as the projection of what he lacks–as the absence implied by Macrobius.
Brought to the“traves of sylke fyne”that hides the invisible object of
desire–the very door of the privy chamber, the veil which conceals the
lady of allegorical courtly entertainment–the narrator falls victim to a
catastrophic failure of identification with the image of power, the failure of
an ambition at once sexual and political.^40
Some light, I think, is thrown on the progress of the poem so far by
Lacan, whoseSeminar VIIspecifically explores courtly love. Skelton’s Dame
Sans-Pere (Lady Peerless) is a characteristic instance of the woman as
Lacan’s“terrifying...inhuman partner”( 150 ). She is placed behind a
veil, an enigmatic intermediary,“introduced through the door of privation
or of inaccessibility”( 149 ), and functioning both as woman and as“secret”
( 151 ). Lacan’s phrases here are part of an extended examination of the
woman as Thing–at once, as Sarah Kay puts it,“the point on the horizon
of the symbolic where the pressure of the real is sensed”and“the hole or
vortex which the real opens at the heart of our systems of representation.”
The Thing“is simultaneously a nothing, the gap within or beyond repre-
sentation, and a powerful something, an irreducible kernel where the
pressure of the real is condensed.”^41 The dreamer’s encounter with the
unrepresented (unrepresentable) Lady results in incapacity: he cannot
“reporte”the beauty of the mysteriousdomina. It is language’s function,
according to Lacan, to regulate, under the dominion of the pleasure
principle, the subject’s distance from the inscrutable and terrifying –
because inaccessible–Thing.“The distance between the subject anddas
Ding,”Lacan observes,“is precisely the condition of speech”( 69 ).^42
Such a logic defines the movement of Skelton’s narrative. The alternation
of Daunger and Desyre plunges Drede into a world marked by an atmos-
phere of“vain incantation and fruitless connection”( 56 ), in which speech
only offers hallucinated satisfaction and thwarted gratification. His feckless
bid for satisfaction has drawn him into an economy ofprosopopeia; he is now
enclosed in a signifier, as if in response to the absent Thing’s straitening
mandates, and in the face of Desire’s tautologies he fades to an empty letter
(“Dread”), dependent on other empty letters for consistency.^43 This pre-
dicament looms even larger when Skelton’s grotesque and sinister Vices
arrive on the scene. As the dream proceeds, speech will further entail
neurotic reenactment of the absent object’s terrifying inscrutabilities in
the form of imagined intrigues, confrontations in which the narrator is
terrorized, but also–as he is increasingly identified substitutively with the
figure of authority he aims to be–inspires terror (“Drede”) himself. The
result is a knowledge that can only be described as paranoid.
52 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland