Lucas Wood the WEREWOLF AS MÖBIUS STRIP, OR BECOMING

Becoming Bisclavret Lucas Wood THE WEREWOLF AS MÖBIUS STRIP, OR BECOMING BISCLAVRET o gloss the story of Bisclavret1 is to wrestle with the intractable silence Tof bodies and the eloquent ways in which they can be made to speak. Within the corpus of Marie de France’s Lais—an enigmatically cohesive com- pilation, organized around unstated principles, unifed on a stylistic level by the expert use of purposive lacunae and ambiguously expressive images and objects (Combarieu; Warren)—the text is remarkable for its insistence upon the act of reading as a vocalization, literally a giving-voice. Bisclavret’s narrative rhythm is set by the series of interpretations to which the werewolf’s awkwardly double body is subjected, so that his own legible substance tends to merge with that of the lai (Freeman; Gertz 402); the hero’s identity is inter- twined with, and in an important sense is, the meaning ascribed to the text. For his part, the werewolf never utters a word after the fateful revelation of his beastly secret sets the plot in motion. Like the other characters, the reader is left with the task of lending a tongue to the voiceless body, of speaking for the beste mue (“dumb animal”)2 who cannot articulate his own identity as that other, exceptional beast, the animal rationale, until others fnd in his 1. Bisclavret, the fourth of Marie de France’s lais in the British Library’s ms. Harley 978, is the story of a noble werewolf who is trapped for a year in wolfsh form when his jealous wife convinces him to reveal the secret of his weekly disappearances and then steals the clothes without which he cannot regain his human shape. Meeting his king hunting in the forest, the werewolf reveals his rationality by performing the ceremony of feudal homage and earns the love of the royal court for his exemplary courtesy. When he eventually tries to attack his wife’s new husband and successfully tears off his wife’s nose, his uncharacteristic violence is immediately attributed to a desire for vengeance. Under torture, the wife confesses her treachery, returns Bisclavret’s clothes, and is banished, while the wolf, having initially refused to return to his human shape in public, metamorphoses back into a man in the privacy of the king’s bedchamber. 2. Although not used by Marie de France, this term is applied to the werewolf Alphonse in the roughly contemporaneous romance of Guillaume de Palerne as part of a punning rime riche that accentuates the link between transformed humanity and animal muteness: “Son estre et sa samblance mue, / Que leus devint et beste mue” (“His condition and appearance changed; he became a wolf, a dumb animal,” vv. 305–6). The Romanic Review Volume 102 Numbers 1–2 © The Trustees of Columbia University 4 Lucas Wood apparently feral fesh a surprisingly domesticable text governed and consti- tuted by language’s socializing law. If, however, this is really how Bisclavret fgures the act of reading, then the conspicuous metaliterary dimension of the lai provides the pretext for a cer- tain authorial sleight of hand. Rather than enframing a story offered up as an object lesson in interpretation, Marie’s overt account of what glossing entails functions poetically and ideologically within the economy of the narrative. The paradigm of reading as decoding, as speaking for the mute body (of the narrative or of its beastly protagonist) in order to bring a concealed truth to the surface of language, exposes one meaning so that the poem can impose another. This cryptographic model of the interpretive process fts within a more expansive hermeneutic program that produces new meaningful “sur- faces” rather than revealing preexisting hidden depths.3 It does so, moreover, in a manner that quietly insists on the paramount importance of attending to particulars. The lai manipulates the tendency of both characters and readers to overestimate the extent to which an individual can ever be identifed with a category, and to (mis)take such identifcation for total equivalence. Precisely where it generates fantasies of perfect belonging predicated on the reduction of identity’s complex feld of plural, imbricated affliations to rigid dichotomies that invite absolute distinctions, Bisclavret shows how right understanding grows out of the recognition that the specifc is irreducible to the general case, the individual problematically—and productively—resistant to perfect subsumption within the classifcatory abstractions of species or group identi- ties, biological, grammatical, and social. Speaking for the bisclavret, the wolf endowed with “sen d’ume” (“human understanding,” v. 154),4 involves assuming that his “semblance de beste” (“animal appearance,” v. 286) is indeed only skin-deep, that he essentially is and always has been nothing but a man—and a superlatively handsome, courtly, noble man at that. His humanity is his interiority, his true self; the 3. This may be a way of refocusing the line of inquiry suggested by Vitz’s observation that “many of the acts or events of the Lais are,” or seem to be, “simply undecodable syntactically,” in terms of narrative cause and effect; “they are analyzable only semantically (thematically, symbolically, etc.) or formally (in terms of their patterns)” (395). Cf. Mickel’s view, in an article that otherwise offers an excellent vue d’ensemble on the Lais, that “often the magical element is factitious and frequently seems to be so irrelevant (except as an atmospheric or structural device) to the principal action . that it defes analysis” (39). I would suggest that, at least in the case of Bisclavret, what seems to defy or preempt analysis plays an important role in generating meaning. 4. All quotations from Bisclavret are taken from Warnke’s edition of the Lais. English translations are my own. Becoming Bisclavret 5 slavering monster is only the illusion Christian doctrine saw in it (Harf-Lanc- ner), a kind of costume that happens to be particularly hard to remove, like the pelt that the werewolf in Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hibernica peels back to reveal the human face and limbs beneath (79–84). It would seem that, once his wife’s betrayal traps the bisclavret in lupine form, Marie slyly invites us to pass over the fact that her hero has undergone innumerable transformations from man to wolf and back again. His struggle to bring his outer shape into visible harmony with the inner man—a struggle in which we are all the more invested because we are, through the narrator, its sole privileged witnesses until the end of the poem—is represented as an effort to restore a stable, idyl- lic status quo temporarily disrupted by female perfdy. The problem’s resolu- tion is a restitution in which “all the pieces are reassembled and the narrative comes full circle.”5 To gloss the text in this way is, however, to read its ending back into its beginning, for it is in the passage through anonymous animality that the hero regains something he never possessed in the frst place: a per- fectly unifed, coherent, self-evident human identity. If both the poem and its protagonist seem to end where they began, the circle they describe is a circle with a twist, a Möbius strip that turns the inner self into a surface and then retrojects that manifest identity into the human being as its essential nature. Why does Marie, the self-appointed poet of memory (Whalen), want us to forget that the hero of her lai was a werewolf before the story began and presumably remains so after its triumphal ending? And, perhaps more problematically, what is to be made of the fact that the reading strategy prescribed by this text is based on a (particular) misreading of the text itself? It has been asserted that “the Lais, in contrast with, say, Jean de Meun’s portion of the Roman de la rose, are without artifce; they mean . what they say.”6 At least in the case of Bisclavret, it might be more accurate to conclude that the art or artifce of the lai lies precisely in its manner of meaning what it says while seeming to say something quite different, that is, while using the appearance of a meaning to mask what is really being said. The introductory discussion of what a werewolf is already sets the coming narrative under the sign of uncer- tainty. “Ce que c’est que le bisclavret,” Hœpffner writes, “Marie a soin de nous le faire savoir dans le prologue de son lai” (144); in fact, the prologue’s deeply 5. Freeman 299. Cf. Ménard, Lais 154, and Pappa’s assertion that “Bisclavret constantly strives to realize his former identifable gendered status. Full (re)integration into his court culture represents the end of his quest” (128). Dragonetti invokes this narrative structure on a grander scale, making of Bisclavret an effort to resolve the tragic predicament of the postlapsarian human “être scindé,” for whom the alienation of soul from body and speech from sense can be overcome only by love (39–40). 6. Bloch 16, paraphrasing Damon 976. 6 Lucas Wood equivocal defnition illustrates that nothing is less clear than the obvious, no reading less reliable than that which preconceptions bring frst to mind: Quant de lais faire m’entremet, Since I have set to making lais, ne vueil ubliër Bisclavret. I don’t want to forget Bisclavret. Bisclavret a nun en Bretan, In Breton, he/it is called “Bisclavret,” Garulf l’apelent li Norman. but the Normans call him/it “Garulf.” Jadis le poeit hum oïr At one time, the stories said e sovent suleit avenir, —and it often happened— hume plusur garulf devindrent that not a few men became werewolves e es boscages maisun tindrent.

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