Voyeurism and Medieval poetry -- The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love-Narratives by A. C. Spearing

Papers on Language and Literature, Spring 1994 by Margherita, Gayle

A. C. Spearing. The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love-Narratives. New York: Cambridge UP, 1993. 321 pp. Cloth $59.95.

Insofar as it rests upon the notion of a critical gaze that is stable, exterior, and epistemologically reliable, the institution of the book review must be situated within the realm of the scopic, the voyeuristic. Like the voyeur who "scopes out" the fetishized and interiorized feminine body, the reviewer is looking for an absence, a lack that will sustain the fantasy of discursive plenitude and epistemological certainty. In this matter of the visible, however, Lacan reminds us that "everything is a trap." The moment one assumes a position of exteriority, of knowledge based on perception, one is caught in the field of vision; in short, we who speculate will always find ourselves interiorized by another look whose point of origin eludes us. In looking, we are always looked at; in unveiling desire, we are always desiring. In my position as re-viewer of a book that takes a critical look at voyeurism, then, I am subject to a scopophilic mise en abyme: the relentlessly iconic language of criticism ensures that we will never have the last look.

To put it in material terms, the institution of the book review, like that of critical discourse itself, is fraught with paradoxes and not a little peril. The review presumably exists to facilitate the dialogue necessary to realize an ideal of intellectual community. An investment in similarity or agreement (implicit in the notion of community) coexists with its opposite, in that the review works to foreground differences that will in turn influence the intellectual direction of the discourse within a given field. The review is also, inevitably, a political "position paper" whose importance in tenure and promotion decisions cannot be denied. It is at once an arena for the defense of tradition, the shoring up of power, and a place where younger scholars may attempt to fell the putative Goliaths of the past. If I have belabored this point in my "long preamble of a review," it is because questions of exteriority, of power and generational struggle were much on my mind as I read A. C. Spearing's The Medieval Poet as Voyeur.

Spearing begins his book with a chapter entitled "Theories of Looking," calling his own method "generally psychoanalytic." Nevertheless he dismisses both Lacan and "theory" in general on page 2, in a gesture both disingenuous and perplexing. He cites Lacan's claim (in the influential Seminar XI) that "desire is based on castration" out of context, and then goes on to assert a relation to psychoanalysis that is reductive and more than a little misleading:

My lack of confidence that this assertion (or indeed any of the theories that place the look among what Freud calls 'the psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes') is wholly true makes me prefer to keep my distance from such styles of theorizing--to engage with them, let us say as a voyeur rather than on closer terms.(2)

I have quoted this passage in its entirety because it exemplifies Spearing's troubled relation to the question of method in general, and psychoanalysis in particular. Lacan's theorization of the look in relation to the Freudian theory of castration is oriented specifically toward a destabilization of the notion of "truth" based on perception; according to Lacan, moreover, to engage with theory "as a voyeur" is to be unavoidably subject to it. Spearing's critical gaze, its relation to an empirically verifiable notion of truth, and his presumption of "distance" are precisely what Lacan's theory of the visual calls into question. More troubling, however, is Spearing's parenthetical dismissal of the psychoanalytic theory of voyeurism as it relates specifically to the question of sexual difference. Spearing has very little to say to or about the feminist theory (particularly film theory) that has made specularity and spectatorship important considerations in both literary theory and cultural studies. Even in his discussion of the "male gaze" (a term he uses in quotation marks throughout, as if to distance himself from it) he refers almost exclusively to the work of John Berger, rather than to any of the many feminist theorists who have given the term currency within the academy, and who have worked on the relation between sexuality and spectatorship over the course of the past two decades. The effect of this effacement/displacement is to make Spearing's own discussions of male voyeurism uncomfortable for the feminist reader. Terms like "striptease," references to Playboy and Penthouse, to "soft-porn movies" which appear here and there throughout the text become troubling, since we are uncertain as to whether or not Spearing really understands that looking at women's bodies is an aggressive political act. Lacking any cohesive methodological framework for thinking about the relations between specularity, gender, and power, Spearing's descriptions of poetic voyeurism can slip into aggressive fetishistic looking as well. When we read, for example, that the feminine object of the gaze "turns herself into an object," that "to attract the gaze is a source of female power," or that, in the rape scene in Partenope of Blois, "it must be admitted that [Partenope] uses some force; but it must also be admitted that [Melior] offers little more than verbal resistance," it becomes impossible to separate the aggressive poetic gaze from the implicitly male critical gaze. Of course, one might say that this slippage is very much to the (theoretical) point. It is not Spearing's point, however; because he takes pains to distance himself from feminist readings of the gaze, and from "theory" in general, these moments appear as symptomatic eruptions in his text, moments at which the "distanced" critic is interiorized by the larger and less apprehensible gaze of a patriarchal intellectual tradition grounded in the putative correspondence between perception and truth.