8—
The "Feminine" Imagination and Jouissance

Skeptics—I am afraid that old women are more skeptical in their most secret heart of hearts than any man: they consider the superficiality of existence its essence, and all virtue and profundity is to them merely a veil over this "truth," a very welcome veil over a pudendum—in other words, a matter of decency and shame, and no more than that.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science

There is no such thing as The woman.
Jacques Lacan, "God and the Jouissance of TheWoman"

The Second Nun

The foregoing analysis suggests that females, or those who find themselves in the feminine position, though they are constrained by the institutional structure that sustains male domination, have no interest in it. Any commitments the feminine subject may manifest to the system itself are structurally motivated by the coercion of the system, not its value for the subject, and appear to a disenchanted perspective as arising from fear, self-protection, and the like, whether conscious or not. But from the same perspective it is clear that if a woman cannot escape the domination of the system—which is another way of saying that as woman she is relegated to the private sphere—she has little reason or need to commit herself to its ideas of truth and its public purposes. Because she has no stake in the structure that oppresses her publicly, she can use it for private purposes, for whatever ends of her own she may want to pursue, and in whatever way she may find convenient, without regard to its public, masculine meaning.

At this point it is useful to put in play a distinction between knowledge and pleasure, particularly as developed by Shoshana Felman in

The Literary Speech Act. Comparing the language philosopher J. L. Austin with the seducer Don Juan, she observes:

It is striking to note that Austin's fundamental gesture, like Don Juan's, consists in substituting, with respect to utterances of the language, the criterion of satisfaction for the criterion of truth. "Truth and falsity are . . . not names for relations, qualities, . . . but for a dimension of assessment—how the words stand in respect of satisfactoriness to the facts . . . to which they refer." Thus, like Don Juan, Austin too introduces into thinking about language the dimension of pleasure, quite distinct from that of knowledge; a dimension that is implicit, moreover, in the success/failure criterion of linguistic performance—success or failure that Austin labels, significantly, "felicity" or "infelicity" of action.^[1]

Felman points out that this distinction generates a series of others. On the side of "knowledge" we have the constative speech act, the term used for the "descriptive utterances, . . . sentences that set forth statements of fact, that report a state of affairs, true or false" (Literary Speech Act, 15). The parallel speech act on the side of "pleasure" is the performative, "expressions whose function is not to inform or describe, but to carry out a 'performance,' to accomplish an act through the very process of their enunciation" (ibid.),^[2] because it comprises acts that respond to the criteria of success or failure rather than truth or falsehood: they turn out well or badly. Consideration of the kind of aporia or impasse proper to knowledge or pleasure generates the opposition contradiction/scandal: the first term is obviously appropriate to describe the sorts of difficulty that impede the rational and discursive character of knowledge, whereas scandal refers to "unhappy" outcomes of language use that evade or escape purely logical criteria, for example, "statements which, though not false exactly nor yet 'contradictory,' are yet outrageous. For instance, statements which refer to something which does not exist as, for example, 'The present King of France is bald,'"^[3] or such logical subversions of logic as "And sith a man is moore resonable/Than womman is, ye moste been suffrable" (III, 441–42).

[1] Felman, Literary Speech Act, 61–62. The quotation from Austin is from How To Do Things with Words.

[2] The classic example, from Austin, is the act of marrying, where the statement "I now pronounce you man and wife" performs the action it describes.

[3] Austin, cited in Felman, Literary Speech Act, 149.

To these distinctions of Felman's I would add, with respect to Chaucer, on the side of knowledge public and "masculine," and on the side of pleasure private and "feminine." Of the "masculine" collocation, knowledge (or truth)–public (or official)–constative–contradiction, I think enough has been said already. I should also think that the general applicability of the "feminine" collocation, pleasure–private (or personal)–performative–scandal, to the Wife of Bath's performance is clear enough. Crucial here is the attitude taken toward the "masculine" institutional structure and the uses made of it, encapsulated in the Wife's citation of Ptolemy's proverb:

'Of alle men his wysdom is the hyeste
That rekketh nevere who hath the world in honde."
By this proverbe thou shalt understonde,
Have thou ynogh, what thar thee recche or care
How myrily that othere folkes fare?
         (III,  326–30)

This attitude is no doubt scandalously irresponsible (and since the context is that of the use of the "bele chose," as opposed to its legal ownership, even more so) and cynical—though perhaps in the mood of Nietzsche's old women. Read with a disenchanted eye, it affirms a disinterest in the truth of things in favor of the pleasure they may afford. It scarcely matters who has the world in hand since whoever he is, he is bound to be a man, who will mask his own interest in domination behind knowledge, public truth, and so on. I will call this position "feminine" disenchantment. Given this situation, the recommendation for how to use the structure is contained in the Wife's account of how she spent (and spends, one gathers) her leisure time:

Myn housbonde was at Londoun al that Lente;
I hadde the bettre leyser for to pleye,
And for to se, and eek for to be seye
Of lusty folk.  What wiste I wher my grace
Was shapen for to be, or in what place?
        (III,  550–54,  emphasis  added)

The "feminine" imagination uses the same institutions and classifications—including self-classifications—as the "masculine" because they are all there is, but it uses them in ways that are more akin to what men call courting, flirting, or even dancing and denigrate as frivolous

(and precisely "feminine") than to what men call knowing and reasoning, which belong to them and are serious.^[4] For the "feminine" imagination, the given institutional structure is to be, as it were, cruised^[5] for whatever occasions of private use and private pleasure it may offer, without regard to such proprieties as public meaning or official function. If this characteristic is understood, it is relatively easy to detect the "feminine" imagination at work in the other two tales in the Canterbury collection that are supposed to be told by female narrators.

I have neither the space nor the occasion to present anything like adequate readings of the Prioress's and Second Nun's tales here, but I can at least suggest how such readings might proceed to exemplify the "feminine" imagination in these tales and these pilgrims along the lines I have been following. The fact that the institutions and classifications of gender difference are ideologically established and controlled by male domination means that there is an imbalance in the symmetry of the gender system I have been describing. It means that there is no such thing as "feminine" naive consciousness as opposed to "feminine" disenchantment because any acceptance of the world as it "appears" to naive consciousness is an acceptance of the world as ideologically preprocessed by male domination. In this sense the naive consciousness of a female subject will be "masculine," and this seems to be the case with the Prioress and the Second Nun, at least insofar as they do not explicitly contest male definitions as the disenchanted Wife of Bath does. Both these women have renounced—or never taken up—carnality and competition. They have chosen, agreed, or been forced—who knows?—to eschew the wicked "nature" of women constructed and institutionalized by masculine society (which the Wife appropriates and manipulates), and they signal this avoidance in part by telling tales appropriate to good, pious, and docile women—a saint's life and a miracle of the Virgin—which they do not question or challenge. Far from it: in their relation to gender and sexuality, being neither carnal women nor masculine competitors, they might thus be said, to paraphrase the Second Nun, to be worthy sons of Eve. Both women also extol and identify with Mary, whom they see as the exemplar and

[4] At this point I join Lee Patterson's description of medieval "feminine rhetoric." See Patterson, "'For the Wyves Love of Bathe.'"

[5] The term is Roland Barthes's, or his translator's, Pleasure of the Text, 4.

original of their own stances. She is the model of what they hope to attain in the next life through perfect humility and submission—the highest recognition from the masculine principle, and the most intimate relations to Him:

Thow Mayde and Mooder, doghter of thy Sone,
Thow welle of mercy, synful soules cure,
In whom that God for bountee chees to wone,
Thow humble, and heigh over every creature,
Thow nobledest so ferforth oure nature,
That no desdeyn the Makere hadde of kynde
His Sone in blood and flessh to clothe and wynde.
          (VIII,   36–42;  cf.  VII,  467–73)

Lady, thy bountee, thy magnificence,
Thy vertu and thy grete humylitee
Ther may no tonge expresse in no science;
For somtyme, Lady, er men praye to thee,
Thou goost biforn of thy benygnytee,
And getest us the lyght, of thy prayere,
To gyden us unto thy Sone so deere.
         (VII,  474–80;  cf.  VIII,  50–56)

If you remain pure and do not compete, it will all come to you in the end.

The Second Nun is the most articulate spokeswoman for this stance, though critics have generally found her to be the most faceless of the pilgrim narrators. She herself is the first to have made this point, which suggests that self-effacing might be a better description:

Yet preye I yow that reden that I write,
Foryeve me that I do no diligence
This ilke storie subtilly to endite,
For bothe have I the wordes and sentence
Of hym that at the seintes reverence
The storie wroot, and folwen hire legende,
And pray yow that ye wole my werk amende.
         (VIII,  78–84)

This narrator aspires to perfect transparency, subordinating herself as fully as possible to the task of translating her source, the Latin life of Saint Cecilia in the Golden Legend. Her desire is the accurate reproduction of the institution: a story about a woman who gave up her life

in perfect obedience to the highest law and was the exemplar of the Nun's own ideal of "leveful bisynesse" (5).^[6]

Yet the narrator of the life of Saint Cecilia allows that the act of translation does something for her, and perhaps we should believe her when she says that the tale is meant to counter the confusions of idleness. Her presentation of its temptations hovers between the perils of luxuria ("delices" [3], "erthely lust and fals affeccioun" [74]) and those of accidia, with perhaps more tonal weight given to the latter:

And though men dradden nevere for to dye,
Yet seen men wel by resoun, doutelees,
That ydelnesse is roten slogardye,
Of which ther nevere comth no good n'encrees;
And syn that slouthe hire holdeth in a lees
Oonly to slepe, and for to ete and drynke,
And to devouren al that othere swynke . . .
           (15–21)

The first line of this stanza is peculiar and becomes more so when it is retrospectively reinforced by a line given to Cecilia in the tale, "If this were lyvynge oonly and noon oother" (322).^[7] It suggests that even without the fear of judgment in the afterlife, the pains of idleness—a rotten boredom, a feeling of confinement within the sameness of the daily round, and a sense of consuming without producing anything—might be enough to drive one to "bisynesse" out of sheer distraction, a need for something to do. Perhaps even a bride of Christ can suffer from housewife's syndrome. And if there are earthly aspects of the problem, might not the solution have its earthly side as well?

[6] The narrator's determination to portray her heroine's "bisynesse" is sinking: "She nevere cessed, as I writen fynde,/Of hir prayere" (124–25); "Every seconde and thridde day she faste,/Ay biddynge in hire orisons ful faste" (139–40, where for the second line the Latin source has only "orans"); "Lo, lyk a bisy bee, withouten gile" (195, where the image is in the Latin, but without the adjective); "Tho gan she hym ful bisily to preche" (342) and, at the end of the tale, with her throat cut, "Thre dayes lyved she in this torment,/And nevere cessed hem the feith to teche/That she hadde fostred hem she gan to preche" (537–39)

[7] I do not mean to suggest that there is any twist to Cecilia's straightforward statement that men might fear to lose their lives if there were no other life than this except that the promise of heavenly reward alleviates the fear of martyrdom. But the occurrence of such similar lines in so short and highly crafted a text suggests to the disenchanted voice-oriented reader—me—that this speaker may attach some importance to the issue of the relation between this life and the next one. And then I notice that in both cases the verbal focus is on this life.

Here let me make a few general observations that might guide a more detailed interpretation. Such stylistic criticism as there is of the tale tends to stress, rightly, the closeness of the translation to its source while noting as well the "technical proficiency" (Donaldson, Chaucer's Poetry, 1108–9) devoted to the versification of the stanzas, albeit at the expense of narrative subtlety or complexity of character. Commenting on the closeness of the translation, G. H. Gerould remarks that "the differences are as slight as they well could be in a poem of rich tonal beauty compared with a piece of mediocre Latin prose."^[8] But it is precisely the resources of poetry, and especially those of stanzaic versification, that are the agents of the transforming "feminine" imagination in the tale. The poetic inversions and the play of sounds that the complex rhyme scheme of the rime-royal stanza demands and encourages are continually exploited for specifically sensuous effect. These techniques are coupled with the exploration of the opportunity, largely denied to continuous prose, to use the final couplet and the sense of point and finality offered by the stanza break to shape punch lines. These and other methods create moments of emphasis that operate alongside the diegetic flow of the narrative and independently of it, establishing a kind of emotional subtext or counterplot. In the first half of the tale, up to the deaths of Tiberius and Valerian, this manipulation of the verse features the occasions of sensuous description that the Latin offers:

And right so as thise philosophres write
That hevene is swift and round and eek brennynge,
Right so was faire Cecilie the white
Ful swift and bisy evere in good werkynge,
And round and hool in good perseverynge,
And brennynge evere in charite ful brighte.
Now have I yow declared what she highte.
          (VIII,   113–19)^[9]

[8] Gerould, "Second Nun's Prologue and Tale," 669.

[9] The Latin runs as follows. I give the whole etymology from Jacobus to make the difference in the order of etymologies apparent. I have italicized the portion translated in the text:

Cecilia quasi celi lilia vel cecis via vel a celo et lya. Uel Cecilia quasi cecitate carens. Uel dicitur a celo et leos, quod est populus. Fuit enim celeste lilium per virginitatis pudorem. Uel dicitur lilium quia habuit candorem mundicie, uirorem consciencie, odorem bone fame. Fuit enim cecis via per exempli infomacionem, celum per iugem contemplacionem, lya per assiduam operacionem. Uel dicitur celum quia, sicut dicit Ysidorus, celum philosophi volubile, rotundum, et ardens esse dixerunt. Sic et ipsa fuit uolubilis per operacionem sollicitam, rotunda per perseueranciam, ardens per caritatem succensam. Fuit enim cecitate carens per sapiencie splendorem. Fuit et celum populi quia in ipsam tanquam in celum spirituale populus ad imitandum intuetur solem, lunam, et Stellas, id est sapiencie perspicacitatem, fide magnanimitatem, et uirtutum uarietatem.
       (Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea, cited in Gerould, "Second Nun's Prologue and Tale," 671)

Cecilia comes from coeli lilia, lily of Heaven, or from caecis via, a way unto the blind, or from coelum, Heaven, and lya, one who works. Or again it is the same a caecitate carens, free from blindness, or comes from coelum and leos, people. For Cecilia was a heavenly lily by her virginity; or she is called a lily because of the whiteness of her purity, the freshness of her conscience, and the sweet odour of her good renown. She was a way unto the blind by her example, a heaven by her unwearying contemplation, a worker by her diligent labour. Or she is called a heaven because, as Isidore says, the heavens are revolving, round, and burning. Thus Cecilia was revolving in that she went around in her good works; she was round in perseverance, and burning with charity. She was also free from blindness by the splendour of her wisdom, and a heaven of the people, because in her, as in a spiritual heaven, the people had Heaven set before their eyes for their imitation; for they saw in her the sun, the moon, and the stars, namely the keenness of her wisdom, the magnanimity of her faith, and the variety of her virtues.
       (Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 689–90)

The Latin primarily stresses a logical, intellectual structure enforced by parallel clauses, whereas Chaucer's English subordinates this structure (without altogether losing it) to the operation of modifiers that stress sensuous experience: "faire," "white," "swift and bisy," "round and hool" (as opposed to the more analytical parallelism of the Latin, "uolubilis per . . ., rotunda per . . ."), "ful brighte," etc. Generally speaking, the more apparent freedoms taken with the translation work to the same effect, as in those noted by Paul E. Beichner: "bath of flambes reed" for "flammis balnearibus" and "confus in thy nycetee" for "necessitate confusum." Beichner, "Confrontation."

With remarkable consistency this stanza employs relatively minute amplifications, word choices that increase the visual or kinetic effect of the language, and a small shift in the order of the etymologies in the Latin original so as to concentrate and focus images of visual beauty and the pleasures of imagined sight with an intensity not present in the source. The slight sense of anticlimax in the last line, which reminds us that this is, after all, only an etymology, points up the involvement of the voice in the description. The stanza is only one small example of the extraordinary extent to which the "translation" savors every pretext the Latin offers for the evocation of garlands, sweet odors of red roses and while lilies, clear light, and the like, to the extent that their

function as symbols of spiritual merit is effaced by their sensuous immediacy. The imaginative vision of the speaker lingers on the cortex at the expense of the nucleus.

In the second half of the tale it emerges that the narrator is not so faithful a translator that she sees the need to clutter up the life of Saint Cecilia with the competing exploits of a lot of other—male—martyrs.^[10] A long logomachia of the usual saint's-life sort between the Roman prefect Almachius and the soon-to-be-martyred Tiberius and Valerian, as well as a number of their conversions of others, is dropped or compressed in the English version, "to tellen shortly" (394), conspicuously foregrounding the lawful busyness of Cecilia and her final confrontation with Almachius. Paul Beichner's analysis of this confrontation remains a classic. He shows in convincing detail how this telling shifts the high point of the story from the death of the martyr to the trial scene and intensifies the clash between Almachius and Cecilia, "creating for each a personality more Chaucerian than traditional; Cecilia had never before been quite so contentious or belligerent, nor had Almachius been so obtuse or stupid" ("Confrontation," 2o4). I think these effects testify less to the appropriateness and conventionality of a comic perspective in late medieval hagiography^[11] than to the enthusiasm of the teller for this part of the tale. She takes advantage of the fact that extremism in the defense of Christianity is no vice, or, as Cecilia herself smugly says when Almachius asks, "Why spekestow so proudly thanne to me?" (473):

"I speke noght but stedfastly," quod she;
"Nat proudly, for I seye, as for my syde,
We haten deedly thilke vice of pryde."
         (474–76)

The point is less that what appears to be foolishness from an earthly perspective is actually divine wisdom than that if you are Saint Cecelia or her impersonator, you get to be rude to people without having to

[10] In a first-rate article, "Laughter in the Second Nun's Tale," Anne Eggebroten makes a compelling case for the prevalence of the deliberately contrived image of "the bumbling human vs. God and the saints" (58) throughout the tale. She does not mention—of course it is obvious—that all the bumblers, "the series of three fools who encounter Cecilia and the demands of the divine" (59), are men.

[11] See Eggebroten, "Laughter," 59–60.

answer for it^[12] —except of course to God, who approves—just as no blame can attach to the vicarious pleasures that accrue along the way in the exercise of "leveful bisynesse" to describe the beautiful symbols of God's love. Neither of these are pleasures we would expect so humble, so self-effacing, and so sensuously deprived a dweller in the desert (57–63) as this narrator to know much about, but the indications are that it is precisely the tale that both expresses the deprivations and gives imaginative relief to their pressures. There is real insight and energy, as Beichner notes ("Confrontation," 203), in the gleeful and malicious account of Almachius's outraged response to Cecilia's baiting:

Thise wordes and swiche othere seyde she,
And he weex wroth, and bad men sholde hir lede
Hom til hir hous, and "In hire hous," quod he,
"Brenne hire right in a bath of flambes rede."
          (512–15)

There is also, it seems to me, an exact image of the narrator's sense of her own situation, cool and unaffected by all the heat, whether sensual or rancorous, that she has blamelessly generated, in her account of Cecilia in that same bath:

The longe nyght, and eek a day also,
For al the fyr and eek the bathes heete
She sat al coold and feelede no wo.
It made hire nat a drope for to sweete.
         (519–22)

If, as I suggested earlier, the Second Nun's choice of genre posits her as someone who has renounced carnality and competition, her conduct of the story demonstrates that sensuous imagining and contentiousness

[12] Eggebroten notes that "the tale is a melodrama, with a struggle between clearly good and bad types; the conclusion is known beforehand, and the theology involved is already accepted by everyone in the audience. The only real interest lies in Valerian's ignorance and surprise at what everyone else already knows. This is how Chaucer chooses to play the story" ("Laughter," 58). "Everyone" includes the Second Nun, and it is in the space created by the foregone conclusion that she takes her pleasure.

are what she is best at—as long as she does not have to avow them.

Though it is tempting to speculate on the appropriateness of this story told in this way to what we know about the situations of some nuns in the fourteenth century, and especially, perhaps, to what we might guess about a nun who accompanies the Prioress, the text does not supply enough information to carry us very far with any certainty along these lines. Nor does it allow us to reach a decision about the narrator's consciousness of what she demonstrably does in her tale. The performance may be said to subvert the divine by dragging it down to earth, by failing to respect the distance between the sacred and its earthly representation. This subversion may well be conscious and may even be a matter of deliberate bad faith. We cannot assume that we are dealing in any simple sense with the speaker's unconscious expression of unconscious drives, and certainly everything happens as if "feminine" disenchantment were the driving force of the tale. What we can say, however, is that the tale clearly does not seem intended by its speaker as a satire. Though the speaker consistently converts the spiritual into the carnal, she does not do so publicly. Her voicing is not directed against the tale, as the Pardoner's is, or against the values it purports to express, as the Manciple's is. Rather, she is using the story for her own vicarious imaginative enjoyment. This purpose makes the performance an instance of the "feminine" imagination, exploiting the given institution for its private pleasure without undue concern for the public meaning the story should have. The Second Nun knows what a tale like this one is supposed to do, and she accedes at various points and in various ways to its official function. But she does not let that stop her.

The same might be said for the Prioress, who, perhaps because she is in a social position that commands more independence and power, is rather less cautious about doing what she likes with her tale. Certainly no one has ever missed the distinctiveness of her voice—"This litel child, his litel book lernynge" (VII, 516)—or the ardor of her devotional style. Since there is really a great deal to be said about her tale, and since much of it is not necessary for the present argument, I will confine myself to a single passage. But first I want to return for a moment to the Wife of Bath and the question of jouissance, "What thyng is it that wommen moost desiren" (III, 905).

The Wife of Bath and the Prioress

Something on the order of a subject can be discerned on the recording surface: a strange subject, with no fixed identity, wandering about over the body . . . yet always remaining peripheral . . . being defined by the share of the product it takes for itself, garnering here, there and everywhere a reward, in the form of a becoming or an avatar, being born of the states that it consumes and being reborn with each new state "c'est donc moi, c'est donc à moi!"  . . . The subject is produced as a mere residue . . . a conjunctive synthesis of consumption in the form of a wonderstruck: "c'était donc ça!"
       Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

If the reader expects me to do what Freud and Lacan could not and reveal the essence of woman, she has another think coming, and so does he. About all that can be said for sure about what I am calling jouissance is that it does not happen where or when it is supposed to, and that may in fact be its definition:

The woman is implicated, of necessity, in phallic sexuality, but at the same time it is "elsewhere that she upholds the question of her own jouissance," that is, the question of her status as desiring subject . . .— what escapes or is left over from the phallic function, and exceeds it. Woman is, therefore, placed beyond (beyond the phallus). That "beyond" refers at once to her almost total mystification as absolute Other (and hence nothing other than other), and to a question, the question of her own jouissance, of her greater or lesser access to the residue of the dialectic to which she is constantly subjected.
       (Rose, in Mitchell and Rose, Feminine Sexuality, 51)

Let me be clear at once that we are not talking about orgasms. We have, I suspect fortunately, no information about the vaginal versus clitoral question in the fourteenth century, not even from Chaucer. What we are talking about is a kind of pleasure that is against the law in the mode of scandal: it is outside the law and shows it up. The treatment of the subject that is most useful for the study of Chaucer is neither by Lacan nor Freud nor Masters and Johnson but by Roland Barthes, his meditations on jouissance in The Pleasure of the Text.^{[ 13]}

[13] The French version was published in 1973, the year after Lacan's Seminar XX had taken up what became Encore, and Barthes's book seems to me to be among other things a complex meditation on, and partial critique of, Lacanian concerns. For adevastating critique, published the same year, of oppositions of the order vaginal/clitoral, see Luce Irigaray, "Psychoanalytic Theory: Another Look," in This Sex Which Is Not One, 34–67, esp. 63ff.

This makes sense if we consider that the Canterbury Tales is a representation of a series of encounters with texts broadly conceived. Both the translating Second Nun and the remembering Wife of Bath, for example, deal with narratives that are in some sense preconstructed, and so in fact do all the other pilgrims since none tells an "original" tale. Barthes goes so far as to suggest that jouissance ("bliss" in the translation) is easier to come by under these circumstances:

Many readings are perverse, implying a split, a cleavage. Just as the child knows its mother has no penis and simultaneously believes she has one (an economy whose validity Freud has demonstrated), so the reader can keep saying: I know these are only words, but all the same . . . . (I am moved as though these words were uttering a reality). Of all readings, that of tragedy is the most perverse: I take pleasure in hearing myself tell a story whose end I know: I know and I don't know, I act toward myself as though I did not know: I know perfectly well Oedipus will be unmasked, that Danton will be guillotined, but all the same  . . . Compared to a dramatic story, which is one whose outcome is unknown, there is here an effacement of [conscious, everyday] pleasure and a progression of bliss (today, in mass culture, there is an enormous consumption of "dramatics" and little bliss).
       (Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 48–49)

This passage suggests that this sort of jouissance, or at least the opportunity for it, will be familiar in a relatively traditional culture, where it is common to retell the same stories, and that it is often a function of what I have called rereading. It also supports Felman's separation of pleasure from knowledge—unless of course, as Barthes notes, "knowledge itself were delicious" (23).

Neither my jouissance nor Chaucer's (though both no doubt find their place) is in question here, and no pleasure of the sort under discussion is dependably transmitted by the text. Rather, the poem is a representation of the jouissance of others and is therefore mediated—at a considerable distance from the fictional experience it constructs. Like all other signifying relations, that between bliss and language is a relation of différance: language does not convey bliss, it only

ambiguously marks its traces, where it has been. This circumstance is of course as true for a speaker as for a reader, and it will help us pick up the track of jouissance in the text.

There is nothing particularly arcane, and certainly nothing modern, about the manifestation of the unconscious in language. It hides itself, to be sure, but it does so behind the most banal and everyday linguistic occurrences: jokes, slips of the tongue, and so forth. Almost any break in the flow of signification can testify to the force of the subtext that is always covertly in operation: laughter, forgetting—or remembering:

 But—Lord Crist!—whan that it remembreth me
Upon my yowthe, and on my jolitee,
It tikleth me aboute myn herte roote.
Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote
That I have had my world as in my tyme.
         (III,  469–73)

This of course is not it. It is testimony after the fact to the fact that it was here and that it felt (feels?) good. As I pointed out earlier, the Wife is not primarily characterizing what it was like to be young but rather what it feels like to remember it now. The fictional experience to which this passage refers is taking place (fictively) somewhere, somehow, around or behind or through some part of this earlier passage:

My fourthe housbonde was a revelour—
This is to seyn, he hadde a paramour—
And I was yong and ful of ragerye,
Stibourn and strong, and joly as a pye.
How koude I daunce to an harpe smale,
And synge, ywis, as any nyghtyngale,
Whan I had dronke a draughte of sweete wyn!
Metellius, the foule cherl, the swyn . . .
          (453–60)

The jouissance is what is going on besides, and beyond, the narrative, the facts, and the description. It is, so to speak, the punctuation,^[14] the

[14] See the discussion of punctuation as "the moment at which meaning constitutes itself as a finished product," Clément, Lives and Legends, pp. 117–120, 176–78. She is commenting on what is perhaps the central Lacanian text for the issues raised here, "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious," Ecrits, A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 191–325.

voicing that only comes into consciousness for us or the Wife after it has happened. No more than we was she expecting it; no more than we could she have predicted it. "But—Lord Crist!" is the Wife's "C'était donc ça!" which Jameson translates perfectly into modern Californian: "Wow!" ("Pleasure," 1).

What is registered here post hoc (or après Ça )^[15] is the invasion of the "rational" narrative order of the text by something else that seizes on some pretext in the narrative and displaces the conscious, communicative, narrating ego. Yeats's "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" is not a dancer's question. Such a moment of bliss is a moment of ecstasy in the etymological sense, a standing out or away from awareness, a loss of the self. Such ecstatic moments are quite common in the Canterbury Tales; they occur whenever a speaker registers (usually after the fact, as above) the effect of getting caught up in the tale, lost in the telling: "But now, sire, lat me se, what I shal seyn./A ha! By God, I have my tale ageyn" (III, 585–86). Jouissance is what runs counter to predictable, one might say institutionalized, pleasure, like eating a meal or otherwise meeting a need or satisfying a demand. It forces its way into the present—in something as small, perhaps, as an apparently gratuitous shift of tense—and displaces meaning and reference, logic and sequence. This is one reason Barthes insists on calling it perverse: it is counterrational, counterinstitutional. The masculine law of pleasure is that you must take it in its proper, lawful place, the place of genital heterosexuality in marriage. For the Wife of Bath this kind of pleasure is caught in the iron mesh of male domination as the bele chose that can be commodified because it can be located, identified, given a consistent value. "Lord Crist!—whan that it remembreth me" records the traces of a pleasure that will not hold still to be sold. It may well occur at the site where the law prescribes its presence, and the Wife says that sometimes for her it has—but not because the law called it forth. Even in the now of telling, it manifests itself as part of an other order beyond the phallus, the memory of a dancing that is itself part of the dance of her jouissance across the text of her telling. As it happens, the following is about the cinema, but suppose it were about that cinema of the mind, memory:

[15] Ça is the French translation of das Es, the term of Freud's conventionally given to English readers in Latin as the id.

It suffices that the cinema capture the sound of speech close up (this is, in fact, the generalized definition of the "grain" of writing) and make us hear in their materiality, sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the fleshiness of the lips, a whole presence of the human muzzle (that the voice, that writing, be as fresh, supple, lubricated, delicately granular and vibrant as an animal's muzzle), to succeed in shifting the signified a great distance and in throwing, so to speak, the anonymous body of the actor into my ear: it granulated, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes: that is bliss.
       (Barthes, Pleasure of the Text,  67)

And so is this:

Fro thennes forth the Jues 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 hym hente, and heelde hym faste,
And kitte his throte, and in a pit hym caste.

I seye that in a wardrobe they hym threwe
Where as thise Jewes purgen hire entraille.
O cursed folk of Herodes al newe,
What may youre yvel entente yow availle?
Mordre wol out, certeyn, it wol nat faille,
And namely ther th'onour of God shal sprede;
The blood out crieth on youre cursed dede.

O martir, sowded to virginitee,
Now maystow syngen, folwynge evere in oon
The white Lamb celestial—quod she—
Of which the grete evaungelist, Seint John,
In Pathmos wroot, which seith that they that goon
Biforn this Lamb and synge a song al newe,
That nevere, flesshly, wommen they ne knewe.

This poure wydwe awaiteth al that nyght
After hir litel child . . .
          (Prioress's Tale ,  VII,  565–87)

The first thing that functions as a signifier of the coming of bliss here is the way the voice breaks with the narrative. We can hear whatever is happening kick in over the stanza break as the speaker goes back again to what she has just told: "I seye that in a wardrobe they hym threwe." This is immediately followed by a set of apostrophes, a figure that is inherently counternarrative and creates imaginary others to

whom the speaker's passion addresses itself. Even more striking is the astonishing leap, again mediated by a stanza break, from the hatred, mire, and blood of the second stanza to the vision of the "white Lamb celestial" in the third. The speaker's voice literally overpowers the story in jarring shifts of tone and mood that seem to take hold of the tale and the speaker and ravish them away.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the passage is the sense of fragmentation it conveys by the sharp breaks in style and subject from stanza to stanza and the interruptions of the telling. Such features connect what is happening here with Barthes's point that jouissance is an affair of gaps and edges:

Is not the most erotic portion of the body where the garment gapes? In perversion (which is the realm of textual pleasure) there are no "erogenous zones" (a foolish expression, besides); it is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance.
       (Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 9–10)

Of course this argument needs to be turned around. Barthes is talking about the experience of reading and the way jouissance fastens on gaps in the text, but he is also clear that as an experience this manifestation is a matter of individual, if unconscious, history and preference—no text will do it for everyone.^[16] But if the gap and the edge do function as he says, then their presence in a text can be used to signify the unshared bliss of another, to create a kind of jouissance effect. I must insist again that I am neither psychoanalyzing nor deconstructing Chaucer's text; I am trying to describe what it represents. In the case of the Prioress, for example, it is the sudden apostrophes that make a space for her bliss, like holes in the text, and tell us where the garment, the weave of the text she is telling, gapes for her.

The Prioress is sometimes convicted of sentimentality, usually with respect to her portrait in the General Prologue —her feelings for her lapdogs, her sympathy with mice, and so forth—but also sometimes

[16] See the particularly illuminating section of The Pleasure of the Text, 62–63. Barthes is playing with Lacan's notion of béance; see, for example, Lacan, "Subversion of the Subject."

over her tale as well.^[17] If sentimentality means excessive indulgence in emotion, the expenditure of a disproportionate amount of emotional energy on an inappropriate object, then it is another word for jouissance, one that gets at the uncomfortable impropriety of bliss, especially for those who witness it without experiencing it. The Prioress's excess has always had an unsettling effect on readers, starting with the poet-narrator, whose extraordinary break in impersonation, the "quod she" in the above passage, serves notice, among other things, that he wants to dissociate himself from what is being said. But the multiple breaks in decorum that occur here are not entirely contained by a relatively dismissive characterization like sentimentality. As the poet's own break suggests, the gap threatens to spread. Since bliss is something that escapes the ordering of knowledge and the law, it can be a threat to the idea of society itself. In terms of the institutional structure and its mystification, jouissance is what zeroes in on the chinks—the gaps—in the armor of society and threatens to show it up for the rattling, jerry-built construction it is. When an innocent tale in praise of innocence suddenly becomes the site of something other, the focus of disturbing, excessive pleasures, the result is the establishment of a fault line that may lead to larger disturbances. The Prioress's investment of darker, aggressive forces in her tale, the ruthlessness of her pleasure in hating others, even if they are for the moment imaginary, is unsettling in the passage and has been unsettling in her tale, as the recurrent controversy over its anti-Semitism testifies.

Perhaps most unsettling of all is how uncaring the Prioress herself is. She takes her pleasure as it comes to her, and her imagination betrays its readiness to use the law as a pretext for its own enjoyments. Her pleasure in her tale, because it is private, is subversive without being competitive, though it does seem to express resentment at male domination, as the other tales told by women also seem to do.^[18] The Prioress's jouissance makes what it wants and what it can of the given institutional structure without care and without responsibility. If she is perforce situated beyond the phallus, on the other side of knowledge,

[17] See, for example, Donaldson, Chaucer's Poetry, 1044–46, 1096–98.

[18] "Jouissance," says Lacan somewhere, "comes easily to the slave, and it will leave the work in bondage." I would not want to say that the Prioress is unaware of the effect she creates. There is something calculated in her outrageousness that reads as doing what she likes not only in spite of but also because of the effect it has on others.

then her answer to the question, What is woman's desire? cannot be something knowable, reducible to a concept that would make it predictable. It can only be an experience, the experience of whatever turns her on.

Jouissance and the "Masculine" Imagination: The Nuns's Priest and Others

What makes jouissance "feminine" or "masculine" has nothing to do, except contingently, with the physical sex of the subject who experiences it, nor does the simple fact of ecstasy, the breakthrough of unconscious energy into language and experience. Rather, it is a matter of how such an experience is handled, and especially how it is related to the institutional structure—the tale and the society—it interrupts. It is not really the manifestation of libido that is at stake but the social construction of it, what options there are for dealing with it once it appears. This social construction is what seems to be gendered in Chaucer and what appears to have consequences for the construction and maintenance of gender. The "masculine" imagination tends to disapprove of jouissance and be made uncomfortable by it because of the stake it has in the stability of institutions and meaning. It feels the need to limit or disavow the outbreak of instinctual energy, erotic or aggressive, as the reporting (male) poet does with his "quod she" in the Prioress's Tale. Whatever we see the traces of in those moments when the Pardoner either forgets the sequence of his tale ("Thise riotoures thre of whiche I telle" [VI, 661]); or withdraws libidinal investment from it (as in his loss of interest in the narrative at its conclusion); it does not seem to make him happy. There is rather a sense of giddiness, a sort of edgy dancing over the void, in the sudden shifts—of tense, for instance—and the ironic reversals of the sermon section of the tale,^[19]

[19] Kierkegaard begins by treating the possibility of this kind of dissolution as funny, within the framework of naive consciousness, which he calls immediacy:

When [immediate persons] are in despair, there is nothing they desire more than to have been someone else or to become someone else. . . . [It] is difficult to keep from smiling over one who despairs in this way, who, humanly speaking and despite being in despair, is so very innocent. As a rule, one who despairs in this way is very comical. Imagine a self (and next to God there is nothing as eternal as a self), and then imagine that it suddenly occurs to a self that it might become someone other—than itself. And yet one in despair this way, whose sole desire is this most lunatic of lunatic metamorphoses, is infatuated with the illusion that this change can be accomplished as easily as one changes clothes. The man of immediacy does not know himself, he quite literally identifies himself only by the clothes he wears, he identifies having a self by externalities (here again the infinitely comical). There is hardly a more ludicrous mistake, for a self is indeed infinitely distinct from an externality.
       (Sickness unto Death, 53)

Kierkegaard's somewhat nagging insistence that this condition must be funny combines with the similarity of the man of immediacy to Nietzsche's old women in a way that helps bring out the tone of masculine disenchantment here. Suppose this comical misapprehension about the impermanence of the self as only the shifting play of its surfaces were actually the truth about it:

Every existence that is within the qualification spirit, even if only on its own responsibility and at its own risk, has an essential interior consistency and a consistency in something higher, at least in an idea. Such a person has great fear of any inconsistency, because he has an immense apprehension of what the result can be, that he could be torn out of the totality in which he has his life. The slightest inconsistency is an enormous loss, for, after all, he loses consistency. In that very moment, the spell is perhaps broken, the mysterious power that bound all his capacities in harmony is diminished, the coiled spring is slackened, everything perhaps becomes a chaos in which the capacities in mutiny battle one another and plunge the self into suffering, a chaos in which there is no agreement within itself, no momentum, no impetus.
       (Sickness unto Death, 107)

See the discussion of corps morcelé below, pp. 277–80.

as there is in the sudden outbreak of free-floating paranoid aggression that deranges pronoun reference in this passage from the Reeve's Tale:

And by the throte-bolle he caughte Alayn,
And he hente hym despitously agayn,
And on the nose he smoot hym with his fest.
Doun ran the blody streem upon his brest;
And in the floor, with nose and mouth tobroke,
They walwe as doon two pigges in a poke.
           (I,   4273–78)^[20]

A moment like this, when the Reeve seems to turn as much animus against his hero Alayn as against his opponent Symkyn the Miller, points in its own way to the kind of self-destructive dissolution of the ego and the distinctions it maintains between itself and others that the Pardoner also displays.

Similarly, in the Nun's Priest's Tale there is a great deal of play with genres, levels of style, and modes of discourse, sanctioned in part by

[20] On this passage see Sklute, Virtue of Necessity, 116.

the carnivalesque license that is provisionally granted to beast fables and Menippean satire.^[21] The tale notoriously both creates and violates a lot of edges and boundaries, more so than any other tale, with the possible exception of Melibee .^[22] In the process it allows its narrator a lot of erotic fantasy (for example, Chaunteclere's harem) and a lot of aggressive freedom as well, as in this passage, which is also a direct expression of the pleasure of the text:

Lo, in the lyf of Seint Kenelm I rede,
That was Kenulphus sone, the noble kyng
Of Mercenrike, how Kenelm mette a thyng.
A lite er he was mordred, on a day,
His mordre in his avysioun he say.
His norice hym expowned every deel
His sweven, and bad hym for to kepe hym weel
For traisoun; but he nas but seven yeer oold,
And therefore litel tale hath he toold
Of any dreem, so hooly was his herte.
By God! I hadde levere than my sherte
That ye hadde rad his legend, as have I.
           (VII,   3110–21,  emphasis  added)

The pleasure taken in making fun of the Prioress and her little clergeon (a theme already touched on at 3050–57) is blended here with the sheer bliss in the lines themselves at the wondrous, fortuitous coincidence of texts, ç'était donc ça! This looks like what Barthes might call delicious knowledge. Yet such moments of jouissance are matched by glints of nihilistic terror—"But casuelly the shippes botme rente" (3101), or the apocalyptic subtext of the fox chase (3389, 3394–96, 3401)—that are not present in the Wife of Bath's performance, nor yet those of the two nuns. Donaldson's suggestion that the theme of the tale is the institutional function of rhetoric as a defense against an inscrutable reality (Chaucer's Poetry, 1106) is in line with the sorts of anxieties that beset the "masculine" imagination, the intimations of meaninglessness,

[21] From this perspective it is possible that the Cook's fragment is the one instance of what I have called "feminine" imagining that is unequivocally assigned to a male speaker in the Canterbury Tales.

[22] The best account of Melibee, with particular reference to jouissance and the function of the text in the Canterbury framework, is Kempton, "Chaucer's Tale of Melibee."

helplessness, and lack of control out of which all that talk and all those authorities are generated.

Moreover, what the tale does with these moments of slippage, whether pleasurable, vertiginous, or both, seems very unlike the Wife of Bath's shifting of roles at the end of her tale to protect and defend the pleasures she has unrepentantly taken in the course of it. The Nun's Priest comes to suspect, with reason, that he will have to pay for his pleasures, and this suspicion leads him first to try to dissociate himself from them:

But for I noot to whom it myght displese,
If I conseil of wommen wolde blame,
Passe over, for I seyde it in my game.
Rede auctours, where they trete of swich mateere,
And what they seyn of wommen ye may heere.
Thise been the cokkes wordes, and nat myne;
I kan noon harm of no womman divyne.
       (3260–66,  emphasis  added)

This transparent attempt to deal with the perils of having disclosed his privetee too openly may or may not convince the Prioress, but it does not appear to reassure the Nun's Priest, who might be said, unlike the Wife of Bath and his employer, to be unsure of what he can get away with. He therefore tries to socialize his losses by making his own problem the theme of the tale: how to deal with the fox, the creature that shows up when you take your pleasures heedlessly and sing without reflecting. The image of Chaunteclere's father, the very old Adam of roosters, standing on tiptoe and crowing at the top of his voice with his eyes closed is not a bad representation of the narcissistic self-absorption of the id, as the fox is of its aggressive hungers, and both are images of the drives that roost and raven in the tale's narrator.

Without pursuing an extremely complex analysis further, I can point to this self-conscious and practically motivated self-allegorization as an instance of the operations of the "masculine" imagination insofar as the Nun's Priest chooses or is compelled to treat his private pleasure as a public issue, something for which he must apologize and do penance and from which he must draw a moral—in fact several morals. What is "masculine" about the Nun's Priest's jouissance is what he does with it afterward: his concern, however forced or even insincere, with its public implications and consequences, and the

need to contain and channel it into controlling institutional forms. Private pleasure, the eros and aggression that are anterior to the law and speak surreptitiously from behind it, are what has to be repressed to acknowledge the law's power and keep it empowered. The same is true of woman, and it is no accident that biological femininity and jouissance are often linked in this society—to say nothing of others. The carnality the Wife of Bath has to deal with is a "nature" that men have projected onto women to avoid facing it in themselves,^[23] and uneasily, sometimes unconsciously but always practically, they know it: The woman tempted me, and I did eat, is not an excuse God finds convincing. "Femininity" is therefore precisely what has to be repressed to keep disenchantment from breaking out and to keep society, including the fraud of gender itself, from being revealed as the rickety construction that, for all its terrible power, it is. Even women are supposed to repress it and become sons of Eve.

What is funniest and most poignant about this requirement is that no one, man or woman, is able to do it even if they want to. There are no masculine or feminine subjects in the Canterbury Tales; there are only "masculine" and "feminine" positions with which subjects have to deal and in relation to which they have to place themselves. The Knight's Tale is perhaps the most thoroughgoing and complex enactment of the "masculine" imagination in the poem, as the Wife's is of the "feminine," and like hers his tale embodies an intricate deployment of feminine and masculine identifications. The Knight has to deal with his own bisexuality and his own jouissance, and I will come to both of these in due course. I will begin, however, with what may appear to be a different sort of engagement of the subject with an institution. In French genre refers to both literary forms and grammatical or sexual gender. La loi du genre actually translates better into Middle English than into modern English, as "the lawe of kynde," the law of natures and sorts of poems and persons. As we shall see, the Knight's Tale is centrally concerned with the connections between these usages. It traces an itinerary that runs at last to a vision of the natures of men and women but begins with a consideration of kinds of poems: epic and romance.

[23] This point, banal enough by now, is particularly well made by Joan M. Ferrante, writing at a time when it was less banal, in Woman as Image in Medieval Literature.