Eternal Flame: State Formation, Deviant Architecture, and the Monumentality of Same-Sex Eroticism in the Roman d'Eneas

This essay will examine allegories of state formation in the Roman d’Eneas (c. 1160–65), an anonymous Anglo-Norman “translation” [translatio] of Virgil’s Aeneid, one of the earliest examples of vernacular romance, and a precursor to the modern novel.1 I will show that the Eneas uses rhetorical, narrative, and allegorical strategies to consolidate power in an incorporated, patriarchal, and dynastic model of the state and, as its corollary, a procreative, phallocentric, and heteronormative sexual regime.2 The allegorical production of the polity suggests, on the one hand, a coherent system of rigidly constructed, multiply articulated levels of meaning in which timeless truths of political order are predicated through hypostatized metaphors. But on the other hand, the polysemic configuration of allegorical meaning might be understood to repudiate absolute structure and point instead to a multiplicity of possible semantic and phantasmic investments and to the potential disruption of metaphors of power through an anarchic or disordered production of political and sexual meaning “otherwise.”3 Gordon Teskey identifies in the etymology of allegory “an oscillating movement” between a negative, intolerable otherness (“the chaotic otherness of the world,” or discursive difference generally) and a positive, transcendent otherness (the supernal realm of unchanging essences). He suggests that intolerable otherness is not subsumed to the transcendent perfection of essences in allegory (as