Speaking the Unspeakable: Alain de Lille, Sexual Regulation and the Priesthood of Genius.
- Author/Editor
- Scanlon, Larry.
- Title
- Speaking the Unspeakable: Alain de Lille, Sexual Regulation and the Priesthood of Genius.
- Published
- Scanlon, Larry. "Speaking the Unspeakable: Alain de Lille, Sexual Regulation and the Priesthood of Genius." Romanic Review 86.2 (1995): 213-42.
- Review
- Scanlon offers a fine-grained analysis of sexuality in Alain de Lille's "De planctu Naturae," deconstructing the grammatical figures used to refer to the "unspeakable" (and unnamed) sin of sodomy in the work, examining recurrent phallic metaphors (hammer and pen), aligning Alain's work with developments in canon law, confronting Genius's status as a priest, maintaining that the work is orthodox, and arguing that its orthodoxy is "the product of its transgressive figurations" (222). Ironically, perhaps queerly, Scanlon shows, the work depends upon transgression--grammatical, rhetorical, and figural--while it excommunicates those who transgress; at the same time, it communicates "the pleasure of the power in regulation" (226). Like modern efforts to control homoeroticism, the excommunication of sodomists in Alain, Scanlon concludes, reveals that "sexual regulation is a species of desire" (242). At the beginning of his essay, Scanlon comments briefly on the "Roman de la rose" and Gower's "Confessio Amantis," where, as in Alain, Genius is a priestly figure who "marks a series of moments where a single, specific practice of a single, if central, institution confronts a broad area of sexual behavior"--"taboos" of sodomy, adultery, and incest respectively in the three works. These confrontations "point quite emphatically to the dependence of these taboos on artificially constructed regulatory structures that are historically variable in the extreme" (214-15), although Scanlon does not specify where or how the pointing occurs or which structures he has in mind. The "very textuality," Scanlon continues, "of these metaphorical confrontations between taboo and institutional form suggest [sic] that sexual regulation is itself characteristically discursive," and, as such, counter evidence to the modern "proposition that medieval culture was disinterested in sex." (215), True as far as they go, these claims could be made more clearly, and they are a minor sidelight in Scanlon's larger argument. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1]
- Date
- 1995
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Aanlogues, and Literary Relations