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 constituted 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 certain 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 “surfaces” 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 identities, 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 resolution 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 perfectly 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. and made their homes in the woods. Garulf, ceo est beste salvage; A werewolf is a savage beast; tant cum il est en cele rage, so long as its rage lasts humes devure, grant mal fait, it devours men and does great harm, es granz forez converse e vait. dwelling and running about the great forests. Cest afaire les ore ester; But now I’ll leave this matter be; del [b]isclavret vus vueil cunter. I want to tell you of the bisclavret. (vv. 1–14)

Werewolves are real, or at any rate were real at some point in the past, and they are or were abominable, destructive brutes. But who or what is the, or a, bisclavret, and what relation does it bear to these legends of lycanthropic savagery? In the frst couplet, “bisclavret”—without an article, but uncapi- talized, like all proper names that do not occur at the beginning of a line, in the Old French manuscript text of ms. Harley 978 at least—seems to be the rigid designator of either a person or a poem, or both, and the second couplet does little to clarify the issue. Names, too, are translatable. Laüstic, which is both a title and a common noun, is given in Breton, French, and English. The prologue goes on to muddy the waters further: bisclavret is equivalent to garulf, but garulf is used as the common noun for a species of animal, or more precisely of hybrid wolf-man (the Norman word is composed of Germanic roots meaning “man” and “wolf”), into which many men used to transform. Finally, Marie decides to “let this matter be”; she wants to tell us about “the bisclavret.” Some contrast is evidently being drawn here, but it remains unclear whether Marie is distinguishing the “afaire” of the garulf from that of the bisclavret or simply indicating that her defnitional and historical preamble has gone on long enough and that it is now time for the conte, the narrative proper, to begin. Either way, “bisclavret” is now a common noun preceded by the defnite article. The word therefore probably refers either to a single, nameless individual identifed only by his species, or else to the universal category of (Breton) werewolves in general—although the precedent of Le Fresne, in which an abandoned girl child is named “Le Fraisne” (complete with masculine defnite article!) after the tree in which she is found, suggests Becoming Bisclavret 7 that the possibility that “bisclavret” is really a proper name should not entirely be ruled out. Even without knowing that the word bisclavret seems to mean something like “speaking wolf” or “rational wolf,”7 we may well wonder at this point whether the word bisclavret is really a synonym for garulf, a direct translation from the Breton of the lais’ oral sources into the Anglo-Norman French of Marie’s audience. Does the bisclavret differ in some as yet unspecifed way from its Norman counterparts? To whose oral tradition do the old stories to which the narrator refers belong? In light of what follows, it is extremely tempting to read Marie’s desire to “leave this matter be” as an indication that we are no longer dealing with the senseless, bloodthirsty garulf, but instead with a story about the rational and polite bisclavret—and hence that Bisclavret’s wife turns against him out of irrational fear or hermeneutic ineptitude, or because she has listened to the wrong stories. However, nothing in the passage indicates that a bisclavret is not just a garulf by another name, although the next line—“En Bretaigne maneit uns ber” (“In Brittany there lived a baron,” v. 15)—suggests, if only by contiguity, that this particular baron is our lycanthrope, and that his famously immaculate conduct should therefore be read (but as a redefni- tion of the class, or as a delectable paradox?) against the reputation for mad violence imputed to werewolves in general. The lai thus begins by starting to show what it will consistently refuse to tell us: how reading works, and how a crafty poet can exploit the nature of interpretation, and the desire for it, to make her text mean more than it seems to say. Marie proffers the opportunity to interpret as a snare to draw the reader into passing over a whole feld of unacknowledged ideological work. The conventional account of Marie’s metapoetry stresses her contention that “reading intently means understanding what lies below the literal surface, as clearly indicated by the Bisclavret’s own werewolf exterior which belies his courtly self” (Gertz 399). I would argue that the invitation to interpretation as a passage from surface to depth is only the surface of Marie’s text. The general prologue to the lais portrays the act of glossing less as the uncover- ing of a veiled truth or the cracking of a literary nut than as a response to the possibility built into the very language, the textual surface, of stories told “oscurement” so that future readers might “gloser la letre / e de lur sen le surplus metre” (“gloss the letter and add the supplement of their understanding,” vv. 12–16). Like the historical translatio studii that has conveyed the wisdom of the ancients to the medieval present, the decoding of literary works is not a transparent translation, a replication verbatim of the original, but rather a

7. Bloch (82) reviews various accounts of the obscure etymology of the word “bisclavret.” 8 Lucas Wood process of transformation and accretion. It not only transmits but also produces meaning as a surplus added to the written word, and this surplus is generated in the encounter with the excesses, the ambiguous obscurities, of the literary object. To dig into the letter is to expand out from it. The trick, however, is to add to the text’s meaning without actually adding anything to it that was not already there: a good reader knows how to “se . . . guarder / de ceo qu’i ert, a trespasser” (“keep from overstepping the bounds of what was there,”8 vv. 21–22). This is precisely the virtue that Marie instills in her unwitting readers. The lai of Bisclavret manipulates the structure of surface/depth exegesis within the frame of a hermeneutics of excess, which is indeed exemplifed by the hero’s own case. The problem of the werewolf is the problem of too many surfaces, of a scandalous plurality of bodies. Marie emplots interpretations—the readers’ as well as the characters’—so as to generate, from and in place of this surplus of

8. This is an unconventional but, I think, plausible and suggestive translation of the end of the most obscure passage (vv. 17–22) in Marie’s prologue. It seems certain that a plural subject, which I identify with the future reader-glossators (“cels ki a venir esteient,” v. 13) anticipated by the philosopher-authors of v. 16, is described as becoming, with the passage of time, subtler in understanding and therefore better able to “se . . . guarder / de ceo qu’i ert, a trespasser” (accepting that the manuscripts’ “qui”/“ki” should be punctuated as “qu’i”). The sense of “trespasser” remains ambiguous. I tend to favor Spitzer’s interpretation of the line as predicting that “the generations to come . . . will guard against deviating, in their ‘glosses,’ from the true contents (ceo qu’i ert) of the ancient works” (100), although Hunt (399) is right to reject Spitzer’s unwarranted assumption that these “true contents” are necessarily connected to Christian truth. In this reading, “trespasser” means something like “to overstep,” “to stray from,” or “to transgress.” However, it could also mean “to overlook, to neglect,” as Rychner suggests in the notes to his edition of the Lais (236–37), in which case the emphasis would be on the skilled reader’s ability to fnd everything that is in the text rather than on the limit imposed on reading by the textual “kernel.” Furthermore, if “trespasser” means “to overlook,” might the line read “se . . . guarder/ de ceo qui” (or “qu’i”) “ert a trespasser,” that is, “guard themselves against that which ought to be overlooked” or passed over in the text, implying that some possible avenues of interpretation are better left unexplored? Or, if “trespasser” means “to fnish, to complete,” might Marie be counseling us to leave some depths unplumbed so that the chain of glosses may continue unexhausted into the future? All of these parallel senses and the complexity with which they are simultaneously suggested support my understanding of the fraught task with which Marie presents her reader in both the prologue and the lai of Bisclavret: to build upon the text’s intrinsic meaning without denaturing or exceeding it, while leaving intact the measure of obscurity that allows the text to manipulate its audience and guarantees its own fruitfulness, what Dragonetti calls “le germe d’une vie latente” (33). Becoming Bisclavret 9

surfaces, a new possibility, even a new being, excessive with respect to the original situation: a bisclavret, a man who sometimes looks like a wolf, where there was once a garulf, a man who truly becomes a wolf and so might just as well be a wolf who spends part of his week as a man. In the course of this transformation, “the” bisclavret also becomes Bisclavret, an individual and the eponym of a poem. “Dame,” he confesses to his wife, “jeo devienc bisclavret” (“Lady, I become a werewolf,” v. 63): from the beginning, bisclavret, here a common noun, marks an identity position rather than an identity, not something one is but something one becomes, and thus the potential site of further becomings. It will soon begin to function as a proper name in the very sentence—“Issi fu Bisclavret traïz” (“Thus was Bisclavret betrayed,” v. 125)—where the narrator sums up the wifely stab in the back that traps the protagonist in the shape of a wolf. Bruckner suggests that Bisclavret is “caught in the redundance of common and proper nouns,” that he lacks and will never fully achieve “the distinction conferred by a name which does not simply coincide with a general category,” so that “his difference can only be suggested in the subtle play with the defnite article” (255). I would contend that the subtlety with which Bisclavret’s identity can be negotiated and fne-tuned ends up being a remarkable distinction. The wolf-man will indeed be individualized and humanized, and not just gram- matically, by the train of events that his “undoing” sets in motion, turning the species-marker of animality into the seal of personhood and the condition that threatens identity into the name that guarantees it. Following the trails of the werewolf’s metamorphoses involves continually overstepping the limits of the textual letter to read, often without realizing it, more than is visible in it—but not more than the author has inscribed there, if only in the seed, for future readers to coax into bloom. Glossing this text, speaking for it, thus involves being ventriloquized by it, letting our voices be commandeered by the textual beste mue. I began by saying that glossing Bisclavret means grappling with silence; the poem’s prologue can make it feel like fshing for red herrings. But by attending to the text’s obscurities, we can start to tease out how and what Marie’s “signifying werewolf” (Bloch 81) means, and what stories his tale tells in silence, not beneath a veil of allegory, but on the narrative’s quietly exorbitant surface. One such pregnant point lies at the very end of the lai, when the bisclavret has regained his human form and is being celebrated by court and king:

Li reis le curut enbracier; The king ran to embrace him, plus de cent feiz l’acole e baise. gave him more than a hundred hugs and kisses, Si tost cum il pot aveir aise, and, as soon as he got the chance, tute sa terre li rendi; gave him back all his lands; plus li duna que jeo ne di. he gave him more than I’m saying. (vv. 300–4) 10 Lucas Wood

More is returned to Bisclavret than what was taken from him; the restituted “same” disguises a difference. What is it that the king has given his favorite knight, more than his former lands and wealth, more than Marie can or will say? Or is it the narrative that has bestowed this great, unspeakable gift upon its hero, as though his becoming-story has allowed the tale itself—a good custodian of its master’s talents, to borrow the biblical metaphor for literary creation from the prologue to Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval—to enrich him with the surplus of its sen? Perhaps Bisclavret’s lycanthropy is a gift insofar as it provides the pretext for storytelling that affords the “species-traitor” (Bloch 81) a chance to be recognized as human and joyfully restored to the untroubled manhood he never fully possessed.9 Punning and playing on overlapping grammatical, ontological, and epistemological categories, Marie solicits interpretation in order to make poetry productive. Productive above all of identities, of selves, whose production must be camoufaged if it is to be effective, and therefore gives itself to be read as a circular narrative of permanence,10 of a crisis that temporarily interrupts an orderly network of truths, the conditions for whose fashioning it in fact creates. A great deal of scholarship tends to oversimplify Bisclavret as a fable of mankind’s universal struggle to dominate the “beast within,” sometimes tailored to specifcally medieval concerns about unbridled warrior violence’s submission to the curb of feudal authority.11 Subtler criti- cism of the lai is aware that the text “makes us question the oppositions it calls into play around the oxymoronic character of human nature: not only the man/beast pair . . . but also those of woman and man, forest and court, nature and society” (Bruckner 253), all of which are systems in motion around the labile human beings whose positions they triangulate. I will focus here not

9. Metamorphosis tends to operate in the Lais not to destroy relationships so much as to make them possible, and at the same time to open up avenues of narrative possibility. In Yonec, for example, “la métamorphose permet l’alliance sexuelle . . . [et] permet à l’auteur de faire avancer son lai dans le sens souhaité” (Bouillot 74). 10. Dubost interprets the twelfth-century werewolf as a fgure of unshakable class identity: “Le drame du garou peut . . . être identifé au drame du sujet aristocratique. Ce dernier se construit sur une certitude ontologique. . . . La permanence d’une nature incorruptible et infrangible à travers les avatars les plus dégradants . . . est, semble- t-il, le véritable enjeu moral et social des histoires médiévales de loups-garous” (565). 11. Bisclavret is interpreted primarily as a feudal fable by Faure and Holten. Dubost, who views it as “essentiellement une apologie de la fonction monarchique” (557), remarks that its political effcacy is developed at the expense of the love-relation because the vassalic relation alone is capable of accepting and incorporating or domesticating instinctual violence, with which the werewolf is aligned. Becoming Bisclavret 11 only on how Bisclavret poses questions, but also on how it answers them,12 setting out from situations of disturbing fuidity and irreducible paradox in courtly culture to imagine, non-prescriptively and within the space of fction, their provisional resolution. This entails taking the betrayal that traps the bisclavret in his wolfsh state not as the problem that it “obviously” is and that the narrative exists to solve, but as an opportunity masquerading as a curse. Firstly, then, the lai uses the lycanthropy motif to rearticulate the problem of human appearance and reality as a question about animality and the limits of the human—a question it answers in a way calculated to dispel one of courtly society’s founding aporias. Courtliness is bound up with a commitment to accept appearance as truth: beauty denotes virtue or prowess, mastery of polite forms bespeaks nobility of spirit, and the knight’s martial performance actualizes him as a heroic subject. The twelfth-century court is a society of the spectacle insofar as reality is confated with its representation, ontology with epistemology. In this respect, aristocratic ideology is Aristotelian rather than Platonist. The truth of things, their essential nature, is not consigned to an inaccessible realm of ideas, but rather is present in the apprehensible surfaces of the material world. And yet—or therefore, since the truth-value attributed to sensible phenomena jostles uneasily against the complex and often patently contradictory nature of empirical knowledge—Old French literature is haunted by the fgures of duplicity that proliferate across its canon, from the handsome traitor Ganelon and the trouvères’ losengiers to the stock adulterous wife, who jeopardizes patrilineal genealogy, and the personifed hypocrisy of Jean de Meun’s Faux Semblant. In Chrétien’s Charrette, Lancelot himself introduces a deep rift into the ideology of the legible self, withdraw- ing into an eroticized interiority and performing heroic valor and ignominy indiscriminately in the service of an antisocial value system tellingly linked to his politically explosive affair with Arthur’s queen. This withdrawal of the self from the infnitely and ambiguously legible body and its deeds is one of the fears, not primal but profoundly cultural, embodied by Marie’s bisclavret. What disturbs the werewolf’s wife before any metamorphosis is mentioned is her husband’s regular but inexplicable absence, the lacuna that casts doubt upon his otherwise impeccable performance of aristocratic manhood. Per- haps, she worries, he has another lover, and their happy home is a den of lies;

12. I agree with Bruckner’s contention that although human identities and human nature are represented throughout the lai as irreducibly contextual, “the object of this contextualization may not be so much the elimination of general categories altogether (that might be a modern deconstruction) as the proper limitation of their usage with respect to human differences (a more properly medieval and Abelardian project)” (267). 12 Lucas Wood compared to this specter, his lycanthropy, however terrifying, seems almost to be a relief since it rules out his infdelity. It is likewise suggestive that although the lady turns bright red with fear when the bisclavret confesses his condition, her dismay drives her not to run screaming from him, but instead to draw him, systematically and with all the rhetorical skill at her command, into a full and detailed disclosure of the conditions of his secret second life. It is as though the silence surrounding her husband’s weekly three-day absences were her great- est worry, as though bringing his lycanthropy to language could exorcise the beast—as indeed it does, in a sense, by giving her the information necessary to banish him to the forest and go on with a new, normal married life. Conversely, the werewolf conceives of his condition primarily as something to be kept under wraps because, as he prophesies, “Mals m’en vendra, se jol vus di; / kar de m’amur vus partirai / e mei meïsmes en perdrai” (“Evil will come upon me if I tell you, for I will put an end to your love for me and lose my very self,” vv. 54–56). By sympathizing with the “constitutional” (Smith 8) werewolf, the lai elegantly detaches the problem of appearance and reality— the knight is justifably concerned that his wife will have trouble accepting that his weekly transformations are compatible with his real nobility and unwav- ering love for her—from ethical misconduct (the crime of willful deception) and roots it in the literal duplicity of the shape-shifting body itself. Although the bisclavret fears to ruin or lose “mei meïsmes,” he has at this point no coherent self to lose. Even when his inner humanity and outer form coincide, his visible being is, as it were, maimed, scarred by his weekly absences. This mark of the beast is the mark of the body, the stigma of the fesh, but not in the sense of an instinctive violence or brute concupiscence that must somehow be mastered or penitentially worked through in the ordeal of Bisclavret’s year in the forest.13 The werewolf’s bodies expose corporeality, or appearance as such, as the unsteady foundation of the courtly epistemic-ontological system. Like Chrétien’s Lancelot, the bisclavret manifests an exteriority that is not meaningless, but properly illegible because overdetermined, double. Unlike the happily introspective Lancelot, however, the werewolf desires, and fnds in his very condemnation to be all beast, the conditions for soldering the fragments of his human—social—self. The bleiz lavaret, the wolf who possesses logos, uses the performance of his reason to become a being of pure language, to transform himself—his body—into nothing but meaning in a manner made possible by the beste

13. Bruckner, otherwise the most sensitive recent interpreter of Bisclavret, speculates— groundlessly, according to my reading of the lai—that “perhaps it is only when he is forced by his wife’s betrayal to live fully in the confnes of his animal self that he discovers . . . the strength of his human reason, its superiority over his animal self” (259–60). Becoming Bisclavret 13 mue’s loss of the power of speech. The identity that perdures through the werewolf’s metamorphosis proclaims an impossible equivalence of wolf to man. The language-using social subject likewise has two hypothetically identi- cal but scandalously distinct modes of appearance to others: the body and the voice, bearer of the word that the Middle Ages at once cherished as the sign of invisible truths and distrusted for its indelible connection to sophistry and false seeming. Language inherently threatens transparency not only because it can be a means of misrepresentation, but also, and more importantly, because (as the example of Bisclavret’s wife makes clear) its unreliability is bound up with the unknowability of human intentions that undermines the epistemic value of both speech and action. That words and deeds signify is never in doubt, but what they signify is for the most part objectively undecidable. When the bisclavret becomes, apparently, all wolf, but a wolf with “sen d’ume,” he becomes a kind of utopian fgure: the human being incapable of a lie. On the one hand, his words cannot diverge from his deeds because his actions, his embodied performance, constitute the only language left to him. On the other hand, unlike a visibly human and thus incontrovertibly signifying subject, the beste is always barely acceding to legibility in human terms. The animal’s language is invisible as such, just as he is excluded from the human community, except insofar as his pantomime of courtly behavioral codes exteriorizes the inner truth that he constantly strives to convey, namely, that he is a man. The primary content of his performance in every instance is therefore its own capacity to convey content at all, to express an intentionality that it cannot fal- sify because misrepresenting his motives would mean failing to evince human reason. From the moment the wolf, cornered by the king’s dogs in the forest, seizes the sovereign’s stirrup and “la jambe li baise e le pié” (“kisses”—not licks!—“his leg and foot,” v. 148) to communicate his plea for mercy—the narrator’s vocabulary humanizes the animal even before the king, astounded by the “merveille,” calls his entourage to witness “cum ceste beste s’umilie” (“how this beast humbles itself,” vv. 152–53), where the frst syllable of the verb s’umilier anticipates the identifcation of the beste as ume (“man”)—what the bisclavret’s gestural language says is always, at bottom, that it signifes. The wolf frst accedes to language in going through the ceremonial motions of feudal homage that advertise his induction into a political community. His climactic recognition as a member of that community revolves explicitly around the decipherable intentionality of what appears to be his self- consciously exemplary adherence to the code of courtesy. The crisis of reading provoked by Bisclavret’s uncharacteristic attempt to maul his wife’s new husband is only nominal, for the debonair beste has become a fxture at court. More than a pet—he originally ran to the king to be protected, and distinguished, from the dogs—he is a companion whose mute “word” seems to carry more weight than that of the chevalier de la cuntree, with whom the barons 14 Lucas Wood are on less intimate terms (cf. Le Saux 214). By contrast with the wife’s “bel semblant” (“fair appearance/conduct,” v. 22), which is quickly revealed to be only a charming but illusory façade,14 the ferce “semblant” (v. 205) Bisclavret shows toward his wife’s new husband is unhesitatingly interpreted by the court as the guileless, active expression of an interiority. Although the most obvious reading of the werewolf’s attack on his wife’s lover is the superfcial one (what could be more natural than a wolf obeying its savage instincts to set upon a man?), there is no question but that “il nel fet mie senz raisun” (“he did not do it without good reason,” v. 208), where “raisun” suggests both just cause and the faculty of rational refection and understanding (“entente e sen,” v. 157) defnitively ascribed to him by the king. The wolf’s motivated behavior, not his body and the animal instincts whose presence it falsely suggests, is the semblant that matters, the textual letter that demands a gloss. And that gloss accounts perfectly for the truth of the situation: humanity as performed interiority occludes the gap between interiority and uncertain appearance, so that the human thoughts of the “honest” (“frans,” v. 179) wolf are transparently bodied forth with a clarity that seems to restore a prelapsarian order of sig- nifcation—and implies, falsely, that such an order existed before Bisclavret’s wife, like another Eve, treacherously knocked appearances out of harmony with reality. The textualization of Bisclavret’s semblant, which allows the question of his behavior’s true signifcance to be raised in the frst place, thus predeter- mines the meaning that will be read in or into the wolf’s gestures. The effcacy of this presupposition appears in the way the explicit acknowledgment of the werewolf’s humanity is tied to acts of violence, which call attention to the divide between man and beast. The distinction between instinctual (animal) and motivated (human) violence marks the degree zero of human being because it demarcates the limit of language where the expression of mindless rage coincides with the production of signs; it “transforms (unread- able) animal violence into écriture” (Dunton-Downer 206). At stake here is a choice between registers of signifcant appearance that determines all further sense-production: meaning resides either in the animal body, whose spontane- ous behaviors are an extension of the changeless species-being in which the individual is subsumed, or in the particular act, which is a priori “human” insofar as its consideration as a singular sign implies its origins in intentionality rather than ontology. Such, however, is not quite the distinction brought to bear on Bisclavret’s attacks on his wife and her new husband. There is never

14. The wife also argues, at the very moment when she learns of her husband’s lycanthropy and decides to betray him by continuing to feign undiminished love so as to wheedle the location of his clothes from him, that he ought to tell her everything because to do otherwise “ne semblereit pas amistié” (“would not seem like love,” v. 83). Becoming Bisclavret 15 any doubt that these acts of violence are special, and that their very unique- ness testifes to the individuality of their perpetrator. On the contrary, as the king’s advisor contends,

N’i a ore celui de nus There is no man among us here ki ne l’ait veü lungement who has not watched [the wolf] at length e pres de lui alé sovent. and been often in his company. Unkes mes hume ne tucha He has never touched any man, ne felunie ne mustra nor shown any cruelty, fors a la dame qu’ici vei. except to this lady standing here. Par cele fei que jeo vus dei, By the faith I owe you, alkun curuz a il vers li he has some cause for anger against her e vers sun seignur altresi. and against her husband, too. (vv. 242–50)

Since sustained empirical observation rules out the possibility that ferocity is part of the beast’s nature, his aggression is already construed as (potentially dishonorable, if unwarranted) human cruelty, “felunie,”15 as opposed to the curteisie he has in fact consistently shown. From the outset, then, the attacks are considered in moral terms whose pertinence is reinforced and naturalized by the narratorial aside that declares of the wife’s lover, “N’est merveille s’il le haï” (“No wonder [Bisclavret] hated him,” v. 218). Granted that the wolf manifests focused human anger and not random bes- tial brutality, the question is whether or not his wrath is a legitimate response to some grievous wrong for which “volentiers se vengereit” (“he would gladly avenge himself,” v. 210). The interpretation of Bisclavret’s calculated amputa- tion of his wife’s nose as a form of judicial violence complicates the negotiation between the universal and the particular in which Bisclavret’s identity is caught up. As a legalized punishment—whose form may respect a medieval precedent, since Brangien in Thomas’s Tristan suggests énasement as a ftting penalty for Iseut’s adultery16—the wife’s mutilation not only precipitates the

15. “Le felon était un noble qui avait enfreint le code qu’il devait observer en tant que noble et chrétien: en vertu de sa naissance il faisait toujours preuve d’adresse guerrière. . . . Appeler un noble felon, c’est donc formuler une accusation contre son honneur” (Hollyman 162). See Rothschild’s extended discussion of felonie (“Rapprochement”). 16. Bruckner (262) cites Burgess (90) and Rothschild (Narrative 135n) as unsubstantiated sources for the connection between énasement and adultery, which she therefore admits as valid only in a folkloric context. However, Dubost (555) identifes a romance precedent for this association in Thomas’s Tristan: “Tant avez usé l’amur / ublié en avez honur. . . . Tres que li rei s’en aparçut / castier par dreit vus en dut. . . . Le nes vus en deüst trencher” (“You’ve made such a habit of love that you’ve forgotten your honor. . . . As soon as the king found out about it, he should, by rights, have 16 Lucas Wood inquiry that will sanction the werewolf’s private vendetta, but also endorses his act of vengeance as a sentence carried out on behalf of public justice. Bisclavret identifes himself as a human by acting in the name of the human, of the royal and, by extension, divine law that mandates the human community to police and so to defne itself precisely in terms of the correspondence between signifcant action and essential character upon which the wolf’s claim to humanity is based. Even more strikingly, though, Marie invites the reader to reconstitute after the fact, as a gesture of submission to the law of the sovereign, what is really the wolf’s play to beg the question of his own humanity. Agamben, referring specifcally to Marie’s protagonist, has pointed out “the werewolf’s particular nature as the threshold of passage between nature and politics, animal world and human world, and the werewolf’s close tie to sovereign power” (64). Bisclavret leaps across that threshold without awaiting a royal summons. The king orders the wife’s torture and extracts her confession only after and indeed because his loyal wolf has already usurped his prerogative and acted for the law, forcing his liege’s hand. Although the effect on both the courtiers and the reader is a reassuring impression that “violence . . . remains fully integrated within the legitimate authority of the king” (Bruckner 262), the wife’s trial and second punishment by exile come as a strange afterthought, passively reiterating the sentence unilaterally pronounced and carried out by Bisclavret. As the narrator asks after Bisclavret has torn off the traitor’s nose, “Que li peüst il faire pis” (“What worse thing could he have done to her,” v. 236)? This gambit duplicates the one through which Bisclavret originally appropriated the monarch’s protection in the forest. By initiating the ritual of fealty before the amazed and frightened king has time to (mis)recognize him as a dangerous beste incapable of symbolic communication, the werewolf turns the astounding fact that he is already using the ceremonial language of feudal chivalry into undisputed proof that he deserves the king’s “pes” (“peace,” v. 159). In the pes to which the wolf lays claim there is already the logical germ of the destresce in which his wife will eventually fnd herself.17 punished you. . . . He ought to have cut off your nose,” Thomas 408, vv. 267–75). Shahar notes that under the legal code promulgated by Frederick II for the Kingdom of Sicily in the Liber Augustalis, “an adulterous woman had her nose cut off and was banished from her husband’s home” (108). 17. Faure suggests that the lai works out the consequences of a usurpation of feudal authority by the wife, rather than the wolf: “N’avait-elle pas tenté de se substituer à la justice royale en prenant une décision individuelle qui devait aboutir au crime, et en utilisant les services d’un ancien amant? Détournement de l’amour conjugal, détournement de l’amour courtois, et usurpation du pouvoir, mâle et royal. C’est ce dernier chef d’accusation qui paraît le plus important” (350). Becoming Bisclavret 17

Exploiting a Deleuzoguattarian signifying “regime of ‘full faciality,’ wherein the face of the despot . . . over-codes the primitive body” (Holland 59), the inhuman (lupine) body uses its capacity for eminently acculturated behavior to interpellate the king and implicate him in a relationship of improbable reciprocity. In both scenes, the wolf proactively performs subjection in order to become the puppeteer—and readers’ nevertheless well-attested conviction that his rehumanization is a boon freely granted by his lord bespeaks Marie’s adroitness in pulling her audience’s strings. The depth of meaning and identity thus becomes legible on the surface of the performing body so that the body’s surface may be brought back into accord with its sense. The man is fnally allowed to shed his wolfsh mask, and the Cratylist self-evidence of the motivated sign is restored.18 To be human on the outside as well as on the inside is at last to be, defnitively and trium- phantly, not a wolf. Never mind that, by this defnition, the Bisclavret who underwent weekly metamorphoses was already “human”—at least four days out of seven. The grammar of lycanthropy exposes this problem at the beginning of the lai. “Hume . . . garulf devindrent,” “jeo devienc bisclavret”: the werewolf (etymologically, the wolf-man) is not what one is, but rather what one temporarily becomes. The bisected self oscillates between the poles of man and wolf-man, not man and wolf, so that human being seems to remain wholly intact while it lasts, and only the lupine form is troubled by an uncanny hybridity. This is in fact a fundamental premise of the poem, for it alone justi- fes Marie’s condemnation of the wife’s otherwise quite understandable terror and repugnance at the idea of sharing her bed with an animal. On the other hand, the hume is by the same token a disturbingly unstable category, since its integrity somehow admits of periodic transformation. Trapped in wolf form, Bisclavret reframes the insoluble ontological problem of the individual with two bodies (and perhaps, if the garulf’s “rage” names a true becoming-animal, two selves) as a disjunction between self and body, appearance and meaning, that can be resolved by readerly decoding. At the end of the lai, Bisclavret’s lycanthropy is irrelevant because both “man” and “werewolf” have been rede- fned in a way that neutralizes the horror of metamorphosis. The logic of surface-depth exegesis veils the generative illogic of the poem. But what other gift might Marie have slipped into this package? Can the poetic offering of this gratuitous conclusion itself be glossed to reveal a surplus de sen? There is at least one more story to be told about Bisclavret, one literally caught up in the lai’s play between the universal and the particular in

18. This is also the conventional reading of the wife’s punishment: disfgured, she exchanges her beautiful false semblance for the face of the “beast” and outcast, wolf or leper, she really is by virtue of her treachery. 18 Lucas Wood

that it concerns gender, that intermediate term between humanity as such and individual human identity. The poem’s interrogation of the human is also a negotiation of medieval manhood. Joseph Pappa, whose reading of Bisclavret is compatible at least in this respect with the one I have just offered, argues that “the werewolf never stops performing ‘human’ ” because “the homosocial bond between aristocratic ‘humans’ ” trumps even visible species difference; “far from disrupting the cultural hegemony, the werewolf actually reinforces the courtly symbolic imaginary” inasmuch as his “ ‘humanity,’ gendered masculine, replicates the homosocial relationships of courtly ideology” (120). I agree that Bisclavret is not an intrinsically subversive text, but it does have subtle ways of foregrounding (which may or may not mean deconstructing) the ideological work it does to generate hegemonic fantasies. One of these fantasies is that there is a monolithic “courtly symbolic imaginary,” or indeed a coherent “courtly ideology” that could provide poets (let alone medieval men) with an untroubled ideal of masculinity to reproduce. The courtly male subject is riven by his double defnition in terms of armes and amours, the requirement that he be both a fghter and a lover, with all that those identities entail in terms of his problematic distribution between the heterosexual erotic world of two and the homosocial chivalric domain of compagnonnage. Bisclavret presents us with a knight who appears to be successfully managing these conficting demands:

De sun seignur esteit privez He was on intimate terms with his lord, e de tuz ses veisins amez. and well liked by all his neighbors. Femme ot espuse mult vaillant . . . He had married a worthy wife . . . Il amot li e ele lui. He loved her and she loved him. (vv. 19–23)

But we know that all is not happy in paradise. The wife is worried that her husband leaves her for days at a time; but if he spends that period away from her in the woods hunting for his supper, what time remains for him to pass with his intimate friend, the king? Or does his mysterious obligation to seek the forest—not coincidentally, the setting for both the wolf’s and the wife’s later meetings with the king—really stand in for the warrior knight’s duty to serve his lord away from the conjugal household to which his wife so jealously calls him back? Might the baron’s telltale absences fgure his inevitable failure to be fully present either to sovereign or to wife, and might that failure betray an impossibility that is properly constitutive (as his lycanthropy is apparently “constitutional” or unchosen) of courtly masculinity? Such an impossibility beleaguers Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec, and seems to be posited in Marie’s lai of Lanval, the Arthurian knight whose love—marked, more explicitly than Bisclavret’s lycanthropy, as unspeakable by a taboo that Becoming Bisclavret 19 accentuates the exclusive erotic relationship’s incompatibility with the knight’s full presence at and to the court (Rothschild writes of Lanval’s “dual vassal- age to his lord and his amie” [“Rapprochement” 81])—can ultimately survive only in fairyland. Bisclavret can be read as an inverted Lanval, playing out a similar scenario in which the king is chosen over the lady. Lanval’s dramatic departure from the court and from male compagnonnage, however, corresponds to a more creatively camoufaged exclusion of the feminine in Bisclavret. The choice of homosociality over heterosexuality and liege over lover is one that Bisclavret, as both a paragon of courtliness and the head of a family, cannot avow. As in Lanval, the rejection of one aspect of knightly identity is legitimated by an initial betrayal that breaks the circuit of reciprocal obligation—Arthur’s forgetful failure to reward Lanval’s service refects and reinforces the foreign knight’s ostracism by his peers and presages the poem’s conclusion, while Bisclavret’s wife betrays a love to which her shape-shifting husband remains constant—in preparation for the hero’s blameless repudiation of an already nullifed commitment. The deliberate, treacherous dissolu- tion of the marital couple by the werewolf’s wife initiates a narrative that frames the knight’s “return” to full humanity as a simultaneous, and equally disingenuous, “reacquisition” of a male self quite different from the one he left behind with his clothes: asexual at the very least,19 entirely committed to the homosocial society of the (apparently unmarried) king’s remarkably female- free court, and, best of all, entirely justifed in rejecting the domestic life and wife at whose hands he suffered so cruelly. Just as the wolf-man becomes a whole human by orchestrating the neutralization of his animal aspect, the lover-courtier is reborn as a whole, unifed male subject thanks to the poetic excision of his heterosexual persona. It is important that this simplifcation of identity depends on a literary sleight of hand, for the poem does not vindicate a social status quo so much as it imagines an end run around male gender trouble that could only be realized in fction. The double bind at the heart of courtly masculinity cannot be undone unless the feminine is not just ostracized but legitimately, legally excluded from a court culture thereby constituted as a homosocial

19. Burgwinkle’s queer reading of the lai suggestively aligns Bisclavret with Marie’s other “men who choose not to marry,” remarking that “Bisclavret’s frequent absence from the foyer in his earlier human incarnation could be taken as a sign of an illicit sexual identity” performed in a “terrifying forest [that] turns out to be the royal hunting ground, the playground of the [bachelor] King” (168). There is no need to interpret lycanthropy as a metaphor for homosexuality to see that Bisclavret’s character is hard to reconcile with the common claim that his animality is a threatening manifestation of excessive (hetero)sexual desire (see Faure 348; Suard 271; Bibring 1–10). 20 Lucas Wood preserve—which the historical royal maisniee (household) certainly was not,20 however important the amistié between a lord and his vassals and the bonds of compaignie between male vassals may have been (Stowell). Even compared to the abundance of dames and puceles to be found at court in Lanval and elsewhere in Arthurian romance, the paucity of women at the court of Bisclavret’s king is striking, and testifes to the wish-fulfllment at work here. This perspective provides a new purchase on the contested misogyny of the lai. It is exaggerated to take the (actually quite moderate) villainization of the lai’s sole female character as an instance of the Middle Ages’ “monstrous misogyny” (Pappa 135; cf. Bibring 10–13 and Creamer), especially since various male and female fgures in the other lais are praised and blamed for the same types of qualities and actions that serve as criteria for judgments of character in Bisclavret. The charge of misogyny does, however, respond to a certain air of artifciality—a symptom of ideological functionality—in the poem’s progressive and programmatic stigmatization of Bisclavret’s wife.21 The poem engineers the exclusion of one woman in a way that feels directed at all women, but it does so in order to (re)produce the hero’s uncontestedly homosocial manhood.22 It is worth returning in this connection to the fact that although critical convention links the forest where Bisclavret lives out his wolfdom to the

20. My thanks to Professor Virginie Greene for pointing out the relevance of this distinction. 21. More understated than the wife’s dramatic énasement and exile, but therefore all the more telling, is the revisionist identifcation, at the end of the poem, of her second husband as “cil . . . pur qui sun seignur ot traï” (“he . . . for whom she had betrayed her lord,” vv. 307–8), when in fact it is quite clear earlier on that the wife had never entertained her would-be lover’s suit and used him only as a pawn to dispose of the werewolf in her bed. 22. Shea persuasively argues a similar point about the Old Norse redaction of Bisclavret. This argument also points to an illuminating connection between Bisclavret and the anonymous werewolf lai of Melion, whose eponymous hero is likewise trapped in wolf form by a deceitful wife and regains his proper shape only when the king recognizes his inner humanity. The lai’s own tacked-on misogynistic moral about the untrustworthiness of women crudely refects the way it, like Bisclavret, uses the repudiation of an initially overvalued wife to bring about the return to homosocial court life of a favorite knight who has been distanced from his lord by his preoccupation with heterosexual love. More interestingly, Melion’s betrayal is set up as a fairy punishment for a foolish vow never to love any woman who has previously loved or even spoken of another man. The problem originates, in other words, when Melion breaks the rules of the courtly game of love, whose ludic formalism contains it and ensures its compatibility with the homosocial dimension of knightly life. Becoming Bisclavret 21 dangerous pleasures of atavistic violence,23 for the medieval aristocracy, it was also the setting for the group hunt, the defning activity of the knightly class during peacetime. The Breton forest, moreover, hardly represented untamed nature’s redoubt against the inroads of culture. It was a circumscribed and legislated space where the feudal hierarchy broke down, not into anarchy, but rather in the face of direct monarchical control (Le Goff and Vidal-Naquet 156; Bechmann 25–26, 273–74). Hence, perhaps, the forest’s complex role in the romance tradition as “a locus of action, transformation and . . . narrative resolution” (Saunders x). It is into such a functionalized forest of male self-actualization and enjoyment under the unmediated jurisdiction of the sovereign that Bisclavret is driven by his wife, and it is in this forest that he meets the king and is welcomed (back) into the collectivity of compagnonnage. Bisclavret’s banishment to the forest, then, may be no punishment at all, any more than the lai necessarily ends in failure because it does not reconstitute the broken conjugal couple. Bruckner argues for such a failure on the grounds that vassalic love admirably complements, but cannot form the backbone of, a strong feudal society. Only a man and woman can “found and maintain the base unit of society, the couple and ultimately the family as the tie across generations” (268), a line of descent stymied in the stasis of male–male affec- tion and perverted in the lineage of noseless daughters begotten by the disfgured wife. Bruckner goes on to suggest that this failure is bound up with the problem of the universal and the particular in a way expressed in Bisclavret’s name, which remains an ambiguous “proper name [that] cannot be easily distinguished from the common name for werewolves” (268). But is it not rather the case that the poem as memory-work assumes the task of sexual generation and transmission, lifting that responsibility, too, from its hero? The violent signature of Bisclavret’s humanity upon his wife’s mutilated face, already a kind of writing, disseminates itself along the branches of a family tree whose noseless girls perpetually (but sporadically, as an oral poem is performed) conjure up their primogenitrix’s punishment as the metonym of her crime, and thus as the subject of a story. Marie insists, however, that this story is not the wife’s, but Bisclavret’s. The female body, at once procreative matrix and site of literary inscription, doubly bears the heritage of the man’s story. “De Bisclavret fu fez li lais / pur remembrance a tuz dis mais” (“The lai of Bisclavret was made so that he/it should be remembered forever,” vv. 317–18): the poem, like its mirror image in the wife’s lineage, will carry Bisclavret’s tale down

23. A commonplace in typological studies of medieval lycanthropes (see, e.g., Faure and Ménard, “Histoires”), this association persists in Bruckner’s representation of the king’s hunting trip as a “ritualized penetration of the savage world effected by the representations of culture” (260). 22 Lucas Wood through the ages. It already bears his name, which is by that token defnitively rescued from its possible applicability to werewolves in general. This is no longer a story del bisclavret (“about werewolves,” or even “of the bisclavret” as a special—unique, albeit dehumanized?—category within that class), as in the prologue to the lai, but instead the lai de Bisclavret (“of Bisclavret”). The prologue’s “ne vueil ubliër Bisclavret” (“I don’t want to forget Bisclavret/ Bisclavret,” v. 2), where it is indiscernible whether “Bisclavret” is the title of the poem or the proper name of its eponym, firts with the possibility that “the bisclavret” is really Bisclavret, the man. Its promise is fulflled in the closing couplet, where the poem is called li lais de Bisclavret, the narrative proper to an individual distinguished by a proper name—a name whose reference to a general class of beast-men is authoritatively circumscribed by the memorial function of the poem titled after it, a narrative that records for posterity the “true events” (“l’aventure . . . veraie,” vv. 315–16) that brought about the werewolf’s accession to unqualifed humanity. Having been constituted as the subject of a poem in the process of its telling, Bisclavret once again retroactively becomes what he “was” all along. The deli- cious irony of Marie’s maneuver echoes that of the productive play upon the constructed dichotomy between appearance and reality that lets the werewolf, traditionally associated with terrifying duality, become a device for suturing a single coherent identity by setting “humanity” (acculturated as a judiciously pruned version of courtly masculinity) against “animality” so as illicitly to elide its internal contradictions. The lai ends with Bisclavret, back in human form but still the court’s cherished pet, waking up in the king’s bed—and with us in bed, in a different sense, with Marie de France, having followed her game of bait and switch all the way to its conclusion.

University of Pennsylvania

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