By : Dr. EARL ANDERSON

"The Healing of Sir Urry," in Malory's Morte Darthur, is the story of a knight of Hungary who travels about Europe as a knight errant, until he fights in a tournament in Spain against Sir Alpheus, whom he kills, but who gives him seven wounds. Alpheus' mother, a sorceress, curses Urry's wounds such that they would never be healed unless the best knight in the world "searched" them. Urry travels from one court to another in search of the best knight, laid up in a horse-drawn litter and accompanied by his mother and sister. Finally he comes to Arthur's court, and Arthur commands all the knights in his court, starting with himself, to search Urry's wounds--without success. Just when Urry and his mother and sister prepare to depart the court, Lancelot arrives on the scene, and Arthur commands him to search Urry's wounds as the others did. He obeys under protest, and Urry's wounds are healed. All the knights in the court respond to this miracle by praising God and the Virgin Mary, but Lancelot weeps "as if he was a child who had been beaten."

My starting point is a desire to understand why, after his success in healing Sir Urry, "ever sir Launcelote wepte, as he had bene a chylde that had bene beatyn" (Malory 1152.35-36). Malory critics have regarded this sentence as the epitome of the story of Sir Urry, but they have expressed diverse views about its meaning. Is his weeping a sign of humility, as P. E. Tucker suggested? Is it a sign of penitence and conversion, leading him to abjure his adultery with Guenevere (Bradstock 212-13)? Is it a sign that Lancelot had already given up his affair with Guenevere at an earlier time, and is no longer to be considered as an adulterous knight (Kennedy 439-41)? Does he weep because he recognizes his own unworthiness of this miracle (Lewis 20; Lambert 64-65), "overwhelmed that he had been graced beyond what he considers to be his merit" (Kelly 178)? Or because he recognizes the gap between what he is and what he could have been were it not for "his instability and earthly love" (Riess 172)? Is Lancelot's weeping a metafictional sign, through which Malory expresses his "own sadness that this, his favorite hero's greatest adventure, must also be his last" (Benson 229)? Do Lancelot's tears in this way "foreshadow all the weeping that will accompany the destruction of the fellowship" in the tragic stories that follow (Whitaker 50)? Or should we conclude that "much about this scene remains mysterious, such as the reason for [Lancelot's] tears" (Archibald and Edwards 229)? Most critics have approached Lancelot's weeping as a sign, attributing a referent to it, or a meaning that brings thematic closure to the story, but I propose to approach it as a signifier which has no explicable "meaning" but which points to another signifier in a (potentially open-ended) chain of signifiers that are motivated by (inaccessible) knowledge in the Unconscious. In other words, I propose a psychoanalytic approach in the manner of Jacques Lacan.

This distinction between sign and signifier is an arbitrary one that is based upon a technical use of the word signifier. When Saussure introduced signe, signifié and signifiant into linguistic discourse, he adapted these terms to his own technical needs: by signe he meant a "linguistic sign" as a totality consisting of two parts, viz. a concept (signifié) and an "acoustic image" (signifiant), such that a linguistic signe is conceived as a two-part entity, consisting of a signifié or concept, and a signifiant or phonetic essence (Saussure 97-100). "Le signifiant [which Saussure had called "image acoustique" in the 1907 and 1908-1909 versions of the Cours] et le signifié sont les deux éléments composant le signe. Le signifiant est auditif, le signifié conceptuel" (Godel 276). Lacan, borrowing Saussure's terms, is no less arbitrary in reconstructing their meanings to suit his technical needs. I doubt that any language lexicalizes the distinction between sign and signifier in the Lacanian sense that I am invoking here as the first principle in the semiotic criticism of a literary text. This should come as no surprise: by maintaining a semantic distinction between sign and signifier, we hope to be able to speak of the "meaning" of a literary text in terms of the relation between that text and unconscious knowledge. It would be unreasonable to expect any language to lexicalize such a concept as this, but no more so than to expect a logical answer to the question, "What is the 'meaning' of a literary text?" if we understand the term 'meaning' in its linguistic sense, as a proposition that would take the form, in English, "Subject + Verb + Complement." Some critical approaches to literature have evaded this intractable problem by speaking of 'themes' or 'topics', thereby substituting labels for 'meanings'. Others have argued that literary texts do not have 'meanings'. I would like to propose a middle way between these extremes: a literary text presents a chain of signifiers that points to knowledge that exists in the Unconscious. This knowledge cannot be articulated because it is unconscious knowledge, but we know that it exists because the chain of signifiers point to it.

I begin with seven observations about the sentence itself:

The setting is a field outside Carlyle, where King Arthur and 110 of his knights have gathered around Sir Urry, his mother, his sister Fyleloly, and their page. Sir Urry has been carried to the scene in a horse-drawn litter, for he has been paralyzed with seven continuously-bleeding wounds that he had received in a tournament in Spain seven years earlier. In this field, Urry is laid prostrate on the ground, and Arthur and his knights attempt to heal his wounds by means of a "searching" ritual, but without success. They give up on this ritual, and help Urry back into his litter, but "as they stood and spake of many thyngis, there one aspyed sir Launcelot that com rydynge towarde them" (1151.1-2), and Arthur silences the company: "'Pees', seyde the kynge, 'lat no man say nothyng untylle he be com to us'" (1151.4-5). By Arthur's command, Lancelot kneels beside Urry and searches the wounds. At his touch, they bleed at first, then become whole. While Arthur and his knights kneel in prayer, giving thanks to God and the Virgin Mary, Lancelot weeps continuously, as if he had been a child who had been beaten.

A tableau, in aesthetic work, is a manifestation of a primal scene. In Freud's analysis, a primal scene is a picture that is derived from some momentous event that a person experienced in early childhood, often combined with the misunderstandings of a young child. He may have observed or overheard his parents having sexual intercourse, or he may have been sexualized or traumatized in some way, or felt threatened by some monstrous creature. One of Freud's patients, Sergei Pankejev, the "Wolf-Man," reported a recurring dream in which he looks out his window to see a barren walnut tree upon which are perched six or seven white wolves looking into his bedroom. For a period of four years, much of Freud's analytical work was concerned with the construction of this recurring scene; one contributing factor, for instance, was that when he was a young child, Sergei's grandfather had told him a story about a tailor and a wolf whose tail had been cut off, and he knew about wolves from other fairy tales. While on a visit to a farm, he may have encountered sheepdogs and mistaken them for wolves. Freud concluded that at a very young age, perhaps when he was a year and a half old, Sergei had witnessed his father having coitus a tergo with his mother. His parents' nightclothes perhaps suggested the appearance of wolves; the recurring dream, as a primal scene, was the device whereby Sergei had been able to suppress the memory of this childhood event. The original event is forgotten, while the primal scene remains as a recurring image, often framed in some way, as by a window or door or corridor. As time goes by, the subject, in dreamwork, attempts to make sense of the primal scene by supplying it with a narrative. This narrative changes over time, such that he returns, compulsively, to the primal scene, each time by means of a slightly different narrative route, while the primal scene itself continues to signify an originary, personality-shaping moment during his infancy.

In the literature of psychoanalysis, the Wolf-Man's recurring dream has become emblematic of the primal scene, but Freud's modernist optimism, his confidence that he could reconstruct the childhood event that gave rise to the primal scene, must give way to skepticism and to the postmodernist conclusion that the primal scene is a signifier that points to unrecoverable knowledge in the unconscious. Recalling his analytical experiences with Freud sixty years later, in 1974, Pankejev stated that he never did recall witnessing his parents in coitus, although Freud had assured him that the recollection of this would come. Then, too, Pankejev had his own theory about the cause of his neurosis. When he was four years old, he was seduced by his sister; as an adult, he could not form romantic relationships with women of his social class because these represented, for him, a symbolic return to the incestuous acts he had performed with his sister (Obholzer 36-38). Freud acknowledged that the childhood seduction of Sergei was not a fantasy, but an actual event (Freud 17:21) whose memory had not been suppressed, and whose connection with Sergei's recurring dream, if there was any, is unknown. However this may be, the origin of Pankejev's neurosis remains a mystery: Masson (xix) claims to have seen some unpublished notes that were made in 1926 by Freud's disciple, Ruth Mack Brunswick, who, at Freud's request, had treated Pankejev for a psychotic episode; Masson asserts that according to these notes, Pankejev told her that as a child he had been raped by a male relative, and that Freud was unaware of this. These disclosures, however reliable or unreliable they may be, reveal that neither the origins of Pankejev's neurosis, nor the sources of his recurring wolf-dream, can ever be known. These competing narratives, all of which might be true, or none, do not leave the primal scene without foundation, but they do imply that Freud's narrow, determinate construction or the primal scene must give way to one that is broader in construction and indeterminate in meaning.

Freud constructed the primal scene in the narrow context of psychoanalysis, as a child's observation of coitus, which is suppressed and forgotten, but re-emerges at a later time, perhaps in the form of a haunting, traumatizing dream, symptomatic of some disorder in the patient's sexual development. In Primal Scenes, Ned Lukacher has demonstrated that primal scenes vary in their subject matter and play a role in a broad range of contexts; indeed, in any sort of context that gives rise to "the necessity, indeed the compulsion, to construct alternative scenes in those instances where memory has become unreliable or somehow suspicious" (Lukacher 330).

A tableau can be interpreted as a sign within a closed system, as Freud does, or, alternatively, as a signifier, the first in an open-ended chain of signifiers. If we interpret the tableau as a sign, with a referent, we will construct for it a primal scene that satisfied the requirements of a predetermined formula, just like Freud does when he asserts that Pankejev's wolf-dream had its origin in a childhood observation of parental coitus, which he thought was the cause of Pankejev's subsequent sexual and psychological disorders. But this referential approach, unambiguous though it seemed to Freud, turns out to be wrong, for the events of Pankejev's childhood, eventful of sexual episodes as they may have been, did not include observation of parental coitus. Put another way, Freud's interpretation of the primal scene was doomed to ambiguity and failure from the start, because it presupposed a referential theory of meaning based upon a binary relationship between sign and referent. What is more, Freud short-circuited further analysis of the wolf-dream, closing off the possibility of discovering alternative meanings, over the patient's objections, for Pankejev never believed Freud's interpretation of the wolf-dream as a sign of parental coitus (Figure 1). For Freud, the primal scene to which we are driven to return is "static, inorganic, and inanimate"; for Lacan it is "dynamic and even chaotic in order to construct a freedom grounded on that chaos" (Garber 55). A tableau, interpreted in this postmodern perspective, indicates the existence of a primal scene that is shrouded in the mystery of the unconscious, whose contents are only glimpsed at and whose meaning is disclosed only partially during repeated, compulsive returns to the tableau.

At this point, I digress from Malory's tale of Sir Urry in order to demonstrate the general usefulness of the distinction between two approaches to signification, viz., (1) the closed, referential interpretation of details as signs, or, alternatively, (2) the open-ended interpretation of them as signifiers in a signifying chain. I will illustrate the point using examples from two contemporary detective novels, a genre that is à propos because a serious detective story must have semiotics as its central theme, since a clue is a special case of a sign and the detective must be able to differentiate between true clues and false ones, or between signs and pseudosigns. Thus in Peter Høeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow, the distinction between signs and signifiers is apparent in the first "detective" scene, after the death of the six-year-old Inuit boy Isaiah, when Smilla observes the police detective, "Toenail," observing Isaiah's tracks in the snow of the roof of the seven-story warehouse from which Isaiah had fallen. Toenail interprets the tracks in the snow as a sign, with a referent, meaning that Isaiah must have been playing on the roof and accidentally fell to his death. Besides, Isaiah's mother, Juliane, was a drunk; therefore Isaiah must have been playing on the roof. But Smilla rejects Juliana's alcoholism as a false clue, a pseudosign, and furthermore, she knows that Isaiah suffered from a phobia of heights, and wonders what might have caused Isaiah to go up to the warehouse roof in the first place. For Smilla, Isaiah's tracks in the snow constitute the first in a trail of clues: Isaiah's phobia for heights, their contour as acceleration tracks, the model of a Cryolite Corporation ship in Isaiah's bedroom, the cassette tape in his hidden cigar box of mementos, and so on. Interpreted referentially as a sign, Isaiah's footprints point to a wrong conclusion (just like the Skeptics said they would), one that illustrates the "bungling police" convention in detective fiction. Interpreted as a signifier, Isaiah's footprints point to a chain of signifiers that indicate the existence of a deep mystery (just as, in psychoanalysis, the Unconscious is a mystery). Høeg bases these contrasting approaches to signification, initially, on the observation of footprints, emblematic clues in the genre of detective fiction, in much the same way as Daniel Defoe isolates a single footprint in the sand as an emblematic sign in Robinson Crusoe (White). Only at the end of the novel is the solution to the mystery revealed to be a vast conspiracy that turns virtually every detail of Smilla's daily life into something sinister, such that, on reading thee novel a second time, each detail of her life can be read as a signifier that points to the threat of a worldwide catastrophe that could end all human life, a danger parallel to the extinction of the dinosaurs in prehistoric times. The object of this conspiracy is the possession of a meteorite buried in the ice on Gela Alta, a primitive "living" rock from outer space that seems to combine the properties of mineral and organic matter, a promise to unlock the secret of life, while, at the same time, in its warm environment, it nurtures the evolutionary adaptation of a parasitic Arctic worm that will quickly destroy all human and animal life once it is released from the glacial confines of Greenland. Notwithstanding this threat, possession of the meteorite represents the promise of scientific glory and a Nobel prize to Professor Johannes Loyen, and of wealth to his co-conspirators, such that the meteorite is the "phallus," the emblem of patriarchal authority and power, in Smilla's Sense of Snow, just like the stolen letter is the phallus in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter" (Lacan, Seminar II, 1991:191-205), and just like the stolen Greek book is the phallus in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.

Earlier in this essay, I referred to Lancelot as the transcendent Ideal Knower in an intensional collective epistemology. I return to that aspect of Lancelot's role in Malory's text, only to modify it. To call Lancelot the transcendent Knower is to compare him to the ideal philosopher in Plato's allegory of the cave, but it would be more accurate to compare him, instead, to Socrates in Plato's Symposium. In the allegory of the cave (Republic book 7, 514-17), Plato represents Socrates as imagining a cave in which human beings are kept prisoner, chained with their backs to the entrance, such that they can see only the wall of the cave. Above and behind them a fire is blazing. An elevated pathway stands between them and the fire. Built along the pathway is a low wall "like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets." Men pass along the wall carrying vessels, statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and other materials. The prisoners can see only their shadows on the back wall of the cave, and the shadows of the vessels and statues and figures in the marionette show. When they converse with each other, they give names to these shadows. Truth, in this prison-cave of language, is composed of the shadows of images, two removes from reality.

Such is the common knowledge of humanity, but Socrates imagines one of the prisoners, only one, the philosopher as transcendent Knower, "liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light," gradually learning that what he saw before was an illusion, now that his eye is turned toward reality. This Ideal Knower is then forced to climb out of the cave into the upper world:

Socrates' Ideal Knower is particular to intensional collective epistemologies. In the other modalities, knowledge consists in the collective observations of the totality of observers, no one of whom is a consummate knower and no one of whom is free from the possibility of error. Malory shares with Plato the possibility of a transcendent Ideal Knower, for Malory's Tale of Sir Urry, like Plato's allegory of the cave, belongs to the intensional collective modality. Lancelot's status as unique Healer accords well with Plato's unique Ideal Knower, but Lancelot's continuous weeping requires that we search elsewhere for the meaning of Lancelot's role.

At the moment of Urry's healing, a relationship develops between him and Lancelot, between patient and healer, or analysand and analyst, that goes beyond the Lacanian triangle of healing by linking catharsis with "transference." By "catharsis" we mean "purgation of pent-up emotions," following Aristotle's Poetics, but catharsis is more than the result of a psychic laxative; it is a cutting off from the symptom, or a break from the symptom that had caused the emotions to be pent up (Schneiderman 219), emotions of grief and sorrow at the loss of jouissance. These emotions that were Urry's, at the moment of empathic healing, are transferred to Lancelot and released through Lancelot's continuous weeping. This empathic "transference" is a miracle, even as (or especially as) an allegory of psychoanalysis, for the "talking cure" is a conversation between two strangers, in which the analyst, the healer, wants to remain a stranger, wants to keep the relationship professional in accord with the ethics of the profession, wants to avoid transference, while the analysand, the patient, wants the healer's sympathy, friendship, and love.

But for Lacan, transference is to be interpreted not in affective terms, but in symbolic ones. Transference occurs when the patient, the analysand, assumes that the analyst has special knowledge, such that when the analysand recalls a dream or a childhood event or even when he engages in a rambling free-association discourse, the analyst can read his words as signs of unconscious knowledge, knowledge that even the analysand is unaware of. (The analyst, of course, has no such knowledge, for knowledge in the Unconscious is inaccessible.) Transference occurs, then, when the analysand identifies the analyst as the "subject [who is] supposed to know" (sujet supposé savoir), thereby establishing a dangerous but necessary liaison that is the basis of psychoanalysis. The patient, the analysand, must initiate transference, and the analyst must respond with what Socrates would call temperance, because transference does have collateral affective consequences, even though the essence of transference is the patient's relation to the analyst as the "subject supposed to know."

Transference is allegorized in the relationship between Alcibiades and Socrates in Plato's Symposium, where, during a Dionysian wine-drinking party to celebrate Agathon's victory in the tragedies, four of his closest friends engage in an all-too-solemn but sometimes ridiculous discourse about the nature of love. Alcibiades arrives late on the scene, a party-crasher, seats himself in between Agathon and Socrates, and in a drunken burlesque of Athenian man-boy love, describes his repeated attempts to seduce Socrates in a bogus wrestling match in the palaestra and in private dinners, even taking him to his bed on one occasion: in a build-up of comic momentum, each attempt at seduction is more brazen and absurd than the previous one. Alcibiades improvises this mock-confession of an unlikely role-reversal, in which he plays the part of a beautiful younger man who pursues the love of a old Socrates, whose appearance he likens to a satyr, or to a caricaturized bust of the flute-playing god Silenus, he (Alcibiades) driven to absurd love-madness by what he calls "the pang of philosophy, which will make a man say or do anything," longs for wisdom as if driven by a serpent's sting; discloses this longing only to fellow-sufferers, for no ordinary person would understand it; and although Socrates may look like a satyr, he believes that Socrates possesses the wisdom that he desires. Underlying Alcibiades' hilarious parody of man-boy love conventions, then, is a critical observation that Lacan was first to grasp, that for Alcibiades, Socrates is the sujet supposé savoir, the "subject supposed to know," even though, as we realize from Plato's Apology, Socrates' only wisdom consisted in his awareness that he did not really know anything. (This is irony in the classic Aristotelian sense; not humility.) Once we understand this, I think that we can understand the role of transference in Malory's Tale of Sir Urry, by comparing the relationship of Alcibiades and Socrates with that of Urry and Lancelot. When Lancelot first draws near Sir Urry, and Urry says, "For methynkis ever sytthyn ye cam here my woundis grevyth me nat so much as they did" (1152.10-11), he attributes a miraculous healing power to Lancelot, and Lancelot becomes, for him, the sujet supposé savoir, even though Lancelot knows that he possesses no such marvelous powers, just as Socrates possess none of the wisdom that Alcibiades attributes to him, and just as the analyst has no more knowledge of the Unconscious than the patient does. Urry's assertion, in which he defines Lancelot as the sujet supposé savoir, is the first assertive thing that he does in the story, his first movement upward from paralysis, this initiation of transference which is the condition of his healing while, at the same time, based upon an illusion.

Afterward, a return to the patriarchal order.

At the beginning of this paper, I noted my dissatisfaction with earlier critics who had interpreted the weeping of Lancelot as a "sign," that is to say, a symbol of Lancelot's humility or unworthiness, or a displaced symbol of Malory's own regret in having to bring Lancelot's story to its tragic conclusion. The source of my dissatisfaction is just that these interpretations seem to me to be attempts to bring thematic closure to the story, whereas it seems to me that Lancelot's weeping is symptomatic of an open wound, such that thematic closure is impossible; Lancelot's weeping points to an open-ended chain of signifiers that indicate the existence of knowledge that is inaccessible to us and that cannot be articulated by us.

Malory does achieve closure for the story, but he does so by artificial means of a narrative frame, or, I should say, by two artificially imposed frames: a narrative frame and a metafictional frame. The narrative frame is a return to the patriarchal order. That very day, Urry felt whole enough to joust in a tournament, and won the prize, a diamond, "for there was none of them but he overthrew and pulled down a thirty knight" (1153.18-19). It was jousting à plaisance; "there justed none of the daungerous knyghtes" (1153.16-17), jouissance kept in check by the courtliness of the court. Urry and Lavayne (the brother of Elayne, the fair maid of Ascolat) are paired as the two best knights in this tournament, Urry joins Lavayne as a companion in knight-errantry and a loyal follower of Lancelot, both are admitted to the fellowship of the Round Table, Lavayne marries Urry's sister Fyleloly, and King Arthur gives them each a barony of lands. The social bonds of marriage, companionage, fellowship, and feudalism thus frame this story of utopian masochism, in simultaneous expression of jouissance and its interdiction.

The metafictional frame is Malory's paratext. Malory as author says that the story of Sir Urry is one of Lancelot's adventures during a twelve-month period when he was nicknamed "le Shyvalere de Charyot" (1154.3). There were many stories from this period, among them "more than forty batayles" (1154.11), but Malory will tell only this one: "bycause I have loste the very mater of Chevalere de Charyot I departe frome the tale of sir Launcelot" (1154.12-13). We are at a loss, too, for at this point the images of Lancelot and Malory both disappear into the dark tarn of knowledge that we know exists but that is inaccessible to us. We do achieve closure, though, at the narrative level and at the metafictional level, but not at the semiotic level, where Lancelot's prolonged weeping continues to seem problematic and strange.