Response to Using Literary Texts in a
History of Sexuality Jean Dangler, Florida State
University
A renowned medievalist in English was once asked what he
thought about Foucaults remarks on the frequent blurring of historical
and literary discourse. He maintained in an unmistakable way that to equate a
literary work with a historical document was disrespectful and offensive to
people in the past.
Since I have never wanted to offend or disrespect
subjects in history, Ive thought long and hard about his response. I
dont think that Foucault and other contemporary theorists mean to say
that all texts are the same, whether in the present or in the past. Instead,
these critics show that discourses often overlap, and that separations between
textual categories are not always absolute. As we know, many of their ideas
have contributed to recent revisions of the categories and values that modern
scholars traditionally apply to medieval writings. So like many of you here
today, I imagine, Ive come to the conclusion that the effort to glean
knowledge about medieval people and cultural values from what we have come to
call literary texts does not denote an irreverence or discourtesy
towards medieval subjects. Rather, it can uncover information and knowledge
about topics otherwise thought to be difficult to derive, such as the history
of sexuality.
This is, in part, what our three diverse presenters have
shown today, with topics and materials spanning the medieval and modern
periods. Louise Vasvári has demonstrated that the language of Juan
Ruizs Libro de buen amor conveys significant meaning about
medieval sexuality. In her essay in Queer Iberia, she focused on the
lascivious and often obscene game of dominance and submission enacted with that
language. Here she has centered on philologys obstruction of issues about
sexuality, and on the orality of the written text. In his contribution to
Queer Iberia, Daniel Eisenberg argued that the mad or crazy love in the
Libro de buen amor was love between men, and that Juan Ruiz was
heterosexist in his silence about it. He framed these observations within a
larger social and political context, namely, the late medieval effort to
distance Iberian Christian kingdoms from hybrid, multisexual Al-Andalus. Today
he has shown in greater detail the historical ramifications of that connection.
And finally, in her study of the camp aesthetic of two contemporary Spanish
writers, Carlos Varo and Lluís Fernàndez, Leora Lev has shown
that queer medieval Iberia continues to impact the ways in which artists in
post-Franco Spain envision and create modern queer identities.
Each of
these presenters relies on an intimate link between literature and historical
events. But one of the elements that most connects their talks is the implied
political, cultural, and linguistic significance of Al-Andalus. These panelists
have directly or indirectly shown that the Andalusi region was as important for
its cultural contributions and ideology as it was for its status as a religious
and political rival for Christians to fight against, especially from the
fourteenth century on. Eisenberg has made the provocative claim that the
Iberian expulsion of Muslims and Jews by the Reyes Católicos and later
monarchs was based, in part, on the effort to differentiate between the
heterosexuality of Christians and Christianity and the queer sexualities of
Muslims and Islam. I have always been fascinated by this most apt concept, and
have been drawn by Eisenbergs application of it to the Libro de buen
amor. However, I find it difficult to reconcile the Libros
supposed anti-queer project with the ways in which it accommodates itself to
different readers. The notion of the Libro as heterosexual propaganda
positioned against sexual others seems incompatible with its lack
of definition and fixedness in so many other areas. I wonder how to resolve
this doubt.
Al-Andalus significantly affects the Libro de buen
amor in other ways, such as in the linguistic game of domination and
subjugation that Vasvári mentions here and describes more fully in her
essay in Queer Iberia. This game is similar to the sexual model Steven
Oberhelman identifies in classical Arabic poetry, a model in which lowly,
inferior boys, women, and pathic males are penetrated by powerful men in an
expression of erotic dominance. Vasvári argues today that the Libro
de buen amor inverts the expected power relationship and screws the
mester de clerecía with sexual parodies of authoritative
discourses. She demonstrates that inferior and lowly discourses win out over
their traditionally more forceful, discursive rivals. This is further evident
in the battle between the armies of don Carnal and doña Cuaresma, in
which carnality and lust win out over the purity and abstinence of Lent. Don
Carnal inevitably defeats doña Cuaresma as time marches on, Lents
rebellion is postponed for another year, and order is restored. Juan Ruiz
suggests that what appears to be the victory of the abject is, in effect, the
restoration of normal organization and order. In other words, the Libro
implies that the grotesque is not anomalous, but ordinary and routine. I
wonder, again, how to reconcile Eisenbergs thesis of the
Libros heterosexism with the suggested conventionality or
routineness of the lowly and inferior.
The Libro
indicates that the lusty, the sensual, and the inferior predominate and are
most desired; it also implies that the base and inferior may not always have
been considered deserving of expulsion in the Middle Ages. Perhaps the
authority and predominance of what we regard as high culture was
not so authoritative or predominant in the medieval period. And perhaps the
idea of the grotesque or carnivalesque as negative is a modern invention used
to describe a medieval society in which, as Juan Ruiz suggests, the lowly
reigns. Along with parodying the straight discourses (as per
Vasvári reading), the Libro seems to respond to a kind of
conflation of the high and low that blurs their limits. To what extent are the
homogeneity, cleanliness, and authority of high medieval
discourses, such as the legal or the philosophical, a fiction of our own
making? Were the works of a single discipline truly so homogeneous? Maybe
different discourses, and human bodies for that matter, were not in an
antagonistic struggle before the later Middle Ages, but instead coexisted. If
this is so, then perhaps the Libros parody refers to a new
struggle between high and low language and discourses rather than to an old
one.
Thinking about the connections between the Libro de buen
amor, medieval sexualities, and Al-Andalus has caused me to question just
how other or disparaged non-heterosexualities were in medieval
Iberia. Lev suggests that medieval Iberia was organized in part by an
Inquisitional logic that resembles the modern ideology and practice of the
Franco regime. Yet I question whether a malicious body comparable to the
militaristic Franco command really existed in medieval Iberia before the late
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As many historians have shown, Al-Andalus
and Christian Iberia were often diverse and accommodating places, even as late
as the fifteenth century. The almost anachronistically queer fifteenth-century
reign of Enrique IV is a clear example.
The link that Lev makes between
the queer identities of medieval Iberia and the camp, heterogeneous identity
constructions of Varos and Fernàndezs novels suggests that
queerness has always been. Just as Juan Ruizs Libro implies that
the inferior and the lowly have always reigned, Lev shows us that queerness
certainly repeats itself over time. Maybe the world has always been queer and
it is the Inquisitors, the philologists, and the modernists who try to make it
seem otherwise. While the study of codices, manuscripts, and language continues
to serve a crucial purpose in medieval studies, critical methods and approaches
that focus on cultural issues rather than exclusively on manuscript-oriented
ones now accompany philology. Philology no longer wields critical, hegemonic
authority. Its influence today clearly is shared.
I opened with the
idea of the discursive blurring of disciplinary limits. In a sense, this
blurring is precisely what the Libro de buen amor suggests, that
positions and categories are not absolute, but interchangeable or difficult to
distinguish. One kind of discourse, value, or text permeates another in the
same way that the sexual penetrator enters into a body in a lower position. To
return to the sexual model in classical Arabic poetry, in the
muwashshaha poems of Al-Andalus the poet often degraded himself in order
to win a patrons favor. The ultimate goal in that poetic relationship was
not to remain in a debilitated position, but rather to earn something from the
more powerful patron. The subjugation resulted in the poets betterment,
potentially altering the power relationship between poet and patron.
Perhaps Juan Ruiz recognized this complex and inconstant power relationship in
the Arabic model and used it in his book to demonstrate the significant
medieval value of the lowly. Perhaps we can consider medieval Iberia a meshwork
of overlapping and underlapping elements, like a cloth or a text,
and so question the predominance of fixed and hierarchical categories in the
daily life of medieval Iberia.