SOURCE: Hult, David F. “The Allegoresis of Everyday Life.” Yale French Studies 95 (1999): 212-33.

[In the excerpt that follows, Hult asserts that in Belle Dame sans mercy Chartier uses the techniques of allegory to construct a critique of the form itself and its interpretation.]

Tout pour moi devient allégorie …

—Charles Baudelaire

Picture the following scene: a young man, about twenty years old, having reached adulthood yet still inexperienced in the domains of love and sexuality, comes upon a gathering of sophisticated people in opulent surroundings who are clearly having a good time.¹ There is music, talk, mingling. Following upon this initial entry into a society that is eminently attractive and yet that elicits some measure of ambivalence, the young man is drawn into the seductions offered to him and encounters both the delights and the sufferings, the invitations and the obstacles that seem inevitably to strew the path leading to the object of one's desires. This description is easily recognized as a thumbnail sketch of one of the great allegorical romances of the Middle Ages, indeed the paradigm of the genre, Guillaume de Lorris's Romance of the Rose. Yet it also adequately encapsulates the plot of one of the landmark works of modern American cinema, Mike Nichols's The Graduate. Lest it be objected that there is little or no connection to be made between the late-1960s film and the medieval romance, between the story of a modern college graduate and the erotic dream of a medieval cleric, between Mrs. Robinson's efforts to prevent the marriage between Benjamin and her daughter and Jalousie's building of the castle around the rose and Bel Acueil, let us consider the following remarks made by Pauline Kael:

The mother is turned into a vindictive witch. (And the comedy turns into melodrama.) Commercially, this worked: the rejection of upper-middle-class values had a special appeal for upper-middle-class college students. The inarticulate Benjamin became a romantic hero for the audience to project onto. The movie functioned as a psychodrama: the graduate stood for truth; the older people stood for sham and for corrupt sexuality. And this “generation-gap” view of youth and age entered the national bloodstream.²

Kael's commentary, which styles itself in part as an interpretation of the film's reception and therefore situates itself at a second degree of interpretation, clearly partakes of the hermeneutic model commonly referred to as allegoresis: her use of the verb “to stand for,” as well as her significant transferal of the term “psychodrama,” which here strangely resembles the medieval genre originated by Prudentius, the psycho-machia—both suggest an allegorizing gesture according to which, first, meaning production takes place on at least two parallel planes linked by some sort of analogical relationship, and, second, individual characters represent exemplars of a particular group or type.

The point of this juxtaposition should be straightforward: contrary to the common modern perception of allegory as an outdated, unfamiliar, mechanical mode of verbal or visual expression, and its hermeneutic obverse, allegoresis, as an unwarranted imposition of meaning upon an unwilling text (stigmatized as characteristic of medieval exegetical practice), I would simply like to suggest that the practice of allegoresis is alive and well in the reception of popular culture—indeed, that it is nearly impossible for us to appreciate modern works of literature or cinema without resorting in some measure to the sort of interpretive imposition that makes of individual characters either representatives of a type or conveyors of some kind of meaning not directly articulated in the work.³ In this regard, an important remark made by Northrop Frye long ago is too often forgotten: “All commentary is allegorical interpretation.”⁴ And whereas we regularly believe that the so-called realist mode in fiction, be it verbal or visual, is indistinguishable from the unfolding of everyday events, this is decidedly not the case. One of the measures of this observation can be seen in the simple fact that for the most part we tend not to “interpret” events in our lives as we do similar events in fiction, precisely because we do not assume that there is some kind of design that would account for those events. I say “for the most part,” because there are social occasions in which an individual's assumption of a particular identity through the ostentatious display of stereotyped behavior takes on a measure of theatricality, and therefore invites interpretation, such as in the phenomenon known as “drag.”

Another example that displays the permeable boundary between the modern fixation on and belief in what we commonly call “the real” and the allegorically exemplary can be found in what has been referred to as the most successful comedy in television history, Seinfeld. Professedly a show “about nothing,” that is, about the meaningless details and events in the everyday lives of a small group of spoiled upper-middle-class New Yorkers, Seinfeld is obsessed not only with the clichéd behavior of its characters and of American society in general, but also with the mechanisms by which such clichés are detected, perpetuated, and, on occasion, misinterpreted. One example of the way this works can be found in an episode in which two of the recurring characters, Jerry and George, who have been friends since high school, are erroneously taken to be a gay couple by a reporter doing a story on the comedian. The theme of mistaken identity, or rather identification, issuing in a quiproquo situation,⁵ is of course a classic comic device and yields a considerable amount of the episode's humor. But what is most intriguing is the further step taken in the episode, when both the fictional audience (the reporter) and the viewing audience (which is abundantly familiar with the two characters' irrepressible, obsessive heterosexuality) are exposed to the ways “innocent” quotidian events (such as the two friends' idle bickering over whether a piece of fruit has been washed, or Jerry's birthday gift consisting of “Bette Midler's Greatest Hits”) can easily be recoded as obvious indices of gayness. The Seinfeld episode not only illustrates the way the characters themselves can turn into walking clichés (think: personifications); it also forces the viewer to acknowledge and analyze his or her own cliché-making tendencies, which can likewise be built upon unwarranted assumptions. On a more global level, one can infer from the series' success the kind of pleasure that attends the unexpected reinscription of the apparently random and fragmented episodes of everyday life into some kind of overarching plan, one of course cleverly manufactured by the series' creators.

This observation should not come as too much of a surprise, for it informs the thought of one of the earliest treatises on fictional emplotment: Aristotle's Poetics. For Aristotle, the key to successful tragedy is plot and the key to successful plotting resides in the expert manipulation of peripeteia, which has been translated in various ways (“unexpected event,” “reversal of fortune”),⁶ but which seems to suggest something closer to what we would call “dramatic irony”—a reversal in the course of events that appears fortuitous and yet the effects of which are so very excruciatingly appropriate that it can scarcely be attributed to chance. Oedipus's unwitting fulfillment of the fatal prophecy in spite of all his efforts to the contrary is Aristotle's well-known focus, but another example he provides in passing demonstrates how difficult it is to keep the random or the “real” in its place when we are dealing with the pleasures of fiction:

Tragedy, however, is an imitation (mimesis) not only of a complete action, but also of incidents arousing pity and fear. Such incidents have the very greatest effect on the mind when they occur unexpectedly and at the same time in consequence of one another; there is more of the marvellous in them than if they happened of themselves or by mere chance. Even matters of chance seem most marvellous if there is an appearance of design as it were in them; as for instance the statue of Mitys at Argos killed the author of Mitys' death by falling down on him when he was looking at it; for incidents like that we think to be not without a meaning.⁷

Aristotle is here articulating a kind of trompe-l'oeil effect that only fiction can provide, undergirding as he does the professedly random event with an indistinguishable yet suspicious layer of intentionality. The example of Mitys's statue, moreover, presented as a lived event, suggests that the most satisfying form of such peripeteia will consist not in the manifestly contrived action but in the historical event made somehow suspect, as though it had been, or might have been, invented. To the extent that such emplotment is considered to be a form of imitation, or mimesis, the pertinence of this effect might profitably be understood within Aristotle's earlier description of the natural human fascination with mimesis, which resides in the interstitial relationship between object and copy; the concept could be extended to include an analogous relationship between random and ordered events, the suspicion of design within a disordered universe. With reference to our previous discussion, the question we should be asking is not why we allegorize our fictions, but how it is that anything in fiction can retain the status of the “real,” if by that we mean random, fortuitous, or lacking explanation.

In a brief yet suggestive article written several decades ago, Roland Barthes attempted to account for the function of the meaningless detail within the esthetics of modern, that is, post-nineteenth-century, fiction, referring to the great author whose goal was also to write a novel “about nothing,” Flaubert.⁸ One of Barthes's primary examples was an opening description from Flaubert's short story Un coeur simple: “Un vieux piano supportait, sous un baromètre, un tas pyramidal de boîtes et de cartons” (An old piano supported, underneath a barometer, a pyramid-shaped pile of boxes and cartons). There, according to Barthes, the description of Mme Aubain's salon can connote such things as bourgeois respectability (the de rigueur piano) or internal disorder (the pile of cartons on top of it) but the barometer remains “neither incongruous nor meaningful.” But Barthes unaccountably shortchanges the hermeneutic angle in his discussion, that is, the way meaning can be coaxed from even the most resistant text. By this I mean that any moderately clever reader can determine a reason for the placement of the barometer, to which Barthes attributes no perceptible signification: it could for instance be seen as yet another ironic element in a rather dysfunctional familial space, a scientific instrument for gauging atmospheric pressure in a household run by the maid, Félicité, who cannot even read a map but who could probably “feel” the weather in her bones through pure instinct; alternately, Flaubert's specific statement that it is the boxes and cartons, presumably empty, under it which are being supported by the piano (in the form of a pyramid, yet!) could suggest a material analogue to the problem of a disordered hierarchy. Our ability to “interpret” the barometer in Flaubert's description does not in fact invalidate Barthes's point about the nature of descriptive details, but it does demonstrate the susceptibility of any detail to be drawn into an interpretive scheme of more ambitious proportions. Barthes fully understood the extravagant pull of “meaningfulness” in what he liked to term classical, that is pre-Realist, fiction. If the meaningless detail of modern fiction (and Barthes privileged description as the principal terrain for such “enigmatic” narrative notations) amounts, semiotically, to a sign without a signified, does that mean, he asks, that it is without a function? His solution is to suggest that in realist fiction, the traditional esthetic, rhetorical, or symbolic function of description yields to a connotative one: the failure of the detail to signify itself connotes what Barthes calls the “reality effect” (effet de réel)—one that is no less a “referential illusion” than any other linguistic construct, but that uses its very insignificance to approximate the details of everyday life, which themselves do not normally contain meaning. As Barthes phrases it so beautifully, such details' “résistance au sens … confirme la grande opposition mythique du vécu (du vivant) et de l'intelligible … comme si … ce qui vit ne pouvait signifier—et réciproquement” (resistance to meaning confirms the great mythic opposition between the lived (the living) and the intelligible as though that which lives cannot signify—and vice versa” (87).

Although it might seem counterintuitive to approach a study of medieval allegory through a modern esthetic based upon the concrete, the particular, and the nontranscendent, my point is precisely that medieval allegory has something to teach us about our most common, yet typically unacknowledged, interpretive mechanisms, especially those that lead us to transpose individual characters into representatives of a class or a type. The license for symbolic readings of medieval texts, and by extension, the understanding that all textual detail bears meaning, as has been amply discussed in the scholarly literature, reside in the theological belief in the world as God's creation and therefore as filled with elements to be read and understood as motivated by some sort of ultimate intention. The “reality effect,” as Barthes describes it, by connoting not some specifiable meaning but rather the lack of such a meaning, connotes as well an authorless or Godless world—seemingly the opposite of the so-called medieval world view.⁹ It is precisely the widespread (but, I am suggesting, misguided) belief that there is such a thing as realism in literature—by which I mean, as per Barthes, a failure to signify anything other than its failure to signify—that explains the perceived strangeness of medieval allegory, which apparently leaves us no option but to discard the husk or remove the veil, and consume the hidden morsels or contemplate the naked flesh. Medieval allegory, in fact, merely distills and highlights many of the most typical linguistic and psychological mechanisms that remain a standard feature in our approach to narrative fiction.

I earlier referred to Guillaume de Lorris's Roman de la Rose as the paradigmatic example of a genre traditionally referred to as the allegorical poem or narrative. It is so for numerous reasons. Formally speaking, it provides one of the most fully realized examples of a narrative tale in which the characters are predominantly personifications—concrete, typically anthropomorphic representations of intangible qualities, emotions, virtues, vices, and so on. Paul Zumthor's working definition remains a standard one: “Discours narratif dans lequel le plus grand nombre, sinon la totalité des agents et des patients sont produits par une figure de personnification” (Narrative discourse in which the majority, if not the totality, of characters that act and those that are acted upon are produced by a figure of personification).¹⁰ Zumthor goes on in the following sentence to add a specification that will prove to be important for our purposes: “Au contraire de ce qu'il arrive lorsque cette dernière [la personnification] apparaît isolément dans une narration à agent humain, le récit allégorique se trouve promu tout entier sur le plan métaphorique” (Contrary to what happens when the personification appears locally in a narrative with human protagonists, the allegorical narrative is in its entirety elevated to the metaphorical plane) (370). The Rose is also paradigmatic in a chronological, or historical, sense; it “inaugurates a new age,” again to borrow Zumthor's words (371). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it announces its own allegorical-ness in the justly famous prologue that provides oblique instructions as to how to read the dream vision. The narrator tells us that what we are about to hear is the versified account of a dream, absolutely all of which, he affirms, later took place in, as we would say, “real life.”¹¹ The prologue thus promotes the fictional chronology leading from prophetic dream, to lived event, to verbal description—not, I might add, of the lived event but of the initial prophetic dream. Furthermore, it is stated that the relation between these two stages is of the allegorical type, figurative or metaphorical: dreams are a “means of signifying” (senefiance) good and bad things; some events can be recounted in an obscure way (covertement) and then take place in a direct or unproblematic manner (apertement). These are of course common speech equivalents for the technical vocabulary used by professional exegetes, the integumentum or involucrum—words for the covering or veiling of the profane text that must be removed in order to reveal the underlying truths. As though it were necessary, the narrator goes on to provide a specific key to decoding the figurative narrative when he says that the Lady for whom he is writing the poem is so worthy of being loved that she “ought to be called Rose.”¹²

As suspicious readers we might want to ask whether the narrator's fictional chronology leading from prophetic dream to lived event to versified account does not in fact problematize the relationship between lived events and fictional accounts. Is it not in some measure itself a cover-up, either of a dream vision that disguises, through a figurative veil, the already-realized love quest, as I have suggested elsewhere,¹³ or even of a dream vision that points forward to an experience that has yet to happen, and that is therefore being dictated or forced by the pseudo-prophetic allegorical invention? Be that as it may, what we can still conceptualize in Guillaume's seminal romance as an “allegory of experience”—that is, a recoding of some actual or potential event in terms of the artificial world of personifications and flowers—will, in subsequent generations, as the narrative model created by Guillaume became itself a poetic universe to be copied and continued, turn into a veritable “experience of allegory,” according to which, as in a dead metaphor, the images and characters lose their inherently novel otherness and become themselves fixed points of departure for further figurative developments.¹⁴ Complex interweavings of the universe of personifications and the world deemed “historical” make it increasingly difficult to adhere to a sharp distinction, such as that drawn by Quilligan, between the allegorical poem per se and works that mix historical event, myths and fables, topical social satire, personifications, and allegoresis. The universe of personifications began to overrun the historical world. One thinks of Charles d'Orléans's seamless admixture of historical landscape and personified interior. The transgressive nature of Jean de Meun's Faus Semblant arose precisely from the inability to differentiate the linguistic construct from the satirical portrait of a Parisian mendicant friar. Philippe de Novarre, instead of rhyming the account of the events he witnessed and lived through during Frederick II's wars in the Middle East, inserts in the midst of his chronicle a branch of the Roman de Renart in which the various historical participants are “figured” as the well-known characters of the beast fable—one, in particular, playing the role of Renart, who, by that time, had become the personification of hypocrisy or betrayal. Another example: Pierre Col, in refuting the arguments condemning the Roman de la Rose proposed by Christine de Pizan and her ally Jean Gerson, addresses his epistle to two interlocutors: Christine, who composed her letters in her own voice, and Dame Eloquence Theologienne, the allegorical figure Gerson had used as his mouthpiece in his playfully devious condemnation of Jean de Meun's work. What these examples demonstrate is an astonishing flexibility in the rhetorical move backward and forward between fiction and reality, between personification and author, between statements of local import and ones purportedly dictating universal ideas.

This lengthy preamble leads me to the principal focus of this essay, a discussion of one of the great narrative poems of the later Middle Ages, Alain Chartier's Belle dame sans mercy.¹⁵ What I will be arguing is that the composition of Chartier's work charts a vacillating course along the uncertain borderline separating the real and the allegorical, the particular and the universal, the individual and the exemplary, and that this very ambivalence, encoded in the work, itself constituted the work's major innovation and the cause for its infamous reception by contemporary readers. The poem, consisting of 100 huitains in octosyllabic verse—incidentally, the same strophic form used by Villon for his Testament—features a dialogue between a Lover and the Lady who refused to grant her mercy. Although the work flirts with allegorical personifications in the way that most late medieval courtly works refer to characters from the Rose tradition, such as Bel Acueil and Dangier, as though they were well-known celebrities and/or authority figures, the work is not properly speaking an allegory, nor has it ever, to my knowledge, been categorized as one. We might recall Zumthor's specification: the Belle dame's characters are individuals (in spite of the author's failure to provide names for them) and any incursion of allegorical characters remains episodic and incidental. The Belle dame does, however, place itself within the long-standing courtly narrative tradition initiated by the Rose, wherein a first-person narrator finds himself alone on a path of some kind, frequently but not always in a dream. As Pierre-Yves Badel's important work on the fourteenth-century reception of the Rose has demonstrated so convincingly, the first-person narrative voice—for us, the most personal and sincere of literary gambits—became a specific signal for the entry into the allegorical paysage.¹⁶ Whereas one would not “normally” encounter personifications or fantastic adventures in the waking hours, the solitary departure on horse or on foot became itself an index of such an out-of-body experience. So when, in the first lines of the Belle dame, we have the narrator stating that he set out once upon a time on his horse (“Nagaires, chevauchant, pensoye” [1, 1]), we are left in the anticipatory balance between a naturalistic and a fantastic narrative, a historical and an oneiric experience.¹⁷ The uncertainty soon abates, however, as we come to find out about the narrator's plight, his sorrow at the death of his mistress, and the concomitant decision to give up poetry. Personifications occur in only the most attenuated fashion: “La mort me tolly ma maistresse / Et me laissa seul, langoreux / En la conduite de Tristesse” (Death took my mistress from me, and left me alone, bereft, in the company of Sorrow) (1, 6-7).¹⁸ Once again, contrary to what we might expect, it is not the narrator himself who has had, or will have, unhappy dealings with the titular merciless lady. The time is past for him to sing or to love: “Je vueil laissier aux autres faire: / Leur temps est; le mien est passé” (I wish to leave it to the others; now is their time, mine is past) (5, 35-36). True to this expression of nonparticipation, the core of the poem will present the voyeuristic spectacle of the narrator, hidden behind a thickly overgrown trellis, listening to and recording the conversation between a younger surrogate and his unwilling lady. Many critics have drawn our attention to the tantalizing mirror effect of this sad narrator confronted by a situation that, he declares, resembles his own in the past, when his lady was alive:

J'apperceu le trait de ses yeulx,
Tout empenné d'umbles requestes;
Si dis a par moy: “Se m'aist Dieux,
Autel fumes comme vous estes.”

[15, 117-20]

I noticed the shaft coming from his eyes, feathered with humble requests, and said to myself, “So help me God, we were just the same as you are.”

The Belle dame has maintained an aura of mystery for twentieth-century readers. For most, the banality of its themes, vocabulary, and courtly situation suggests the dismal state to which the repetitive rhetoric of courtly lyric had led—and this, only a scant generation before François Villon would revitalize traditional poetry with his vibrant and radically personal fictional testament. Little has changed from Arthur Piaget's disparaging comments at the turn of the century:

It is banal to say that Alain Chartier is more successful as a writer of prose than of poetry. … Chartier, who had the same impoverished idea of poetry as his contemporaries, saw in it nothing but a pastime for the use of the upper classes of society. … In their verse poets dealt only with questions of love, without personality or sincerity, using the same formulas and the same situations. … Chartier was not original enough to liberate himself from this fashion, and he banished from his verse that which would touch us most, his patriotic sorrows, his discouragements, and his hopes. Instead of a noble poem … he could write only verses displaying a conventional and icy banality.¹⁹

To this day, commentators have continued to criticize Chartier because his retreat into this vapid and stylized courtly world marks a failure to deal with the calamitous political and social miseries that beset France after the battle of Agincourt.²⁰ Why Chartier's patriotic sadness should be more touching, to borrow Piaget's terms, than personal sorrow is difficult to answer. Nonetheless, there are certain facts that belie this negative appreciation of Chartier's poem and of his courtly poetry in general—not the least of which is its staggering popularity through the end of the fifteenth century, suggested not only by the relatively large number of manuscripts in which it is collected and anthologized, but also by the lively debate to which it gave rise. Two of the three surviving manuscripts containing Villon's Testament, recognized as the greatest poetic work of the fifteenth century, anthologize it with the Belle dame; both authors' works first reached print in the same year, 1489. Furthermore, Villon and Chartier, along with Jean de Meun, are virtually the only medieval authors whose reputation continues into the Renaissance.²¹

The majority of the 44 extant manuscripts of the Belle dame include a brief dossier consisting of two prose letters responding to the Belle dame and an Excusacion aux dames, an allegorical apology in which l'Acteur (author) will defend himself before the God of Love and identify himself at the end as “Voustre humble serviteur Alain” (Excusacion, 1. 241), an identification that is not made explicitly by the narrator of the Belle dame. But this is not all: such was the effect of this initial dossier that it gave rise to a further Response by “les dames” and a variegated sequence of over a dozen narrative poems, some longer than the Belle dame itself, that either styled themselves as sequels to the original or simply imitated the situation of Chartier's work.²²

The vehement contemporary reactions to the Belle Dame (both poem and character), not all negative, focused upon the portrayal of the titular heroine, and in particular the cruelty that would ultimately issue in the death of her suitor, as reported in the poem's ninety-eighth huitain:

Et depuis on me rapporta
Qu'il avoit ses cheveux desroux,
Et que tant se desconforta
Qu'il en estoit mort de courroux.

[98, 781-84]

And afterward I was told he had torn his hair out and that, disconsolate, he rent his hair and ultimately was so affected that he died of despair over his plight.

The sequel poems place the Belle Dame on trial for murder and use the mock-legal setting of Amor's courtroom to present arguments for and against her previous actions. Helen Solterer has recently attempted to situate the Querelle within a broad late-medieval polemic regarding defamation of women and juridical accusations of libel, basing her argument on the “Response des dames faicte a maistre Alain,” a scant 100-line verse text found in only three surviving manuscripts.²³ Now, even if we are convinced by Solterer's characterization of the ladies' response as an accusation of verbal injury and thus of defamation, which she defines technically as “an attack on a person enacted symbolically” (177), it is less easy to see in what sense Chartier committed such an attack. Indeed, in order to justify the accusation, Solterer is led to portray the Belle Dame rather dramatically as a “female persona who is both liberated and a murderer” (181).

The nature of Chartier's crime would, according to this reading, reside in his portrayal of a liberated woman who, as a result of her liberation from the constraints of courtly convention, becomes responsible for the death of her suitor. Such an interpretation deems the Belle Dame's liberation to be not only the source of the alleged crime within the text, but understands Alain to be condemning the liberation itself, by transferal, as a crime. Whether or not this can be substantiated as the text's “argument,” or whether or not this is even the point made by the ladies in their defiant response to Maistre Alain, I will leave for another discussion. But what is of interest to me here is the critical maneuver that sanctions any reader's transition from particular statements to the realm of generalization, from anecdote to exemplum, from fiction to allegory, or, using Barthes's terminology, from the real to the significant. What I will be attempting to show is that, alongside the overdetermined courtly polemics that are the stuff of the Belle dame, Chartier is constantly attentive to the modes of argumentation and, in particular, to the juxtaposition between the actions of an individual and the prescribed actions appropriate to a particular class.

As I have suggested, Chartier's choice to differentiate the narrator persona from that of the protagonist, the Amant whose dialogue with the Belle Dame occupies roughly 550 of the poem's total 800 lines, is not irrelevant. This differentiation performs at least two contradictory functions. First, the distancing allows the narrator an objectivity he might not otherwise have were he simultaneously the lover-figure (as, for instance, in the dits of Machaut and Froissart). The implicit association between narrator and author, between the speaking voice and Maistre Alain, is precisely what allows readers and critics to hold the latter—as a distanced exterior agent, a voluntary auctor—accountable and even to put him on trial for communicating, and purportedly advocating, the Belle Dame's criminal actions. Simultaneously, however, a totally interiorized, fictional mirroring effect tends to caricature and therefore exemplify the figure of the courtly lover by providing two instances of a similar phenomenon: the narrator whose beloved is dead at the start of the poem and who is in mourning; and the Lover who, seemingly also in mourning judging by his black garb, bears a striking affinity with the narrator. If death is frequently metaphorized in the lyric tradition of love poetry, then the narrator's own mourning over his beloved's death might itself be construed as the state of a courtly lover after the love affair has ended. In any event, by positing two such lovers who resemble each other, indeed, who find themselves in parallel situations—autel fumes comme vous estes—the narrative suggests the existence of a class rather than discrete individuals and, ultimately, the replaying of a situation that, far from being unique, has occurred many times before.²⁴ It also allows the narrator/author figure to maintain the two otherwise irreconcilable roles of perpetrator and victim.²⁵

As Daniel Poirion has pointed out, the dialogue itself does not follow any logical order or line of reasoning:²⁶ basically, the Lover keeps asking and the Belle Dame continually refutes his line of argumentation. Most pertinent for my purposes, however, is the way the Belle Dame's refutations shuttle between an argument based upon universals and one based upon her individual status. The Belle Dame's crime—if crime there be—is that she acts according to the first-person pronoun “I” rather than according to the indeterminate “one”—even as she occasionally uses the universal argument to refute the Lover's claims. Early on, the Lover claims that it was she who initiated the affair: “La guerre y meïstes / Quant voz yeulx escrirent la lectre / Par quoy deffier me feïtes” (You started the war when your eyes wrote the letter through which you provoked me) (29, 226-28). In traditional fashion, he adds that her eyes, aside from “writing the letter,” dispatched Doulx Regart to him as a herald. Through this rhetorical gesture, the Lover personifies the eyes, making them a synecdoche for the Lady's person, and thereby turns his outside perception into a declaration, further concretized in the metaphor of the “letter,” which signifies her inner intention. In one of the most famous lines of the poem, the lady's retort, in which she has recourse to the most banal understanding of vision, constitutes a radical deallegorization: “Les yeulx sont faiz pour regarder … Qui y sent mal s'en doit garder” (Eyes are made for looking … He who suffers from it should watch out) (30, 238, 240). This is not to say that the Lady does not use the vocabulary or personifications of the traditional courtly stock, but these highly codified devices are nearly always used to characterize the Lover's behavior, and rarely to dictate her own. The strongest and most devastating of the Belle Dame's moments, however, are when she speaks in the first person, declaring her own individual take on the situation. Thus, in the justly famous huitain that forms the core of her resistance:

D'amours ne quier courroux n'aysance,
Ne grant espoir ne grant desir;
Et si n'ay de voz maulx plaisance
Ne regart a voustre plaisir.
Choisisse qui vouldra choisir.
Je suis france et france vueil estre,
Sans moy de mon cuer dessaisir
Pour en faire un autre le maistre.

[36, 281-88]

I seek neither distress nor solace from love, neither great hope nor great desire. Accordingly I don't get any kick out of your sorrows nor do I care about your pleasure. Each to his own. I am free and I wish to remain free, without relinquishing my heart just to make another its master.

The Lover's answer to this assertion leads to a critical moment in the debate. The Lover fundamentally agrees with the Belle Dame's point, but expresses her mastery in the following terms: “Amours … Mist les dames hors de servaige / Et leur ordonna pour leur part / Maistrise et franc seigneurïage” (Love placed women outside of servitude and prescribed to them as their lot mastery and free lordship) (37, 289-92). The contradiction between the Belle Dame's putative “Maistrise” and Amor's own control over it (“leur ordonna”) is stunning. By surreptitiously submitting the Belle Dame's self-proclaimed freedom to the wishes of Amor, the Lover attempts to reinscribe her power within the scope of a still higher power, the rules of which she should be compelled to follow: of course she is the master, he insists, but that requires proper treatment of the servants—namely me.

The Belle Dame's arguments tend toward a linguistic skepticism, based in part upon the fear of hypocrisy and insincere speech, and a reconception of the courtly vocabulary as individually, not universally, valid. Thus she will claim that one person's joy is another's sorrow:

Plaisir n'est mie partout un;
Ce vous est doulx qui m'est amer,
Si ne pouez vous ou aucun
A voustre gré moy faire amer.

[42, 329-32]

Pleasure is not the same thing in all places: what is bitter to me is sweet to you. And so neither you nor anyone else can make me love according to your wishes.

At another point, later in the poem, she suggests that the Lover's stock in trade, his courtly vocabulary, can lead to unexpected, even contrary results:

Se dame est a autruy piteuse
Pour estre a soy mesmes crüelle,
Sa pitié devient despiteuse
Et son amour hayne mortelle.

[84, 669-72]

If a lady shows pity to another, and thereby treats herself with cruelty, her pity becomes pitiless and her love mortal hatred.

Chartier ends up using the poem's formal characteristics to unmask the relentless logic of the courtly contract, for, to the extent that it is predicated upon reciprocity and exchange—the cultural mechanism of the gift—, the dialogue form itself underwrites the Lover's request. This explains why one of the most forceful and necessary of the Lady's strategies is to separate the mutual implications and entailments of the dialogue by stressing each individual's own duties to self. Whereas the Lover defines Courtoisie as reciprocity, “Courtoisie qui vous semont / Qu'amours soit par amours merie” (Courtoisie, which entreats you to reward love with love) (51, 407-8), the Lady redefines Courtoisie as a refusal of the system of exchange: “Guerredon, contrainte et renchiere / Et elle, ne vont point ensemble” (Rewards for service, constraint and escalating claims do not at all go together with her) (52, 415-16). Later she tells us that a gift is not a gift when it is not taken up:

Je ne tien mie pour donné
Ce qu'on offre a qui ne le prent,
Car le don est abandonné
Se le donneur ne le reprent.

[60, 473-76]

I do not consider that something has been given when it has been offered to a person who does not accept it, for the gift is forfeited if the giver doesn't take it back.

The Belle Dame's concentration on the self at the expense of any potential communication leads her to a radical insistence upon introspection and indifference to the other: “Car tant moins du sien en retient / Qui trop veult a l'autrui entendre” (So much the less of one's own [honor] does one retain when one pays too much attention to that of another) (56, 447-48). What makes this statement particularly striking is that these words are not simply meant to apply to her—she attempts to instill self-reliance in the Lover, which would help him to exit the circular and self-confirming discourse of love that makes everything accord with its preestablished rhetoric:

Qui n'a a soy mesme amitié
De toute amour est deffiez;
Et se de vous n'avez pitié
D'autruy pitié ne vous fiez.

[80, 633-36]

He who does not bear friendship toward himself is repudiated from any love; and if you do not take pity on yourself, don't count on anyone else's pity.

Her last words, just before closing the dialogue, make the Lover totally and individually responsible for himself: “Riens ne vous nuist fors vous meïsmes; / De vous mesme juge soyez” (Nothing is harming you but yourself; be your own judge) (96, 763-64).

Any exemplary treatment of the Belle Dame—even Chartier's own in the final huitain, which makes of her a counter-example—inevitably has the effect of undermining the very basis of her arguments by reinscribing her within the allegorizing framework of the courtly context. Whether we call her, with Chartier, the “Belle Dame sans Mercy,” or, as certain of Chartier's epigones renamed her, the “Cruelle Femme en Amours” or the “Loyale Femme,” we are treating her as a paradigmatic rendering of femininity rather than a character whose principal aim is to refute such classificatory mechanisms. Allegoresis, that is, the interpretive reinscription of an individual into a particular class, proves to be a gesture of empowerment and appropriation when used by dissatisfied readers. The rhetorical strategy of the courtly men's response to Alain's poem is thus quite apposite, for they situate themselves within a manifestly allegorical situation, one more similar to the Romance of the Rose than to the Belle dame.

Three ladies, who sign themselves as “Katherine, Marie et Jehanne,” send a letter to Maistre Alain in which they ask him to respond to and defend himself against the charge made in the men's letter, of which they send him a copy. The men protest the feminine image provided in and by the Belle Dame. They identify themselves as knights, questers in search of the precious gift of Mercy that our familiar friends Dangier, Reffus, and Crainte have ambushed and carried off to the Forest de Longue Actente. They would be steadfastly awaiting the help of Espoir, Bel Acueil, and Doulx Actrait were it not for the troubling recent publication of a novel verse composition that they attribute not to one, but several authors. They suggest that the authors of this book called La belle dame sans mercy were once themselves fellow questers who quit because of faint heart or rejection and who therefore wish to rob the rest of mankind of their joy. This book risks removing the virtue of Pity from the ladies of the court, which will result in the departure of their humble servants and a reduction in the ladies' power. The courtiers end their letter to the ladies by requesting that they turn their eyes from the book, punish the authors, and allow their humble servants to continue their quest.

What interests me here is the way the “men” use the mode of allegory in order to submit the book to a judgment that is already, shall we say, predetermined. Furthermore, it presupposes that a tale such as this one can only be exemplary—that is, not only does it risk teaching women a certain type of behavior, but it can also make them incapable of acting in any other way. As the God of Love will put it in Alain's response, the Excusacion, “You wish to take from women their power” (“Tu veulx … Tolir aux dames leur puissance” [Excusacion, ll. 105, 107]). This in spite of the fact that Alain's own coda to the poem, in which he addresses men and then women, requests that the latter not be merciless and not resemble the Belle Dame at all.

In the Excusacion, Alain rewords and expands the aforementioned protest within the discourse of the God of Love, who calls the book “wretched” (“maleureux livre” [1.27]) and, as we have seen, accuses him of undermining his own laws as well as attacking womankind. Alain's defense is shrewd, for it also, in its own way, obligingly reinscribes his creation into the courtly context and places its protagonists under the aegis of the courtly exchange. And this, of course, is the best defense possible. How does he do it? He launches into lengthy praise of Pitié, a lady's greatest treasure—so great that she can't give it up easily, nor should it be surrendered by force or constraint—and then he suggests that waiting is the only thing a guy can do. The implication is that the dead lover simply didn't wait long enough: his death is reread not as a sign, however exaggerated, of his sorrow, but rather as a punishment for his inconstancy. Alain proceeds to the specific defense of his book, the importance of which he minimizes, first by claiming it to be “worth little” (“peu vault et monte” [Excusacion, l. 193]) and then by turning around to say that it is very simply the account of a single discontented lover, nothing more and nothing less: “Et qui autre chose y entent, / Il y voit trop ou n'y voit goute” (And whoever understands anything else in it either sees too much or nothing at all) (Excusacion, ll. 199-200). Accordingly, any insinuations of the lady's cruelty should be attributed not to the author Alain, who is nothing but the transcriber of the lover's plaint (“Dont je ne suis que l'escripvain” [Excusacion, l. 216]), but to the terminally deluded, raving lover. In any event, we shouldn't believe such insinuations. What he neglects to mention is that the narrator himself, in his final huitain, had called the Belle Dame cruel (100, 795), and therefore is himself more deeply implicated than we might have thought.

Thus, at the end of the Excusacion, Alain raises the question of the narrator's status once again and surreptitiously corrects the common biographical association between poet and first-person narrator even as he affirms the authorial identification.²⁷ If he, Alain, claims to be still in the period of waiting (Excusacion, ll. 243-44), then he distinguishes his voice from that of the narrator of the Belle dame, who, we recall, was in mourning after having lost his own mistress. The Belle dame is recontextualized as the reverie of a lunatic poet and the Excusacion becomes a Retraction. The question that is raised, and perhaps ultimately dropped, in the Belle dame, is that of the nature of the exemplary in a situation that is saturated by a complex, domineering slate of literary and cultural stereotypes. What I am suggesting is that, first, Alain is using the markedly individualistic rhetorical stance of the Belle Dame in order to call into question the allegorizing interpretive habits that accrue in any highly codified cultural moment, be it the overdetermined courtly literary culture of the early fifteenth century or, to turn back to the image with which I opened this article, a nascent, yet already clichéd, late 1960s counterculture in which erotic practice, social behavior, and political belief mirror and mutually signify each other. I would further propose that the Belle dame dossier, taken as a whole, demonstrates effectively the power that allegoresis, as a more or less conscious rhetorical tool, can wield by bending figures to fit a particular stereotype or by making the “real” signify (one form, as I have suggested, of human mimetic pleasure) and then by passing judgment on these figures—literally and figuratively placing them on trial—based on the stereotype and not on the discrete individual.

What I am not saying is that Alain refuses to indulge in such allegorical manipulation. Indeed, he understands it all too well. His request to the female readers of the Belle dame in the final stanza, that they avoid her exemplary cruelty, is in this regard highly conventional:

Ne soyés mie se crüelles,
Chascune ne toutes ensemble.
Que ja nulle de vous ressemble
Celle que m'oyez nommer cy,
Qu'on appellera, ce me semble,
La belle dame sans mercy!

[100, 795-800]

Do not be so cruel, as individuals or as a group. May none of you ever resemble that woman whom you can hear me name as follows: she will be called, it seems to me, the Belle Dame sans Mercy.

Not only does this closing gesture constitute a familiar palinode by way of allegoresis,²⁸ but it enshrines within what has always been taken as the work's title the Lady's infamously stereotyped label, as though the transforming allegoresis were itself the subject of the work. Alain's stigmatizing of the dead lover in the Excusacion provides, as we have seen, a further example. However, even if the Belle dame does ultimately get roped back into the conventional courtly frame, we should perhaps see it as adumbrating Villon rather than rewriting Guillaume de Lorris, looking forward rather than backward. It is not, I think, the psychological reading of the Belle Dame's persona that is noteworthy—her cruelty, her refusal—but a broader cultural one suggesting that to circumvent the constraints of courtly discourse, to keep from being turned into a cliché, indeed from being allegorized, one needs either to dismantle the power of its stereotypes or simply step outside it, cease to play the game, stop talking.²⁹ Just as what I have been calling courtly discourse will live on for centuries, so will the problem of silence as a remedy to the dangers of the love dialogue and what participation in that dialogue implies, particularly for the female.

I can think of few better illustrations of this dynamic than Laclos's Les liaisons dangereuses, the title of which itself evokes the interlocking problems of exchange, communication, and entrapment. There, the exchange of letters becomes a metaphor for dialogue and erotic engagement, if not jouissance itself. The Présidente de Tourvel understands that the minute she reads Valmont's letters—no, the minute she accepts the envelope—she is lost. When, at a crucial voyeuristic moment, she is observed carefully reassembling the scraps of the letter she had torn up publicly as an oblique sign of rejection to Valmont, she is merely fulfilling in the most physical of ways, piecing together the courtly contract that several centuries before the Belle Dame had refused to sign.

Notes

1. My thanks to Jody Enders for inviting me to present an earlier version of this paper at UC Santa Barbara. I am grateful for her comments and suggestions, as well as for those I received from Cynthia Brown, Catherine Nesci, and Cynthia Skenazi on that occasion.

2. Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1982, rpt. 1991), 299.

3. Rita Copeland and Stephen Melville have recently suggested that, contrary to the common understanding of allegory and allegoresis as two radically opposed genres, a point argued most notably by Maureen Quilligan in her book The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), we understand them as “mutually enfolded” and, taken together, as displaying a “permanent and radical tension between meaning and its means” (“Allegory and Allegoresis, Rhetoric and Hermeneutics,” Exemplaria 3/1 [Spring 1991]: 186).

4. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 89.

5. Quiproquo is a common French technical term, clearly based upon the Latin expression quid pro quo and usually used to discuss a specific type of theatrical situation. It can be defined as a misapprehension in which one person or thing is taken for another, or as the situation that results from such a misapprehension.

6. On the numerous difficulties in defining and translating Aristotle's technical vocabulary, and specifically peripeteia, see the lengthy note in S. H. Butcher, Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art with a Critical Text and Translation of the Poetics (1894; rpt. New York: Dover, 1951), 329-31. Butcher translates it as “Reversal of the Situation.” More recently, Roselyne Dupont-Roc and Jean Lallot, in their edition, translation, and commentary of the Poetics (Aristote, La poétique [Paris: Seuil, 1980]), translate peripeteia as “coup de théâtre,” and emphasize that the term combines, almost paradoxically, both a plausible causal sequence of events and an unexpected surprise-effect. It is, as they put it, at the very extreme limit of the plausible (vraisemblable).

7. Aristotle, Poetics 9 (1452a), in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, Bollingen Series 72, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2323.

8. Roland Barthes, “L'effet de réel,” Communications ll (1968): 84-90.

9. I am indebted to Nancy Freeman Regalado's astute and suggestive application of Barthes's study to François Villon in her “Effet de réel, Effet du réel: Representation and Reference in Villon's Testament,” Yale French Studies 70 (1986): 63-77. Yet whereas Regalado takes the effet de réel to include, rather broadly, “the processes of representation within texts … the lifelike, convincing, plausible representation of objects, characters, actions, and emotions” (64), I limit it to its specifically semiotic definition.

10. Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 370, translation mine.

11. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le roman de la Rose, ed. Félix Lecoy (Paris: Champion, 1965), ll. 28-30: “Mes en ce songe onques riens n'ot / qui tretot avenu ne soit / si con li songes recensoit” (But there was not a single thing in this dream that did not entirely take place just as the dream told it). All translations mine.

12. “Et tant est digne d'estre amee / qu'el doit estre Rose clamee” (Rose, ll. 43-44). My translation follows Lecoy's capitalization of the word Rose. If it were printed in lower case, the phrase could be construed as “should be called a rose.” For more on this critical issue, see note 17 below.

13. See my Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Readership and Authority in the First Roman de la Rose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

14. Cf. Zumthor: “Une partie non négligeable de la poésie des XIIIe, XIVe, XVe siècles se construisit à partir de lui [Le roman de la Rose], se référant à lui comme à la réalité même de la poésie” (A not insignificant portion of the poetry of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries laid its foundations upon it, referring to it as if to the very reality of poetry) (Essai, 371).

15. All quotations from the Belle dame sans mercy, as well as the responses and the Excusacion, will be taken from The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier, ed. J. C. Laidlaw (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984). Stanza and line numbers for the Belle dame will be indicated in the text. All translations are mine.

16. Pierre-Yves Badel, Le roman de la Rose au XIVe siècle. Étude de la réception de l'oeuvre (Geneva: Droz, 1980), esp. 339. Badel in particular speaks of a subcategory of vision poetry in which, even though a dream is not mentioned, there is a dream-like first-person narrative in which we find a “liaison manifeste entre la matière de la vision et les préoccupations antérieures du narrateur” (an overt connection between the subject matter of the vision and the narrator's prior preoccupations) (339).

17. For the relation between horseback ride and reverie in medieval poetry, see Michel Zink, “The Allegorical Poem as Interior Memoir,” Yale French Studies 70 (1986): 100-26.

18. Laidlaw's handling of this passage provides an interesting though not unusual illustration of the editorial problem involved in dealing with expression in such medieval texts, as evidenced by his capitalization of “Tristece” and his failure to capitalize “la mort”—as though the former were functioning as a personification and the latter were not. Any decision to capitalize such marginally personified abstractions itself constitutes an interpretation of the figures in question—precisely the issue at hand here. Piaget chose in his edition (Alain Chartier, La belle dame sans mercy et les poésies lyriques [Lille: Giard/Geneva: Droz, 1949]) not to capitalize either one. The choice not to capitalize personifications does not, however, seem a fruitful solution to the problem, as we may judge by Armand Strubel's recent edition of the Roman de la Rose (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1992). The logic of his choice to follow the practice of the manuscripts leads him to maintain not only the names of the personifications in lower case, but also those of the mythical gods, such as Venus and Jupiter. On the relative status of figures from classical mythology and new myths created within the universe of Christian allegory, see Hans Robert Jauss, “Allégorie, ‘remythisation’ et nouveau mythe. Réflexions sur la captivité chrétienne de la mythologie au moyen âge,” in Mélanges d'histoire littéraire, de linguistique et de philologie romanes offerts à Charles Rostaing (Liège: Association des romanistes de l'Université de Liège, 1974), 469-99. These observations on the not inconsiderable consequences of capitalization can be extended to include the decision of how to display the work's title, which remains a modern imposition (and thus interpretation) since there are no medieval rules for capitalization of titles. We have in the course of this article gone along with the journal's editorial policy; however, as the ensuing argument will suggest, this seemingly empty gesture also attenuates the exemplarity that is possibly adumbrated in the work but which certainly gets attached to the work's heroine in subsequent traditions. This exemplarity makes of her the epitome of the hard-hearted woman and therefore the properly capitalized Belle Dame sans Mercy (an allegorization not unlike the Forest de Longue Attente). On the other hand, to refer to the heroine, who has no other name, we consistently use “Belle Dame” as an individualizing proper name.

19. Arthur Piaget, “La Belle dame sans merci et ses imitations,” Romania 30 (1901): 22, translation mine.

20. For a good account of this critical tradition, see Robert Giannasi, “Chartier's Deceptive Narrator: La belle dame sans mercy as Delusion,” Romania 114 (1996): 362-84.

21. See my brief remarks in “La fortune du Roman de la Rose à l'époque de Clément Marot,” in Clément Marot “Prince des poëtes françois”: 1496-1996, ed. Gérard Defaux and Michel Simonin, Colloques, Congrès et Conférences sur la Renaissance, vol. 8 (Paris: Champion, 1997), 143-56.

22. Piaget's series of articles in Romania, all with the same title as in note 18 above, remains the standard reference: Romania 30 (1901): 22-48, 317-51; Romania 31 (1902): 315-49; Romania 33 (1904): 179-208; Romania 34 (1905): 375-428, 559-602.

23. Helen Solterer, The Master and Minerva: Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), esp. 176-99.

24. At least one manuscript, according to Laidlaw's notes, has the reading “Autel fus ge” (So was I), which suggests a more precise focus upon the two lover-figures rather than the two couples.

25. See Giannasi, “Chartier's Deceptive Narrator,” esp. 383-84.

26. “Lectures de la belle dame sans merci,” in Mélanges de langue et de littérature médiévales offerts à Pierre Le Gentil (Paris: SEDES, 1973), 691-705.

27. This is admittedly a tricky question, for Alain does not name himself within the text of the Belle dame and, according to Laidlaw, only two of the forty-four manuscripts in which it is found attribute it to him by name. The situation for the letter written by the three ladies and the Excusacion (which accompany the Belle dame in roughly three-quarters of the surviving manuscripts) is quite different: Laidlaw affirms that “many of the rubrics of the letters and of the Excusacion mention Chartier's name” (Poetical Works, 329), and the final quatrain containing his name is found in many, though not all, of the manuscripts.

28. Consider Guillaume de Lorris's gloss on the Narcissus tale, which similarly realigns the story and makes of it a counter-example, a warning against refusal of one's suitors, addressed to the ladies in the audience.

29. This explains why Alain's shifting of the center of blame to himself in the Excusacion, interestingly enough, performs the task of preserving, by virtue of her absence, the quasi-mythic image of the Belle Dame. It explains as well why the sequel poems such as the Parlement d'Amour, by Baudet Herenc, or the Cruelle femme en amour, by Achille Caulier, needed to bring her back to face the legal charges against her in Love's court, and to speak her defense in her own voice—thereby reinscribing her as a victim.