Monday, March 31, 2014

A Patchwork Lancelot: Nomadic Spaces and Masculine Quilting in The Knight of the Cart


Chrétien de Troyes’s Lancelot unveils the uncomfortable and often uncanny overlapping and intermingling of spaces.

No, let me start over: after admitting to a small group of medieval-and-early-modernists over dinner that I find muppets to be truly horrific, I began to think about the perversities of felt, which led me to Deleuze & Guattari on smooth and striated spaces, which led me to think about the patchwork rhythms of Chrétien’s Lancelot and, consequently, to this consideration of the various trajectories through competing, conflicting and overlapping spaces in and about which our hero, the knight of the cart, wanders. Thus, a grad student who is terrified of anthropomorphized felt wants to think about difficult spaces in Chrétien de Troyes’s Lancelot. Hold your mules.

Step back: last week, as a way into our discussion of Lancelot, the director of my independent study invited me to think about beds, to move from bed to bed with Lancelot, and to consider what beds might mean, what they might do, how Lancelot’s relations with the various beds he encounters might offer an object-oriented reading of the text. We spoke briefly about the sarcophagus-as-bed, and what it might mean to resist one’s messianic calling, but now I am thinking about the more temporary beds, what is on the beds, about the fabrics that get set aflame, the sheets stained with blood, the coverlets upon which rape narratives play out; in short, the various textiles and textures upon which Lancelot/Lancelot writes and is written. For Lancelot is a nomad, a wanderer following his quarry – Guinevere – across un-mappable spaces and resisting again and again the invitations to familiar places written on the sheets of the beds that orient his errant aventure.

Very early in Chrétien’s romance, a beautiful girl warns Lancelot NOT to sleep in a most luxurious bed that is close to her own; which is as good as telling him that he simply MUST crawl in beneath its fancy fur sheets (one might suspect the girl knew exactly what she was doing in giving Lancelot such a warning). In the middle of the night, a flaming lance pierces the bed which Lancelot has chosen and sets “fire to the coverlet, the sheets, and the entire bed,” and even grazes Lancelot’s side and removes a little skin. Flame writes a call to adventure as it ingests the flammable samite; Lancelot, however, subdues the fire and sleeps soundly through the night.

A little later in the tale, after Lancelot spares the life of an enemy knight at the request of a lady, the same lady offers her lusting body as a reward. Lancelot agrees to sleep with the fair woman, and sleep, once more, is all he desires. The lady stages a rape scene upon the bed that she and Lancelot will share: Lancelot sees her bare breasts, pressed against the skin of her assailant, and in the struggle to slay the “rapist” – how unfortunate the knight she cast for that role! – Lancelot’s own top garments are severed, his chest exposed. Two half-naked bodies, blood pumping from the thrill of battle, the bed inviting them to a battle of another sort. Yet, Lancelot abstains from sex and simply falls asleep; Lancelot prefers to envelop himself in the sheets and not in the stories others try to write for him.

Thus these beds are like texts upon which different invitations are written, yet Lancelot prefers to write his own slumbery stories from the words already burned into the bedframes. Or perhaps the space of the bed itself resists certain stories precisely as it engenders others. For what are beds, but comfort machines composed from bits of the animal and vegetal world, acts of carpentry, hewn and stitched together to provide solace and relief to the human. Yet something of the vegetal remains in a bed’s flammability, something of the animal obtains in its porosity; the bed invites an intimacy with the more-than-human world. To say that a bed can be a text is quite true, for sheets are as inscribable parchment, for beds succumb to flame’s appetites as swiftly as books. Might beds have their own stories to tell, stories of liminality, of the spaces between animal and vegetable, mobility and repose, the tactile workings of fabric on human flesh? Or are the beds in Lancelot merely sites for the re-inscription of (male) human narratives?

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe smooth and striated spaces – nomadic trajectories and the sedentary political spaces of the State apparatus – by examining various fabrics. Striated space, the urban political center, the seat of sovereignty, is directional, centered, and closed. Striated space, then, is a woven blanket of vertical and horizontal paths, easily navigable, each point plotted and definite, the familiarity of genre, the locus of control, Camelot. The smooth space, on the other hand, is the patchwork quilt that stretches indefinitely with no fixed points, only nomadic wanderings – it is non-directional dimensionality, the fluid and heathen space of Gorre. Thus as Lancelot moves from bed to bed throughout the various spaces of his tale, he practices a sort of nomadic quilting; or, to put it another way, Lancelot is writing his own narrative with the materials at hand, each bed a patch on an amorphous quilt. A pattern emerges from his fabric, but Lancelot creates a rhythm of dissimilarity, a smooth space upon which trajectories can be traced but which has no overarching, organizing principle. “Patchwork, in conformity with migration, whose degree of affinity with nomadism it shares, is not only named after trajectories, but ‘represents’ trajectories, becomes inseparable from speed or movement in open space” (D&G, 477). Lancelot is a nomad, stitching together a patchwork quilt of resistance.

What does Lancelot resist, whose narratives does he overwrite with his own errant trajectories? These beds are women’s spaces, the stories of female desires – perhaps locations dictated to Chrétien by his patroness, Marie de Champagne? Eventually we arrive at the romance’s ultimate bed, the sheets between which Lancelot and Guinevere achieve the long-awaited climax. Even here, however, Lancelot re-writes the story, scripting a new narrative in blood. Whereas blood on the sheets should signal a loss of female virginity, instead it is Lancelot who writes with in this sanguine script, whose bloodied hands leave an ineradicable trace on the white fabric. For this is not Guinevere’s story, but Lancelot’s; Lancelot the masochist, Lancelot who revels in the chance to rend his flesh for love. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen reminds us, S&M is not as equitable a pairing as its acronym implies; although the sadist – Guinevere – is in the sovereign position of authority, the masochist participates too enthusiastically in the system, exuberantly exceeds expectations, and thus rewrites the very laws the sovereign can only enforce (for more on Lancelot’s masochism, see JJC’s Medieval Identity Machines). Sadist and masochist, striated and smooth, “the two spaces do not communicate with each other in the same way” (D&G, 475). Smooth and striated spaces overlap, relating not equitably, but instead mixing dangerously; one space is always bleeding through into another. The masochist ruptures the sadist’s desiring apparatus with the spilling of his blood.

Telescope out into narrative space and we find more ruptures and resistances to women’s narratives. The tale opens with Chrétien’s admission that he is in service to a patroness, Marie de Champagne, and that he is only the pen for her story, that he is only writing in the bed that she has made. But might not these moments of Lancelot’s resistance, Lancelot’s recumbence and sanguine revisions of what has been scripted for him, mark the actual author’s own aberrancy? Is Chrétien creating a patchwork of smooth space in opposition to the striations dictated by his muse? Like Lancelot’s, Chrétien’s story is the quiet refusal to take up arms or fully erect lance and, instead, sink deeper beneath the sheets, to squirrel himself away and abandon invitation – which is also to regain control of one’s own narrative, to reposition oneself outside the story in order to regain authority, to sew the patchwork quilt that is always multiple.

Thus Chrétien builds a tower in the middle of his page, to which he runs to hide, to hide Lancelot, creating a striated space within the smoothness, a point emptied of time; yet the building is loosed from its architecture, it is only ever an echo of its blueprint, for we know that here, in the tower, Chrétien abandons his narrative, his hero, his patroness, and leaves the story to another: Godefroy de Lagny. The patchwork quilt, I say again, is multiple, and we know from Godefroy’s own mouth (pen) that he is only telling Chrétien’s story, with Chrétien’s approval. But wasn’t this Marie de Champagne’s story? Thus it seems by escaping from the woman’s woven tale, by moving to the smooth space outside his patroness’s authority, by walling himself away inside his tower, he achieved ultimate sovereignty through an act of ventriloquism.

Muppets bleeding through…

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