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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 April 2021
For Leo Bersani, ‘There is a big secret about sex: most people don't like it’. As it regards medieval French verse romance, the secret seems to be out. While troubadour lyrics focus on suspended desire, which goes nowhere, coitus usually occurs, or can be presumed to occur, in romance. Yet, if romance ‘reintroduces the deed (fach)’ into fin’amor, as Jean-Charles Huchet puts it, it then seems uninterested in representing it. Fabliaux ‘speak openly, often crudely, about human genitalia and their various functions in the sex act’. Romances rarely do.
Yet, I contend, coitus is not so much disregarded by romance as it is an insistent absence, with an important, though paradoxical, place in the genre's poetics and politics. This essay explores the understudied space of heterosexual coitus in verse romance – focusing especially on Arthurian romance – in three movements. I first consider romance plots in relation to canon law, which flourished at roughly the same time (c. 1140–1240). Juxtaposing the two suggests that romance is more con cerned with specific sexual behaviours, foremost coitus, than criticism generally assumes; yet, it also points to how romance's engagement with coitus is curiously, and persistently, implicit. I then turn to sex scenes in different romances, which corroborate the idea that coitus is paradoxically present in its absence. For rather than representing explicit sex, romance narrators – such as Chrétien's – have a tendency to insist, often dramatically and self-consciously, on what they cannot or will not say. One term best embodies romance's contradictory attitude towards sex: li sorplus, ‘the rest’. Frequently figuring in sex scenes, this term appears to reflect a desire not to spell out what is happening; there is hugging, kissing and then ‘the rest’. With Huchet, I shall argue, though, that the sorplus is also a profound statement that indicates the space of that which cannot be expressed; the rhetoric of romance does not so much exclude sex as it includes its exclusion, often via quite conspicuous narratorial interventions. The final section of this essay theorizes why romance relates so peculiarly to sex. I suggest that heterosexual sex occupies a paradoxical space in medieval French verse romance, because it has a paradoxical relationship to patriarchy.
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