concluding remarks pointing the way toward greater historical development of the tropes. Finally, I would like to briefly address the question of "anachronism" in seeing medieval texts through the lens of modern theory. This is surely one of the oldest and most tiresome of debates plaguing medieval studies.23 While it is undoubtedly of the first importance that we study and become familiar with medieval modes of thinking—how they talked about themselves to themselves—it is equally important that we not stop there. For the

most part, recent scholarship has successfully pursued a twofold approach: to take up (in the case of its being explicit) or to tease out (in the case of its being implicit) a medieval discourse on some particular aspect of culture, society, ethics, mind, behavior, etc., and to “interface" that discourse with an outside perspective that helps shed a light on it by showing points of relation, points of convergence and divergence.24 The underlying assumptions that modern theory is important for medieval studies are at least three. The first is that, like any culture, the Middle Ages was not always aware what it itself was about—that is, it was not entirely "present to itself”—and cannot be said to be the last word on its own processes. Modern theory can help bring to light what the Middle Ages did not or could not acknowledge because of the limitations of their own vocabulary. The second is that, also like any culture, the Middle Ages was not "homogeneous" and thus almost any issue, from the nature of universal to the Eucharist, was open to competing voices which modern theory can help clarify from an outside perspective. The third is that, although modern theorists have given us a technical vocabulary for talking about patterns in human behavior, they were not the only ones to recognize those patterns. Thus it is possible, and indeed probable, that the vocabulary of modern theory might have been welcomed by the medievals themselves as clarifications of problems they wrestled with. That is, there is nothing to prevent a logic consistent with modern theory from being present in medieval thought—a logic to which many medievals would have been sympathetic. The use of contemporary psychoanalytic and stylistic theory thus stands to have a profound conceptual and historical value for medieval studies. The interdependency of selfhood, language, and body was a central issue in medieval educational practices—in music, in rhetoric, in poetry, in theology, and in many other areas—yet it was not taken up by any explicitly sustained medieval discourse. Modern psychology and language theory can thus give us a technical vocabulary for detecting the contours of the medieval understanding of these concepts. Surely we are less correct to talk about "applications" of modern theory then intersections of contemporary and medieval formulations. Moreover, since such intersections clarify points of correspondence and difference between the times then and now, they are profoundly historical by their very nature and method. Notes 1. Donatus's Ars G ram m atical has been recently edited by Louis Holtz in D onat et la tradition de l’enseigem ent gram m atical (Paris: CNRS, 1981). For Priscian, see Institutiones G ram m aticae, ed. M. Hertz, vols. 2-3, G ram m atici L atini (Leipzig, Teubner, 1857-80). 2. Nicholas Orme, English Schools in the M iddle A ges (London: Methuen, 1973) 63. 3. Leo Treitler, "Troubadours Singing Their Poems," The Union of W ords and Music in M edieval P oetry , ed. Rebecca A. Baltzer, Thomas Cable, and James I. Wimsatt (Austin: U of Texas P, 1991) 19.

4. The phrase "natural music" is Eustace Deschamps' (c. 1400); see James I. Wimsatt, C haucer and His French Contem poraries: N atu ral M usic in the Fourteenth C entury (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991): "In Deschamps' usage, accompanying melody—what we call music— is 'artificial music,' while the words of the poem— the text— make 'natural music.' Of themselves, poetic texts are musical and able to stand alone" (13). For the materiality of words in the music of the Middle Ages see Baltzer, Cable, and Wimsatt, eds., The Union of W ords and M usic in M edieval P oetry , and John Stevens, W ords and M usic in the M iddle Ages: Song, N arrative, Dance, and D ram a (Cambridge-. Cambridge UP, 1986). For a consideration of the relation between signs and music, see Jesse M. Gellrich, The Idea of the Book in the M iddle Ages: L anguage Theory, M ythology, and Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985) pages 74-91. 5. Thus John of Garland, "Rithmica species est enim musice" (Wimsatt, French Contem poraries 296). 'Rhythmica,' or accentual poetry, is contrasted with 'metrica,' or measured poetry. The strain of medieval poetic theory that associates words with music rather than rhetoric stretches from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century (13). 6. Treitler, "Troubadours" 18. 7. Poetria Nova, trans. Margaret F. Nims (Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 1967) 50. On the relation between sound and sense in medieval poetry and the occasional predominance of the first over the second, John Stevens observes that in Dante's lyric poetry, "it is not that the 'sound must seem an echo to the sense’ but something more physical - ‘the sense must seem an echo to the sound'" (qtd. in Wimsatt, French C ontem poraries 10). 8. Quoted in Anne Clark Barltett, M ale A uthors, Female Readers: R epresentation and Subjectivity in M iddle English D evotional Literature (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995) 17. 9. Trans, with an introduction by D. W. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Liberal Arts, 1958) 9, 35. Modern scholarship has resurrected a good portion of medieval language theory. See especially R. Howard Bloch, E tym ologies and G enealogies: A Literary A nthropology of the French M iddle A ges (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1983); Eugene Vance, Mervelous Signals: Poetic and S ign Theory in the M iddle A ges (Lincoln. U of Nebraska P, 1986); Marcia Colish, The M irror of Language: A S tu d y in the M edieval Theory of Knowledge, rev. ed. (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1983); and, from a slightly different perspective, Theresa Coletti, N am in g the Rose: Eco, M edieval Signs and M odern Theory (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988). 10. See U. Eco, R. Lambertini, C. Marmo, and A. Tabarroni, "On Animal Language in the Medieval Classification of Signs," O n the M edieval Theory of Signs, ed. Umberto Eco and Constantino Marmo (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1989) 3-42. 11. Aw Introduction to D ivine and H um an Readings, trans. with an introduction and notes by Leslie Webber Jones (New York: Octagon Books, 1966) 111. 12. Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton, 1987) G. 17-28. 13. Qtd. in Martin Irvine, The M aking of Textual Culture: 'G ram m atica ' and Literary Theory, 350-1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994) 14. 14. Irvine, Textual C ulture 371. 15. Qtd. in Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the L atin M iddle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983) 322. For the trope of the 'book of

nature,' see Curtius 319-47 as well as Gabriel Josipovici, Tfie W orld and the Book: A S tu d y of M odern Fiction, 2nd ed. (London: MacMillan, 1979). For a broader, more theoretical discussion of the book in the Middle Ages— a discussion shaped by current theory— see Gel 1rich, The Idea of the Book. 16. The issue of subjectivity in medieval literature is experiencing an unprecedented outburst of activity. Of notable books recently treating the question at length see Lee Patterson, C haucer and the Subject of H istory (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991); H. Marshall Leicester, D isenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the C an terbu ry Tales (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990) Louise O. Fradenburg, C ity, M arriage, Tournam ent: A rts of Rule in Late M edieval Scotland (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991), and Anne Clark Bartlett, M ale A uthors, Female Readers: Representation and Subjectivity in M iddle English D evotional Literature (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995). For medieval literature other than in English see especially Sarah Kay, S u bjectivity in T roubadour P oetry (New York: Cambridge UP, 1990) and Peter Haidu, Subject of Violence: The Song of Roland and the Birth of the S ta te (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993). 17. See Boethius, The C onsolation of Philosophy, trans. with introduction and notes by Richard Green (New York: MacMillan, 1962): "Reason ... investigates by universal consideration the species itself which is in particular things" (5.m.4). For Boethius's early commentators, ratio was the first mental power (after sensus and im aginatio) to have the capacity for abstracting into entity and giving names to; see Boethius, Consolatio 5.m.4, and the anonymous ninth-century commentary in Edmund Silk, ed., Saeculi Noni Auctoris in Boetii C onsolationem Philosophiae C om m entarius (Rome: Amer. Acad, of Rome, 1935) 180, 3.m.9. Moreover, according to Jeffrey Cohen in the online colloquium "Medieval Subjectivity" hosted by the Labyrinth Medieval Web Server (Fall 1993), the medieval concept of ratio had been associated, since at least Augustine, with the antechamber of selfhood. 18. See Remigius of Auxerre (c. 900), Com m en tu m in Martian u m C apellum , ed. Cora E. Lutz (Leiden: Brill, 1962): "Philologia ergo ponitur in persona sapientiae et rationis, Mercurius in similitudine facundiae et sermonis. Cum ergo in sapiente haec duo convenerint, et acumen videlicet rationis et facundia sermonis, tunc quodam modo sociantur Mercurius et Philologia" (introduction). In more condensed form: "Philologia typus est rationis, Mercurius symbolum sermonis" (25.14). 19. An account of the shifting emphasis from rhetoric to grammar to logic has been given by Marcia Colish, M irror. For a consideration of the institutions at the center of this shift, the cathedral schools, see C. Stephen Jaeger, The E nvy of Angels: C athedral Schools and Social Ideals in M edieval Europe, 950-1200 (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1994). 20. Coletti, N am in g of the Rose 64. 21. Coletti, N am in g of the Rose 65. 22. Bodies have become a major issue in medieval studies recently, and it might be valuable to briefly differentiate my work from that of Caroline Walker Bynum,

Fragm entation and Redem ption: E ssays on G ender and the H um an B ody in M edieval Religion (New York: Zone, 1991); Peter Brown, The B ody and S ociety: M en, W om en, and Sexual R enunciation in E arly C hristianity (New York: Columbia UP, 1988); Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin, eds., F ram ing M edieval Bodies (Manchester, Manchester UP, 1994); and Linda

Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury, eds., Fem inist A pproaches to the B ody in M edieval Literature (Philadelphia, U of Pennsylvania P, 1993). Almost overwhelmingly this body of work focuses on the figuration of bodies—that is, bodies to the extent they are subjects of representation, especially as sites for ideological confrontation. Thus Lomperis and Stansbury note in their introductory remarks that their collection is intended to focus critical attention "on representations of the body in medieval literary texts as a means of investigating the politics of gender-body relations in the Middle Ages" (ix) and that "the study of the body in the Middle Ages necessitates an understanding of its ideological structuring: the critical task of making the body intelligible— indeed, of establishing its literal existence—demands that one regard it as a politically charged discursive construct, a representational space traversed in various ways by socially based power relations" (ix). Likewise, in Theresa Coletti's article in the same collection, "Purity and Danger: The Paradox of Mary's Body and the Engendering of the Infancy Narrative in the English Mystery Cycles," the representations of Mary's body in these plays "serve not simply or mainly to reinforce dominant ideologies but rather to expose contradictions and instabilities within the sex and gender system" (66). In Linda Lomperis's "Unruly Bodies and Ruling Practices: Chaucer's Physician's Tale as Socially Symbolic Act," both Virginius and modern critics of Chaucer's tale are said to privilege "the metaphysical at the expense of the physical," both having responded "to the tale's representation of bodily considerations by effectively cutting them off" (21). My approach, in contrast, focuses on the body in medieval literature not as it is represented in language but as it IS in language. That is, it is concerned with the body not so much as a subject for representation but as a material presence within language in enunciation, intonation, melody, and rhythm, and with the bearing these affects have on meaning and selfhood. My intent is to treat the drama and poetry of the Middle Ages as an intensely embodied act— an act that takes place by within, through, and on account of the body—with what consequences that has for selfhood. 23. Studies discussing the relation between modern theory and the Middle Ages are legion. Especially relevant are Lee Patterson, N egotiating the Past: The H istorical U nderstanding of M edieval Literature (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987) and Brian Stock, Listening for the Text: O n the Uses of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1990). Of recent assessm ents of the current state of the field, I shall mention only two: Stephen G. Nichols, "The New Medievalism: Tradition and Discontinuity in Medieval Culture," in Marina S. Brownlee, Kevin Brownlee, and Stephen G. Nichols, eds., The New M edievalism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1991) and Anne Middleton, "Medieval Studies," in Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, eds., R edrawing the B oundaries: The Transform ation of English and A m erican Literary Studies (New York: MLA, 1992). 24. For Stephen G. Nichols the dialectical approach of current theory avoids treating the Middle Ages as wholly "other" on the one hand and collapsing it to modernity on the other. The benefit of this approach is that concepts such as "modernity" themselves can come under scrutiny: "new medievalism tries to contextualize the concept of modernity as a process of cultural change, and thus to profit from the decline of modernism's hegemony both as a dominant period and the arbiter of methodological orthodoxy" ("The New Medievalism" 8).

Entry into Language

Medieval Literature and the Poetics of Julia Kristeva

"It was at the threshold of a world such as this that I stood.” —Augustine, Confessions

Broadly speaking, the work of Julia Kristeva accounts for the triple relation among material language, physical body, and a sense of selfhood.1Her central notion is that the body itself, an envelope of diverse and fluctuating drive-energy, provides a fundamental distinctiveness which underlies both a subjective sense of self and signifying systems based on difference. SEMIOTIC CHORA The body at its most concrete level is shot through with tumultuous surges of drive-energy. These surges, emerging from various "sources” and directed towards various "objects," arise from within the materiality of the body itself. Although drives move organisms in several directions at once (hunger, sex, and blushing all qualify as drives), they can nevertheless be reduced, says Kristeva (following Freud), to two fundamental and contradictory compulsions, a "positive” drive of assimilation, gathering, and holding together; and a "negative" drive of destruction, dispersal, and dissolution. These two compulsions are in constant struggle and they make the interiority of the body a place of tumult and conflict.2 Nevertheless, this struggle is essentially rhythmic. As drive-charges contend with each other and with various biological and social constraints, they rise and fall in what can be described as great oceanic surges of ebb and flow. The rhythmicity is noted by Freud: "one group of instincts rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life as swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey... it is as though the life of the organism moved with a vacillating rhythm.”3 These rhythmic surges wash over the interior of the body and up against

their point of impact, the psyche. Here they articulate what Kristeva calls the semiotic cfiora. The chora is the most primitive level of ordering in the psyche: nothing more than a rh ythm . Kristeva, in fact, calls it a "rhythmic space”; "a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated"; an "essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases” (Revolution 15, 40). Situated on the border between body and mind, the chora might be said to be the "turning point" at which carnal pulsations become available to the higher level order of consciousness, thought, and representation. The distinguishing characteristic of the chora is its ambivalence, it is at once essentially dichotomous— that is, comprised of "positive" and "negative” drives—and also "heterogeneous," both biological and yet affected by various social and psychical "constraints." Rhythmic and ambivalent, the chora is only provisional. It is not yet a "thing" that can attain a "position" in an open combinatorial system. No boundaries stable enough to allow the formation of enduring identity can exist in the chora. Yet in its oceanic rise and fall there is a fundamental distinctiveness that lends itself to the formation of a proto-symbolic space which Kristeva labels the "semiotic."4 Within this distinctiveness there is as yet no possibility for subjectivity or signification. Both subjectivity and signification are products of established differential systems based on clear-cut separations among clearly separated units. For a subject to exist, an "I" must be differentiated from "others.” For signification to exist, syntactic and grammatical positions must be differentiated from other syntactic and grammatical positions (nouns from verbs, subjects from predicates, signifiers from signifieds, etc.). Because the chora is differential only in the most enigmatic way—an "ebb" and "flow" rather than a "this" and "that"—the systems permitting the elaboration of subjectivity and signification are as yet impossible. That is to say, the chora exists prior to models or paradigms which require "things" to be set over against other "things" in specifiable relationships. The whole vocabulary of things, each, other, is foreign to the chora because the chora is distinctive, not differential: "neither model nor copy, the chora precedes and underlies figuration and thus specularization, and is analogous only to vocal and kinetic rhythm" (26).5 Nevertheless, the rhythmicity of the chora makes it possible to talk about signification and subjectivity in the process of taking shape: "the semiotic chora is no more than the place where the subject is both generated and negated, the place where his unity succumbs before the process of charges and stases that produce him" (28). The chora must be understood to precede the "positing" of both signification and subjectivity: "previous to an ego thinking within a proposition, no Meaning exists, but there do exist articulations heterogeneous to signification and the sign: the semiotic chora” (36).

Entry into language Although prior to subjectivity and signification—and their sharp-edged differences—the chora's distinctiveness is a crucial stage in their formation. The sense we have of ourselves as autonomous and coherent subjects opposed to equally autonomous and coherent objects is not an innate psychic capacity. We are not born, that is, able to tell “this" from "that"—including “us" from "others.” To newborn babies there is no “me." Rather, the capacity to differentiate is gained only through a complex developmental process which ends with “entry" into language—or more precisely, entry into a logic of difference, the most powerful expression of which is language. For Kristeva, the ebb and flow of the chora acts as a threshold to this entry: "the theory of the subject proposed by the theory of the unconscious will allow us to read into this rhythmic space, which has no thesis and no position, the process by which signifiance is constituted" (26). The body's drive-energy, in its ceaseless processes of gathering and dispersal, contain an enigmatic difference which, upon entry into language, is shattered into the differential “this" and "that" of more sharp-edged systems. This “entry into language" signifying the moment of a child's coming-toawareness of a logic of difference that permits the establishment of subjectivity and signification—and their correlatives, system, structure, and the social contract—is broadly conceived in relation to castration, the "cutting off" constitutive of the “Father's" world of law, system, and language. In terms of this narrative, the most archaic state of self-development is a space of utter indistinguishability; senses and impulses come into the mind in an incessant flow; there are as yet no impressions of inside/outside, I/Other, conscious/unconscious. Castration is the act that ruptures this space, introducing a logic of difference into what before had been only a space of nondifference. In her elaboration of this narrative, however, the concept of the chora allows Kristeva to posit a third, middle space between the two endpoints of "castrated" and “not-castrated." For Kristeva, what moves the child out of the space of non-difference is not the sudden cutting-off of castration but rather the internal pulsations of the body's own drives forming the chora. The child is swayed into its first impressions (as yet only impressions) of difference. That is, for the suckling infant not yet aware of any discontinuity between its and its mother's body, the breast cannot be elsewhere, yet it is sometimes here, sometimes there. When the child is hungry, the breast is sought; when sated, it is spit out. By means of these primitive, drive-based distinctions, the child gains its first dim awareness of difference. These first inklings of otherness are powerfully connected with the mother, and Kristeva calls the ambivalent subjectivity associated with this phase the m aternal space. The maternal space is the chora regarded backwards from the perspective of what will eventually become subjectivity. It is called the maternal space because the mother's body is the prototype of the chora

emerging into symbolic law: “the mother's body is what mediates the symbolic law organizing social relations and becomes the ordering principle of the cfiora” (27). To the child at this time, the mother's body is an unstable and fluid “non-object": not yet a “thing" understood to be different from the child but rather a “not-quite-thing” on the way to separation. Thus the child is "in the process of separating from this non-object so as to make that nonobject 'one' and posit himself as 'other': the mother's body is the not-yetone" (47, 241 n21). Consequently, stable selfhood is as yet only a promise in this stage, an ambivalent "me" continually constituted and washed away in flickering surges of drive-energy. Castration, however, ruptures this immediacy of the maternal space; the Law of the Father intervenes in the mother/child dyad, bringing about their separation. At one fell swoop subjectivity and signification are accomplished. The child is separated and introduced into a logic of difference.6 Contrary to the oceanic flow of the semiotic, this new symbolic phase is structured by means of breaks or theses. Capable of perceiving "itself" now different from objects set over against it, the child (which only emerges as such in the aftermath of castration) realizes itself to be just one discrete thing among many. Not only does it recognize that there are other things out there besides itself (and there is, for the first time, an out there out there), but also that these other things are, in fact, other to each other as well as to it. The result is the pervasive—and dramatic—recognition of an entire brimming constellation of discrete identities (“things” of the world) clearly separated from one another and capable of attaining to positions in an open combinatorial system. In coming to terms with the fragments of its now-shattered universe, the child adopts language. In fact, the events are inextricable and simultaneous. The semiotic motility characteristic of the chora emerges as a symbolic order, where it is given expression as well as subjected to the boundedness of separation and constraint. In castration, the “subject, in finding his identity in the symbolic, separates from his fusion with the mother... and transfers semiotic motility onto the symbolic order" (47). Signification in the symbolic phase, just like subjectivity, is structured by means of theses. The symbolic is what we commonly think of as the language system —a differential network. In order for signs to perform as such, they must be upheld by a general law of separation at all levels of functioning. In order for a sign to "work," that is, it must be a different "thing" than its referent. Subjects must be different from predicates, “signifiers" from "signifieds," this word from that word, nouns from verbs, etc. “All enunciation, whether of word or sentence, is thetic" (43). There is no signification that is not thetic—that is not, in other words, established in and through breaks that create discrete identities at the time they position them in a network of relations.7 Since language differentiates, divides, demarcates, it itself must be capable of differentiation, division, and demarcation. In this respect, there is only one signification: that constituted by castration and the thetic phase.

The symbolic thus represents the emergence of ruptures and boundaries within the rhythmic space of the semiotic chora. The thetic phase marks a threshold between two heterogeneous realms, the semiotic realm of drives and their articulations and the symbolic realm of position and difference. As the chora emerges into language it becomes shattered, parceled out. But the breaks in signification that structure the symbolic do not cancel out the drive-based articulations of the chora: “once the break instituting the symbolic has been established what we have called the semiotic chora acquires a more precise status” (68). Drive-energy re-emerges in signifying practices as material and articulatory effects skirting the border between body and language.8 This return of semiotic functioning within the symbolic cannot be over emphasized. The drives and their articulations are not eliminated in the journey through the thetic phase, but re-appear—within the symbolic matrix—as musical and poetic effects on the threshold between body and signification. Kristeva calls this aspect of language the semiotic, and its manifestation in language testifies to the archaic origin of language in the oceanic processes of the chora. Broadly considered, the semiotic emerges in the materiality of embodied language: in the accumulations and repetitions of sounds in alliteration, consonance, sibilants, assonance, rhyme, and other poetic effects; in the pulsations produced by accents, beats, breaks, and percussions of all kinds; and in intonational surges of volume, rhythm, tempo, timbre. But the semiotic is also evident in places where the clear-cut separations of the language system are infringed by articulation—in puns, for instance, where multiple meanings arise out of a single utterance. In this category are undecidabilities and intertextual ambiguities of all kinds, such as ellipses, puns, pronomial instabilities, even eyeskips in manuscript copying. All these affirm the presence of an embodied, drive-based distinctiveness running under a chain of symbolic differences. It is the nature of these articulatory devices to be "mobile”—that is, to bear in and out of language a sense of movement and motion, pressure and process. To the extent we talk about linguistic and poetic affect, we are talking about the semiotic. The symbolic and semiotic are not mutually exclusive. They are two modalities of a single signifying process: "the text offers itself as the dialectic of two heterogeneous operations that are, reciprocally and inseparably, preconditions for the other" (66). Without the symbolic, the return of semiotic motility would be impossible, for every text, in order to hold together as a text, requires a completion, a structuring, a totalization. What the symbolic guarantees is the expression of language, its "sayableness”; "there can be no signifying practice without the thetic phase” (64). By the same token, no signifying practice would be possible without the semiotic, for every act of language takes place phenomenally, within a material "text” (whether by speech, writing, or gesture). Every instance of textual practice is thus a "twisted braid of affect and thought," a "rhythm made intelligible by syntax” (30). Moreover, to the extent the semiotic is "segmented” (without, howev-

er, being “differentiated”) it already looks forward to a symbolic logic and thus cannot properly be said to oppose it: “the second,” says Kristeva, meaning the symbolic "includes part of the first”: "as a precondition of the symbolic, semiotic functioning is a fairly rudimentary combinatorial system, which will become more complex only after the break in the symbolic" (68). Nevertheless, the semiotic and symbolic are distinct modalities of the signifying process and are heterogeneous to each other. As an articulatory motility in a realm of positions, the semiotic can be said to “infringe” the symbolic—that is, distort it, pluralize it, destabilize it: “the semiotic, which also precedes [the thetic phase), constantly tears it open” (62). The semiotic "destabilizes" the symbolic by loading into it the movement of skittering drive-energy refusing to remain in place. It tends to appear within it as musical and poetic distortions, disturbances, and deviations. Any time a clear boundary in the symbolic is transgressed or “sutured over" by an articulatory effect—in a pun, for instance, when two (or more) semantic differences are generated by a single articulation, or in rhyme, when the meanings of two words are brought forcefully together because of their similarity of sound—one can see the tension between symbolic and semiotic at work. The return of the semiotic, however, must not be considered a "failure" of the symbolic. Because the semiotic returns, it does not mean the thetic break has not been posited strongly enough and thus is in danger from a semiotic "dismantling.” On the contrary, the second return of drive-energy in signification is precisely attributed to a forceful instantiation of the thetic, not a weak one: "the semiotic's breach of the symbolic in so-called poetic practice can probably be ascribed to the very unstable yet forceful positing of the thetic" (62). The semiotic always comes to us after the thetic break (68). Likewise, the second return of the semiotic should not be thought of as the negation of the thetic, but as a going beyond: "this explosion of the semiotic in the symbolic is far from a negation of a negation, an A ufhebung that would suppress the contradiction generated by the thetic and establish in its place an ideal positivity, the restorer of pre-symbolic immediacy. It is instead a transgression of position, a reversed reactivation of the contradiction that instituted this very position” (69). Poetic language is simultaneously open to and yet not totalized by symbolic meaning (81). Poetic play is possible only in the "beyond" of the symbolic, in the emergence on its other side in a space of possibilities open simultaneously to boundaries, things, borders, and to that which pulverizes those very boundaries, things, and borders. It is thus possible to identify the semiotic and symbolic not just diachronically, as stages in the self's emergence through the maternal space into subjectivity, but also synchronically, as two distinct modalities in subjectivity and signifying practice. And it is the chora that lies at the root of both operations. As it passes through the thetic break on the one hand, it becomes subjectivity. As it passes through it on the other hand, it becomes signification. In both operations, a re-emergence of the semiotic is neces-

sary. Properly accomplished, the resurgence of the semiotic in the symbolic produces selfhood at the intersection of affective and structural "inscriptions" and language as such at the intersection of the dual "discursive strategies" of semiotic and symbolic. This helps us to see the extent to which selfhood—and material body—is implicated in language. Both selfhood and language are spaces of "fixity" and "unfixity": spaces parceled out, on the one hand, first by the rudimentary structurings of the chora and then by the harder edges of the symbolic and yet sutured together, on the other, by the irruptions of drive-energy in the "returned" semiotic—two corresponding dynamics constituted at once by limits, boundaries, gaps, borders, and by blurrings, destabilizings, and bindings of all sorts. Selfhood is thus inextricable from language and both are rooted firmly in the body, at the intersection of semiotic and symbolic. That for selfhood to take shape a firm symbolic is required has been a concern for many feminist critics of Kristeva, who argue that by making the "paternal" symbolic the sine-qua-non of selfhood Kristeva makes it politically impossible to criticize patriarchal social formations. It is important to address this concern for what it tells us about the nature of the symbolic—and especially what it is not. The criticism frequently levied against Kristeva is that if the symbolic is both paternal and envisioned as necessary for selves as such to exist, her theories can only lead to a "pessimistic" view of selfhood, one for which patriarchal economies reign supreme. Thus Dorothy Leland charges that "the political pessimism engendered by [Kristeva's) view can be expressed as the claim that the Oedipal structuring of subjectivity is "total"—i.e., once in place, we cannot escape the identificatory oppositions circumscribed by patriarchal representations and gender categories."9 But the symbolic, as simply a structure of differences, cannot be linked to specific "patriarchal representations." Or, rather, it would be more correct to say that the symbolic must be linked to ALL social and cultural institutions, "patriarchal" or otherwise, for no ideology or set of representations can be any less predicated on differences—on naming things, on using words—than others. The symbolic as Kristeva conceives it is nothing more than the most fundamental of heuristic maneuvers: distinguishing one thing from another. As such, it is common to all epistemologies—not just to selected ones.10 By way of summing up, two points deserve to be stressed. First, the Kristevan conception of entry into language represents the relation between the semiotic and symbolic as motivated not arbitrary. That is, the symbolic realm is conceived to emerge out of the semiotic, not to be something alien to it that suddenly comes out of nowhere and represses it. In her view the semiotic can be said to give way to the symbolic as the chora's distinctive ebb and flow emerges into the more clear-cut units and gaps that constitute the symbolic. In its drive-energy, the chora already contains a proto-subject constantly being gathered and released in the body's fluctuations. In its aspect as maternal space, it is therefore properly a threshold to selfhood and language. Signs and symbolic relations are not for her only arbitrary and

alienating structures as they are for other theorists. In many ways they correspond to the demands of our own bodies. They are not simply something foisted onto us from without, but arise out of deep-seated, instinctual compulsions to separate, push away. Simply said, we do not always want to bury ourselves in Mommy and the plenitude her body implies. At times are bodies reject—babies do spit the breast out, after all, when they have had enough—and it is this instinctual action which prepares the way for the thetic break and thus for signs and symbol-making. In this respect, our bodies can be said to "program" the symbolic, and the relation can never be labeled arbitrary. Secondly, selfhood and language are understood to emerge together and be proofs of one another. Since the thetic break founds the separations that permit the establishment of the symbolic, both language and a subjective sense of self come into existence together. For Kristeva, therefore, a "transcendental" subject can never be said to precede language and control it. Neither, however, can a pre-existing language-system be said to precede and control selfhood.11Both emerge simultaneously from a common matrix. They are shown to be indissolubly linked, as Kristeva's constant interweaving of terms indicates: "thetic signification is a stage attained under certain precise conditions during the signifying process, and ... it constitutes the subject without being reduced to his process precisely because it is the threshold of language" (44-5, emphasis mine). Indeed, to constitute one is to constitute the other; and to put one in jeopardy is to jeopardize both. The Tropes: Castration, Mourning, Ecstasy It remains now to consider whether the entry into language is a good or bad thing. While it might seem odd to frame the question that way, it is of the utmost importance that we consider the affective consequences of entry into language, for it is with the emotions of this event that we enter into the realm of literary representation of self and selfhood. It will be a central assertion of this dissertation that works of medieval literature tell the story of entry into language along lines similar to those of Kristeva, but that they do so from a number of what we might call affective clusters, or emotional "tropes." Entry into language can be euphoric, for example—a joyful and desirable thing. But it can also be painful and saddening. In the literature, these emotions appear to group themselves in three main tropes of castration, mourning, and ecstasy. Since entry into language is the advent of the awareness of differences— the sudden awareness of individual things—it is partly, and can be envisioned from one perspective to be, a kind of castration. Entry into language cuts the distinctiveness of the semiotic chora into pieces—that is, fractures it into pieces to make sharp-edged difference. Not only is the maternal space of ebb and flow thus shattered into such things as doggies, balls, kitty-cats, and self, but also that self is further shattered into a hodgepodge

of discrete sensations, secretions, limbs, abjections—perhaps unified, perhaps not. From this perspective, the experience, on some level, cannot be other than painful bewildering, and frightening—a forced and truly undesirable split from the cherished maternal space. The trope of castration represents the story of entry into language principally from this viewpoint. It draws on images of pain, bewilderment, and terror, and the advent of the thetic is depicted as a shocking and painful event, the maternal space a desirable and soothing presence. In addition, since the entry into language also involves the awareness of having lost, it is equally mournful. The disappearance of the mother's body means its loss to the child, the advent of an intolerable space between, a parting as powerful and final as death. The child must work through the loss of its whole self/world to objectivity. Thus, entry into language can also be told in terms of grief, regret, and sorrow. In contrast to the castrative trope that depicts the advent of the symbolic as the visitation of pain upon the body of a proto-subject, the melancholic trope depicts it merely as a predominant sense of loss that leaves the proto-subject passively exposed and terribly vulnerable. In the melancholic trope, the symbolic is acceded to only reluctantly. It is not a thing to be feared, as in the other, but rather the only thing remaining to the one having been left. Finally, since entry into language also means the instantiation of a capable, acting self in a world of things, it is also ecstatic: delightful, desirable, and empowering. The advent of the symbolic not only makes possible self and self-agency in an open combinatorial system but also permits the second return of semiotic functioning that we have seen is associated with emotional expression and the complex articulation of musical and poetic practices. Play as such is born—as is the playful subject. The ecstatic trope tells of entry into language in terms of joy, celebration, and pleasure. In this trope, in contrast to the prior two, the maternal space is the undesirable thing: not beholden to system, form, structure, it appears arbitrary, tyrannical, and despotic. The symbolic is the "good guy" here, a godsend promising stability and permanence in the world of precariousness. It is important to reiterate here that these three characterizations or tropes of what it means to be a self are not three separate components. The tropes are mutually inclusive—three windows into the same house. They are intended to be an approximate not absolute set of categories: sorrow, of course, is painful, but pain can also be pleasurable, and pleasure sorrowful. Nevertheless I believe it is possible to specify a dominant trope which functions (a la Northrop Frye) as a "keynote” for a particular text. Still, any single narrative of selfhood stands to contain a combination of these tropes, and in the readings that follow, I have indicated places where I think alternate tropes exist, in the Prioress's Tale, for instance, although it is clearly dominated by images of castration, there is a brief vision of the ecstasy of the 144,000 virgins dancing around the Celestial Lamb in joy—this is clearly another "snapshot" of selfhood, the other side of the little clergeoun's

painful entry into language. Likewise, although the Offering of the M agi is ultimately ecstatic in its portrayal of the pleasures of subjectivity, it is clearly reminiscent of the twin opening scenes of the two Shepherd plays that depict battered and sorrowful selves frustrated by the poverty and mutability of the world of things. The tropes are thus not intended to institute a set of pigeon-holes for classifying medieval narratives of selfhood. And they are not only operative at the level of individual works. Entire genres can have a dominant trope (as I argue Miracles of the Virgin do, in chapter 2), as may individual works, and even episodes within individual works. The tropes are discoverable in isolated threads in the course of works about other matters, in distinct narrative blocks, and even in the consistent use of a particular set of images within larger works. The Language of System/Affect Kristeva's formulation of entry into language stems mainly from Freud and Lacan. Since the work of Lacan has been so prevalent in recent years, it remains to consider, as a coda to this chapter, how a "Kristevan" approach compares and contrasts with a "Lacanian" approach. The Lacanian approach to questions of selfhood tends to stress the relation between the general and particular.12 Lacan was profoundly influenced by the structuralism of Ferdinand Saussure and Claude Levi-Strauss, for whom the operative principle of social functioning was the distinction between a general law or pattern and a particular instance of that law or pattern, or between langue and parole. It has long been recognized that Lacan's contribution to the study of subjectivity has been the combining of these terms with principles of Freudian psychoanalysis. Simply said, for Lacan we are selves to the extent we activate our double nature as generalized subjects committed to various social roles on the one hand and as particularized bodies that can never be reduced to those roles on the other. Since our embodiedness is particular, it can never entirely be contained by the generalized roles that subjectivity demands of us. A residue of contingency always remains, undermining, or subverting, ourselves as "subjects." This approach thus tends to beget a vocabulary of subversion/containment. Social roles are typically described as "constraining” or "distortive" in respect of some irreducible particularity. Lacanian readings tend to demonstrate how selfhood, properly described, is a struggle between an "undetermined" particularity on the one hand and some system of generalizations (be they grammatical, biological, or social) on the other. This language of "particular bodies" and "general roles" that underlies Lacan is an important theme in recent methodological approaches to medieval literature. New Historicism, feminism, queer theory, Marxism, and others are concerned to one degree or another with the ideas of social roles and how such roles determine "subject positions” for particular bodies.

These methodologies have developed a supple vocabulary for discussing the processes and nature of this determination. The forays into medieval formulations of selfhood currently being carried out in medieval studies tend to turn on this particular/general dyad. Thus Lee Patterson, in his recent Chaucer and the Subject of H istory, uses the vocabulary of particular/general to situate pilgrims in their social context: "the pilgrims are usually conceived less as objects whose particularity is to be detailed than as subjects...."13The Prioress is a "subjectivity caught between the demands of two conflicting social definitions of femininity, those of nun and courtly lady."14 H. Marshall Leicester, in his Disenchanted Self, talks of "institutional structures" set over against "concrete and individual activity." For Leicester, particular "subjects" are caught up in the twin generalizing "institutions" of male-dominated power structures and of conventions of story-telling. What is represented in the C anterbury Tales, he says, “is the encounter of subjects, the narrating pilgrims ... with institutions, the stories they tell."15The W ife of Bath's Prologue is thus a "public” performance in opposition to "private" experiences: "beyond and behind the public, necessarily caricatured feminism of the 'apert' narration there is a set of 'privy' experiences."16 Likewise, Louise Fradenburg places the concept of particularity and the "relatedness" of particulars at the center of her writings on medieval subjectivity. In Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, for example, she is critical of attempts (both by critics and indeed by Chaucer himself) to make mourning function to smooth over the Black Knight's lost by "asserting the eternity of undifferentiated community."17His generally-commended "good" mourning, which strives to transcend loss for the good of the community, is opposed to Alcyone's "bad" mourning which refuses to do precisely that. The result is that Alcyone "comes to represent something like individuality indifference as opposed to the good of the community.”18 There is no question that an approach that emphasizes particular and general is a powerful way to engage medieval subjectivity. The medievals themselves regularly talked about the experience of selfhood as a fusion of contingent and universal. For example, the scholastic discourse of essence ("being") and existence ("being" at a level modified by accidents) contains just such a dichotomy. However, two major criticisms can be levied against a particular/general approach to questions of selfhood—criticisms that can be articulated best against Lacan's work, so let us take them up there. The first is that Lacan fails to account for the presence of drives and drive-energy. That is, despite its focus on the particularity of the body, it loses sight of the materiality of the body. For Lacan, our bodies serve only to place us in a here and now—a here and now admittedly subversive of various grammatical, social, and gendered subject positions—but one essentially divorced from its own internal rhythms and pulsations. What defines the emergence into the symbolic order for the Lacanian subject at the convergence of particular and general is not a transfiguration of drive-energy during castration, but its repression or loss. According to Kelly Oliver, "the onset of the Lacanian

subject is completed at the cost of repressing drives”; there is ”no access to drives themselves."19 Thus methodologies of selfhood predicated on the particular/general dyad such as Lacan's are unable to explain how drives make it into the symbolic—or even whether they do at all: "Lacan's account of desire covers over its relationship to the semiotic body, full of drives, out of which it comes.”20This is not to mean that repressed drives are inaccessible for Lacan, but simply that the realm of drives (Kristeva's semiotic) is altogether other to that of the symbolic. This leads to the second major criticism, that the relation between driveenergy and symbolic systems is always, and can only be always, arbitrary. A severe and distinct break exists between the realm of materiality (that is, the realm of Lacan's "real"), the realm of the "imaginary” (the primitive stage of subjectivity otherwise known as the "mirror stage”) and the "symbolic” (the final stage of the fully-established subject-position). Consequently, the materiality of drive-energy or linguistic utterance has no direct bearing on subjectivity or language. Signs may as well be one thing or another: there is no motivated connection as we have seen in Kristeva. According to Kaja Silverman, "the definitive criterion of the signifier [for Lacan | is that it abandon all relation to the real, and take up residence within a closed system of meaning, not that it partake of a given materiality.”21 The end result is that social and linguistic roles are always alienating and antagonistic to our inner motions, never complementary. The realm of the "real" for Lacan serves only to "disrupt” or "resist” or "refuse" the roles of subject-positions. Notes lonathon Scott Lee, "the real, then, stands 'behind' the reality constituted in and by our use of language and only hints at its operative presence in the variety of failures or ruptures or inconsistencies that mark this symbolic reality”; "the body cannot quite dwell in language ... that this 'touch of the real' may be confused with madness or sin suggests, once again, the distinctly Lacanian notion of the real as that which fails to conform to the signifying structures of language, which disrupts all coherence, and which refuses to be subsumed under any closed notion of possibility or reality.”22 Simply said, Lacan's approach, like so many others, is unable to explain how drive-energy may be complementary to social formations, only how it is surplus, residual, resistant.23 In contrast, the Kristevan discourse of semiotic and symbolic stresses the relation not between the general and particular but between system and affect. For Kristeva, particular utterances are already, by definition, symbolic, for they are enmeshed within positionality and a logic of difference (one makes this utterance in order to mean this). Though particular, they are already given to the processes of differentiation that come to us after the thetic break. Thus while the idea of generality corresponds closely with her notion of the symbolic, particularity as such can be said to encompass both her symbolic and semiotic. Rather, by reconceiving the dynamic of subjectivity in terms of semiotic and symbolic rather than general and particular, language and selfhood can be depicted as the struggle between elements

that parcel out—gaps, separations, forms, systems, and structures—and the rhythmic elements of their materiality that hark back to the pre-verbal ordering of the chora—sounds swelling one into another across indeterminate borders. Thus Kristeva is able to reintroduce the ebb and flow of driveenergy back into language and selfhood. It becomes possible to consider subjectivity and signification not just as predicated on loss or repression (though clearly lack is one element in the dynamic of entry into language, and the dominant element in our trope of mourning) but also as the completion of our inwardness pushing outward for expression.24 Rather than entry into language meaning the loss of drives, for Kristeva it means their transfiguration across the thetic break into a different order.25Rhythmic drives are not so much repressed by as emergent into the boundaries and borders of the symbolic. Instead of being what disrupts or refuses or resists the symbolic, the body's inner motions also (and it is an also, not an on the other hand) support, beget, and uphold. Simply said, Kristeva's work helps explain more adequately than other formulations of subjectivity the sense that systems and structures of the social contract are not totally alienating but have their beginnings in “inner" impulses pushing for expression.26 The result is a highly satisfactory account of the triple relation of material language, the physical body, and a sense of selfhood—and one particularly suited for the Middle Ages with its delight in systems of all kinds and its fascination with the body. It is typical of the Middle Ages that it speaks of "delightful circles" (Byrhtferth of Ramsey, c. 1000, w ynsum a circul) and “rejoicing in continence” (Bede, continentia gaudebant). For Remigius of Auxerre, in his commentary (c. 905) on Martianus Capella's De nuptiis Philologiae (a popular commentary in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and one almost certainly read by the Sem iram is poet), the body's processes are not other to system but are systems themselves: the nine officia of the human voice, for instance—the tapping of the four teeth, the reverberation of the two lips, the percussion of the tongue, the echoing in the throat, and the aid of the lungs—are a correspondence, within the body, of such external orders as the nine Muses and the nine planetary spheres.27 Since for Kristeva subjectivity and signification are conceptualized as motivated rather than arbitrary, her theories, better than others, provide a vocabulary for talking about this medieval sense of the symbolic emerging out of the rhythms of the physical body not necessarily in opposition to it. Also, it places the body as a physical and carnal fact back of the center of self and language—the body as a "sounding board” for text and life. What remains unaccounted for in general-and-particular approaches like Lacan's is that they downplay the role of drive-energy and thus the rhythm and motion we know to be meaningful part of the experience of a subjective sense of self in performances of embodied speaking, writing, and living. On all levels, selfhood and language are twin textures of ebb and flow grounded in drive-energy. Patterns of accented and unaccented syllables in language, the down and upbeats of tempo, the "rhythm" of black word-forms

and white the spaces between them, patterns in letter configurations, the presence and absence at the heart of symbolization, the fulfillment of a dependent clause by its main clause—these are all palpably registering rhythmicities felt in and upheld by the chora. But just as palpably felt are the rhythms we experience as selves functioning in the world: the rhythms of justice, for instance—the down and upbeats of injury and compensation—or those of sin and confession. The story of Gawain and the Green Knight turns precisely on an issue of injury and compensation; the C anterbury Tales is constructed around the idea of a journey out and back; even such a small image as the one used by Innocent III to talk about his desire to escape for a few “little hours" from his multiple worldly occupations to meditate on divine laws—"tide-waters do not run in from the sea that have not run out from the sea"—also employs just this sense of the rhythm at the heart of existence.28 Examples could be endlessly multiplied. Kristeva's vocabulary gives us a framework for talking about these formulations in medieval thought, especially as they concern the body and embodied affect. A Kristevan reading will thus tend to demonstrate, broadly speaking, how language and selfhood are suspended between affective ebb and flow on the one hand and a systematic logic of separation on the other. It posits selfhood as an unstable structure of difference contingent on the ebb and flow of language's materiality. Simply said, selfhood wavers as language wavers—and vice versa. The surface of language cracks with rhymes, chimes, puns, and other articulatory effects to create affective indeterminacies within otherwise clearly-defined formal differences. Selfhood, too, cracks with mourning, sadness, and joy in the same drama of indeterminacy and difference. The readings that follow thus concentrate on “narratives of selfhood" in which these issues of entry into language are most crucial and achieve their most pointed development. I call "narrative of selfhood" any narrative that concerns a self taking its place within the social contract. Such narratives are familiar to readers of literature in all eras—from the obvious texts, such as Bildungsromans like Great Expectations or A la recherche du temps perdu to the less obvious ones of, say, Restoration comedies like W a y of the W orld, which end with main characters becoming established members of society. “Narratives of selfhood" were no less a feature of the Middle Ages, finding their way into personal histories, confessions, saints' lives, mystical writings, lyrics, romances, Miracle of the Virgin stories, drama, allegories. In such works, the “social contract" is about as broadly defined as there are individual texts and means more “community" then specifically the social contract of city, court, or nation. Such communities might include those of profession, family, or even heaven (in saints' lives, for instance, the saints as martyrs seek to “enter into" the community beyond). Nor, it must be stressed, does entry into language suggest a one-time-only event. The drama of a subjectivity struggling to make distinctions—and fearing and mourning and rejoicing in the very distinctions that bring it into being—

must not remain tied to a developmental model. Entry into language is a process that occurs over and over again. The dialectic of semiotic and symbolic, as we have shown, is a continual process never completed and always in flux in both language and selfhood. Priests and kings as much as little children find themselves constantly having to discover—and rediscover— the demands and rewards of language and community. In addition, medievalists are especially fortunate to consider narratives of selfhood in manuscripts, for individual manuscripts are especially fertile places to glimpse the fixity and unfixity of the selfhood/language dyad. As material performances, manuscripts record the tension between semiotic and symbolic in a variety of ways. Texts containing a large number of manuscripts—Chaucer's Prioress's Tale, for example, in over seventy—reveal scribal struggles with syntactic instabilities, semantic waverings, lexical misgivings, and phonemic/graphemic ambivalences of all kinds. A single textual moment traced across multiple manuscripts reveals abundant mistakes, driftings, eyeskips and other uncertainties—uncertainties powerfully connected to subjectivity. Thus, in the readings that follow, individual manuscript pages become a privileged site of investigation—from the scribal slip "Frowarde and towarde'' in the Prioress's Tale for the accepted phrase "fro word to word," to the misspelling torribilis in Sem iram is, to the entire mise-en-scene of the Offering of the Wiagi in the Towneley MS. Such moments are telling instances of the precarious negotiations we continually carry out in performances of selfhood/language.29 Although Kristeva's work provides the framework and methodological grounding for the specific readings of texts to follow, it will be buttressed by a wide variety of interpretive strategies. The movements in literary criticism in this century have cultivated a supple vocabulary for talking about the material text, and it is with a close and determined reading of the words on the page made possible by this vocabulary that the inquiries of this book begin and end. The following chapters are thus liable to appear alternately as new critical, structuralist, formalist, post-structuralist, reader-responselike—even philological. Although differing from one another in particulars, these methodologies all agree, to some extent, that the space of language is a structure simultaneously fixed and unfixed. In their common appreciation of textual specifics—of grammatical structure, word order, sound pattern, syntax, rhyme scheme, alliteration, assonance, etc.—they provide a richly contrasting, but highly nuanced, way of talking about Kristeva's semiotic and how it emerges concretely in language. Kristevan theory is thus broadly of interest to literary critics because it alone is capable of extending formalist concerns to questions of subjectivity, that is, of bridging a philological/stylistic vocabulary concretely focused on language's fixity and unfixity with a psychological vocabulary of self and selfhood at the intersection of embodied affects and a realm of system, structure, and method. But it is especially of interest to medievalists because its focus on the materiality of selfhood and language—especially

as it emerges so intensely in individual discursive performances—makes it an ideal methodology for manuscripts, each of which is its own unique site of indeterminacy and difference. It is also important because, although not historical per se, such an approach begs the question of history. By reconceiving the dynamic among material texts, self-agency, and communities in terms of semiotic and symbolic, it lays a solid foundation for assessing the material manuscript cultures of the Middle Ages and especially how “textual communities” possessed and deployed material texts. 1plan to treat this question more fully in the conclusion, but suffice it for now to say what is particularly enabling about a Kristevan reading for medievalists is the way it grounds a rich psychoanalytic discourse in the materiality of manuscripts, and opens a passage between medieval discourses of selfhood and such fields as literature, rhetoric, philology, codicology, music, education, and more. Notes 1. For what follows, I draw mainly from R e v o lu tio n in P oetic L a n g u a g e , trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia UP, 1984); P o w ers o f H o rro r. A n E s s a y o n A b je c tio n , trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1982); T ales o f L ove, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1987); and B la c k S u n : D e p ressio n a n d M e la n c h o lia , trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1989). Although principally a modernist, Kristeva has frequently taken up topics of interests to medievalists, including the works of Ovid, Plotinus, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas, the "Stabat Mater,” and the troubadours of the twelfth century, all in T ales o f L o v e ; the semiotic of Old and New Testament abomination and abjection in Powers o f Horror; and the Paintings of Giotto and Giovanni Bellini in D esire in L a n g u a g e : A S e m io tic A p p r o a c h to L ite r a tu r e a n d A r t, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1980). The critical appraisal of Kristeva's work tends to focus overwhelmingly on her epistemology, feminism, and politics, not so much on her poetics, which I am doing here. Of current book-length critical treatments, John Lechte Julia K r iste v a (London: Routledge, 1990) is a general introduction to her concepts and terms tracing especially her debt to Lacan, and Kelly Oliver R e a d in g K r is te v a : U n ra v e lin g th e D o u b le B in d (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993) is a careful consideration of her work and feminism. For a bibliography, see Joan Nordquist, Julia K r iste v a (Santa Cruz: Reference and Research series, 1989) as well as Oliver 203-4, 208-12. Citations to Kristeva's books will be located in the body of the text. 2. "We must emphasize that 'drives' are always already ambiguous, simultaneously assimulating and destructive; this dualism, which has been represented as a tetrad or as a double helix, as in the configuration of the DNA and RNA molecule, makes the semiotized body a place of permanent scission” (Kristeva, R e v o lu tio n 27). It must be noted here that Kristeva's dense, uncompromising, and ever-shifting language makes it difficult to quote her succinctly, for every specialized term or concept one hopes to settle by quotation invariably gives rise to two or three others in need of settling in turn. I have therefore chosen throughout the chapter to keep quota-

tions to a minimum in the body of the text and shift them rather to the notes for more expansive treatment. 3. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 49. 4. "Though deprived of unity, identity, or deity, the chora is nevertheless subject to a regulating process, which is different from that of symbolic law but [that) nevertheless effectuates discontinuities by temporarily articulating them and then starting over again and again" (Kristeva, Revolution 26). The term distinctive will be used in this chapter to signify a rhythm or segmentation not yet broken into outright differentiation—that is, a non-separated variation within a continuum rather than contrast between clearly separated entities. It is associated with the "segmentation" within the chora. The term difference will be reserved to indicate the state of one clearly separated unit over against another that is characteristic of the symbolic. 5. If the chora is not yet a "thing," what is the ontological status of the term chora itself? The criticisms by Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans Alan Bass (Chicago, U of Chicago P, 1988) turn on this question (see 75, 106 n 39). For Kristeva, the wording is necessary to make the concept intelligible even though it turns what is essentially a "rhythm" into a "container": "once named, it immediately becomes a container that takes the place of infinitely repeated separatability. This amounts to saying that this repeated separatability is 'ontologized' the moment a name or word replaces it, making it intelligible" (Kristeva, Revolution 239 n 13). 6. In conceiving subjectivity to be the moment when a chora suddenly perceives itself separated, Kristeva's approach differs from those that are more constructivist in character—i.e., for which subjectivity is inextricable from social and historical contexts. The difference is significant, especially in regards to work being done in medievalism. For example, for Peter Haidu in his recent Subject of Violence: The Song of Roland and the Birth of the State (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993) selfhood is a function of State and State Apparatuses. For Haidu it is improper to speak of "subjects" or "subjectivity" before about the year 1050 when the various Western tribes were first consolidating into nation-states (see chapter 10). In contrast, I begin from a psychoanalytic standpoint and consider as "subject" any psyche that comes to selfawareness or self-articulation regardless of social contexts. This is not to say that psychoanalysis and constructivist approaches to not meet at some point or that it does not make a great deal of difference which social contexts the psyche comes to self-awareness in, but simply that, at its deepest roots, psychoanalysis posits a core human nature prior to socialization—even if it is a nature constituted by nothing more than lack—and that certain psychic processes are universal. On the question of generalizing in psychoanalysis, see Kristeva's comments in "Julia Kristeva in Conversation with Rosalind Coward," Desire, ICA Documents 1 (1984): 24. These comments are not to mean that I (or Kristeva) equate selfhood only with self-awareness—that is, only with what a psyche is conscious of concerning itself. Rather, selfawareness is the beginning of a subject's struggle with what it knows about itself and what it does not know, what it can control and not control. Without at least a nominal sense of "I," the pressures of the sub- and unconscious have no meaning or consequences.

7. "[Enunciation) requires an identification; in other words, the subject must separate from and through his image, from and through his objects. This image and [these] objects must first be posited in a space that becomes symbolic because it connects the two separated positions, recording them or redistributing them in an open, combinatorial system" (Kristeva, Revolution 43). 8. In the return of the semiotic, language "tends to be drawn out of its symbolic function (sign-syntax) and is opened out with semiotic articulation; with material support such as the voice, the semiotic network gives 'music' to literature" (Kristeva, Revolution 63). What is meant by music here is obviously not the idea of musical compositions but rather the tangible effects of language's being spoken, written, or gestured. Tied to drive energy, the music of the semiotic is not yet or is too fragile to be structurable. Rather, it is the phenomenal qualities of volume, timbre, pitch and intonation— perhaps style of gesture in sign languages— that ebb and flow throughout language in ways specially understood to be associated with the body and its movements. To this extent I follow the meaning of "music” that Justice George Lawler, in his Celestial Pantomime (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979), notes has been long held in poetics, "the undefinable and ineffable elements in all communication . . . which communicate through, over, and beyond the lexical statement as such" (9-10). 9. "Lacanian Psychoanalysis and French Feminism: Toward an Adequate Political Psychology," Hypatia 3.3 (1989): 99. A reply to such charges has been adequately handled by Ewa Ziarek, "At the Limits of Discourse: Tracing the Maternal Body with Kristeva," Hypatia 7.2 (1992): 91-108. 10. If this seem s disingenuous on my part to imagine such a thing as a neutral set of distinctions (that naming is not political in its very act of categorizing), I ask the reader to keep in mind that Kristeva's symbolic is not a particular set of distinctions but rather the logic of distinction. No epistemology can proceed (feminine ecriture notwithstanding), without at least som e nominal sense that som e things are different from other things. The words of Umberto Eco concerning metaphor are relevant here: "the success of a metaphor is a function of the sociocultural format of the interpreting subjects' encyclopedia. In this perspective metaphors are produced solely on the basis of a rich cultural framework, on the basis, that is, of the universe of content that is already organized into networks of interpretants, which decide (semiotically) upon the identities and differences of properties" (from "Metaphor, Dictionary, and Encyclopedia," qtd. in Martin Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture, 'Grammatica' and Literary Theory 350-1100 [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994] 511 n 6). This quote is instructive for the distinction it makes between two levels of meaningmaking. Although no one could disagree that every culture does indeed establish a "network of interpretants" and decides semiotically which things are indeed "things," nevertheless they all require the logic of "thingness," which Eco means here by "properties," the quality of being one's own. It is this most basic of heuristic maneuvers that is at stake in Kristeva's conception of the thetic break and entry into language. 11. "Modern philosophy recognizes the right to represent [that] the founding thesis of signification (sign and/or proposition) devolves upon the transcendental ego. But only since Freud have we been able to raise the question not of the origin of this

thesis ther a phase 12.

but rather the process of its production.... Such a standpoint constitutes neireduction of the subject to the transcendental ego, nor a denial of the thetic that establishes signification" (Kristeva, Revolution 44-5). For an account of structuralism's impact on Lacan, see Jonathan Scott Lee, Jacques Lacan Twayne's World Author Series 817 (Boston: Twayne, 1990), chapter 2, "The Family and the Individual." Accessible introductions to the difficult work of Lacan are available in Lee as well as Richard Boothby, Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan's Return to Freud (New York: Routledge, 1991). A book-length consideration of Lacan's account of subjectivity in relation to language is provided by Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford UP, 1983). Of Lacan's own work, see Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977) and The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978). Lacan is notoriously difficult to read; I have therefore opted to quote more accessibly from secondary sources. 13. (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991) 30. 14. Patterson, Chaucer 30. 15. Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990) 21, 24. 16. Leicester, Disenchanted Self 157. 17. "Voice Memorial: Loss and Reparation in Chaucer's Poetry," Exemplaria 2.1 (1990): 185. Fradenburg's writing on medieval self and selfhood take place in the midst of a wide range of topics, including discourses of mourning in Chaucer, the imagination of city-scapes in early sixteenth-century Scottish urban documents, and even the current state of medievalism. See especially her book-length study, City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991). 18. Fradenburg, "Voice Memorial" 190. 19. Oliver, Reading Kristeva 32. 20. Oliver, Reading Kristeva 32. According to Kristeva, "Lacan located idealization ji.e., the mirror stage) solely within the field of the signifier and of desire (the symbolic); he clearly if not drastically separated it from narcissism as well as from drive heterogeneity and its archaic hold on the maternal vessel" (Tales of Love 38). Lacan's so-called "captation" of drives, the separating off of the symbolic from the realm of materiality, has been widely noted by other critics. Thus Kaja Silverman: "Within the Lacanian argument the signifier is the mark of the subject's radical alienation from the real" (The Subject of Semiotics 164), Lacan's "real" being the realm of drives and drive-energy. Also, Jonathan Scott Lee.- "the transition from imaginary individuality [i.e., the mirror stage] to symbolic universality |i.e., subjectivity) marks another level of alienation in the human being, a level of alienation that builds upon the earlier alienation grounded in the beance [gapj between the infant's lived experience of the 'fragmented body' (the "real"| and her assumption of a unified imaginary identity in the mirror stage" (Jacques Lacan 20). 21. Silverman, Subject of Semiotics 164. 22. Lee, Jacques Lacan 136,154. 23. Such a view of the antagonistic relation between bodies and system is perva-

sive in recent approaches to the body in medieval literature. Thus Linda Lomperis, "Unruly Bodies and Ruling Practices: Chaucer's Physician's Tale as Socially Symbolic Act" Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993): "The Physicians Tale, I would argue, finally reveals these and all such gestures of control for what they are: band-aid gestures amidst the forces of bodies, unruly bodies, that will not simply be governed by the prevailing institutionalized ruling practices" (33). I hope, however, 1 have made it clear that I find in these formulations a host of unexamined assumptions about how or why bodies should be conceived to be so relentlessly opposed to structure or why we should assign to bodies disrupting forces (e.g., "unruliness") that might more accurately be connected with, say, consciousness. One of the great unwritten works of medieval scholarship, it seem s to me, is an examination of the relation between the body and the will in medieval discourses of selfhood. One of the places to start, in fact, might be Confessions 8.8-10, where Augustine, narrating his struggle in the garden to commit himself to continency and noting how he tore his hair and hammered his forehead, reflects on why his bodily actions were obedient to the "slightest wish of his mind" but his will wasn't. 24. Oliver: "Kristeva suggests that lack alone cannot motivate a move away from the maternal body and into language. She argues that material rejection is the result of an excess even if it is also a loss. The separation that is inherent in the body is experienced as pleasurable. She concludes that the logic of separation that is taken over in language is founded on pleasure as well as lack, or lack experienced as pleasure" (Reading Kristeva 33). 25. That drives are already given to biological and social "constraints" has been a source of confusion for Kristeva's critics. Almost everyone agrees that drives are already caught within the realm of the symbolic. In fact, Lacan distinguishes between "need" and "libido" which is raw drive-material on the one hand and drives themselves "essentially constituted 'in the field of the Other'" and "clearly shaped by cultural and symbolic factors" on the other (Lee, Jacques Lacan 150). For Kristeva, however, while it is true that drives are, as she says, "dictated by natural or sociohistorical constraints" and that the body is already "socialized," nevertheless "that social organization, always already symbolic, imprints its constraint in a mediated form which organizes the chora" (Revolution 26-27, emphasis mine). Drives, in other words, are not the chora, as we noted at the beginning of the chapter. Rather, it is their pressure that "articulates" the chora, but the chora itself is not broken into units of identity and difference that would make it symbolic. What Kristeva writes about sadness and affect in Black Sun, "Irreducible to its verbal or semiological expressions, sadness (like all affect) is the psychic representation of energy displacements caused by external or internal traumas" (21, emphasis hers), can be said about the chora (as Chapter 3 will argue, sadness or mourning represents a psychic state shifted away from the symbolic back towards the chora). Nevertheless, critics such as Judith Butler have accused Kristeva of trying to posit the chora as an imaginary "unmoved mover" and thus failing "to consider the way in which the law might well be the cause of the very desire is said to repress" ("The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva," Hypatia 3.3 (1989): 114). She goes on to say,

By restricting the paternal law to a prohibitive or repressive function Kristeva fails to understand the paternal mechanisms by which affectivity itself is generated. The law that is said to repress the semiotic may well be the governing principle of the semiotic itself, with a result that what passes as "maternal instinct" may well be a culturally constructed desire which is interpreted through a naturalistic vocabulary. And if that desire is constructed according to a law of kinship which requires the heterosexual production and reproduction of desire, then the vocabulary of naturalist affect effectively renders that "paternal law" invisible. What Kristeva refers to as a "pre-paternal causality" would then appear as a paternal causality under the guise of a natural or distinctively maternal causality. (115)

But Kristeva is not that schematic: the semiotic and symbolic exist in a dialectical relationship that privileges neither. "Each is,” in her own words, "the precondition for the other.” Thus, Kristeva would agree with the assertion that paternal law begets desire—this is a fairly familiar notion going back to at least Augustine— and indeed that the semiotic is relying on symbolic law for expression. But she would point out that desire—a state requiring the "loss" of something and situated clearly in the symbolic— is a relatively "late” or more complex development in the progress of the psyche and is not equatable with the semiotic chora— even though the affective pressures of the chora certainly make up part of the functioning of desire once the chora has emerged into subjectivity. The thetic break is at once a completion of something begun earlier and yet also something wholly different. When she talks about a "pre-paternal causality,” she is talking about a rudimentary logic of causality, but without there yet being any "things" capable of "causing" or "being caused.” 26. To some extent, Fradenburg's concept of relatedness comprises a question of affect—that is, the semiotic. As she points out in "Voice Memorial," one of the continuing issues of theories of mourning is the problem posed by the particularity of the lost object: "what makes grief agonizing is precisely that when som eone or something particular has been lost, it cannot recur” (182). This is a problem because, although we can move on in mourning to other objects of desire, this particular one has been lost and cannot be repeated. For Fradenburg, it is precisely because we have affective attachments with the particular object that mourning poses such a problem: "our capacity to particularize—to form particulars— is what allows objects of desire to become special, unique, irreplaceable" (183). 27. Remigius Autissiodorensis Commentum in Martianum Capellum, ed. Cora Lutz (Leiden: Brill, 1962) sec. 19.11. 28. Commentarium in Septem Psalmos Poenitentiales, ed.J. P. Migne, Patrologia Latina 217 (Paris: J. P. Migne, 1844-55) cols. 968-9. 29. My work both intersects with and diverges from the approach to the materiality of manuscripts promulgated by the "new philology.” This new methodology asserts, according to Stephen G. Nichols, "Introduction: Philology in a Manuscript Culture” Speculum 65 (1990): 1-10, "that the language of texts be studied not simply as discursive phenomenon but in the interaction of text language with the manuscript matrix and of both language and matrix with a social context and networks they inscribe" (9). My dissertation is similar to this kind of work in its concern for the

interaction of text language and manuscript matrix— in particular, for me, for the manuscript as a place of radical contingencies, of eye-skips, elisions, and variants of all kinds, which indicate the tensions between semiotic and symbolic and the negotiations of subjectivity. It diverges, however, as I will have many an occasion to note, in its avoidance of the social context. For more on the "new philology," see the special issue of Speculum 6 5 (1990), as well as the sampling of "new philological" work in The N ew M edievalism , ed., Marina S. Brownlee, Kevin Brownlee, and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1991).

Castration

Chaucer's P rio re ss’s T ale and John of Garland’s S te lla M a r is

"My infancy is long since dead, yet I am still alive." —Augustine, Confessions

The surface of language embodies a struggle between symbolic separations that parcel it out and semiotic instabilities that blur the separations and make them indeterminate. Suspended between fixity and unfixity, textual surfaces are precarious dramas of stability and instability enacted in the leap from word to word, line to line, sentence to sentence—risky sites of anticipation, disruption, and reconsolidation carried out in signification at its most concrete, material levels. This drama has a special meaning for Chaucer's Prioress’s Tale. The story of a little clergeoun who miraculously sings the hymn A lm a Redemptoris M ater is the story of a painful entry into language, a violent passage into a world of loss and absence, which is also the world of subjectivity and self-awareness. It, too, unfolds over a topography of stable and unstable thresholds—thresholds, moreover, associated with the semiotic and the maternal space. The sweetness of the A lm a Redemptoris M ater is a maternal space drawing the little clergeoun to the very threshold of the symbolic.1 Its semiotic—the fluidity of its melody, rhythm, and sounds—brings him sweetly to grammar and symbolic meaning, which is the knife that cuts him off, precipitates into the world of difference and separation. His murder is a castration that brings him into language and selfhood. Yet, the A lm a's re-emergence in that pain—it arises miraculously from his cut throat as he lies dying—is the semiotic re-emerging in the spaces of the symbolic to mitigate it, to protect him from its intolerably sharp edges. The Prioress's Tale is a predominantly castrative treatment of the story of becoming a subject: a proto-self's acquisition of language and selfhood saturated in images of fear, bewilderment, and pain. The recognition that we are alone in this world and that we have fundamentally impermeable limits, which at the same time they allow us to achieve a certain coherency and

purposiveness of action, nevertheless bar us, prohibit us, screen us off, make between ourselves and others intolerable and irrevocable spaces, is the stark and grievous trauma at the heart of the Prioress's Tale. The advent of the symbolic is too overwhelming to the little clergeoun. The tale's world is one of violent contrasts, austerity, and finality. It is a heavily symbolic world in the way we have defined it: constituted by difference. Consequently, the re-emergence of the semiotic maternal space in this world is a miracle, a godsend. In the castrative treatment of entry into language, the return of semiotic functioning in the spaces of the symbolic, otherwise a normal and natural consequence of becoming a subject, appears as a miracle of mitigation.2 In the Prioress's Tale, Mary and her hymn represent this miracle. *

*

*

In Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s C anterbury Tales, Bryan and Dempster observe that Chaucer modified his sources in reducing the age of the little clergeoun from ten years old to seven, thereby placing him in his very first term at school.3 Seven was widely considered in the Middle Ages to be a threshold year, especially in relation to the social contract. Roman law, for instance, held that seven was the age at which children were accountable for knowing right from wrong, and the sermons of Chaucer's time regularly report that children of age seven were responsible for the rudimentary elements of faith: the Credo, Pater Noster, and Ave Maria.4 At the outset of the tale, the little clergeoun teeters on the brink of entry into the symbolic. In attending school for the first time, he is making his initial forays into signs, symbol, and society. The tale's opening stanza characterizes this symbolic—a space of divisive social contrasts: Ther was in Asye, in a greet citee, Amonges Cristene folk a Jewerye, Sustened by lord of that contree For foule usure and lucre of vileynye, Hateful to Crist and to his compaignye; And thurgh the strete men myghte ride or wend, For it was free and open at eyther ende.

(7.488-94 )5 Schematically, the city is divided between the Jews and Christians, those who are foul and villainous and those who hate them, and the clergeoun's "litel scole of Cristen folk” stands precisely in the middle way, "doun at the ferther ende,” not yet a part of these differences. In schools of the Middle Ages, as mentioned in the Introduction, lan-

guage was first introduced in the heavily vocalized forms of reading and singing. Only later were sentences construed in the process of learning grammar. The materiality of language—its melodies, rhythms, and qualities of intonation and contour—served as a wellspring for the instruction of language's more systematic elements. In Chaucer's story the little clergeoun overhears the older children reciting from the antiphoner, a book of hymns for more advanced students, as he sits at his own prym er, or prim arium , an elementary first reader: This litel child, his litel book lernynge, As he sat in his scole at his prymer, He A lm a Redem ptoris herde synge, As children lerned hire antiphoner; (7.516-19)

More generally, the children learned at the school Swich manere doctrine as men used there, This is to seyn, to syngen and to rede, As smale children doon in hir childhede. (7.499-501)

Although the word doctrine had already come to mean by Chaucer's time a specific body of instruction or teaching, it retained its long-established use as the act of teaching. This makes clear the apparent parallelism of the phrases "swich manere doctrine" and "this is to seyn, to syngen and to rede,” implying that what is taught in the little school is much less accessible at this initial stage than how it is taught: children follow such manner of teaching that men used there, that is to say, to sing and to read. This phrasing clearly foregrounds the semiotic component of instruction over the symbolic. An indeterminacy in the phrase—it can also be read as a list ("that is, to say, to sing, and to read”)—enacts the instability of grammar for the little clergeoun. Certain, propositional meaning is not yet construable for him, and not yet construable in the passage itself. The Virgin Mary is clearly linked with this beginning state of language learning. Intercessor and mediatrix, Mary appears in places of transition. In relinquishing his mother and going to school, the little clergeoun discovers both m ater Mary and material language. One, in fact, hears Mar^ in prim ariu m . The first mention of the clergeoun's attendance at the little school dissolves into a description of his attention to "Cristes mooder.” Phyllis C.

Gage has shown that the syntax of the stanza appears to have been manipulated by Chaucer specifically to fuse the clergeoun's little school and his worship of Mary: a unification underscored by the echoing phrases "was his wone" and "hadde he in usage."6 Among thise children was a wydwes sone, A litel clergeon, seven yeer of age, That day by day to scole was his wone, And eek also, where as he saugh th'ymage Of Cristes mooder, hadde he in usage, As hym was taught, to knele adoun and seye His A ve M aria, as he goth by the weye. (7.502-8)

It is at the school, moreover, that the clergeoun first hears the hymn A lm a Redemptoris M ater, a lyric written in praise of the Virgin's mediating power and set to music as an antiphon. Not yet aware of the hymn's propositional meaning—"Noght wiste he what this Latyn was to seye" (7.523)—the clergeoun is drawn to it simply on account of the sweetness of its semiotic sounds and rhythms. He brings himself near to the place of the song: This litel child, his litel book lernynge, As he sat in his scole at his prymer, He A lm a Redem ptoris herde synge, As children lerned hire antiphoner; And as he dorste, he drough hym ner and ner, And herkned ay the wordes and the noote, Til he the firste vers koude al by rote. (7.516-22)

The meeting of little clergeoun and song is itself enacted on the material level of the passage in a complex and multi-layered pun: hym and hym n not only converge phonetically, /him/, but also graphically: hym becomes hym n drifting across the indeterminate space of "hym ner"—i.e., HYM.N(er). In fact, hym converges completely with ner to become hym ner, Middle English for hymn-book, synonymous with "antiphoner" (7.519). The convergence of hymn and clergeoun is thus a somatic event. His body draws nearer and

nearer, and he fixes by rote it sounds and melody: "the wordes and the noote.” The materiality of the hymn gets rooted in his own body—so much so that "he kan nat stynte of syngyng by the weye" (7.557). Hym becomes completely absorbed in h ym n —a union achieved on the tangible page with eye and ear. Moreover, the lexeme rote (7.522) can mean in Middle English either rote (i.e., he knew the first verse by memory) or root (he knew it "root and all”). The English word root, in fact, derives from the original IE stem *wort~ and is a variation of the ME word wort which had come to take on specialized meanings. But one need only hear the chime between wort and word to appreciate the complex series of echoes and evocations in this passage. This convergence of semantics and sounds in rote, root, wort, and word is an example of what poet )ohn Hollander calls "the fable of sound shift.”7 Etymologically, words may have nothing to do with each other, yet if they sound as if they do, they can come to take on what he calls a "genealogical” character and be associated in meaning as well as in sound. Such complex webs of semantic and phonemic relation helps to show the extent to which the semiotic and symbolic are inextricably interwoven. Moreover, there is probably a further pun on rote, which is also an ME word for a medieval musical instrument resembling a lyre. Chaucer himself uses the word in the Friar's portrait in the General Prologue, "Wei koude he synge and pleyen on a rote” (1.236). The pun accentuates the suggestions of music and melody in the passage. Only after having been drawn near to it on account of the sweetness of its language and having set about to memorize it does the little clergeoun desire to understand the more properly symbolic meaning of the song. He asks a schoolmate T'expounden hym this song in his langage, Or telle hym why this song was in usage; This preyde he hym to construe and declare Ful often tyme upon his knowes bare. (7.526-29)

The grammatical terms "expound,” "construe," and "declare” proclaim the clergeoun's request as an entry into the symbolic: he desires to know what the sounds stand for. Knowes bare, though talking about the little clergeoun's knees, cannot help but evoke issues of understanding (know and knee were both spelled knowe in Middle English and in Chaucer). In coming to the hymn then, the clergeoun becomes aware of his own bare knowledge—that, in short, he does not know. The shift from the A lm a's material sounds and rhythm to its more properly symbolic meaning is succored every step of the

way by Mary. His kneeling "upon his knowes bare" echoes his earlier having knelt before "th'ymage" of "Cristes mooder" (7.505-6). The sweetness and beauty of her song somehow make her known to him. Although pitched now toward the symbolic, the clergeoun's learning continues to be an acutely somatic event. He embeds it materially in his own body, singing it twice a day "thurgh his throte,” "acordynge with the note”— the rhyme helping there to bind up the identification: His felawe taughte hym homward prively, Fro day to day, til he koude it by rote, And thanne he song it wel and boldely, Fro word to word, acordynge with the note. Twies a day it passed thurgh his throte, To scoleward and homward whan he wente; On Cristes mooder set was his entente. (7.544-50)

For the little clergeoun, the A lm a's rhythmic motility, a twisted knot of affect and thought, is emerging into the discrete units of "word to word.” It is significant that the spelling of the little clergeoun's fellow (felawe) contains a hint of the world of Lawe to come. Equivocations, however, continue to keep the semiotic motility firmly in place. The hymn's progression "Fro word to word" is still an articulatory motion "froword toword” (fro-word to-word). In fact, in their listing of variants for the Prioress's Tale, Manly and Rickert note the MS now known as Rawlings Poet. 149 contains the phrasing "frowarde and towarde, according with the noote.”8 This variant tells us something about the ability of the surface of language to be indeterminately a thing both cut up and not cut: a surface dance of sound tenuously structured by symbolic breaks. There is no question that the Rawlings Poet. 149 variant "frowarde and towarde” is an error. Occurring only once in all of the extant C anterbury Tales manuscripts, it was neither inherited from any examplar nor bequeathed to any copy. All modern editors have chosen not to retain it: a patent example of eye-skip. But Garrett Stewart has recently shown that spaces between words are not nearly as stable as we take them to be.9 For example, in Milton's cataracts of Fire we hear also an angry God's cataracts of Ire; in serpent’s tongue we hear serpent stung. Stewart claims we elide sounds from one word to the next—"from word to word” as it were—articulating new "words" out of the concatenation of phonemes grouped at lexical borders, just as the scribe of Rawlings Poet. 149 has done. Lexical gaps for Stewart are "indeterminate middles,” at once separating words one from another in the unfolding of the signifying

chain, yet precisely on that account drawing them together into unexpected convergences. Though most clearly felt at the lexical level, indeterminate middles surely function on much broader levels of textual organization. Phrases, verselines, sentences, stanzas, even whole sections of narrative can blink and waver in the separation between otherwise determined ends, just such a moment, in fact, is the entire line "Fro word to word, acordynge to the note" that we have been considering. Pointed only by the shifting and tractable virgule,10 the dependent adverbial phrases that constitute the line can be said to belong conclusively to neither of the independent clauses that border it front and back. Thus the Hengwrt: His felawe taughte hym / homward priuely Fro day to day / til he koude it by rote And thanne he soong it / wel in boldely Fro word to word / acordyng with the note Twyes a day / it passed thurgh his throte To scoleward / and homward / whan he wente On Cristes moder / set was his entente"

Grammatically, syntactically, and intonationally, "Fro word to word acordyng with the note" could modify "And thanne he song it well and boldely," as an afterthought—i.e., he sang it boldly, from word to word according with the note. Or it could just as easily, by anticipation, modify "it passed thurgh his throte,”—i.e., from word to word according with the note, twice today, it passed through his throat. This instability is noted by modern editors Albert C. Baugh and John Fisher, both of whom, in what must otherwise seem as one of the strangest editing decisions in Chaucer scholarship, make the line its own sentence—though with neither subject or finite verb: His felawe taught hym homward prively, From day to day, til he koude it by rote, And thanne he song it wel and boldely. Fro word to word, acordynge to the note. Twies a day it passed thurgh his throte, To scoleward and homward whan he wente; On Christes mooder set was his entente.12

In short, Stewart suggests what scribal errors tend to confirm and what modern editors know by experience: that the surface of language is undecidably suspended, even when written down (maybe especially when written down), between symbolic and semiotic—that is, between stable structures of difference such as the separation of words in the unfolding of the sentence and the unstable materiality of language that can make these separations uncertain, blunt their sharp edges. In drawing him thus to the threshold of symbolic grammar and meaning, the A lm a Redemptoris Mater acts as a maternal space for the little clergeoun of the Prioress's Tale, bringing him sweetly to castration, the knife that cuts him off, separates him. The sweetness of its language and melody, its "wordes and the noote,” harbors him safely under the cloak of the maternal at the same time it draws him steadily on to his murder and mutilation—sweetly and merrily perhaps, but steadily nonetheless.13The sense of a guiding hand is unmistakable: As I have seyd, thurghout the Juerie, This litel child, as he cam to and fro, Ful murily than wolde he synge and crie O A lm a Redem ptoris everemo. The swetnesse of his herte perced so Of Cristes mooder that, to hire to preye, He kan nat stynte of syngyng by the weye. (7.551-57)

Embodying the enigmatic space of the semiotic, the sweetness of the hymn—Mary's sweetness—"pierces” the clergeoun before his throat is cut. The language allows simultaneously for piercing his heart, yet harboring that wound within its own split noun phrase ("the sweetness ... of Cristes mooder”), simultaneously transfixing him and yet sheltering him at the margins. That the hymn is a prelude to the "kitting” of his throat is captured in the peculiar phrasing that "Twies a day it passed thurgh his throat” (7.548).14 The Jews in the story aim specifically at cutting off the symbolic of the hymn, because they object to its sentence, which conflicts with their law's reverence. An equivocation in the word agayn (it means against as well as a gain) suggests the extent to which the hymn's symbolic meaning, or sentence, is already complicit with the logic of same and other characteristic of Law. But whether the hymn's sentence is other to the law's reverence (i.e., is against it) or it is the same (is it a gain) makes little difference. The awareness of Law is the product of castration:

Oure first foo, the serpent Sathanas, That hath in Jues heart his waspes nest, Up swal, and seide, "O Hebrayk peple, alias! Is this to yow a thing that is honest, That swich a boy shal walken as hym lest In youre despit, and synge of swich sentence, Which is agayn youre lawes reverence?"

From thennes forth the lues han conspired This innocent out of this world to chace. An homycide therto han they hyred, That in an aleye had a privee place; And as the child gan forby for to pace, This cursed Jew him hente, and heeld hym faste, And kit his throte, and in a pit hym caste.

I seye that in the wardrobe they hym threwe Where as thise Jewes purgen hire entraille. (7.558-73)

There is a castrative appropriateness to the murder. The voice box where breath is both shaped and broken to form words is targeted for the hymn's violent cutting-off and is laid open, ruptured. Fittingly, it is the AeBRAYK people that perpetrate this break, lust as the chora is initially lost in the cutting off of castration only to re-emerge later, the clergeoun's voice, akin to the semiotic, is swallowed by the gaping wound of his murder and disappears within intolerable spaces. The four parallel clauses of the last two lines strike in rapid succession, relying heavily on initial I d and / h i sounds: cursed, hym , hente, heeld, hym , kitte, his, hym , caste. All these are sounded in the back of the throat enacting the murder, as it were, in the reader's own body. The clergeoun's death is the precipitation into the abyss that suddenly emerges between things in the symbolic, the yawning emptiness that hedges subjects around in structures of difference. The word pit hails from the IE root *peu~, to cut, and thus is a fitting place for the clergeoun to be cast in this narrative of castration. Nor is the synonym wardrobe less fitting:

for as a precipitation into the symbolic, the clergeoun's death is a displacement for the coming-to-awareness of the world of signs and symbols that constitute his schooling: we hear word in wardrobe. The Hengwrt, in fact, contains the variant spelling wordrobe. The cut throat divorces the little clergeoun from all that went before. So complete is the splitting the narrative thread snaps. What more can be said? A series of apostrophes call out into absence. A collapse into metonymy ensues: John's apocalyptic vision of 144,000 virgins dancing at the throne of God. It might be noted that John's vision represents another side of entry into language. The advent of the symbolic is not, after all, inherently tragic, as we will have occasion to discuss more thoroughly in Chapter 4 when we talk about Wakefield Cycle. The emergence of language and identity is a complex event fraught with conflicting emotions. It is at painful and bewildering in the dismembering of a primordial whole and mournful in the sense of loss that that entails, but it is also joyous in the sudden unfolding of new and potentially limitless horizons for action. John's vision touches on this last, holding out the possibility of castration as a kind of redemption, an act that completes us, brings us before the origin and end of our desire, and allows us to get a purchase on ourselves. The symbolic of the Prioress’s Tale, in contrast, emerges strongly and without pity. The worldview of the Tale is a castrative one of austerity, starkness, and finality: a place of violent contrasts. Christians and Jews live hopelessly segregated; Jews are the worst of evil; Christians the best of good; exclamations of hatred, anger, and lamentation give way one to another with no seeping admixture. Transitions are uncomfortable and abrupt. Conflicting images are awkwardly associated: gems juxtaposed with filth; the "mouth of innocentz" with a "throat ykorven"; the excremental "pit besyde" with the "white Lamb Celestial"; the dismemberment and violence of mutilation with innocence and the tranquility of death. There is no middle ground in this world. Overly determined by difference, no room remains for the palliations and distinctiveness of the maternal space. Quite literally, the little clergeoun is lost to his mother; she cannot find him: "This poure wydwe awaiteth al that nyght / After hir litel child, but he cam not" (7.586-7). In this stanza, the nearness of the a- and b-rhymes (ogfit, -ygfit) serves to enact the widow's close hope she will find her son in familiar places—not ranging too far at first—until "finally" she comes to understand, in turning to places altogether other, that he has become lost her. The rhyme turns too, in emphasis: This poure wydwe awaiteth al that nyght After hir litel child, but he cam noght; For which, as soone as it was dayes lyght, With face pale of drede and bisy thoght,

She hath at scole and elleswhere hym soght, Til finally she gan so fer espie That he last seyn was in the Juerie. (7.586-92)

With "moodres pitee in hir brest” (7.593) she seeks her son. Moodres pitee contains another equivocation, holding within itself the pit that claimed the life of her child (Moodres PITee). An archetypal maternal space, on the one hand it contains that cutting-off (pit hails from an IE root meaning to cut, separate) and on the other it swaddles it at the margins: mother's pity providing a harbor for the subject on the way to separation. Too, moodres pitee not only chimes with the Jew's despit (7.563) but harbors across its lexical gap moodRES P\Tee, the ME and Chaucerian word respit, a delay or extension of time, that comes to the clergeoun by virtue of the maternal space: a momentary preservation from the partiality of the Father's world. Pit-despitpitee-respit: again, a sliding concatenation of chancy phonemes work to truss up the text, rustling a semiotic undercurrent of unexpected convergences from untrusting symbolic separations, tethering together widely separated moments. Miraculously, the clergeoun is sustained in this world by a miracle of the Virgin Mary. Having been deprived of his natal mother, another comes to him in this moment of loss to uphold him in the intolerable gaps that threaten him around. In the death and deathly gaps opened up in the passage into selfhood, he finds himself unexpectedly succored—protected in the maternal space constituted by Mary and the singing of her hymn. "My throte is kut unto my nekke-boon," he says: "and as by wey of kynde I sholde have dyed, ye, longe tyme agon. But Jesu Crist, as ye in bookes fynde, Wil that his glorie laste and be in mynde, And for the worship of his Mooder deere Yet may I synge 0 Alma loude and cleere.” (7.649-55)

Having once brought him to the verge of the symbolic, the A lm a now reemerges from within it and on account of it. The return of its sweetness is the semiotic re-emerging in the shattered symbolic to blunt sharp edges, produce an indeterminate middle of death and life. The space is exactly

identical with the materiality of his embodied singing: "The welle of mercy, Cristes mooder sweete, I love alwey, as after my konnynge; And when that I my lyf sholde forlete, To me she cam, and bad me for to synge This anthem verraily in my deyynge" (7.656-62)

Mary and material language are both maternal spaces re-emerging in the brutal separation between overdetermined ends—life/death, singing/silence. The clergeoun's voice box is at once ruptured and not ruptured, cut and not cut. The rhyme synge/deyynge captures perfectly the double nature of selfhood at the intersection of the semiotic and symbolic, of melody and death. The clergeoun has now come to understand the propositional content of the A lm a whose sweetness had been so desirable for him: Mary's ability to uphold her subjects in the afflictions that threaten to overwhelm them. “Succor" for "falling ones" who strive to “rise" is the feature precisely attributed to Mary in the Alm a: Alma redemptoris mater quae pervia caeli Porta manes et Stella maris succurre cadenti Surgere qui curat populo tu quae genuisti Natura mirante tuum sanctum genitorem Virgo prius ac posterius Gabrielis ab ore Sumens illud Ave peccatorum miserere.

[Nurturing mother of the Redeemer, you who remain the pervious portal of heaven and star of the sea, succor the falling ones, the people who strive to rise; you who bore, nature admiring, your Holy Begetter, virgin both before and after receiving that Ave from the mouth of Gabriel; have pity on sinners.)

The site of ambiguity and paradox and the pervious gateway to Heaven, the Virgin stands as a mediatrix at the threshold of two spheres, the fixity of the sky and the unfixity of the surging world. She is the soothing distinctiveness of the semiotic, a balm for symbolic wounds. The epithet Stella maris conveys this in a captivating image: the “star of the sea” is here as well as

there, mired in the flux and reflux of a worldly ebb and flow as well as bound firmly to the heavenly foundation—an image, moreover, not unwilling to capitalize on a pun: maris/M aria. As "virgin before and after" Mary does not represent a regress away from paternal separation but rather a going beyond to be restored again on separation's other side. The Latin phrase Virgo prius ac posterius embodies this concept in an equivocation: at the margins of PosteRIUS is again prius, an "after" also a "before." Now situated at the intersection of symbolic and semiotic, the clergeoun's somatic involvement with Mary and the singing of her hymn is complete. "Whan that I hadde songe,” he says, "Me thoughte she leyde a greyn upon my tonge": "Wherfore I synge, and synge I moot certeyn, In honour of that blisful Mayden free Til fro my tonge of taken is the greyn; And after that thus seyde she to me, 'My litel child, now wol I fecche thee Whan that the greyn is fro thy tonge ytake. Be nat agast, I wol thee nat forsake."' (7.663-69)

"Whan that I hadde songe" wavers momentarily in the reading as a complete thought, "when that I had (the) song," suggesting a final convergence of boy and hymn at the end of the process begun back when he "drough hym ner and ner." The clergeoun not only "has" the song symbolically but semiotically as well—for it is rooted inseparably, miraculously, in his body. Chaucer's story of the little clergeoun is the story of entry into the symbolic in three movements. The maternal space of the A lm a draws him to the threshold of castration; his murder projects him into a world of symbols, language, and selfhood; the sweetness of the A lm a re-emerges at castration's other end, a miracle of continuity in the place of truncation. This return of the semiotic in the intolerably hollow gaps of the symbolic is the miracle of the Prioress's Tale. As subjects, we cannot survive in an unmitigated symbolic world: it separations are too severe; its severations too final. Our bodies themselves urge a subjectivity rooted not just in the breaks of the symbolic that establish us as discrete identities, one set over against another, units of an open combinatorial system, but also in the semiotic rhythms of a contingent materiality that makes UNdifference possible on the other side of difference. In an unmitigated symbolic our humanity threatens to fall through the structures of difference. Emerging into selfhood and separateness, we need to know anew how things can flow back

together again. The final image of the poem, the little clergeoun's tomb arising in the space of his absence, is a final image of the drama of loss and restoration in the tale. Like language, the tomb is a materiality evoking an absence. Its "marbul stones cleere"—the adjective "cleere" also having been used to describe the singing of the A lm a (7.655) and thus binding together in a triple knot tomb, boy, and song—commemorate him, uphold a remembrance suspended over the gaps of extinction, call it forward at the very moment of its passing away. The tension of presence and absence is reflected in the ambiguity of the Prioress's final words about him, "Ther he is now, God leve us for to meet!" (7.683). In ME and Chaucer, ther meant both there and where (and is use both ways in the Prioress's Tale), and the line teeters suggestively on their border. It points deictively to the very place he is presently—“There he is now; God grant that we may meet!"—and evokes absently a place he has attained, wherever that may be—"Where he is now God grant that we may meet!"15 To the last, the Prioress's Tale presents readers with indeterminate middles undecidably suspended between overdetermined ends. *

*

*

This Kristevan reading of the Prioress's Tale suggests ways one might more broadly approach Miracles of the Virgin as a genre.16 Miracles were one of the Middle Ages' most popular verbal artifacts, yet they have received scant attention from modern critics.17 Understanding the story of Chaucer's little clergeoun as a story of entry into language allows some general remarks to be made on the possible meaning—at least on the psychological shape— of Miracles as a whole. The Prioress's Tale suggests that Miracles can be read as stories of entry into language and selfhood even when they seem farthest from issues of symbols, letters, and signs. Such a reading allows us to consider Miracles beyond their roles merely as "pious tales” and be much more specific about how they embody a particular configuration of subjectivity— one that assesses the worth but also the terrible cost of being subject to the Law of the Father. The Stella M aris of john Garland (c. 1250) contains over 60 Miracles and represents one of the first primarily literary treatments of the genre.18 Typically, Miracles tell of a devastating loss that threatens to overwhelm a principal character or characters: a monastery loses its supply of grain; a city is besieged by merciless enemies; a nun dreams she hovers helplessly over the mouth of a pit filled with all manner of snakes and vermin; cancer devours a monk's tongue; a thief is suspended on the gallows. Mary emerges in the midst of these losses to minimize them, to restore life and hope to those afflicted by them. In the Stella M aris, the genre is reduced to its most fundamental expression. Several of John's "tales" are as short as six lines. Each is the same story of lost and restoration, just transposed into new narrative sequences and new themes and images. As the Stella M aris unfolds, repeating images, phrases, and syntactic patterns begin to build a

web of likenesses within and across individual tales. The result is a broadly concretized and highly nuanced expression of the loss and the pain of being a subject. Though many of John's stories explicitly involve language— prayers, speech, and utterances of all kinds are linked to the distress of existence in a symbolic world—some stories drift far from any express mention of symbols, letters, and signs. But the sheer accumulation of losses in story after story testifies not so much to any one loss but to the pattern of loss that makes us human. In short, a Kristevan reading helps us see that the Miracles of the Stella M aris depict a humanness occasioned by deprivation, pain, misery, and terror. They reveal an advent of the symbolic so terrible in its severity that the maternal space that emerges in the midst of it to calm it, make it tolerable, comfort those who are threatened by it, is a godsend. By their very nature, miracles are castrative visions of subjectivity. A look at a few of John's stories reveal how the Stella M aris creates a web of repeating images, themes, and narrative structures in telling of the succoring role of the maternal space in the death and deathly gaps of an overdetermined symbolic. A detailed delineation of the likenesses is beyond the scope of the remaining part of this chapter. What follows is sketched out only in the broadest of terms. That John's stories directly involve the suffering, bewilderment, and pain of castration is best exemplified in "De peregrino qui sibi guttur amputavit et testiculos" (About the Pilgrim Who Amputated His Own Throat and Testicles), in which the throat of a wayward monk is accidentally severed at the same time as his genitals. A story like this helps reveal how thematically close the Prioress's Tale is to castration. In John's story, both losses are restored by intercession of the Virgin. In the collection's opening story, "De lingua clerico restituta" (About the Tongue Restored to a Cleric), a cleric devours his own tongue. Mary restores it. In the story in its entirety one can see how the devouring of the tongue is a symbol for a much greater devouring: the death that swallows us whole: 1. Clerus matrem salutavit Linguam quam hie devoravit Hec lacte restituit. Formam gerit pietatis Dulce lac et ubertatis, Que de celo defluit. Lac est vere virginale, Nectar vite spiritale, Quo mors victa corruit.

2. Sicut eger coniectabat, Rose celi supplicabat Angelus pulcherrimus. Eius fuit sub tutela, Et servatus sub cautela Surgendo sanissim us19 [1. A clerk hailed the Mother, the tongue which this one devoured, she restored with milk. Sweet milk bears the form of piety and plenitude, which flows down from the sky. Milk is truly virginal, spiritual nectar of life, to which conquered death falls down. 2. Just as the lacking one hoped, a most beautiful angel besought the Rose of the Sky. He was under her protection, and served under her care in becoming most healthful.)

Strikingly, it is specifically the maternal body that emerges at the moment of the cleric's deprivation to mitigate his loss, calm it—a semiotic buffer against symbolic edges. Mary's breast milk is the instrument of salvation to which “conquered death falls down.” The castrative relation between selfhood and deprivation is marked by the word eger, lacking one, which hails from the same root as ego. In Miracles of the Virgin, the essence of selfhood is to be wanting: to be an ego in these stories is to lack. The story "De filio ludei ab incendio liberato" (About the Jewish Boy Liberated From a Furnace) clearly associates its threatened loss with language. A Jewish boy, just like Chaucer's clergeoun, is going to school and learning his Latin letters. But he takes the sacrament with his Christian schoolmates and is thrown into the furnace by his enraged father. The loss of the tongue in "De lingua clerico" is rendered here as a entire threatened loss of life. The death that swallows us whole is a fiery furnace: 1. Missus puer in fornacem Et in flammam comminatem Est saluti redditus. Ad doctrinam literarum Primitivam latinarum, Puer fuit positus.

2. Ussit pater hunc Iudeus Quern protexit Christo Deus, Et Maria pallio. Salus illi, Christus sumptus Fuit, per quem inconsumptus Vixit ab incendio

3. Hie cum parvis corpus Christi Sumpsit, et a patre tristi Missus, ignem subiit In fornacem missus pater, Factus erat cinis ater, Et infernum iniit

4. Hec est umbra ederina, lone mitis medecina, Extinguens incendia. Hec est nubes grati roris, Celia favi, tons dulcoris, Salutaris pluvia (76-99)

[ 1. A boy sent into a furnace and threatening flames is restored to wholeness [salus); at the early learning of Latin letters the boy was positioned. 2. His Jew father burned him, whom God protected with Christ and Mary with her mantle; wholeness was his, Christ having been accepted, through whom he lived unconsumed in the inferno. 3. He, with his little friends, took the body of Christ and, sent by a saddened father, underwent the fire; the father, sent into the fire, was made black ashes and entered into the inferno.

4. This one [Mary) is the shade of the Ivy, mild medicine of Jonas, extinguishing flames; she is the mist of gracious dew, cell of honeycomb, fount of sweetness, rain of wholeness.)

In "De monacho submerso” (About the Drowned Monk) the imagery of the furnace and burning of "De filio ludei” is transposed into water and drowning. Mary restores the life of a drowned Monk who was given to delights of the flesh. In the story's third stanza this set of images is again reconfigured as the monk becomes a sheep saved by the shepherd Mary from the jaws of ravishing wolves. 1. Monacus submersus erat, Causam rei si quis querat, Erat carni deditus. Pia matre succurrente, Pio deo discernente, Vite fuit redditus.

2. Nam per noctes exeundo, Et a luxu redeundo Illud Ave dixerat. Per hanc celi restauratur Denus ordo, reportatur Ovis que perierat.

3. Virgo mater est pastoris, Servans oves a raptoris, Faucibus pastoria. Illi cedunt lupi fortis Per quam prede sunt exortes Noctis in vigilis (568-85)

11. A Monk was drowned; should anyone asked the cause of this matter, he was given to the flesh; pious mother succoring, pious God judging, he was returned to life. 2. For, in going on each night and going back to lust, he had said that "Ave"; through this one (Mary), order was once again restored to heaven, a sheep brought back that had been lost. 3. The Virgin is the mother of the Shepherd, saving sheep from the throat of that ravisher, a shepherdess; to that one strong wolves fall, predators are deprived in vigils at night.)

Parallel clauses Pia matre succurrente and Pio Deo discernente concisely embody the genre's fundamental paradigm of scission and suture. The familial mother succors (succurrente) those in the space of the Father's separations (discernente, a word hailing from an IE root meaning to cut, separate out, distinguish). It's important to note that this maternal succoring never takes place as a negation of the Father's cutting, but always alongside it, through it to a space on the other side that is both cut and not cut. As in this story, "life" is given again when scission and suture are both present, at the intersection of semiotic and symbolic. in the very brief "De demone verberato a beata virgine" (About the Demon Beaten by the Blessed Virgin), the ravishing predators of "De monacho submerso" come to the fore at the very center of the story-, a monk is terrorized by a demon in the forms of bull, dog, and lion: Forma hostis in taurina In canina, leonina Monacum terruerat. Hostem virgo bis fugavit, Tertioque verberavit Virga quam tenuerat. [The enemy in bovine, canine, and leonine forms had terrified a monk. The Virgin made the enemy flee twice, and the third time she beat him with a stick which she held.]

The rhymes in this tale, as they did in "De monacho submerso," tie together words of loss and restoration (dedditus/redditus in that tale; terruerat/tenuerat in this). Each tale's loss is repaired on a symbolic level by a pairing enacted at the semiotic level. Mary (virgo) is the very stick (virga) that beats away the threatened devouring of the symbolic. She is the semiotic maternal space using the word itself to beat away threats of the word: verberavit (beat) contains a pun on verbum (word). Passages like these suggest language's capacity to bind together widely divergent textual moments in an echoing play of sounds, wordforms, and syntactic patterns. The Stella M aris shows, beside extensive linking of images and themes, a great deal of verbal play. Anagrams and other such visual puns, in which the letters of one word are rearranged to form another word or part of another word, are frequent. In "De lingua clerico," for example, lacte (33) becomes lac et (34) and the chiming lac est (36). In "De monacho submerso,” the collocation pastoris/raptoris/pastoria share significant letters. In "De filio ludei,” pater is transmuted into erat which becomes in turn ater, enacting on language's material level a father become black ashes. Also frequent is the incorporation of a whole word in its rhyming counterpart. In "De monacho submerso," erat is found again in querat. In "De filio ludei," Deus is in Iudeus and ater in pater. This capacity for material language to draw together in echoes across the very symbolic differences that constitute it and to cloud them, palliate them, make them less terrifying, is distinctly Marian. Just as Mary respects God's judgmental discernments but refuses to consent to them as unbridgeable separations, just so does material language sustain symbolic parcelings-out yet suppress them in semiotic linkages. In its web of verbal, phrasal, imaginary, thematic, and narrative association, the Stella M aris gives expression in phrase after phrase, story after story, to the experience of a subject constituted by separations that threaten to consume it and from which it is protected by a semiotic reflux—though only nominally. * * * It is this last feature of Mary that needs comment in the scope of Marian literature generally. She is not an alternative to the gaps and separations of the father. That is, the texts do not suggest she is a "fantasy of continuity." What a Kristevan reading of the Prioress’s Tale and Stella M aris allows us to see about Mary's role in Marian literature is that she has a more precise status. Like the semiotic, Mary materializes in the gaps of an otherwise stronglysituated paternal logic; though distinct from it and at odds—and at times powerfully at odds. Like the semiotic, she at once abides by the Father's separations and discernments, yet works within them, emerges on account of them, and refuses to consent to them as unbridgeable separations. However, a bridge in no way erases the precipice it teeters over. Mary's succoring stands to alleviate the afflictions that threaten her subjects, but she cannot erase those afflictions. She comes to the gaping wounds of selfhood not to blanket them over and pretend they never happened but to blunt

their sharp edges, make tolerable the abrupt borders of contrast, soothe the scissions of discretion. Nevertheless, these edges, borders, and scissions remain. She may drive away the devouring beast this time but can never drive away the enduring realization, for ever afterwards, that one is devourable. In separating from mother and acceding to structures of difference, a subject meets death at every turn, the emptiness that threatens it although it causes it to be, and though Mary can ease that passage she can never fully erase the awareness of pain, terror, and fear that is its legacy. *

*

*

Suspended between fixity and unfixity, discernment and succoring, loss and restoration, language harbors within itself this drama of a subjectivity struggling to separate yet fearing the very breaks that bring it into being. The byplay between stable structures of symbolic systems and the unstable affective pressures of the semiotic chora creates an enduring paradigm for narratives of selfhood such as autobiographies, confessions, romances, Saints lives, revelations, personal histories, lyrics, and others. Medievalists are especially fortunate to receive these narratives in unique manuscripts, for a single textual moment traced across multiple manuscripts can reveal the semiotic slippages, driftings, and uncertainties of language—indeterminacies connected to subjectivity. Manuscript variants are the material records of scribal struggles with the ebb and flow of syntactic and semantic features—with puns, rhymes, lexical misgivings, syntactic waverings, phonemic/graphemic equivocations. They are especially fertile places to glimpse language's capacity for stability and instability, the precarious negotiations we continually carry out in processes of selfhood. Notes 1. The Prioress's T ale has invited a number of psychology-based readings. Maurice Cohen, “Chaucer's Prioress and Her Tale: A Study of Anal Character and AntiSemitism" P sy c h o a n a ly tic Q u a r te r ly 31 (1962): 232-49, performs a Freudian-style psychoanalysis on the Prioress, and describes the tale itself as a “paradigmatic analsadistic fantasy." Judith Ferster, '"Your Praise is Performed by Men and Children': Language and Gender in the P rio ress's P ro lo g u e a n d Tale," E x e m p la r ia 2.1 (1990): 149-68, discusses the tale in terms of its teller, offering a feminist reading that strives to locate the Prioress's "voice" in relation to the "tale's double vision of the female's dependence on her relationship to the male, and her importance in her own right" (163). And Louise O. Fradenburg, "Criticism, Anti-Semitism and the Prioress's Tale," E x e m p la r ia 1.1 (1989): 69-115, dazzlingly makes use of psychoanalytic discourse in exploring issues of "Sameness" and "Otherness" in the three elements of her title. 2. Does the P rio ress's T ale invoke the semiotic mitigation only for a specifically Christian subject? There's no question that the representation of lews in the tale is anti-Semitic. The deep divide between the Jews and Christians in the P rio re ss’s T ale gives rise to intolerance, bigotry, and hatred within the story, but stands to contribute, outside of the story as well, to the creation and conserving of enduring cul-

tural stereotypes. The tale especially vilifies the.lews and forecloses for them any promise of symbolic mitigation. Yet it must be recognized that it does so for the Christians as well. In fact, it is only the little clergeoun who attains any kind of succoring in this world rife with polarization, hatred, and the austerity of unmitigated law. Since, as I'm arguing throughout the dissertation, the semiotic is available to subjects in any number of capacities—a fact made plain by the Prioress's Tale's own yoking of Mary, school, and language— we need not view the tale as asserting that only Mary-fied Christians achieve som e measure of succor in the symbolic realm of differences. For this reason I do not believe the semiotic is being invoked for a specifically Christian subject. Besides, as I will argue in the next two chapters, the semiotic is not without its dangers for subjectivity. The most complex statement of the possibilities/impossibility of reading within and/or beyond the tale's antiSemitism is offered by Fradenburg. 3. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1941): "Seven was the age at which boys ordinarily began school attendance; and, as the clergeoun resolved to learn the anthem 'er Cristemasse is went,' it is clear that the Michaelmas term has not yet ended and that the clergeoun was still in his first term at school" (465). The (still) standard article placing the clergeoun in his educational context is Carleton Brown's "Chaucer's 'Litel Clergeoun,"' M o d e m P h ilo lo g y 3 (1906): 467-91. For issues of Chaucer and education more broadly, see Nicholas Orme, "Chaucer and Education," C h a u c e r R eview 16 (1981): 38-59, and Charles A. Owen, Jr., "A Certein Nombre of Conclusions: The Nature and Nurture of Children in Chaucer," C h a u c e r R eview 16 (1981): 60-75. 4. See, for example, M id d le E n g lish S e r m o n s , ed., Woodburn O. Ross, EETS os 209 (Oxford, Oxford UP, I960): "This prayoure (Pater Noster) is euery man and childe hold to kunne gif he passe / vii gere olde; and there frendes be in grett perill geff hei teche him nott is Pater Noster, Aue Marie, and is Beleue" (12). 5. The text of the Prioress's T ale is from the R iv e rsid e C h a u c e r, ed., Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton, 1987). Further citations will appear in the text by fragment and line number. 6. "Syntax and Poetry in Chaucer's P rio ress's Tale," N e o p h ilo lo g u s 50 (I960): 252-61. For a broad-based discussion of the medieval link between Mary and education, see "Chapter 2: Mary as Nutrix and Ma g is tr a ” of the unpublished dissertation of Mary Katherine McDevitt, "With a worde, of the mayden spoke: Medieval Marian Poetics," diss., Stanford U., 1993, 49-77. 7. "Dallying Nicely with Words," M e lo d io u s G u ile: F ictive P a tte r n in P oetic L a n g u a g e (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988) 180-93. 8. T h e T ext o f th e C a n te r b u r y T a le s: S tu d ie d o n th e B a sis o f A ll K n o w n M a n u s c r ip ts (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1940) 7:164. 9. See his R e a d in g V oices (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990). 10. On the consistency and logic of medieval punctuation practices see M. B. Parkes, "Punctuation, or Pause and Effect," M e d ie v a l E lo q u e n c e : S tu d ie s in th e T h e o ry a n d P ra ctic e o f M e d ie v a l R h eto ric, ed. James J. Murphy (Berkeley: U of California P, 1978) 127-42, who argues that punctuation practices were very inconsistent and that it appears as though scribes only punctuated in order to produce clarity in otherwise troublesome or ambiguous passages. For punctuation in Chaucer specifically, see

George B. Killough, "Punctuation and Caesura in Chaucer," S tu d ie s in th e A g e o f C h a u c e r 4 (1982): 87-107, who examines the principles governing the placement of the virgule, or midline marker, and concludes that virgule placement is so irregular that it cannot be said to mark any consistent feature—grammatical, semantic, or otherwise— of medieval poetry. This is of course not to say that medieval writers did not write in the logical structures of phrase, clause, and period, but rather to point out that these structures can achieve, when not consistently pointed, a certain measure of fluidity. 11. Paul Ruggiers, ed., T h e C a n te r b u r y T ales: A F a csim ile a n d T ra n sc rip tio n o f th e He n g w rt M a n u s c r ip t, w ith V a r ia n ts F rom th e E lle sm e re M a n u s c r ip t, vol. 1 of T h e V a rio ru m E d itio n o f th e W o r k s o f G eoffrey C h a u c e r, gen. ed. Paul Ruggiers (Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P, 1979) fol. 21 lr, 838-9. 12. John H. Fisher, ed, T h e C o m p le te P o e try a n d Prose o f G eo ffrey C h a u c e r (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1989); Albert C. Baugh, ed., C h a u c e r's M a jo r P o e try (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963), B2.1734-40. 13. In using the word "sweet” in reference to the semiotic and Mary's succoring I am following the text (see 7.555 and 7.656). I wish to emphasize that the epithet is unique to the castrative trope and reflects the function of the semiotic when perceived only from the viewpoint of an austere and overwhelming symbolic. When the symbolic comes on so strongly that it threatens to humpty-dumpty the subject's world into irretrievable shatters, the semiotic, in its distinctiveness and ebb and flow, comes across as a miracle of palliation and comfort. In the other tropes, however, the semiotic is not so sweet. It is cloying and not a little bit loathsome in the ecstatic trope where it never leads beyond itself to allow the formation of a firm subjectivity and self-agency. Moreover, the reading of semiotic "sweetness" takes into account the whole tale. Should Mary's "sweetness" have brought the clergeoun to his death and then left it never to return, it would be sadistic, not sweet. But this is not the case, and it bears repeating that each trope configures entry into language in different terms, and that my readings are designed to sketch out this topology, not argue for any specific once-and-for-all characterization of the process. 14. A moment also noted by Fradenburg: "the poem's anxiety about openness includes the body as well as the body politics: the fascination with dangerous passages, with comings to and fro, is reflected not only in the geography of the ghetto ('For it was free and open at eyther ende') but also in the strangely physiological description of the little clergeoun's singing—a wound that mutilates the linings, the borderlines, of a bodily passageway. So the A lm a Re d e m p to ris 'Twies a day... passed thurgh his throte, / To scoleward and homward whan he wente'" ("Criticism" 99). 15. Beverly Boyd's gloss on leve in the V a rio ru m edition of the Prioress's T ale (Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P, 1987), vol 2, part 20 o f T h e V a rio ru m E d itio n o f th e W o r k s o f G eoffrey C h a u c e r, gen. ed. Paul Ruggiers, captures the instability of the graphemic material text. She notes that the variant len e occasionally appears in the passage, due mainly to "the problem of interpreting two minim strokes: do they form a u (i.e., a v) or an n T (165). She concludes that "the textual evidence itself in inconclusive but suggestive. The forms of u /n are ambiguous in most of the base MSS." This issue, however, is only an issue for texts written in the medieval "court hand," with its heavy

emphasis on uniform, repeating minims, and not, say, for modern texts with typographies capable of clearly distinguishing n from u and v. Yet the controversy sheds a light on writing's status as, in Augustine's words "a thing in itself," and reveals how even the graphemic text can be a site of semiotic indeterminacy. For how this topic might be taken up by the so-called "new philology," see the comments of Siegfried Wenzel, "Reflections on (New) Philology" S p e c u lu m 65 (1990): 13. Much more work deserves to be done on this rich area of manuscript studies. 16. The topic of the Virgin Mary, but not the genre of the Miracles of the Virgin, has been taken up by Kristeva in "Stabat Mater," T ales o f L ove, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1987) 234-63, and in "Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini," Desire in L a n g u a g e : A S e m io tic A p p r o a c h to L ite r a tu r e a n d th e A r ts , ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice lardine, Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1980) 237-70. 17. The standard work on Miracles of the Virgin remains Eileen Power's introduction to Johannes Herolt, M ira c les o f th e B le sse d V ir g in , trans. C. C. Swinton Bland (London: Routledge, 1928). For Miracles in English and a discussion of their manuscripts, see Beverly Boyd's T h e M id d le E n g lish M ira c les o f th e V ir g in (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1964). A substantial collection of Middle English Miracles are contained in Ruth Tryon, "Miracles of Our Lady," PMLA 38 (1923): 308-88. Contemporary work on Miracles is surprisingly hard to come by. Notable for this study is Robert Worth Frank, Jr., "Miracles of the Virgin: Medieval Anti-Semitism and the 'Prioress's Tale'," in T h e W is d o m o f P o e try : E s s a y s in H o n o r o f M o r to n W. B lo o m field , ed. Larry D. Benson and Siefried Wenzel (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan UP, 1982) 177-88. The medieval attitude to miracles in general (though in a time before Chaucer) has been taken up by Benedicta Ward, M ira c les a n d th e M e d ie v a l M in d : T h eo ry, R eco rd , E v e n t 1000-1215 (London: Scholar Press, 1982), with chapter 8, "Miracles of the Virgin" being most relevant. 18. See Evelyn Faye Wilson's introduction to T h e S te lla M a r is o f ]o hn o f G a r la n d (Cambridge: Med. Acad, of Amer., 1946): "John of Garland wrote, not as a monk, but as a layman interested in the art of writing poetry" (68). Not only was John a grammarian by trade, further implicating the connection between Mary and languagelearning, but the S te lla M a r is was written specifically for the classroom: "The author intended to use his collection, as he did many of the other things he wrote, in the schools" (67). That Chaucer had read the Miracles of his thirteenth-century countryman is uncertain. The S te lla M a r is was very popular in England into the fifteenth century, but the question remains open. What is certain, however, is that the rea d ers of Chaucer were also readers of John of Garland, for part of John's miracle "De puero qui cantavit de beata Maria in Anglia" (About the Boy Who Sang About the Blessed Mary in England) is recorded in the margins of the Hengwrt, on 212v, which contains the Prioress's Tale: de puero qui cantavit de gloria virgine de maria quicquid scivit

puer cantans enutriuit Maternam inopiam hunc Iudeus nequam strauit domo sua quem humauit Diram per Inuidiam Mater querens hunc vocavit hie in terra recantauit Solita preconia Puer liber mox exiuit Mortis reos lex puniuit Iudeos et cetera.

JA boy, singing what he knew about Mary, supported his mother’s poverty. Through bitter hatred, a Jew nevertheless killed him, buried him in his house. The mother, seeking him, called as a solitary crier, this (child) replying out of the ground. Soon the boy got free, the law punished the guilty Jews with death, etc.)

Cited and translated by Boyd, V ariorum 156; see Ruggiers, Facsimile 844-5. 19. Wilson, Stella M aris, lines 31-39. Translations are my own. Further references will appear in the text by line number.

Mourning

Se m ir a m is of MS Paris B.N. lat 8121A and Robert Henryson's O r p h e u s a n d E u ry d ic e

"I was weeping all the while with the most bitter sorrow in my heart, when all at once I heard the sing-song voice of a child." —Augustine, Confessions

In the last chapter we saw that the Prioress's Tale represents entry into language as castration, a fierce visitation of the symbolic on the body of a subject emerging into selfhood. Under this aspect, the recognition of boundaries and limits which we have called entry into language is the precipitation into a bewildering and painful world of contrast and isolation. But inasmuch as entry into language involves a sense of loss it is additionally associated with mourning. For along with separations from things that make a self autonomous is a profound awareness of the absence of those things that those separations entail. In the medieval Latin poem Sem iram is, entry into language is represented as mourning: a subject's confrontation with lack, loss, and absence at the limit of selfhood.1 In mourning, the forsaken one asks, "How can 1live, now that my other self has been taken from me?" and in this question one can readily recognize the awareness of difference and loss that marks entry into language. Sem iram is is a predominantly mournful treatment of the story of entry into language: the acquisition of self and language told in images of grief, sorrow, and powerlessness.2 The shattering grief of having lost forces a protosubject into the separations of the symbolic. As with castration, the advent of the symbolic in the trope of mourning is sudden and shocking. Yet, in contrast to castration, it emerges only weakly or disowned. Rather than being too strong, the symbolic fails to come on strong enough. Recall that a forceful advent of the symbolic is required decisively to establish the thetic break. But when this advent is weak, the boundaries between self and notself never become established with certainty: a subject never goes through clear separation to become its own and therefore remains in an indetermi-

nate state of ebb and flow characteristic of the chora. The cost of entry into language is so traumatic that to avoid ever losing again, the forsaken one attempts to disavow separation and gaps altogether. Entry into language in the trope of mourning is thus the struggle to retain symbolic form rather than it coming on too-strongly, as in the Prioress’s Tale. It is a dynamic almost diametrically opposed to castration. In castration, the proto-self struggles to regain some measure of semiotic in the face of an overwhelminglyintense symbolic, but in mourning, because the symbolic emerges weakly, the proto-self has to struggle to keep from being sucked back into the distinctiveness of the semiotic. In effect, language and selfhood are accomplished not because the Father (that is, the Father-function) cuts off the child from the Maternal body, as we saw in the last chapter, but because the Mother simply departs, leaving the child passively exposed and terribly vulnerable. In this situation, acceding to the symbolic is all that is left to the forsaken one: reaching for the planks of a shattered ship to keep from drowning. The poem Sem iram is dramatizes an exchange between Semiramis, legendary queen of Babylon, and her brother Tolumnius. Semiramis having recently died, Tolumnius, an augur or high priest of some renown, seeks to call her back from the dead, provoked partly by rumors of her lascivious activities (she apparently took a bull as lover), and partly by his own grief. Though Semiramis' shade makes its appearance only in the final lines of the poem, her disembodied voice is present throughout, instructing her brother in his rituals and reprimanding him for his excessive grief. The poem is especially remarkable for its emphasis on the procedures and protocols of these rituals. The exchange between Semiramis and Tolumnius that forms the center of the poem goes into great detail about the formalities of Tolumnius' magical incantations. The emergence of Semiramis' ghostly shade relies on these formalities. Yet, when she does finally emerge—only in the last thirty lines of this 181-line poem—the message she bears to her officious brother is that "law has been wholly overcome." It was Jupiter, she claims, concealed in the shape of a bull, who came to her in the garden and ravaged her, and she found him full of grace. The coitus so stridently condemned at the outset of the poem is upheld at the end: a playful union of human and divine beyond the very differences that brought them into being. Tolumnius' attempt to bring his dead sister back from the underworld through the mediation of his ritual formalities can be read as the attempt to work through her death and loss to him. At the outset of the poem, her death has projected him into a space where clear-cut and dependable boundaries are threatened. The symbolic is overwhelmed, succumbing to an ebb and flow of indistinguishability. His identity, for example, is inseparable from hers. "I am a brother no more," he says at one point, "my sister a corpse, why do I live?" (71, Iam non sum frater: sororest |cur vivo?] cadaver). Her death has imperiled fiis identity. He is no longer frater (a term used especially

as an index of difference over against soror)—and the ambiguity of the predicate adjective cadaver, applying both to soror and to the implied "I” of vivo, blurs away any sure distinction. His emotions likewise are ambiguously undifferentiated in a confused knot of love-hate, typical of those grieving. His sister is both disgusting and irresistible to him, intolerable and alluring. She is “abject" (78, despectilem), a “deceiver" (147, fallendi), "whore" (6, lupa); the root-stock of "infamous transgressions" (67, mala scandala); the enacter of “foul defilement” (114, mala corruptela). Yet, she is also his “poor sister" (26, lugenda soror), one who has been “deeply wronged" (130, valde molestatur) and one whose return from the underworld he ardently seeks (56, T epetopertenebras), and for whom he “beseeches, waits, burns in his five senses" (148, Postulo, prestolor, quinis in sensibus uror). Typical of such grieving, he seeks at once to push his sister away and hold her to him—to establish, that is, and at the same time to eliminate, borders of otherness. In this respect, as it is for every work of mourning, Sem iram is harks back to what psychologists call the “archaic loved object," the maternal figure that is the primary instance of loss and separation replayed in acts of mourning.3 Struggling to separate but being afraid, Tolumnius cannot release her and consent to the logic of loss and separation that founds the autonomous self. Thus he wavers indeterminately in a state of abjection and desire. Even as he fervently calls for the return of her body's "shade," for example, he pragmatically recognizes that her remains have began to putrify. The following excerpt gives a good example of the histrionic tone characteristic of Tolumnius' lines: I do not ask for the bones—goddess Earth has the devoured these with Nature's tooth— but I call upon you to beseech grave Pluto, you dark dwellings, if your blackness is diffused on every side, to implore the dread one, for amid the fires you know him: he who implores can obtain the return of a body's shade. I do not seek the limbs of my sister Semiramis— they have decayed.

(44-49) (Now precor ossa— Ceres N atu re dente voravit —

Sed voco vos orare gravem , nigra castra, Plutonem , Si color ille niger diffunditur undique vester, Exorare tetrum , quia noscitis ignibus ipsum l

Im petrat exorans redeuntem corporis um bram . Now peto S em iram is — pu tru eru n t— m enbra sororis .)

The unincorporated placement of p utruerunt between Sem iram is and menbra

sororis—it emerges abruptly and ungrammatically—enacts Semiramis' decay: for readers the sentence dissolves as she begins to dissolve. Moreover, the inflections in the passage bear a notable part of its meaning. It is only because the verb diffU N D U ur (46) is in the passive, third-person singular (and not, say, in the past participle diffu sum ) that UNDI^ue (46, "on every side") sounds as if it is on every side in an exact echo. Similarly, the verb voravit (44) contains in its infinitive form (vorare) Tolumnius' call to "you" powers of the underworld to beseech their leader for his sister's return (vos.ORARE). Also, we hear bones (os in the nominative) being devoured in the word for devouring itself, v/OS/orare. These effects are made possible by the nature of Latin as a highly inflected language—a nature that has a direct being on the relatedness between semiotic and symbolic. Although no language is so fixed that it eliminates slippage and play, highly-inflected languages make these slippages possible in a particular way, for unfixity occurs more drastically at the word level. Briefly, in inflected languages a word takes on various forms according to the grammatical role it plays in the sentence—thus, as above, exorare (47) when a present infinitive but exorans (48) when a present participle. According to Latinist Frederick Ahl, this shifting of lexemes (word-forms) leads to a greater reservoir of punning and other sound- and wordplay than in languages like English which are less inflected: "Wordplay is more abundant in highly inflected languages which makes the listener more aware of the constantly shifting shape of the word as it changes person or case. In English, words have a more 'fixed' appearance than they do in Latin, Irish, and Welsh."4Slippage can take place more frequently at the word and syllable level, claims Ahl, because one "hears" chimes not only between words but within a word's own declension. Thus, as above, one hears a chime between voravit and vos.orare through the "intermediary" (though unspoken) infinitive vorare. To see Latin texts in this way is to envision a seething mass of conjoining and interweaving words and word-forms. Not only is any given word transmutable into different lexemes as it moves from case to case— for example, the nominative lex ("law" or "word") becomes legibus in the ablative plural. But also different words are liable to converge into identical lexemes: the nominative singular "dog" and second person singular for "sing" are both cams. The end result, says Ahl, is that Latin becomes less a language of words than one of syllables, even letters: "A sentence is a movable configuration of letters and syllables rather than words."5Word boundaries are conspicuously fluid. Syllables "may be extended either backwards or forwards" or the "root syllable may be augmented in a variety of ways" that stand to produce unexpected semantic convergences.6 "There is death in love," he says, "because there is MOR in aMOR, just as there is fire in wood because there is IGNIS in 1IGNIS."7One sees just such play in Sem iram is, as we have been pointing out. Another example in the passage from Sem iram is above is the chiming between the syllables pet and put in the final line—he seeks (peto) what has putrefied (putruerunt): it perfectly captures how desire

(seeking) and abjection (loathing) have become blurred for Tolumnius in the death and loss of his sister. Caught in a maelstrom of love-hate, Tolumnius associates Semiramis' death and loss with her transgressive desires for the bull. The poem's 19line prologue (though not attributed to a speaker in the manuscript but consistent with the views of Tolumnius) describes these desires in great detail: "Never did any courtesan on earth burn more fiercely than wanton Semiramis, taking her paramour from the field" (5-6, In terns meretrix n um q ua m crudelius arsit / Quam lupa Sem iram is moecfium que traxit ab fierbis). The unruly transfiguration of phonemes /t-r-s-x/ in the collocation TERRIS— meRETRIX—ARSIT—TRAX1 enacts precisely her playful wantonness with the bull. Yet, the prologue never once alludes to her death. Tolumnius' first words—the first words of the dialogue proper—are thus quite a surprise to us: "I invoke the god of pale Fear from the threshold of death, that the dread image of my sister may be brought back" (21-2, Invoco palloris num en de limine mortis / Ut nunc terribilis reddatur imago sororis). This abrupt shift juxtaposes Semiramis' desire for the bull and her loss to her brother. In turning her attention and desires elsewhere, she has become dead to him. In fact, the very word terribilis ("dread") that Tolumnius uses to describe her image in the underworld is spelled torribilis in the manuscript, thus recalling the "bull,” tauri, that was her lover. The slippage (perhaps translatable into English as "terribull") powerfully conflates her death and her dalliance on a material level in suggesting their convergence at a thematic level. Tolumnius' need to call her shade back from the threshold of death consequently entails a need to know about her desires. "I seek to know," he says, "of my sister's loves" (143, quero sororis amores) and "I beseech that Semiramis may tell her secrets" (53, Obsecro, Sem iram is que su nt reticenda loquator). He wants her to explain her lascivious activities in order to "better her fame in his eyes" (111, Emendabo m eam tibi cum surrexerfam am ). In this way, the arising of her shade from the underworld is intended to correspond with an acknowledgement of her desires. The two are inextricably related. In turning her desire elsewhere she has made him bereft, left him alone, separate. He wants an explanation. Kristeva has shown the extent to which the child's awareness of the mother's desire for someone or something else—for some Third Party—can be said to initiate the child's entry into the symbolic. For, in turning her attention elsewhere, the mother, the archaic loved object, indicates something outside their excluding relationship, which outside is, and must be, other to the mother/child dyad—in other words, the symbolic. This forced awareness, says Kristeva, "takes place thanks to the assistance of the socalled pre-Oedipal mother, to the extent that she can indicate to her child that her desire is not limited to her offspring's request."8Simply speaking, if Mommy loves somebody else, I cannot be her all-in-all. That realization is a shock akin to separation and consequently founds the thetic break for the proto-subject and entry into language. In Semiramis, her dalliance with the

bull forces Tolumnius to come to terms with the existence of this Third Party. The symbolic can thus be said to emerge in respect of Tolumnius. But it emerges only weakly. In contrast to the Prioress's Tale, in which the little clergeoun is brought brutally into the symbolic by a stern and unremitting Father, in Sem iram is there is no strong Father-function and Tolumnius is left to founder. The loss and therefore death of something he had always thought was a part of himself compels him to face isolation and separateness. The difference between the two tropes, it should be repeated, is not a difference of object or content. At a certain depth, the Mother's turning her attention elsewhere IS the Father's brutal cutting-off. Rather, the difference is one of affect—what emotional keynote the story (same story) is told in. In the trope of mourning, as opposed to castration, the symbolic is a thing to be attained, not just endured. It emerges as compensation for the waywardness of the lost or unfaithful maternal vessel. Consequently, there is no maternal space as such in the trope of mourning since it is the mother herself, the archaic loved object, who initiates the process of entry into language by simply receding. Rather, it is the symbolic that enables some reconciliation of loss in the trope of mourning—but only if it comes on strong enough. For only the logic of a symbolic Third Party, space, or formal structuring will allow the newly-constituted self to work through its now-impossible attachment for the lost object and form its own proper subjective boundaries. “What makes triumph over sadness possible,'' says Kristeva in Black S u n , “is the ability of the self to identify no longer with the lost object but with the third party— father, form, schema."9An identification with the symbolic allows the child to recuperate partially in language what has been lost: “upon losing mother and relying on (the symbolic] I can retrieve her as sign, image, word."10A paradox ensues: entry into language allows some measure of reconciliation for a loss that has come about precisely because of entry into language. But the symbolic can only provide this reconciliation if it comes on forcefully enough. A symbolic that is too weak never definitively establishes the thetic break necessary for the instantiation of signs and meaning. The lost object cannot be returned to me in language, in other words, if the entire logic of signification is ambiguous, is sometimes in place, sometimes not. Mourning requires the strong advent of the symbolic and (to say the same thing) the proto-subject's consent to its logic: “The speaking being seems to be saying, 'I have lost an essential object that happens to be, in the final analysis, my mother. But no, I have found her again in signs, or rather since I consent to lose her I have not lost her, I can recover her in language.'"11 Thus, as indicated at the outset of this chapter, the essential narrative movement of mourning is the struggle to achieve the symbolic in the face of a too-strong semiotic. To attain it, Kristeva speaks of a symbolic "graft" psychologists can place at the disposal of those in mourning: "by analyzing—that is, by dissolving—the denial mechanism wherein depressive per-

sons are stuck, analytic cure can implement a genuine "graft" of symbolic potential and place at the subject's disposal dual discursive strategies working at the intersection of affective and linguistic inscriptions, at the intersection of the semiotic and the symbolic."12 In other words, triumph over loss takes place by working through to the symbolic and out the other side—not by denying it.13 Consequently, Tolumnius' ritual formalities play an especially crucial role in the working through of mourning associated with the double desire to have his sister present to him again and to know the secrets of her loves. The unfolding of his ritual forces him to stay connected to a symbolic logic of difference not only by requiring him to recognize a well-defined order beyond ambiguity but also by requiring him to pay heed to a host of third parties and spaces beyond—all elements of the presence of the symbolic. Simply said, in having to define, demarcate, and discriminate—in having to put everything in its proper place—he is not permitted the luxury of letting objects collapse into indistinguishability. Moreover, Semiramis herself, much like Mary in the Prioress's Tale, acts as a figure drawing him to the symbolic. She plays the central role in keeping him turned to otherness and forcing him to negotiate the symbolic spaces of language and ritual. Ritual itself, a prescribed order of religious or other devotional services, requires a selfhood situated at the intersection of semiotic and symbolic. It is the acting-out of a set of protocols, and as such deploys both symbolic systems and semiotic affects. As a system that requires its participants to keep to a prescribed order with a well-defined structure, ritual is symbolic. But as a material performance—as actual bent knees on hard floors, as actual anointed thumbs, as vibrating vocal chords—ritual is affective and therefore semiotic. Recall that embodied acts are for Kristeva both semiotic and symbolic since they are discrete actions taking place within the body's carnal matrix. But at the outset of the poem, under the stress of his sister's loss, Tolumnius' symbolic is imperiled. His speech is overwhelmingly semiotic, wavering on the edge of symbolic collapse. It is characterized by illogical and ambiguous responses, vague references, and powerful material repetition in echoes, alliteration, and consonance. The following passage is representative of this excessive allusion and elliptical sequences: (Semiramis.) I hear— I cannot come. I am bound down. (Augur.) I have gone through all the rites by which harsh death is honoured. While I call you, my poor sister, my mind reels senselessly. S. Why waste yourself, brother, in a plague of grieving? Let the high-priest of Fate address his prayers to Pluto. A. Without the sun's light I perceive monsters with my hands: Lerna's

brood springs up on the earth, through the fateful sisters' decree. S. The hour of my rising is not yet granted by Pluto's lips. A. I am not like the Arcadian augur whom the moon deceived, who could never darken the sister of the sun. S. This is a night of prayer—one must not be silent keeping the vigil. A. May a hundred thousand shades listen to me, that after tomorrow I may behold my sister's face. S. Orpheus sought sweet Eurydice with song. (25-38)

(S. A udio. N on possum , quia sum religata deorsum . A. O m n ia sum passus quibus aspera m ors celebratur.

D um voco te, lugenda soror, sine m ente volutor. S. C u r te consum is, frater, sub peste dolendi?

A ntistes fati solvat sua vota Plutoni. A. Sentio m onstra meis m anibus sine lum ine solis —

Crescit in orbe seges Lerne ratione sororum . S. Hora resurgendi nondum d a tu r ore Plutonis. A. Arckadie non su m quern L una fefellit aruspex

Q u i num quam solis potuit fuscare sororem. S. Nox ista precum: non est vigilando silendum .

A . S in t exaudibiles centum mifii m ilia M anes, Ut post eras possim vultum lustrare sororisl S. O rfeus Euridicem quesivit carm ine dulcem .)

This passage borders on a dissolution of meaning. In another context, references to "Lerna's brood” (meaning the hydra, a mythical monster) might suggest shared knowledge of a common cultural matrix. But here the allusions, not picked up by Semiramis, demonstrate only a disjunction of words and meaning.14 How is "I am like the Arcadian augur whom the moon deceived” an answer, or any kind of dialogic response, to Semiramis' statement about the hour of her rising? A meaningful context remains unprovided. Also, underscoring all of this is a very powerful material repetition closely identified with the semiotic. The word soror ("sister”), for example,

although not signifying Semiramis in every instance, emerges three times (30, sororum; 33, sororem; 36, sororis) in three different cases at the end of three separate verse-lines. The syllable sum strikes four times in rapid succession at the opening of the passage both as a lexeme in itself and as an inflectional case ending for both verb and adverb, posSUM—SUM—deorSD M — SUM. Alliteration is present in mifii milia M anes (35) and m onstra meis m anibus (29), which is itself a line of sustained alliteration in s/m/n: Sentio monstra meis m anibus sine lum ine solis. And chiming is present in such collocations as solvat/sua.vota (28), hora/ore (31), est/ista/est (34), Euridicem/dulcem (37), and the remarkable sequence n o n du m /no n.sum .q uem /nu m .qu am (31-33). These aural repetitions at the material level of the text, together with dissolute responses at the semantic level, emphasize a symbolic on the verge of disintegration. As the dialogue unfolds, however, Tolumnius' attention is patiently yet firmly directed and redirected to the job at hand. It is primarily owing to Semiramis that this takes place. The effect is to draw his fascination away from herself to the patterns of order—that is, to the rules, regulations, protocols, and procedures—that will eventually permit her return. In the passage above, for instance, she reminds him twice that her ghostly shade can only return through the mediation of the god of the underworld. The mere mention of Pluto is enough here to keep the horizons of otherness flickering outside their own excluding relationship. Elsewhere, she scorns him when his words are offensive to Diana: “Why do you speak vile matter in Diana's presence?” (60, Materiam luteam curarguis ante Dianam ?); and she apologizes to Hecate at one point for his inappropriate language, "Why do you rage, Hecate, distressed at my brother's words?” (117, Quidfuris, Rebate, fraterno tristis ab ore?). Tolumnius, thus apprised, calls on the powers of the underworld to hear his words: "May a hundred thousand shades listen to me" (35, S in t exaudibiles centum mihi milia Manes); "Hear me, Pluto, author of vain phantasms" (133, Inventor vani, Pluto, pbantasm atis, a udi); "Be receptive to my voice, Diana” (139, Esto mee vocis, Diana). Other statements in the course of the dialogue are directed at Diana (139-41), Pluto (31,133), Mamuhel (131), Pallas (88), the collective shades of the underworld (35, 38, 45, and 119), as well as at the human participants of Tolumnius' ritual, his attendants (96) and a dirge-singer (126). Apollo is called upon twice (96 and 135), and he has a brief speaking part in the poem—the only third party to have one—which is, in turn, directed to another auditor, a certain "Floxus,” who also is apparently listening in (136-7). Thus, although cast as a dialogue, the exchange between Semiramis and Tolumnius is by no means a private affair. Words constantly ring out to others, and the insistent intrusion of a space beyond inevitably opens up the dialogue to otherness in a way that makes it impossible for Tolumnius to collapse together with his beloved object. In having to ritualize his semiotic—in having to parcel out his actions and words—he is forced to keep his language crucially unenigmatic and non-private and thus forced to stay in the Third-Party space of the symbolic.

A second way that Semiramis keeps Tolumnius rooted in the patterns of order is by making him account for the precise, technical details of his ritual. The dialogic exchange at the center of the poem clearly conveys Tolumnius' struggle to implement order under his sister's guidance. In order for his magic to work, he has to give sharp edged order beyond ambiguity: S. Set up three alters once more. After tomorrow I shall be released from the urn; I shall appear before your eyes as if free from death. A. I shall now, to more effect, burn three dogs together in the fire, so that for twelve hours the chains of death may be broken, and I may bring my abject sister back. S. Let cocks be not far from the dogs, at the slaughter, imitating the hours of the night with their dark plumage. In the ritual feast let there be no single drop of honey. A. Why should my two eyes be open the whole night? My ears are open, but blessed by the replies they hear: an augur is solaced only by what he hears. S. If an ass's hair should be carried by the wind, and, by an unlucky chance, fall amid the dogs' ashes, the magic of resurrecting will lose all its strength. A. I beseech you, Pallas, destroy all passes, lest confusion fall upon our offerings today. May the Earth remain without further plagues when asses are banished! S. Remove grains of salt— let there be no savour in your mouth. Unsalted food is most pleasing to Orcus below. Remember to utter no ambiguous words in your prayers.

(74-93) (S. Tres a ra s ite ra . Post e ra s la x a b o r a b a rm -. A p p a r e b o tu is o cu lis q u a s i lib era m o rtis .

A. Tres s im u l ig n e c a n es a r g u m e n to s iu s u ra m , Ut b is sex fioris r u m p a n tu r v in c u la m o rtis , Q u o d e s p e c ti< b i> le m p o ss im releva re so ro re m .

S. A c a n ib u s g a lli n o n s in t s u b cede re m o ti, Q u i fu rv is p lu m is im ite n tu r te m p o r a n o ctis.

No n

s it in o rg iis a lic u iu s g u ttu la m ellis.

A. C u r o cu li b in i s in t to ta n o cte p a te n te s ?

S u n t aures patule, sed per responsa beate, Nam consolatur solis ex auribus augur. S. Si pilus ex asina fuerit delatus ab aura Ut cadat in cineres inim ica sorte caninos, Perdet vim totam sciom antia vivificandi. A. O bsecro te, P allas , asinas interfice cunctas, Ne cadat in nostris fiodie confusio votis.

A biectis asinis m aneat sine pestibus orbisl S. Q rana salis remove— non sit sapor ullus in ore. Insulsus prono cibus est gratissim us O reo.

In precibus nihil a m bigu u m proferre m em ento.)

Tolumnius' continual drenching in the symbolic helps him to separate from his impossible loved object and to consent to the logic of separation and difference characteristic of a full-fledged subject position. Such drenching, however, must not be construed as a denial or foreclosure of the semiotic. just like castration, mourning has as its final goal a balancing of semiotic and symbolic. We recall Kristeva's observation that the symbolic "graft" can place at the subject's disposal "dual discursive strategies working at the intersection of affective and linguistic inscriptions, at the intersection of the semiotic and the symbolic."15Likewise, the ritual acts described in Semiramis bolster a weak advent of the symbolic. The ebbing away of his love object has projected Tolumnius into an ambiguous space where borders blur beyond recognition and the thetic threatens to fail. In having to bend to ritual, however, he is required to parcel out the overwhelming semiotic into some sort of order, some form. But this does not mean that the semiotic thereby becomes repudiated in turn. Triumph over loss in Semiramis, just like triumph over castration in the Prioress's Tale, is possible only by working through the symbolic to emerge on its other side into a space both stable and unstable. In a space such as this, the borders of self are at once established and also open to the blur, sway, and transfigurations of materiality. *

*

*

It is in respect of this paradigm of mourning that Robert Henryson's O rpheus and Eurydice is a meaningful companion piece to Sem iram is. Henryson's poem is also a story of loss and recuperation which emphasizes both the centrality of symbolics for the successful working through of mourning and the need for a decisive final balancing of symbolic and semiotic. By bringing these two poems together 1 do not intend to show or imply any kind of source connection. That Henryson knew the earlier poem is extremely

doubtful. Rather, I wish to show that a similar narrative shape exists in both poems, and thereby suggest a common medieval insight into mourning and mourning's relation to language and selfhood—an insight prior to, or at least independent of, any particular source. The story of Orpheus was a fascinating intertext for writers of the Middle Ages—of which number, as indicated earlier, must be included the Sem iram is poet.16 In Sem iram is, the dead queen reminds her brother briefly that "Orpheus sought sweet Eurydice with song" (37). In Henryson's poem, by contrast, Orpheus seeks his Eurydice not just in song, but in "tonys proportionate” and in intervals of "duplar, triplar, and epetritus," "emoleus," "quadruplate," and "epogdyus." He works in the modes of "dyatesseron," "dyapason," and "dyapente." And he can woo the gods of the underworld to tears with "base tones in hypodorica" and "gemelling in ypolerica." The technical terms give Orpheus's music (the most semiotic of arts) a quantitative, systematic, even scientific texture. The result is very similar to Sem iram is’s emphasis on the technical features of Tolumnius' magic. In the attempt to win back his lost love from the powers of the underworld, Orpheus learns that he can do so only through a complex articulation of intervals, modes, symmetries, and proportions—that is, only through a firmly-established symbolic. What he discovers in his travels through heaven and hell is precisely the tecfine of his art, elements of its formal shaping. For it is only through these that he can, in the fiction of the poem, raise the right affects of "reuth" and "pitee” that move the gods of the underworld to grant his desires. In the double image of the system that moves, a network in motion, we perceive the convergence of symbolic system and semiotic affect. Like Tolumnius, Henryson's Orpheus cannot admit his loss at the outset of the poem, and the result is a threatened symbolic. On learning of the death of his wife-queen he goes mad, immediately taking up his harp and, "half out of his mynd," seeking the solace of the woods where he is driven to compose a lament.17"O dulfull harpe," he sings, "with many dolly stryng, /Turneall thi mirth and musikin murnyng" (134-5). Like Tolumnius he seeks to close up the spaces of separation and "put his heart in peace" not by working through his loss but by denying it. He wants to be brought were she is*. "Len mi thi licht," he begs Apollo, "and let me nocht ga les / To fynd the fair in fame that neuer was fyld, / My lady quene and luf, Erudices!" (171-3). He vows to seek her relentlessly "for seke hir suth I sail, / And nouthir stynt nor stand for stock no stone!" (178-9). He begs Jupiter, "Throu thy godhede, gyde me quhare scho is gone" (181). Like Tolumnius' language, these passages are more than ordinarily alliterative, and the heavy-handed emergence of the semiotic is a symptom of the threatened failure of the symbolic. Orpheus' withdrawal from society, his putting off the trappings of refinement, and his descent, though momentary, into indiscriminate savagery, is a sign of a symbolics under siege:

Fair weill, my place; fair weile, plesance and play; And welcome, woddis wyld and wilsome way, My wikit werd in wilderness to wair! My rob ryall and all my riche array Changit sail be in rude russat of gray; My diademe in till ane hat of hair; My bed sail be with bever, borke, and bair, In buskis bene, with mony bustuous bes, Withoutin sang, sayng with siching sair, "Quhar art thow gane, my luf Erudices?” (

154- 6 3 )

Orpheus' subsequent search through the landscapes of the heavenly spheres and benighted paths of the underworld is a working through of his loss. When he first escapes to the wood, he reacts to Eurydice's loss by wringing his hands and "walkand to and fro." But in the process of mourning, that rhythmic directionless pacing becomes precisely a pacing to somewhere—that is, becomes linked to some external reference point: "Quhen endit was the sangis lamentable, / He tuke his harp and on his brest can hyng; / Syne passit to the hevin, as sais the fable, / To seke his wyf—" (184-7). He proceeds erratically at first, canvassing the heavenly spheres one by one, but in passing down from sphere to severe, his search becomes ever narrower and more focused. On his return to earth, he knows to seek the gates of Hell—not only a fairly specific point in a universe of locations, but also, significantly, the threshold to loss: "he passit furth the space of twenty dayis,/ Fer and full fer and ferther than I can tell, / And ay he fand stretis and redy wayis, / Tyll at the last unto the yett of hell / He come” (247-51). His mourning as wandering thus culminates not only in the ever more precise discriminations of his descent through the narrowing spheres of the heavens but also in the express recognition that if Eurydice is to be found at all, it must be in the spaces of death: "To seke his wyf atour the grauis gray" (244). Significantly, this work of mourning is played out against a background of increasing poetic competence. In the mournful search for his wife, Orpheus discovers as well the formal elements of his craft. In his passage among the planets, for example, he learns the melody of the heavenly spheres: "Thus fra the hevyn he went doun to the erde, / Yit by the way sum melody he lerde:" (217-18):

In his passage amang the planetis all, He herd a hebynly melody and sound, Passing all instrumentis musicall, Causid by rolling of the speris round; Quhilk armony, throu all of this mappamound, Quhill moving cesse, unyt perpetuall— Quhilk of this warld, Plato the saul can call. (219-25)

The “music of the spheres” is itself a teacher to Orpheus of the symbolic of song: Thare lerit he tonys proportionate, As duplar, triplar, and epetritus; Emoleus, and eke the quadruplete; Epogdyus, rycht hard and curius; And of thir sex, suete and dilicius, Ryght consonant, fyve hevynly symphonyis Componyt ar, as clerkis can deuise.

First dyatesseron, full suete I wis; And dyapason, symple and duplate-, And dyapente, componyt with a dys; This makis five, of thre multiplicate. This mery music and mellifluate, Complete and full wyth nowmeris od and evyn, Is causit by the moving of the hevyn. (226-39)

These lines refer to the arithmetical proportions which form the basis of the Pythagorean theory of music as well as the harmonious combination of notes of different pitches. They do not appear in any sources and apparently were originally added by Henryson. Yet, as pointed out by Henryson's

most recent editor, Denton Fox, they make no musical sense.18The phrase "dyapente, componyt with a dys" is meaningless as worded; "epetritus” is actually Fox's emendation from the nonsense word "emetricus” (spelled so in all witnesses); and a term used later in the poem for one of the eight modes, "ypolerica," simply does not exist in the medieval musical lexicon. The point is that these terms sound technical and that, correct or not, they import into the poem a sense of the constructedness of Orpheus's art. As Orpheus seeks his lost Eurydice, he finds instead the formal patterns within which his music and poetry find their complex elaborations: proportions, intervals, modes, "symphonies.” Immersed in a semiotic swelling of sounds and rhythms, the music Orpheus comes to learn is quantitative as well— numerable, measurable, weighable—and it is this quality of apportionm ent that ultimately leads Orpheus back to the realm of the symbolic and to the only possible recuperation of his lost love.19 But recuperation as such can only transpire, as we have said, through the symbolic on its other side to the "second return” of the semiotic, at the intersection of both semiotic and symbolic. It thus takes the phenomenal expression of Orpheus' art to achieve his aims. The intervals, modes, and proportions of the symbolic require actual vibrating strings and resonating wood. Only these can raise the cathartic affects of "reuth” and "grete pitee” which move Pluto and Proserpina to free his Eurydice:20 Than Orpheus before Pluto sat doun, And in his handis quhite his hard can ta, Andplayit mony suete proporcion, With base tonys in ypodorica, With gemilling in ypolerica; Till at the last, for reuth and grete pitee, Thay wepit sore that coud hym here and see. (366-72)

Henryson's return to technical terms at the moment Orpheus plays before the King and Queen of Hell reveals the importance of the symbolic at this crucial juncture: the moving forces of affect as such can emerge, on the other side of the symbolic break, as semiotic vocalizations, alliteration, rhythmicities, and intonations that help to ameliorate the gaps of loss and death. But only on the other side. The image of Death being moved to "reuth” and "pitee" by a complicated system of arithmetical proportions in formal sequences—that is, Death, the embodiment of loss and lack, himself set in motion to overcome borders in sympathizing with, feeling for—signals the convergence of affect and system. It is this convergence of the "dual

discursive strategies" of the semiotic and symbolic that permits Orpheus his wished-for reconciliation: Than Proserpyne and Pluto bad hym as His warison, and wald ask rycht noucht, Bot licence wyth his wyf away to pas Til his contree, that he so fer had soucht. (373-6)

The work of mourning in O rpheus and Eurydice is thus paradigmatic: in balancing semiotic and symbolic, Orpheus enters into language, comes to understand the logic of a thing simultaneously present and absent. On the one hand, in coming to awareness of death and loss, he avoids the collapse of distinctions that results in denial of self and other. On the other, in linking that awareness to affect, he avoids an instantiation of the symbolic so rigidified that recuperation of the lost thing in memory or words is impossible. Mourning does not aim for the complete disappearance of the lost object from the affections but strives for a balanced perspective on it as a thing at once present in the affections and treasured memories but absent in fact. We are thus not surprised at the end of the story that Orpheus is destined to lose his Eurydice all over again because he can never regain her apart from the separations and gaps of the symbolic. This point cannot be over stressed. For mourning to succeed and entry into language transpire appropriately, the symbolic logic of loss must be upheld. Orpheus will never completely "win back" his lost loved object because she (and he) must be transferred to the realm of the symbolic to complete his entry into language. Says Kristeva, "1 have lost the essential object...' is what the speaking being seems to be saying. 'But no, I have found her again in signs, or rather since I consent to lose her I have not lost h e r... 1can recover her in language.'”21 This trope of mourning, for which subjectivity is impelled by loss, portrays a bleak vision of selfhood. But this is the point of the tropology being outlined in this book: each trope is just one facet of a complex event, each figuring entry into language as a particular set of affects and not others. For the trope of mourning, being a subject means achieving a coherent self and yet been without. Although some recuperation is possible at the meeting of semiotic and symbolic, the trope's keynote is absence and lack. To be a subject in such a world is to constantly feel at a loss. Thus Orpheus' final words are especially telling: "I am expert," he says, "and wo is me tharfore" (411). The word expert in Middle English had the double meaning of "being experienced" (giving rise to today's meaning of "being an authority by virtue of special knowledge or skill”), and also of "being devoid of" (though we no

longer use the lexeme in this sense, deriving from ex plus the Latin root pars, part-). Orpheus is thus not only “expert” in his art but in his loss is well: an accomplished and therefore lacking subject. *

*

*

Similar to Orpheus, Tolumnius' reconciliation with his lost love object in Sem iram is also occurs at the balanced intersection of semiotic and symbolic. A strong instantiation of the symbolic takes place in the final stages of the ritual to bring Tolumnius to this intersection. In particular, night, sacrifice, and language emerge as death-bearing forces predominantly bringing about the reemergence of the symbolic and Semiramis. Like Orpheus, Tolumnius "descends" to the underworld in the calling up of the shades for his magic: "Now the duty of my dark sacrifice begins. Rise, sister, meet your brother! Now the day's herald is dying: we do not invoke the shades in the hours of the day, we do not offer blind Orcus an ambiguous gift; what we give to hell shall never see the day's light. May the foolish creatures (the dogs and cocks), muzzled in ropes, not succeed in crying out! I shall put out the light— let the dirge-singer give me her song, we have darkened all the bright gleams of light. I shall utter words contrary to life. Hear me, Pluto, author of vain phantasms! As you engulf six (other lives) release my sister's shade!" (118, 121-7, 132-4) (In c ip it o b sc u ri n u n c o b secju u tio v o ti

S u r g e , soror, f r a tr ii

Ma n ib u s

Mo r itu r

ia m p reco diei:

in sp a c iis n o n p re c o n a n d o d iu rn is ,

A m ig u u m ceco m u n u s n o n c e d im u s O re o — O u e d a m u s in fern o n u n g u a m fie n t in a p e rto . R e s ib u s a str ic ti n o n p o s s in t ru d e re stu lti. E x tin g u a m lu m e n , p a n d a t m ifii tfire n a ra c a r m e n , L u c is sp le n d o re s n o s e x c e c a v im u s o m n e s.

Ut tib i c o m p la c e a m , v ite c o n tra r ia d ic a m . In v e n to r v a n i, P lu to , p fia n ta s m a tis , a u d i: D u m sex d e g lu ttis , sp e ciem d im itte so ro risl)

The ritual work of measuring, weighing, and apportioning is reflected and culminates in these sacrifices and in the explicit awareness of language's capacity for meaning. Tolumnius finds he must put to death in order that a symbolic matrix can become and remain emergent. This "putting to death" is clearly a manner of descending into the symbolic. It is at once the sacrifice of the dogs and the cocks—that is, one element within the series of protocols demanded by the ritual—and the protocols themselves. Like Orpheus, Tolumnius finds he must seek his lost loved object at the threshold of death. But this invocation is also performative, meant to move, much like Orpheus' performance before Pluto and Proserpine. Says Semiramis, "between complaint and tears you are moving the shades of darkness" (104, Inter utrum que m o m tectos fuligine Manes). The material expression of his invocation, that is, not only conveys meaning—straightforward meaning—but also sets the forces of the underworld into motion. He says, "I hear the scattered inhabitants of the night hastening, a stir is caused by the huge advance of spirits" (151-52: A udio dispersos noctis properare colonos, / M axim a spirituum facit adventacio m otum ). This combination of a sacrifice that moves is a compelling image of ritual and language and the combined forces of the semiotic and symbolic. At this achieved intersection of semiotic and symbolic, Semiramis' shadowy form finally emerges. Tolumnius' own explicit awareness of the capacity for language to signify heralds the beginning of her ghostly return. "My incantation has given a signal to the monsters of the night. O mediators, while I seek to know of my sister’s loves, your presence brings about a horrified numbness in me: a harsh dementia has been born in my brain. Let me now solemnly behold Semiramis' shade. I beseech, I wait, I burn in my five senses. The thing I ask is possible—through you I now see my sister!" (142-9) (Signum nocturnis dedit incantatio m onstris. O m e d ia to rs, dum quern sororis am ores, Pa rtu rit fiorribilem presentia vestra stuporem , Est rudis in nostris insania nata cerebris

S em iram is iam iam videam sollem pniter u m b ra m :

Postulo, prestolor, quinis in sensibus uror.

Possibilem peto rem — per vos iam cerno sororem .)

His ritual words are directed at the powers of the underworld, the "media-

tors," that work to bring about her return. Inflectional play in this passage helps to underscore the poem's explicit concern with the closing of gaps. Iam iam , videam, and um bram , though performing three separate grammatical functions in the sentence—adverb, verb, and noun—all end in -a m , a bit of play with inflections. In an established symbolic, such convergence signals play not threatened disintegration, as it does in the presence of a weak symbolic. Through, in, and on account of Tolumnius' consent to symbolics, the figure of Semiramis finally emerges, but midway between presence and absence, as an imago both bordered and borderless, neither too indistinct nor too clear-cut, a shadowy form both semiotic and symbolic: A. Now the creation of shadowy form can see her brother! Once this was my sister's royal face— it is she, most renowned likeness of an illustrious mother. Queen, give me your hand. Sister, bring near your tragic lips. S. Do not touch my limbs! I am not a palpable body. (154-8)

(A. Ia m v id e t u m b rife re fr a tr e m p la s m a tio fo rm e l Q u o n d a m reg a lis v u ltu s fu it iste so ro ris — H ec e st illu s tris sp ecies n o tissim a m a tris . D a , re g in a , m a n u m . S o ro r, os m ifii p o rr ig e fle n d u m

S. Ne ta n g a s a r tu s l N o n s u m p a lp a b ile c o r p u s .)

In such a form, she is both present and absent to him and, like Eurydice to Orpheus, both accessible and inaccessible. She exists solely in the miraculous space of his incantations—a recuperated lost object capable of returning only as a ghostly and shadowy vision.22 The shifting, blurring boundariedness of form, this plasm atio forme, is exactly how we have characterized words in inflected languages. Recall that the English feature of one word-meaning to one lexeme does not exist as such in inflected languages like Latin. Under the sway of inflections, a single word can proliferate into many lexemes according to its various grammatical functions (lex becomes legibus) and that, conversely, different words can converge into identical lexemes (canis and canis). Thus in Latin, the word—the dyad of lexeme and word-meaning—changes shape in changing contexts. The string of sounds that comprise the signifying chain is more greatly open in inflected languages to ambiguity, indeterminacy, and punmanship than it is for non-inflected languages. But such ambiguity can only take place in the presence of a highly stable symbolic. That is, it is only because canis and cano are each in establish paradigms in the first place—

only because a matrix of symbolic difference is firmly in place to begin with—that such pun-making is even possible. This giddy erasure of difference that we find playful can only occur, in other words, only in the presence of otherwise well-established identities. In a weak symbolic, erasure of difference threatens us as dissolution; in a too-strong symbolic, there is no erasure of difference, for the divisions between things are stark and severe, as we saw in the Prioress’s Tate. But in a symbolic nicely balanced with the semiotic, it can delight us as play. And it is precisely as “play” that Semiramis characterizes her dalliance with the bull in the poem's final bit of dialogue. Semiramis' sexual encounter is justified in the final lines of the poem as a playful blurring of boundaries. Stable selfhood has enabled her to partake in a "guiltless” mixing of self and other. It was Jove who came to Semiramis in the garden, already marked with the impress of the symbolic, filled with “adulterous desire" (164, adulterio orto) to unite himself with her in love: “lupiter who sends his lightnings from his starry throne, was filled with desire” (168-9, Q ui de stellifero sotio sua fulfura m ittit / lupiter appetiit). And he "across heaven's thunder under the beautiful divine audacity smiled at me gently, yet pressed hard upon me with love” (171, P^r cell tonitrum presum ptio pulchra deorum / Arrisit leviter, sed pressit amore potenter). The opposition self/other founded by a strong symbolic is the sina-qua-non of ecstasy. It's so because a determined and delineated self must exist in order for a straying-outside-the-self to be possible in the divine excess of sexual union. This straying out and merging of self with not-self is not, however, what it was for Tolumnius. When a symbolic is not stable, blurring of boundaries in semiotic play is threatening, the abject mergings of imperiled borders. But not so under a sure symbolic, such as that guaranteed by a god. Says Semiramis, “if the god played, this does not condemn his deed—there is no judgment against a divine seducer, such an adulterer smiled at me without blame” (172-4, Si deus illusit, non est da< m > pnatio facti—/ Divino scortatori proscriptio non est; / Inculpabiliter talis mihi risit adulter!). Rather, it is the merging that liberates possibilities of combination within an open combinatorial system of selfhood and language in a space were there is simultaneously law and transgression of that law: "When the blessed one ravaged me, we both sinned guiltlessly. When goddesses yield to voluptuousness, law is wholly overcome" (177-8, M e stuprante pio, iuste peccavimus am bo—/ Lascivis penitus lex est ablata deabus). Notes 1. Semiramis is contained in Paris B.N. lat 8121A (fols. 30r-32v). The poem has been edited and translated by Peter Dronke in his P oetic I n d iv id u a lity in th e M id d le A g es: N e w D e p a rtu r e s in P o e try 1000-1150 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970), 66-113. Dronke dates the manuscript to the late eleventh century (75) and gives S e m ir a m is the admittedly speculative date, on stylistic grounds, of about 1000 (84 n2). The extant manuscript contains six items, including— in addition to S e m ir a m is —three satires, a comedy, and

a set of rules for making organ pipes. One of the satires, an eleventh-century misogynistic attack on Jezebel, immediately precedes the poem on Semiramis and ends with the rubric "Explicit liber primus. Incipit secundus." Dronke discusses the connections between the poems and persuasively concludes that S e m ir a m is is "not a continuation" of the earlier piece (76-80). Before Dronke's edition in 1970, S e m ir a m is was printed by Bernard Leblonde in an appendix to L A c c e ssio n d es n o r m a n d s d e Ne u strie a la c u ltu r e o cc id e n ta le (Paris: Nizet, 1966). See Dronke 113 nl for a brief discussion. Since the poem is unnamed in the manuscript, the title S e m ir a m is is obviously an editorial fiction. There has been, as far as I have been able to ascertain, no critical work done on the poem other than Dronke's commentary in P oetic In d iv id u a lity . His reading of the poem is strongly thematic, stressing the poem's emphasis on magical events and the supernatural. In my own treatment of the poem, I hope to show that S e m ir a m is can be profitably understood as a poem principally about loss and mourning and the struggle to retain symbolic boundaries over against semiotic instabilities. 2. Was there even a sense of subjectivity before the twelfth century? It seem s like a banal question to ask but has had surprising attention. See, for instance, Walter Ullman, T h e In d iv id u a l a n d S o c ie ty in th e M id d le A g e s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1966); Colin Morris, T h e D isc o ve ry o f th e I n d iv id u a l 1050-1200 (London: S.P.C.K. for the Church Historical Society, 1972); Robert Manning, T h e I n d iv id u a l in th e T w elfth C e n tu r y R o m a n c e (New Haven: Yale UP, 1977); R. W. Southern, T h e M a k in g o f th e M id d le A g e s (New Haven: Yale UP, 1953) 219-57; and John Benton, "Individualism and Conformity in Medieval Western Europe," I n d iv id u a lis m a n d C o n fo r m ity in C la ss ic a l Isla m , ed. A. Banani and S. Vryonis, Jr., (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1977) 148-58. The issue is admirably summarized, and dispensed with as a serious topic for academic discussion, in Caroline Walker Bynum, "Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?" Jesu s a s M o th e r (Berkeley: U of California P, 1982) 82-109. Although one would have hoped this to be the end of the matter, the issue has been recently raised again, by Peter Haidu, S u b je c t o f V iolence: T h e S o n g o f R o la n d a n d th e B irth o f th e S ta te (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993), who argues from a principally Marxist standpoint that subjectivity as such cannot be said to have existed before the emergence of nation-states, at around 1050. 3. For the purposes of this chapter, the exact relationship between Semiramis and Tolumnius (incestuous?) need not detain us. It is enough that Semiramis shows all the earmarks of a beloved object. It is noteworthy to add, however, that Semiramis' reputation in the Middle Ages was connected with all manner of sin and sexual indiscretion. She was seen as the epitome of shameful lasciviousness both in her dalliance with the bull as well as in reported incest with her son, Nicodemus. She was also rumored, in the medieval mode of gender-bending, to have worn men's pants and to have ruled her kingdom with the manly strength of a virago. However, she was also upheld as the prime example of an energetic and capable ruler who skillfully fashioned an empire from wretched beginnings. For a comprehensive discussion of Semiramis' changing medieval portrayal from Augustine on (but not including our poem), see Irene Samuel, "Semiramis in the Middle Ages: The History of a Legend," Me d ia e v a lia et Hu m a n is tic a 2 (1943): 32-44.

4. Me ta fo rm a tio n s: S o u n d p la y a n d W o r d p la y in O v id a n d th e C la ss ic a l P o e ts (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985) 21. 5. Ahl, M e ta fo r m a tio n s 54. 6. Ahl, M e ta fo r m a tio n s 55. It could be argued that English words are likewise fluid in their boundaries because their meanings depend on the unfolding of the signifying chain—that is, on syntax. But this confuses word-meanings with parts of speech. That is, the lexeme d o g means "a domesticated carnivorous animal, etc." regardless whether it is the subject in D o g b ites m a n or the object in Maw b ite s d o g . The meaning of the sentence changes certainly, but the lexeme itself remains the same: one word form tied to one word-meaning. Of course, there are inflections in English, as the plural and possessive forms attest to, but they are not nearly so pervasive as they are in Latin. What is so rich in highly inflected languages is that a word-meaning is associated with a wide variety of different sounds and letters— thus c a n is, c a n e m , c a n i, c a n e, ca n es, c a n u m , c a n ib u s , all depending on what role /dog/ plays in the sentence. That is, the b o d y of the word is much more provisional in its varied deployments than in less-inflected languages like English. 7. Ahl, M e ta fo r m a tio n s 40. 8. T ales o f L o ve (New York: Columbia UP, 1987) 40. 9. Bla ck Saw-. D e p ressio n a n d M e la n c h o lia , trans Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1989) 23. My understanding of loss and mourning has been shaped in general by Freud's "Mourning and Melancholy," trans. Joan Riviere, G e n e ra l P sy c h o lo g ic a l T h e o ry, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: MacMillan, 1963) and more specifically as elements for literary studies by both Peter M. Sacks, T h e E n g lish E le g y : S tu d ie s in th e G e n re fro m S p e n c e r to Y e a ts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985), especially Chapter 1, "Interpreting the Genre: The Elegy and the Work of Mourning,” and Louisa O. Fradenburg "’Voice Memorial': Loss and Reparation in Chaucer's Poetry," Ex e m p la ria 2.1 (1990): 169-93. In the area of medieval studies, loss and mourning have been pervasive. This is partly so because themes of mourning and melancholy pervade medieval literature itself, but it is also partly so, suggests Fradenburg, because loss and mourning are c o n s titu tiv e of medieval studies. The Middle Ages have always been a nostalgic and privileged site of "loss" and "otherness"— and it has been the medievalists themselves, claims Fradenburg, who have for the most part insisted on this alterity. All the better that they can overcome such loss by miraculous acts of study and extraordinary powers of sympathy, to reach across the gaps of time and bridge the unbridgeable. Historicity is unavoidably a part of medieval study, and Fradenburg's article is valuable for its suggestion that we ought to avoid a vocabulary of identity and difference, of "being like" and "not being like," and think instead of our engagement with the Middle Ages in terms of "relatedness." The theorizing of such a relatedness which deconstructs "alterity" and which "does not depend on gain or presence or identity" (177) can be found, for Fradenburg, most carefully elaborated in the work of feminist theory: A deconstruction of alterity such as feminist theory might assist would make possible fresh considerations of whether and how we might define the particularities of past and present, and whether and how we might understand, not their "iden-

tity,” but their interstitiality. (192)

10. Kristeva, Black S u n 63. 11. Kristeva, Bla ck S u n 43. 12. Kristeva, Bla ck S u n 52. 13.1thus take issue with the view of mourning put forth by David Aers in his discussion of Pea rl in "The Self Mourning: Reflections on Pearl," S p e c u lu m 68 (1993): 54-74, in which the mourner is asserted to be "displaying [a] kind of individualistic and rebellious assertiveness" (65), stubbornly set over against the Church, insisting on a "competitive" and "habitual individualism" (71). But what is at stake in mourning is not the individual against the community but the whole capacity to differentiate between individual and community in the first place. In mourning, the shock of losing is so great that the self vows never to lose again and sets about dismantling the very gaps and separations that make it what it is. Mourning, in short, does not isolate the individual but destroys it. The language of individual vs. community is also present in Fradenburg's "Voice Memorial." 14. See Dronke, who likewise notes the disjunction, but accounts for it as "deliberate dramatic intention," by a poet whose "powers of writing were not fully equal to his tenebrous vision": Another way in which the poet's language and his vision seem imperfectly matched can be seen in som e of the briefer exchanges of dialogue (e.g. 29-37), where the transitions are hard to follow. This may be due simply to an excessive love of ellipsis and compression of these exchanges, yet even after attempting to expand them I still feel unable to reconstruct all the links satisfactorily. Again I suspect a deliberate dramatic intention—that the suddenness and unpredictable swiftness of the turns of thought are to help give the scene its aura of mystery—yet cannot see that it has emerged quite as the poet intended. (Poetic Individuality 109)

While it is true that the sudden turns of thought in the poem give it an aura of mystery, I am suggesting that the "ellipsis" felt by Dronke signals an imperiled symbolic. Indeed, all "links" cannot be satisfactorily "reconstructed" because the whole idea of linkage is threatened. It is only at the end of the poem, when some measure of fixity is again regained, that some of the mysteries and ellipses that texture the poem make dramatic sense. 15. Kristeva, B la c k Sun 52. 16. For a book-length consideration of the place of Orpheus in the thought and literature of the Middle Ages, see Jonathan Block Friedman, O rp h e u s in th e M id d le A g e s (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1970), with a chapter especially devoted to Henryson. See also Kenneth Gros-Louis, "Robert Henryson's O r p h e u s a n d E u ry d ic e and the Orpheus Tradition of the Middle Ages," S p e c u lu m 41 (1966): 643-55. 17. T h e P o e m s o f R o b e rt H e n ry so n , ed. Denton Fox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981) line 129— hereafter cited in the text by line numbers only. 18. Fox, P o e m s o f R o b e rt H e n ry so n 400-3. 19. A short and accessible discussion of the double nature of medieval art as perceived both in terms of quantity—that is, proportionality, numerability, measurableness—and quality—that which, like light or color, eludes proportionality— is

provided by Umberto Eco in A r t a n d B e a u ty in th e M id d le A g e s, trans. Hugh Bredin (New Haven: Yale UP, 1986). According to Eco, "the aesthetics of proportion was the medieval aesthetic p a r excellence" (40) and the intersection of quantity and quality in medieval art, especially music, corresponded with the very make-up of the body itself: "the theory of m u sic a m u n d a n a led ... to a more concrete conception of beauty—of beauty in the cycles of universe, in the regular movements of the time and seasons, in the composition of the elements, the rhythms of nature, the motions and humours of the biological life” (32). This formulation intersects with Kristeva's symbolic and semiotic and suggests the degree to which a Kristevan vocabulary could be useful in looking afresh at many aspects of medieval material culture, such as art. 20. The ability of Orpheus' music to alleviate the pangs of death—that is, to close off the gaps of loss at least partially, to make tolerable the intolerable spaces of absence and want— is first displayed in his brief trip to the underworld on his way to the "hideous hell house" of Pluto and Proserpina. Here he m eets with three of hell’s most famous denizens— Ixion, Tantalus, and Titus—whose notorious afflictions of unsatisfied desire are satisfied, if only temporarily, by his music. As Orpheus plays his harp, Ixion gets to steal away from his whirling wheel, Tantalus finally gets that drink, and the vulture that eternally gnaws at the entrails of Titus flies off for a bit, allowing him, however momentarily, to "leave off his cry." Hell in Henryson's poem is a hark back to the world of castration we saw in the Prioress's T ale, nothing less than a place of eternally galling pain, "pit of despair" without remission, "groundless deep dungeon" with torments too numerous to mention, "furnace of fire" wherein those who dwell are always dying but never more may die. These pains, pits, torments, furnaces, and deaths remind us of the Miracles of the Virgin. The "sweet melody" of Orpheus' music is to these torments just what the dulcet "Ave" and Mary's intervention were to the threats of devourment and death in the Miracles: a rest, respite— but not, recall, an abolishment of them. It must be borne in mind that Orpheus' "sweet melody" emerges only in respect of systematic structures and thus partakes of the same wound it is a balm of—wound and balm at once. 21. Kristeva, Bla ck S u n 4 3 . 22. In this powerful image of the lost object returning as a "ghostly shade," Se m ir a m is is able to avoid the cut-and-dried closure of many elegies that, as Fradenburg notes, by insisting too much on "concepts of law and order, of equilibrium, of rational balance," permit the work of mourning to slide too easily into the "expulsion" of grief through a kind of "exorcism" ("Voice Memorial" 186). From her feminist standpoint, Fradenburg is concerned with the cultural and political implications of such insistence and points out that mourning can never really be said to be over, for what stubbornly remains about mourning is its particularity: What makes grief agonizing is precisely that when som eone or something particular has been lost, it cannot recur. Thus in the concept of substitution there continues a defense against the loss of the particular, hence against the advent of the new as well as the end of the old. If the particular cannot be repeated, it remains forever lost; and this is why there can be no final closure to mourning. There can be,

alongside of mourning, learning to love new particulars. (182-3) Although it might be said of the substitute, like the metaphor, that it's simultaneously new and old and thus perhaps precisely the necessary for step towards the "advent of the new as well as the end of the old,” her point is well-taken that mourning is soaked in the contingent. We might see in Semiramis' "ghostly shade” a figure for the "relatedness" of the lost loved object to the successful mourner. The poem does not end with her being either here or there, either entirely alive back from the dead so that she is present again or so dead and buried that she has been completely expunged. Rather, she remains stubbornly present and absent to him—as well as he to her—in all of her particularity.

Ecstasy

the Wakefield Shepherd plays and O ffe rin g of th e M a g i

"Man is one of your creatures, Lord, and his instinct is to praise you" —Augustine, Confessions

In the last chapter, we saw that Robert Henryson's Orpheus and Eurydice and the anonymous poem of MS Paris B.N. lat 8121A represents entry into language as mourning, a symbolic "graft" for a self threatened by affective dissolution. However, inasmuch as the symbolic provides some recuperation for the very loss it begets, it may be seen positively. For, along with a brutal onset of separation, the advent of the symbolic makes possible an open combinatorial system which is capable at once of establishing self and selfagency and also permitting the "second" return of semiotic functioning. In the Wakefield mystery play Offering of the M agi, entry into language is just such a godsend. In abandoning their homeland to journey to the place of the Christ child, the kings willfully adopt a pre-existing symbolic order which promises stability and permanence in a world plagued by misery, deprivation, and doubt. The kings become subjects in this order, able to take on the roles of others and become persons—objects—to themselves. This doubling, this entry into language, is ecstasy, pleasure in excess. Moreover, the Offering's heavy use of sound repetition in rhymes and consonance enacts the wavering of the boundaries of self and other made possible by consent to the symbolic. The Offering of the M agi is a predominantly joyful treatment of the story of entry into language: the acquisition of self and language told in images of ecstasy, delight, desire, and the promise of expanding horizons of agency. The semiotic, represented as supporting and comfortable in the Prioress's Tale and as enigmatic and wayward in Sem iram is, appears in the Offering as an abject realm of suffocating unpredictability: the inconstant December weather and the tyrannical whim of Herod. In contrast to the tropes of castration and mourning, in which the symbolic emerges intolerably or at best

only reluctantly, in ecstasy it is sought after. The symbolic is a loving Father that promises stability, constancy, and meaning in the midst of an overwhelming semiotic. The trope of ecstasy thus intersects with and diverges from those of castration and mourning. In castration, the symbolic comes on unexpectedly, a sudden and unpleasant shock, and the newly-constituted self struggles to regain some measure of semiotic in the face of that hard edge. In mourning, the symbolic comes on weakly, and the emergent self has to struggle to retain it, but the struggle is ambivalent; the newly-constituted self is not yet ready to give up its archaic loved object because the twin functions of language and selfhood are not powerful enough attractions to bring about separation. In ecstasy, however, the symbolic emerges strongly and surely, and the semiotic appears loathsome and smothering in turn. The symbolic is additionally a source of delight, for the newly-constituted subject discovers the pleasure of becoming a subject, being a thing functioning in a world of things, and further discovers play, itself overbrimmed and melded in joyous union with others. Why else would a subject give up its maternal space unless something more delightful beckoned? If language and selfhood are accomplished in the trope of castration because the Father cuts off the child from the Maternal body, and in the trope of mourning because the Mother silently departs and the Father is all that is left, they are accomplished in the trope of ecstasy because the child willingly leaves the Mother to accede to the joyous new wonders promised by the Father. In the Wakefield cycle, the play of the magi gains much of its force and meaning from its position after the staging of the cycle's two shepherd plays (hereafter designated Shepherd I and Shepherd II). It also gains much of its meaning from its sound- and wordplay. Rhymes, chimes, and the pervasive presence of consonance function to enact on the semiotic level of the text what is at stake in its symbolic: the emergence of the magi into a system that at once gives shape to selfhood and provides for the slippages and substitutability of play.1 The shepherd plays begin in powerful declarations of loss and of the anxiety generated by an uncertain and unstable world. The shepherds find themselves without, a lack figured most powerfully at the outset of the play as the total inability to establish some sort of security in the contingent world. “All my shepe are gone,” says primus pastor of Shepherd I, "I am not left oone, // The rott has theym slone” (24-26).2 Rents are due to the landlord and the shepherds' purses are wanting, penniless: "ffermes thyk are comyng / my purs is bot wake” (31). Primus pastor plans to go to the fair to buy more sheep, in order to "multyple // ffor all this hard case” (44-45), but how he expects something to come from nothing is unclear. Secondus pastor, for his part, complains about the bullies who oppress them, the "boasters and braggers" who bear no gainsaying of their capricious demands: "If he hask me oght / that he wold to his pay, // ffull dere bese it boght / if I say nay" (73-74). Lack of material things and of any self-agency to exercise on

them is the state of being human at the outset of these Christmas plays, a humanity endlessly subjected to inconstant flux: “Thus this Warld, as I say / farys on ylk side, // ffor after oure play com sorows unryde" (10-11).3 The opening stanza of Shepherd I strikes these keynotes most sharply, depicting in anaphoric surges the Christless world of an unendingly miserable ebb and flow: Lord, what thay ar weyll / that hens ar past! ffor thay noght feyll / theym to downe cast, here is mekyll unceyll / and long has it last, Now in hart, now in heyll / now in weytt, now in blast Now in care, Now is comforth agane, Now is fayre, now is rane. Now in hart full fane, And after full sare. (1-9)

Shepherd II likewise begins with the depiction of such a world. Primus pastor's complaint about the “oppression" of the gentry may be read not so much as an index of “real" pastoral abuses as an expression of the world's unfairness: "we ar so hamyd, / ffor-taxed and ramyd, / We ar mayde hand tamyd, / with thyse gentlery men" (15-18). Members of the gentry borrow wagons and plows from the husbandmen who need them but who dare not tell them no. “Thus," concludes primus pastor, “lyf we in payne / Anger, and wo, // By nyght and day" (40-41). Secundus pastor extends these sentiments to marriage, where again the keynotes of sorrow, woe, and a limited selfagency are struck: “we sely wedmen / dre mekyll wo; // We have sorow then and then / it fallys oft so" (65-66); "These men ar wed / haue not all thare wyll" (73), “Mekyll styll mowrnyng / has wedyng home broght, // And grefys; // with many a sharp showre" (95-96). The unfairness of the world is also present in the inconstant December weather. "Lord, what these weders ar cold!" says primus pastor, "In stormes and tempest, // Now in the eest, now in the west // wo is hym has neuer rest” (1,6-8). Secundus pastor echoes his companion, “Thyse weders ar spytus ... Now in dry, now in wete, // Now in snaw, now in slete" (58, 60-61). Tercius pastor adds that the world "is euer in drede / and brekyll as glass, // And slythys" (121-22) especially with "mervylls mo and mo, // Now in weyll, now in wo, // And all thyng wrythys" (124-26). In this world of smothering mutability, of now this, now that, Christ's

birth heralds the advent of a stable symbolic order. He is the "boot" of bale, the turner of all to the good, the sender of good mending. The shepherds' adoration of the Christ child is the recognition of the sweeping patterns of otherness within which a self finds itself, entangled.4 The turning point of each play is the moment the shepherds open themselves up to others. In Shepherd I, for instance, the shepherds unselfishly decide to give their broken meats to the poor: "ffor oure saules," says tercius pastor, "lett us do // Poore men gyf it to." Primus pastor responds immediately with, "Geder up, lo, lo, lo! // ye hungre begers ffrerys!" (283-6). Immediately, the shepherds find a measure of the rest they had been seeking, for they sleep and are visited by the Angel that brings them to Christ. The powerful juxtaposition brings together the work of generosity and the "discovery" of Christ. In Shepherd II, the triumph over Mak—the shepherds tossing him in a blanket—signifies a victory over avarice and greed, which Mak represents in their fellowship: "this is a fals wark," says primus pastor, "ffor this trespas, // we will nawther ban ne flyte, // fyght nor chyte, // Bot haue done as tyte, // And cast hymn in canvas" (624-8). Like in the first play, the shepherds immediately fall asleep and are visited by the Angel who then brings them immediately to Christ. As we have tried to indicate throughout this book, the entry into language and discovery of otherness is the moment of selfdiscovery, and in the Wakefield Christmas plays other-directed actions such as charity, generosity, and fellowship are the witnesses and guarantors of a dawning symbolic order more conventionally symbolized by the advent of the Christ child. That is, they are all displacements one for another, and the enactment of any one rightly leads to the discovery of the others. The words of the Angels emphasize this connection. "Herkyn, herdys, awake!" says the Angel of Shepherd I, "he is comen to take / and rawnson you all, // your sorowe to slake / king emperiall, / he behestys" (296, 298-300). Christ the Redeemer is the preeminent example of the One who has others in mind. As we saw in Chapter 3, a concern for others is the cure for loss and mourning—emerging precisely on account of that loss paradoxically both to instantiate it and to make up for it: "Ryse, hyrd men heynd! / for now he is borne // That shall take fro the feynd / that adam had lorne" (638-39). The shepherds' journey to the place of the Christ child signals their willingness to forsake familiar territory to transfer to the place of the Other for no other reason than to celebrate the glory of that otherness: We must seke hym," say the shepherds, of Christ (320); "We shuld go to bedleme, // To wyrship that lorde” (330-31). This journey, moreover, is strongly concerned with symbols and symbolization. The place the shepherds seek is betokened by a star: "We must seke hym," says secundus pastor of Shepherd 1, "I you warne, // That betokyns yond star // That standys yonder owte" (320-22). And it is the sight of this "betokening" star that brings about their arrival at Bethlehem. Says primus pastor: "Abyde, syrs, a space / lo, yonder, lo! It commys on a rase / yond starne vs to. [secundus pastor:| It is a great blase / oure gate let vs go, here

he is!” (450-53). The Angel's song is likewise a foregrounding of signs and symbols at this crucial moment. It performs much the same function as the A lm a Redemptoris M ater in the Priores's Tale, drawing the shepherds to the threshold of the symbolic. Moreover, both of the Shepherd plays lay a great stress on the musicality of the angel’s voice, in particular its palpability. In Shepherd 1, secundus pastor refers specifically to the pulsations of musical beats perceivable in the singing: "Now, by god that me boght / it was a mery song; // I dar say that he broght / foure and twenty to a long” (413-14). In Shepherd II, a similar observation is made: "Say, what was his song? / hard ye not how he crakyd it? // thre brefes to a long" (656-57). In noting this aspect of the song, the symbolic dawning that is being enacted in the text is not allowed to emerge independently of the carnal body. It is the carnal body that leads there. For primus pastor in Shepherd I, the notes come in such a heap he cannot count them, yet he finds them well-toned: "In fayth I trow noght / so many he thrown // On heppe; // They were gentyll and small, //And well-tonyd with all” (416-19). In Shepherd II the Angel's singing is so graceful that it is said to lack nothing: "yee, mary, he hackt it, //was no crochett wrong / nor no thyng that lackt it” (658-59). As in the Prioress's Tale the symbolic is heralded by language's materiality, but as in Sem iram is this materiality points not backwards to the maternal body but forwards to the promises of the Father as law, form, and structure. In this submission and search, one detects the workings of entry into language, particularly as accomplished under the aegis of what Kristeva calls the "imaginary father.” *

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The "imaginary father” is a primordial form of the father-function before the thetic break and full-blown entry into language. It is "an archaic occurrence of the symbolic."5It corresponds, in all respects, to the maternal space. It is, in fact, the maternal space seen from the perspective not of what is left behind, the mother's body, but of what promises to emerge, the Father's symbolic order.6 It represents, in other words, a transitional stage to language and selfhood seen not retrospectively but prospectively.7 Not yet the stern father of the established symbolic, the imaginary father is a "loving” father whom we seek to identify with, the guarantor of a primordial form of the self: "a fragile inscription of subjecthood.” In comparison to the sharper edges of full entry into language, the imaginary father is only shadowy and provisional—"under the subsequent Oedipal sway,” says Kristeva, it retains "no more than a phantasmatic status.”8Yet it ensures the transition to selfhood and language by being the beginnings of a "third party” offering itself to the mother/child dyad and making them "two" rather than "one”: "we're dealing with a function that guarantees the subject's entry into a disposition, a fragile one to be sure, of an ulterior, unavoidable destiny, but one that can also be playful and sublimational.”9"Without the disposition of the psyche, the child and the mother do not yet constitute 'two'."10 The Angel and its Gloria represent an external marker of this disposition

in the Shepherd plays. The Angel and its hymn, both nebulous spaces akin to Semiratnis' ghostly shade at the conclusion of Sem iramis, are not the symbolic order in themselves but can be said to “guarantee” the shepherds' transfer to that space by evoking it for them and keeping them mindful of it. In contrast to the Prioress's Tale in which the A lm a Redemptoris M ater reassures a newly-emerging self that the maternal semiotic will not be lost in the transition to the paternal symbolic, the Angel and Gloria of the Shepherd plays look forward to the promise that the symbolic will provide some relief from the stiflingly mutable semiotic. Both hymns accomplish the same process: transition to selfhood and language. But it is important to stay mindful of the different keytones of the two formulations and the way each "hooks up" with a differing set of affects. The imaginary father allows us to postulate how a child can rejoice in the beginnings of its existence as a subject and not view it is a thing only painful and sad.11 Rather than brought unwillingly to the thetic, the shepherds seek it out because of its promise of stability and joy. The father-function of the Wakefield nativity plays is not the Prioress’s Tale’s unanticipated brutality nor Sem iram is’ consolation prize, but rather the goal of the journey from the outset, though perhaps unknown. The two primary attributes of the imaginary father that are pertinent to the nativity plays of the Wakefield cycle are that a proto-self takes it to be a pattern or model distinct from “itself" and that the proto-self can “identify" with it.12 In a world not yet constituted by objects as such, the imaginary father looms as a “nonobject," a pattern or model. Prior to Oedipality and the partiality of objectness, it is, in other words, not a thing, only a set of relationships. It therefore cannot be had or owned (by a "self" who does the “owning") but only identified with. The proto-self says Kristeva, "takes to" this function in the realm of “being-like” instead of "having": “This archaic identification... where what I incorporate is what 1 become, where having amounts to being, is not truly speaking, objectal"; for, in this space "I identify, not with an object, but with what offers itself to me as a model."13 The preeminent example of this model-that-is-not-yet-a-thing is language, because one never has language, one only participates in it: “when the object that I incorporate is the speech of the other—precisely a nonobject, a pattern, a model—I bind myself to him in a primary fusion, communion, unification. An identification."14 As nothing more than a pattern that the proto-self identifies with, the imaginary father facilitates entry into language by means of a logic of “reduplication" quite distinct from the logic of rejection that characterizes castration.15Says Kristeva, “enigmatic, nonobjectal identification ... is an identification that sets up love, sign, and repetition at the heart of the psyche."16 Simply said, by duplicating patterns again and again, a proto-self begins to establish some degree of permanence in the realm of being Me: "Patterns are duplicated on level after level until thresholds are crossed, the semiotic gives way to the Symbolic, biology becomes culture."17 By constantly iterating patterns and mimicking models, drive-energy finds itself parceled out,

the semiotic crystallizing into the symbolic. This process is particularly carried out in speech (though for the proto-self this speech is not yet a language marked by distinctions—only an ebb and flow of sounds): "In being able to receive the other's words, to assimilate, repeat, and reproduce them, I become like him: One. A subject of enunciation. Through psychic osmosis/identification."18 In short, the imaginary father gives us a vision of entry into language that is gradual rather than sudden, and one that functions in an economy of pleasure rather than in fear or grief. Separation, besides being mournful and painful, can also be an occasion of sheer joy, an opportunity for selfhood rather than a command.19The Offering of the M agi is the Wakefield cycle's most complex statement about this characterization of selfhood that is only suggested in the other two plays. The Offering, more completely than either of the Shepherd plays, narrativizes the "imaginary exultation" as well as the "risk of dissolving identities" that characterize the imaginary father.20 It does so, moreover, in language especially marked by phonetic and syntactic intersections. The wordplay of the words of the play, in other words, portrays the fragility of "selves" on the verge of entry into language. In aural echoes, rhyme, and the heavy use of consonance, the language itself participates in the reduplication, mimicking, and pattern-making of emergent selfhood. *

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On many levels, the Offering of the M agi is a reconfiguration of the images, themes, and narrative structure of the Shepherd plays. However, it is more somber, less given to frenetic action and imagination, and, despite the rantings of Herod and the elation of the visit to the manger, more shifted toward mourning and the sadness of a human existence foredoomed to instability and the oceanic torrents of a worldly ebb and flow. More than its predecessors, the Offering of the M agi unfolds in billowing surges of rise and fall. The three kings converge seemingly by coincidence, are washed somehow up to Herod's palace, are interrogated there, and are washed away again just as fitfully. The star of Bethlehem is lost to them, but returns again after prayer. Their joy at the holds but a little while until it too ebbs away, the threat of Herod's violence forcing a hasty retreat. As in the Shepherd plays, this rise and fall is thematic, gesturing to a world fundamentally unstable—and fundamentally intolerable to a stable and secure sense of self and selfhood. The arbitrariness of this world is embodied in Herod. His first words, though directed at the audience, foreground the erratic and despotic nature of his rule: Peasse, I byd, both far and nere, I warne you leyf youre sawes sere; Who that makys noyse whyls I am here

I say, shall dy. Of all this warld, sooth, far & nere, The lord am 1. 0 -* )

Ostensibly the champion of the devil Mahoun, he nevertheless puts himself on an equal footing with his god: "To mahowne & me all shall bow, // Both old and ying" ( 15-16). I bid, I warn, I say, I will—the world of the Offering is at the outset Herod's world, subject entirely to his tyrannical whims:21 The myght of me may no man mene, ffor all |that| dos me any teyn, I shall dyng thaym downe bedeyn, And wyrk thaym wo; And on assay it shall be seyn, Or I go. (37-42)

This passage well illustrates one of the principal stylistic features of the Offering of the M agi, consonance. As a poetic strategy, consonance runs throughout the Wakefield cycle and is one of its principal vehicles for meaning. At times, consonance's shift of the inner vowel sound works expressively to underscore a note of dissimilarity. In The Creation, for instance, Satan asks how it would be for him "To sit in seyte of trynyte?" (105). Not good, one is tempted answer, since in this passage sit reads like a corruption of seyte, a non-fit enacted in the miscarriage of vowels from one to the other. At other times, however, the shift serves to suggest not dissimilarity but a sense of binding up or drawing together. In The Prophets David notes that God will his "son down send" (112), for which God's son is inseparable from God's sending—especially as it is carried over the lexical gap: SON.0 (o w n ).SEND. In the Conspiracio, consonance serves another function: to underscore the inevitability of Christ's death in a triple linking: "his deth is dight no dowtte" (36). There is no doubt, in reading a phrase like this, that consonance is a deliberate poetic strategy in the Wakefield plays. Phonemes do not naturally congregate like this. In the passage we just quoted from the Offering, consonance emphasizes Herod's attempt to reduce all to himself. Shall anyone cause him woe by pointing out his limitations, he will "dyng thaym downe bedeyn," hammer them down at once. DING/DOWN/beDEYN—the text carries out its own phonemic hammering in

these repeated strikings. From a thematic standpoint, Herod's command that all bow to himself and Mahound is the desperate attempt to hold off otherness and to ensconce the self at the center of its universe, as the universe, to make all subject to it—that is, to disavow the symbolic and return to or stay in that developmental stage, the chora, in which oneself is all-in-all. The king's messenger speaks to the audience: He commaundys you, euerilkon, To hold no kyng bot hym alon, And othere god ye worship none Bot mahowne so fre; And if ye do, ye mon be slone; Thus told he me.

(79-84) Like Mak in Shepherd II, Herod is the greedy and selfish mirror-image of the play's principal characters—in this case, the Kings of Saba, Araby, and Tars who leave the place of their kingship to become exiles in foreign lands. While Herod remains fixed in his megalomania, ceaselessly asserting his omnipotence and grandiosity, the magi actively submit themselves to loss and alienation in a loving search for the other. The kings' journey is the joyful experience of entry into language: the bliss and elation of becoming an acting subject conjoined and conjoinable with others in symbolic webs of relation.22 From the outset of the play, the magi are in the process of separating (e.g., from their homelands) and constituting themselves as subjects. Their first words speak of their "trauayll" in being led away from the only places they had known to places they know not of—being transferred, that is, to the place of the Other. By means of the star that "means," this Other is specifically connected, as it is in the Shepherd plays, with signs and symbolic meaning: [Prim us rex.\ Also I pray the specyally, Thou graunt me grace of company, That I may haue som beyldyng by, In my trauayll: And, certys, for to lyf or dy I shall not fayll,

To that I in som land haue bene, To wyt what this starne may mene, That has me led, with bemys shene, ffro my cuntre; (

91- 100)23

The desire for company results from the movement toward the symbolic. The transference away from the chora represented by leaving their countries IS a reaching out to others, just like the shepherd's generosity in the Shepherd plays. The kings' chance convergence is a discovery of otherness—a discovery otherwise prevented if they had remained in the separate enclave of their own chora/spaces. Herod, however, is resolutely anchored at the center of his space, doggedly proclaiming he is “king alone,” the image of the proto-self stuck in the chora: grandiose, omnipotent, given to terrible whims, all there is. The kings, by contrast, are led out of their lands by means of the star, a "selcouth” wonder: Secundus rex. whens euer this selcouth lyght dyscende, That thus kyndly has me kende Oute of my land, And shewyd to me ther I can leynd, Thus bright shynand? (

103- 8 )

The word kyndly means both “in a kind way" and “naturally,” that is, by virtue of the natural order of things (“instinct" in other words)—but one nevertheless having to be, in this passage, “taught” (kende). This triple intersection concisely figures the ecstatic view of entry into language, not only its inevitability but also its advent from without as a loving godsend—an intersection made all the more apt by emerging in the intersection of consonance and pun. The point is made more pointedly a few lines later: Secundus rex. That lord be louyd that send me hedyr! ffor it will grathly ken vs whedyr, That we shall weynd;

We owe to loue hym both togedyr, That it to vs wold send. (

128- 32 )

The star of Bethlehem, as for the shepherds of the Shepherd plays, is a symbol that draws the magi to the threshold of the symbolic. The kings desire to know "whens may com this lyght, // and from what place" (111-12). It is clearly a sign—"it is a token that is mase // of nouelry" (183-84). Yet its meaning is currently inaccessible: "what it may mene, that know I noght" (139) and "Meruell I haue what it may meyn" (191). The pattern of a protosubject being brought into knowing by a material set of signs is consistent with the treatments of entry into language we have in the Prioress's Tale and Semiramis. The semiotic must be acknowledged to perform a central role. For it is through the materiality of signs and symbols that the symbolic gets its hooks into a chora struggling at the margins of subjectivity, tugging at "its" muscles, coddling "its" senses, pulsing within and against "its" visceral rhythms, and leading "it" forth from semiotic pulsation to symbolic proposition at the horizons of knowing—of the being aware, in other words, of the other things outside of self, which awareness is difference and selfhood. In coming to understand what the star "means," the kings insert themselves into an order of knowledge prior to and greater than themselves. This pre-existing order is represented by the prophecy of Christ's birth that the kings suddenly remembered to have heard. Under influence of the star's m eaning, the kings now recall having heard prophets speak of a "star" that shall spring of Jacob: "yond starne betokyns, well wote 1, // The byrth of a prynce, syrs, securly, // That shewys well the prophecy // That it so be" (199-202) and "Certan, balaam speaks of this thyng, // That of lacob a starne shall spryng // That shall ouercom kasar and king, // Withouten stryfe" (205-8) and "Now is fulfyllyd here in this land // That balaam said, I vnderstand" (223-24). Prophecies, by their very nature as linguistic events (prophecy hails from the IE root *bha- to speak) are creatures of the symbolic, especially inasmuch as they anticipate the future fulfillment of a present deprivation, want, or lack. They signify the anticipated closing of a desirous gap, the gap made possible only by acceptance of the thetic. In calling to mind these prophecies, the kings explicitly situate themselves in the symbolic matrix signified by such concepts as loss and lack—as well as completion and fulfillment: "Certys, lordyngys, full well wote I // ffulfyllyd is now the prophecy" (217-18). In addition, this scene of the magi's gathering is soaked in semiotic repetition, enacting precisely the desirous convergence of entities suggested by the play's symbolic. The scene takes up a considerable portion of the play: more than one-fourth (173 lines) of the play's total length (642). What especially marks the material level of the passage is a sustained degree of

repeating. Words, phrases, entire verse-lines are repeatedly echoed by the three kings in imitation of each other. The repetition is most noticeable at the level of sound. Syllables rhyme, chime, and echo within as well as across whole stanzas, and whole clusters of rhymes recur in different stanzas in different orders. Foremost in the outright repetition of wording in the scene is the recurrence, in some form or another, of the question of what the star of Bethlehem means: “To wyt what this starne may mene" (98); “A lord! In land what may this mene? (133); “What it may mene that know I noght" (139); “And of this starne that shynys thus clere, // what it may mene" (149-50); “what it may mene, this sterne so clere" (165); “Sich selcouth sight haue I sene none, // what so euer it may mene" (180); “Meruell I haue what it may mene: (191); “what it may meyn, yond starne veray" (196). The word star itself recurs fifteen times, five times specifically as “yond starne" and nine in connection with "shining," "bright," "sheen," or "clear" in various combinations: thus "starne ... with bemys shene" (98—9); “starne, shynand so shene" (135); "starne that shynys thus clere" (149); “this starne so clere // Shynand us tyll" (166-7); “starne ... shynand full sheyn" (187-9); “yond starne veray // Shynand tyll us" (195-6); "starne, so bright shynand" (227). Other phrases redound as well, passed similarly among the kings: "sooth to say (or tell)" (primus rex [PR) 102, secundus rex [SR) 117, tercius rex (TR| 160); "selcouth sight" (PR 179, SR 104, TR 134); “kaiser and king: (PR 207, SR 220); “whither to wend" (SR 129-30, TR 147); "sea and sand" (PR 248, TR 225). However, the repetition of words and phrases in the passage is best illustrated in the kings' self-exhortation to bear offerings to the Christ child. Several key words and phrases (worship, token, offerings, bring, rede, shall be, sirs, etc.) reappear in turn in each of the kings' speeches, as if in imitation: prim us rex. Lordyngs, I rede we weynd all thre ffor to wyrship that chyld so fre, In tokyn that he kyng shalbe Of alkyn thyng; This gold now wyll I bere with me, To myn offering.

ijus rex. Go we fast, syrs, I you pray, To worship hym if that we may; I bryng rekyls, the sothe to say, here in myn hende,

In tokyn that he (is| god veray, Withoutten ende.

iijus rex. Syrs, as ye say right so I red; hast we tytt unto that sted To wirship hym, as for oure hed, with oure offerying' In tokyn that he shalbe ded, This Myrr I bryng. (

229- 46 )

The material text participates in this repetition and variation: worship is spelled three different ways in the three different stanzas, furnishing the eye with a different texture on each pass. The word token is situated always second in its verse-lines, twice joined with in, once with the near-sounding is. And the collocation to kyn-kyng -alkyn-thyng in just two verse-lines (231-32) provides the ear with a sliding concatenation of phonemes. Consonance is also a predominant feature of the larger scene. Such collocations as "kyndly has me kend" (105), "1 rede we ryde togeder" (164), "shynand full sheyn” (189), and "me thynk in thoght // I thank" (140-41), show individual words coupled directly with chiming counterparts. Triple instances occur in such lines as "sagh neuer sich a sight" (171) and "what it may meyn in myn intent" (191-2). In other instances, consonance and other soundplay extend over a combination of words: the star of Bethelem's "selcouth light" (104) is a "selcouth sight" (134, 179). One of the kings declares "wote I well" (211) that Christ can "weyld at wyll" (226). Frequently, chimes and rhymes are interwoven: It gyfys more light it self alone Then any son that euer shone, Or mone, when he of son has ton His light so cleyn; Sich selcouth sight haue I sene none, What so euer it meyn. (

175- 80 )

Not only does son (176) rhyme with seven words in this passage, including

one outright repetition (son, 177) and one palatized near-miss (shone, 176), but it also chimes with sene (179), itself the last member of the alliterative chain sich~selcouth-sight~sene containing three instances of consonance, sichselc~sight. Mone (177) not only looks like more (175) on the page and rhymes with the same series of words as son but also consonates with the stanza's final word, m eyn. Although these effects are predominantly local, the scene's determined verbal interweaving creates connections more far-flung—verbal echoes occurring many lines apart. The rhyming couplet bright/night, for instance, occurs in both stanzas 19 and 29 and recurs variantly as broght/noght in stanza 24. One of the passage' most common words, land (appearing in lines 106, 172, 223, and 247 in rhyming positions, and in 97 and 133 in non-rhyming positions) broadly echoes and is broadly echoed in turn by another of the passage's most common words, leynd (86, 107, 114). Finally, the scene is bound together through repetition of rhyme: sets of rhyming syllables and words recurring repeatedly. The following stanzas for example all employ words ending in -ene: |P rim us rex.] To that I in som land haue bene, To wyt what this starne may mene, That has me led, with bemys shene, ffro my cuntre; Now weynd I will, withoutten weyn, The sothe to se. (

97- 102)

Tercius rex. A, lord! in land what may this mene? So selcouth sight was neuer sene, Sich a starne, shynand so shene, Sagh I neuer none; It gyffys lyght ouer all, bedene, By hym alone. (

133- 38 )

|S ecundus rex.\ ffor sich a starne was neuer ere seyn, As wyde in warld as we haue beyn, ffor blasyng bemys, shynand full sheyn,

ffrom hit ar sent; Meruell I haue what it may meyn In myn intent. (

187- 92 )

Recurring a-rhymes, moreover, frequently appear as b-rhymes in other stanzas. For example, the a-rhyme in stanzas 42 and 38, -a n d , is also the b-rhyme in stanzas 18 and 29. The b-rhyme -in g in stanzas 37, 39, and 41, is also the a-rhyme in stanza 35. All told, only 26 different rhyming syllables are used out of a possible 56 in the 28 stanzas that make up the scene, suggesting to what extent the Offering’s author made repetition a conscious feature of the poem's texture. Rhymes also occur within lines on a regular basis. We already noted the son-ton-m one-alone-none-sfione rhyming chain of stanza 30, but in stanza 15 as well, internal rhyme is an echoing extension of the regular a-rhyme: "Lord, of whom this light is lent, //And unto me this sight has sent" (86-87). In stanza 39, internal rhyming words in - y n also chime with the stanza's - y n g b-rhymes—themselves with two instances of internal rhyme: prim us rex. LorDYNGys, I rede we weynd all thre ffor to wyrship that chyld so fre, is TOKYN that he KYNG shalbe Of ALKYN THYNG; This gold now wyll I bere with me, To MYN OFFERYNG. (

229- 34 )

The result of all this aural interweaving is a carrying out on the semiotic level of the text the confluence of entities that is clearly proclaimed in the play's symbolic. The repetition is a reduplication, identifying the place of the kings as the threshold of entry into the symbolic. Aural reverberations enact on the material level of the text the kings' collective convergence under the sway of the star of Bethlehem: in coming together under the star that "gyffys light ouer all” they come together as well in a common set of sounds and common vocabulary. In drifting up against the same words and word-sounds in repetition, consonance, and rhyme, the kings ritualize in throats and diaphragms, lips and tongues, the very same enunciative vibrations and pulsations ritualized by their partners, thus converging somatically as well as geographically, semiotically as well as symbolically.

The effect also works—regardless of the kings—on a purely verbal level, for the words themselves act out, in their convergence and intersection of phonemes and letter forms, the workings of a combinatorial order represented in the text by the birth of the Christ child—a combinatorial order which on the one hand isolates subjects and objects as their own and on the other permits them to come together in larger accretions. The Offering of the M agi is the story of a self's discovery not only of the mournfulness of isolation but also the possibility, inherent in the symbolic order by virtue of its materiality, of momentarily transgressing that isolation, momentarily enacting a convergence of one entity with another within and on account of the symbolic gaps and separations that establish them. This struggle of isolation and convergence is carried out at the material level of the text in the rhymes and consonance of the words, entities at once isolated yet convergent, different yet constantly evoking one another in their difference. The play's symbolics—its plot, themes, and propositional meaning—are soaked in this material matrix, a web of seeping admixtures permeating a story of seeping admixtures.24 These overtones are supported by the page layouts of the Towneley manuscript itself, in which heavy black lines bracket the stanzas, visually indicating the web of associations created by the rhymes.25 Common to many medieval manuscripts the b-rhymes of the Towneley manuscript are written not under the a-rhymes, as they are frequently presented in modern editions, a-rhyme a-rhyme a-rhyme b-rhyme a-rhyme b-rhyme But next to them—that is, to the right, like this, with lines to mark the relations:

a-rhyme a-rhyme

b-rhyme

a-rhyme a-rhyme

//

b-rhyme...............I

The linearity of the script is displaced. Instead of reading down, one reads down the first three a-rhymes in order, then back up and over for the farhyme, then down and back over for the final a-rhyme and back over to the final b-rhyme. The result, visually, is to split up the separate rhymes into separate columns, enforcing the convergence of rhyming words and enhancing a general sense of spaciousness over one of linearity. In the Wakefield master's signature stanza, with its four levels of rhymes, the effect is even more pronounced: a-rhyme : b-rhyme............ I a-rhyme : b-rhyme a-rhyme : b-rhyme............I

c-rhyme

I a-rhyme : b-rhyme............I d-rhyme d-rhyme

c-rhyme

d-rhyme Since the Wakefield cycle as a whole and many of the individual plays themselves are written in a variety of stanza forms, and since many stanza forms themselves are blocked in more than one way, the visual impact of the Towneley manuscript is stunning. To open it is to lay eyes on a mass of con-

verging and diverging black lines and brackets, arranged first in this system and then in that, placed one after another here but yoked together differently there, now with long lines, now with short. The ballad-like stanzas of the Play of the Doctors, for example, are arranged at one time in four short lines with double alternating brackets, a-rhyme —I b-rhyme —I —I a-rhyme —I I b-rhyme......... I and at another in two long lines with a single bracket marking the b-rhymes, a-rhyme / b-rhyme............I a-rhyme / b-rhyme............I The result of all of this is a profuse sense of system underlying the semiotic surges of the material text. To read the Wakefield plays is simultaneously to participate in the pulsations and ebb and flow of its materiality and to take part in an underpinning stability, a careful arrangement of sound in precision and order—a system, moreover, that in its very establishment liberates the possibilities of play. In contrast to the kings who seek to embrace the systems of otherness instantiated in Christ, Herod is threatened. His exclamations of mourning and dole are not improper responses, as we saw in chapter 3. His reaction to the tidings that foreign kings have come to his country in search of a "barne" who "shulde be kyng / of town and towre" (275, 279-80) reveals his anxiety, sorrow, and vulnerability characteristic of the trope of mourning: "Ther dyd no tythyngis many a day, / Sich harme me to” (297-98); and "These tythyngis mar my mode in ernes” (303); and "Alas, alas! For doyll and care! / So mekyll sorow had I neuer are / If it be sothe, for euer mare / 1am vndoyn” (319-22). These are typical anxieties felt by those at the threshold of entry into language. But Herod's call for the death of Christ signals denial, a psychotic foreclosure of otherness. The boy-king is seen by him not as companion but as rival: "Shuld that brodell, that late is borne,” he asks, "Be most of mayn?” (315-16); and "We, fy! fy! ... he shall neuer haue might to me, / That new-borne lad” (291-92). Consequently, he orders the magi brought to his court for further interrogation. In a scene that reveals just how much Herod can be understood to be the alter-ego of the magi, he too is confronted by the significations and prophecies of Christ birth—but with markedly different results. They serve only to deepen his anxieties and confirm his pre-Oedipal megalomania. The

difference is nicely caught in a single stanza: iius rex. lord, when that starne rose vs beforne, There by we knew that chyld was borne.

herodes. Out, alas, I am forlorne ffor euer mare! I wold be rent and al to-torne ffor doyll and care! (

385- 90 )

Whereas the kings take the star as a sign and promise of a meaningful otherness outside themselves, Herod considers it only is a threat—a difference revealed in how Herod's dialogue completes the a-rhymes in the stanza: that Christ is borne makes Herod feel fo r forlorne—that is, lost, absent, separated—and also, significantly, to-torne—that is, shredded, shattered, fractured. Instantiation of the symbolic can appear shattering, as we saw in connection with the Prioress's Tale and Miracle of the Virgin stories in chapter 2, and it is principally from within an affective cluster like castration that Herod understands the advent of otherness represented by Christ—sad, painful, and threatening. Thus the prophecies of Isaiah and Micah revealed to Herod by his counselors only confirm what is intolerable from this perspective, the symbolic's promised advent. As loathesome as Herod is, his final words are nonetheless a deeply-affecting expression of what it means to enter into subjectivity under the threat of castration, be cut off from preOedipal omnipotence, become just one more unit, no better or worse than others, in a universe of units, a “self" subject now to heat, cold, hunger, abjection, loss, and privation: Alas, wherto were I a crowne? Or is cald of greatt renowne? I am the fowlest borne downe That euer was man; And namely with a fowll swalchon That no good can.

Alas, that euer I shuld be knyght, Or holdyn man of mekyll myght,

If a lad shuld reyfe me my right All thus me fro. Myn dede ere shuld I dyght, Or it were so. (

469- 80 )

The refusal of the symbolic by Herod jeopardizes its appearance to the kings. For as they leave Herod's court to make their final journey to the place of the Christ child, they find the star has disappeared: "where is the lyght that vs has led?" asks secundus rex, "Some clowd, for sothe, that starne has cled / ffrom vs away" (495-6). The double use of consonance in lyght/led and clowd/cled embodies the very idea of a thing obscured, not what it was. This obfuscation has its source in Herod: iiius rex. wo worth herode, that cursyd wyght! wo worth that tyrant day and nyght! Ffor thrugh hym haue we lost that sight, And for his gyle, That shoyn to vs with bemys bright within a whyle. (

499- 501 )

Herod's mourning for lost omnipotence and his desire to eliminate otherness threatens to cancel at once star, symbolics, and signification. To counteract this foreclosure, the kings find they must pray: prim us rex. lordyngys, I red we pray all thre To that lord, whose natyuyte The starne betokyned that we can se, All with his wyll; pray we specyally that he wold show it vs untyll. (

505- 10)

They kneel down and address their words to the loving Other and, in that praying, effect a second return of the token star and end to their journey. In

contrast to Herod's attempt to hold off otherness, the kings' prayers engage it directly: iius rex. Thou chyld, whose myght no tong may tell, As thou art lord of heuen and hell, Thy nobyll starne, emanuell, Thou send vs yare; That we may wytt by fyrth and fell how we shall fare.

iiius rex. A, to that chyld be euer honoure, That in this tyd has stynt oure stoure And lent us lyght to oure socoure, On this manere; we loue the, lord of towne and towre, holly in fere. (

511- 22 )

The final phrase holly in fere catches the loving and fearful ambivalence of the advent of otherness. Not only does the love of the other take place, “wholly in fear," as we saw in the castrative trope, but also “wholly together"—in companionship. Moreover, the phrase blurs the distinction between kings and the symbolic, for it is at once adverbial for the magi, in the sense of "we being wholly together love you," and an adjective for the, in the sense of “we love thee, Christ, the triune God, who is holy together." Another pun exists that signals the capacity of the symbolic to grant wholeness in the realm of differences: the kings are once "wholly" and "hole-y" together. Their identities and the pleasures of their companionship are inseparable from the very symbolic order that threatens them though it causes them to be. Moreover, the echoing phrases oure stoure and oure socoure powerfully locate the kings emerging selves (oure) within, and just as powerfully dislocate them from, a tumultuous world of alternating turmoil (stoure) and sweetness (socoure). It is possible to see in this wording the end of the journey of entry into language: an achieved intersection of semiotic and symbolic. No longer entirely enfolded by the rhythms of surge and abatement, the kings' selves are both enfolded and stand alone. Consequently—immediately—the star reemerges, and the kings recognize their travail is at an end and the child near at hand:

|Tercius rex. | we owe to loue hym ouer all thyng, That thus has send vs oure askyng; Behold, yond starne has made stynyng, Syrs, securly; Of this chyld shall we haue knowyng, I hope, in hy.

iius rex. lordyngys dere, drede thar vs noght Oure greatt trauell tyll end is broght; yond is the place that we haue soght ffrom far cuntre; yond is the chyld that all has wroght, Behold and se! (

523- 34 )

If the kings' prayers, the search for the star, and their arrival of the place of the Christ child all enact a celebration of otherness, the celebration is further emphasized—indeed, explicitly thematized—in the great hymns of praise that constitute the play's climax. Tercius rex advises the kings to worship the child they have found: I red we make offeryng, all thre, vnto this chyld of greatt pauste, And worship hym with gyftys fre That we haue broght; Oure boytt of bayll ay wyll he be, well haue we soght. (

535- 40 )

A celebration of otherness, the kings' words of praise to the Christ child bind together their unsolicited giving, their desire to submit themselves to the other, and the matrix of signs and sign-making. The kings' offerings of gold, frankincense, and myrrh are turned to signs in the action of gift-giving

and stand as tokens to the preeminence and might of the King Whose advent permits their very kinship. The collocation tokening-king-kin~kind emphasizes the confluence of the sign-making power together with self and relatedness made possible by the symbolic. prim us rex. hayll be thou, maker of all kyn thyng! That boytt of all oure bayll may bryng! In tokeyn that thou art oure kyng, And shalbe ay, Resayf this gold to myn offeryng, prynce, I the pray.

iius rex. hayll, ouercomer of kyng and of knyght! That fourmed fysh, and fowyll in flyght! ffor thou art godis son most of myghte, And all weldand, I bryng the rekyls, as is right, To myn offerand.

iiius rex. hayll, kyng in kyth, cowrand on kne! hayll, oone-fold god in persons thre! In tokyn that thou ded shalbe, By kyndly skyll, To thy grauyng this myr of me Resaue the tyll. (

541- 58 )

Hail emerges as an immensely important word in this passage. Used principally as a salutation or greeting, it nevertheless retains the adjectival force of its Old English root meaning healthy or whole. This is the same root that, given a sacred twist, becomes our words “holy" and “hallow." Hail is thus a semantic field encapsulating notions of completeness and sanctity, as well as that of simply speaking in recognition of the other. The mere use of the word fiail or its modern equivalent, hello, locates the speaker and listener in

an intersubjective exchange—an exchange that, by its very nature, confirms the boundaries of a self over against another self. To salute another is at the same time to give shape to an "I." Praising or hailing is thus performative in the sense that it accomplishes the instantiation of the subject as such. In pointing to that and celebrating it, I differentiate it from this, a me.26 That the kings salute the other in turn serves to place them at the intersection of semiotic and symbolic, as substitutable units in a combinatorial order, at once clearly separate and yet not separate at all. The anaphoric repetition of hail at the beginning of the three responses divides the kings one from another—as well as from the Great Other—just as it binds them together in an identificatory reduplication of enacted phonemes. Subtly, in these hymns of praise, in the celebration of the other performed, as in all cases in the Wakefield cycle, communally, subjectivity is confirmed and annulled simultaneously. The access and consent to a language that is meaningful allow the kings to become, in effect, kin, to establish themselves as subjects one against the other and yet to take themselves for each other in a joyful and loving vertigo. Love and joy are pleasure in excess—when "I," in effect, becomes the other. The word ecstasy, chosen to represent this aspect of entry into language, refers not only to ravishing joy but also to the standing-outside-ofself that entry into language makes possible (ex, 'out,' + stasis, 'standing'). In entry into language, the self becomes what for Herod is intolerable: just another object in a world of objects, one element in an elementary system. But a self must be in place as a self for to be overbrimmed and exceeded in joyous excess. And it is this keynote that is struck as the kings leave the house of the Christ child. Words of praise and love are interwoven with words of joy and bliss: prim us rex. A, lordyngys dere! the sothe to say, we haue made a good lornay; we loue this lord, that shall last ay with outten ende; he is oure beyld, both nyght and day, where so we weynd. (

577- 82 )

iiius rex. I loue my lord! we haue well sped To rest with wyn. (

591- 92 )

It is a paradox that the kings' love in celebration of the other is a joyous overflowing of the very self-boundaries that such celebration makes possible. Wyn still retained in the Middle Ages its OE meaning of pleasurable experience—touching semantically on what we mean by love but also toppling over into the area of a decidedly embodied pleasure. The chime of weynd and wyn in this sequence is unmistakable and suggests that the great struggle that characterized the kings' coming to their glimpse of the Christ child (i.e., "Our greatt trauell," 530) has been turned into joy—their travail of travel converted, in effect, into a winning of wending. The play's final scene serves to remind us that the ecstatic view of self and selfhood cannot be maintained indefinitely—that a surge of coming together must be washed away again in a flood of separateness. As the kings sleep, they are visited by an Angel who tells them they must split up and go their separate ways, for Herod is seeking to harm them. The kings regret their parting but take their different ways: (tercius rex.] I rew full sore that we shall twyn On this manere; ffor commen we haue, with mekyll wyn, By wayes sere.

prim us rex. Twyn must vs nedys, syrs, permafey, And ilk on weynd by dyuers way; This wyll me lede, the sothe to say, To my cuntre (622 - 8 )

It must be stressed that Christianity promises final and full reunion, and although convergence is only possible here momentarily, the meaning of the star in the hymns and of the vision in the manger is that He will be back. In this respect, Christianity is what Lacan would call an imaginary construct—a promise of total identity and full plenitude. And this construct and promise certainly lurks in the nativity plays. But the specific vision of subjectivity developed by the plays is much less imaginary. It recognizes at once that plenitude can exist for selves—it IS possible to be an integrated self—and that such plenitude cannot hold, that desire can be satisfied and never always satisfied, that identities are things in themselves and also only a play of differences. Kristeva helps us to understand the double nature of this conception, for to crest the thetic break is for her to glimpse on the one hand the possibility and impossibility of self-integrity and on the other the

pain, sorrow, and joy that it entails. It might be said that Christ does not so much show up to save us from our fragmentation and finitude as His advent is at once our fragmentation and finitude and the possibility of their knitting up in patterns, networks, and webs of relatedness.27 The recurrence, in the kings' final words, of w yn inside twyn helps to locate the kings finally at the intersection of semiotic and symbolic: w yn indicating the embodied joy emerging from within the tw ynning, the splitting or parting, indicative of the thetic break. This word play has all along been the pattern for the more properly propositional meaning of the play. The play charts out how the “I” can become the other through unstable boundaries: the kings finding themselves situated by their desire for delight in the Other, yet converging as well in companionship, kings become kin. We can understand that process as taking place in two distinct stages—first the self becomes boundaried and thus establish, then it overbrims those boundaries in loving excess. But these two stages are simultaneous in reality. The discovery of a boundaried self IS the discovery of its limitations and of the sheer joy of transgressing those borders in identifying with, becoming— being—another. In such wordplay as echoes, rhymes, and consonance, the words on the page can literally act out this becoming of another. The lexical pair of twyn and w yn—or wend and w yn—or tauris and torribilis in Sem iram is, or fro word and frowarde in the Prioress's Tale—gives the impression that one word can become another word—IS another word in enunciation—a giddy, playful, joyous melding of words and things made possible by the open combinatorial system guaranteed by entry into language. Notes 1. There is an increasingly rich fund of criticism on the Corpus Christi plays— a criticism focused primarily on the prevailing climate in the Middle Ages on how the plays were written or received. Representative studies include V. A. Kolve, T h e P la y C a lle d C o rp u s C h risti (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1966); Peter Travis, D r a m a tic D e sig n in th e C h e s te r C y c le (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982); and Theresa Coletti, "Purity and Danger: the Paradox of Mary's Body and the Engendering of the Infancy Narrative in the English Mystery Cycles," F e m in ist A p p r o a c h e s to th e B o d y in M e d ie v a l L ite ra tu re , ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993) 65-95. It might be helpful to take a moment and differentiate my approach from this work. With minor changes, Kolve's statement that his study is meant to "enter into the habits of thought and feeling of another age" (4) and discuss "ways in which a member of the medieval audience might legitimately have understood the play before him" (2) stands as a representative statement of this critical tack because it seeks to locate the plays in late-medieval social, religious, and aesthetic contexts. Thus Kolve refers the feasting scene in the Shepherd plays to real Christmas feasts meant to cap the "fasting and privation" of Advent, saying "We must approach the season as they did" (161). For Travis the very same moment can be linked to a Franciscan— specifically a Bonaventuran—theory of epistemology: the great emphasis on "sense per-

ception” before the visit to the manger reveal the shepherds’ transition from a world of delight to one of spiritual apprehensions, thus objectifying an "inner process of growth" (128): "the psychological process of the shepherds' transformation ... conforms perfectly with the tenets of Bonaventuran epistemology" (126). In contrast, my approach seeks to focus attention not on any specifiable conceptual context than can be linked to medieval epistemology, philosophy, or theology, but on the pattern of self-discovery revealed in texts independent of such contexts. We need not go to Bonaventure, in other words, or to the penitentials to explain the text if a pattern of self-discovery is already readily apparent. It is possible that plays were written and received in a manner other than that sanctioned by "authoritative texts" and of dominant, even prevalent, interpretive strategies. The notion of the "textual community," it seem s to me, is a tricky one, and one that might very well close off certain possibilities of meaning if adhered to too rigidly. My work attempts to find patterns in the medieval narrative of selfhood that might very well represent their own consistency, whether or not buttressed by identifiable social, cultural, or aesthetic contexts. To me it seem s unnecessary to trot out a thirteenth-century theologian, without otherwise direct evidence, to explain a late-medieval English mystery play. It seem s much more sensible to posit that any correspondences in ideas of selfhood in Bonaventure and the mystery plays might have their origin in some other, perhaps deeper formulation of selfhood. But the two approaches are not incompatible, and Kolve's observation that "drama in the later Middle Ages sought to increase the emotional richness and depth of man's existence as a creature under God" is certainly something I would subscribe to, adding that at least part of the plays' richness is their conception of what it means to be a subject in English or any other culture. 2. The Towneley Plays, ed. George England with side-notes and introduction by Alfred W. Pollard EETS es 71 (London: Oxford UP, 1897). All references to the plays are from this edition. Too late to be used more than as a passing reference is the first new edition of the Wakefield plays in almost a hundred years, The Towneley Plays, ed. Martin Stevens and A. C. Cawley, EETS ss 14, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995). 3. Compare Kolve, who also notes that "the opening soliloquies define a world at its worst—aged, cruel, full of suffering" (C orpus Christi 167), but only so that a "(theological | progress may be made therefrom": "Christ came to end man's most extreme misery, and therefore even the time and hour of His birth (in the dead of winter) came to have symbolic meaning" (167). The world, in short, represents for Kolve a kind of theological landscape of Christlessness. In contrast, I suggest more broadly that the world of the nativity plays represents the psychological landscape of a self not yet fully constituted in the symbolic— Christian or otherwise. 4. I fail to see how the shepherds can be considered "fools" refusing to see the larger divine patterns of which they are a part as suggested by John Gardner in his Construction of the W akefield C ycle (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1974), mainly because they live in a world which as of yet participates in no consistency that could give structure to wisdom. Their "foolishness," in other words, is one way of figuring existence in a world that has no overarching meaning, no concept yet of any sort of larger vision. It is precisely the matter of these plays to unfold the advent of such a world.

5. "Julia Kristeva in Conversation with Rosalind Coward,” Desire, ICA D ocum ents 1 (1984): 23. 6. The emergence of the imaginary father and the maternal space are simultaneous. See Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1987): "The immediate transference toward the imaginary father, who is such a godsend that you have the impression that it is he who is transferred into you, withstands a process of rejection involving what may have been chaos and is about to become an abject. The maternal space can come into being as such, before becoming an object correlative to the Ego's desire, only as an abject" (41). 7. The imaginary father thus represents "a sort of symbolic instance” at a moment when the symbolic is not yet possible: "something that is here that cannot be here— the possibility of absence, the possibility of love, the possibility of interdiction but also a gift” (Kristeva, "In Conversation” 22). This marks its difference from the maternal space, a difference not so much in kind as one secundum ratione : the imaginary father "is something different from the overwhelming presence of the mother which is loving, but which is also too much desiring, too much in close proximity with the child, and in this way she perhaps cannot give enough space for this symbolic elaboration” (22). It is the most archaic instance of the "third party.” 8. Kristeva, Tales of Love 46. 9. Kristeva, Tales of Love 46. 10. Kristeva, Tales of Love 40. 11. Kelly Oliver, R eading Kristeva: U nraveling the D ouble B lind (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993) 80. 12. Kristeva, Tales of Love 33. 13. Kristeva, Tales of Love 25. 14. Kristeva, Tales of Love 26. It must be noted that the imaginary father, or "father of individual pre-history" in Freudian terminology, has nothing to do with real fathers. Says Kristeva, it "is not grasped as a real person by the infant but like a symbolic instance: something that is here that cannot be here— the possibility of absence, the possibility of love, the possibility of interdiction but also a gift" ("In Conversation” 22). 15. Bear in mind that any single entry into language is constituted by the impression of both a loving and stern father: emergence into the symbolic is at once an invitation to reduplicate as well as an order to submit. The stern and unforgiving father is a part of the castrative trope. 16. Kristeva, Tales of Love 25. 17. Oliver, R eading Kristeva 73. 18. Kristeva, Tales of Love 26. 19. This is not to deny the anxiety and risks caused by entry into language carried out in the name of the imaginary father: "Such a warm but dazzling, domesticated paternity includes the imaginary exultation as well as a risk of dissolving identities that the Freudian Oedipal process alone ends up strengthening: (Kristeva, Tales of Love, 46). "Separation is our opportunity to become narcists or narcissistic, at any rate subjects of representation" (42). 20. It might be helpful here to draw a clear distinction between the Kristevan and

the Lacanian vocabularies of the "imaginary." For Lacan, the "imaginary" is the realm of fullness or plenitude associated with the child's first glimpse of itself in the mirror. In the mirror, the child sees a unity in its reflection which belies its experience of itself prior to that as a fragmented bundle of contentious drive-energy not at all unified. The imaginary is thus for Lacan a realm of illusory wholeness. It is a dangerous stage because if one never goes beyond it into the Symbolic proper, one can end up believing too much in the notion of a stable, secure, unified self—a notion which puts tremendous pressure on the subject to try to fulfill the dictates of an overly-unified self-conception which has little or no basis in reality. (It's helpful to remember that both Lacan and Kristeva were/are practicing psychoanalysts.) Consequently, for Lacan the Symbolic is a remedy for this state of affairs inasmuch as it is an obvious structure of difference. It exposes the lie in the mirror that "things" can said to exist as wholenesses— including such a "thing" as a "self." To enter into the Symbolic is to recognize that all sources of power/authority/rescue are limited and partial. In contrast, Kristeva draws no distinction between the imaginary and symbolic; or, if she does, the first is merely a latterly operation dependent on the second (see, for example, Tales of Love 7). For her, they are two sides of the same coin and come into existence together. To see one's own boundaries in the mirror is already to set up a realm of differences, for in order to recognize "my" shape, I have to differentiate a "me" from the "other" objects in the mirror. So when I say in this chapter that the shepherds or kings have "fully entered into subjectivity" or "become full-fledged subjects," I am not speaking in terms of Lacan's imaginary. That is, I'm not saying selfhood is wholeness or that the advent of the Christ child, as the guarantor of selfhood, is a guarantor of plenitude and full self-presence. Rather, to become subjects is to recognize simultaneously the possibility of self-wholeness and the limitations and partialities of that wholeness in difference. Thus, says Kristeva, "separation is our opportunity to become narcists or narcissistic, at any rate subjects of representation The emptiness it opens up is nevertheless also the barely covered abyss where our identities, images, and words run the risk of being engulfed" (Tales of Love 42) The threshold of entry into language means the awareness of a gossamer self constantly trembling into shape and being dissolved and generally at-risk in the world— but to the extent it also allows us to conceive of ourselves as whole objects capable of acting coherently it makes possible the ecstasy—the "standing outside of the self"—that permits the self to take its place in the combinatorial systems which characterize subject positions in language and the social contract. Lastly, it must be said that the characterization of the Father-function in the ecstatic trope is not entirely what the father is. It is only a partial perspective. If we seek a more complete view, we need to balance that characterization with the brutal father in the Prioress's Tale and the non-existent father in Sem iram is. The father-function, properly speaking, is all of these together. It bears repeating once more: the tropes characterize a complex medieval view, but each is only partial. The "real" thing is all of them together, and more. 21. For the formation of Herod's character, see David Staines, "To Out-Herod Herod: the Development of a Dramatic Character," The D ram a of the M iddle Ages, ed. Clifford Davidson, C. J. Gianakaris, and John H. Stoupe (New York: AMS, 1982)

207-31. 22. Travis likewise views the nativity plays as a combination of communal unification and "psychological process.” However, as mentioned in note 1, his focus is on the conceptual contexts of late-medieval epistemology. Thus the psychological process being enacted in the plays is not so much that of selfhood generally but more specifically "the spiritual enlightenment experienced by all faithful Christians” (D esign 118). For Travis, the nativity plays celebrate the transition from a secular world of societas, the "everyday order of society” as represented by "jural, political, and economic powers,” to one of com m unitas, '"society as undifferentiated, homogeneous whole' made up of 'concrete idiosyncratic individuals, who, though differing in physical and mental endowment, are nevertheless regarded as equal in terms of shared humanity'" (quoting Victor Turner, The R itual Process: Structure an d A n ti-S tru ctu re (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1969) 177). In contrast, I am regarding the psychological process enacted by the nativity plays as the much more fundamental maneuver of entry into language. This allows me to consider Herod's world, the world before the advent of Christ, as the representation of a psychological state and thus permits a much greater stress to be laid on what I consider the distinguishing characteristic of Herod's world: its mutability, unfixity, aimlessness, and tyranny. It is not clear why the Christian world of com m unitas should be opposed to law, economy, and politics. 23. The rubrics indicating the speaking parts in the Towneley manuscript vary greatly. The second king, for example, is likely to appear as Secundus rex, secundus rex, or iius rex. I have tried to be as faithful as possible in all instances. When it was necessary to add the speaking part in parentheses (by way of clarification), I used the expanded, capitalized version. 24. One might object that the whole cycle is structured with such verbal and aural effects and that chimes, rhymes, and consonance also function in, say, the Conspiracio which is about betrayal and fracturing instead of joy and convergence. How would a "web” of seeping admixtures work in that case? Or, to put it another way, if all plays of the cycle are shot through with these effects—and som e in much more complex patterns than the O ffering — how can they mean anything in particular in this play? Aren't they just part of the cycle's style? This objection, however, lends the semiotic an independent meaning which it does not have. It must be remembered that sem iotic articulatory effects such as chime, rhyme, and consonance do not exist independently of symbolic and propositional meaning— even though, incipiently symbolic, they sustain a faculty for such meaning. They are potential meanings, in other words, actualized in specific utterances, taking on expressive, propositional meaning only in combination with the symbolic. In a story "about" convergences, these effects will appear convergent—their status as indeterminate meaning toppled over into "convergence” under pressure of a symbolic "aiming” that way. Yet one could easily imagine an instance in which the same type of effects might help support the reading of a text about betrayal or disjunction, like the Conspiracio or Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale. In this case, the same chimes, rhymes, and consonance might read as failures or "near-misses,” the material expression of disparity, disjunction, and defeat. But in a context concerned with representing the bliss of entry into language—the transfiguration of the indeterminate chora into a capable acting subject

conjoined and conjoinable with others in symbolic webs of relatedness—the phonemic giddiness of the Offering's aural effects possesses overtones of linking or bindingup, not disjunction. 25. The Towneley manuscript is the only manuscript of the Wakefield plays and now resides at the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery in San Marino, California, under the accession mark HM 1. According to the editors of the most recent edition of the Wakefield plays, Martin Stevens and A. C. Cawley, The Towneley Plays, EETS ss 14 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995), the manuscript can be dated later than 1475, with a date of 1500 likely (Lxv). The manuscript's history, condition, and provenance are fully discussed in this most recent addition. Also discussed are the nature and purpose of the manuscript, and I would like briefly to summarize this information since I will be talking about the manuscript's visual impression. Who would have read it? For what purpose? According to Stevens and Cawley, HM 1 is similar to other manuscripts of Biblical cycles in that it is a late text, “one that probably followed by som e years the actual performance of the cycle” (Lxxii-xxiii). Yet unlike most other play manuscripts, it is "something of a luxury volume.” With its elegant and beautiful strapwork initials, interlaced loops, scrolls, and garlands, the manuscript "was clearly meant to be admired as a book in itself, and may not originally have been intended for everyday use” (Lxxiii). It appears to have been what is called a regenall, an original complete text or authorial version, rather than a register, a public record book containing many gaps and blank spaces for insertion of new pageants as they were added to the performance—that is, it was not a working copy. If it was indeed the regenall specifically referred to in the Wakefield Burgess Court entry of 1599, it is probable, say the editors, "that it may have existed for some of its early life as a literary text that had little direct connection with the actual performance of plays" (1 :xxiv). Although it is no doubt a "dramatic text”— as attested by the presence of speakers' names and stage directions— it is nevertheless a text with little practical value as a guide to performances ( Lxxv). The evidence suggests that it was "probably the work of a small provincial shop in which one or two persons produced the entire finished text” (Lxxiii), and that he (or they) copied directly from many examplars, perhaps from the regenalls of individual pageants. In short, HM 1 appears to have been more of a luxury than a working copy and "it is not impossible that the lord of the manor of Wakefield was for a time its owner” (1 :xxxiii). It is thus highly probable that the manuscript was meant from its inception to be seen and have distinct visual value. A facsimile edition (though in black and white) has been issued jointly by the Huntington Library and heed’s Studies in English: The Towneley C ycle: A Facsimile of H untington MS HM1, with an introduction by A. C. Cawley and Martin Stevens (Leeds: Leeds UP, 1976). 26. My account of hailing intersects with that of Louis Althusser in "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” C ritical Theory Since 1965, ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee: U of Florida P, 1986) 239-51. For Althusser, hailing is the action by which ideology turns individuals into subjects—that is, gives them a distinct sense of their-own-ness: Ideology "acts" or "functions" in such a way that it "recruits" subjects among the

individuals (it recruits them all), or "transforms" the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: "Hey, you there!" (245)

Such hailing "recognizes" the subject, who then "recognizes" him- or herself and agrees to enter into practices sustained by that recognition. Hailing, for Althusser, thus creates the impression of freely-acting selves freely choosing to enter into a freely-chosen state of affairs when in reality the individuals are only subjects to the extent they remain "recognized" and feel like they are free to answer that "hey, you there." But to not answer is to risk not being recognized and not being "subjected." Althusser would thus interpret the star of Bethlehem as the first hailing that "recognizes" the magi, who then answer that "hey, you there!" by hailing the Christ child in turn and agreeing to submit themselves to the "state of affairs” represented by Christ. This is a reading that makes a great deal of sense to me— as long as we are careful to attend to the joyousness that is so obviously a part of the text and to the fact that such interpellation takes place only at the level of distinctions in the Wakefield plays, not of "real" social and cultural institutions. That is, since Althusser does not recognize any benefit or pleasure in "interpellation," his theory cannot explain as well as Kristeva's how or why a text like the Offering considers that moment of entry into selfhood/language to be a good thing and desirable. Also, Althusser's focus is never too far away from actual institutions (the example of ideology he develops in detail, in fact, is the Church) but Kristeva would move the focus back to the primal moment of differentiating that enable actual institutions to exist at all. And although these undoubtedly take place within specific institutions, they are far more structurally-driven than content-driven. That is, being hailed allows us to be a thing, but not to be anything in particular. There's a big gap, it seem s to me, between recognizing oneself as a subject and buying the simultaneous "guarantee" that "everything really is so," such that "on condition that the subjects recognize what they are and behave accordingly, everything will be all right" (248). This goes back to the distinction I made between a Kristevan sense of full-fledged subjectivity— one essentially undivorced from notions of limitedness and partiality—and the Lacanian Imaginary of the mirror-stage. Althusser was, in fact, a student of Lacan's, and his notion of subjects being subjects to the extent they buy into the all or nothing of the status quo, is an example of Lacan's Imaginary at work. Rather, Kristeva helps us see the story of the magi as the story of entry into language not just of a specifically Christian entry into language. The Middle Ages held many different views on what it means to be a Christian subject— not all of them happy or comforting, as the Prioress’s Tale attests. 27. To that extent, Kristeva's symbolic captures both Lacan's Imaginary (the realm of identity, sameness, wholeness, plenitude) and Symbolic (the realm of difference, otherness, disjunction, partiality).

Epilogue Concluding Remarks

In a certain way, this dissertation has avoided history. There are, for example, few historical particulars in the preceding pages. My discussion of the Prioress's Tale makes no allusion to the turbulence of succession in late fourteenth-century England that might have produced a somber “castrated” sense of self, or to the Peasant's Rebellion of 1381, or to real medieval alleyways or urban living conditions. My discussion of Sem iram is makes no mention of late tenth- and early eleventh-century discourses of selfhood. With the exception of a short note concerning who could be expected to read the Towneley manuscript, my analysis of the Wakefield plays makes little reference to Lollardy, Bonaventurism, conflicts over the Eucharist, or the Hundred Years War. As the dissertation has proceeded, in fact, it has had occasion to distinguish its readings from those that seek to place the texts in their social, religious, or aesthetic contexts. In other ways, however, it has been profoundly historical, and these concluding remarks are meant to suggest the ways my analysis of Kristeva and my readings of medieval texts can be inserted back into history. This is all the more likely since Kristeva's work was originally prompted by her desire to shift “classical semiotics," which had become too focused on models, back to, as she puts it in an early essay, "the specificity of the practice as such.''1 Her work so far has been a sustained attempt to find a way to talk about the "speaking subject” at the intersection of the “logic of the systematic” and "its body, its unconscious and also its history.”2 Likewise, my dissertation has ultimately kept in mind the larger issues of history—in particular, the larger issues of subjectivity in the Middle Ages and especially how subjectivity as such emerges in works of medieval literature. The identification of tropes is the beginning of a process that would map out various ways the Middle Ages figured the experiences of selfhood. The ascribing of particular passages to particular tropes helps us to plot the subtle and varied medieval conceptions of subjectivity—as well as to be

much more specific about changes in these conceptions over time. It gives an especially solid foundation, for example, to examine what is at stake in such familiar formulations as the four humors, the mind/body split, the "irascible," "concupiscible," and "rational" faculties—as well as who employs such terms for what end. Moreover, by considering how the body itself emerges into symbolic systems, my work enables an assessment of the ways selves took shape in the various material and institutional forms of reading and writing that characterize medieval deployments of texts. To return then to historical particulars. These might be some of the directions a continuation of this work could go. One might take a cross-section of tropes for a given period of time in a single location—say, the first quarter of the fifteenth century in Italy and France or the 1380's in London—and bring together several different characterizations of selfhood in a wide variety of texts read in those places: medical treatises, saints' lives, wills, homilies, and city charters. Such a "synchronic" project like this would stand to reveal the rich array of medieval conceptions of self at play all at once in a single "slice of time." Alternately, one might take a single genre, such as satire or the hagiography of women saints, and compare changes over time. A study like this might reveal a satire grown less mournful, say, suggesting shifting conceptions of the role of social formations, or reveal a hagiography become more focused on the ecstasy of martyrdom than on its pain. These would signal transformations in medieval perceptions of persons, bodies, subjects. Or one might take a single "textual community" like that of the Franciscans or women mystics and see how it revises, comments on, or selectively emphasizes received texts in order to generate a consistent, or changing, view of self.3 The tropology thus enables a complex comparison between and among textual communities and their views on the nature of body and language. What do they emphasize? downplay? discover? try to elide? That is, it can only be suggested here what lies forward: developing a tropology allows us to see much more clearly the contours of selfhood and language not only in the systematic thought of the period's philosophy and theology but also in its prevailing climates of opinion, in literature and art movements, and in more informal ways of thinking and feeling. History need not reside solely in historical particulars.4 This dissertation lays the groundwork for a more informed, sustained, and careful examination of threads of thought in works as varied as those of medieval theology, philosophy, physical science, medicine, schools, art, historiography, and literature—in all the areas of medieval culture, in short, where selves took shape. Notes 1. "The System and the Speaking Subject," Tfie Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia UP, 1986) 27.

2. Kristeva, "Speaking Subject" 28. 3. The phrase is Brian Stock's but has been helpfully expanded by Martin Irvine, The M akin g of Textual Culture: "G ra m m a tica " and L iterary Theory, 350-1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994): "a received canon of texts and an interpretive methodology articulated in a body of commentary which accompaniejs) the texts and instituted) their authority" (15). 4. For a sharp critique on current theory's investment in historical details, see Alan Liu, "Local Transcendance: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail" Representations 32 (Fall 1990): 75-113.

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Index

agency, xxi, 9, 73-74 Ahl, Frederick, 52 A lm a Redemptoris M ater, 23, 26-28 as maternal space, 30, 33-35, 77-78 Augustine of Hippo, xv, xvi, xviii Bede, 13 Berhtferth of Ramsey, 13 Body, xv, xvii-xx, xxii, 1-5, 7, 8, 10-14, 28, 35, 38, 49, 55, 77, 87 Capella, Martianus, xviii, 13 Cassiodorus, xvii, Castration, 3-4, 11 in Miracles of the Virgin, 37-38, 43 in Prioress's Tale, 30-31, 35, 59 trope of, xx, 8-9, 23-24, 49-50, 54, 73-74, 91,93 Chaucer, Geoffrey, Book of the Duchess, xix Legend of Good W om en, xvii Prioress's Tale, xx, 9, 11, 15, 23-36, 73, 77, 78, 83, 91,98, 105 chora, 1-8, 13, 14, 31, 49-50, 81-83

Daniel (Latin play), xix Donatus, xv Drive-energy, 1-6, 8, 11-13, 78 ecstasy, 77-79 in Offering of the M agi, 78-98 trope of, xx, 8-9, 32, 73-74, 79, 82, 96-97 in Wakefield Shepherd plays, 75-78 Erkenwald, xix Father-function, 3-4, 7, 33, 35-36, 41, 50, 54, 74, 77 as "imaginary father," 77-79 related to maternal space, 77 Freud, Sigmund, 1,10 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, xvi hailing (see praising) Henryson, Robert, xx, xxi, 59-65, 73 Hollander, John, 27 Innocent III, 14 John of Garland, xvi, xx, xxi, 36-43

Kristeva, Julia, xx, 1-3, 5-8, 10, 12-16, 36, 42, 53-54, 64, 77-78, 105 Lacan, Jacques, 10-13, 97 Language, entry into, as configured by tropes 8-10, 105-106 in castration, 23, 27, 32, 36 defined, 3-4, 13-15, 76 in ecstasy, 73, 77-79, 93, 96-98 in mourning, 49-50, 53 materiality of, xvi-xx, 1, 5, 12-16, 23, 25, 30, 34, 42, 77, 83, 87-88 in alliteration, 5, 31, 55, 57, 60, 63, 86, in anagrams, 42, in chimes (also echoes), 53, 57, 74, 79, 85, 93, 97-98 in consonance, 5, 55, 73, 74, 79, 80-82, 85, 87, 92, 98 in "indeterminate middles," 28-30, 33 in inflectional play, 52-53, 67 as maternal space, 34 in music, 27-28, 77 in puns, 5, 25-27, 30, 31-32, 35, 36, 42, 82, 93 in repetition, 56-57, 83-85, 87 in rhyme, x, 5, 32, 73, 74, 79, 86-87, 89, 91,98 in rhythm, xv, 28, 63 as signification, 2-8, 11-15, 23, 32, 36, 37, 54, 73-74, 77-78, 106 Manuscripts, materiality of, xviii, 5, 15-16, 28-30, 43, 88-90 Mary, as maternal space, 24, 30, 33-35

related to education, 25-28 role in Miracles of the Virgin, 36-43, 55 maternal space, 7-9, 23-24, 30, 32-34, 36, 38, 50, 54, 74 defined, 3-4 related to "imaginary father," 77 Maurus, Rabanus, xvii melancholy (see mourning) Miracles of the Virgin, xvi, 10, 14, 36-43, 91 mourning, 11, 53, 54-55, 64, 76, 90, 92 in O rpheus and Eurydice, 59-64 in Sem iram is, 49-59, 65-67 trope of, xx, 8, 9, 13, 14, 49-50, 54, 64, 73-74 music, as maternal space, 77 role in education, xv-xvi as system , 60-63 Offering of the M agi (see Wakefield Cycle) otherness, xxi, 2-4, 24, 53-55, 57, 76-79, 81-82, 93-96, 98 Paracelsus, xviii play, 9 in Offering of the M a gi, xxi, 74, 90, 98 in Semiramis, 68 praising, 95-96 Priscian, xv prophecy, 83 Remigius of Auxerre, 13 rhythm, articulating the chora, 1-3, 5, 11, 13-14 ritual, role in mourning, 50, 55-58, 65-66

selfhood, in castration, xx, 8-9, 23-24, 32- 35, 36-39 in ecstasy, xx, 8-9, 73-74, 77-79, 81,95-97 as general-vs-particular, 10-12 in mourning, xx, 8-9, 49-51, 53-60 medieval formulations of, xv, xviii-xxii, 106 narratives of, defined, 14 as product of entry into language, 3-4, 6-8 as system-and-affect, 10, 12-14 semiotic, 50, 54-59 in castration, role of, 74 defined, 5 in ecstasy, role of, 73-74, 77-79 as element of language and selfhood, 5-9, 12-16 in Miracles of the Virgin, 38, 42 in mourning, role of, 50, 54-55, 59, 74 in Offering of the M agi, 73, 83, 87-88, 90, 93 in O rpheus and Eurydice, 59-60, 63-64 in Prioress’s Tale, 23-26, 28, 30-31, 33- 35, 73 related to chora, 2-4 in Semiramis, 55, 57, 59, 65-68, 73 in Wakefield Shepherd plays, 77-78 Sem iramis, xx, xxi, 13, 15, 49-59, 65-68, 73, 77, 78, 83, 98, 105 signification, (see language; as signification) Stewart, Garrett, 28, 30 subjectivity (see selfhood) symbolic, 49-50, 53-59 in castration, role of, 74

defined, 4 in ecstasy, role of, 73-74, 77-79 as element of language and selfhood, 4-9, 12-16 in Miracles of the Virgin, 38, 42, in mourning, role of, 49-50, 53-55, 59, 74 in Offering of the M agi, 73, 81-83, 87-88, 91-93 in O rpheus and Eurydice, 59-60, 62-64 in Prioress’s Tale, 23-28, 30-35, 54 in Semiramis, 50, 54-55, 57-59, 65-68 in Wakefield Shepherd Plays, 73, 76-78 Wakefield Cycle, xxi, 32, 89, 96 Conspiracio, 80 Creation, 80 Offering of the M agi, 10, 15, 73-74, 79-98 Play of the Doctors, 90 Prophets, 80 Shepherd Plays, 74-79, 81-82 William of St. Thierry, xvi