SOURCE: “The (Un)naming Process in Villon's Grand Testament,” in The French Review, Vol. 66, No. 2, 1992, pp. 216-28.

[In this essay, Cholakian discusses Villon's widespread use of names in his Testament, suggesting that they serve to disempower those who are named and empower the narrator. The intense self-referentiality of the poem, he argues, further emphasizes Villon's use of naming as a means of asserting selfhood against dominating Others.]

Many scholars have delved into the university, police, and municipal archives of fifteenth-century Paris to identify the names appearing in Villon's pseudo-testament.¹ My own interest in the Grand Testament's onomastic mysteries, however, is inspired by the psycho-literary principle that every text is invariably a fiction and even an auto-portrait.² I wish to explore the naming process and the ways in which it reveals the narrator's attitudes toward his imagined testamentary universe.³

While critics like Thuasne (III, 588), Regalado (65), Fox (31), Siciliano (517), and others all attest to the intense subjectivity of the Villon text, only a few have explored the psychological implications of the profuse self-referentiality. Humphries remarks on the “confusion of object love and self love” (158) and Yve-Plessis speaks of the poet as an “obsédé de sa personalité” (71). The pronounced egocentricism of the Testament calls out for an analysis of its emotional substructures.

But this is no easy task, for any discussion of the Testament must begin with language, a language which defies easy access. It may be reasonably argued that time and distance have made this so. I would counter, however, that the poet chose to obfuscate, to create a linguistic universe which excluded, to invent a “texte déroutant” (Demarolle, Villon 195) in order to refashion and to subordinate the members of a hostile world. Discourse proved to be a gratifying fountainhead of power, especially in the imaginary perspective of an afterlife. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the subtleties of onomastic fantasy.

The Testament teems with names. They burst through the text, both disrupting and informing.⁴ Not even counting the actual recipients of the testator's ironic largesse, nearly one hundred persons are named, so many that any good edition necessarily comes replete with an onomastic glossary. Whether Villon in fact invented the mock testament,⁵ surely the choice of literary form is in itself noteworthy. What does it signify to opt for a text whose predominant characteristic is naming (heirs)?⁶

Accepting the assumption that “fiction makes good certain omissions in our lives” (Lesser 83), that it helps to control the otherwise uncontrollable, a text devoted to naming provides a particularly inviting source for psychological comment on the relationship between re-invented Self and Other. Fenichel brings home this point:

Tying up words and ideas makes thinking proper possible. The ego has now a better weapon in handling the external world as well as its own excitations. This is the rational content of the ancient magical belief that one can master what one can name.

(165)

The Testament is unmistakably a retaliatory restructuring of the universe. Readers of this text have long appreciated the clever ways in which the poet appears to reward his enemies when in fact he dispossesses them. One critic calls the entire text an “inventory of dispossession” (Humphries 161). For most it is a work of irascible, combative “protest” (Fox 103), a personal outcry for retaliation (Dufournet 172). Moreover, at the unassailable distance of imaginary death, revenge is sweet if, as here, one can be a witness to the results: “Le thème du Testament n'est pas l'immortalité mais la mémoire du mortel” (Regalado 68).

But enough has already been said of the biting sarcasms of the Villon text. At a more syntactically fundamental level of the Testament the defiant testator takes another, more “textual” kind of revenge, a psycho-onomastic phenomenon which I shall call UN-NAMING.

There is a rare moment when the poet comes close to defining this process. Huitain CXXXVII begins⁷: “Item, a Thibault de la garde … / Thibault? je mens, il a nom Jehan” (1354-55).⁸ The parenthetical interjection no doubt alludes to the double meaning of Jehan as “cocu,” but it is also an important psychological marker. It signals the need to re-invent, to re-form the emerging poetic universe with new names, new values, and new hierarchies. It is acknowledgement of the potential authority invested in the act of naming, and, by extension, the act of un-naming.

There are two identifiable techniques of “un-naming” in the Testament: collectivization and textualization. The first is the less subtle. It absorbs the singular into the collective, subordinating the specific to the general. As Bertaut notes, the testator conjures up a “flou de visages indéfiniment substituables” (144). But this goes beyond the medieval tendency toward characterological generalization. Let us examine a few prime examples.

There are fewer than a dozen female recipients in this text, so the exceptions are worth noting.⁹ In the introductory lines of the poem, the testator leaves his soul to “glorïeuse Trinité / Et la commende a Notre Dame” (833) and his body to “nostre grant mere la terre” (42). The reference may be passed off as a well-worn cliché, but in light of other female references, the antithetical double maternal image suggests something else.¹⁰

Later, with mock magnanimity, he bluntly offers to give nothing to the “filles de bien” (1567) because he has “tout donné aux servantes.” Un-named, the women have one feature in common. They all have “peres, meres et antes” (1568). Such a curiously unexpected generalization cannot go unnoticed. As Vitz writes:

It is not just because they are rich, filles de bien, that Villon refuses them the slightest gift. It certainly is not because he has nothing left—his penury has never kept him from giving a gift before! It is because they have peres, meres et antes.

(57)

The female un-naming becomes the place where onomastic lack points to an unfulfilled desire. The female collectivization serves a depersonalizing purpose: it defines a primordial lack and original hurt. Blakeslee may be quite correct in concluding that the love theme reflects in the most essential Freudian terms “culpabilité à l'égard de la mère désirée” (16).¹¹ But I should like to put the emphasis here rather on that other trauma, the one which has to do with familial security and the comfort of identity in kinship. I shall need to return to this idea when I have more thoroughly examined the other manifestations of un-naming in the text.

As there are many more male recipients, not surprisingly there are more examples of the collectivization trope as regards the male heirs. One can discount an allusion such as the one to “Celestins et Chartreux” (1575) as little more than a commonplace satire of the religious orders. There are better examples which define the process of un-naming the named male.

The first is a reference to “Unze Vingt Sergens” (1086). Further along the testator speaks of “des auditeurs messeigneurs” (1206), judicial officers of the “Chambre des comptes.” At one point he alludes to “mes trois povres orphelins” (1275), and later to “mes povres clergons” (1306). He makes a bequest to “Enfanz trouvez” (1660) and another to the “Quinze Vings” (1728). Finally he has a special reward for “amans enfermes” (1804).

At first glance no logical similarity ties these together. Yet detailed scrutiny reveals that in all cases the language uncovers a conflictual relationship which is primarily class-oriented. The narrator seems to set against each other, at opposite ends of the socio-economic scale, the rich and the poor, the powerful and the dispossessed. It is a characteristic of his turn of mind:

Je congnois que pouvres et riches,
Sages et folz, prestres et laiz,
Nobles, villains, larges et chiches,
Petiz et grans, et beaulz et laitz. …

(305-08)

In this adversarial cosmos the male authority figure looms very large. One critic specifically comments on the testator's “haine et révolte à l'égard des figures masculines d'autorité” (Blakeslee 1). It is possible in fact to create three clear-cut categories of authority figures:

RELIGIOUS: 4, 1158, 1796, 1190

JUDICIAL: 990, 1026, 1067, 1086, 1095, 1118, 1214, 1222, 1230, 1362, 1406, 1828.

ECONOMIC: 1007, 1014, 1047, 1054, 1266, 1275, 1306, 1339, 1346, 1354, 1774, 1812.

Unmistakably, the testator envisions a pursuing multitude of cruel persecuters and exploiters.

Where there are victimizers there are inexorably victims seen as a collective body of un-named casualties of the system. He devotes an entire huitain to the “Quinze Vings” (1728). Although they are beneficiaries of a generous Saint Louis, they are still to be counted among the injured in a cruelly-structured world.

One might be inclined not to include the allusion to “amans enfermes” (1660) with the preceding examples, but the psychological link is unarguable. The poet is describing a fixed universe, a “hierarchy of beings” (Vitz 111) of victims and victimizers.

In short these first cases of collectivization seem to define the nature of things. They point to a discouraging world-view which sets some against others. On the other hand, in two important respects it is a kind of textual retaliation. Generalizing thus not only offers comfort in shared misery: it distances the pain, makes it less personal and therefore less hurtful. The commonality of suffering in life and death makes one feel “enferme” but not alone.

The second type of un-naming, textualization, draws far more of its emotional substance from the need to dehumanize and thus reduce the threat of the Other. In an important passage on proper nouns Meschonnic notes: “Le paradoxe de la théorie du nom est qu'il vide le signe” (75). Names defy definition and therefore do not belong to the reified world of designation. They are, as he goes on to point out, “conservatoire,” outside the universe of meaning and classification, “unsusceptible of definition,” as John Stuart Mill puts it (76).

The textualization technique has to do with the way in which testamentary names are literalized, made precisely into definable objects and therefore subordinated to the defining subject. The testator creates a kind of onomastic annominatio¹² in which the person is transformed into homonymic object. The Testament offers many examples of this process, and while I am certainly not the first to notice them (see for example, Demarolle, L'Esprit 39), little has been said beyond relating the verbal humor to the historical referentiality of the person named.

In some instances, the onomastic joke is plainly scatological in nature:

Item, a l'Orfevre de Boys,
Donne cent clouz, queues et testes,
De gingembre sarrazinoys,
Non pas pour acouppler ses boictes,
Mais pour joindre cuz et couëctes.

(1118-22)

In others, the humor is not sexual in its orientation, but merely a play on the objectifying homograph: “Item, a Chappellain je laisse / Ma chappelle a simple tonsure” (1836-37). In either case, the humor is never entirely innocent. The verbal game-playing does not deter the careful reader from discovering the “angoisse aiguë que le poète voile sous l'humour, l'ironie, la grivoiserie” (Blakeslee 2).

A parallel manifestation of the same phenomenon is the tendency to turn “signs” in the streets into signs in the text's discourse. When rewarding “maistre Pierre Saint Amant,” the narrator writes:

Me myst ou ranc de caÿmant,
Pour le Cheval blanc qui ne bouge
Lui changë a une jument,
Et la Mulle a ung asne rouge.

(1010-13)

Whereas the person has elsewhere been rendered inanimate, here the sign is animated, given a place in the reality of moving things: “Cheval blanc” = “une jument”; “Mulle” = “ung asne rouge.” The re-invented poetic world makes possible such signifying exchanges of identification. Its inventor enjoys here the magician's power.

To Jacques Raguier he bequeaths “le Grand Godet” adding, however: “Se sans moy boyt, assiet ne lieve, / Au trou de la Pomme de Pin” (1045). If in the previous example animation was inherent in the sign, in this instance metonymic representation designates the activity: the object points to the person.

The most illustrious example of this practice appears in La Grosse Margot (1583). Is he addressing the woman or the tavern sign which bears her name? Is he giving the tavern to the tavern, the sign back to the sign? Signifier and signified, text and event become inextricably intertwined as the testator appears to reify the woman and humanize the place. The testator reveals in this commutation of “signs” the need to distance the woman. But she is but one source of injury and anguish, and the process of textualization is both more pervasive and more complex.

In an original and controversial study on double meanings and onomastic reification, Guiraud takes the whole argument of names reduced to their nominative definability one step further. In examining the text's “système cryptographique” (55), he alerts us to the fragmented syllabic clusters of proper nouns and in so doing defines meaning in terms of “new” particled sub-structures, thus drawing attention to an implied signifying system within the linguistic structures of the borrowed discourse of normal communication. But, eager to discover hidden second meaning at the etymological level of signification, Guiraud fails to push his analysis to its ultimate phonic reduction, the name qua phoneme. Yet this is by far the most impressive of the poet's various techniques to in-corp-orate the Other in the testating text. Subordinating the name to poetic function gives precedence to the word over the name, in short, it un-names “poetically.”

The first observation to make in this regard is that in virtually all cases where legatees are specifically named, the proper noun is conspicuously situated in the initial rhyme position: 910, 990, 1054, 1086, 1118, 1222, 1230, 1346, 1362, 1406, 1812, 1828. The customary syntactical formulae are either “Item à maistre Jehan Laurens” (1222) or “Item, je donne à Basennier” (1362). In only two cases (1070/1836) does the testator break with the recurring pattern (1970). In huitain CIII he syntactically distorts in order to bring about the desired effect of reducing the name to a homophonic exercise: “Item, viengne Robin Turgis / A moy, je luy paieray son vin” (1054-55).

Ecriture itself thus subsumes onomastic identity. Absorbed into text, surrendering personhood to poetic exigencies, the named is thus un-named for the sake of poetic discourse. In the established rhyme scheme of the huitain—ababbcbc—the legatee typically becomes the phonic pair of lines one and three:

Item, a maistre Jehan Cornu
Autre nouveau laiz lui vueil faire,
Car il m'a tousjours subvenu.

(990-93)

The process of harmonic absorption is further enhanced when, in at least two cases, the name is transferred to the second line (1007, 1508), for in that way it harmonizes with no fewer than four of the verse lines:

Item, pour ce que scet sa Bille
Madamoiselle de Bruyeres,
Donne prescher hors l'Euangille
A elle et a ses bachelieres,
Pour retraire ces villotieres
Qui ont le bec si affilé,
Mais que ce soit hors cymetieres.

(CXLIV)

The most extravagant subordination of onomastics to text comes when, in a number of huitains, the testator couples two names. For example, in speaking of the redoutable Perrenet (Marchant) of the Chatelet police guard, the testator enters the recipient's sobriquet at the second rhyme position and thus ties name to rhyme at six out of the eight rhyming lines:

De rechief donne a Perrenet,
J'entens le Bastart de la Barre,
Pource qu'il est beau filz et net,
En son escu, en lieu de barre,
Trois dez plombez, de bonne quarre,
Et ung beau joly jeu de cartes.
Mais quoy? s'on l'ot vecir ne poirs,
En oultre aura les fievres quartes.

(CVIII)

This does not, however, prevent the imaginative poet from playing other clever word games at the same time. Since “barre” is often the symbol for illegitimacy, the repetition at line 1097 reinforces the reification. One system of un-naming does not preclude another.

Yet another impressive case of onomastic doubling in the rhyme position is that of Françoys de la Vacquerie (CXXIII), the much disliked “promoteur de l'Officialité”: “Item, donne a maistre Françoys, / Promocteur, de la Vacquerie.” The poet must have derived much pleasure from deflating and reducing this powerful personage to a pretext for text.

An especially interesting example of the type of phonic absorption I am examining here is the huitain CLI which names two presumed prostitutes. Along with the general phenomenon of onomastic textualization, at another level of un-naming, both women are made to seem representative and unspecified: “Idolle,” no doubt a sobriquet prompted by professional activity, is joined to another descriptive cognomen “Jehanne” (de Bretaigne), usually used to designate a woman of low esteem. Moreover the final half of the huitain helps to explain the psycho-linguistic motivation of the verse:

Lieu n'est ou ce merchié ne tiengne,
Synom a la grisle de Meun;
De quoy je diz: “Fy de l'enseigne,
Puisque l'ouvraige est si commun!”

(1632-35)

In one fell swoop the testator devalues the woman by 1) defining her in terms of what she does, 2) absorbing her into the text, and 3) telling the reader/listener that the woman needs no “enseigne” (signifier) because here, as with the Grosse Margot, she is the “enseigne.”

If one accepts the notion that naming is a divine, life-giving power, then the processes of un-naming as I have identified them here are tantamount to onomastic annihilation. Textual absorption (death) of the Other makes possible textual space (life) for the Self, and that is where this analysis will finally lead us.

To acknowledge that the speaking persona is an interloper between discourse and reader is no doubt to express a critical platitude: “Le monde que nous créons est inséparable de vue de ce je poétique qui nous rapporte tout, qui s'interpose entre nous et le monde évoqué” (Regalado 65). But surely in this heavily onomastic text, the issue takes on special importance.

It is not only imminent physical death which distresses the testator but the fear of a terrifying genealogical void. He bewails the “Povreté” of his ancestors and longs for a namable past (275-76). That same apprehension engenders the hyperbolic naming of his “plus que pere”: “Maistre Guillaume de Villon, / Qui esté m'a plus doulx que mere” (850-51). To identify the father is to name oneself. Moreover, the “plus que pere” must be “plus doulx que mere” because name and genesis linked guarantee birth rights and legitimate selfhood.

In this context the process of the self-naming acrostic deserves another look. It is not without significance that the first case is in the ballade composed for the persona's un-lettered and un-named mother:

Vous portastes, digne Vierge,
princesse,
Jhesus regnant qui n'a ne fin
ne cesse.
Le Tout Puissant, prenant nostre
foiblesse,
Laissa les cieulx et nous vint secourir,
Offrit a mort sa tres clere jeunesse;
Nostre Seigneur tel est, tel le confesse.

(903-38)

To have embedded his name at this textual juncture conveys a twofold message. The self-naming supplies the creative substance at the same time that the maternal voice generates poetic discourse. In giving speech to the mother, the mother in turn names the son.¹³

Significantly both of the other two famous examples of auto-onomastic acrostics in the Testament appear in love poems. The search for the female Other has to be defined, it seems, in terms of the self-naming son. In the ballade addressed to his mother, the woman was given speech. She was provided with the son's text, composed for the unlettered female. In the Ballade to “La Grosse Margot” the woman is made to listen to the composed text of which she is the subject matter: “Qu'on luy lise ceste ballade” (1590).

As in the mother's ballade, he names himself in the envoi/signature:

Vente, gresle, gesle, j'ay
mon pain cuyt.
Je suis paillart, la paillarde me
suyt.
Lequel vault mieulx? Chascun bien
s'entressuyt.
L'un vault l'autre; c'est
a mau rat mau chat.
Ordure aimons, ordure nous affuyt;
Nous deffuyons honneur, il nous deffuyt.

(1621-26)

The testator communicates through his own sign system, with a woman who is herself perhaps but a sign. Both defy identification and both reverse the accepted norms of speech. In brief, the entire exchange takes place outside the established signifying code. Naming challenges at the very point where personhood claims its reality and distinctiveness—in emotional bonding.

The third example is the so-called “Ballade a s'amye” (942-77). The entire poem is permeated by fierce satire, first, of the courtly manner and second, of the woman for whom it is supposedly composed. The tone is already set in the disparaging reference to his beloved as “Orde paillarde” (941). But I would like to go beyond the stylistic mockery and see the specific relationship between content and the auto-acrostic in the first stanza:

Faulse beauté qui tant
me couste chier,
Rude en effect, ypocrite doulceur,
Amour dure plus que fer a macher,
Nommer que puis, de ma deffaçon
seur,
Cherme felon, la mort d'un povre
cueur,
Orgueil mussé qui gens met
au mourir,
Yeulx sans pitié, ne veult
Droit de rigueur,
Sans empirer, ung povre secourir?

(942-49)

The emotional focus of the text is situated in the “Nommer que puis, de ma deffaçon seur” (950-56). Naming the Female Other (MARTHE) provokes fear of selfhood: “Villon like Freud much later sees death [Love] as desfaçon” (Humphries 153).

At the same time, however, there is willful irony in the statement, since another kind of “undoing” is also suggested. Naming is, after all, what makes the poem possible; naming gives textual substance to the testator. It is the triumph of the namer over the named in that every name provides lexical nourishment to the making of text. All names are “undone” only to be restructured to feed the poet's ambition, to absorb Other for the sake of Self, to assure life over death through the sorcery of onomastics: “What magic ultimately defends the self against is psychic death” (O'Keefe 263). This is the psychological coherence which unites all the acrostics in the text.

To be sure, there are cases in which the testator names himself horizontally, where his name is generative in the normal direction of text-making. His generosity to the “enfans enfermes” is contingent on prayer for the named and inadequate donor: “Pourveu qu'ilz diront ung psaultier / Pour l'ame du povre Villon” (1810-11). Giving, as it so often happens in this text, is in fact taking.

On his “epitaphe” he asks that one inscribe:

Cy gist et dort en ce sollier
Qu'Amours occist de son raillon
Ung povre petit escollier
Qui fut nommé Françoys Villon.

(1884-87)

What is striking in the language is the redundancy of the lexeme “nommé,” thus conspicuously associating fear of the loss of personal identity to the more obvious apprehension of physical death. The very inconsistencies of the text point to the informing anguish:

Item, vueil qu'autour de ma fosse
Ce qui s'enssuit, sans autre histoire,
Soit escript en lectre assez grosse,
—Qui n'auroit point d'escriptouorie,
De charbon ou de pierre noire,
Sans en riens entamer le plasture.

(1876-81)

On the one hand, the testator wants to provide for his “identity” (“vueil qu'autour … soit escript en lectre assez grosse”); on the other, he half-seriously concedes his non-identity (“sans autre histoire”). He longs for indelible personhood (“Sans en riens entamer le plastre”), yet points to his socio-onomastic vulnerability (“De charbon ou de pierre noire”).

The last piece in the collection echoes these sentiments. This is the ballade to which Marot has given the seemingly unimaginative title of “Ballade de Conclusion.” But this “conclusion” summarizes the psychological informants of the Testament. It reports the struggle between death and defiance, the conflict between menacing Other and indomitable Self which underlies it.

Whereas, in the world outside text, death means loss of desire (“Car en amours mourut martir” [2001]) and social status (“Quant mourut n'avoit q'un haillon” [2013]), in the testating universe it promises the revenge of a still-speaking narrator who cunningly, ironically, and unforgivingly outlives both Self and Other. Death triumphs over death, and the emblem of the final act of defiance is auto-onomastic identification: “Icy se clost le testament / Et finist du povre Villon.” To testate is to name and to name is to be empowered.

Whatever the historical identity of names in the Testament,¹⁴ its onomastics has much to say about the narrating persona and his anger. Poirion sees in the testator “[u]n Moi opposant un monde intérieur au monde extérieur” (528). The Testament stands out among all the medieval texts known to us as a particularly scornful albeit witty discourse which cries out for justice and finds it in the pleasure of the “last word.” In the testamental format the right to speak uninterrupted and from the vantage of inaccessibility allows the disinherited Self to turn the tables so that the Other becomes giver and he, the testator, the recipient. The ultimate gift is onomastic identity itself transfused into text which is consubstantial with its “texter.”

Naming places the namer in a position of domination. But, beyond that, the power to name bears with it also the author-ity to un-name. Anguished by the vulnerability of his own precarious selfhood, the testator undoes the Other by clever and vindictive verbal deformations. Names are reified, collectivized, reduced to their phonic value, textually absorbed. As such they become the possession of the word-creator, the lexicographical material of his re-structured universe: “Villon has done more than simply re-order, or re-interpret the world. He has re-created it” (Vitz 82).

In three important senses the testator defies namelessness. Medieval aesthetics absorbed the actor into the act. The artist deciphered the symbols of a visible, lesser world which in the process exacted the price of creative anonymity. The poetic persona also suffered from his inferior place in the socio-political scheme of things:

Povre je suis de ma jeunesse,
De povre et de peticte extrasse;
Mon pere n'eust oncq grant richesse,
Ne son ayeul, nommé Orrace.

(275-76)

He bemoaned the unchanging structures which left him low and unimportant in the hierarchy: “es mon ne bougent de leurs lieux, / Pour ung povre n'avant n'ariere” (127-28). Such a point of view, moreover, seemed embedded in the very way the world was created:

hierarchy suggested two correlative ideas or attitudes. The first was that everything created by God was of worth, because God had created it and thus continued to reveal Himself in it. Secondly, the value of the creatures was itself hierarchical: some were higher up on the ladder than others, hence were closer to God, participating more fully in the divine nature.

(Vitz 111-12)

But that is not all. From the text emerges a deeper sense of namelessness, the one which in fact forces him to assume the name of his “plus que pere.” By willing his body and soul to his earthly and celestial “mothers” (833-48), by calling up the name of the father (852), he recreates himself. He longs to be the named son.

Distressed by the absence of genealogical security, thwarted by the unmovable political universe, the testator creates a textual cosmos which turns the world “inside out and upside down” (Peckham 77). If Villon chooses the Testament as his literary frame, it is not only because it provides an outlet for his virulent sarcasm: it is also his ultimate revenge on anonymity. It is his defiant response to a family and society which refuse to name him. In lieu of a socio-economic revolution, the disparaged and disappointed persona/testator assumes a surrogate identity—that of writer.¹⁵ In death he resurrects Self by onomastically possessing and dispossessing the injurious and dominating Other. To read the onomastics in this way is to uncover a crucial reason for the “testiness” of the Testament.¹⁶

Notes

1. Onomastic research has been a favorite sport of Villon scholars for many years now. Peckham's recent bibliography offers a good compendium of sources. Glossaries in the Thuasne, Longnon/Foulet and Rychner editions all provide a good point of departure.

2. Even historicist critic Siciliano finds himself saying at one point: “dans le sousconscient de Villon on remarque encore un refoulement” (522 n.2). It is clear that this text cries out for subtextual interpretation: “En plus clair: le rire ambigu de Villon n'est pas le sens (entendons: raison profonde) mais le signifié de l'œuvre” (Mela 776).

3. Our learned journals continue to show evidence of active interest in the issue of authorial versus narrative “I.” With regard to Villon, one might profitably read Calin, Frank, and Lacy. I would merely say here that, while one can certainly fall into the naive position of equating creator and creator's fictional voice, to assume that they are unrelated is to argue that the text writes itself.

4. Much has been made of that other hidden onomastic source uncovered by the poet Tristan Tzara (Cf. Dufournet, Fox, Le Gentil). I tend to agree with Fein's warning against losing ourselves too much in “literary cryptography” (François 56), and will concentrate here on the more accessible onomastics of the Villon text.

5. Several critics have dealt with origins of the form, notably Siciliano and Rice, and more recently Rossman.

6. It is worth noting in this respect that in many cultures naming was an important part of the cosmogony. For the Babylonians, for example, the world could not have existed without naming (Hogarth 10). Naming has been thought to be a divine function (Genesis 2:19) and by extension, the power to name has often been considered a way to subjugate the Other (O'Keefe 44). For the Egyptians name and person were believed to be so intimately intertwined “that if the name were blotted out, the man ceased to exist” (Clodd 224). Thus naming and magic power have been linked in many primitive religions: “The formal recital of personal names to secure control over their owners appears as a constant feature of magical procedures” (Webster 101).

7. My basic text is Rychner/Henry, although I have checked both Longnon and Thuasne.

8. Yve-Plessis sees the tendency to prevaricate as an important index of the poet's pathology (84-85).

9. For every four men there is but one female. This and other factors have led some critics to argue for a homosexual bias (Dufournet, Legage). I would say that this is more precisely a piece of homosocial discourse.

10. See my essay on the troubadour lyric in which I identify the prevailing double image of Mary/Eve as psycho-literary construct of the beloved.

11. “Et tout au fond on entrevoit l'enfant qui appelle le premier object de son amour, celle qui lui ayant donné la vie s'est trouvée séparée de lui” (Poirion 526).

12. Fox devotes an interesting part of his own essay on Villon's text to this rhetorical tradition of “playing with words through use of homonymes” (16).

13. Pickens speaks of the “circular logic which proceeds from and returns to his mother” (50).

14. In her perceptive article on historical referentiality in Villon, Regalado counters the excessive preoccupation with diachronic context by pointing out that the poet is in fact more interested in “effet de réel” than “effet du réel”!

15. “Il vise avec les mots le modèle d'une réforme des structures créées. Avec un poème, le Testament par exemple, il réalise cette réforme parmi les hommes, leurs institutions, et leurs possessions” (Kuhn 480). Strangely, Vitz's intelligent definition of linguistic cleverness leads her to conclude quite the opposite. She points to the testator's “lack of confidence in language's ability to express even the ordinary human condition” (140).

16. For an interesting etymological review of the word “testament,” see Rossman 32-33.

Works Cited

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Blakeslee, Merritt R. “Le Lais et le Testament de François Villon: essai de lecture freudienne.” Fifteenth Century Studies 5 (1982): 1-8.

Calin, William. “Observations on Point of View and the Poet's Voice in Villon.” L'Esprit Créateur 7 (1967): 180-87.

Cholakian, Rouben. The Troubadour Lyric: A Psychocritical Reading. Manchester: University P, 1990.

Clodd, Edward. Magic in Names and in Other Things. London: Chapman & Hall, 1920.

Demarolle, Pierre. L'Esprit de Villon: étude de style. Paris: Nizet, 1968.

—. Villon: un testament ambigu. Paris: Larousse, 1973.

Dufournet, Jean. Nouvelles recherches sur Villon. Paris: Champion, 1980.

—. “Deux poètes du Moyen Age en face de la mort: Rutebeuf et Villon.” Dies Illa: Death in the Middle Ages. Ed. Jane Taylor. Liverpool: Cavins, 1984.

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—. François Villon and his Reader. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1989.

Fenichel, Otto. The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis. New York: Norton, 1945.

Frank, Grace. “Villon's Poetry and the Biographical Approach.” L'Esprit Créateur. 7 (1967): 159-69.

Fox, John. Villon: Poems. London: Grant & Cutler, 1984.

Guiraud, Pierre. Le Testament de Villon; ou le gai savoir de la basoche. Paris: Gallimard, 1970.

Hogarth, D. G., ed. Authority and Archeology: Sacred and Profane. London: John Murry, 1899.

Humphries, Jefferson. The Otherness Within Gnostic Readings in Marcel Proust, Flannery O'Connor and François Villon. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1983.

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—. “François Villon's Testament and the Poetics of Transformation.” Fifteenth Century Studies 11 (1985): 71-83.

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—. “La Fonction poétique des noms propres dans le Testament de François Villon.” Cahiers de L'Association Internationale des Etudes Françaises 32 (1980): 51-68.

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Yve-Plessis, R. C. La Psychose de François Villon. Paris: Schemit, 1925.