Zonas de protección de hábitat o especies

A CURIOUS CASE OF SUBLIMATION

I have for you today something curious and amusing. But I believe that we analysts are perhaps alone in being in a position to situate things properly.

Last time when Mr. Kaufmann had finished talking about Bernfeld's arti- cle, I stated that the problem we face is that of establishing the link between sublimation and identification. Before we leave the subject of sublimation as I have outlined it for you around the notion of the Thing - and it may still seem enigmatic and veiled for very good reasons - I would like to present you with a text, as it were as a note, on the subject of what might be called the paradoxes of sublimation.

Sublimation is not, in fact, what the foolish crowd thinks; and it does not on all occasions necessarily follow the path of the sublime. The change of object doesn't necessarily make the sexual object disappear - far from it; the sexual object acknowledged as such may come to light in sublimation. The crudest of sexual games can be the object of a poem without for that reason losing its sublimating goal.

In short, I don't think it a waste of time for me to read you a piece of evidence from the file of courtly love that even the specialists themselves literally don't know what to do with; they can't make head or tail of it.

There aren't two poems like this in the literature of courtly love. It's a

hapax, a single occurrence. It appears in the work of one of the most subde

and polished of the troubadours, whose name is Arnaud Daniel, and who is famous for his extraordinarily rich formal inventiveness, most notably in the poetic form of the sestina, which I don't have time to go into here; however, you should at least know the name.

Arnaud Daniel wrote a poem on the oddest of those relations of service that I told you about between the lover and his Lady; it is a whole poem that is distinguished by the fact that, much to the delight of a number of startled writers, it breaches the boundaries of pornography to the point of scatology.

The poem is concerned with a case that seems to be presented as a question 161

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to be resolved in terms of the moral casuistry of courtly love. The case involves a Lady, called Domna Ena in the poem, who orders her knight to put his mouth to her trumpet - an expression that is quite unambiguous in the text; and the order is designed to test the worthiness of his love, his loyalty and his commitment.

So as not to make you wait any longer then, I will read the poem - in French because I don't think that any of you can understand that lost lan- guage which is the langue d'oc, a language that nevertheless has its style and its value. The poem is in stanzas of nine lines with a single rhyme, which changes with every stanza.

Though Lord Raimond, in agreement with Lord True Malec, defends Lady Ena and her orders, I would grow old and white before I would consent to a request that involves so great an improriety. For so as "to put his mouth to her trumpet," he would need the kind of beak that could pick grain out of a pipe. And even then he might come out blind, as the smoke from those folds is so strong.

He would need a beak and a long, sharp one, for the trumpet is rough, ugly and hairy, and it is never dry, and the swamp within is deep. That's why the pitch ferments upwards as it continually escapes, continually overflows. And it is not fitting that he who puts his mouth to that pipe be a favorite.

There will be plenty of other tests, finer ones that are worth far more, and if Lord Bernart withdrew from that one, he did not, by Christ, behave like a coward if he was taken with fear and fright. For if the stream of water had landed on him from above, it would have scalded his whole neck and cheek, and it is not fitting also that a lady embrace a man who has blown a stinking trumpet.

Bernart, I do not agree in this with the remarks of Raimon de Durfort, in saying that you were wrong; for even if you had blown away gladly, you would have encountered a crude obstacle, and the stench would soon have smitten you, that stinks worse than dung in a garden. You should praise God, against whomsoever seeks to dissuade you, that he helped you escape from that.

Yes, he escaped from a great peril with which his son also would have been reproached and all those from Cornil. He would have done better to go into exile than to have blown in that funnel between spine and mount pubic, there where rust colored substances proceed. He could never have been certain that she would not piss all over his snout and eyebrows.

Lady, may Bernart never venture to blow that trumpet without a large bung to stop up the penile hole; then only could he blow without peril.

This quite extraordinary document opens a strange perspective on the deep ambiguity of the sublimating imagination. One should first note that all the poetic works of the trouvires and troubadours have not come down to us, and that we only find some of Arnaud Daniel's poems in two or three manu-

scripts. Yet this poem, whose literary merit goes far beyond what a transla- tion is able to reveal, not only was not lost but is to be found in some twenty manuscripts. We have other texts which show that two other trouveres, Tru- malec and Raymond de Durfort, participated in this debate, arguing on the other side, but I won't go into that.

We find ourselves here faced with a sudden reversal, a strange reaction. Heaven knows that Arnaud Daniel went a long way in the direction of lend- ing the greatest subtlety to the pact between lovers. Doesn't he push desire to the extreme point of offering himself in a sacrifice that involves his own annihilation? Well, he is the very same one who turns out to have written a poem, however reluctantly, on a subject that must have concerned him in some way for him to have taken so much trouble with it.

The idealized woman, the Lady, who is in the position of the Other and of the object, finds herself suddenly and brutally positing, in a place knowingly constructed out of the most refined of signifiers, the emptiness of a thing in all its crudity, a thing that reveals itself in its nudity to be the thing, her thing, the one that is to be found at her very heart in its cruel emptiness. That Thing, whose function certain of you perceived in the relation to sub- limation, is in a way unveiled with a cruel and insistent power.

It is nevertheless difficult not to note echoes of this elsewhere, for the oddness involved is not without precedents. Remember, for example, the origin of the flute evoked in Longus's pastoral romance. Pan pursues the nymph Syrinx, who runs away from him and disappears among the reeds. In his rage, he cuts down the reeds, and that, Longus tells us, is the origin of the flute with pipes of unequal length - Pan wanted, the subtle poet adds, to express in that way the fact that his love was without equal. Syrinx is trans- formed into the pipe of Pan's flute. Now on the level of derision that is to be found in the strange poem that I brought to your attention here, we find the same structure, the same model of an emptiness at the core, around which is articulated that by means of which desire is in the end sublimated.

I wouldn't tell all if I didn't add to the file, in case it proves useful, that Dante places Arnaud Daniel in Canto XIV of his Purgatory in the company of sodomites. I haven't been able to pursue the particular genesis of this poem beyond that.

I am now going to ask Madame Hubert to speak. She will be talking to you about a text that is frequently referred to in analytic literature, namely, Sperber's article entitled "On the Influence of Sexual Factors on the Origin and Development of Language," but it also touches on all kinds of problems relative to what we have to say about sublimation.

In his article on the theory of symbolism - an article on which I wrote a commentary in our journal but which, I have heard, is not particularly acces- sible to a reader - Jones expressly singles out the Sperber article. If, he says,

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Sperber's theory is true, if we must consider certain forms of primitive work, agricultural work, in particular, the relations between man and the earth, as the equivalent of the sexual act, features whose traces are, as it were, retained in the meaning we give that primitive relation, then can this be explained by the process of symbolization? Jones says no. In other words, given the con- ception he has of the function of the symbol, he considers that what is involved is by no means a symbolic transposition, neither can it be registered as a sublimation effect. The sublimation effect is to be taken in its liberality, in its authenticity. The copulation between the ploughman and the earth is not a symbolization but the equivalent of a symbolic copulation.

It is worth taking the time to reflect on that, and in my article I draw certain consequences to which I will return. Sperber's text appeared in the first issue of Imago, and it is perhaps even more difficult to find than the others. But so that it may receive its due, Mrs. Hubert has been good enough to concentrate on it, and she will tell us today what it contains.