Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland

eschatological implications emerge into thematic consciousness. This is in
every sense a“fatalfiction”; a pleasant pastime becomes amemento mori.
“Out of my body my soule than it went”: in such a statement, who am
“I”? If Amoure is the“I”of penitential lyric, he also recalls the revenants
who in some popular late-medieval narratives describe purgatory. Like
Amoure, the protagonist ofThe Spreit of Gyis caught in a pronominal
whirl, shifting uneasily between“we”and“I”as his soul awaits the resur-
rection of a body to which it is still tied:

Gyes body has now na skathe,

And I am pyned to saue vs bathe.

And efter, when we com to blys,

What joy sa I haue, sall be his

...

if I answer for Gy,

I do him no velany.

Mi spekyng es all for his spede,

That I may neven to yhow his nede...^34

Such passages are illuminated by Roland Barthes’s point that the words“I
am dead”constitute“a true hapax of narrative grammar, a staging of words
impossible as such.”
“In the ideal sum of all the possible utterances of language,”Barthes
writes,“the link of thefirst person (I) and the attribute‘dead’is precisely
the one which is radically impossible.”His understanding of this utterance
as an“empty point,”or a“blind spot of language,”^35 has other suggestive
resonances in Hawes’s case.The Pastimeemerges as an instance of anamor-
phosis–a distorted or deformed perspective,first associated with early-
modern painting, that requires the use of special equipment (such as a lens)
or a particular vantage point to reform the image. Lacan’s own favored
example of the technique is Holbein’sThe Ambassadors, painted around
thirty years after Hawes’s poem. The skull which in Holbein’s painting
hovers in the foreground before his subjects amid their multiple artifacts, a
“strange, suspended, oblique object,”suggests for Lacan“simply the subject
as annihilated.”^36 In Sarah Kay’s words, the viewer is enabled to see“that
what he or she takes for‘reality’is one particular take on a‘real’that exceeds
it.”^37 Here, the disturbing“return of the‘real’”–the skull hidden in plain
sight looks back–becomes the site of the poem’s authority. In late-medieval
terms, Barthes’s“impossible utterance,”with its penitential and purgatorial
burden, does not query language’s referential capacities so much as redouble
them; in Lewis’s words, the voice“at once compels belief.”The doubling

120 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland