Can Helen Speak? - A Return to Questions of Identity and Discourse

It goes without saying that poem as gleefully and unabashedly "foul" as "Ganymede and Helen" does not offer much in the way of pathos. (On the strength of lines 229-232, I'd wager that Ganymede would respond strongly to a particular scene from Return of the Jedi.) Nevertheless, amid the crudity and the shrill back-and-forth, I thought that one of Helen's responses struck a bit of a poignant note:

I do not know which way to turn, for if I do not speak on a par with the vicious,
I shall be called the loser;
But if I strive to equal you in words,
I shall be thought a whore to have spoken so impurely (201-204).

Here, Helen voices a discursive and representational dilemma identical to that raised (apparently without knowing it) by Nature in Alan of Lille's poem: "I first of all refuse to explain my theme on the plain of plain words or to vulgarise the vulgar with vulgar neologisms, but choose to gild things immodest with the golden trappings of modest words and to clothe them with the varied colours of graceful diction....Nevertheless, as we experienced above, since the language of our discourse should show a kinship with the matters about which we speak, there should be at times an uncouthness of style to conform to the ugliness of the subject-matter.... [H]owever, it is my intention to contribute a mantle of fair-sounding words to the above-mentioned monsters of vice to prevent a poor quality of diction from offending the ears of readers or anything foul finding a place on a maiden's lips" (143-144). [Whew!]

This attempt to have one's discursive cake and eat it too, along with a number of other factors, prevents us (me anyway) from taking seriously anything Alan says. Attempting to harmonize these incommensurable modes of relating tone/form/style and content leads to Alan's extravagant metaphorical conceits - the workshop of hammers and anvils, and especially the grammar - which are simultaneously too opaque and too explicit. In their airy artificiality, their sheer poetry, they continually call attention to themselves instead of to what they signify; conversely, their elaborate and self-conscious fabric[ation] cannot sustain the weight of their referents. The struggle over what language and representational mode is appropriate - natural - to his subject-matter involves Alan, on the level of his own discourse, in a version of the natural/unnatural question about which he is trying to opine. How "natural" is it to talk about gay sex via labyrinthically complicated grammatical figures of subject and predicate?

To return to "Ganymede and Helen," Helen's complaint raises the same potentially debilitating representational predicament, but with heightened stakes - the reason for my assertion of the poignancy of these lines. Helen recognizes that gender and her own femininity, not abstract considerations of mimetic suitability, are what is really at issue here. The question is not really "what tone and language are appropriate to the subject at hand?" but "what tone and language are appropriate to a woman?"

Helen realizes (and rather poignantly laments) the fact that men entirely control the discourse and conventions of this argument. She needs to win the debate to defend her gender from Ganymede's misogyny and to maintain for it some kind of socially valued presence and role. (Among Ganymede's more telling moves is social inflection of homosexual behavior: "Peasants, who may as well be called pigs - / These are the only men who should resort to women" [135-136]. In Ganymede's ideal world, heterosexuality - and by extension, women - could not be "high society.") However, Helen, within the constraints of the construction of her gender identity, can't win the debate without forfeiting that identity. (Ganymede's response to all this is that Helen, having never really occupied this identity, can't really complain about the prospect of being stripped of it.)

Therefore, when, stung once too often by Ganymede's misogynistic provocations, Helen finally resolves to "throw away the cloak of modesty" and "henceforth speak plainly" (241-242), we can advance at least two interpretations of the forced and unconvincing victory that follows: 1) The poem shows that aristocratic young women, with their fetishized virtues of modesty and virginity, can "speak on a par with the vicious" and still maintain the identity rooted in those virtues, or 2) The poem violates its own logic and, like The Plaint of Nature, falls accordingly into contradiction and incoherence. On the whole I find this second interpretation more likely, since it seems to provide a better explanation of the implausible ending. I would add, though, that unlike Alan's representational and discursive muddles, the self-contradiction here feels more controlled and deliberate. (Unless Alan was being totally satirical, an interpretation that has occured to me once or twice.) This artificial and fantastical conclusion in which Helen is allowed to speak would thus accord with the poet's genially capricious and crude tone throughout his work.