symbolic currencyLacan tells us that the Thing marks the place of a loss beyond representa-
tion,figured in psychoanalysis as the loss of the mother’s body, and that the
space of fantasy is tenanted by the objects of imaginary identification, at
once interchangeable and rivalrous.The Bowge’s very beginning is emulous;
a narrator struck by poetic ambition is troubled by a desire to rival“the great
auctoryte / Of poetes olde.”The poem never leaves, but rather revolves
around this scene of failed identification. As the dream begins, a ship arrives
in port calledThe Bowge of Courte, which already posits afluid relationship
between pleasure and objects; it is“fraghted with plesure to what ye coude
devyse”( 42 ). When the ship enters harbor an anonymous voice subjects it
to an act of naming as initially arbitrary as that of Drede himself (“‘the shyp
that ye here see, / The Bowge of Courte it hyghte for certeynte,’” 48 – 49 )
and after the introduction of Dame Sans-Pere the merchandise it carries is
termed“Favore-to-stonde-in-her-good-grace”( 55 ). The words of Fortune,
the steerswoman, are themselves suggestive:
Of Bowge of Court she [Fortune] asketh what we wold have,
And we asked favoure, and favour she us gave. ( 125 – 26 )Just as Dame Sans-Pere is a projection of individual desire, so Fortune’s
proclamation confirms that“Bowge of Court”is fashioned to appetite–it is
a shifting signifier with no clear identity of its own, existing at an interface
between desire and signification.
Lacan observes thatVorstellungenor ideas“operate exchanges and are
modulated according to...the fundamental laws of the signifying chain”
( 62 ). The pleasure principle’s inertia is guaranteed by the valorization or
substitution of one sign over or for another, and a concomitant transferral of
affective charge. It is no accident that Skelton’s poem features a metaphorics
of traffic and commerce; the word is object, often a distorted kind of gift,
and personifications themselves are no exception. The phrase“bouge of
courte”derives from the Old French phrase,“bouche [mouth] à court,”and
denotes“an allowance of food and drink granted by a king or nobleman to a
member of his household or of the retinue of a guest.”^44 Like all wages to the
royalfamilia, it was a payment in kind, and had the advantages and
limitations of all such payments. A source of immediate sustenance to the
royal servant, it nonetheless afforded him no lasting security; asL’Abuzé en
courtsuccinctly puts it,“Brouet de Court n’est heritaige!”[“Court-broth is
no inheritance!”].^45 It thus had the quality of a credit voucher:^46 an entitle-
ment to eat at royal expense without enduring substance or content, which
The Bowge of Courteand the paranoid subject 53