Guilt and shame easys in french literature throught and visual culture

Jenny Chamarette and Jennifer Higgins eds Guilt and Shame Essays in French Literature, Thought and Visual Culture As theoretical positions and as affective experiences, the twin cur-re

Jenny Chamarette and Jennifer Higgins (eds)

Guilt and Shame

Essays in French Literature, Thought and Visual Culture

As theoretical positions and as affective experiences, the twin

cur-rents of contrition – guilt and shame – permeate literary discourse

and figure prominently in discussions of ethics, history, sexuality and

social hierarchy This collection of essays, on French and francophone

prose, poetry, drama, visual art, cinema and thought, assesses guilt

and shame in relation to structures of social morality, language and

self-expression, the thinking of trauma, and the ethics of forgiveness

The authors approach their subjects via close readings and

compara-tive study, drawing on such thinkers as Adorno, Derrida, Jankélévitch

and Irigaray Through these they consider works ranging from the

medieval Roman de la rose through to Gustave Moreau’s Symbolist

painting, Giacometti’s sculpture, the films of Marina de Van and

recent sub-Saharan African writing The collection provides an

état-présent of thinking on guilt and shame in French Studies, and is

the first to assemble work on this topic ranging from the thirteenth

to the twenty-first century The book contains nine contributions in

English and four in French.

Jenny Chamarette is a College Lecturer and Director of Studies in

French at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge She specialises in

French and European cinema and time-based media, film and art

theory, and twentieth-century French thought.

Jennifer Higgins is a Junior Research Fellow at St Anne’s College,

Oxford She specialises in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century

French poetry, and particularly English responses to this poetry via

translation

ISBN 978-3-03911-563-1

Jenny Chamarette and Jennifer Higgins (eds)

Guilt and Shame

Essays in French Literature, Thought and Visual Culture

As theoretical positions and as affective experiences, the twin

cur-rents of contrition – guilt and shame – permeate literary discourse

and figure prominently in discussions of ethics, history, sexuality and

social hierarchy This collection of essays, on French and francophone

prose, poetry, drama, visual art, cinema and thought, assesses guilt

and shame in relation to structures of social morality, language and

self-expression, the thinking of trauma, and the ethics of forgiveness

The authors approach their subjects via close readings and

compara-tive study, drawing on such thinkers as Adorno, Derrida, Jankélévitch

and Irigaray Through these they consider works ranging from the

medieval Roman de la rose through to Gustave Moreau’s Symbolist

painting, Giacometti’s sculpture, the films of Marina de Van and

recent sub-Saharan African writing The collection provides an

état-présent of thinking on guilt and shame in French Studies, and is

the first to assemble work on this topic ranging from the thirteenth

to the twenty-first century The book contains nine contributions in

English and four in French.

Jenny Chamarette is a College Lecturer and Director of Studies in

French at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge She specialises in

French and European cinema and time-based media, film and art

theory, and twentieth-century French thought.

Jennifer Higgins is a Junior Research Fellow at St Anne’s College,

Oxford She specialises in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century

French poetry, and particularly English responses to this poetry via

translation

Guilt and Shame

M odern F rench I dentities

Edited by Peter Collier

Volume 79

PEtEr Lang

Oxford l Bern l Berlin l Bruxelles l Frankfurt am Main l new York l Wien

Jenny Chamarette and Jennifer Higgins (eds)

Guilt and Shame

Essays in French Literature, thought and Visual Culture

PEtEr Lang

Oxford l Bern l Berlin l Bruxelles l Frankfurt am Main l new York l Wien

© Peter Lang ag, International academic Publishers, Bern 2010

Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland

info@peterlang.com, www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net

all rights reserved.

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Die Deutsche nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

a catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

guilt and shame : essays in French literature, thought and visual

culture / [edited by] Jenny Chamarette and Jennifer Higgins.

p cm (Modern French identities ; 79)

Contains nine essays in English and four in French.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBn 978-3-03911-563-1 (alk paper)

1 French literature History and criticism 2 Ethics in literature.

3 Literature and morals 4 art and morals 5 guilt in literature.

6 Shame in literature I Chamarette, Jenny, 1981- II Higgins,

Jennifer, 1978-

PQ145.1.E83g85 2009

840.9‘353 dc22

2009038884

Guilt, Shame and Masculine Insufficiency:

The Case of La Fille du Comte de Pontieu 15

Quand le langage spirituel plaide coupable:

linguistique et péché au XVIIe siècle 87

Natasha Grigorian

Guilt and Desire in the Dream World:

Gustave Moreau and Jean Moréas 101

Guilt and Shame in Occupation Narrative:

Reading the Open Secret and Cultural Amnesia in Blanchot’s

Timothy Mathews

Trauma, Witness, Form: Thinking Walter Benjamin with

Davina Quinlivan

‘Whispering on the threshold of the flesh’: The Breathing Body,

Silence and Embodied Shame in Marina de Van’s

Lucy Bolton

Remembering Flesh: Morvern Callar as an Irigarayan Alice 189

Charlotte Baker

‘For a minute, their sense of the ways of the world was ruptured

Just by looking’: The Black African Albino in the Novels of

Didier Destremau, Patrick Grainville and Williams Sassine 201Notes on Contributors 215

Jenny Chamarette and Jennifer Higgins

of, personal and collective guilt on the one hand, and social, bodily or mediated (or indeed mediatised) shame on the other, are constants of our everyday experience, these issues continue to haunt our moral and ethical lives In her recent volume, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After,

Ruth Leys engages with key debates in recent shame and trauma theory,

to make a compelling case for the continued importance of these issues in our twenty-first-century lives In her discussions of trauma and torture, she points out how guilt and shame, powerful twin mechanisms of subjectivity, have become inextricably linked to the socio-political dynamics of power

In the context of a media-saturated society where the camera is not only a tool of illumination but also an infinitely extended tool of public humilia-tion, Leys remarks upon the revelations of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison

as a dark marker of our contemporary perceptions of guilt and of shame She paraphrases Mark Danner when she writes, ‘As a “shame multiplier”

1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future,

ed Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman, trans Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 [1886]) 62.

2 Jenny Chamarette and Jennifer Higgins

[…] the camera epitomizes the logic of torture at Abu Ghraib, which can

be defined as a spectatorial logic of shame’.2

Leys makes a claim for a shift in contemporary socio-political and psychological stances on guilt and shame, not simply with regard to the torture of prisoners in the Abu Ghraib detainment facility, but more broadly

in the world at large She claims that:

The shift from a logic of torture based on guilt to a logic of torture based on shame reflects a more general shift that has taken place in the course of the last forty years […] It is not just a question of assuming, as anthropologists used to do, that the Iraqis belong to a more primitive, ‘shame culture’ that our own Western ‘guilt cul- ture’ Today, shame (and shamelessness) has displaced guilt as a dominant emotional reference in the West as well 3

For Leys, tackling questions of guilt and shame in the contemporary world involves a twofold engagement On the one hand, discourses pre-dominantly disposed towards guilt explore the psychical effects of this guilt upon the self, and consequently upon the expression of that self as individual, separate and distinct Elements of such thinking are espoused by Diderot’s notions of virtue ethics, by Freud’s psychoanalysis, and by trauma theorists such as Shoshanna Felman, and indeed Leys.4 On the other, post-traumatic postmodernity requires a re-evaluation of shame, where shame, both anthropologically and sociologically conceived, has been concerned with a sense of exteriority, of inclusion or exclusion within a community,

or of constitution by some external agent of shame

While shame is, in essence, spectatorial (I am shamed by the look of

an other upon me, and consequently I am shamed by the judging and the judgement of that look upon myself as shameful), guilt appears to be what both psychoanalysis and trauma theory have put forward as an originary and explanatory mechanism of a self that also provides its own processes of

2 Ruth Leys, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 2007) 3.

3 Leys, 3–4.

4 Cf Shoshanna Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York and London: Routledge, 1992).

Introduction 3

ethical (or unethical) decision making It relates to an internalised tory system and, as a result, guilt’s involvement with self-regulation also becomes a force of self-constitution Just as guilt becomes inherent in the social structures of prohibition and patriarchal order asserted in Freud’s

regula-Totem and Taboo, Oedipal prohibition and primal guilt are combined in

Lacan’s primary signifier, the Nom du Père.5 This primary signifier, the symbolic intervention of the father into the mother–child bond, simulta-neously positions the subject with relation to a symbolic order and marks the prohibition of Oedipal desire Consequently the symbolic naming

of and prohibition by the father both inscribes and constitutes guilt as a founding relational structure for the psychically normative subject Rather simplistically put, guilt structures how the subject comes to be a subject for Lacan Where subjects become abnormal, such as in his Séminaire III: Les Psychoses, Lacan claims that the Nom du Père is foreclosed, and the origi-

nary guilt or promise of punishment is absent Subsequently subjects which are ‘psychotic’ are unable to organise the self meaningfully with relation

to this internalised guilt, in opposition to the self-structuring guilt of the

‘sane’ subject Guilt, for psychoanalytic thought, is not simply regulatory;

it is what constitutes the self as a recognisable social being

It is interesting, then, that while guilt is a founding structure of the self for psychoanalysis, phenomenological and existential accounts of shame suggest that the inverse holds true In his writing on ‘le regard’ in L’Être

et le néant, Sartre sees shame as a primary means of comprehending an

encounter with the other; shame is what enables the possibility of hending that this other regards the self, while the self regards the other.6

compre-James Richard Mensch frames this problem in phenomenological, rather than existential, terms when he states:

5 Cf Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans James Strachey ([London]: Routledge and Paul,

[1950]), Jacques Lacan, Séminaire III: Les Psychoses 1955–56, ed Jacques-Alain Miller

(Paris: Seuil, 1981).

6 See Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Être et le néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943) 292–341.

4 Jenny Chamarette and Jennifer Higgins

I am ashamed before the actual other, that is, before his or her concrete presence

I internalize this presence, rather than any generalized other A primitive, ate, prelinguistic type of empathy is at work here, where I regard myself through the

immedi-other’s presently regarding me This regard is painful I do not want this other to see

me in my present situation In contrast to guilt, then, shame requires the real, or, at least, the imagined presence of specific others to be activated 7

Although not quoting Sartre explicitly here, Mensch articulates what

is effectively a Sartrean, existential commitment to the other, regulated

or indeed produced by shame Shame is induced when one is exposed to another: it is ‘routed through the eyes’8 and consequently always requires a kind of specularity or scopic function in order for it to be revealed Shame

is a kind of double reflection on the self: we watch our shameful selves being watched One might also argue that shame is a phenomenological experience that can be accounted for in the face of the other, and con-sequently operates on the level of the personal body, as well as in terms

of broader socio-political discourse Sartre’s shame, and indeed Levinas’ shame, is constitutive of a presence before the other – an other present to, but totally incommensurable with, the self.9 The incommensurability of the self with the other becomes for Levinas an ethical compulsion to have

a manner in the world that, as Levinas describes, is otherwise than being, articulating an orientation towards the other in the face of an other that one can never be

What becomes noticeable in these series of engagements with guilt and shame is that the visual, scopic and specular emphasis of shame is a noteworthy feature in many modes of contemporary French thought Twentieth-century thinkers, such as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Levinas,

7 James Richard Mensch, ‘Shame and Guilt’, Hiddenness and Alterity: Philosophical and Literary Sightings of the Unseen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005),

103–17 (103–4).

8 Leys, 126.

9 For an engagement with the ethical consequences of thinking this presence before

an other, see Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini: essai sur l’extériorité (La Haye:

Martinus Nijhoff, 1961) and Autrement qu’être, ou au-delà de l’essence (La Haye:

Martinus Nijhoff, 1974).

Introduction 5

and indeed those European thinkers associated with French thought, such

as Giorgio Agamben, share a simultaneously constitutive and yet cious engagement with vision as a contestatory mode through which to understand issues surrounding our contemporary subjectivity, including those of guilt and shame.10 While Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan and Levinas relate the broader philosophical concerns of vision, seeing, and shame to a philosophical investigation of the conditions of general being, Agamben and Levi take up issues of specular shame with regard to the traumatic events of the mid-twentieth century In particular, Agamben’s construc-tion of the Musulman as the abjectly suffering figure of the concentration camps in Homo Sacer: le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue inscribes the shame

suspi-of exclusion as a constitutive practice suspi-of understanding the human.11 As a figure of ultimate abjection, the Musulman is both shamed and shameful, emerging as a sacred figure that is consequently excluded from humanity

in order for humanity to maintain its boundaries This formulation of the inhumanity at the heart of humanity, which is so astutely taken up in twentieth-century literature by figures such as Robert Antelme and Mau-rice Blanchot, is a terrifying, sometimes abject, encounter with subjectiv-ity, whose borders are so proximal to alterity as to almost exceed them.12

However, as J.M Bernstein has mentioned in Agamben’s case, perhaps the vision of a morality, rather than a testimony, based on the shame of inhu-manity, is grotesque and veers dangerously close towards being a justifica-tion, rather than a condemnation, of some of the most shameful events of the twentieth century.13 Consequently, the Nietzschean configuration of shame cited at the beginning of this introduction, induced by humanity’s

10 Cf Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1993) See

also Sartre, L’Etre et le néant and Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’invisible, ed Claude

Lefort (Paris: Gallimard, 1964).

11 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue, trans Marilène

Raiola (Paris: Seuil, 1997).

12 See Robert Antelme, L’Espèce humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1957) and Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).

13 J.M Bernstein, ‘Bare Life, Bearing Witness: Auschwitz and the Pornography of Horror’, Parallax, (10:1 [30]), Jan–Mar 2004, 2–16

6 Jenny Chamarette and Jennifer Higgins

own morality, in excess of the shame induced by its immorality, casts a long shadow over the status of contemporary French and European thought around the inhuman

The discipline of French Studies is particularly well placed to bring to light the critical issues arising from guilt and shame Metropolitan French and French-speaking culture retains an intimate emotional, critical and philosophical relationship with guilt and shame, from its plural philo-sophical, literary and cultural perspectives In studies in French from the medieval period to the present day, the complex structures of guilt and shame play out across the arenas of philosophy, literature, visual culture, history and linguistics The purpose of this volume is consequently to bring together a range of recent and innovative scholarly work in the area

of French Studies on this current in cultural discourse

Essays in Context

The essays collected here span a broad range of disciplinary methodologies and historical periods Guilt and shame are far from exclusively modern and post-modern states of being, and in fact these twin themes are significant even in the earliest periods of cultural production that form the object of what is understood as French Studies This significance is borne out by the first three articles in this collection, which examine medieval texts These articles present dilemmas arising from the consequences of shameful acts

or events, dilemmas which, rooted in Christian ethics, expose the ings of social structures governing personal interaction Bill Burgwinkle’s coupling of modern and medieval accounts of shame and masculine iden-tity in the article, ‘Guilt, Shame and Masculine Insufficiency: The Case of

work-La Fille du Comte de Pontieu’, opens the collection His article addresses

conceptual transformations of shame, via a series of perspectives from sociology and anthropology, psychoanalysis and cultural studies In his innovative analysis of the medieval tales, Tristan et Iseut, and La Fille du

Introduction 7

Comte de Pontieu, Burgwinkle makes fascinating connections between

the chiasmic relation between guilt and shame in medieval literature, and how this might enable us to reflect upon our contemporary involve-ment in processes of guilt and shame He suggests that our positioning towards guilt and shame is troubling, confusing, and fundamentally unfixed within social or subjective stratifications Irène Fabry also cites shame as a transformative moment, but here mythologised in the thirteenth-century

roman en prose of La Suite vulgate In the cases of the knights Enedain

and Gauvain, their transformations into dwarves are manifestations of internalised guilt and culpability after rules of social etiquette have been transgressed Mary Flannery’s discussion of the Roman de la rose adds still

more complexity to the picture of medieval concepts of shame and ity Here shame, the guardian of female chastity, is a necessary ‘attribute’

moral-of female virtue, but one that must be violable in order for a man to assert his power The figure of shame, and her violation, thus function as key modes of social and gender-based modulations of masculine dominance

in medieval French narrative

By contrast, in the context of a post-renaissance, neo-classical France, the social configuration of shame gives way to a more personal configuration

of guilt and ethics In some ways prefiguring the ethics of social shame and personal guilt expressed by Diderot in the eighteenth century, the satire

of the moralistes associates guilt and shame with individual moral

strug-gle and responsibility The articles by Emilia Wilton-Godberfforde and Frédéric Miquel explore these seventeenth-century anticipations: Wilton-Godberfforde, in ‘Guilt’s Reconfiguration of Time and Relational Ties in Seventeenth-Century French Theatre’, explains the significance of guilt as

a structuring device to affectively intensify temporality within the teenth-century classical French theatre of Racine, Corneille and others Anguish provoked by guilt constitutes a moment of the ‘collapsing in’, or coalescing, of past, present and future, and guilt itself thus functions as

seven-an authentication of the psychical realities coexistent within the theatrical representation of time The subsequent article by Frédéric Miquel, ‘Quand

le langage spirituel plaide coupable: linguistique et péché au XVIIe siècle,’ explores the intimate detail of language itself in the seventeenth century

8 Jenny Chamarette and Jennifer Higgins

Miquel’s examination of ‘le langage spirituel’ in the seventeenth century traces the controversial thematic of an individual acting as a transmitter

of the word of God without incurring the guilt either of committing phemy or of distorting his divine source As if to foreground the future transformations of guilt and shame in the nineteenth century, Miquel’s citation of Pascal’s (and indeed, echoing Augustin’s) affirmation that ‘il n’y

blas-a de honte qu’à n’en point blas-avoir’ resonblas-ates with Nietzsche’s insistence (cited

at the beginning of this introduction) on the compulsion to experience the shame of one’s own moral discourse, and to be aware of the shame that foreshadows and constitutes any moral encounter

In eighteenth-century writing, philosophical discourses of guilt and shame permeate a mode of Enlightenment thought that does not simply engage with what is shameful or what induces guilt, but how one may or indeed should act Literary thinkers such as Diderot construct value ethics via a socially engaged form of writing, producing a sentimental morality which acknowledges the place of pain and passion, in addition to moral virtue.14 One might argue that this understanding of guilt and shame with regard to a subject that can experience moral pain shifts the emphasis of morality from a universal determinism to a set of self-determined atti-tudes towards the world, in the social conditions through which a subject lives The role of the philosophe, like the moraliste, takes on the character

not purely of a philosopher, but one engaged, through writing, with the pragmatic challenge of leading one’s life

The textual exploration of problematics of guilt, shame and ethics, however, is not the sole mode of representation explored within this col-lection Natasha Grigorian explores models of narrative in painting, and contributes further to the debates on femininity (and indeed masculinity) initially invoked in earlier essays by Burgwinkle and Flannery In Grigorian’s discussion of dream worlds in late nineteenth-century poetry and painting, the two themes of guilt and desire are irrevocably caught up with viewing and envisioning the feminine Grigorian examines the principles of guilty

14 For further details, see Jan Blomsted, Shame and Guilt: Diderot’s Moral Rhetoric

(Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 1998), 11–26.

Introduction 9

desire in the Symbolist paintings of Gustave Moreau and the Symbolist poetry of Jean Moréas as aesthetic explorations of beauty, and ventures towards the possibility of myth and fantasy as a quasi-humanist antidote

to the anguish of a France on the cusp of modernity

The crisis of representation undergone in the nineteenth century, and exemplified in Grigorian’s essay, uncannily foregrounds figurative transformations in thought and visual culture in the twentieth century

By regarding shame as in some way ‘necessary’ to the constitution of a self, this shame also represents a necessary attempt of individuals to contain that shame in some way, via either physical or psychical processes, and in particular the psychical processes of memory Twentieth-century analyses

of a politics of memory, and its correlative theories, most notably those of trauma theory, have assessed the cultural history of the catastrophic and momentous events of the twentieth century – thus imbricating the affec-tive processes of trauma, identification with shame, and survivor guilt, with those of memory.15 At the same time, and on an intertextual level, such discourses also operate through a frame of subjectivity This subjectivity is one constructed in concert with the forms of representation of imperative moments in collective and societal cultural memory – frequently traumatic moments in history, such as the concentration camps, the hydrogen bombs

in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Algerian War

Memory is consequently a privileged psychical medium (and tive idiom) through which textual and social/historical narrative may be understood: memory is the subject through which history emerges and

collec-is also subject to hcollec-istory as a dominant or hegemonic dcollec-iscourse Equally, history is bound up with a past informed and disrupted by memory –

a ‘battle’ between subjectivity and the possibility of truth claims external

to the subject.16 Consequently, in trauma theory, it is cultures of memory,

or memorial cultures, which persistently ground the thinking of guilt and

15 For further details on cultural memory, see Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).

16 It is this battle, in all its violence, that Walter Benjamin describes in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, ed Hannah Arendt, trans Harry Zorn

(London: Pimlico, 1999) (245–58) 249.

10 Jenny Chamarette and Jennifer Higgins

shame associated with atrocity, in terms of perpetrators, witnesses and vivors Guilt and cultural amnesia are closely intertwined, prefiguring a shift between the individual and the national in bearing witness to trauma The individual and the communal or national operate simultaneously within the realm of attempting to bear witness, however shamefully, to the global events of the twentieth century

sur-Within the context of French Studies, the complex issue of caust memorial, remembering and forgetting, brings into sharp relief issues

post-Holo-of guilt, shame, pardon and sin A number post-Holo-of the articles focussing on the twentieth century in this collection address this issue, from its philosophical and ethical treatment to the moment of experience or quasi-experience of

an unpardonable act Najate Zouggari’s article on the discourse of pardon between Jacques Derrida and Vladimir Jankélévitch addresses the very principle of pardon when faced with the unpardonable act and implacable culpability of killing, linking ethical commentary with the innumerable instances of the unpardonable during civil and international violence in the twentieth century Notions of pardon and of an originary sin lead Eszter Horváth’s article to examine the concept of an originary figure of thought that appears in several incarnations in the works of Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, in a series of interlocutory manoeuvres around the ‘figures of thought’ of Psyché and Khôra These figures encompass but do not embody the betrayed figure of ‘woman’ which, Horváth argues, is, for Derrida and Nancy, the inconceivable unknown at the heart of philosophy

Ruth Kitchen’s article turns to the instance of the individual in her treatment of cultural amnesia and the imperative of forgetting in Maurice Blanchot’s semi-autobiographical account of L’Instant de ma mort (1994),

the moment at which he faced the firing squad during the Second World War Timothy Mathews’ article examines the impossibility of an approach

to ‘viewing’ guilt and shame from afar without the inevitable affective distortions of seeing suffering Through the principles of mediation that Benjamin refutes, he draws together a treatment of the works of Giacometti

to examine how presence and absence of witnessing and the witness rely upon an unaccountably visual turn In his discussion of Giacometti, he invokes gesture and mediation as means of accessing the difficult passages

(2002) Quinlivan argues that close-miked sound produces a particular kind of sensuous encounter with the body of the film’s protagonist, one which produces an uncanny proximity with the protagonist’s progres-sively destructive explorations of her flesh The thought of Luce Irigaray here permits an exploration of this protagonist’s silent, breathing body, as

a site of a transgressive, renewed form of subjectivity that acknowledges and returns to, rather than rejects, the shame of its own alterity The arti-cle by Lucy Bolton also acknowledges the thought of Luce Irigaray, but instead attempts to think female subjectivity through the English-language film, Morvern Callar (2002) Bolton engages with the unusual fate of the

eponymous protagonist, as an instance that would conventionally instigate extreme conditions of guilt and shame, but which, in this example seems

to set to one side questions of morality and ethics in order to engage with questions of being Bolton describes Morvern as an Irigarayan ontological figure, an Alice stepping through the looking glass where phallogocentric norms, including the constructs of individual guilt and shame, are inverted Morvern’s weird, Alice-like anti-moralistic world transforms the potential for female subjectivity

The focus on seeing, sight and visualising outcast and transgressive figures is a consistently recurring trope in studies of guilt and shame in French – one that comes to light particularly in the contemporary audio-visual medium of film, but which maintains a pertinence in contemporary studies of French literature, thought and culture outside metropolitan France The final article of this collection negotiates this visualisation of the outcast in a striking trope: that of the albino in African literature in

12 Jenny Chamarette and Jennifer Higgins

French In representations of the figure of the albino, Baker argues, alterity and subjectivity run alongside one another, and produce profound ruptures

in ways of seeing the world By being seen, the albino troubles and threatens boundaries between normality and difference, invoking a crisis of look-ing that results in shameful acts of stigmatisation, and the designation of the albino body in literature as ‘deviant’ Once again, questions of ethical attitudes to the other, and to radical otherness, arise from an engagement with transgression, vision, shame and guilt

Conclusion

The articles conclude with Baker’s poignant examination of the figure of the albino, who is forced to submit to another as the object of scrutiny, and is outcast from normative appearance because of this hybrid exist-ence between cultural designations of white and black The scrutiny of or

by the other seems to be a concern which arises particularly frequently in studies of twentieth- and twenty-first-century French cultural production, particularly given that the rise of audio-visual media attaches an emphatic importance upon what can or cannot be seen Nonetheless, the anxiety and apprehension produced by scrutiny is by no means a uniquely twentieth-century ‘concern’ For instance, Grigorian’s and Fabry’s articles insist upon vision as a vehicle for shame – in Fabry’s article, the transformed dwarf ’s shame is activated by the gaze of others, and by the recognition of his alterity with relation to them Considering the articles in context in this collection draws a fascinating and troubling association between disfigurement and

‘difference’ as punishment, both in the medieval story that Fabry attends

to, and the alienation of the albino whose difference can also take the form

of punishment, that Baker analyses Such associations suggest that issues of scrutiny and shame, difference and pain, have been far from laid to rest as key concerns in the analysis of French and Francophone literature.Articulations of guilt and shame, both at the level of the individual self

or subject, and in a mode of societal organisation, take on a philosophical

Introduction 13

and ontological significance that goes beyond the anthro pological.17 Guilt and shame are not solely significant to a time far from us (the medieval period) and very close to us (in the cases of Derrida, Blanchot, Giacometti and our contemporary positions towards terrorism) It is this constant negotiation, between the historical and the personal, the familiar and the estranging, that is always at work in scholarly thinking about guilt and shame

This collection confirms the challengingly and troublingly ‘essential’ nature of guilt and shame Intimately linked to suffering and trauma, guilt and shame are no less fundamental to human experience than forgiveness and reconciliation, which are also recurrent concerns in this collection Underlying each exploration of the broader concerns of guilt and shame

is a questioning of what it is to be human, how to live among others, and how to recognise or dismiss the ethical imperatives that ensue From the manuscripts of the Roman de la rose to Molière, from Nietzsche to Blanchot,

the centrality of guilt and shame demands attention and re-evaluation, not simply to provide an état present of their position in French Studies, but

also to reflect more broadly upon these ethical, ontological and aesthetic concerns in the study of the humanities

Suggested Reading

Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue, trans Marilène

Raiola (Paris: Seuil, 1997)

Blomsted, Jan, Shame and Guilt: Diderot’s Moral Rhetoric (Jyväskylä: University of

Jyväskylä, 1998)

Freud, Sigmund, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans James Strachey ([London]: Routledge

and Paul, [1950])

17 For further philosophical explorations of guilt and shame, see Bernard Williams,

Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

14 Jenny Chamarette and Jennifer Higgins Huyssen, Andreas, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New

York and London: Routledge, 1995)

Jay, Martin, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1993)

Lacan, Jacques, Séminaire III: Les Psychoses 1955–56, ed Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris:

Morgan, Michael L., On Shame (New York and London: Routledge, 2008)

Morris, Herbert (ed.), Guilt and Shame (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1971)

Piers, Gerhart and Milton B Singer, Shame and Guilt: A Psychoanalytic and a Cultural Study (New York: WW Norton, 1971)

Sartre, Jean-Paul, L’Être et le néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943)

Williams, Bernard, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1993)

Bill Burgwinkle

Guilt, Shame and Masculine Insufficiency:

The Case of La Fille du Comte de Pontieu

The existence of guilt and shame cultures, once widely accepted in lectual circles as valid, heuristic descriptions of cultural difference, has since been largely abandoned One reason for this rejection involves the uses to which these categories were put by scholars anxious to set up hierarchies along an ill-defined scale of modernity that inevitably presupposed a pro-gressive development from shame to guilt.1 As the argument went, shame

intel-is characterintel-istic of ‘traditional’ cultures – cultures that value group identity over individual identity; while guilt is an outgrowth of ‘modernity’, in which the individual is set off from the community, capable of keeping secrets, and responsible to a single master or idealised image of the self Guilt emerges

as both stigmatised and privileged and is seen as characteristic of Western post-industrial modernity Shame, on the other hand, is:

the affect of inferiority No other affect is so central to the development of tity None is closer to the experienced self, nor more disturbing Shame is felt as an inner torment It is the most poignant experience of the self by the self, whether felt

iden-in the humiliation of cowardice, or iden-in the sense of failure to cope successfully with

a challenge Shame is a wound made from the inside, dividing us from both ourselves and others.2

1 Gerhart Piers, Milton Singer, and Thomas Schiff and Suzanne Retzinger all imply that the similarities between shame and guilt are actually stronger than the differ- ences between them See: Singer, ‘Shame Cultures and Guilt Cultures’ in Piers and Singer, Shame and Guilt: A Psychoanalytic and a Cultural Study (New York: Norton,

1971), 68; and Thomas J Scheff and Suzanne M Retzinger, Emotions and Violence: Shame and Rage in Destructive Conflicts (Lexington and Toronto: Lexington Books,

1991), 13.

2 Gershen Kaufman, The Psychology of Shame: Theory and Treatment of Shame-based Syndromes (London: Routledge, 1989), 17 Italics added.

16 Bill Burgwinkle

This citation by Gershen Kaufman leads us in two directions: on the one hand, towards an identity that is fundamentally group-based (‘divid-ing us from both ourselves and others’) and dependent on external valori-

sation; and on the other, towards a sense of individual subjectivity (‘the most poignant experience of the self by the self ’) Kaufman thus sees guilt,

with its particularly ‘modern’ flavour, as a part of shame from the very beginning Similarly, Norbert Elias, while accepting that shame is key to group cultural identity, also saw it as a fundamental ingredient of rational (i.e modern) societies: ‘No less characteristic of a civilizing process than

“rationalisation” is the peculiar moulding of the drive economy that we call “shame” and “repugnance” or “embarrassment”.’3

This link between ‘modernity’, guilt, and the civilising process is ther blurred on a chronological scale, such that ‘modern’ is less a marker of time than a distinction between Protestant Rationality and, well, almost everything else Mediterranean Catholicism is lower on a scale of modernity because it retains traditional forms of irrational worship; post-war Japan

fur-is lower on the scale because it persfur-ists in seeing the individual primarily

as part of a group or team; most Muslim countries because they conceive

of men and women as part of kinship groups rather than as independent agents Milton Singer summed this up critically in 1971:

‘primitive cultures’, with a few exceptions, and practically all the cultures of Asia, are regarded as shame cultures which rely principally on shame as an external sanc- tion for assuring conformity to the cultural norms The reliance on a sense of guilt

or ‘conscience’ as an internal sanction is, on the other hand, said to be restricted to the cultures of Western Europe and America Progressive change is, of course, only possible in guilt cultures, possessed of absolute moral standards which are effectively enforced by a religious ‘conscience’ and dedicated to the welfare and dignity of the individual The shame cultures are said to be static, industrially backward, without absolute moral standards, and dominated by ‘crowd psychology’ 4

3 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, vol 2: Power and Civility, trans E Jephcott

(New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 292.

4 Milton Singer, ‘Shame Cultures and Guilt Cultures’, in G Piers and Milton B Singer,

Shame and Guilt: A Psychoanalytic and a Cultural Study (New York: Norton, 1971),

59.

Guilt, Shame and Masculine Insufficiency 17

It should be obvious that being high on the guilt scale is not necessarily

a good thing; but according to Singer’s logic, a guilt culture at least allows you to move forwards, away from, or against that guilt Associated with a subject who feels alienated from the group and its supporting identity yet internalises all of its values that continue to govern his behaviour, guilt is the most telling curse of modernity as well as its salvation It is what makes

us so deep, so tortured, so capable of realising our alienation and expressing

it, over and over again …

This dichotomisation of guilt and shame does not stop with allying geographical and religious differences to one category or the other; it also extends to periodisation and gender The Middle Ages, having been con-ceived of as somehow ‘in the middle’ – a waste land, both ‘traditional’ and subjectless because supposedly prior to subjectivation as we know it, can serve as a test terrain Those scholars who would claim that there were no

‘subjects’ in the Middle Ages because everyone knew his place and kept to

it could also, no doubt, deny that it allowed for any sense of alienation or self-reflection The very term ‘medieval subject’ then seems an oxymoron,

an anachronism, often a mislabelling of shame as guilt.5

Most of this heuristically useful but simplistic thinking had been rected in anthropological circles by the 1980s Scholars argued that cultures that had for decades been labelled ‘guilt cultures’ or ‘shame cultures’ on the basis of whether guilt or shame operated as the major agent of social control actually fit into both categories and they recognised as well that the categories themselves were harder to distinguish than had been assumed The Middle Ages was no exception: a judicial system in which kin groups shared in the collective shame as well as in judicial punishment (usually through reparative fines); but also a protagonist who felt perpetual guilt before an all-powerful and unavoidable God.6 Medieval literary texts were

cor-5 See, for instance, the discussion on the topic in Peter Haidu, ‘Althusser Anonymous

in the Middle Ages’ in Exemplaria 7.1 (Spring 1995), 55–74.

6 Gerhart Piers, for example, sees the Middle Ages as a prime period for guilt, rather than shame, since every subject was, in his view, irremediably subject to God: ‘The highly patriarchal, feudal and hierarchical society before the Reformation put a high emphasis on guilt Guilt before God was an accepted and practically unalterable fact;

18 Bill Burgwinkle

seen as tossing on troubled seas, veering first towards one then the other

or staging an open conflict between the forces of shame and guilt In the

Chanson de Roland, for example, Roland is driven primarily by avoidance

of shame when he decides not to blow the oliphant and call for ments; and Olivier seems a pragmatist, in comparison, allied first and fore-most to the mission of his lord, Charlemagne, rather than the paradoxically shame-inflected but individualist defence strategy of Roland.7

reinforce-In the case of Béroul’s Tristan, the earliest recounting of the tale of

fatal love and adultery, the text is also said to be staging a confrontation between traditional shame and hip guilt, sketching a model of individual justice that would bypass shame codes Instead, a pseudo-rational notion

of justice predominates, in which the external sanctions of a shame culture meet the self-punishing conscience of the new internal criteria of personal responsibility Tristan’s defiance of his age’s systems of justice, his claim to be immune to such notions of shame, frees him from one system of morality but enchains him to another In his first meeting with the hermit Ogrin, for example, Tristan argues that he is beyond feudal and ecclesiastical bonds He has no need for lord or Lord and can forego their presumptuous claims to his body and soul In response to the hermit’s call to repent through public confession, Tristan answers with the arrogance of youth and love:

[…] Sir, par foi

Que ele m’aime en bone foi,

Vous n’entendez pas la raison:

Q’el m’aime, c’est par la poison.

Ge ne me pus de lié partir,

N’ele de moi, n’en quier mentir

(ll 1381–6) […]

everyone was essentially equal in this, so that there was no distinction nor ity to achieve any distinction except by degrees of submission; humiliation before God-Father was of the essence of human existence and no matter of shame (53)’ See Piers, ‘Shame and Guilt: A Psychoanalytic Study’ in Piers and Singer, Shame and Guilt, 53.

Guilt, Shame and Masculine Insufficiency 19

Sire, j’am Yseut a mervelle,

Si que n’en dor ne ne somelle.

De tot an est li consel pris:

Mex aime o li estre mendis

Et vivre d’erbes et de glan

Q’avoir le reigne au roi Otran.

De lié laisier parler ne ruis,

Certes, quar faire ne le puis.

(ll 1401–8) 8

(‘Lord, with all due respect, I tell you that she loves me in good faith You just don’t understand why that is: it’s the potion (poison) that makes her love me I cannot be away from her, nor she from me, and about that I cannot lie […] My lord, I love Yseut beyond all limits, such that I cannot sleep or have any rest without her The decision has been made and it stands for all time: I would rather be a beggar with her, and live off grasses and grains, than possess the realm of King Otran I cannot even consider leaving her behind; for the fact is that I could never actually do it.’)

In Howard Bloch’s well-known reading, not only does Tristan cally refuse shame and personal guilt, but his uncle, King Marc, is also put

dramati-in a quandary He turns to persecutdramati-ing the lovers – his nephew and his wife – only when he is forced to do so because of the political consequences of what others will think of him Unlike Tristan, shame will continue to haunt Marc because he cannot afford to lose face His actions must be public and ritualised because he is always, unavoidably, addressing his public He will-ingly rejects the notion of vengeance, the justified killing of the adulterous lovers, because he loves them both; and this refusal to act as the wronged monarch represents for Bloch ‘the beginning of the fictive corporate state, the abstract amalgam of assumed ties that will henceforth determine all relations between individual and community’:

With the intrusion of reflection upon action conscience is born Guilt as a erating internal deterrent to transgression supplants the vendetta ethic characteristic

self-gen-of all shame cultures The fear self-gen-of reprisal inherent to the feudal doctrine self-gen-of Self-Help and private war has been transformed, in the moment that Marc decided to leave

trans-lations are my own.

20 Bill Burgwinkle

a sign of his presence in Morrois rather than slay the sleepers, into a fear of ing that which is right Hereafter, Tristan, like the citizen of the modern state, will respond not only to that which is overtly dangerous, but also to that which makes him feel uncomfortable In sparing the couple Marc opens the floodgate of boundless personal guilt Significantly, his own conscience finds an analogue in that of Tristan who has felt, up until Marc’s visit, that something awful has happened to him and who subsequently senses, for the first time, that it is he who has done something wrong […] If the sublimation of violence brings a necessary transformation of shame into guilt, it also entails, as its most immediate consequence, the reconciliation of consciousness and being 9

violat-This is a brilliant reading of the Tristan legend that offers insight into the ways that social obligations not only intrude into, but also structure what is thought to be the most private and sacrosanct core of the individual subject But Bloch does not extend his argument to the full range of medi-eval literature He tells us only that he has identified the source of social change – its first rumblings – in the murmurs of the individual conscience

in Béroul’s Tristan The move to the guilt culture that he intimates here is

not attributed to any prior social change that is then internalised; rather it

is the result of a mere shift in personal relations, in which two individuals, linked through both affective and kinship ties (Tristan is Marc’s nephew

as well as his closest advisor and best friend), reinvent the social contract, including the laws of kinship, through a subtle variation on their expression

of love for one another In saving Tristan for selfish reasons, Marc’s action makes it appear to Tristan that the world itself has changed around him In inducing in Tristan what Bloch calls guilt, i.e particular responsibility to

an individual whom he must please, Marc also induces the realisation that Tristan can no longer be the completely self-centred member of a social group to which he is answerable Guilt, in Bloch’s formulation, involves not just an internalisation of responsibility, a deterrent to transgression that comes from within, but a recognition of one’s responsibility to the other, a realisation that the former law, in which you were responsible for yourself only, insofar as you brought no shame upon the group, has given way to a law that implicates you as now responsible for the effects that your

9 R Howard Bloch, French Medieval Literature and Laws (Los Angeles, Berkeley,

London: University of California Press, 1977), 244 Italics added.

Guilt, Shame and Masculine Insufficiency 21

actions might carry for any other member of that group In other words,

if the categories of guilt and shame undergo a modification in the twelfth century, that modification takes a chiasmic shape that blurs the boundaries

of these categories and sees the one collapse into the other

The classic formulation in which shame is associated with a lack of self and a group identity, and guilt is associated with alienation from the group and an exaggerated sense of the self as a responsible agent, is in this case inverted In Beroul’s Tristan, solipsistic self-involvement – the claim

of immunity from community standards – is paradoxically aligned with what Bloch calls shame before the individual (i.e Tristan’s shame before his uncle Marc is internalised as guilt); and voluntary affective social and kinship bonds to king, court, lover or God give rise to a new and modern sense of guilt in that you can never measure up and will always be found deficient The shame that would normally prevent open adultery within

a social group because of the weakening effects it would have on political and social ties is claimed as allowable in the Tristan text because Tristan

can argue that his identity is not primarily that of a group member The group’s norms and values are not the only ones to which he is subject Tristan believes himself superior to those norms, exempted by magic from their constrictions, capable of a private understanding with the God whose presence underlies and validates the strength of those bonds

Tristan is then, at the very moment that he is subject to a shame ture’s hold, also most free to imagine those bonds as flexible, pliant, and open to negotiation And, once bitten by the guilt bug, rather than finding himself alienated from social constricts, he is further embedded in another set of bonds – this time affective – whose hold is even more tenacious, inhibiting, and successful in restraining transgression than was group shame After Tristan’s eventual return with Yseut to the court of King Marc, he does not give up his love for Yseut: he renews repeatedly his quest for her attention, and if anything becomes more obsessed with what he thinks that she might be thinking that he thinks that she is thinking, etc.10 No one

cul-10 Milton Singer suggests something along the same line in this observation about Freud: ‘If this picture of the evolution of civilization is correct, primitive man has a greater burden of guilt than civilized man, for he feels morally related to the entire

22 Bill Burgwinkle

would really expect that guilt would bring in its wake a freeing of social obligations on Tristan’s part but they might well have expected that it would mean banishment from the community Tristan does eventually leave behind the world of Tintagel, does embrace that other, itinerant identity

of the orphaned hero – but he does so through having renewed his bond of love and fear with Marc, a bond that actually has little to do with his erotic attachment to Yseut Much the same, I predict, could probably be said for those other subjects of ‘traditional cultures’, those supposed non-subjects whose shame culture roots have proven, if anything, more liberating than constricting, at least in the arena of affective attachments

One other text from the early thirteenth century worth looking at

in this respect is La Fille du Comte de Pontieu, a text that raises similar

questions about shame, guilt, group identity and affective relations As

in Tristan, I will argue that shame is not easily cut off from guilt; it is not

an affect that assures cultural integration; and the way that it plays out, both through its symptoms and its effects, is linked in crucial ways with gender La Fille is a very short text (620 lines), thought by many to be the

earliest instance of a prose romance in the French language It begins in the northeast of France, where Tiebaut de Domart marries the daughter

of his neighbour, the Count of Pontieu They seem at first a good match but five years later they still have no children Tiebaut resolves to go on pil-grimage to Santiago de Compostela and, against his father-in-law’s advice,

he takes his wife along with him On route, somewhere near the Pyrenees, they arrive at a fork in the road and must choose which path to take One path has been cleared deliberately by bandits so as to encourage pilgrims

to choose it and Tiebaut falls for the trap No sooner are they into the deep dark woods than the couple is surrounded by eight menacing men Tiebaut manages to kill three of them before he is thrown to the ground, stripped naked, bound hand and foot, and thrown into the brambles.11

universe as well as to his group, there are a few specialists to whom we can delegate responsibility, and his standards are in general unequivocal and unrelenting in their demands’ (Singer, ‘Shame Cultures’, 94).

11 ‘Il li tolirent sa reube dusc’a le cemise’ (9); ‘e quant il le virent nu’ (11) in La Fille du

Guilt, Shame and Masculine Insufficiency 23

The other five men claim his wife as repayment for the death of their brother (‘Segneur, j’ai mon frere perdu, si voel avoir ceste dame en restor’ [9]); then, instead of bothering to take her with them, they strip her and all five rape her, in full view of Tiebaut The bandits then depart The wife staggers to her feet, lifts up a sword belonging to one of the three dead bandits and approaches her husband, who asks her to untie him (‘desliés moi’ [10]) In response, she says ‘Sire, je vous deliverai’ [10]) then attacks:

Elle le cuida ferir parmi le cors, et il vit le cop venir, si duta, et si durement tresali que les mains et li dos li furent deseure Et elle le fiert si q’elle le bleça es bras et copa les coroies Et il senti les mains laskier, et saca a lui, et rompi les loiens, et sali sus en pies, et dist: ‘Dame, se Diu plaist, vous ne me ocirés huimais!’ Et elle li dist: ‘Certes, sire, ce poise moi’ (10–11)

(She tried to strike him right through his body but he saw the blow coming, shied from it and so twisted himself that his hands and back were on top She struck him and wounded him in the arm but the blow also cut the cords that bound him He felt his hands break through, brought them back and loosened his bonds, jumped to his feet and said: ‘Lady, by God, you will never henceforth be able to kill me.’ And she responded: ‘And that saddens me greatly.’

Tiebaut treats her normally after they emerge naked from the forest, but when they arrive in the next town he leaves her in a convent, to which

he returns only after having completed the pilgrimage alone They then travel north to Pontieu, where their return is cause for celebration, but something is clearly terribly wrong The entire reason for Tiebaut’s pilgrim-age to Santiago was to pray for a child but we learn that after the rape, he and his wife never again slept together (‘fors ke de gesir en son lit’ [12]) When Tiebaut is forced to tell his father-in-law about what happened to them in the woods, the older man flies into a rage and tells him that he would have hung the woman from a tree branch by her hair, by a branch

of brambles or by the very cord that once held her husband immobile He then calls his daughter before him to ask for an explanation She admits to the attempted murder and says once again only that she is saddened not to have been successful Two days later, the Count brings his son, his daughter, and Tiebaut to Rue sur Mer There he puts his daughter into a barrel, seals

it with tar, then goes out to sea with fishermen to kick the barrel overboard

24 Bill Burgwinkle

All three men drop to their knees, begging that God should now deliver them from their pain The author notes quietly that their prayers are not answered (‘Il ne leur vaut otroier’ [17])

The floating barrel is later retrieved by Flemish merchants at sea who free the lady and revive her emaciated body Then, having docked on the island of Aumarie (Almaría), they offer her to the sultan of the land in return for favourable trading rights The young sultan is taken with her beauty and asks if she would willingly give up Christianity for him When she realises that it would be better to convert by choice than by force, she accepts, marries him, and produces two children, a boy and a girl – definitive proof that it was never she who was infertile.12 She learns to speak ‘sarrasinois’ and integrates perfectly into the Muslim court; back in Pontieu, however, things are not so jolly The old Count begins to think that maybe he was a bit harsh on his gang-raped daughter; Tiebaut never dares to remarry; and the young brother rejects knighthood completely, thus doubly dooming the kingdom – no defender and no heir As penance, the three men go off on pilgrimage, spend a year with the Templars, then move on to the Holy Land En route to Acre, however, a storm comes up and the men are shipwrecked – in Almaría Twice during these scenes the text uses the expression, ‘Li qens et ses fix estoient si fort acousu ensanle et acolé c’on ne les pooit departir’ (23, 24).13 The men are literally bonded in their grief and their guilt They seem to have kept the Fille’s punishment

a secret, such that only the other two members of their familial clique are privy to their collective guilt, male guilt, built of an ill-understood sense

of shame and transgression

The men are thrown into prison after having been stripped of their possessions and only see sunlight again when a travelling group of Turk-ish infantrymen need someone to serve as a bull’s eye The sultan says to

12 ‘Ele vit bien que mix li valoit faire par amours que par force, se li manda qu’ele le feroit’ (20) (She realised that it would be better to convert through love than through force, so she sent word that she would do it.)

13 On the first occasion, there is only a difference of tense: ‘Li troi s’acousirent si fort ensanle qu’on ne les pooit departir’ (The three were so sewn together that one could scarcely pull them apart).

Guilt, Shame and Masculine Insufficiency 25

pick the weakest man in the prison below and the aged and hairy Count is chosen – as the sultan says of him, ‘Cis n’avoit mestier de vivre’ (25).14 His now Muslim wife, however, recognises her father and asks to speak to him

He, of course, fails to recognise her, presumably because she is behind a veil, but she is able to convince her husband to save this man and the others

in order to serve as game partners – as she says, they can all throw dice, play chess, and tell a good story Shortly thereafter, when she learns that enemies are at the Sultan’s gate, the woman hatches a plan and confronts the prisoners With the admission ‘Je sui Sarrasine’ and a threat of death, she poses to her father the Count a series of questions about his past.15 The Count confesses that he thinks his daughter is probably dead but in retell-ing the incident of the rape and attempted murder, he subtly modifies the story In this version, Tiebaut claims that he asked his wife ‘doucement’

if she would untie him, then added: ‘si nous en irons’ (31); whereas in the first recounting of the incident, Tiebaut says that after the rape, he said only: ‘Dame, pour Diu, desliés me, car ces ronses me grievent molt’ (10).16

Emphasising his pain rather than hers, especially after her ordeal, it is little

wonder that the woman mistrusted him

The Count then admits that the younger couple’s marriage was lematic because of ‘l’atargement d’oir’ (the delay in producing an heir), an admission that could certainly have induced shame on the part of both husband and wife; then he turns to the fact that it was his daughter who insisted on accompanying her husband to Santiago, another way of sham-ing Tiebaut by saying ‘I told you so.’ In both accounts, however, there is room for misunderstanding The lady’s statement of assent, ‘Je vous deliv-erai’ in the first telling and her ‘Je vous deslierai’ in the second version can both be read either as entirely equivalent or subtly different – either ‘I will

prob-14 ‘This one doesn’t need to live any more.’

15 ‘Je sui Sarrasine et sai d’art, si vous di que vous ne fustes onques pres de si honteuse mort que vous estes ore, se vous voir ne me dites, et jou sarai bien se vous dirés voir’ (30).

16 This is the translation of the first telling: ‘My lady, untie me, for these brambles are really hurting me’; in the Count’s retelling Tiebaut’s speech is slightly different: ‘My lady, untie me and we will go on our way’ (31).

26 Bill Burgwinkle

deliver you/free you’ or ‘I will untie you/free you’ It is telling that it is in the first version, the version that is told in direct address and in which we hear Tiebaut’s emphasis on his own pain, that she answers ambiguously:

‘I will deliver you’ Just as it is impossible to interpret from his request his emotional state: is he angry, resentful, insensitive or dismissive of her pain? – it is impossible to interpret her answer as an expression of either love or anger Will she deliver him from life, kill him as one is delivered from evil? Or will she simply cut his bonds, as she says explicitly in the second account?17

The Count’s retelling of the tale, the third such recounting in the text, softens his daughter’s heart When he has finished, she says simply: ‘bien sai que voir avés dit, et bien sai por quoi ele le vaut ocirre’ (32).18 When asked to clarify, she answers: ‘Por le grant honte qu’il avoit veu que ele avoit soufferte

et rechut devant lui’ (32).19 Tiebaut, hearing this answer weeps and says only, ‘Elas! Ques coupes i avoit ele? Dame, fait il, si me voelle Diex delivrer

de la prison u je sui, ja por ce pieur sanllant ne l’en eusse fait’ (32–3);20 to which his wife responds: ‘Sire, fait ele, che ne coidoit ele mie adont’ (33).21

They all profess to their disguised questioner that their most profound wish would be that the wronged woman be returned to them, at which point she too weeps and reveals her identity Announcing that she is pregnant and feeling ill, she comes up with an escape plan She leaves with her first family and the Sultan’s only son to return to her former life in Pontieu, leaving behind her daughter, who is in many ways the true heroine of the story This young girl, who will forevermore be known as ‘la belle cetive’,

17 Teruo Sato, ‘Trois figures de la femme: à propos du film japonais Rashomon et La Fille du Comte de Pontieu’ in Mélanges offerts à Rita Lejeune, ed F Pirot (Gembloux:

21 ‘My Lord’, she answered, ‘that is not what she thought then’ (35).

Guilt, Shame and Masculine Insufficiency 27

is brought up by her father in her mother’s absence, married to a Turkish warrior, and eventually gives birth to a daughter who will be the mother of the greatest of Muslim heroes, the conqueror of Jerusalem, the man whom Saddam Hussein compared himself to regularly and who is called in the closing words of the text, the ‘courtois Salehadin’ (44)

There is a host of reasons why this is an important text, above and beyond the issue of shame and guilt, but on that issue alone this text poses problems that go beyond the psychological and thematic Here we have,

in the example of the woman about to kill her already humiliated band, an example of shame so enigmatic that few critics have ever actually agreed on why the lady behaves as she does when confronted with her husband’s request for freedom or what she imagined would be gained by such a murder Social and psychoanalytic theory provide only meagre clues What exactly does she mean when she says: ‘Por le grant honte qu’il avoit veu que ele avoit soufferte et rechut devant lui’ (32)?22 The shame is surely shared, on some level: shame at her sexual humiliation and at his inability

hus-to defend her We could postulate that she thought she would suffer the shame of having been seen, or, alternatively, the suspicion that she enjoyed

it She might have feared dismissal from Tiebaut’s bed, or loss of reputation

in Pontieu She might have feared pregnancy, an ironic outcome of their holy pilgrimage, or actually welcomed that possibility and then felt guilt

at her shameful joy She could have been angry at Tiebaut for putting her life in danger (then guilt for having suggested that she accompany him),

or for having shown so little canniness in his choice of route or his fectiveness at protecting her

inef-And what to make of him, bumbling his way through their return home, his confession to her father, his inadvertent assent to the attempted murder of his own wife, his silent shame and tears in his underground prison? A facile way to characterise these complex emotions would be to

22 Sharon Kinoshita answers this question with reference to the Fille’s ability to shapeshift,

to bridge cultural and genealogical boundaries, in Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,

2006).

28 Bill Burgwinkle

say that she feels shame and he feels guilt She cannot face her husband as the metonymic stand-in for the social order and her own failings before that order; he cannot even acknowledge publicly his unwitting collabora-tion in her rape and murder and lets these feelings of inadequacy eat into his psyche, thereby producing the sort of guilt that has become a staple of modernist fiction But Erik Erikson’s characterisation of shame and guilt complicates this simplistic reading by bringing the two together, just as in

is an emotion insufficiently studied because in our civilization it is so early and easily absorbed into guilt [… the impulse] to bury one’s face, to sink into the ground [is] essentially rage turned against the self, which is an important guilt mechanism’.23

As in Béroul, read through Bloch’s analysis, La Fille du Comte de tieu is a key text for understanding not the move from a shame culture to

Pon-a guilt culture, from the Pon-archPon-aic to the modern, but how shPon-ame Pon-and guilt collude in establishing identities and undermining them Like Tristan, the Fille thinks she is beyond cultural norms, beyond the protective embrace

of feudal, masculine culture; but when she insists on travelling with just her husband and a small band of men she not only finds herself violated and scorned by little understood forces but puts her husband’s life and honour in danger as well His subsequent guilt at abandoning her for a second time to masculine brutality, this time in the person of her father, and his keeping of that sacrificial murder secret, is his undoing His initial shame at not having fathered a child is compounded by his shame at not mastering his wife Thinking that she would spare him and herself shame

by killing him, the Fille opens the floodgates of chiasmic shame and guilt Tiebaut’s shame becomes guilt when he is reduced to living as his father-in-law’s puppet, the holder of the secret and the unwitting executioner of his wife; and the Fille’s guilt at attempting to kill her husband only surfaces when she is confronted with the shame she feels at hearing that she was loved all along, both before and after her humiliation Contrary to what

23 Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1963) 252, cited in Piers,

‘Shame and Guilt’, 21.

Guilt, Shame and Masculine Insufficiency 29

Bloch had suggested, guilt has not supplanted the vendetta ethic: it works with it, hand in hand; and the vendetta ethic, linked with shame, turns out

to be fuelling that guilt every step of the way Tristan’s sense that thing awful has happened to him […] that it is he who has done something wrong’ (Bloch, 244) is shared by Tiebaut; and while the Fille and Iseut make do with their lot, reintegrating shame and guilt into their limiting circumstances, it is the men who give themselves over to grief and mourn-ing, finding in masculine identity only a fragile ally, against the threat of perceived insufficiency, and what we might even call gender shame

‘some-Suggested Reading

Bloch, R Howard, French Medieval Literature and Laws (Los Angeles, Berkeley,

London: University of California Press, 1977)

Elias, Norbert, The Civilizing Process, vol 2: Power and Civility, trans E Jephcott

(New York: Pantheon Books, 1982)

Erikson, Erik, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1963)

Kinoshita, Sharon, Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006)

Piers, Gerhart, and Singer, Milton B., Shame and Guilt: A Psychoanalytic and a Cultural Study (New York: Norton, 1971)

Pirot, F (ed.), Mélanges offerts à Rita Lejeune (Gembloux: J Duculot, 1968)

Scheff, Thomas J and Retzinger, Suzanne M., Emotions and Violence: Shame and Rage

in Destructive Conflicts (Lexington and Toronto: Lexington Books, 1991)

Short, I (ed.), La Chanson de Roland (Paris: Livre de poche, 1990)

Tristan et Iseut, ed D Lacroix and P Walters (Paris: Livre de poche, 1989)