as I have said I did not see it with my own eyes) lest I make any rash assertions. And
so until I am more fully instructed, I leave a wide space in my book for such a
warlikefield.]
There is then a gap of a page and a half in the manuscript, to befilled in,
André says, once he knows more. Readers have been quick to presume
tactful evasion, and certainly if any historical event could defy representa-
tion in the ethical terms mandated by André’s ancient model Sallust, it
would be Bosworth, with its numerous equivocations and last-minute shifts
of allegiance.^20 There is, however, more at stake here. We may recall that
Ned Lukacher has read Freud’s concept of the primal scene–where the
child supposedly beholds its parents in intercourse, an act that analysis
must then construct or reconstruct–in terms possessed of a historical
significance that goes beyond the family romance.“Rather than signifying
the child’s observation of sexual intercourse,”Lukacher writes,“the primal
scene comes to signify an ontologically undecidable intertextual event
that is situated in the differential space between historical memory and
imaginative construction.”Deployed for different medieval moments by
Fradenburg and Paul Strohm, the notion suggests a confrontation with the
radical contingency of historical origins. In this sense, the treacheries of
Bosworth are indeed the Tudor primal scene.^21 My translation, forfluency’s
sake, blurs André’s pun oncampum, at once the battlefield and the gap in
the manuscript. In a series of substitutions, André faces this“warlike”space
of masculine action from what Patricia Parker has called the“ambiguous”
position of men of letters,^22 repeated and displaced in succession by his
sightless eyes and a blank space in a text. He thus points to his narrative’s
inability to sustain a point of origin, which instead starts to look suspi-
ciously like an unnameable trauma.^23
But this blindness is, as soon becomes apparent, rather constitutive of
dynasty. For the heavily signposted absence that is Bosworth (“X doesn’t
mark the spot”) acquires meaning as it werenachträglich, in a new meta-
phoric substitution in which André’s poetry is profoundly implicated.
Henry of Richmond’s post-Bosworth entry into London receives striking
preparation in André’s text. Up to this point, all we have heard of André’s
own metrical proficiency is a brief Sapphic stanza, as Henry addresses the
clergy after his victory:
Praesules sacri celebres ministri,
Prima sunt vobis quibus Ille primo
Visus est olim recubare foeno
Gaudia certe. ( 34 )Beginnings: André and Dunbar 27