Unspeakable Pleasures: Alain De Lille, Sexual Regulation and the Priesthood of Genius

Abstract

1. The Long Shadow of Medieval Sexuality(1) With the appearance of Alain de Lille's De planctu Naturae sometime between 1160 and 1180, the figure Genius became a priest.(2) Originally a Roman tutelary god, he had already been elevated to an important cosmic functionary in Bernardus Silvestris's Cosmographia, where his office was the originary union of form and matter.(3) But Bernardus also used the term at the end of the work to describe the testicles, the twin brother's in charge of propagation.(4) As Winthrop Wetherbee remarks in his still indispensable Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century, the sacramental role Alain assigns Genius conflates these disparate significances, and confirms the completeness of man's intellectual, moral, and sexual participation in cosmic life.(5) One measure of the power of this synthesis can be found in its considerable posterity. Genius plays a similar priestly role in two of the later Middle Ages' most influential vernacular poems, the Roman de la Rose, and the Confessio Amantis of John Gower. Moreover, this tradition provided an important staging point for the modern notion of genius: that secular deification of intellectual creativity, which, as Christine Battersby has shown, retains strong conceptual links to male procreativity.(6) Perhaps the death of the author will mean the death of genius. If so, however, this will no doubt be a death like Nietzsche's death of God: its shadow will linger for a long time to come.(7) Modernity's debt to the medieval figure may have been obscured in part because the coherence of the medieval tradition itself has proved elusive. For many scholars the problem has been the disjunction between the figure's moral significance and its rhetorical variability. The conclusion to De planctu presents Genius as the voice of orthodoxy, while his sermon advocating procreation in the Roman de la Rose is clearly parodic. Gower's Genius is less clerical than Alain's, but nevertheless clearly a moralizer. It is possible to argue that the figure conveys orthodoxy from start to finish.(8) However, that requires reading him entirely straight in the De planctu and the Confessio, and as a simple burlesque in the Roman-that is, insisting on the figure's ideological coherence to the complete exclusion of its rhetorical specificity. (Is the figure didactic or ironic? How could it have started as one, became the other, and then just as indiscriminately changed back?) In this essay I will take a different tack. Using Wetherbee's discussion as my point of departure, I will suggest that sexuality rather than orthodoxy underlies Genius's specificity as a rhetorical figure. Taken in its most obvious sense, this suggestion should be unexceptionable. It amounts to little more than a summary statement of some very basic plot details. In each of the three works, Genius's pastoral functions involve mainly encouraging or forbidding various types of erotic behavior, and in each case he carries out this function by employing discursive practices of the church: excommunication, preaching, or confession. Of course, each of these practices are distinct, as are both the taboos with which Genius is concerned, and the stance he takes toward them. In De planctu, he is the excommunicator of homoeroticism, in the Roman de la Rose, the advocate of adultery, and in the Confessio Amantis, the analyst of incest. Nevertheless, in all of these texts Genius marks a series of moments where a single, specific practice of a single, if central, institution confronts a broad area of sexual behavior. These confrontations accomplish two things. First, they point quite emphatically to the dependence of these taboos on artificially constructed regulatory structures that are historically variable in the extreme, although obviously the taboos have a durability beyond their particular instantiations in these texts. Second, the very textuality of these metaphorical confrontations between taboo and institutional form suggest that sexual regulation is itself characteristically discursive. …