film theory in which a maternal“voice-object”conjoins fantasies of fusion
with paranoiac terror.^41 The effect is not unlike that of the interrupted
ekphrasis ofThe Goldyn Targe, but here it is a strident declamation that
disrupts the relation between the eroticized garden and the dreamer-narrator
who had been so“at home”there. The voice intrudes from without as alien
object; the dreamer errs (“foruay[s],” 92 ) and is suddenly engulfed in a strange
corporeal delirium,“With sprete arrasyt, and euery wit away. / Quakyng for
fere, baith puncys [pulse], vane and neruis”( 98 – 99 ). This dreamer’sbodycan
“not sustene so amyabyll a soun”( 102 ); he is, literally,floored by an over-
whelming excess of voice and genre.
Nor does this relationship between the speaker and the language of which
he is afigure reach any kind of equipoise. The dreamer is transported from
the garden of love to a“wyldernes abhomynable and wast”( 155 ). Here the
scenery shows us the future translator of theEneados, and the author whose
classical inclinations have frequently provoked critical debate about the
nature and extent of his“humanist”impulses. Yet his“deserte terrybill”
( 136 ) is a syncretist’s nightmare: a“stinking”stream“Lyke tyll Cochyte, the
ryuer infernall”( 138 ) contains yellingfish leaping from commentaries on
Revelations.^42 Here the landscape’s monstrosity is the very measure of its
intertextual heterogeneity. It is no wonder that the dreamer bursts into a
lament on transience and Fortune’s unpredictabilities, glossing the meta-
phoric transformation of“veyr translat in wyntyr furyus”( 190 ).
The metalinguistic nature of this lurch into dystopia is suggested in a
number of ways. The artifice with which nature is shot through at the
poem’s opening gives place to a denatured wasteland where the vegetation is
dead, yet still forces its way to light in a kind of negative life:
Not throu the soyl, bot muskan treis sproutyt rotten
Combust, barrant, vnblomyt and vnleuyt. withoutflowers;without leaves
Ald rottyn runtis quhairin no sap was leuyt stumps
Moch, all wast, widdrit with granis moutyt... Decayed;withered;fallen
( 149 – 52 )
This terrain, where to be present at all is to be out of place, seems to generate its
own contradiction in the catalogues that attend the courts of Minerva, Diana
and Venus, pagan and Old Testament characters ordered and clustered as if in
defenseagainsttheground’s decomposition and formlessness. Even then,
however, the poem dwells on the waste matter rejected by these fragments of
the archive. When Minerva’s court passes–thewiseontheirwaytothePalace
of Honour, which draws all the poem’s characters–attention is given not to
thefigures who accompany her, but to the“catiuis twane”( 231 )whobringup
the rear, Sinon and Achitophel, the one with“awedy[noose] about his mone
Barclay’sEcloguesand Douglas’sPalice of Honour 101