interminable complaint

(on hoccleve)

Complaint, as Lauren Berlant expressed it in The Female Complaint, is a genre characterized by ambivalent attachments. It speaks to both the disappointment resulting from “the failure of relation” and the survival of “some fidelity to the world of distinction and desire that produced such disappointment in the first place.”¹ It’s a “genre,” but also a mode – of investment, of backhanded attachment, and of enjoyment. In Jewish humor, complaining – kvetching – “can be applied indifferently to hunger or satiety:”² the kvetcher takes a special pleasure in complaining about complaining; about having complained; about others who complain. The Yiddish word kvetch is derived from the Middle High German quetschen, meaning to crush, bruise, or squeeze;³ but Michael Wex makes sure to highlight the anality of the Jewish translation of the word into its rich culture of complaint:

It isn’t simply to strain, but “to strain,” as Harkavy has it, “at stool,” to have trouble doing what, if you’d eaten your prunes the way you were supposed to, you wouldn’t have any trouble with at all. […] A really good kvetch has a visceral quality, a sense that the kvetcher won’t be completely comfortable, completely satisfied, until it’s all come out.⁴

The true kvetcher, though, is never completely comfortable. They withhold their own satisfaction, remaining within the scene of complaint. The complaint of the habitual kvetch, then, has an object, but it isn’t necessarily the one that occasions her kvetching at a given moment. To complain is to attend to the fact that there’s something lacking in the real, which is to say that it touches the real through the presupposition of a fantasy. Complaint is itself a mode of “negotiating belonging to a world,”⁵ even it proceeds from a dogged attachment to what’s lacking in it. Complaint is a symptomatic discourse; it always has an object whose inexistence it both marks out and is occasioned by; it demands a supplement, which often must be created by way of what it occasions in the first place.

Thomas Hoccleve is one of Middle English poetry’s most prolific kvetches. In the Compleynte paramont, his translation of a Marian lament from Guillaume de Deguileville’s Le Pèlerinage de l’Âme, grief tips over into the realm of complaint when the subject’s loss of a beloved object is world shattering, and brings into view a sense of loss that precedes the loss of the object in question. Narrated from the perspective of the Virgin Mary, the Compleynte paramont is cried from a place of utter despair. At least within what’s preserved in the passage selected by Hoccleve for translation, absent is the temporal logic of Boethian fortune. The speaker’s “ioye hath made a permutacioun” – an exchange – “With wepyng and eek lamentacioun,”⁶ and within the moment of agony the poem articulates, the anticipation of that joy returning is circumscribed:

O Gaubriel, whan þat thou come aplace
And madest vnto me thi salewyng
And seidist thus, “Heil Mary, ful of grace,”
Whi ne had thu gove me warnyng
Of þat grace that veyn is and faylyng,
As thu now seest, and sey it weel beforne?⁷

The shattering effects of loss reverberate in all directions, resignifying what precedes it. It reveals grace to be “vain,” and divine hailing to have proceeded from the deceptive withholding of knowledge. This is the site that complaint takes as its founding point of reference, however contingently: contemptuously looking upwards from the nadir of existence.

It’s this positioning of the subject of complaint that is of interest to me here. The Marian complaint here begins with grief over difference – specifically, that between mother and son, and figures Christ as an ambivalent object of attachment. “It seemeth þat thow makist departynge / Twixt thee and me for ay withoute endynge,” she laments, making special note of the impersonal way in which he addresses her: “And namely syn thow me ‘womman’ callist, / As I to thee straunge wer and vnknowe. / Therthurgh, my sone, thow my ioie appallist.”⁸ More than grieving the loss of a son what she laments is his separation from her. Who enacts that separation? The Father or the Son? It’s this entanglement of taking and losing that renders the Christ into an unbearably ambivalent object in this scene, as the loved object becomes, too, the agent responsible for the destruction of her joy.

The ambivalence I’m trying to emphasize in this passage can perhaps be clarified by way of a reminder of iterability of the father function in Freudian psychoanalysis. Within a certain trajectory of Lacanian readings of Freud, there is a particular emphasis on impersonality of the Father as a function. As Willy Apollon articulates it in his rereading of the Freudian Oedipal scene, this renders the family itself into a “problematic” in which “the father or the function of the father comes to articulate a limit, to install the time of a loss. He renders possible an object for desire, as long as this object is lost, inaccessible, or impossible. The father is then a separator […].”⁹ Or, as Lucie Cantin writes, “The father has no raison d’être other than to represent the law of the symbolic,” and the performance of his function is somewhat portable: “The father is thus whoever is named as ‘father.’ He is not the father, strictly speaking, merely because he may have impregnated the female.”¹⁰ What the Marian scene re-enacts is the particular violence of this function when its falls upon the child to perform it. The child, here, is the mother’s symptom: he “gives her, in immediately accessible form, what the masculine subject lacks: the very object of his existence appearing in the real.”¹¹ Insofar as the child is the mother’s symptom, his function is, in a sense, to occupy the space left empty by her lost object. In the scene of Marian complaint, this dynamic can be traced in her total identification with her symptom by way of a process which exceeds the limits of life itself.¹²

Hoccleve’s translation of the lyric is marked by a particular sensitivity to and emphasis on this moment of identification, in which grief has moved from world-shattering resignification, to the confrontation with the ambivalence of the loved object, and, finally, to a shattering of the self. As I've touched upon before, one facet of Marian fantasy is a collapse of difference with the loved object. Here, this is articulated in the jouissance of the destruction of the I: “Wel may men clepe and calle me Mara / From hennesforward, so may men me call. / How sholde I lenger clept be Maria, / Syn ‘I’, which is Ihesus, is fro me fall.”¹³ The play on spelling – and on the courtly language of “sweetness and gall” (“Mara” being itself a name derived from the Latin amare, bitterness) – slips into the grammatical a few stanzas later, when Mary’s suffering provocatively risks tipping over into the experience of Christ’s death as her own:

For now the taast I feele and the streynynge
Of deeth. By thy deeth feele I deeth me stynge.
O poore modir, what shalt thow now seye?
Poore Marie, thy wit is aweye.
 
Marie? Nay, but ‘marred’ I thee calle.
Vessel of care and wo and sorwes alle.
Now thow art frosty cold, now fyry hoot,
And right as þat a ship or barge or boot
Among the wawes dryueth steerelees,
So doost thow, woful womman, confortlees.¹⁴

Hoccleve’s rendering of the poem into rhyme royal in English is in part responsible for the devastating line break which results in the triple repetition of the word “deeth” on line 215. In the lines which follow – and for the remainder of the poem – the “I” is displaced, as the second person addressee is no longer God/Christ but Mary herself. Not only does her “wit” wander away, with her maternal function having been exhausted so too does her motherly “style”. “And of modir haast thow eek lost the style,” this new ghostly “I” entones, “No more maist thow clept be by thy name.”¹⁵ What’s striking about the function of complaint here is that it doesn’t appear to foreclose redemption, but it does locate the speaker prior to its arrival, in a moment when it is circumscribed and only present as a potentiality which has yet to make its imprint on the complaining utterance itself. In the Compleynte paramont, there’s no mention of “redemption” until the final line of the poem.¹⁶

Though firmly positioned in the negative, the complaint marks the space of what it lacks: the object to which it’s attached is preserved insofar as it structures its entire discourse even in its inexistence. The complainer is compelled to speak by and through the loved object which she’s lost but continues to create space and speech for nonetheless. In the Compleynte paramont, before it brings the poetic death of the speaker, the loss of the “I” occasions an overflowing of speech: “Of sorwe talke may I nat ynow,” the Virgin complains, “Syn fro my name ‘I’ doon away is now.”¹⁷ While complaint is a symptomatic discourse, its structure – that is, the shape or trajectory of the desire its narrative belies – isn’t determined by its symptom so much as it is articulated through it. While the “original” and famously autobiographical poems Hoccleve is now better remembered for articulate structurally distinct desires and narrative trajectories than the Compleynte paramont’s Marian mode, these later works do share an interest in symptomatic discourse, particularly in the way that the complaint begins in negativity and self-difference.

The articulation of self-difference – of the representation of the dysphoria that results from feeling other to oneself that recurs so frequently in Hoccleve’s writing – is also of course importantly sexed here. This is perhaps a banal observation to make about a Marian lament lyric, but is nevertheless striking in light of Hoccleve’s more personal work. The figure of a wandering “wit” so famously associated with My Complaint (more on this later) of course makes its appearance here, but in a distinct overflowing of jouissance, in which the speaker is eliminated by and alongside her object, “wit” and “style” spilling out along with the “I.” This, of course, proceeds from an unbearable recognition of sexual difference: in the strangeness of being called “woman” by her own son (“As I to thee straunge wer and vnknowe”),¹⁸ and in the severance so harsh that the entire experience of having been a mother takes on a new darker hue. Another, earlier, moment in which Mary apparently addresses herself in the second person is when she addresses the former self who had carried and nursed Christ:

O womman þat among the peple speek,
How þat the wombe blessid was þat beer,
And the tetes þat yaf to sowken eek
The sone of God, which on hy hangith heer,
What seist thow now, why comest thow no neer?¹⁹

Especially contrasted with her current state, the passage is remarkable for its emphasis on the sensuality of motherhood. In Mothers, Jacqueline Rose muses on the ways in which the idealization of motherhood obscurs the centrality of pleasure and pain to it, recalling a quip of Jean Laplanche’s regarding the absence in art and psychoanalytic writing of representations of breastfeeding. “I have known mothers who stopped breastfeeding,” she notes, “simply because they felt they were liking it too much.”²⁰ In another moment in the Compleynte, the speaker reminisces on all the moments in which her child snuggled up in her arms, or sat upon her knee, with kissing slipping into sucking: “Thow sat and haddist many a kus of me. / Eek thee to sowke on my brestes yaf Y, / Thee norisshyng fair and tendrely.”²¹ This provocatively erotic representation of breastfeeding may offer a nice counter-example to Laplanche’s comment, and hardly less so for the unrecoverability of the enjoyment they speak to, in part because it’s the world-shattering loss of the object that brings into view the extent to which that world was structured by the object’s presence in the first place.

Despite the poem’s overtly melancholic register, too, and despite the way in which this jouissance comes into view when the speaker is forced to confront herself as an other, the poem doesn’t begin and end with a melancholic theory of gender. The speaker isn’t less feminized, for instance, for her present condition, in which she finds herself “barren” of joy²² and with a “woful wombe.”²³ Rather, something like a “feminine jouissance” is found in the poem not in the signifiers of femaleness or femininity – or, for that matter, their lack – as much as it appears as something immanent in the complaint itself, which weaves together the extremes of pleasure and pain into a discursive whole that paradoxically constitutes the subject in the very process of its unraveling. It’s from this register that the jouissance of the text proceeds: in the literal coming-apart of language on the level of the letter, in these silent shifts in grammatical subject/object, and in this unarticulatable distance between motherhood at its most serene and most abject. It’s this non-communicative excess of language from which this “other jouissance” arises that Lacan referred to as lalangue, and which language, short of being able to represent, certainly speaks to it and strives to know it: “Language is what we try to know concerning the functioning of llanguage [lalangue].”²⁴

Compare this with Hoccleve’s La Male Regle, which begins with a description of the speaker’s unwellness. “And now my body empty is, and bare / Of ioie and ful of seekly heuynesse,” Hoccleve laments, in lines striking if for no other reason than for their recollection of the Compleynte paramont’s language of emptiness and heaviness.²⁵ In La Male Regle the speaker is also looking back on a former self from the perspective of a miserable present, though the tone is comical and mock-penitential. The first part of the poem consists in this disclosure of sin which begins, as it does for many, in the speaker’s youth. This youthfulness appears, for a moment, in prosopopoeial form, and the speaker’s “unwary youth” is referred to with feminine pronouns: “Myn vnwar yowth kneew nat what it wroghte,” he writes, “whan fro thee twynned shee. / But of hir ignorance hirself shee soghte, / And kneew nat þat shee dwellyng was with thee.”²⁶ The feminine pronouns drop, however, when the invocation of “youth” moves to more general proclamation that “for the more paart, youthe is rebel / Vnto reson.”²⁷ The moment stands out if only because La Male Regle is not a poem that is otherwise especially interested in allegory. Though the poem is addressed to “helthe,” the word only comes up three times in the poem,²⁸ and the concerns of the speaker wander substantially with respect to the question of his own health.

In fact, this passing reference to the speaker’s own youth in this way is an example one of the poem’s many diversions in the unfolding of its speaker’s symptomatic discourse. While the insistance of “another jouissance” can be traced in the gap between the maternal pleasure the Compleynte paramont’s speaker enjoys in her youth and the abjection of her narrative present, in La Male Regle the attempt to draw a contrast between the speaker’s past self and present immediately falls flat and is forgotten. This is because in the temporality of the poem’s symptomatic discourse, this “unwary youth” is very much part of the speaker’s narrative present in his writing of an ongoing ailment. The “letter” of the speaker’s symptom – the signifier, that is, around which it is organized – lies elsewhere, providing the Male Regle’s speaker with a fundamentally different relationship to his own enjoyment than what is seen in the Deguileville translation. Far from staging the speaker’s identification with his symptom, what’s notable about La Male Regle is that it self-consciously presents itself as a “writing of jouissance” with and against the signifier with which its symptom is embroiled. The poem’s discourse, in other words, is symptomatic insofar as the poem speaks itself as its own symptom.

After broadly condemning youthful rebellion against reason, the first section of the main body of the poem mainly consists in the recounting of the speaker’s various wrongdoings. The speaker’s principal sins are gluttony and drunkenness, sins which are from the start tied to money. The speaker notes that he’d been inclined to drink as often as he could,²⁹ at least until he would run out of money to spend on alcohol:

For me, I seye I was enclyned ay
Withouten daunger thidir for to hye me
But if swich charge vpon my bak lay
That I moot it forber as for a tyme,
Or but I wer nakidly bystad
By force of the penylees Maledie,
For thanne in herte kowde I nat be glad³⁰

Money functions as the signifier around which the speakers symptom takes shape: it functions to limit the enjoyment of the narrator’s “greedy mowth,”³¹ without which he would simply never stop shoving things in it. By providing his illness with a limit, however, money also grants it a shape and a temporality: it marks its pathology as something other than something characteristic of the subject’s “nature” or as a passing illness by granting it a rhythm. It makes the symptom repeatable and imbues it with a rhythm, providing a scene to which the subject is compelled to return to over and over again. Money structures his pathological tendency towards “excess,” but it also provides the rhetorical conceit around which the poem’s tongue-in-cheek irony turns when its affected penitential tone is revealed to have been a complaint all along.

It’s on this point that the subject’s relationship with himself “as an other” is already radically distinct from that of the speaker in the Compleynte paramont. In the latter, the movement of the speaker’s lament is carried along by a desire to overcome the difference between the subject and its object, even if this requires the shattering or death of the subject. Marian devotion is erotic: its desire is to transform two into one.³² For the speaker of the La Male Regle, however, the object itself induces a split: if one will excuse the terminology, money partakes in a wholly “phallic” symbolic economy, insofar as it functions at the place of the phallus as limit to enjoyment while at the same time providing the terms on which the subject is able to enjoy at all. This is a “masculine” structure, insofar as the terms of enjoyment are incomplete without this limit, and insofar as the object “keeps the symbolic moving in the same circuitous paths, in constant avoidance of the real.”³³ Whereas Marian jouissance proceeds indifferent to the limits of language and life itself, in La Male Regle “thought itself is jouissance-laden,”³⁴ as the pleasure of the text is folded back on itself by way of its layers of self-deprecating irony.

One of these layers appears in the way Hoccleve represents his own masculinity in this section. While there seems to have been no shortage of beautiful women passing through among the taverngoers at his regular haunts,³⁵ he recalls that he never slept with any of them, and that, given the opportunity to, he would have been perfectly content with just a kiss: “Of loues aart yit touchid I no deel. / I cowde nat, and eek it was no neede, / Had I a kus, I was content ful weel, / Bettre than I wolde hand be with the deede. / Thereon can I but smal, it is no dreede.”³⁶ And despite the rambunctiousness of tavern culture and his reputation as a regular amongst it, he insists upon the consistency of his “manly cowardyse” preventing him from ever slandering anyone – at least, that is, “on highte” – lest it come to blows.³⁷ It’s the anticipation of inadequacy that informs Hoccleve’s timidity in these scenes. Here, the risk of an encounter – whether sexual or combative – is something the subject flirts with but doesn’t go all the way through with; never bold enough to risk his actual emasculation moving beyond the level of a threat. Such is the assumption of “manly cowardice”: not that one doesn’t “have it” (that is, the “phallus”) but precisely the opposite, insofar as what the manly coward fears most is having “it” taken away.

It’s with exactly this kind of backhandedness that Hoccleve establishes something like an authoritative poetic voice throughout the poem. The next major part of the poem consists of an extended rant against flatterers. The digression is prompted by the recollection of a time when he’s headed home drunk and decides, lazily, to pay for a boat ride back. “Other than maistir callid was I nevere,” he observes, noting that the politeness never failed to prompt him to tip well: “So tikelid me þat nyce reuerence / Þat it me made larger of despense.”³⁸ It’s a clever moment of tongue-in-cheek self-deprecation, as the purpose of this doubling down on his own sloth and gluttony ultimately provides the material for a diversion. What follows is a lengthy digression as the speaker laments the ways in which the worst “combreworldes” – world-encumberers – of all are flatterers and “enchantours,”³⁹ and how “Men setten nat by truthe nowadayes.”⁴⁰ Despite the speaker’s own history of gluttony and sloth, one may suppose, it may at least be observed that he’s honest.

The poem of course begins as a confession, and upon ending the digression with a pithy final condemnation of “excess,”⁴¹ the speaker begins to loquaciously, and perhaps even with a hint of fondness, reflect upon his history with it once more:

No force of al this. Go we now to wacche
By nytirtale out of al mesure,
For, as in þat, fynde kowde I no macche
In al the Priuee Seel with me to endure,
And to the cuppe ay took I heede and cure,
For þat the drynke apall sholde noght,
But whan the pot emptid was of moisture
To wake aftirward cam nat in my thoght.⁴²

“Go we now” to watch the night all the way through: this invitation in the present tense to stay up all night prompts in Hoccleve the memory of many nights spent drinking himself to sleep. One assumes, though, that with this “go we now,” Hoccleve isn’t sitting and pouring himself another drink but coming to terms with the consequences of his actions. The temporality of “go we now” is ambiguous. Even as the recounting of historical drunkenness implies the sins that the speaker recounts to belong in the past, the “now” in which the reminiscence is prompted speaks to an ongoing condition as the speaker grasps for more footholds to fill in the space left by lack of drink with words.

It’s a motivating conceit of the poem that the sickness suffered by the speak is one “As wel of purs as body,”⁴³ and it’s the ongoing sickness of Hoccleve’s purse which remains the emphasis for the remainder of the poem. As he embarks on another digression about the importance of moderation in spending one’s coin, he catches himself rambling: “Ey, what is me, þat to myself thus longe / Clappid haue I? I trowe þat I raue. / A, nay, my poore purs and peynes stronge / Han artid me speke as I spoken haue.”⁴⁴ What’s remarkable about Hoccleve’s use of digressions is precisely the way he frames them as empty speech; truly, they are diversions from the actual object of the poem – and the poem does very much want something. Hoccleve’s digressions are clearly defensive: what the digression on “enchanters,” for instance, would seem to want to imply is that for all the speaker’s “excess,” it at least may be said that he is honest, and that despite the “sickness” of his purse that he really, in fact, does have a genuinely good command of just price theory and abstinence. Given how Hoccleve himself has described his illness as a compulsion, one may well ask whether this moment of impoverishment is simply the prelude to another drunken binge, as it’s this “sickness of purse and body” that physically and financially prevents him from continuing more than anything else.

But this perfectly logical deduction would perhaps itself be the outcome of another backhandedly ironizing gesture. What Hoccleve finally leaves us with is not a petition to “Helthe,” but to his patron, who he now addresses in order to ask for his £10 annuity and to remind him that he still owes the speaker payment for previous years.⁴⁵ It’s on this latter detail that the ending of the poem slips from confession to complaint: “I dar nat speke a word of ferne yeer, / So is my spirit symple and sore agast.”⁴⁶ While what the poem demands is the payment of an owed wage, what the rhetorical shift suggests is that the speaker’s “sickness of purse” may not entirely be the result of his own bad habits, but may at least in part result from a history of neglect on the part of his patron. It’s here where the poem shifts to complaint, insofar as the thing that its speaker lacks speaks to a history of that lack which precedes the narrative present of the poem itself, a present in which the condition produced by this history of lacking is very much ongoing. It’s exactly in this turn to complaint, though, that Hoccleve does something quite radical: he makes a demand, and he names the Other from which the poem makes that demand by addressing the poem to Lord Fourneval.⁴⁷

Insofar as the poem is written in order to petition for the payment of a wage, there is a sense in which money is in itself the poem’s symptom, as it would appear to be the thing the speaker most wants. Because the speaker lacks that object, this lack occasions the poem itself and colors its scenes. It’s this distance from the object that preserves it, however: unlike in the case of the Compleynte paramont, there’s no sense in which the speaker identifies with his object, except insofar as he remains attached to the scene which it symptomatically structures. Rather than appearing as a world-shattering event, the loss of the object is ordinary, and is even in a sense pleasurable, at least to the extent that it produces a scene that he keeps returning to. It’s the anticipation of this loss happening again (and again) which emplots the use he makes of the object in the first place.

In that sense, at least until a certain point in the poem, money would appear to be the speaker’s symptom: we can trace the speaker’s illness along its path, and see that insofar as it occupies the space left by his objet a it also obfuscates it by locking him into a self-destructive cycle of false need and false desires. Hence the fleetingness of Hoccleve’s metaphors and digressions: the feminine, prosopopoeial “youth” dissipates as quickly as she is summoned because what she is invoked to give form to is in fact also embodied by the speaker himself in speaking her into being. The poem symptomatizes itself for its object; its speaker speaks himself as a scene which is made intelligible by its object’s lack. And of course it does: as the poem nears the end and shifts to the register of complaint it confesses itself to have not been a confession in the first place and retroactively provides the terms of its own fictionality. This is of course a conceit: the poem wryly reveals the speaker’s self-deprecating persona as a persona in an ironic twist that itself serves as the passive aggressive set-up to ask its audience for payment in a sense not altogether dissimilar to the plaint about spendthrifts that begins Le Roman de Silence, or any number of troubador lyrics.

I would suggest that there’s also something deflating in the way Hoccleve levels the demand at the end of the poem. By addressing his specific patron by name, and by writing in an autobiographical mode, Hoccleve calls attention to the symptomatic function of money in his own poem. No longer does the poem appear to be addressed to God or “helthe,” but more specifically to a certain Lord Fournival; and the rehearsal of the subject’s gluttonous repetition compulsion whose cycles are determined by the phallic signifier of money take on a new character when the complaint shifts its mode of address from its own self-demeaning and ill speaker to a failing on the part of the Other who his discourse is revealed to have been addressing all along.

In psychoanalytic terms, what the writing of signifier of money as a signifier here does, then, is to help shift our attention away from the scene of the signifier – whose jouissance is centered on the subject’s castration – and brings to its attention the Other’s castration. “It is important to note,” Apollon writes, “that the symptom has more to do with the failure of the signifier than with the loss that signifies the subject’s castration. It’s the jouissance at stake in the symptom that relates more radically to the Other’s castration, in that the Other’s castration is the mode in which the failing of language is verified.”⁴⁸ What’s most remarkable about La Male Regle lies in the fact that this ironic turn by which confession transforms into complaint casts the authority of this signifier into doubt, shifting the site of the speaker’s enjoyment from the repetition of the signfier’s scene to the writing of the symptom itself.

cited