however, is the part played by“bowge of court”in the poem’sfiguration.
A blank space in itself, it becomes the medium by which words acquire a
more evident materiality. As one of the possible meanings of the wordbowge
is converted into another, it becomes the center of afigurative currency: an
agent of endless commutation, symbolic money.^53 Words are coin, devoid
of universal value, or food, reducing the relation between truth andfigural
garment to a body whose contents spill unpredictably, and which is always
visible, as if turned inside out. This, Skelton’s poem suggests, is the nature
of a court body where the currency of relations is monetary. The body of
rhetoric becomes the object of vision: the knowledge produced by a subject
who“sees.”It is to this subject that we shall now turn.
substantial wordsIn its remorseless, literalizing techniques of embodiment,The Bowge of
Courtepoints to a traditional problem in the rhetorical construction of
subjectivity: the difficulty of assessing the sincerity behind the rhetorician’s
mask, the perennial anxiety as to whether adept speech necessarily betokens
moral worth. Thus Petrarch points out that the arts which make a good
rhetorician–mimetic skills, the ability to use the colors of rhetoric well–
become immoral when translated into conduct, and indeed generate a kind
of alienation from the self.“What is advantageously taught in the art of
oratory, the art, that is, of speaking with propriety and elegance,”he writes,
“has ...been mischievously applied to the art of wicked and disgraceful
living ...no one is of a clear mind as to his costume, his speech, his
thought–in short, as to what sort of man he would like to be, and therefore
every man is unlike himself.”^54 Petrarch’s emphasis is not new; rhetorical
texts, classical and postclassical, warn against seduction through persuasive
rhetorical artifice by troping rhetoric itself as a body either diseased or
overdressed, whose defects may not readily meet the eye. Quintilian fears
lest stylistic excess, through overdressing and cosmetic adornment, render
the body of rhetoric“effeminate”; to the author of theAd Herennium,
inflated language may seem impressive to the novice ear, just as a tumor may
be indistinguishable from a“healthy condition of the body”; in an especially
violentfiguration, Alberic of Monte Cassino depicts the introduction of
abrupt transitions into the calmflow of a work as at once a grafting of
deformed members on to the rhetorical stock and a form of violation.^55 In a
suggestive discussion, Rita Copeland has argued that suchfigures emerge
from the desire to control rhetoric’s inherent delinquency. Rhetoric,
she argues, “repeatedly– almost ritually – re-enacts and enforces its
The Bowge of Courteand the paranoid subject 55