Desire by Gender and Genre in Trouvère Song 1843841649, 9781843841647

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements vii
Abbreviations ix
Introduction: A Kaleidoscope of différance 1
1. The Song System I 23
An Unstable Hierarchy: The Unmarked Masculine
2. The Song System II 42
The Ignoble Words of Eve: Femininity in the System
3. Desire by Gender and Genre I 69
Low Lusts and High Desires: 'Pastourelle' and 'Chanson'
4. Desire by Gender and Genre II 96
Ignoble Desires of the Triumphalist 'Chanson d’Ami'
5. Chronotopes of Desire I 115
Case-Study of a 'Malmariée': Feminine Space-Times
6. Chronotopes of Desire II 141
The Contained and Containing Heart: Masculine Space-Times
7. Desiring Differently 166
The 'Chanson' in the Feminine Voice
Afterthoughts 204
''[T]hat’s not it' and 'that’s still not it''
Bibliography 211
Index 229

Citation preview

Gallica Volume 10

DESIRE BY GENDER AND GENRE IN TROUVÈRE SONG This study brings the songs of the trouvères to an encounter with Lacanian psychoanalytic theories of signification, sexual difference and unconscious desire. In trouvère song desire functions as a means of generic and ‘genderic’ differentiation. The trouvères distinguished between sexual need or lust and fin ’amors, the latter usually confined to the masculine voice in high style. Less exalted persons, in whose company women were already included, appear as incapable of desire in the fin ’amors register. Critics have treated the issue of desire as represented in the courtly chanson but, because scholarship has followed the trouvères’ distinction between desire and lust, discussion of desire has been limited to songs in the courtly register rather than across the system of genres. There has been, therefore, no exhaustive examination of the links between desire and genre, although the gendering of desire has now received some attention. Desire in Lacan’s sense, that is unconscious desire, is present in all genres and voices, however. All lyric subjects make demands but these demands are subverted by hidden desires which can only be inferred. Desire is differently hidden in different genres, however, and must be uncovered by different means. This book unearths the unspoken desires of trouvère song by an attention to the characteristic means by which subjects subvert their demands in different genres. HELEN DELL is a research fellow in Literary Studies in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Australia.

Gallica ISSN 1749–091X

General Editor: Sarah Kay

Gallica aims to provide a forum for the best current work in medieval French studies. Literary studies are particularly welcome and preference is given to works written in English, although publication in French is not excluded. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the editor, or to the publisher, at the addresses given below; all submissions receive prompt and informed consideration. Professor Sarah Kay, Department of French and Italian, Princeton University, 303 East Pyne, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA The Managing Editor, Gallica, Boydell & Brewer Ltd., PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK

Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of this volume

DESIRE BY GENDER AND GENRE IN TROUVÈRE SONG

Helen Dell

D. S. BREWER

© Helen Dell 2008 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Helen Dell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published 2008 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge

ISBN 978–1–84384–164–7

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn

CONTENTS Acknowledgements

vii

Abbreviations

ix

Introduction: A Kaleidoscope of différance

1

1. The Song System I An Unstable Hierarchy: The Unmarked Masculine

23

2. The Song System II The Ignoble Words of Eve: Femininity in the System

42

3. Desire by Gender and Genre I Low Lusts and High Desires: Pastourelle and Chanson

69

4. Desire by Gender and Genre II Ignoble Desires of the Triumphalist Chanson d’Ami

96

5. Chronotopes of Desire I Case-Study of a Malmariée: Feminine Space-Times

115

6. Chronotopes of Desire II The Contained and Containing Heart: Masculine Space-Times

141

7. Desiring Differently The Chanson in the Feminine Voice

166

Afterthoughts ‘ “[T]hat’s not it” and “that’s still not it” ’

204

Bibliography

211

Index

229

Dedicated to the memory of my father, Jack Lynch

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many people have assisted me in bringing this book to the light of day. The members of the Freudian School of Melbourne Seminar have given me (and continue to give me) invaluable help every Wednesday as we interrogate the work of that enigmatic man, Jacques Lacan. I am also very grateful to members of the Encore reading seminar, in particular its convenor Linda Clifton, for the difficult pleasure we shared of grappling with Lacan’s understanding of feminine sexuality. On the medieval side I should like to express my gratitude to the members of the Round Table, a medieval discussion group in the English department of Melbourne University (now Literary Studies in the School of Culture and Communication), where I was able to try out new ideas in a kindly but challenging environment. I thank them too for expanding the range of my medieval education into so many new areas. Stephanie Trigg comes in for special thanks as the convenor, and Ann Sadedin and Kathy Troup as the secretaries of this admirable group. I would also like to thank Ann Sadedin and Helen Hickey for our wonderful lunch discussions which helped and encouraged me more than I can say. And my gratitude to Helen again for helping out in a variety of ways. Although I have usually made my own translations of the songs, in particular those presented in full, I have often had access to those of others and my own translations frequently owe a debt to theirs. A number of people were kind enough to give me drafts of as yet unpublished material and I am very grateful for this opportunity: John Frow for Genre, now published as Genre. London and New York: Routledge, 2005; Simon Gaunt for ‘ “Le cœur a ses raisons …”: Guillem de Cabestanh et l’évolution du thème du coeur mangé’, now published in Chapter 3 of Martyrs to Love: Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature. Oxford: OUP, 2006; Joan Tasker Grimbert for ‘Songs by Women and Women’s Songs: How Useful is the Concept of Register?’, now published in Altmann and Carroll, 117–24; and Wendy Pfeffer for ‘Constant Sorrow: Emotions and the Women Trouvères’, now published in The Representation of Women’s Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Ed. Lisa Perfetti. Gainesville: U of Florida P., 2005. I thank Ann Sadedin, Joel Windle and Diane Raggatt for their help and advice with modern French; Anne Trindade, Adina Hamilton and again Ann Sadedin for advice on my Old French translations; Janice Pinder who started me off with Old French. Ann Sadedin also provided invaluable information on electronic databases and new book lists. I am thankful to many more in the English department for their help and support in a variety of ways. In particular, Brett Farmer read a

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late draft and made many valuable suggestions. Most of all I would like to thank Stephanie Trigg, who provided me so generously with her time, her enthusiasm, her encouragement and her rigorous and challenging intelligence. Thanks too to Bernard Muir and to Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay for their kind encouragement to publish my work and helpful suggestions. And thanks again to the School of Culture and Communication for generously supporting my research by granting me a fellowship in the department. This project has been carried out on many fronts. I offer my heartfelt thanks to all those people who have sung and played trouvère and other medieval musics with me in three successive ensembles: Tre fontane, Carnevale Medieval Music Ensemble and now, Troveresse; there are few greater pleasures. Thanks go to my family, young and old. My brother, Andrew Lynch, has been, as ever, a source of support and useful knowledge, and my sister, Mary McKenzie, has helped me enormously by sharing with me her own experience. I thank my adult children and my grandchildren, simply for the blessing of their presence in my life. I come last to my dear partner, Peter Gunn, whom I thank for reading my draft with a friendly but critical eye and for our many conversations on the topic of Lacan. Mostly I thank him for his love and his unfailing support. Chapter 3 of this book develops ideas previously published as ‘Desire and Generic Differentiation in Trouvère Song’ in Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies 22, 1 (2005) (INC). I am very grateful to the editor for permission to re-use this material. Publication of this work was generously assisted by a publication grant from the University of Melbourne.

Author’s Note My medieval ensemble Troveresse, will be making a recording of some of the songs included in this book. Please consult our website, http://www.myspace.com/troveresse, for further information.

ABBREVIATIONS AND USE OF SOURCES

Bibliographic data Different editors indicate manuscript pagination differently. For instance, ‘Au cuer les ai, les jolis malz’ is indicated in Rosenberg and Tischler as Ms. I 4: 6 and in Doss-Quinby et al. as I 198v–199r (208v–209r). In my transcriptions of the songs I have given the indication offered in the edition I have used as the basis for my translation, listed as ‘text’ in the bibliographic data above the song. B B rond. G rond. L MW RS

Boogaard, Rondeaux et refrains (refrain) Boogaard, Rondeaux et refrains (rondeau) Gennrich, Rondeaux, Virelais und Balladen, 2 vols. Linker, A Bibliography of Old French Lyrics Mölk and Wolfzettel, Répertoirem métrique de la poésie lyrique française des origines à 1350, 2 vols. Raynaud, G./Spanke, Hans. G. Raynauds Bibliographie des altfranzosischen Liedes neu bearbeitet und erganzt von Hans Spanke

Manuscripts cited A B C F K I M O R S T U V W Z a

Arras, Bibliothèque Municipale, ms. 657 Bern, Stadtbibliothek, ms. 231 Bern, Stadtbibliothek, ms. 389 London, British Museum, Egerton ms. 274 Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, ms. 5198 Oxford, Bodleian, ms. Douce 308 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, ms. fr. 844 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, ms. fr. 846 Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, ms. fr. 1591 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, ms. fr. 12581 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, ms. fr. 12615 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, ms. fr. 20050 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, ms. fr. 24406 Paris, Bibliothéque Nationale, ms. fr. 25566 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, ms. fr. 24406 Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Regina 1490

x f k u Vat. Reg. 1543

ABBREVIATIONS AND USE OF SOURCES

Montpellier, Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire, Section Médecine, 236 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, ms. fr. 12786 Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Regina 172 Rome, Vatican Regina, lat. 154

Secondary sources I have distinguished in the body of the work between the English and French versions of Lacan’s Écrits. The English translation (Écrits: A Selection) is abbreviated as Écrits, the full French publication, rarely used, by Éc. followed by the volume number. Any emphasis marked in quoted material is present in the original unless indicated otherwise excepting quotations from the songs.

INTRODUCTION ‘What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown’ (Marcel Proust, v.xii, 241).

The aim of this book is to explore the gendering of desire in the songs of the trouvères, with the accent in particular on feminine desire. It will consider desire as an aspect of register and genre in the light of the Saussurian understanding that signification is established through difference. While this understanding is often acknowledged, it is difficult to follow into practice. Positivity has a way of creeping back; the semantic emptiness of terms on their own – the lack in the Other of language – is a difficult matter to embrace. This project constitutes an attempt to follow seriously the logic of signification as difference. A path from Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics could take many directions. I have chosen to read the songs in connection with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory because of the way this theory responds to issues raised in the songs of signification, sexual difference and unconscious desire. The Trouvères and Desire Desire and the desiring subject in trouvère song are constituted within a system of generic differentiation. Desire is an effect of the organization of a text’s rhetoric, as Simon Gaunt has observed (‘Discourse Desired’).1 ‘System’ is not used here to suggest a closed set with fixed meanings but, as Rowe expresses it, ‘a set of relations among elements shaped by a historical situation’ (25). What I am pursuing is the idea of a structure capable of innumerable transformations although this may not always be evident to those who participate in it.2 The slippage might be hidden. In the trouvère 1 Gaunt is discussing different transmissions of a ‘single’ composition – which is anything but single – rather than the effects of generic differentiation, but the point holds. 2 Cf. Claude Levi Strauss: ‘[T]he structure exhibits the characteristics of a system. It is made up of several elements, none of which can undergo a change without effecting changes in all the other elements’ (Structural Anthropology 279).

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system of genres, constant experimentation results in an endless process of modification. Genres appear, develop, combine, disappear, and these changes set up chain reactions in signification across the system but the traces of this history may be eclipsed. The kind of desire presented in a song is one of the ways by which genres are differentiated. Trouvère desire speaks with many voices and this generic variety is one of the great strengths of the corpus. The discourse of the lusty knight who rides off lightheartedly in search of a shepherdess, for instance, is clearly distinguished from that of the stricken lover of the courtly chanson. Here is strophe 2 of the pastourelle ‘Dales Loncpre u boskel’: Je le salu au plus bel que jou poi raisnier puis li dounai mon chapel pour moi acointier. Quant jou vi sa mamelete ki lieve sa cotelete, mes bras li tendi si le trais vers mi, et la bele tout ensi enprint a canter: Robin cui je doi amer, tu pues bien trop demourer.

I greeted her as well as I could, then I gave her my garland to introduce myself. When I saw her little breasts lifting up her tunic I held out my arms to her and drew her towards me and the pretty one began at once to sing: Robin whom I should love, you can delay far too long. (Paden, Medieval Pastourelle I, 176–7)

Here, on the other hand, is a sample of the chanson lover’s endless, impeccably articulated complaint, in strophe 2 from ‘Pour mal temps ne por gelee’ attributed to Gace Brulé. Here love is a matter of life and death: Quant primes l’oi esgardee, tant la vi bele et plaisant que je l’ai des lors amee et amerai mon vivant. Ma mort pris en resgardant: se s’amors ne m’est donnee, Deus! mar la virent mi hueil. Je l’aing plus [que je ne sueil, Mes pou la voi, si m’en dueil].

When first I looked at her I found her so beautiful and agreeable that I have loved her ever since and will love her for the rest of my life. My death took hold of me when I looked at her: if her love isn’t for me, God! In an evil hour I saw her. I love her more than ever but little I see her, and it saddens me. (Rosenberg and Danon 168–9).

Gender has generic implications and feminine desire appears as registrally distinct from masculine. The trouvères distinguish between lust or sexual need on the one hand and fin’amor on the other: something infinitely

INTRODUCTION

3

more refined and meritorious. This exalted condition is usually confined to the masculine voice in high style. Less exalted persons, in whose company women are already implicitly included, are presented as incapable of desire in the fin’amor register. Often they appear as childish, uneducated, wayward, irrational and wild, as in this motet text: ‘Osteis lou moi’: Osteis lou moi, l’anelet dou doi! Avoir pas vilains ne me doit, car, bien sai, cous en seroit s’avocke moi longement estoit; departir m’an vuel orandroit, je ne suix pas marïee a droit.

Take it off me, the ring on my finger! No churl should have me, because, well I know, he would become a cuckold if he tarried long with me; I want to leave him this minute, I am not married rightly. (Doss-Quinby et al. 249).

Lacan too distinguishes between need and desire. He suggests also that desire is different depending on which side of the sexual divide one lines up. But, for Lacan, no-one subjected to the signifier is exempt from desire. Critical attention to desire in the trouvère corpus as an aspect of generic differentiation is rare because an approach to the question across the system of genres is equally rare.3 Many critics have treated the issue of desire as it is represented within the courtly chanson of the trouvères, the issue of fin’amor.4 Many more have examined desire in its southern counterpart, the canso of the troubadours.5 Questions of fin’amor or ‘courtly love’ in the

3 In L’amour discourtois Jean-Charles Huchet leaves open a way to examine desire in the non-courtly genres although his discussion remains within the courtly register. Here he distinguishes between desire, addressed to la dame, and jouissance, addressed to ‘l’autre-femme’: ‘She whom I enjoy (l’autre-femme) is not she whom I desire (la Dame)’ (49). He examines the dialectic which pits desire and jouissance against each other in the different relations implicit in the canso but he does not consider the desire at work in the low styles which speak jouissance but deny desire, such as the pastourelle where ‘l’autre femme’ turns up as the shepherdess or in the chanson de femme, where she is the lyric ‘I’. Other scholars have considered the dialectic between chanson and pastourelle. See, for instance, Calin, ‘Contre la femme’ and Zink, Pastourelle. 4 A list of scholars interested in fin’amor in the North includes such names as Roger Boase (The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love), Jacques Lemaire (Eros dans la littérature française), and D. W. Robertson Jr. (‘Concept’, and Chaucer, especially Ch. 5). There are also the more formalist studies of Bec (Lyrique française) and Zumthor (Medieval Poetics and ‘Circularity’). 5 John Haines gives a ratio of over double: ‘[W]ell over twice as many studies in the twentieth century were devoted to troubadours (198) than to trouvères (75)’ (Eight Centuries 210). For troubadour studies on fin’amor, see, for instance, A. J. Denomy (‘Fin’amors’), René Nelli (L’Erotique des troubadours), L. T. Topsfield (Troubadours and Love), Moshe Lazar (Amour courtois, and ‘Fin’amor’), Sarah Kay (‘Contradictions’

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northern literature have more frequently been addressed in relation to the roman, in the figure, for instance, of Lancelot.6 This difference is the outcome of two assumptions. The first is fundamental. Scholars have followed the distinction made by medieval poet-composers themselves between desire and lust or need. Criticism on the subject of desire usually limits itself to songs in the high style because what appears or can be inferred in low-style song is not graced with the name of desire. But, as E. Jane Burns points out, ‘courtly love begins to look quite different if we move just beyond the edges of this corpus’ (‘Courtly Love’ 31), looking, for instance, at the work of the trobairitz and troveresses,7 and the chansons de femme (31). The picture enlarges when these marginalized voices are admitted to the discourse. These works, as she suggests, ‘stage complex expressions of desire and pleasure on the part of elite women in ways that call into question more established courtly configurations of male passion and love service’ (32).8 I shall consider also some less elite voices: the shepherdesses of the pastourelle and those wild girls of the chansons d’ami and chansons de malmariée who, while their social status is unclear, seem far removed from the life of the court or the houses of the elite which stage the scenarios of the chansons de toile.9 I maintain that desire, in the sense it carries for Lacan, is to be found in all the song genres, so an examination which crosses generic boundaries presents an opportunity to broaden the scope of the enquiry. But this desire is hidden. It is unconscious knowledge, of which Lacan says: [It] is a savoir […] but one that involves not the least connaissance, in that it is inscribed in a discourse, of which, like the ‘messenger-slave’ of and ‘Desire and Subjectivity’), William Paden (‘Troubadour’s Lady’ and ‘Utrum copularentur’), Linda M. Paterson (‘Fin’amor’), Paolo Cherchi (Andreas and the Ambiguity of Courtly Love), Rouben C. Cholakian (The Troubadour Lyric). 6 For instance, Cherchi characterizes northern courtoisie in the figure of the knight of roman while the courtly virtues of the South are exemplified by the troubadour (Andreas 47). R. Howard Bloch, in Medieval Misogyny, illustrates the love lyric, in the main, by reference to the troubadours (although he does mention the work of Thibaut de Champagne) while the North is mainly represented by reference to the roman and the work of Andreas Capellanus (see in particular, Chs 5 and 6 113–64). Simon Gaunt follows a similar path in Gender and Genre with Ch. 2 focusing on the northern roman and Ch. 3 on the southern canso (71–179). 7 Doss-Quinby et al., in their anthology Songs of the Women Trouvères, occasionally use this term, ‘troveresse’, which they have adopted from Godefroy’s Dictionnaire (26). 8 Burns is herself one of those who extends the boundaries of the enquiry into desire beyond the traditional courtly boundaries. See Burns, Bodytalk, ‘Courtly Love’, ‘Sewing like a Girl’, Courtly Love Undressed and Burns et al., ‘Feminism’. 9 Burns considers the tribulations of chanson de toile heroines in ‘Sewing like a Girl’, Courtly Love Undressed and Burns et al., ‘Feminism’. I have written on the chansons de toile in ‘An halte tour’ and ‘Voices’.

INTRODUCTION

5

ancient usage, the subject […] knows neither the meaning nor the text, nor in what language it is written (Écrits 302).

The means by which desire is hidden differ in different genres, however, and it must therefore be unearthed in different ways. In all the genres lyric subjects make demands, whether fin or otherwise, but in every case these demands are subverted by a desire which is not spoken and can only be inferred. In all the genres an object is posed to fit the subject’s need but in each case something fails in the progress towards this object or else something is left as an unsatisfiable residue after the satisfaction of need. The opposition, made by the trouvères and continued by scholars between desire in high style and need or lust in low style, is not sustained at the unconscious level. The quest for unspoken desire seems inevitably to raise questions of the characteristic chronotopes of different genres, that is the characteristic behaviour of time, space, contingency and necessity in the songs and their relative importance.10 Desire and the chronotope are intimately linked. The second critical assumption made about the trouvères is related to the first. If it is considered that desire can only be spoken of in the high-style genres then the troubadour corpus is usually preferred by scholars to the trouvère. This preference is based on a critical valorization of the troubadour canso over the northern chanson. Criticism – on the whole, twentieth-century criticism – has often considered the trouvère chanson as a mere pale echo of the troubadour canso.11 At the least it is considered a secondary form – which of course it is. The trouvère version of fin’amor has not often been considered as having much to add to the picture. The same is true of psychoanalytic accounts. Lacan himself assisted this tendency when he turned to the troubadours for lyric illustrations of fin’amor and to Chrétien de Troyes, presumably for the roman. Where Lacan cites a work by Chrétien it is his translation of Ovid’s Ars Amandi (Ethics 153). He does not appear to draw on the northern lyric in his examination of courtly love. Among these negative judgements of the trouvères is that of Caseneuve in the seventeenth century, who claimed that the difference between trouvères and troubadours is like that ‘between the imperfect imitations of a monkey

10

Bakhtin describes the chronotope in this way: ‘We will give the name chronotope (literally, ‘time space’) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’ (Dialogic Imagination 84). A little further on he points out the generic implications: ‘the chronotope in literature has an intrinsic generic significance. It can even be said that it is precisely the chronotope that defines genre and generic distinctions, for in literature the primary category in the chronotope is time’ (85). 11 Curiously, this evaluation represents a reversal in the fortunes of North and South, as John Haines notes: ‘In a strange reversal of their posthumous fortune, the southern poets have risen to international prominence, leaving the trouvères in comparative neglect’ (206).

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and the natural actions of a man’, and the less lurid judgement of Paul Meyer, that the northern poetry ‘remains considerably inferior to its elder sister of the Midi, as much in its elegance of expression and for the variety of its ideas […]’ (both quoted in Bec, Lyrique française 52). This view is still held in some quarters, for instance by Deborah H. Nelson: ‘Critics often claim that the poetry of northern France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is merely a faint and less effective echo of its southern origins, a view that careful examination of the songs of both traditions does not contradict’ (Nelson 256). Paul Zumthor gives content to the notion of ‘faint’ in his more discerning differentiation: [T]he form [of the trouvère songs] obeys subtle rules, inherited from the troubadours of Aquitaine, but which seem purified by an imagination that is even more controlled or more abstract – a more ascetic expressive intention’ (‘Circularity’ 179).

So criticism with a focus on desire has largely ignored the chanson in favour of the canso, especially in the Anglophone tradition. For this reason I have often drawn on the troubadour critical tradition when it is a question of desire. But fewer examples of the non-courtly genres survive in the troubadour chansonniers, so attention to desire in these genres has been scant, as it is also for the first reason.12 Such songs must have been sung in the South but, for whatever reason, were less frequently recorded than in the North.13 In particular, the woman’s voice in low style is not well-represented there.14 For both these reasons – a preference for the high over the low styles and a preference for the troubadours over the trouvères – criticism within the lyric field has focused on desire within the courtly register rather than across different genres and registers. Consequently, there has been comparatively little opportunity to examine the links between desire and genre. My own sense is that the more ascetic intention in the trouvère chanson is linked to the generic range available to the trouvères. They hived off the less ascetic, more full-bodied utterances to genres considered more appropriate

12

William Paden offers a breakdown of 80% for the canso, the sirventes and the coblas combined, leaving only 21% (which seems inconsistent) for those remaining, the ‘minor’ and ‘marginal’ genres. These include pastourelle and alba among others, and dance songs like the dansa and ballade (Medieval Lyric 23). 13 Cf. Rosenberg, Switten and Le Vot (2) and Aubrey (‘Dialectic’ 7). 14 Pierre Bec was right when he declared that ‘on the Occitan side there are trobairitz but virtually no “chansons de femme” ' (‘ “Trobairitz” ’ 236), but wrong when he reversed the proposition and claimed that on the northern side there are numerous chansons de femme but no trobairitz (236). Paden does not refer to the chansons de femme by name in his breakdown of troubadour genres, which suggests, similarly, that the numbers recorded are negligible. They may have been composed and sung, however.

INTRODUCTION

7

to house them, such as the pastourelle and the chanson de femme. This must remain a speculation, since we cannot know what circulated unrecorded in the South. One could speculate further, however, that the idea of a system of genres where the full gamut of utterances was permitted, each in its appropriate place, was more compelling to the trouvères than to the troubadours, since it was in the North that the greater number of less courtly genres was recorded. The trouvères did not leave it at that, however. They proceeded to confuse the issue with an intergeneric and inter-registral interplay which threatened these proprieties, displaying, as Ardis Butterfield observes, ‘deep tendencies towards hybridity’ (Poetry 294).15 Since medieval women’s writing has received greater critical attention, the gendering of desire has been foregrounded but again usually in relation to the high-style genres. This question of the gendering of desire is also usually referred to the South, where differences in the approach of the trobairitz to fin’amor are cited and analysed. Some of these studies are discussed in Chapter 7. More recently, interest in the gendering of desire has turned its gaze to the North, for instance in the recent anthology, Songs of the Women Trouvères, edited by Eglal Doss-Quinby et al., where the relation of the women trouvères to fin’amor is discussed (35).16 But no-one so far seems to have attempted the kind of deep analysis of feminine desire in the songs of the trouvères which is undertaken here. This can only be attempted by paying as much attention to desire in the ‘low’ registers where the feminine voice usually surfaces, as to the heady desires of fin’amor, usually a masculine preserve.17 Signifying by Opposition The trouvère corpus offers an excellent test case for this study because it affords a wide range of voices singing in different registers and articulating different desires – masculine and feminine, exalted and earthy, aristocratic and vilain – and these desires can be seen to signify only in the light of their difference from other desires. This is to say that the system of song genres operates like language in Saussure’s terms, as ‘a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others’ (Course 114).18 On its own a term can signify nothing.

15 As Sarah Kay remarks, the tension provided by contradiction could be pleasurable (Courtly Contradictions 25). 16 See also Tyssens, ‘Voix de femmes’ (384–6). 17 Wendy Pfeffer has considered feminine emotion in a range of northern songs in the woman’s voice in ‘Constant Sorrow’, while Burns has spoken of the lot of the chanson de toile heroine, as mentioned earlier. 18 Cf. Alexandre Leupin: ‘The Middle Ages knew that a text began to signify between the lines, only in the writing of another text’ (‘The Middle Ages’ 30). The song genres are,

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The value of each term is achieved through difference posed, moreover, as opposition: ‘each linguistic term derives its value from its opposition to all the other terms’ (88). Jacques Lacan echoes these sentiments in ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire’: ‘[T]he signifier is constituted only from a synchronic […] collection of elements in which each is sustained only by the principle of its opposition to each of the others’ (Écrits 304). The illusion of an anchoring positivity for any term relies on its difference being posed as an opposition. I wish to treat the song genres of the trouvères in this way: as linguistic terms whose signification rests on their opposition to other genres. Jeff Rider suggests precisely that: Like a phoneme, a genre may be defined ‘only by those of its characteristics that have differentiating value,’ as a bundle of distinctive traits defined in opposition to other such bundles, thus receiving its value from its place within a generic system of opposition (‘Genre’ 18).19

If, as Lacan maintains, the meaning of red in the symbolic order is its opposition to black (Psychoses 10), then the trouvère system provides many points from which to set up an opposition. This system is of course multiple rather than binary, but a binary opposition always seems to lurk beneath the differentiations of genre, gender, register and so on which comprise the system. Thomas Laqueur is right when he says that ‘if structuralism has taught us anything it is that humans impose their sense of opposition onto a world of continuous shades of difference and similarity’ (Making Sex 19).20 Lacan expresses is thus: ‘[l]anguage begins at the opposition’ (Psychoses 167); but for him, the consistency which appears to underwrite the oppositions of language is illusory. There is, he maintains, ‘no metalanguage’ to support the claims of language to rational consistency (Logic of Phantasy 23.11.66): [I]f we simply admit that the signifier cannot signify itself […] the following is necessary […]. It is not possible to reduce language, simply because of of course, only part of a much wider context of cultural production, as Ardis Butterfield notes in the prologue to Poetry and Music in Medieval France: ‘Song emerges not as a single, hermetically sealed genre, but as one that is infiltrated and extended by all sorts of other elements, or else itself abbreviated and inserted into seemingly extraneous settings’ (2). The song system is not closed but, in the interests of limiting my topic, I must focus only on a selection of the song genres. 19 The quotation within Rider’s is from Ducrot and Todorov (The Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Science of Language). 20 For instance, as Jonathon Culler proposes: ‘width is a continuous phenomenon, but if a suit is fashionable because of the width of its lapels then it is because a discrete distinction between the wide and the narrow bears significance’ (Structuralist Poetics 14).

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the fact that language cannot constitute a closed set; in other words: that there is no Universe of discourse (Logic 16.11.66).

Language is not a closed set. We aspire to a ‘Universe of discourse’ where, in the words of David Pereira, ‘the function of a [One] […] supports an [all]’ but language always misses this mark (‘Grammar of the Unconscious’ 8). Nothing underwrites the meaning effects generated by opposition. This is where the structuralist account sometimes falls short in action. As Rowe observed: ‘Properly understood, no structure could be totalized or understood in its entirety or essence’, but sometimes structuralists ‘fail to live up to their own theoretical ideals’ (Rowe 25).This study aims to avoid another such failure. I wish to make clear, therefore, that although there is always in the songs an implicit binary opposition in mind, making possible the effects of meaning, this opposition is not sustained with any consistency; it is never fixed. Something always escapes that neat binarity. French medieval lyric demonstrates both an attempt to stabilize difference, in particular sexual difference, via opposition, and the failure of that attempt. The implicit binary is based on the presence or absence of a presumed quality. As Lacan observed: ‘The signifier is a sign […] which is […] structured to signify the absence of another sign, in other words, to be opposed to it in a couple’ (167). This is borne out in trouvère song; certain oppositions are fundamental to the song system: courtly/not courtly, masculine/not masculine, learned/not learned, refined/not refined etc. In this sense it is an opposition of ‘positives’ and ‘privatives’ according to the terms of Aristotle’s Categories (Basic Works 30), but at times this opposition seems to imply an opposition of contraries, as in Categories: ‘Pairs of opposites which are contraries are not in any way interdependent, but are contrary the one to the other. The good is […] the contrary of the bad’ (29). But is what lacks the good obliged to be bad? Yes, if ‘good’ can only carry an effect of meaning by its opposition to ‘bad’.21 This question has particular relevance for the masculine-feminine opposition. The lack of a ‘Universe of discourse’ allows the terms of the binary opposition to shift continuously to bring different aspects of the multiple system into play, but the shift must remain hidden in order to give the opposition the appearance of consistency. Binarism is suggested in the way it is articulated by Lacan, above: ‘its opposition to each of the others (chacun des autres)’, as if two elements of a system are always foregrounded in an opposition to produce signification. Two is the required number: the dual logic of presence and absence is needed to give the effect of meaning.22 21 I am indebted to the work of Sarah Kay on different understandings of contradiction, especially her book Courtly Contradictions. See in particular the Introduction. 22 Paul Zumthor notes this phenomenon of ‘well-documented oppositions’ in the dimension of fin’amor (Medieval Poetics 159).

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Wherever an opposition can be posed signification takes place; something is said. When one genre or register is read against another something is said about both via the principle of opposition. One can speak therefore of a larger discourse across the system. Notions and attitudes belonging to no one in particular – in this case about desire – can circulate across the interstices between genres. The aim of my project is to glean these ideas by an attention to oppositions across the system of genres. The issue here is not the conscious interauthorial discourse analysed by such authors as Meneghetti and Grüber, ‘the close formal interdependence between a text and one or more of its antecedents’ (Meneghetti, ‘Intertextuality’ 181).23 My concern here is with language as transindividual. Subjects – authors and readers, singers and listeners, in this context – are only the means by which signifiers communicate. Such a discussion necessarily decentres the author, who, in any case, is often very difficult to find in this corpus.24 It will be clear from these remarks that I will make no attempt here to determine the biological sex of authors. The concern is with féminité textuelle rather than féminité génétique, to apply the terms used by Pierre Bec (‘ “Trobairitz” ’ 235–6). For Lacan subjects, whether the authors of songs or their subjects and characters, are constituted by signification rather than the other way around, and this is my approach here: What must be stressed […] is that a signifier is that which represents a subject for another signifier. The signifier, producing itself in the field of the Other, makes manifest the subject of its signification. But it functions as a signifier only to reduce the subject in question to being no more than a signifier (Fundamental Concepts 207).

The subject is inserted as no more than a signifier within the signifying chain. In this sense all féminité – all subjectivity in fact – is textuelle.25 For Lacan, too, the true subject is the subject of the unconscious. He points to ‘this fundamental distinction between the true subject of the unconscious and the ego as constituted in its nucleus by a series of alienating identifications’ (Fundamental Concepts 207). Songs have more to say than the conscious intentions of authors. These conscious intentions operate at the

23

See also Jörn Gruber (Dialektic e.g. 256). See Ria Lemaire’s semiotic study, Passions et positions, which explodes the myth of the medieval author/subject. The only subject who remains in medieval literature is, she contends, ‘the one who appears in the same texts’ (9). 25 Cf. Alexandre Leupin: ‘In the final analysis, sexual difference is a textual matter’ (Barbarolexis 166). E. Jane Burns criticizes Leupin for this remark, calling it ‘a most extensive example of reading woman out of the medieval text’ (Bodytalk 22, n. 53) I think this is a misreading, and at odds with her earlier relinquishing of ‘the modernist quest for a coherent subject’ (Bodytalk 11). 24

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level of the ego. It is the speech of the subject of the unconscious at work in these songs that I wish to trace – not the unconscious of authors but of texts – which are ‘not only […] unwilling but unable to tell us all they know’, in the words of Paul Strohm (Theory xii). The trouvère system is unashamedly hierarchical with certain songs, their subjects and their desires being ranked higher than others.26 I shall examine a small but significant sample: on the masculine side, the pastourelle to represent the low style and the chanson the high. On the feminine side, the low style is represented by the chanson d’ami and the chanson de malmariée, and the high style by the feminine chanson. The feminine chanson appears only in the final chapter which investigates the processes by which the feminine voice sometimes alters thematically and discursively to speak in high style. Of these genres the masculine chanson is always in a privileged position, privileged by gender and by genre. But it is not therefore unassailable. A cat may look at a king, and a low-style song may comment deprecatingly on a chanson. It follows too that if genres and registers signify each other by opposition, any ‘registral interference’ as Bec terms it (Lyrique française 40), subverts the system’s ‘official’ significations and valuations.27 In this instability there is room for movement. Body and Soul: The Place of the Feminine In the songs, as in other medieval discourses, the crucial opposition defining subjectivity is posed as that between men and women. I take up in the songs that opposition which has its basis in the Aristotelian dichotomy: An animal is a living body, a body with Soul in it. The female always provides the material, the male provides that which fashions the material into shape; this, in our view, is the specific characteristic of each of the sexes: that is what it means to be male or to be female. (Aristotle, Generation 184, 738b)

In these words of Aristotle’s, the question of masculinity as an attribute belonging to men is in some doubt. Masculinity might be thought simply to

26 Cf. L. O. Aranye Fradenburg’s remarks on ‘the ranking arrangements central to exchange in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries’ (Sacrifice Your Love 23). 27 I am using ‘official’ in Bakhtin’s sense here, as in his understanding of an official discourse, ‘the serious official, ecclesiastical, feudal, and political cult forms and ceremonials’ as distinct from the ‘[carnival] forms of protocol and ritual based on laughter’ (Bakhtin Reader 197). Within the trouvère system the chanson comes the closest to an official discourse, but the songs are so shot through with registral interference that it is difficult to uphold a simple binary distinction between official and unofficial. Also, the positions ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ are not fixed but shifting; from a clerical perspective chanson rhetoric would be the ‘unofficial’ discourse.

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mean activity. Elsewhere in his work it is clearly a matter of possession. He speaks of ‘the male as possessing the principle of movement and of generation, the female as possessing that of matter’ (Generation 11). This is the point on which sexual difference turns – this ambiguity between difference as meaning and difference as an attribute or possession.28 In the songs sexual difference can be read as a distinction between what bears soul in generation and what bears matter. Fradenburg suggests that ‘[t]he problem of insentient matter was the focus of medieval Europe’s most arduous philosophical project, the Christianizing of Aristotelian and Averroistic thought’ (Sacrifice Your Love 14). It is clear from Aristotle’s words that for him the question of matter is heavily imbricated with the question of sexual difference, and this also was the focus of some arduous work for medieval masculinity. The materiality of the feminine is an urgent issue when women function as objects of exchange between men.29 Aristotle does not say that a woman has no soul. In his De Anima the human soul is not explicitly gendered.30 What he says is that, on her own, a female cannot ‘generate an animal; because the faculty [which produces the sentient Soul] is the essence of what is meant by “male” ’ (Generation 203).31 Nonetheless in medieval discourses the feminine soul is a doubtful entity, constantly undermined. The ambiguity of Aristotle’s dichotomy is transferred completely onto the feminine and becomes her own attribute. Her soul becomes clouded with ambiguity; the earth clings to it. In the songs this difference in the ‘meaning’ of the sexes can be seen in the distinctive articulations of masculine and feminine desire. The songs open up a paradox of the desire of matter. In De Anima it is desire which distinguishes the souled from the unsouled being: ‘Nothing […] that is not engaged in desire or avoidance is moved except by force’ (De Anima 212). This study explores the ways in which feminine speech and feminine desires in the songs evoke the purely material, that is, something which is moved by force rather than by desire. It is an imperative for the soul of masculine subjectivity to have feminine matter to ‘bounce back off ’ in Irigaray’s phrase: ‘If there is

28 Galen betrays a similar ambiguity: ‘Forthwith, of course, the female must have smaller, less perfect testes, the semen generated in them must be scantier, colder, and wetter (for these things too follow of necessity from the deficient heat’ (qtd in Laqueur Making Sex 40). Thomas Laqueur suggests that for Galen: ‘To be female means to have weaker seed, seed incapable of engendering, not as an empirical but as a logical matter’ (40). 29 Fradenburg alludes indirectly to this aspect of feminine materiality when she speaks of ‘[t]he unstable sentience of objects of exchange’ (Sacrifice Your Love 34). This function of women as objects of exchange in medieval life is demonstrated in the four thirteenthcentury romances comprising the ‘cycle de la gageure’, as Roberta Krueger points out (‘Double Jeopardy’ 45). 30 See Book III (De Anima 189–221). 31 Here again is the plaguing ambiguity between meaning and attribute.

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no more ‘earth’ to press down/repress […] no opaque matter which in theory does not know herself, then what pedestal remains for the existence of the “subject”?’ (qtd in Burns Bodytalk 18). When a woman rushes about, seeking a lover against all the odds, we are meant to hear in her words something of this mindless force, as in the motet text ‘Je sui jonete et jolie’: ‘[B]y the faith I owe to God, I will love! Never for a husband will I leave off loving’ (Doss-Quinby et al. 220). Whenever a woman speaks, moves, acts, desires, however, she problematises this comfortable arrangement. As a creature of matter she presents difficulties. Every woman, historical or fictional, is a walking contradiction. The matter in woman can only be postulated at a purely theoretical level. Ways must then be found to maintain the opposition in the face of a universal noncompliance, as it is maintained in the Destructionis Troiae: ‘We know the heart of woman always seeks a husband, just as matter always seeks form’ (qtd in Halloran n. 26, 11–12). Feminine desire is represented here as matter blindly sniffing out form as iron filings fly to a magnet, or, as in Andreas’ On Love, as ‘melting wax, always ready to assume fresh shape and to be moulded to the imprint of anyone’s seal’ (313). These acts of seeking are not presented as true acts of human desire but as a kind of blind force of nature, the mindless activity of matter which knows not what it is or what it does – a kind of machine. The association of woman with unsouled matter, failing in practice, can be revived as metaphor.32 Femininity in the songs is constituted in opposition to masculinity but it runs into problems.33 For a start, femininity runs into the ambiguities which result from the attempt to superimpose a binary sexual opposition onto a multiple system of genres. ‘Woman’ is required to fill a space in opposition to ‘man’ but ‘man’ changes his spots according to genre. Yet he – he being the courtly protagonist in different guises – is presented as whole: a whole being with differing desires. Something must give to enable him to remain so. Femininity is generically split to accommodate him and his differing desires. What gives in the process is the ‘meaning’ of femininity. If ‘Woman’ is required, as Irigaray suggests, as ‘a reserve supply of negativity’ (Speculum 22), then Woman must become multiple to fit in where required.34 This splitting is one way to deal with the equivocality produced by the play of the restless signifier. But in the process the semantic emptiness of ‘Woman’ is revealed in the stubborn inconsistency of the term. 32 The association is based on a notion of matter and form as separable as they are not in Aristotle’s formulation in De Anima (157). 33 Cf. Burns and Krueger: ‘[T]he proper place of woman shifts radically between surprising extremes’ (‘Introduction’ 208). 34 Sarah Kay notes: ‘Recognising the splitting of ‘woman’ into two contrasting types, one negative, the other positive, has become a commonplace of troubadour feminist criticism’. Kay cites E. Jane Burns as an example of such criticism in ‘Desire and Subjectivity’ (219).

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In the pastourelle the shepherdess has a certain passivity. She sits patiently, waiting to be found by the sexually interested, active narrator, as in the anonymous ‘En ma forest entrai l’autrier’: ‘I found a pretty shepherdess … tending lambs in an orchard’ (Paden, Medieval Pastourelle 110–11, his translation). She is always at hand when required, like some natural feature of the landscape, although she is not always presented as the hapless victim of his lust. The paradigm is sometimes subverted in the interests of keeping the denouement in doubt. In the masculine-voiced chanson, where the lover passively awaits his fate, she becomes la dame, sublime, absent, silent object of desire. In Thibaut de Champagne’s ‘Tuit mi desir et tuit mi grief torment’ she lights the world: ‘Bewildered, I forget myself marvelling where God found such strange beauty. When he placed her here below among mankind he acted towards us with great generosity. All the world is illuminated by her’ (Brahney 134–5). But to what extent is she among us? As global illuminator she seems too large to be placed, as a creature among other creatures, contained within space-time and a human form. It is even a question how her strange beauty came into existence since God had to go in search of her beauty. In certain reaches of the chansons de femme such as the chanson de malmariée, where la femme is presented as rebellious, she must be active, rushing from husband to lover, breaking out against the wishes of those who try to keep her home, as this exchange between the single-minded heroine of ‘Osteis ma kenoille’ and her mother demonstrates: ‘ “Mad little whore … you’re not going anywhere because I’ll lock the door on you” … “By God, dear mother, your words are in vain … I won’t be without a friend … Neither father nor mother can turn me from it, nor keep me from looking for love …” ’ (Doss-Quinby et al. 137). This activity places her to provide the ‘meaning’-generating opposition to the chanson lover’s exalted passivity – his desire is exalted at the expense of hers. This question of activity and passivity is complicated by narrativity in the songs. The genres examined all contain narrative elements in some form but only the pastourelle presents a coherent tale. The presence of narrative generates activity in a song. It is crucial to the representation of a sexual encounter. Successful sex requires the spatio-temporal coordinates that narrative provides to bring it to completion, and is thus confined to the more narrativized genres. The narrative means for sex are not provided in the chanson. The timeless passivity of chanson lyric is not compatible with the bringing of stories to a resolution. Any narrative fragments can only be threaded together by implication. Narrativity and sexual desire, then, sit in a complex and paradoxical correspondence, which is why taking a closer look at the characteristic chronotopes associated with different genres and genders can be illuminating. Femininity is found to be unstable, in the songs as elsewhere in medieval discourses. Women are fickle, as Andreas reminds the reader (313), and

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maybe this perceived fickleness is in fact an effect of the difficulty in pinning ‘Woman’ down to a single, unchanging essence.35 Feminine subjectivity, for authors as for characters, remains ambiguous. The female author in medieval French literature, no less than the character, as E. Jane Burns points out, speaks ‘in a voice that is at once her own and not her own’ (Bodytalk 10): ‘For her, as for Philomena, the subject position remains tentative and unstable as her speech moves subtly between the poles of describer and described’ (10). Feminine subjectivity is always in danger of falling into ‘objectality’.36 Theoretical Implications: Why Lacan? Lacan finds his way into this discussion of desire in trouvère song in a variety of ways. In the first place, something of an unconscious can be inferred in the articulations of desire to be found in the songs. When one considers closely the claims made there about desire, contradictions appear which invite suspicion. Jean-Charles Huchet spoke of an impossibility in desire which saturates medieval texts: From the outset […] medieval literature in the vernacular languages is to a very great extent a discourse on love rooted in an impossibility of loving which it attempts to make us forget (Littérature médiévale 22).

But this attempt itself is what indicates the impossible: ‘When a text speaks the sexual impossible in the effort of forgetting it, it produces a knowledge of this impossible’ (27).37 While the spoken desires of song subjects – their demands in Lacanian terms – support the notion of the possibility of fulfilment with an object fitted to the lover’s needs, other unspoken desires, which emerge in spite of their claims, appear to be founded on the impossibility of fulfilment. This hidden knowledge of the impossible can be found, I suggest, differently produced, in both masculine and feminine-voiced songs and in both low and high style. The impossibility of fulfilment is a matter to which Lacan

35 Sarah Kay notes the alignment of Woman and Nature in Jean de Meun’s continuation of the Roman de la Rose. Both are changeable, in contrast to the changeless supernatural (Kay, ‘Women’s body’ 214–15). In the songs, however, woman’s fickleness seems to co-habit, inconsistently, with a materiality conceived as changeless. Perhaps one could say, paradoxically, that she is unchangingly fickle. 36 This is a term Lacan draws from Kleinian object-relations theory. ‘Objectal’ = object-like, ‘objectalité’ = objecthood, as in Ethics 293. 37 For other psychoanalytic accounts of desire in medieval literature see for instance, also by Huchet, L’amour discourtois, Henri Rey-Flaud, La névrose courtoise, Sarah Kay, Courtly Contradictions, Fradenberg, Sacrifice Your Love, Erin Felicia Labbie, Lacan’s Medievalism (esp. Chs 2 and 3), and Bruce Holsinger (The Premodern Condition, esp. Ch. 2).

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returned throughout his life. In his Ethics seminar he illustrates the problem by reference to the troubadours.38 Secondly, this ‘impossible’ of desire in conjunction with the difficulty of finding a stable place for ‘woman’ in relation to ‘man’ in the song system focuses impossibility in the sexual relation itself. This related impossibility is also at the forefront of Lacan’s concerns, for instance in Encore: Love is impotent […] because it is not aware that it is but the desire to be One, which leads to the impossibility of establishing the relationship between ‘them-two’ (la relation d’eux). The relationship between […] them-two sexes (Encore 6).

‘Them-two’ can never make up the One for which they strive, ‘the One of the relation “sexual relationship” (rapport sexuel)’ (7). The sexual relation is a sum which will not add up to One. There have been attempts to shift the relation between masculine and feminine voices in medieval song to others less detrimental to the feminine. Some critics have opted for a sense of ‘equal and active’ partnership between them.39 Others have argued for a kind of complementarity, one discourse providing what the other lacks.40 But these attempts do not appear to be supported by the material, at least in the trouvère corpus. In the songs, I suggest, femininity is postulated as the opposition against which masculine subjectivity comes forth. However, this oppositional positioning cannot be sustained either. The play of the signifier as generic difference in the songs destabilizes any opposition. Lacan postulates not an opposition nor a complementarity nor an equality, but a fundamental ‘dissymmetry in the signifier’ (Psychoses 176). The dissymetry, argues Lacan, occurs at the symbolic level: ‘[T]he function of man and woman is symbolized […] literally uprooted from the domain of the imaginary and situated in the domain of the symbolic […]’ (Psychoses 177). The symbolic is, moreover, the only domain in which they function: ‘Man and a woman […] are nothing but signifiers. They derive their function […] from saying (dire)’ (Encore 39). Symbolic masculinity and femininity are not co-extensive with biological male- and femaleness. The ambiguity of Aristotle and Galen, and the misogynous discourse this ambiguity supports, arises from the confusion of the logical with the empirical, the symbolic with the biological. Signification is deeply embroiled with the business of sexual differentiation and this embroiling is at the heart of the impossibilities encountered by the trouvères and those who study them in all attempts to postulate a sexual

38 39 40

See Ch. 11: ‘Courtly Love as Anamorphosis’, 139–54. Doss-Quinby et al. (Introduction 11), Grimbert (‘Songs by Women’ 123). Halloran (xi), Earnshaw (13).

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relation whereby man and woman can add up to One. Signification, sexuated subjectivity and desire are inextricably bound together in Lacanian terms, equally effects of the signifier: [M]an cannot aim at being whole […] while ever the play of displacement and condensation to which he is doomed in the exercise of his functions marks his relation as a subject to the signifier. The phallus is the privileged signifier of that mark in which the role of the logos is joined with the advent of desire (Écrits 287).

What is attractive about this body of theory is the way it can tackle the instabilities apparent in trouvère song. What appears in the songs on the one hand is an endeavour, urgent yet almost playfully subverted in the interests of generic experiment, to align settled meanings with settled sexual differences; on the other hand, an unbearable ache of desire which is revealed in its attempts to hide itself. At the centre of the nexus is the troublesome phallus which many have found an unpalatable item in this privileged role. Much has been written from a feminist perspective to either sanitize its effects or expel it altogether in favour of an alternative symbolic which does not rely on it.41 Derrida and deconstruction have been invoked to deprive the phallus of its centrality. In the main, though not entirely, I follow here a Lacanian path unmediated by feminist analysis outside medievalist circles. This decision is not based on any lack of interest in or concern with the feminist enterprise. It stems instead from a desire to find for myself some kind of viable reading of Lacan’s theories on sexual difference, signification and desire before attempting to disentangle the myriad complex arguments between psychoanalysis and feminism. To try for both at once is a task which I could not hope to accomplish satisfactorily in this project. Approaching Lacan only from a feminist perspective is also an unsatisfactory venture. This unsatisfactoriness is not limited to the feminist perspective. Any attempt to find Lacan through the lens of secondary material is fraught with difficulties, and post-Lacanian feminism is profoundly if conflictedly indebted to his work. It is more interesting to attempt an individual, provisional reading rather than to make do with the individual readings of others, although this is sometimes no easy matter. This preference is based on an assumption which needs to be made explicit: I have found all readings of Lacan, my own included, to be ingrained in the conditions of a personal history. We read him according to our own present bent. His work is not, and can never be, fixed knowledge, the same for all and always the same. Its polysemic nature insists that we find our own way 41 See, for instance, Brennan’s Introductionto Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis (1–23) where some of these attempts are reviewed.

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with it and attempt our own reading. This is why this Introduction begins with the quotation from Proust. Where I have followed a feminist approach I have often found, even with those apparently most antagonistic towards Lacan, that there are, surprisingly, enough shared assumptions for the differences to be sidestepped for the purposes of this project. Psychoanalytic theory has had to fight for an acknowledged place in the study of medieval texts, although, as Fradenburg maintains, it ‘is simply in medieval studies now, in a variety of acknowledged and unacknowledged ways’ (‘Analytical Survey’).42 We cannot simply slough off, as critics, a century’s inheritance of theory which so seismically altered the terms of the enquiry into the human condition.43 Lacan’s response to these attempts at expulsion (expulsion being an experience with which he was familiar), might be to say, as he does in Ethics, that ‘these ideals [of courtly love], first among which is that of the Lady, are to be found in subsequent periods, down to our own’ (149). We are still grappling with them. However, as Fradenburg remarked in a more recent work (2002), ‘the future is bright’ for psychoanalytic theory in medieval studies (Sacrifice Your Love 11). Lacanian theory has a particular appropriateness in the study of medieval texts because of its concentration on the relation between language and subjectivity, as R. Howard Bloch notes (Etymologies 17).44 Lacan himself may not have approved my efforts, however. He was unhappy with the idea of an ‘applied’ psychoanalysis.45 This idea of application prompts a question of how to bring the theory to the songs; the bringing together is a matter of some delicacy. Lacan issues various warnings about the application of psychoanalytic theory to art, for instance in ‘Homage to Marguerite Duras’, where he refers to the ‘boorishness’ and ‘stupidity’ of a ‘certain kind of analysis’ in relation to texts: [T]hey are sliding towards stupidity […] for example, by attributing an author’s avowed technique to some neurosis: boorishness. Or again, by

42 See ‘Analytical Survey’ for a review of this conflict. See also Elizabeth Scala’s ‘Historicists and their Discontents’ and Fradenburg, Sacrifice your Love, Ch. 1 (43–78). 43 We cannot, that is, read medieval texts ‘in their own terms’ as Mark Chinca observes (Introduction’ 103). 44 Cf. ‘[T]he High Middle Ages represents an ideal test case for the radical questioning of the subject’ characteristic of such minds as Lacan’s, inter alia (17). For the High Middle Ages, as for Lacan, ‘the problem of whether the discourse of the individual is, to invoke the medieval expression, ‘founded’, or whether a transpersonal discourse speaks through the individual, is crucial […]’ (17). Cf. also Leupin who asked, in ‘The Middle Ages’, ‘[W]hat is modernity if a medieval text can so audaciously address the concept of the signifier[?]’ (23). 45 For instance, in ‘Jeunesse de Gide’ he remarks: ‘Psychoanalysis is only applied, in the proper sense, as a treatment and thus to a subject who speaks and hears’ (Éc. II 226).

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showing it to be an explicit adoption of certain mechanisms which would thereby make an unconscious edifice of it: stupidity (‘Marguerite Duras’ 124).46

He does, however, go on to offer an oblique suggestion about the role psychoanalysis can play in relation to literature: The only advantage that the psychoanalyst has the right to draw from his position […] is to recall with Freud that in his work the artist always precedes him […] the artist paves the way for him. […] Marguerite Duras knows, without me, what I teach […]. In paying homage to her, all that I shall show is that the practice of the letter converges with the working of the unconscious (124).

The psychoanalyst and the artist are treading the same path. Duras precedes Lacan, blazing the trail. She knows what it is he teaches because their paths converge in ‘the working of the unconscious’. The psychoanalyst does not so much ‘apply’ an analysis to the author or the text (which is to say, attempts to impose a psychoanalytic grid to master them), as acknowledge that they are on the same ground.47 This is how it is with the songs. There is a knowledge there, unknown to their lyric subjects, akin to what Lacan teaches. Huchet was on different but related territory when he offered an alternative slant to the notion of application in Littérature Médiévale et Psychanalyse, outlining the ‘determining role’ which literature plays in psychoanalytic theory, by ‘inverting the meaning of application’ (21). I have found that the two, medieval literature and psychoanalytic theory, are mutually illuminating. This has become for me the fundamental requisite of theory: that it performs this dance of mutual recognition with my texts. This mutuality seems to mean that the notion of application in either direction is inappropriate. Neither provides an explanatory grid for the other, although they bring from their different quarters different modes of knowledge. Neither is subordinated to the other or underpins the other. To me, devoted as I am to both, affinities are constantly appearing. Bringing the two together (reading Lacan with the songs of the trouvères), produces an increasingly fertile field for mutual discovery; something grows in the space between.48

46 Boase’s survey of Freudian interpretations of the troubadours gives an indication of where this kind of criticism can end up. He rejects Freud on the basis that there is not ‘sufficient evidence to postulate the theory that the majority of court poets in the Middle Ages suffered from a mother fixation of infantile origin’ (101). 47 Erin Labbie, raises the possibility of a ‘relationship between the disciplines and discourses of literature and psychoanalysis that exists outside of a master-slave relationship’, a notion she attributes to Shoshana Felman (‘Phoné Sex’ 3). 48 Shoshana Felman suggested, in the 1970s, the idea of the ‘generat[ion of] impli-

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Kaleidoscopic Methodology Since I take as a kind of maxim Saussure’s statement that ‘in language there are only differences […] without positive terms’ (Course 120), there are implications for methodology. His statement seems to imply that the terms of one’s study alter with the alteration of the relation between them. Their ephemeral ‘substance’ is subject to their position in relation to each other in language. It is grammatical, so to speak. On this basis, this study is constructed so that most chapters follow each other on the basis of difference. There are three sets of paired chapters: Chapter 1 considers the trouvère system of songs, a structure which privileges the masculine, while Chapter 2 considers the place of femininity within that system. Chapter 3 tackles masculine desire, high and low – another difference – and Chapter 4, feminine desire. Chapter 5 takes a chronotopic approach, looking at the ways in which feminine desire in the chanson de malmariée appears in conjunction with particular spatiotemporal representations and operations in the songs, while Chapter 6 does the same on the masculine side. Chapter 7 brings together the three major centres of the discussion: discourse, desire and the chronotope, with reference to the few feminine-voiced songs that venture into high style. What this amounts to is a turning of the kaleidoscope for each chapter so that the relations between the terms shake down into a different pattern with different differences emerging. Relation is a matter of time as well as space. If Chapter 3 tackles masculine desire, then feminine desire, the subject of Chapter 4, will fall easily into its place as the secondary term, propping up masculinity by its generating opposition. But by reversing the order, Chapter 5 puts feminine desire and feminine subjectivity first and explores the possibility of masculinity as the secondary term. Masculinity is thus offered the chance of the secondary and femininity of the primary position (to see what turns up), in precisely the same way as the turning of the kaleidoscope – a temporal matter – offers the elements different forms of relationship – a spatial matter – which may privilege some and deprivilege others. The privileging is done in the setting up of the argument in the terms of the feminine or masculine. Then whichever follows must rest its case within that set of terms. It will be unlikely to excel because the first term will be privileged. What this method attempts, like any deconstructive process, is to expose the arbitrary nature of privilege itself. Privilege is merely an effect of signification and a lot of clever talk backed up by power which fills in its own hollows – the lack of substance in language – with a spurious positivity. The method also, it must be confessed, exposes the arbitrariness of argument itself – the cations between literature and psychoanalysis […], each one finding itself enlightened, informed […] by the other’ (9). I agree.

INTRODUCTION

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clever talk – and the impossibility of a final conclusion. My own argument could never be concluded because another turn of the kaleidoscope would simply turn it on its head. It is an attempt to turn difference into Derrida’s différance: a structure and a movement that cannot be conceived on the basis of the opposition presence/absence. Différance is the systematic play of differences […], of the spacing [espacement] by which elements relate to one another. This spacing is the production […] of intervals without which the ‘full’ terms could not signify. (Derrida, qtd in Culler, Deconstruction 97)

As Derrida says elsewhere, the meaning of meaning […] is infinite implication, the indefinite referral of signifier to signifier […] [I]ts force is a certain pure and infinite equivocality which gives signified meaning no […] rest but engages it in its own economy so that it always signifies again and differs. (Writing and Difference 25)

The organization is an attempt, in a small way, to reorder, through movement, the espacement of the elements in relation to each other; to coax the play of différance into revealing itself. Nonetheless, in spite of the ultimate futility of privileging, I have favoured the feminine side, partly because this is what draws me most powerfully, partly because the ground is still less well-trodden; there is still so much more to say, especially when one moves beyond chanson terrain, and especially when psychoanalytic theories of desire are drawn into the equation. On the masculine side so much has been said that much of what I write is already familiar. But where that masculine is constantly brought up against the feminine which is ‘intended’ to support its claims, it may be startled into saying something new and unexpected.49 It too, as the feminine is forced to do, might reveal its splits. This constant harrying of the claims of the masculine by a series of changing juxtapositions is my aim, although I recognize its ultimate limitations. It is a difficult matter seriously to unsettle the primacy of masculinity in the discourse of the songs or in any discourse. If genres signify only in relation to each other, meaning in the system is in a constant state of renegotiation. Yet I believe some semblance of stability is maintained. The renegotiations are partially hidden. The generation of meaning in the system would crumble without that anchor of apparent stability. Perhaps it could be said that the system appears whole, consistent, rational. However often its

49 This is the advantage of a ‘gender-specific approach’, such as Ria Lemaire follows in Passions et positions (9–10).

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binarity is deconstructed the image pulls itself together into a semblance of pristine wholeness. The Corpus Most of the songs considered here are monophonic, although the motet form is briefly discussed, because it makes apparent an intergeneric discourse on desire which in the monophonic songs can only be inferred. These monophonic songs cover trouvère activity from (roughly) the middle of the twelfth century to the end of the thirteenth.50 For the chanson, this period is taken to be sufficiently homogenous to allow a synchronic approach, as Zumthor does (Zumthor ‘Style’ 263). The pastourelle is less homogenous across the period, as are also the different genres and subgenres of the chansons de femme. According to their placement (the chansons de femme) in Bec’s popularisant register they represent ‘[a] textual tradition which only emerged in the thirteenth century’. Zumthor remarks of this register, which he terms the ‘good life’ register: We often perceive this register as not really being expressively cohesive but rather as a jumble of debris, which are nonetheless identifiable as elements of the register, thus justifying the use of this term in the analysis. (Medieval Poetics 203)

For the present purposes – the unearthing of hidden desire across genres and genders – it is possible to consider both the chansons d’ami and malmariée and the pastourelle as having sufficient cohesion to consider synchronically also. The really significant divergence in my terms is that between the lowstyle chansons de femme and the feminine chanson. The translations are mine except where another translator is cited. My project is limited to this aim of coaxing into the open a discourse of unspoken desire, masculine and feminine, in trouvère song. Only a selection of genres and sub-genres have been chosen, and only a selection of songs from within them. No exhaustive reading of the songs is intended. In any case, the methodology used precludes any such ambition. If, as Derrida maintains, ‘the meaning of meaning’ is ‘a certain pure and infinite equivocality […] so that it always signifies again and differs’, the economy of meaning is inexhaustible (Writing and Difference 25). This is my understanding. My hope is that in the process some new differences may appear.

50

Chrétien de Troyes is thought to have been active from c. 1160 (Rosenberg and Tischler 550). Adam de la Halle, who as Haines notes is ‘considered the last trouvère’, died c. 1285 (13).

1

The Song System I An Unstable Hierarchy: The Unmarked Masculine Desire in trouvère song is constituted differently according to where it appears within the loose web of genres, genders, registers and voices which make up the entire system. This chapter will examine the system itself and the nature of the relationships within it. The fundamental structuring categories within the system are those of high/low, courtly/non-courtly, and masculine/feminine. Difficulties arise, however, with the attempt to categorize the feminine side. It is not so easy to distinguish between high and low or courtly and uncourtly here because ‘feminine’ is already included on the low, uncourtly side. It is the struggle of femininity with its generic and registral lowness which this book explores. The chanson, standing at the top of the hierarchy, is the high-style song of fin’amor, pure or refined love – the love which critics since Gaston Paris have often referred to as ‘courtly love’.1 Roger Dragonetti coined the phrase grand chant courtois for this genre and his usage is sanctioned by the scribes of ms. I, who refer to grans chans in their rubrics. Nonetheless I prefer the simple term chanson (the equivalent of the Occitan canso), because its unmarked status best indicates its value for the trouvères as against marked forms of the term such as chanson d’histoire, one of the designations used in Renart’s Roman de la Rose (Psaki l. 1151). This is in line with Dante’s use of the Italian term canzone, ‘the supreme form’, for the Italian equivalent of the canso and the chanson (De vulgari eloquentia 73).2 Roman Jakobson notes the evaluative aspect of marking in ‘The Concept of Mark’, written with Krystyna Pomorska:

1

David Hult advances 1883 as the year in which Paris first ‘rather tentatively’ introduced the term (‘Gaston Paris’ 193 and n. 4). The opposition ‘high’ and ‘lower-style’ is that used by Christopher Page (Voices 16). 2 Page follows this terminology, for instance in Voices (29), also Jeanroy in Chansonniers français.

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The conception of binary opposition at any level of the linguistic system as a relation between a mark and the absence of this mark carries to its logical conclusion the idea that a hierarchical order underlies the entire linguistic system in all its ramifications and manifestations (Jakobson 137).

Marking works to delimit the marked category: ‘The constraining, focusing character of the marked term of any grammatical opposition is directed toward a more narrowly specified and delimited conceptual item’ (Jakobson 138). Dante is claiming an unmarked status for the canzone when he maintains: ‘That the whole of poetic art is contained within canzone is evident from the fact that whatever art is found in other songs is also found in the canzone, but not vice versa’ (De Vulgari 73, my emphasis). By this token, Dante categorizes all other poetic productions as marked and thus delimited and inferior. Marking has a special significance in relation to sexual difference, a significance which French grammatical gender makes clear. In French lionne is marked whereas lion is unmarked, providing the ‘basic meaning’ as Jakobson points out (Jakobson 138). ‘Man embraces woman’, as the saying goes. The difficulty, alluded to above, of categorizing songs in the woman’s voice is a question of marking. The unmarked masculine poses as universal, leaving the feminine in an invidious and contradictory position, as both outside categorization and enclosed as a subset. The chanson had its origins in the South; it is a northern adaptation of the troubadour canso of Occitania.3 It is the serious, aristocratic production, against which all other genres are automatically devalued. Nevertheless, prized as the chanson undoubtedly was, in the northern chansonniers we also find numerous examples of non-courtly or less courtly genres, such as aubes, chansons de toile, dance songs and many others.4 The inclusion of these genres in such numbers in the northern chansonniers allows us access to a great breadth in style and register across the system. Different voices – voices of women, voices of the peasantry – frequently interrupt the lonely monologue of the overwhelmingly masculine, aristocratic subject of the pure lyric chanson. The characteristic flavour of the trouvère system rests on the breadth of style and register which the inclusion of these less courtly genres in such numbers allows. The pastourelle, which is chosen here to represent the low style on the masculine side, allows the masculine voice its expression of non-courtly values, creating a useful foil for the exalted attitudes of the chanson. The ‘classical’ pastourelle is a narrative genre with a male-voiced, first-person narrator, in which the narrator recounts his attempts to seduce a shepherdess.5 As I have suggested, the low style comes ‘naturally’ to the

3

See Bec, Lyrique française (44). See Rosenberg, Samuel. ‘Introduction’ Rosenberg, Switten and Le Vot. See also Aubrey, ‘Dialectic’ (6–7) and Zink, Medieval French Literature (45), on the same point. 5 I am following William Paden’s terminology here, to define the ‘classical’ 4

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feminine voice. In the context of the system it is her capacity to sing in the high style which is surprising. The chanson de malmariée and the chanson d’ami, representing the low style on the feminine side, are usually down to earth and sensual in tone. They express a young woman’s insistence on her right to love, often against the wishes of her guardians. In the first category the woman is married, in the second she is unmarried. As opposed to the experienced voice of the married woman, the chanson d’ami adopts the position of a young girl, less experienced but equally eager to try love. The Question of Terminology: ‘Genre’ and ‘Register’ My argument assumes the validity of the terms ‘genre’ and ‘register’ for medieval literature, an assumption some medievalists question. For instance, Doss-Quinby et al. advise caution in using generic terminology since ‘[t]he concept of “genre” was inexact to medieval theorists, at least until the fourteenth century’ (Songs 46). In the same work they note: Medieval poets […] had no compunction about mixing various levels of style within a single composition […] indeed, they seemed to delight in doing so. Consequently, such notions as register and genre are relatively fluid and likely to lead to erroneous perceptions when rigidly defined and applied (9).

Nevertheless, some category of genre seems to be indispensable for the songs of the trouvères.6 Even when the terminology is inconsistent or absent the differences are crucial.7 Other medievalists offer an idea of genre based on alterity which is compatible with the approach taken here. Hans Robert Jauss defines such a notion of medieval genres as providing a ‘preconstituted horizon of expectations’ for any text.8 Michel Zink is on similar ground with his ‘effects of contrast’.9

pastourelle, that is, one which has at its centre the attempted seduction ‘successful or not’ of a shepherdess by the narrator (Medieval Pastourelle 1, ix). 6 Chansonnier scribes occasionally classified songs by genre, for instance Oxford, Bodleian Library Douce 308, and Rome, Vatican, Reg. 1490. See Jeanroy (Chansonniers français 40–54 and 220–32). 7 Cf. Bruckner: ‘Medieval genres may not be easily defined according to modern generic notions, but verifiable differences do exist to distinguish different categories of medieval texts’ (Shaping Romance 206). Cf. also Simon Gaunt’s pertinent question: ‘Are generic terms necessary for genres to exist, or can generic filiations be signalled simply by formal and thematic similarities between texts?’ (Gender 4), to which he answers in the affirmative (4). 8 ‘[T]he literary work is conditioned by “alterity,” that is, in relation to another […]. To this extent, every work belongs to a genre – whereby I mean […] that for each work a preconstituted horizon of expectations must be ready at hand’ (Jauss, Toward an Asthetic 79). 9 ‘[M]edieval literary art took great care to obtain effects of contrast by conferring

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Pierre Bec also offers an idea of register based on alterity, when he opts for a binary division of registers ‘dialectically established in relation to each other’ (Lyrique française 1, 34). Speaking at a level within the register, Zumthor for his part notes a ‘coherence’ between certain texts (Medieval Poetics 182). He defines the register as a ‘global prefiguration’.10 A pre-established coherence between certain texts, the ‘global prefiguration’, however, presumes an alterity between these texts (chansons) and others. What these critics’ remarks imply in their different ways is that each genre or register can only signify in relation to each of the others. This is my opinion also. This book accords to the terms ‘genre’ and ‘register’ the kind of signifying function in relation to each other which Lacan offers for language generally. To reiterate: ‘[T]he signifier is a sign […] which is […] structured to signify the absence of another sign, in other words, to be opposed to it in a couple’ (Psychoses 167). This is why, as William Calin suggests, ‘we can fully understand [pastourelle] only by contrasting it with the “grand chant courtois” ’ (‘Contre la femme?’ 67).11 Doss-Quinby et al. quite rightly find that the trouvères delighted in generic and registral mixing, but this does not invalidate the notion of generic ‘laws’. Quite the reverse! As Todorov remarks: The fact that a work ‘disobeys’ its genre does not mean that the genre does not exist […] because, in order to exist as such, the transgression requires a law – precisely the one that is to be violated (196).

The flouting of generic rules is not simple fluidity, as Doss-Quinby et al. contend, but itself a generically meaningful act.12 Without a law this signifying transgression could not take place. Genres, in other words, work normatively. A law is always implied. Paradoxically, these ‘laws’ are, of course, only shaped by the works which they include.13

on one part of the lyric production marks of simplicity and rusticitas’ (Zink, Enchantment 15). 10 For Zumthor, the register is ‘a network of pre-established relationships between elements belonging to different levels of formalization, as well as between the levels themselves; this network provides a global prefiguration of the chanson, eliminating from the poem the simple power to communicate impressionistically’ (Medieval Poetics 183). 11 This signifying function is visible and complex in French medieval texts as Ardis Butterfield comments (Poetry 75). 12 Cf. Butterfield, on the ‘pleasure in combining sharply diverse registers’ (Poetry 140). 13 Cf. Schaeffer: ‘When we seek to elucidate the relationship of the Aeneid to the epic, the question we ask ourselves is not that of its belonging to the class as it may be defined once the Aeneid is a part of it, but that of its shaping force, the shaping force that is precisely one of the reasons the class such as we know it today possesses one appearance rather than another’ (174).

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Generic laws manage to work normatively in spite of this logical contortion, however, as Jacques Derrida suggests in ‘The Law of Genre’: As soon as the word genre is sounded […] a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind: ‘Do,’ ‘Do not,’ says ‘genre,’ the word genre, the […] law of genre (224).

It is a law invoking generic purity: ‘Thus, as soon as genre announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must not cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly or monstrosity’ (‘Law of Genre’ 224–5). There is a flaw, however, Derrida maintains, in the law of genre, which he refers to as ‘the law of the law of genre’: ‘It is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy’ (227). Here he invokes the language of set theory to demonstrate that when a text marks its membership of a genre by some signal, this signal does not itself belong to the genre: ‘I would speak of a sort of participation without belonging – a taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set. The trait that marks membership inevitably divides, the boundary of the set comes to form, by invagination, an internal pocket larger than the whole […]’ (227–8). This is another version of Lacan’s dictum that language does not constitute a closed set, touched on in the Introduction: ‘[T]here is no Universe of discourse’ (Logic 16.11.66). In genre, as in language generally, the same flaw prevents the set from closing neatly to contain everything.14 Thus there is a law, but one that can be relied upon to fail. As there is no sexual relation, so also is there ‘no Universe of discourse’, making of meaning a ‘sea of variations’, a ‘moving and transitory order’ (Logic 23.11.66). Sexual difference is mentioned here because gender and genre are intimately linked in the songs and it is this same logical flaw which makes of femininity a moving target in the system, ultimately impossible to bind within a set. It is helpful to employ the term ‘register’ for the way a generic transgression works. A pastourelle narrator may employ courtly language for the seduction of a shepherdess by means of registral inflexion, constituting a sudden invasion of the pastourelle by the chanson. For instance in Simon d’Authie’s pastourelle ‘Quant li dos estés define’ the narrator addresses the shepherdess as if she were la dame of the chanson: ‘O sweet happy creature, gracious heart and sweet’ (Medieval Pastourelle I, 130). In such a case a meaning effect is generated by the inappropriateness of the narrator’s language, our sense of which rests on an ideology of class.15 Here it signals

14 Cf. Fradenburg: ‘[W]hile the symbolic order is systematic, [it] is an open system […] ‘it’ is always changing’ (Sacrifice Your Love 68). 15 I have not foregrounded here the class ideologies of genre although they follow from what I am saying, but see Gaunt: ‘A writer may use the form of one genre, yet

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a lack of discernment on his part which allows the shepherdess the high ground. Parody arises from the dissonance between genre and register; that is what indicates the spoof. Other inferences may be drawn outside the narrative frame. The strategy of registral infiltration might be read/heard as authorial skill or savoir-faire.16 Bec uses the term interférences registrales to account for such anachronistic moments (Lyrique française 27). The term ‘register’ allows for a classification of songs beyond generic boundaries.17 It is not simply a question of embedding a genre within a register, however. They do not work quite the same way. Much detailed criticism has been written on the score of ‘register’, notably by Zumthor.18 A simpler usage, employed here, is to say that registers are the stuff of which genres are made or the processes by which they are made. Lance St. John Butler says something very like this: ‘Literary registers are the languages in which literary genres have their being’ (126). St. John Butler uses register in the same way that Bakhtin uses ‘speech genres’ (St. John Butler 110), that is as ‘typical forms of utterances’ (Bakhtin ‘The Problem’ 86). For Bakhtin ‘speech genres’ are inseparable from language.19 These speech genres, which I will call registers, could be seen as the way languages (in this case, literary and musical languages) are organized into typical utterances. In trouvère lyric one could call register the organizing process by which song genres are constructed. In this case genre could refer to the group of songs, register to something less substantive – to how that grouping is achieved – as St. John Butler seems to suggest: [E]very register hints at, sounds like, belongs to a genre; it is impossible to imagine the one without the other. Gibbon sounds as he does (register) because he is writing classical history (genre) in the eighteenth century. (126)

In trouvère lyric, register is what organizes language and music to make a song sound as it does. Genre is the product which results from its sounding that way. One can invoke a genre without being in that genre by using the register appropriate to it, as ‘Quant li dos estés define’ momentarily sounds deploy themes and motifs which are “marked” as belonging to another and this may signal the establishment of a conscious or unconscious dialectic between different ideologies’ (Gender 8–9). On genre and ideology see also Fredric Jameson’s ‘Magical Narratives’ (167–92) and the Introduction to Thomas Beebee (Ideology of Genre). 16 For an account of the way refrains function intergenerically see Butterfield (Poetry 75–102). 17 Bec uses it in this way in Lyrique française (35). 18 Zumthor attacked the question of register in successive studies, with different nuances but with a degree of consistency. See Langue et Techniques (144), ‘Style and Expressive Register’ (266), Medieval Poetics (190). 19 ‘Speech genres organize our speech in almost the same way as grammatical (syntactical) forms do. We learn to cast our speech in generic forms’ (Bakhtin, ‘Problem’ 90).

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like a chanson when it is clearly a pastourelle.20 This is another reason why it is helpful to maintain both terms. In a situation where genres infiltrate and cross-fertilize, it is useful to have a distinction between an idea of what something is and an idea of what it sounds like. Register allows a slant on generic behaviour which can detect anomaly, as in ‘Quant li dos estés define’. Each genre in the system is generated by a set of thematic, formal and musical strategies placed in opposition to each of the other genres, by which means these others also are generated as ‘genres’. One such opposition is in rhyme patterns. In a comparison between a chanson and a pastourelle, one observes that the anonymous pastourelle: ‘L’autrier m’iere levaz’, has more rhyme repetitions (aaabaaabbbaab) than the chanson: ‘Li nouviauz tans et mais et violete’ by the Chastelain de Couci (ababbbab), two songs examined in detail in Chapter 3. In the context of shorter lines in a longer strophe, the greater tendency to rhyme repetition in ‘L’autrier m’iere levaz’ contributes to what Christopher Page calls ‘short-range and conspicuous effects’ (Voices 16). The melody (in U), strengthens this tendency.21 In the ‘lower-style’ songs the melody often repeats in tandem with the rhyme as it does here. It sounds ‘catchy’, in other words. In the chanson, where there are more alternations, and therefore longer intervals between repetitions, the repetitions (in melody and versification) are harder for the ear to track, especially given the length of line. The song is less easy to remember, less frivolous. It is possible to read, for instance in these differences in versification, a message about the greater seriousness of the chanson relative to the pastourelle. In another system these differences in rhyme and melodic repetition might signify differently or not signify at all.22 The seriousness of the chanson can only signify in the context of its opposition to the frivolity of the pastourelle and low-style genres such as the chansons de femme.23 Those strategies which define a genre by placing it in opposition to another genre also form the subject of discourse.24 In Lacanian terms, the signifier ‘represents a subject for another signifier […] to reduce the subject in question to being no more than a signifier’ (Fundamental Concepts 207). As I approach it here, the subject is a product of generic differentiation, of a certain set of discursive strategies represented to others. In song, particularly,

20

Joyce invokes the epic in Ulysses without it being possible to call Ulysses generically an epic (St. John Butler 127). 21 See Marrocco and Sandon (67–8). 22 For instance the low-style dance forms of the thirteenth century, the virelai and the rondeau, become, in the work of fourteenth-century poet-composer Guillaume de Machaut, the vehicle for high-style songs of fin’amor. On the question of intergeneric interplay see Sara Sturm-Maddox and Donald Maddox, Intergenres. 23 Bruckner, citing Zink, speaks of the chanson and pastourelle as an ‘interlocking system’. I think the entire system interlocks to produce significations in the same way. 24 Genre makes also a world for the subject to inhabit, a quite specific world with its own co-ordinates, cf. Frow (130): ‘[A]s many worlds as genres’ (135).

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the subject is little more than what he/she sounds like. The entire range of poetico-musical strategies – melody, versification, syntax, lexis, and so on – is available for this project. Here register is a crucial concept since register is the means by which a subject’s voice is achieved. The subject of a song, which is to say (in the main) his or her voice, is constituted by signifiers arranged according to register. When a song is heard, then, the system is present. Any meaning which can be derived from a song is based on a knowledge of the entire system. Clearly the participants were aware of the system and the way it shaped the production of songs.25 But, as I intimated in the Introduction, the main focus here will be on the transindividual awareness of the Other of language, a knowledge belonging to no-one. Awareness appears in songs in the corpus in a variety of ways, both intertextual and intergeneric, conscious and unconscious. Sometimes it is simply the implicit mutual commentary of difference postulated as opposition. Sometimes it is made formally explicit, as in the jeu parti, where two trouvères adopt different positions on a thorny issue of fin’amor and debate it, strophe by strophe. Sometimes it is by quotation, as in the refrain form, where a refrain from one song is quoted in another, carrying associations from elsewhere along with it. Sometimes an anti-genre sets itself up in direct confrontation with a genre,26 as in the sottes chansons, which grotesquely parody the courtly attitudes of the chanson. One such is ‘Chans de singe ne poire mal pellee’, where la dame, so hyperbolically praised in the chanson, is referred to as ‘badly washed’ and whose face is ‘brown, black and wrinkled; to see you in the morning is to die in the evening’ (Rosenberg, Switten and Le Vot 217). Sometimes this mutual awareness between genres appears through musical polyphony, a development which fascinated the North. This musical development opened new possibilities for intertextuality, especially in the motet, where different texts, often in different genres and sometimes even in different languages, are sung simultaneously to different melodies. Sometimes these different texts offer opposing accounts of desire, for instance Montpellier

25 Bloch disputes this awareness, contending that troubadours and trouvères ‘resemble each other the least […] in the consciousness among the southern poets of the process of verse-making itself ’ (Bloch, Etymologies 125). What this assessment excludes is that the consciousness of the trouvères is directed towards verse-making in a different way. It is a consciousness of the system as a whole and how songs relate to each other intertextually and intergenerically across it. 26 Cf. Butterfield (Poetry 130). I mean ‘antigenre’ in Rider’s sense, as in his discussion of exordial types, as an ‘antitype’: ‘Every theoretical genre within a system of genres, analogously, is […] an antigenre for other genres with which it shares no traits’ (24). ‘Antigenre’ goes further, however, with the trouvères. In sotte chanson the ‘anti’ of antigenre carries, I think, the further connotation of direct antagonism towards its paired opposite, the chanson.

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Codex 264 (Tischler VIII 86). This is a bilingual motet in which the triplum (the highest line), in French, offers a courtly discourse on the improving effects of fin’amor, while the Latin motetus (the second line) in clerical mode, stresses the sinfulness of carnal love. Motets are a good example of the mutual awareness of genres made explicit. They draw material from all the genres and bring them to confront each other in a single polyphonic song. In her essay, ‘Intergeneric play: The Pastourelle in Thirteenth-Century French Motets’, Sylvia Huot tracks the ‘intergeneric dialogue’ between the three lines of a number of motets (300). The first, ‘Par un matinet l’autrier’/‘Hé berchiers! si grant envie’/EJUS, offers two opposing commentaries on the courtly/non-courtly opposition in relation to love. In the triplum a lover, identified by his attitudes as belonging in a chanson, scorns the shepherd for his boastfulness about his sexual exploits and his ‘low-class love’, and contrasts his own immaculate behaviour as one who seeks only loving recognition from his beloved (Huot 300). The motetus adopts a position of envy towards the shepherd, for precisely the same reason: his (undeserved) success in love (301). In Huot’s second example, the triplum represents a similar courtly lover in despairing mode vis-à-vis his lady, while the motetus narrates a pastourelle-style rape of a shepherdess by a high-born or possibly clerical protagonist (302–3). Huot comments: ‘the frustrated desire of the triplum has been projected into an arena where it can be acted upon without restraint’ (303). In other words, the vocal lines are, in a sense, aware of each other. A discourse is taking place about the nature of fin’amor and its discontents in contrast to the supposedly unrestrained behaviour of the vilain, and the possibility for the aristocrat of negotiating between the two. It is also a discourse about the behaviour of genres and their subjects – in this case the chanson and the pastourelle – and the possibility of negotiating between them. Historically speaking, what we can learn of the community who made these songs places them as participants of a court, whether aristocratic, common or clerical, or as burghers who emulated the language of the court.27 Overwhelmingly they were men, and these same men who wrote songs of fin’amor also wrote uncourtly songs, of ‘simplicity and rusticitas’ in Zink’s words (Enchantment 15). Textually speaking, those other voices which speak the uncourtly stand as oppositional positions of subjectivity admitted to a discourse. They may be included to their intended detriment, to signify the greater prestige of the courtly, but they remain.28 Bakhtin’s notion of reported

27 See Butterfield’s account of the urban context for composition in thirteenth-century Arras (Poetry 133–50). 28 Cf. Burns, speaking of the Old French fabliau and roman: ‘While often speaking a dominant discourse that figures woman’s oppression, the Arthurian lady and fabliau wife can also be heard to speak against those dominant discourses, to resist and dissent, turning their borrowed speech into something else’ (Bodytalk 17).

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speech is useful here.29 Points of opposition which are allowed to stand, perhaps purely for contrapuntal effect, become sites for contradiction and instability. The hegemony of the masculine chanson is not left to rest on its laurels, but suffers continual challenges. Arranging the Genres Three medievalists have offered useful registral distinctions between genres. Pierre Bec adopts for his ‘dialectic’ division the terms aristocratisant and popularisant. This terminology has the effect of de-emphasizing the origins – for instance class origins – of different registers, voices, genres, styles, while emphasizing their effect. Thus his term parafolkloric which foregrounds the synchronic at the expense of the diachronic. Bec insists also that the two registers are synchronous. These riders allow him to deal with the appearance of two registers within the one song, thus to distance himself from the earlier unproblematized terms, ‘popular’ and ‘aristocratic’, used by scholars such as Gaston Paris and Alfred Jeanroy. In register one Bec places: ‘the canso, the sirventes, the planh, the tenson or jeu-parti, the lai-descort’; in register two: ‘the aube, the chanson d’ami, the malmariée, the chanson de toile, the rondet de carole, the ballette, the vireli [virelai] and the resverie’. Finally he considers the ‘hybrids’: ‘the pastourelle, the reverdie, the chanson de croisade, the motet, the estampie, the rotrouenge’, and, as ‘bourgeois’: ‘the sotte chanson and the fatrasie (Bec, Lyrique française 35). Christopher Page’s typology has a different focus. He is more interested in drawing out the actual distinctions in poetic and musical form, although some points seem to have been taken straight from Bec’s typology. With his ‘high’ and, euphemistically, ‘lower’ styles, he makes explicit the hierarchical distinction which is implicit in Bec’s terms, ‘aristocratizing’ and ‘popularizing’.30 Zumthor offers two registers with an apparently less hierarchical basis:

29

See, for instance, Morris’ commentary in the introduction to Bakhtin Reader: ‘Any assertion made in the reported speech is destabilized or relativized by the intrusion within it of the opposing tones of the reporting speaker, but similarly the reporting speaker’s authorial or narrative authority is undermined by a spill-over of tone or words from the reported speech’ (‘Introduction’ 13). See also Earnshaw’s Female Voice in Medieval Romance Lyric, esp. Ch. 1, for a discussion of reported speech. Earnshaw, however, plays down the power of the reported voice to disrupt the dominant discourse. In her account, everything is righted at the end of the song, and the reader/listener is handed back to the author for a ‘correction’ of the partial truth conveyed by the song (15–16). 30 Page’s terminology, like Dragonetti’s, is drawn from the ‘levels of style’ discourse, as Doss-Quinby et al. point out: ‘Roger Dragonetti (1960) was the first to identify the courtly love lyric […] with the “high” style’ (Songs 9). But Dante himself made this association in De vulgari eloquentia (74).

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the register of ‘requête d’amour’ and the register of ‘bonne vie’ (Medieval Poetics 200). This second register, he suggests, is less coherent than the ‘requête d’amour’. It has ‘a coherence, which may be much less strong than that of the courtly register but which is much stronger than that found in all the other poetic systems attested in medieval tradition’ (200). The ‘central motif ’ is ‘that of joie de vivre […]. This motif can be amplified in three different ways […]: play and dance or al fresco meal and, very commonly, declarations of love’ (202). Zumthor’s and Page’s divisions place the chanson alone, with a register all to itself, while all the others are grouped together. In Bec’s case the chanson stands with its closest formal relatives, the jeu-parti, the planh and so on. Page would probably place the jeu-parti further from the chanson. He quotes from a poem by Raimon Vidal on the subject, ‘Abril issia’, in which a minstrel lists his skills. This minstrel, who places a high value on these skills, disdains ‘performers whose only concern is to learn lovedebates in verse, or jocx partitz, together with “every wisecrack that one says to fools” ’ (Voices 27). More is at work in this distinction than formal considerations. In the minstrel’s opinion the jeu-parti, whatever its formal characteristics, is a hack production. Both Bec and Page take care to place ‘lyrico-narrative’ and ‘lyrico-choreographic’ songs in the second register, away from the chanson. For the trouvères, it would seem, the chanson stood alone, and its standing alone is linked to its functionless status. Chansons do not tell stories, engage in dialogue or accompany a dance. To understand the significance of the functionlessness of the chanson it is necessary to turn to more contemporary observers. Medieval Theorists Dante Alighieri’s De vulgari eloquentia was written circa 1300, that is, at the end of the trouvère period, the end of the hegemony of this kind of monophonic song.31 Thus he is only a little out of date – or perhaps not at all, since poetic systems are not usually codified until after their demise. Dante’s interest extends beyond Italian, to works in Occitan and French. In any case, he insists, they are essentially the same ‘tripartite’ language: ‘for some speakers say oc, others oïl, and others si’ (De vulgari eloquentia 55). His examples cover all three languages. For Dante the canzone (chanson) is ‘the supreme form’, conferring the ‘greatest honour upon [its] authors’ (73). Dante allows three subjects to be suitable for the canzone, but in French, Love (with a capital letter) is overwhelmingly the theme. The canso ‘must 31

The page references are to Marianne Shapiro’s translation in De vulgari eloquentia: Dante’s Book of Exile. References to On the Art of Composing Poems are to her translations in the same book.

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speak agreeably of love’ says the author of On the Art of Composing Poems (127). Johannes de Grocheio, the Parisian theorist, in his De musica, has it that it ‘deals with delightful and lofty subject-matter, such as friendship and love’ (Grocheio 24). It is Love writ large which concerns the chanson. Lowstyle songs often speak of love. These songs, however, do not discuss love’s meanings, but generally confine their speech to the concrete, the physical aspect of love. It is sexual pleasure that concerns the low-style song rather than the grand desire of the chanson although, as will be argued, more complex, hidden desires are at stake here too. Dante incorporates his discussion of the canzone into the ‘levels of style’ discourse: For tragedy an exalted style is appropriate; for comedy a lowlier style, and for elegy, the style of the wretched. If the subject seems to call for the tragic style then the illustrious vernacular is to be used; consequently the song should be bound together as a canzone (De vulgari eloquentia 74).32

Dante leaves aside the middle and low styles, to be taken up later ‘in the fourth book’ (81). Sadly, this was never written. In the eyes of our theorists the chanson was simply the best. Johannes de Grocheio names it cantus coronatus, the crown of monophonic secular song (Grocheio 23).33 The crown is important. Grocheio continues: it is ‘customarily composed by kings and nobles and sung in the presence of kings and princes, moving their minds to boldness and fortitude’ (24). Grocheio distinguishes the worth of different styles on the basis of who composed and performed them and the intended audience. It was characterized, said Dante, by ‘gravity of thought, magnificence of poetic line, exaltedness of construction and excellence of vocabulary’ (De vulgari eloquentia 74). It should include only the ‘noblest words’ (79). Dante stresses also the sheer size of the chanson. The longer the line the better – best of all the hendecasyllable – ‘for if weighty things are multiplied then their weight is multiplied similarly’. Lower-style songs, on the other hand, often present themselves as little songs and use the diminutive forms. Grocheio includes songs like this in his category ‘cantilena’ which might translate, in Old French, as chansonete, a ‘little song’. Dante uses the term cantilena to mean ‘the diminutive form’ which is suitable for comedy, that is, his middle or lower style (De vulgari eloquentia 81). Cantilena could 32

Shapiro notes Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Rhetoric ad Herennium and John of Garland’s Poetria nova as chief sources for Dante’s division of styles (223). See also Dragonetti’s discussion of levels of style in De vulgari eloquentia and other medieval treatises (Ch. 1). 33 Page argues that ‘in some important respects Grocheio’s distinction between cantus and cantilena corresponds to our distinction between the High Style and the Lower Styles’ (Voices 67–8).

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also mean ‘an old song’. Either translation distinguishes it from the chanson where sheer size and novelty are both desirable attributes. Grocheio says also that the cantilena lacks the ‘virtue’ of the cantus coronatus, the high-style chanson ‘in poetry and melody’ (24). The chanson is exclusively lyric. Dante says that it produces ‘by itself and without aid that for which it was made’ (73). It is a song for one voice only, speaking in a lofty way of love. Thus it is nobler than the ballate (dancesongs), ‘which’ says Dante, ‘need the presence of dancers for whom they are produced’ (73). The chanson is its own raison d’être, needing no external aid or exterior justification for its existence. It is not for anything other than itself. Dante gives an idea of what the chanson was on the basis of what it was not – the ballate. In the chanson we can distinguish the supreme worth of the good that is useless, that which, in Cicero’s words ‘is sought […] for itself ’ (‘Deliberative Genre’ 1): Anything that is sought either entirely or partly for itself we shall call honestum (honorable). Because there are two parts to it, of which one is simple, and the other is mixed, we shall consider the simple part first. All the things in this genus are embraced in the single force, and under the single name, of virtue. Virtue is a disposition [habitus] of spirit [animus] in harmony with the measure of nature and of reason. (1)

Cicero’s second category is that of utilitas (utility, expediency or advantage) but honestas is the greater necessity (1). Virtue has no use. It cannot be harnessed to any purpose. Dante mentions honestas by name in Convivio, as onestade, which equals the courtly: ‘Courtliness and onestade are one and the same’, he maintains (qtd in Cherchi 42). Onestade is identified as the ancient principle of ‘onesto […]. That which, without expediency and without any fruit, is to be praised for its own reason’ (Cherchi 43). Onestade, and so courtliness, can therefore be opposed to usefulness, as Cherchi suggests (44). The lower-style song, unlike the chanson, is often harnessed to activities outside itself. In lower style the pure lyric voice is contaminated with narrative, dialogue and the movements of dancers. These are songs with a purpose and therefore less noble than the chanson. Dante does not explicitly devalorize narrative or dialogue, as he does dance against the canzone, but the same argument, of a usefulness beyond the song itself, applies equally to them. There is, it would seem, a preference for the solo performance over group activities such as dance or conversation. The exclusion of conversation would suggest, as Page does, a devalorization of the jeu-parti, whatever its formal characteristics. The language of the chanson is apparently rational, the syntax comparatively complex with many connectives, and the versification sophisticated,

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all indicating a high level of achievement on the part of its author. Dante allows polymetric lines in the canzone, strictly according to rule (De vulgari eloquentia 84), but there is a tendency in the French repertoire to the greater austerity of isometrism in the chanson, especially in the twelfth century. The lines of the lower-style song are frequently polymetric, with, as Page notes, ‘short-range and conspicuous effects of rhyme and metre’ (Voices 16). They are generally smaller, simpler in form, in syntax and vocabulary, cheerfully lightweight. They appear to be examples of an older tradition with a popular flavour. The chanson, Dante instructs, is a ‘colligation of equal stanzas without refrain’ (De vulgari eloquentia 81). There is no pattern of periodic return with its echo of the dance and therefore of the body.34 Repetition is not permitted to cloud the flow of the song’s argument, its claims to rationality. Musical and textual repetitions – obvious effects for the ear to catch hold of – are de-emphasized. The lower-style song frequently has a refrain. As Grocheio says of the rotundellus (O. Fr. rondeau, a form of cantilena), ‘it turns back on itself in the manner of a circle’ (26). The little song’s pattern of return opens up the potential for a kind of ‘intratextuality’ – a relationship of alternation and interaction between stanza and refrain – which is excluded by the chanson’s linearity.35 Christopher Page suggests that strict musical rhythm, which has the effect of squashing the text into an inflexible container, giving it less room to breathe, would not be appropriate to the chanson (Voices 16). Certainly, that weightiness and nobility extolled by Dante suggest that the chanson was given plenty of room to move in performance, allowing its text to shine forth and its long-range patterns enough space in which to unfold. Not the kind of song to set your feet tapping! The low-style songs, on the other hand, do favour patterns of short-term repetition in words and melody which dominate the text and, if they were dance songs, were probably performed with strict musical rhythm, as Page suggests. They were in harness to something outside themselves. The first example here, the chanson, ‘Ausi com unicorne sui’, is a good representative of the high style. It is by Thibaut de Champagne, a trouvère mentioned approvingly by both Dante and Grocheio as a master of the high style. In fact it is one of the songs chosen by Grocheio to represent the cantus coronatus. Thibaut’s double title of king of Navarre and count of Champagne probably did him no harm with Grocheio, who, as we have seen, makes a point of the regal milieu of the chanson. It has a relatively complex syntax.

34

As can be seen in a chronological anthology, refrain became more popular in the northern chanson as the thirteenth century progressed, however. See for instance Rosenberg and Tischler’s anthology Chanter m’estuet. It is a question of degree. As Page suggests refrain is ‘rare or non-existent’ in the chanson (Voices 16). 35 See Zink, ‘Remarques’ (424–7).

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There is no refrain, no short-term repetition, the melody is through-composed within the stanza and it has isometric lines. It has also a certain magnificence – as for instance in the allegorical framework, reminiscent of Guillaume de Lorris’ Roman de la Rose, and the extended architectural metaphor – which fits the scale of Dante’s requirements. The second example, to point the contrast, is the littlest of little songs: a rondeau. Like the ballata it needs the presence of dancers. Zumthor says of the rondeaux: ‘These pieces, sufficiently rigorous and fixed in form, range […] across several different registers’ (Langue et Techniques 144). The rondeau, therefore, is a single genre but is traversed by numerous registers. This is true in one sense but it obscures something else. In another sense, all rondeaux, while they employ a range of forms of expression, of registers therefore, share a particular flavour, the rondeau flavour, deriving partly from their distinctive form, ABaAabAB, which works at both the musical and textual level (the uppercase representing the refrain, constituted by textual and musical repetition). Whatever is said sounds completely different if it is chopped up by verbal and musical repetitions and interruptions in this way. The utterance may be courtly in substance; the rondeaux which have been preserved are presented as courtly productions to accompany courtly activity. But the courtliness of the message is transformed by the medium. John Stevens coined the term ‘courtly-popular’ for such songs (162). Rondeaux all sound less serious than they otherwise would, if they were laid out in the impeccable, uninterrupted versification of the grand chant. The light-hearted, almost trivial quality bestowed by the form gives them something in common which one could call registral, because it gives the songs their voice. This register shares its breathless, heedless quality with all songs sung while doing something else, like children’s skipping songs or sea shanties. The theme is distorted by the insouciance of the form while the singers’ attention is elsewhere. Courtly seriousness becomes eroded by its inclusion within the eccentric frame of the rondeau, which owes its form to dance, and the language of courtliness loses weight, like the dancing feet it encourages. For instance the refrain: ‘Mes cuers est emprisonés en trop cruel prison’ (B 1318, B rond. 157) while perhaps verging on the perfunctory, could easily function as part of a chanson. But embedding it as a refrain within the rondeau form effectively removes its gravitas. Its teasing half citation in the middle of the strophe, ‘Mes cuers est emprisonés’, followed at a distance by the lagging remainder, ‘en trop cruel prison’ gives it an intonation of irreverence. Similarly, in ‘C’est tot la gieus en mi les prez’, the refrain, though it gestures to the courtly, the gesture is flung from a distance: ‘Vos ne sentés mie les maus d’amer ausi com je fas’ (‘You don’t feel the pains of love at all as I feel them’). What could be more, and, at the same time, less courtly? It is what courtly lovers say constantly in a variety of refined ways, but to have it so baldly expressed, like a children’s squabble, scatters its claims to

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the refinement of fin’amor to the winds. In fact it goes further; it exposes the pretensions of fin’amor itself. The significance of this refrain is in its interregistral relation with the chanson. What it is can only be defined by what it is not. Yet it also speaks, in its heedlessness, to challenge the pretensions of chanson. Rondeaux may suddenly interpolate material in a different mode, for instance, instructions for the dancers, as in ‘C’est tot la gieus en mi les prez’ (B rond. 5), where the tiny narrative is interrupted by the imperative, ‘Remirez vos bras’ (look at your arms!). The rubric, by juxtaposition, becomes incorporated into the narrative and this eccentric association and others like it, are what give the rondeau its flavour. It is as if a play were performed including the rubrics. ‘Ausi conme unicorne sui’ chanson RS 2075, L 240–3, MW 2437 Manuscripts: K, also ABCFMORSTUVXZa, envoi from M Attributions: Thibaut de Champagne in KRTXa, Pierre de G and in C Music: in KMORVXZa Text: Brahney 102–5 Other eds: Rosenberg and Tischler 339–40, Rosenberg, Switten and Le Vot 307–8. 1. Ausi conme unicorne sui qui s’esbahit en regardant quant la pucele va mirant. Tant est liee de son ennui, pasmee chiet en son giron; lors l’ocit on en traïson. Et moi ont mort d’autel senblant Amors et ma dame, por voir; mon cuer ont, n’en puis point ravoir. 2. Dame, quant je devant vos fui et je vos vi premierement, mes cuers aloit si tressaillant que il remest quant je m’en mui. Lors fu menez sanz raençon en la douce chartre en prison, dont li pilier sont de talent et li huis sont de biau veoir et li anel de bon espoir.

I am like the unicorn who is bewildered when he gazes at the maiden. So overjoyed is he in his torment that he falls fainting in her lap; then they treacherously kill him. And me have they killed in the same way, Love and my Lady, in truth; they have my heart and I can’t reclaim it. Lady, when I stood before you and saw you for the first time, my heart leapt so that it remained with you when I left. Then it was led without ransom a captive in the sweet prison with the pillars of desire and the gates of beautiful sight and the chains of good hope.

THE SONG SYSTEM I

3. De la chartre a la clef Amors, et si i a mis trois portiers: Biau Semblant a non li premiers, et Biauté ceus en fet seignors; Dangier a mis a l’uis devant – un ort felon, vilain puant, qui mult est maus et pautoniers. Cist troi sont et viste et hardi; mult ont tost un honme saisi. 4. Qui porroit sousfrir les tristors et les assauz de ces huissiers? Onques Rollans ne Oliviers ne vainquirent si fors estors; il vainquirent en conbatant, mès ceus vaint on humiliant. Soufrirs en est gonfanoniers; en cest estor dont je vous di, n’a nul secors que de merci. 5. Dame, je ne dout mes riens plus fors tant que faille a vous amer. Tant ai apris a endurer que je sui vostres tout par us; et se il vous en pesoit bien, ne m’en puis je partir pour rien que je n’aie le remenbrer et que mes cuers ne soit adès en la prison et de moi près. [Dame, quant je ne sai guiler, merciz seroit de saison mès de soustenir si grevain fès.]

39

Love holds the key to that prison and has placed three wardens there: the first is Beautiful Appearance, and Beauty is lord of them; Obstruction is placed at the front gate, a filthy villain, a stinking knave, a completely wicked wretch. These three are quick and strong; they can seize a man in no time. Who could suffer the torments and the assaults of these wardens? Never did Roland or Oliver win such difficult battles; they won by fighting, but these are defeated by humility. Suffering is the standard-bearer; in this battle I’m telling you about, there’s no help but mercy. Lady, I fear nothing more than that I should fail in loving you. So much have I learnt to endure that I am yours completely by habit; and if this grieves you much nothing can make me go away without remembering it all and my heart will be forever in prison and yet close to me. Lady, since I cannot lie, it is the time for mercy to reward me for bearing so heavy a burden.

‘C’est tot la gieus, en mi les prez’ rondeau B 1865, B rond. 5, L 265–315 Manuscripts: u 71, Guillaume de Dole v. 1846 Text: B Rond. 5 C’est tot la gieus, en mi les prez, vos ne sentés mie les maus d’amer dames i vont por caroller, remirez vos bras! Vos ne sentés mie les maus d’amer si com je fas.

It’s right down there in the meadow, you don’t feel the pangs of love at all, ladies go there to dance caroles, look at your arms! You don’t feel the pangs of love at all as I do.

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So, on the one hand we have the chansons, songs of greater scope and austerity, requiring serious attention and discernment on the part of listeners to catch their overall patterns of metre, melody and rhyme – serious songs dealing with Love on a grand scale. The emphasis is apparently on what Julia Kristeva calls the phenotext, the linguistic, communicative aspect of language, as opposed to the genotext, a ‘process’ which is ‘language’s underlying foundation’ (Revolution 87). The chanson’s claim to rational, linear thought is not justified on closer inspection, however. Desire presents its own obstacles to straightforward linearity. We shall return to this question in Chapter 3, the chapter devoted to masculine desire, and again in Chapter 6, which examines the masculine chronotope. On the other hand, we have songs such as ‘C’est tot la gieus en mi les prez’, courtly products but uncourtly in register, simpler, more catchy, making fewer claims – little light-hearted songs for the celebration of courtly life, intended, as Grocheio suggests, for the young (24–6). Such songs emphasize the non-linguistic, ‘genotextual’ aspects, ‘phonematic devices (such as the accumulation and repetition of phonemes or rhyme) and melodic devices (such as intonation or rhythm)’ (Revolution 86). Since the chanson conferred the most honour on its author, it is not surprising that in the northern chansonniers the songs with attributions are most often chansons. The author who is so honoured by association with such a song is more likely to be remembered as its composer. If he is not, the scribe will probably have attached a likely name. Where honour and fame are, the name will follow. In France the most honourable songs were those modelled on the troubadour forms, notably the canso. The indigenous northern forms, the chanson de toile and the dance forms rondeaux and ballette, are frequently anonymous.36 Within the northern lyric system style, genre, prestige and attribution were linked categories. In the North, it is in these lower-style songs that the voices of women usually emerge, either as lyric monologue or woven into a narrative, as in the various encounter genres such as the pastourelle. Michel Zink suggests that such songs, in particular dance songs, were anonymous, not on account of their lesser prestige but because, unlike the chanson, they support a physical activity (‘Remarques’ 424): The singer places there something of his own, not only of the spirit, but also of the body’s gestures, and, by giving himself body and soul to the poem, he assumes completely its subjectivity. (424)

Such little songs as these do proclaim their unimportance and indeed frivolity vis-à-vis the chanson, however. It is precisely their association with the body and its activities that proclaims their low status. The absence of a 36

Cf. Rosenberg, Switten and Le Vot (3); Bec, Lyrique française I (33).

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name reflects a hierarchy in which honestas is valorized at the expense of utilitas and soul at the expense of matter. It is impossible to dissociate questions of gender from those of genre and the differential valorization of genres. The power and prestige of the chanson is impossible to extricate from its association with masculinity. The inferiority of the lower-style genres in the North is associated with the inferiority of femininity, although women do not have the lower ground to themselves. Because the gender hierarchy is imbricated with other hierarchies, women share this ground with the childish, the old-fashioned and the rustic, as in the pastourelle, where the rustic and the feminine are neatly encapsulated in the figure of the shepherdess. So we will turn now to the registral constitution of femininity in the system of song genres.

2

The Song System II The Ignoble Words of Eve: Femininity in the System ‘So that the soul may come into being, woman is differentiated from it right from the beginning. She is called woman (on la dit-femme) and defamed (diffâme) (Lacan, Encore 85). ‘[T]he woman becomes, or is produced, precisely as what [the man] is not’ (Lacan, qtd in Introduction II, Mitchell and Rose 49).

This chapter explores the constitution of textual ‘women’ as speaking subjects in the system, and the registral and generic implications of their femininity. It is a necessary step towards a consideration of feminine desire. The exploration takes place mainly in the work of ancient and medieval theoreticians, but their understandings of femininity are brought into dialogue with the understandings of twentieth-century structuralist, psychoanalytic and, to a lesser extent, feminist theory. In trouvère song, the posing of sexual difference as an opposition is taken up as a way of providing contrast. Matilda Bruckner observes: [C]ultures – like that of the medieval courtly world – ‘coopt’ [women’s songs] and use the persona of the female voice as a contrast, the voice of the other inscribed within its own polyphonic system. The dominant male voice responds to its complement, the female voice, and recognizes itself by the difference (‘Fictions’ 872).1

I suggest that this recognition of oneself is brought about by the meaning effect produced when difference is posed as opposition. In fact it is more than recognition, which suggests some pre-existing substance to be recognized. There could be no masculinity without the prop of a supposedly complementary femininity, as the two Lacan quotations which herald this chapter suggest.

1

Bruckner here cites Earnshaw The Female Voice (137–41).

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The feminine voice does not complement the masculine, it constitutes it. The elegant refinement of the masculine chanson comes into being (receives its soul, to borrow Lacan’s terminology) by differentiation from the unrefined feminine of the chanson de femme (the body from which soul has been removed). Consider the noble sufferings of the lover of the Chastelain de Couci’s ‘La douce voiz du louseignol sauvage’: Tant ai en li ferm assis mon corage qu’ailleurs ne pens, et Diex m’en lait joïr! C’onques Tristanz, cil qui but le beverage, pluz loiaument n’ama sanz repentir; quar g’i met tout: cuer et cors et desir, force et pooir – ne sai se faiz folage; encor me dout qu’en trestout mon eage ne puisse assez li et s’amor servir.

So steadfastly have I set my heart on her that I think of no-one else, and God give me joy of it! Even Tristan, he who drank the potion, never loved so truly and without regret as I because I’ve put everything into it; heart and body and desire, strength and power – I don’t know if I’m mad, but I fear that in all my life I could never show enough devotion to her and to her love. (Lerond 69)

We would not hear these sentiments as noble without the ignoble feminine words which constitute nobility by their lack. Here is the motet line ‘Hé! Cuer joli, trop m’aves laissie en doulour’ to point the contrast with its string of avid exclamations: Hé! cuer joli, trop m’avés laissié en dolour, dont ja n’istrai a nul jour! Bien sai! Hé Diex! dusqu’adonc que je vous ravrai? Trop sui marie de vou compaignie que je n’ai. Biaus sire Diex, quant vous verrai? Trop m’est tart que je vous revoie, se Diex me gart! Jesus vous ramaint et si saint! U je morrai a ce mot: E! e! o! biaus dous amis, ore demorés vous trop.

Oh my passionate heart! You’ve left me in such sorrow, I’ll never come out of it! Ever! I know it well! Oh God! how long till I get you back again? I’m so sad without your company. Sweet lord God, when will I see you again? I’m longing to see you again, so help me God! May Jesus and his saints keep you! Or I will die with these words: Ah! ah! oh! beautiful sweet friend, too long you stay away. (Doss-Quinby et al. 212).

Chapter 1 attempted to theorize the hierarchy of genres in the trouvère system from this starting point of signification as difference posed as opposi-

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tion. I now want to feed gender into the equation and consider it in relation to genre, that is, to view gender and genre as imbricated symbolic systems. In this context, the women of the chansons de femme will often appear, therefore, as that-which-is-not-man, although there are other possibilities for women in trouvère song. If the woman in question is the Virgin Mary, she may appear as that which is unlike all other women. For instance, in Thibaut de Champagne’s ‘De grant travail et de petit esploit’, Mary is praised for what makes her different to all other women. This is strophe 2: Dex, qui tout set et tout puet et tout voit, nos avroit tost un entre .ii. geté, se la Dame, plaine de grant bonté, qui est lez lui, pour nous ne li prioit. Si tres douz moz plesanz et savoré le grant coroz du haut Signeur rapaie. Mult par est fox qui autre amor essaie, qu’en cestui n’a barat ne fausseté, ne es autres ne merci ne manaie.

God, who knows all and can do all and see all, would have dealt us a deadly blow if the Lady full of great goodness who is beside him had not prayed for us. Her most gracious, delicate words calm the wrath of the great Lord. He who attempts any other love is completely mad, for in this love there is neither trickery nor falseness, in the others, neither mercy nor protection. (Brahney 248–51).

Mary is valorized against the inadequacies of other dames. She alone can truly love. Other songs, like ‘L’autrier estoie en un vergier’, attributed in some MSS to Gace Brulé, oppose a ‘good woman’ (la bone), who expresses sentiments of fin’amor, to a ‘false woman’ (la fausse), who will ‘take the money’, not ‘the honour’, that is she will look for a rich lover. In trouvère song all women are meant to sound essentially ‘feminine’ but this ‘essence’ is precisely an empty slate, semantically speaking, on which different characteristics can be inscribed depending on the opposition required. ‘[W]oman does not exist’ as a category, as Lacan provocatively insists (Encore 7). Bruce Fink elaborates: ‘Lacan is asserting here that Woman with a capital W, Woman as singular in essence, does not exist; Woman as an all-encompassing idea (a Platonic form) is an illusion’ (Encore 7, n. 28). ‘Woman’ is unstable, with a tendency to shift, both on a synchronic and a diachronic axis, across the system and across time. This is how femininity manages to travel in a system where it is designed to speak only for the low. ‘Femininity’ is subject to continual adjustment and yet it always looks essential. This chapter is concerned with ‘feminine’ discourse as it is constituted in opposition to ‘masculine’ discourse in the system. Constructions of femininity and the feminine relation to discourse current to any era find their way inevitably into literary register and thus into genre. Women, supposedly, sound as they do because of what they are. In fact, the reverse is true: these women ‘are’ as they are because of how they sound, that is, how they are

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constituted within a symbolic system. This remains true whoever ‘writes’ them – whether it is a man or a woman, whether women write or are written. In psychoanalytic terms, sexual difference is always at the symbolic level: ‘Man and a woman […] are nothing but signifiers’ as Lacan insists (Encore 39). This is why I have preferred the terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ rather than ‘male’ and female’ with their biological connotations. I will therefore not distinguish here between women as they ‘are’ and women as they are written, spoken or sung. As I suggested earlier, in this context all féminité is textuelle (Bec ‘“Trobairitz”’ 235–6). This emphasis on féminité textuelle also prevents entanglement at this point in the issue of female authorship of the chansons de femme, which is not my primary concern here.2 Others are doing this work.3 Moreover, if femininity is constituted by discourse it cannot escape genre since no discourse is free from genre, as I have discussed in the previous chapter.4 The ‘Feminine’ Register Various attempts have been made to organize trouvère song genres according to register, as discussed above. Bec, Zumthor and Page have created ‘typologies’ with this aim. Gender finds its way into these typologies (explicitly in Bec’s), because registral characteristics are marked for gender. Anne Klinck comments: ‘As Bec recognized, the chansons de femme adopt a particular register’ (‘Oldest Folk Poetry’ 243). They do not constitute a generic group but what Bec calls a ‘type lyrique’ (Lyrique française 57), which covers a range of generic and sub-generic groups.5 Bec places the lyric type of the chansons de femme within his popularisant register (57), which is opposed to the aristocratisant register of the chanson. He does not use the terms ‘high’ and ‘lower’ style as Page does (Voices 16), but I think this positioning can be assumed; ‘feminine’ is a subset of ‘low’. The popularizing tendency of the feminine voice is the tendency of feminine subjectivity in the system since what is produced by this register

2 Female authorship is a matter which cannot be ignored, however, and I return briefly to it in my final chapter on the feminine chanson. 3 See, for instance, Madeleine Tyssens (‘Voix de femmes’), Maria Coldwell (‘Jougleresses’), Joan Tasker Grimbert (‘Trobairitz’), Eglal Doss-Quinby (‘Rolan’), Wendy Pfeffer (‘Complaints’) and, of course, the anthology Songs of the Women Trouvères edited by Doss-Quinby et al. 4 Cf. St. John Butler: ‘one cannot just speak “Standard English”, one has to speak in a register’ (13), and speaking in a register always entails speaking in a genre: ‘It is impossible to imagine the one without the other’ (126). Femininity, in these songs, is a register and is thus produced as genre. 5 Cf. Zumthor: ‘The registral distinction traverses that of genres without being identified with it’ (Langue et techniques 144).

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is the feminine subject. This registration of feminine voices raises questions which trouble some feminist critics, because it excludes the woman’s voice sui generis from the more valued mode of utterance, and for related reasons it is of interest in this study, which is concerned with the epistemological implications of this question of the registration of femininity in the system. Zumthor does not explicitly consider the place of femininity in the system, but the qualities he ascribes to the ‘good life’ register are those frequently associated with the feminine voice. Firstly he notes the presence of exclamations and interrogatives. Secondly, that ‘paratactic juxtaposition predominates greatly over subordination’. Thirdly, ‘the vocabulary contains […] constant use of the diminutive et (m.) or ette (f.) with substantives or adjectives, whose semantic effect is the neutralization of connotations of respect or distance’. He mentions also the concretizing, descriptive effect of this lexis, ‘referring to objects rather than to qualities’ and the ‘almost total lack of metaphors’. Fourthly, ‘the central motif is that of joie de vivre, […] amplified in three different ways […] play and dance or al fresco meal and, very commonly, declarations of love’ (Medieval Poetics 201–2). Anne Klinck notes the gender implication in Zumthor’s good life register: One of the characteristics of this register that Zumthor picks out is the use of diminutives; typically, these are feminine adjectives […] Whatever we call that register, whether ‘popular,’ ‘lower-style,’ or something else, these feminine diminutives are certainly markers of it, and in them gender and register are inseparable (‘Poetic Markers’ 341).

One cannot find all the qualities suggested by Zumthor in every low-style chanson de femme but there are usually enough of them to make the voice unmistakeable. Like ‘Hé cuer joli’, quoted above, this rondeau by Adam de la Halle demonstrates the femme’s discourse: ‘Fi maris, de vostre amour’ Rondeau, chanson de malmariée B rond. 74, L 2–45 Manuscripts: W, Vat. Reg. 1543 Attribution: Adam de la Halle Music: in W Text: Bec, Lyrique française II 16. Fi, maris, de vostre amour car j’ai ami! Biaus est et de noble atour: fi, maris de vostre amour! Il me sert et nuit et jour: pour che l’aim si. Fi maris, de vostre amour, car j’ai ami!

Fie, husband, on your love for I have a friend! He’s handsome and nobly attired: fie, husband, on your love! He serves me night and day for that I love him so. Fie husband, on your love for I have a friend!

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The construction of ‘Fi maris’ is partly paratactic, the language concrete rather than figurative. The femme’s speech is usually down to earth; this is the nub of her ‘sensuality’. The song begins with an exclamation and, over all, it displays the joie de vivre noted by Zumthor, in the third of its manifestations: the declaration of love. There are no diminutives for good reason. Their association with femininity is a different one. They usually appear in descriptions of the woman herself, as object. It is she – the femme of low style, not the dame of high – who is made small by diminutives. As Klinck notes, they usually appear in the feminine form, which suggests they are usually found in the masculine voice. There is a group of songs, however, in which the woman refers to herself in such terms, as in ‘E, bone amourette’ where the French allows for more diminutives than can be captured in the translation: ‘Car je sui jonette, plaisans et doucette, rians’ (For I am young, charming and sweet, full of laughter) (Doss-Quinby et al. 130, their translation). One of these songs will be considered in detail later in this chapter, and the following chapter will explore the masculine use of diminutives to cut the femme down to size. The overall effect is one of simplicity. Klinck sees the woman’s song as ‘love poetry which is (a) in a woman’s voice, (b) contrastive to male-voice love lyric, (c) apparently simple, (d) outspoken, (e) openly sensual’ (‘Oldest Folk Poetry’ 243). What these qualities produce, overall, is woman as material.6 Feminine artlessness has been praised in medieval feminine-voiced lyrics. For Meg Bogin the trobairitz were ‘women [who] wrote in no-one’s character but their own’ (Women Troubadours 66). She continues, ‘The language is direct, unambiguous and personal. […] [T]he women wrote about their own intimate feelings’ (67–8).7 I see this voice as a ‘fiction’ of femininity as Bruckner expresses it.8 Nonetheless, these fictions are what constitute flesh and blood women as well as the bloodless subjects of song. These same characteristics of ‘artlessness’ also mark songs as low style – leaving ‘feminine’ securely positioned as a sub-set of ‘low’.

6

Cf. Antoine Tavera, on the ‘naively confessed excess of sensuality’ of the trobaritz (‘Troubadours maudits’ 144). 7 Meg Bogin, dubbed one of the ‘naive enthusiasts’ by Bruckner (‘The Trobairitz’ 212), was a product of her time. She brought out her anthology, The Women Troubadours, in c. 1976, in the full flowering of second-wave feminism when the project for feminism was often to discover the truth of women and their lives. This truth was supposed to be found unmediated in their words once their writings had been unearthed from their obscurity. It must also be recalled that we owe our knowledge of the trobairitz to this enthusiasm. Tavera, writing two years later, makes a similar claim, that the trobairitz ‘undoubtedly outdid the troubadours […] in authenticity of feeling’ (144). 8 ‘[T]he trobairitz’ songs demonstrate […] the way poetic fictions play with cultural, literary, and social definitions of man and woman, masculine and feminine’ (‘Fictions’ 865).

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A Woman’s Place The question of where women’s voices do and do not belong is, in the trouvère context, a matter of their positioning within the song system in opposition to the masculine voice. My solution is to accept the placement of most of the chansons de femme squarely in the ‘uncourtly’ register, as Klinck does (‘Oldest Folk Poetry’ 244), for reasons which will be elaborated, but with the proviso that the woman’s voice has a tendency to leak out of its uncourtly, ‘low’ boundaries and challenge the masculine voice on the high ground – the ground of the chanson.9 The opposition fails at times. The neat complementarity is not sustained because ‘them-two’ sexes will not add up to One (Encore 7). Doss-Quinby et al. reject the usefulness of the registral distinction for the chanson de femme, arguing that ‘it often seems more of a hindrance than a help’ (9),10 but, as has already been argued, the discourse of the songs relies for its meaning effects on an inter-registral interplay in which sexual difference is already incorporated. To be feminine is already to be ‘low’ to the masculine ‘high’. To bring Saussure’s terminology to the trouvères, ‘high’ can only signify in opposition to ‘low’ and in the songs, feminine is the ‘low’ by which masculine becomes ‘high’.11 Lacan is following a Saussurean path when he says: ‘the woman becomes, or is produced, precisely as what [the man] is not’ (Lacan, qtd in Mitchell and Rose 49). Her ‘meaning’ is her difference from him. This is the ‘meaning’ of femininity which we find in trouvère lyric but it does not inhere in any signified. Although sexual difference is organized logocentrically as a binary opposition privileging the masculine in the songs of the trouvères, gender takes its place within a system of many genres, where the differences are multiple. This inconsistency, however, presents no problems for binarizing human subjects.

9 Bec, in his 1995 anthology, classifies the songs of the trobairitz as ‘Le grand chant courtois féminin’ (cited in Grimbert ‘Songs by Women’ 119). See also Lyrique française (34, 57 and 61, n. 14). Grimbert’s concern is that, having placed all the chansons de femme in his popularisant register, Bec then ‘concedes that the chanson de femme penetrated the registre aristocratisant, particularly the cansos that have a feminine voice’. This can only be accounted for by a ‘disconcertingly high degree of interregistral borrowings’, making the original designation somewhat spurious (Grimbert, ‘Songs by women’ 6). I argue, however, as I think Bec implies, that women break a generic law by stepping out of the registre popularisant. 10 Doss-Quinby et al. cite Zumthor in support of their argument (Doss-Quinby et al. 9–10). He, however, seem to uphold the registral distinction. See Medieval Poetics: ‘I would therefore be inclined to admit the existence of two registers, of differing degrees of cohesion’ (200–201). Zumthor does suggest that the second register is ‘in decay’ in the late period (203). It is, however, the cohesion of the second register which is in doubt, not the distinction between the two. 11 Cf. Michel Zink (Enchantment 89–98).

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We produce the effects of meaning by turning difference into opposition. What is continuous in the real is, in language, made discrete and binarized. Generic differences are always binarized, in the sense that meaning can only appear fixed within a binary opposition, as we have seen. Once a third term is introduced the differences shift into new oppositions. The chansons de femme woman, for instance, will have one signification when opposed to the chanson lover-singer and another when opposed to the pastourelle narrator. She is not the same femme, but alters according to the requirements of the opposition, in her role as a ‘reserve supply of negativity’ (Irigaray, Speculum 22). Although similar characteristics, such as waywardness, intransigence and sensuality, turn up over and over again, they are not invariably all present at once and even when they are they will be differently arranged. The system generalises these different manifestations as ‘Woman’, however, and the differences are quietly elided. This is what makes it possible to map a binary gender system onto a multiple genre system. So I provisionally leave the chansons de femme on the low, uncourtly side. This study will argue that this is a woman’s ‘proper’ place, the place the system has designed for her, since the term ‘woman’ is always already constituted as subordinated to ‘man’. In Lacanian terms it is a symbolic ordering based on the absence of the phallus. Lacan suggests: [The phallus] can play its role only […] as itself a sign of the latency with which any signifiable is struck, when it is raised (aufgehoben) to the the function of signifier. The phallus is the signifier of this Aufhebung itself, which it inaugurates (initiates) by its disappearance (Écrits 288).

The phallus underpins the function of signification but it can only do so in its absence: [T]his test of the desire of the Other is decisive not in the sense that the subject learns by it whether or not he has a real phallus, but in the sense that he learns that the mother does not have it (Écrits 289, my emphasis).12

Sexual difference is thus the point at which signification originates through the inauguration of absence. It is a version of ‘in language there are only differences’. But this understanding makes it the primary differentiation from which all subsequent differentiations spring. It determines how ‘meaning’ is possible and thus how things can be ‘known’. There is, anatomically speaking, nothing incomplete about women, since,

12 Peter Gunn presents it in this way: ‘Sexual difference is carried in discourse by the function of the phallus, that signifier which, by its indications of no more than absence, difference, installs both the very possibility of signification and also the barring of the signifier from any fixed meaning’ (‘Woman as the Face of God’ 2).

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as Lacan remarks, ‘there is no absence in the real’ (The Ego 313).13 The symbolic constitution of ‘woman’ in relation to ‘man’ stems from the inscription of this difference as a lack or absence. It ‘does not involve the body but what results from a logical exigency in speech’ (Encore 10).14 Absence allows sexual difference to be inscribed as an opposition and elided with feminine inferiority. Women can then be made to bear ‘for both sexes, the castrations or separations on which subjectivity is founded’ (Creed 7).15 This is why women’s songs are ‘meant’ to be low. Signification in language is predicated on her logical subordination and this subordination is read and written as castration, deviance or inferiority. Man becomes the norm from which woman deviates.16 Women can be seen to wear the lack-in-being of human subjectivity more openly than men and by the visibility of this lack they become sitting ducks for masculine disparagement. We are familiar with the way feminine subordination plays out in discourse; the sexual non-relation is binarized in favour of masculinity. In the French language the gender system accentuates the hierarchy.17 As this study hopes to demonstrate, the place of the woman’s voice in the trouvère lyric system is determined by this logocentric ordering, itself a product of the way absence underpins signification. So I must part company with Doss-Quinby et al. in their attempt to equalise masculine and feminine voices in the songs of the trouvères: ‘[W]ould it not be fairer to consider the woman’s voice as an equal and active partner in the creation and development of the game of courtly love?’ (Doss-Quinby et al. 11). This argument is not sustainable from the psychoanalytic perspective I am following here. While it may be fairer to see the woman’s voice as ‘equal and active’, the notion of equal partnership between gendered voices disregards the realities of the hierarchical necessity in logocentric discourse and the symbolic ‘realities’ of sexuation itself. Sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander. As Simon Gaunt argues in the Introduction to Gender and Genre: ‘[A]ny simple opposition between masculine and feminine is 13

Alain Vanier notes: ‘[I]n the real, a woman lacks nothing in order to be a woman. But it is precisely because, on the symbolic level, this can be inscribed as a lack that the very notion of woman can exist. Being a woman proceeds from a symbolic determination, not a real one’ (Lacan 59). 14 E. Jane Burns, following Irigaray, refers to ‘the specular logic that casts woman as man’s negative counterpart’ (Bodytalk 39), whereas I, following Lacan, see it as a matter of saying rather than seeing, but perhaps the two are not so far apart. Both Lacan and Irigaray suggest that it is the non-presence (the ‘nothing to be seen’) of the mother’s phallus which creates the possibility of signification. 15 Cf. ‘a carrying over onto the woman of the difficulties inherent in sexuality, in so far as its subjective acquisition is problematic’ (‘Phallic Phase’ 118). See also Cholakian (Troubadour Lyric 185). 16 Cf. Mary Eagleton (Feminist Theory 287). 17 Cf. Hélène Cixous (Newly Born Woman 64). Cf. also Jakobson, quoted in Ch. 1 (138).

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not symmetrical, but asymmetrical since one pole in the opposition within patriarchy is privileged and given more value’ (12).18 This is what feminist criticism is up against in this repertoire, and what female authors of the Middle Ages were also up against: the difficulty of writing a way into this situation. Jane Gallop’s comment on Ernest Jones sums this up well: ‘[F]eminism does not necessarily find its ally in the man who theorizes the relation between the sexes according to how, in all fairness, it ought to be’ (Gallop xiii). We must deal with the painful reality. Lacan offers little encouragement for the feminist enterprise; nonetheless the dissymmetry in language which he describes is everywhere apparent, not least in the songs of the trouvères, and it is from this dissymmetry that one must begin. Other medievalists replace a discourse of equality with one of complementarity between masculine and feminine voices in medieval literature. Doris Earnshaw, citing Bakhtin, suggests: ‘In the role of a complementary voice, the female voice in reported speech permits a psychic plenitude, a wholeness of emotional expression very valuable to lyric poetry and its audience’ (13).

Feminine speech restores the missing half, making a perfect whole – a plenitude. It is clear that this complementarity is predicated on notions of opposition. Complementarity could be thought of as a way of placing opposition within a whole – a whole which can be achieved only by the inclusion (and reconciliation) of its two opposing parts. Yet again, this notion of a wholeness, valuable to all, smacks more of things as they ought to be than as they are. Susan M. Halloran cites Lacan to justify a similar notion of sexual complementarity in medieval masculine/feminine dialogues: I believe that a Lacanian reading of the texts’ male-female relationships reveals the necessity of complementarity between the sexes, not only within the creation of individual identity but in the furtherance of religious and social harmony, so important to a culture saturated with notions of Christianity as the organizing framework of existence (ix).

18 For some feminists the problem goes beyond that of assymetrical binarism. Irigaray, Judith Butler suggests, presents the feminine as the ‘constitutive exclusion’ which allows the ‘philosophical enterprise’ (Bodies 37). She is ‘cast outside the form/matter and universal/particular binarisms. She will be neither the one nor the other, but the permanent and unchangeable condition of both’ (Bodies 42). She is the ‘outside’ which allows the very possibility of distinction (see Bodies 36–44). It may even be that, illogically, she functions as both: outside as a prior requirement and subsequently placed inside as a sub-set.

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Halloran too seems to be suggesting that the necessity or the desirability of sexual complementarity argues its existence. It is not easy to see how this idea can be supported by a Lacanian interpretation of sexual difference. His provocative dictum ‘There is no sexual relation’ (‘il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel’), in its sense of the impossibility of a ratio between the sexes, rules out any notion of complementarity. In trouvère song sexual difference appears as a series of shifting oppositions by which masculinity is privileged and femininity appears wherever an opposition is needed to shore up this privilege and leave the sleeping dogs of ‘no sexual relation’ lying undisturbed. Neither in the Lacanian discourse, nor in the discourse of sexual difference as opposition at work in these songs, can concepts of a beneficial equality or complementarity be sustained. Nonetheless, masculinity itself is not left unchallenged in the songs. Oppositions can cut both ways and privileges can be challenged. Jean-Charles Huchet, for his part, approaches sexual difference in troubadour song as a matter of structure. In ‘Les femmes troubadours’ he offers the feminine voice as a necessary place in the system: ‘Sex is therefore nothing other than a place to occupy in a system, unthinkable without the return of the word addressed to the Other sex’ (75).19 This is roughly my own understanding of how the feminine voice is positioned in the trouvère system although I do not take the same direction with it.20 It must also be remembered that the system ultimately fails in its attempts to place masculine and feminine voices in a relation. Feminine speech, Huchet continues, menaces but ultimately safeguards fin’amor. It is that speech ‘torn from silence’ (the silence of la dame) which ‘unveils the secret surrounding and greedily nourishing love’ (80). She says what should not be said, dragging into the light, with her dreams of presence, the ‘fragile edifice’ of fin’amor which relies for its existence on absence and forgetfulness (80–1). What is missing in his argument is any reference to the low-style chansons de femme. Virtually unrecorded in the troubadour chansonniers, such songs are nonetheless a necessary backdrop to our understanding of the feminine

19

Cf. Lacan: ‘The Other, in my terminology, can thus only be the Other sex’ (Encore 39). This Other, he suggests, is feminine, for men and women: ‘Man here acts as the relay whereby the woman becomes this Other for herself as she is this Other for him’ (‘Guiding Remarks’ 93). 20 In my opinion Huchet’s arguments offer an understanding not of the trobairitz as a necessary fiction, but of the difficult context into which they wrote, one in which a position was already laid down for them in the system. Femininity may be textual but women writers are not therefore fictional. Cf. Bruckner’s suggestion: ‘Huchet seems to have embarked on a systematic elimination of women from the medieval corpus […] (‘Fictions’ 867). Cf. also Paden’s suggestion that Georges Duby was ‘persuaded by the bizarre arguments of Charles Huchet that the trobairitz in southern France … cannot have been real women poets, simply because Duby, like Huchet, could not imagine a medieval woman poet’ (‘Gender’ 51).

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canso. In the chanson de femme it is the part of woman to blurt out what should not be spoken. Like the artless girl in the chanson d’ami ‘E bone amourette’ who exclaims: ‘I love you, I cannot hide it’, she brings what is lofty and mysterious down to earth, flattening out secrets (Doss-Quinby et al. 129–30). How this comes to be her part is the topic of the next section. That Missing Aristotelian Drop: The Soul Discourses on the imperfections of women are easily accessed in medieval writing. There is no need to doubt the Christine persona in Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies on the prevalence of misogynistic literature in medieval Europe: [J]udging from the Treatises of all philosophers and poets and from all the orators – it seems that they all speak from one and the same mouth. They all concur in one conclusion: that the behaviour of women is inclined to and full of every vice […] Like a gushing fountain, a series of authorities […] came to mind, along with their opinions on this topic. And I finally decided that God formed a vile creature when he made woman’ (4–5).

Women were sometimes defended as well as defamed, but the defence assumes an earlier defamation which it seeks to refute.21 At the heart of the debate is the linking of woman to matter, ‘bound by the material, by flesh and lust’ as Bloch expresses it (Medieval Misogyny 27).22 The traditional position of women as objects of exchange between men is heavily embroiled in the designation of woman as matter. According to Lacan this reduction of woman to matter addresses an urgent masculine need. He says: So that the soul may come into being, woman is differentiated from it right from the beginning. She is called woman (on la dit-femme) and defamed (diffâme). The most famous (fameux) things that have come down to us about women in history are, strictly speaking, what one can say that is infamous (infamant)’ (Encore 85).

21 Pamela Benson notes that in medieval Florence, ‘making the case for women … meant entering into a debate. Whereas the case against women often stood on its own […] the case for women always was presented in company with its opposite’ (‘Debate about Women’ 165). The backdrop to the debate is always ‘the cultural given’ of ‘women’s imperfections’ (Fenster and Lees, Introduction 4). 22 Barbara Newman offers a more benign interpretation of the association of women with matter, one which links women with the care of bodies (‘More Thoughts’ 238). But the evidence she offers for this encouraging suggestion, the healing powers of women, has a catch. Woman’s healing powers ‘are ascribed to almost anything except her intelligence’ (238).

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Nothing less than the loss of a soul is at stake, a soul which is stolen goods, says Lacan: ‘[H]e takes the other as his soul’ (Encore 82). This is at the heart of the Aristotelian dichotomy where woman plays body to man’s soul.23 To quote again from De Generatione: ‘The female always provides the material, the male provides that which fashions the material into shape’.24 Woman is ‘as it were a deformed male’ (175),25 because her ‘semen’ is impure, lacking, precisely, soul. Thus her contribution is purely material: ‘[T]he menstrual discharge is semen, though in an impure condition; i.e. it lacks one constituent, and one only, the principle of Soul’ (Generation 175). Femininity represents a curious and profoundly ambiguous thing: a necessary deformity. Without it procreation would fail. Lacan comments: Let us […] consider the terms ‘active’ and ‘passive’, for example, that dominate everything that was cogitated regarding the relationship between form and matter, a relationship that was so fundamental, and to which each of Plato’s steps refers, and then Aristotle’s, concerning the nature of things. It is visible and palpable that their statements are based only on a fantasy by which they tried to make up for what can in no way be said (se dire), namely, the sexual relationship (Encore 82).26

Aristotle fantasises a soul/body complementarity as a means by which man and woman can be added up to make one perfect whole. Form and matter are not separable entities for Aristotle, as he makes clear in De Anima: We should not then inquire whether the soul and body are one thing, any 23 The Aristotelian dichotomy is, perhaps, not as simple as it might appear to modern eyes. Judith Butler suggests that, for the Greeks, ‘to be material means to materialize, where the principle of that materialization is precisely what ‘matters’ about that body, its very intelligibility’ (Bodies 32). I shall not attempt to trace the subtleties of Aristotelian thought here as Butler does, although her arguments inform my work. See, in particular Ch. 1 (Bodies). I will emphasize the medieval heritage of the attitude articulated by Aristotle, that women are the bearers of matter as opposed to men, the bearers of soul. 24 There are many ways in which misogynist attitudes can be traced down the ages. R. Howard Bloch calls it ‘something of a cultural constant’. He continues: ‘Reaching back to the Old Testament and to ancient Greece and extending through classical Hellenic, Judaic, and Roman traditions all the way to the fifteenth century, [misogynist discourse] dominates’ (Medieval Misogyny 7). Again, my concern must be with the medieval inheritance. Cf. also Daniel Boyarin on a possible link between Greek, Jewish and, ultimately, Christian thought on the mind/matter dichotomy (4–6). 25 Solterer comments on the medieval inheritance of the ‘Aristotelian definition of woman as incomplete’ (Master 51), quoting from the late-thirteenth-century Placides et Timéo: ‘And Aristotle in his book on Nature […] says that woman is an incomplete man; that is to say, a failed, imperfect one’ (qtd in Master 232, n. 70). 26 Paul Verhaeghe claims Encore as Lacan’s ‘obstinate, almost heroic fight to leave behind the deadlock of the classical binary oppositions: body/mind, nature/nurture, sex/ gender, and finally man and woman’ (‘Lacan’s Answer’ 109). The ‘what can in no way be said’ of the sexual relationship is precisely the nub of this battle.

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more than whether the wax and its imprint are, or in general whether the matter of each thing is one with that of which it is the matter (157).

The soul/matter dichotomy can be traced very readily into the substrate of medieval thought but it seems to lack something of the subtlety of the original, in particular this non-separability of body and soul. Isidore of Seville (c. 570–636), picks up the dichotomy in his Etymologies: ‘A “mother” [mater] is so called because from her something is made: for “mother” [mater] is as it were “matter” [materia], while the father is the cause’ (qtd in Blamires et al. 44). For Isidore it seems that feminine matter is separable from masculine cause. In these Christian inheritors of classical thought the need to separate off from the abjected feminine seems stronger than the urge to add masculine and feminine up to make One. It is taken up again by St. Anselm (1033–1109): [T]he Supreme Spirit is more suitably called father than mother because the first and principal cause of offspring is always the father. For, if the paternal cause always in some way precedes the maternal cause, then it is exceedingly inappropriate for the name ‘mother’ to be applied to that parent whom no other cause either joins or precedes for the begetting of offpring (qtd in Blamires et al. 47).

Aquinas (1225–74), also incorporates it: [T]he father, as the active partner, is a principle in a higher way than the mother, who supplies the passive or material element […] Hence […] the mother provides the matter of the body which, however, is still unformed, and receives its form only by means of the power which is contained in the father’s seed (qtd in Blamires et al. 47).

No one is suggesting precisely that a woman has no soul herself. What these references do is to put a woman’s soul into doubt, render it uncertain and inferior.27 In Christian terms her soul is presented as being at one further remove from God, as in the ‘Image of God’ trope which Tertullian takes up: Do you not know that you are Eve? The judgement of God upon this sex lives on in this age; therefore, necessarily the guilt should live on also. […] you are the one who persuaded him whom the devil was not capable of corrupting; you easily destroyed the image of God, Adam. (qtd in Blamires et al. 51) 27 Charlotte Witt suggests that ‘the idea [for Aristotle] is not that women, or their reproductive organs are matter, but rather that […] there is something compromised about the forms women have, or about the way that they have forms’ (‘Form, Normativity’ 123).

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If Adam is the ‘image of God’ what is Eve? Not God’s image, apparently. Eve’s exclusion can be assumed (and all women are doomed to be Eve, Tertullian insists). Ambrosiaster, the pseudo-Augustine, is more explicit: ‘[T]he apostle said, “A man ought not to cover his head because it is the image and glory of God; but a woman covers her head because she is not the glory and image of God” ’ (Ambrosiaster, qtd in Blamires et al. 85). Adam, formed first, came fresh from God’s hand. Eve, formed from the rib, has a secondary status, as in Ambrose: ‘[B]ut man was made first and then woman from him’ (qtd in Blamires et al. 86),28 hence, perhaps, Tertullian’s tirade against femininity. Women are the ultimate spoilers, spoiling what they do not possess and cannot understand, man’s divine spark. This position of secondariness is the position of the subject of the chansons de femme.29 But this ‘femininity’ creates problems, perhaps greater than those it attempts to solve. Women’s very existence, in Aristotelian terms, is problematic.30 Feminine subjectivity is riddled with ambiguities. The position of secondariness in which it is placed cannot hold it. The logic cannot be sustained. Helen Solterer suggests: [F]emale lack also involves, in the Aristotelian dialectical structure, a form of surplus […] If woman is defined dialectically as the lesser half, she is also the material foundation that sustains all those differences. Her incompleteness is symmetrically balanced by her capacity to exceed every formal limit (51).

This lack/surplus of the feminine is reminiscent of the logic Lacan articulates in his schema of sexuation. There, whereas on the masculine side, all except one, the primal father, are completely subject to the phallic function, on the feminine side the exception is missing. Therefore, although all those who line up on the feminine side – they need not be biologically women – are subject to the phallic function, not one is subjected completely (Encore 76). The Woman (with a capital W – in French it is the article rather than the noun which is under erasure), cannot exist because there is not the defining limit provided by an exception (Encore 78). The feminine ‘will not allow for any universality’ (80), so women can be considered only ‘one by one’ (10), not as a set. Thus Lacan’s ‘not-whole’ feminine (81) could be thought of as either lack or non-limitation, or both. ‘Woman’ refuses any consistent

28 Cf. Gratian: ‘God did not create in the beginning a man and a woman, nor two men, nor two women: but first man, and then woman from him. […] It is natural that women serve men, as sons their parents, because it is just that the inferior being serve the superior one’ (qtd in Bloch, Medieval Misogyny 24). 29 Cf. Bloch on the secondariness of woman (Medieval Misogyny 40). 30 Cf. Burns (Bodytalk 89).

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symbolization or representation. It ‘cannot be said’ (80).31 ‘Woman’ will not stay in place, being at once a surplus and a lack, causing anxiety.32 Lacan’s remarks about the soul are illuminating in the light of the Aristotelian dichotomy, and the medieval discourses on women which take it as a founding definition. It points out the problem with sexuation by opposition. If woman is produced as what man is not, then what he is depends on her remaining its negation. If her subjectivity is tied to his as its negation, then there are urgent reasons to keep her in her place. Words must be tied inextricably to an unchanging essence so that no awkward questions are allowed to emerge. Thomas Laqueur mentions, for instance, Isidore’s insistence that ‘the origins of words informs one about the pristine, uncorrupted, essential nature of their referents, about a reality beyond the corrupt senses’ (55). This is clear in the organization of Isidore’s sentence, quoted earlier: ‘A “mother” […] is so called because…’. The signifier is here a mere faithful reflection of its referent, essence of ‘mother’. The importance of the difference between meaning and signification is clear. ‘Meaning’ might be expected to hold her in place (in a set), set her ‘essence’ in concrete. Nevertheless, it is these masculine attempts to keep Woman in her place which reveal man’s subjectivity as hostage to hers. Judith Butler’s concept of performativity offers an understanding of the urgency of the need but also of the dangers inherent in binding sexual identity to an opposition: [P]erformativity must be understood […] as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names […] [T]he regulatory norms of ‘sex’ work in a performative fashion […] to materialize sexual difference’ (Bodies 2).

If words have this performative, almost sacramental power to enact what they name, then masculine anxiety about sexual identity is understandable – hence the lure of misogyny.33 The supposed power of words to reflect essential nature can turn and bite with frightening power. Discourse which crossed the gender boundary might turn a man into a woman (that is, castrate him), as Christ turned water into wine or the priest turns wine into Christ’s blood. If Isidore’s words, for instance, changed, the world would have to change with 31

Cf. Bloch’s definition of misogyny: ‘I propose, then, a definition of misogyny as a speech act in which woman is the subject of the sentence and the predicate a more general term’ (Medieval Misogyny 5). 32 Jean-Charles Huchet uses a version of this theory: Femininity is excess, but an excess ‘which returns to the man in the form of a ‘too little’ concerning his own sexuality’ (‘Femmes troubadours’ 72). 33 The same urgent need to maintain the gender distinction which reflects and fosters the defamation of women also leads, in the Middle Ages, to a masculine anxiety about effeminacy: ‘[Men] had ever to be on the lookout for threats to their masculinity. Femininity in males was regarded as an illness, and many of the qualities associated with femininity were frowned upon if they appeared in the male’ (Bullough 42–3).

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them. Attempts to rein in femininity with words only make matters worse. If signification is really meaning instead of only masquerading as such, sexual identity, rather than being dealt with for good, becomes even more a matter for radical anxiety. That it was a matter for anxiety can be illustrated, for instance, in the importance assigned to sexual position in the penitentials, as Karma Lochrie points out (182). The woman-on-top position enacts a dangerous ‘unnatural’ reversal, analogous to the reversal in the thirteenth-century Lai d’Aristote where the infatuated Aristotle ‘allows [a woman] to ride him like an animal’ (Solterer 23). If sexual identity is established relationally, a reversal of positions threatens identity itself. This is the charge the ‘unnatural’ carries – the horror of confronting the possibility of a reversal of sexual identity with all that it entails.34 When the young mistress of Alexander rides Aristotle it is clear that the sexual reversal encompasses the unthinkable domination of masculine soul by feminine matter. Or, even worse, if women aspire to intellectual achievement, could this aspiration entail a possible taking over of the soul by the feminine, leaving masculinity in the matter category?35 The horror proceeds from the intuition that sexual difference is fundamentally unstable, being ‘only’ a matter of words. Sexual difference, by which identity is established, works performatively through the saying of words but must be lived, with difficulty, by flesh and blood men and women. Medieval constructions of femininity move with ease from fictional to ‘factual’ discourses and back again. In Kathryn Gravdal’s enquiry into the discourse of rape in the literature and the courtroom documents of medieval France she traces a mouvance between literary and other discourses: My study of legal writing shows that figures of discourse ‘move’: they travel from field to field, are re-couped, re-employed, and re-invested. Linguistic paradigms first identified in fictional texts reappear in legal documents, reconverted but equally functional and bearing an equal affective charge. (Ravishing Maidens 140)

34

Similarly, in Classical Athens the effeminate man (mollis) and the masculine woman (tribade) ‘were thus unnatural … because they played out – literally embodied – radical […] reversals of power and prestige’ (Laqueur 53). 35 See Solterer’s arguments on the threat to masculine identity posed by women’s intellectual achievements (Master 23–60). Leupin’s reading of De planctu naturae in Barbarolexis illuminates the bonds between sexual difference and language (59–78). In this text Nature complains that sodomy flouts the laws of grammar and logic when ‘a Venus turned monster […] changes “hes” into “shes” and with her witchcraft unmans man’ (qtd in Barbarolexis 60). Jehan Lefèvre’s Lamentations de Matheolus is a fourteenth-century text, which warns of the threat to logic in ‘unnatural’ sex. When Aristotle was ridden by a woman – in the Lai d’Aristote – ‘grammar was betrayed and logic rendered useless’ (qtd in Solterer 59–60, her translation). See also R. Howard Bloch for a commentary on this text (Medieval Misogyny 49–54).

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Femininity, like rape, is negotiated through the movement between different discourses but the same habits of denigration are encountered in all of them, and women suffer in lived experience the penalties of their symbolic constitution. Genres work in a similarly normative way to ‘produce the effects [they] name’. Jacques Derrida notes the normative power of genre. To quote again: ‘As soon as the word genre is sounded […] a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind’ (224). The tendency of generic description to become prescription, that is, normative, is intimately bound up with the question of gender in the songs. This tendency of the law to produce the named effect is precisely what constitutes woman’s song as low. The laws of gender and genre combine to bind her to the discourse of the low. This may well be why some feminist critics are unhappy with the relegation of women to the low genres, because it implies that there is a principle at stake, as in all taxonomies, which implicitly claim to divide on the basis of principle.36 The principle in this case is that women ‘really’ are low, that their (our) reality, their lived experience, cannot escape the symbolic designation and its consequences, for instance in the lawcourts. The fear is that there is no way out of this impasse if sexual difference is only accessible symbolically; if, in other words, the only real we can ever know is symbolic.37 The worry is that the word really makes flesh, is painfully inscribed in women’s flesh, that the word mutilates women, justifying misogyny by placing it after the fact.38 This is what Aristotle is saying when he concludes: ‘that is what it means to be male or female’ (my emphasis). He poses femininity as an inherent trait, before signification rather than as an effect of signification.39 Women, both fictional and historical, unless they fail to cite and reiterate normative femininity, will sound (and ‘be’) feminine, however femininity is construed in the particular historical moment. In this respect, femininity

36

Cf. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, who speaks of those ‘essentialist generic theories’ [that] claimed to explain the existence of and essential characteristics of literature through generic definitions’ (‘Literary Genres’ 170). 37 Cf. Toril Moi on poststructuralist theories of sex/gender: ‘But if political oppression is taken to follow from the fact that every concept draws a boundary, and thus necessarily excludes something – i.e. from the very fact that words have a meaning, and that meaning is normative – then it becomes difficult to see what political alternative poststructuralists intend to propose’ (‘What Is a Woman?’ 43–4). 38 I think this concern is behind the feminist desire to present the female voice as ‘equal and active’. 39 Cf. Butler’s theorization of the body: ‘The body posited as prior to the sign, is always posited or signified as prior. This signification produces as an effect of its own procedure the very body that it nevertheless and simultaneously claims to discover as that which precedes its own action’ (Bodies 30). This is the kind of manoeuvre at work in the misogynist making of femininity.

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behaves like a genre. But there is a possible complication here which will be addressed further on. Speaking in Paradise Dante Alighieri traces one half of the movement between the discursive construction of women and women’s discourse (the movement from gender to genre), when he argues, in De vulgari eloquentia: Yet although we find in Scripture that a woman spoke first, it is still more reasonable to believe that it was a man. It is improper to think that so noble a human action did not originate from a man rather than a woman. (De vulgari eloquentia 50)

It is not reasonable or even proper to look for nobility in the speech of women. Eve should leave nobility to Adam.40 Later in De vulgari eloquentia Dante draws out the generic implications of gender when he evaluates words for their appropriateness to ‘the highest style’ (78), ‘since only the best is worthy of the best’ (72): To begin, I state that it is no little work for the reason to judge among words, since many different kinds are to be found. For we sense that some words are childish, others feminine, others masculine; and of these some are rustic, some urbane (78).

Dante is constructing his own ‘typology’ here like those discussed above. In all this potential vocabulary, he directs that feminine words should be ‘sifted out’ from those ‘noble words which are worthy of the highest style’, along with childish and rustic words (De vulgari eloquentia 79).41 He does not speak precisely of the words of women, but of ‘those that are feminine because of their softness’ in the same way that mamma and babbo ‘are childish because of their simplicity’ (79). The relation is metaphoric rather than literal. Dante senses something inextricably related to the femi40 Better still if she didn’t speak at all. According to St. John Chrystosom, she ruined everything when she did. He says, ominously: ‘The woman taught the man once and made him guilty of disobedience’ (qtd in Blamires et al. 59). See Kathryn Kerby-Fulton’s ‘When Women Preached’ for an understanding of what women faced in speaking authoritatively in the later Middles Ages and the strategies they employed. 41 According to Robert Hollander, Dante suffered a change of heart about childish words. Babytalk returns in a place of honour in the Commedia. Hollander, perhaps wisely, leaves the question of womantalk alone and sticks cautiously to the words of children: ‘Let us attend to the first exclusionary principle alone’ (Hollander 77). But, given that Dante only excludes these words from the canzone, which represents the highest level of style, why should he not include babytalk (or womantalk) in the Commedia, when he classifies comedy as the middle style? (De vulgari eloquentia 74).

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nine in the quality of these words: an unwelcome softness. It would not be too great a leap to infer from this an exclusion of feminine discourse in the ‘illustrious vernacular’. This would come as no surprise after his strictures on Genesis. Here we can follow through, into the nuts and bolts of poetic style and register, the implications of generic impropriety in allowing Eve the first say in the serious arena of holy writ. The genre for which Dante’s ‘illustrious vernacular’ is destined is the Italian canzone (including the canso and chanson), that is, a song with the ‘degree of construction we call the most excellent’ (75–6). We can assume that, in Dante’s opinion, women’s words would be out of place there, excluded by prescription. In the masculine-voiced chanson there are, of course, no women’s words. She, la dame, is silent and absent. As Jean-Charles Huchet suggests, ‘ “[F]in’amors”, inasmuch as love of language deployed on the basis of sexuality in impasse, makes of la dame’s silence a categorical imperative’ (‘Les femmes troubadours’ 76). La femme babbles, la dame is silent. Brunetto Latini, a contemporary of Dante’s, elaborates his position when he, for his part, excludes women’s words from ‘the science of rhetoric’: Let [the common way of speaking of men, which is without art and without instruction] stay far from us, appropriate only to the silliness of women and unimportant people, for they have nothing to do with civic things. (Treasure 284)

Women’s words belong with the speech of the foolish, the untutored and the unimportant, outside the world of art and the discourse of rhetoric. The words of Latini suggest that women are incapable of using speech as a means of persuasion. They are incapable, he perhaps implies, of achieving the kind of distance from their discourse which would allow it to be used. Woman is thus produced as ‘the one who speaks without saying anything’ in the words of Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux, seventeenth-century French poet, satirist and critic (qtd in Bloch, Medieval Misogyny). This attitude finds expression in the chansons de femme. The women of the chansons de femme are presented as spoken by their language rather than speaking it – ‘speaking’ in the sense of making rhetorical choices to achieve an end. This is why women’s speech is so often characterized as ‘artless’. The artlessness of the femme indicates a relation to discourse – as the spoken rather than the speaking – which places her subjectivity in doubt. If she is not capable of choosing her words then who is it who speaks? Someone else must speak through her. This is a matter to which we shall return throughout this study. She is positioned as spoken so as to generate an opposition for the man as ‘speaking’, in accord with his position as soul to her matter. At the nub of this is the ego’s prized illusion of autonomy. Lacan refers to this mirage, that it is the individual, the human subject […] who is truly

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autonomous, and that, somewhere in him […] there’s a signalman, the little man within a man, who makes the apparatus tick (The Ego 68).

Men prop up this illusion by pointing to a feminine lack of autonomy. In truth the masculine subject is as spoken as the feminine, but women wear the lack, the tenuousness of subjectivity, more openly, as was argued earlier. If we take Dante and Brunetto Latini as our guides, then the generic implications of gender are clear. To be feminine is to be generically ‘low’ in relation to the ‘high’ of the chanson. There is no escaping it. This is the same logocentric imperative as that which Cixous described. We must look for the speech of women outside the chanson and we must expect to find, in women’s songs, words of a different, lower character – an artless character. Her words do not belong in Paradise. Dante’s strictures give us a fairly accurate picture of the femme of the chansons de femme. We would expect on this basis (and we would not be disappointed) to find the simple syntax and lexis of the unlearned, allied to attitudes of childishness, naïvety, irrationality, irresponsibility and a tendency to waywardness, or at least a selection of these qualities.42 Her discourse and her behaviour cannot be separated from one another. If, as I am suggesting, this woman is arrived at by opposition to masculine subjectivity, then this is the space she is meant to fill, although her position alters depending on which masculine position she is opposed to. Material Woman The ballete ‘Deduxans suis et joliette, s’amerai’ demonstrates the kind of woman Dante and his contemporaries may have had in mind, a woman who performs the Aristotelian dichotomy which aligns woman with matter, man with soul. Most scholars translate amis or amin as sweetheart or lover. I have chosen to retain the term ‘friend’, because its presence is an important registral characteristic. As this song demonstrates, amis is distinguished from amant (lover). ‘Deduxans suis et joliette, s’amerai’ Ballette, chanson de femme, chanson d’ami RS 59a (=983); MW 502; B 469; L 265–455.

42 Earnshaw sees the female voice as ‘a carrier of of undercurrents of social values not generally permitted or approved […]. Thus it would not be a foreign element to the male psyche, but a carrier of repressed values, the negative, often childish and archaic … currents that co-exist … with our positive and rational attitudes’ (The Female Voice 13, her emphasis). My concern with her account is that it tends to leave the gender hierarchy intact and stable. Her use of ‘our’ suggests an unproblematic identification with ‘positive and rational’ masculinity, leaving femininity unproblematically and inextricably bound to the negative and the irrational.

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Manuscript: I 5: 91 Text: Rosenberg and Tischler 3, pp. 4–5. Dialect: Lorraine Other eds. Bec II: 166; Doss-Quinby et al. 127–8. Deduxans suis et joliette, s’amerai.

I am charming and pretty so I will love.

1. 1. Ier matin me levai droit au point dou jour, Yesterday morning I rose at the break of day, I entered my father’s orchard which was on vergier mon peire antrai ki iert plains full of flowers; de flours; my friend I wished for more than a mon amin plus de cent fois i souhaidai. hundred times. I am charming … Deduxans suis … 2. J’amerai mon amin, ke proiét m’an ait; il est biaus et cortois, bien deservit l’ait; mon fin cuer mal greit peire et meire li donrai. Deduxans suis …

I will love my friend who has entreated me; he is good-looking and courteous, well has he deserved it; my true heart I will grant him in spite of my father and mother. I am charming …

3. Chanson, je t’anvoi a toz fins loialz amans, qu’il se gaircent bien des felz mavais mesdisans, car j’ain tant bien sai ke covrir ne m’an porai. Deduxans suis …

3. Song, I send you to all true, loyal lovers that they should guard themselves well from the false, evil slanderers, because I love so well I know I couldn’t conceal it. I am charming …

‘Deduxans suis’ has no music. The ms. I, where it makes its only appearance, contains none. The music from another ballette from the same manuscript has survived, however, in a motet by Guillaume de Machaut.43 With this example in mind, it is possible to surmise that the last line of the strophe shared a melody with the refrain,44 as it shared a rhyme-sound, resulting in a fair degree of repetition. Dance-songs usually had a minimal melodic, rhyme and metric scheme which must have cued the dancers. ‘Deduxans suis’ is in Lorraine dialect. It has an irregular metre and variable caesura, which together give it a slapdash air which the listener translates into the unlearned ‘artlessness’ of the feminine. Rosenberg and Tischler suggest that this irregularity may be ‘an inherent feature of the composition’ (5).45 Brunetto Latini postulates exact counting of syllables as essential: ‘If 43 Rosenberg and Tischler have retrieved the melody for this ballette, ‘Por coi me bait, mes maris?’, from the motet (2). 44 This form has been sometimes referred to as a rotrouenge, cf. Hoppin (293). 45 If, as I believe, there are internal rhymes or assonances (for instance first strophe: ‘levai’, ‘antrai’ and ‘fois’ in lines one, two and three, respectively), this might suggest stronger stresses than usual, substituting for regular metre.

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you wish to write good poetry, you must count all the syllables in your poems’ (qtd in Stevens 22). Of course ‘Deduxans suis’ is not presenting itself as ‘good poetry’. Its role is precisely to oppose the good – that is, learned and skilful – poetry of men. It has a refrain, a simple syntax, which is mainly paratactic with few connectives. The strophes are tercets with a rhyme scheme of aab and the refrain is B. These characteristics of ‘simplicity’: the paratactic syntax, the diminutive ‘joliette’, the aabB rhyme scheme and the refrain, also the song’s association with dance and thus with the body, mark the song as ‘feminine’, within the song system. As a dance-song ‘Deduxans suis’ is associated with something outside itself. It is a song with a purpose. Like the ballate referred to by Dante in De vulgari eloquentia, it ‘need[s] the presence of dancers for whom [it is] produced’ (73). Thus it is less noble than the functionless chanson; it is not for itself alone.46 Women’s traditional association with dance thus aligns them with the inferior, because functional (not to say physical) form.47 ‘Deduxans suis’ is functional also in the sense that it contains a small narrative clearly contained within the spatio-temporal co-ordinates: ‘yesterday morning’ and ‘my father’s orchard’. This subject can be found. She has her feet on the ground and her body in the imagined scopic field of the listener/reader. Her precise placing, like the association with dance, emphasizes her body, her containment in space; it is what makes her visible. Narrative provides a screen on which she can be displayed, providing spectacle in a non-visual form. This containment, along with her self-reference, ‘I am charming and pretty’, gives her subjectivity some object-like qualities, akin to the shepherdess of pastourelle who is always ‘found’ (trovee). It is as if this girl is mirrored in her own gaze as an object for male consumption. The body which is contained within a gaze becomes an object for somebody. She is constituted by a ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’, in Laura Mulvey’s phrase (27), even though she is supposedly doing the looking. She just cuts out the middle-man, so to speak. In the absence of a man she must speak for herself in order to make herself visible, like the shepherdess who 46

See discussion in Ch. 1. Many songs represent women as the principal initiators of dance. Cf. Klinck’s contention that women’s songs were traditionally linked ‘to the life of the group and its ritual occasions’ (‘Sappho’ 16, 19). Examples abound, for instance, two rondeaux in the roman Guillaume de Dole include the lines: ‘It’s over there in the meadow … ladies are getting up to dance’ (B. rond. 16), ‘It’s right over there in the meadow … ladies go there to dance caroles’ (B rond. 5). Similarly, in the Roman du Castelain de Couci et de la Dame de Fayel ladies are described as organizing the dance. For instance, at l. 3852, la dame de Fayel ‘sprang up … and around her, here and there, she placed ladies and knights hand in hand for carolling, first singing this song’ (127). Sermons and penitentials also suggest, to the detriment of women, that it is they who are to blame for the lascivious pursuit of dance, for instance in this excerpt from Caesarius of Heisterbach: ‘[the devils] transform themselves into surpassingly beautiful girls and dance caroles around them, inviting the young men with their many lithe movements’ (qtd in Page, Owl 124). 47

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announces her presence to any passing knight by her song. In the GalegoPortuguese corpus feminine self-reference can tip momentarily into a thirdperson voice, for instance, in the cantiga de amigo ‘Eno sagrado en Vigo’ attributed to Martin Codax: ‘In the sanctuary in Vigo a beautiful girl (literally ‘beautiful body’), was dancing: I am in love!’ (Jensen 209). This ‘beautiful girl (body)’ (corpo velido), is difficult to hear in first person although it is the woman herself who speaks. Many cantigas de amigo use the same trope, suggesting a tendency for the beautiful girl to slip out of sight as subject as she slips into sight as object.48 The setting of the scene, the sanctuary in Vigo, like ‘my father’s orchard’, assisted by her self-reference, works to display her. Feminist film theory provides an interesting sidelight on these girls who display themselves via the screen of narrative. Sue Thornham, discussing an article by Mary Ann Doane on the Hollywood ‘woman’s film’ of the 1940s, suggests: ‘The distinction between the subject of the gaze and its object is collapsed … and what the female spectator is offered is […] an identification with herself as image, as object of desire’ (55). This captures something of the compromised subjectivity of the chanson de femme girls. The motif of self-reference or ‘auto-eulogy’ is ‘a variant’, says Esther Corral, ‘of the descriptio puellae typical of the cantiga de amor’ (81), the masculine-voiced song of love. So the woman of the cantiga de amigo speaks the man’s words of her for herself. This transposition suggests that she moves (or is moved), from subject to object position or that her status is ambiguous and her position as subject under threat. I think this is true of the subject of ‘Deduxans suis’, although the move is less obvious in the French corpus. Her opposition to the masculine position of subjectivity propels her into objectality. Her materiality does not sit comfortably with subjectivity. As canny listeners or readers, it is we who appropriate, or are assumed to appropriate, her subjectivity, which puts us on the ‘masculine’ side, in the place of the absent masculine subject. Her naïvety and lack of learning make her eminently transparent and readable to the more learned audience. We can see right through her, which means we cannot see her subjectivity. She tells us this in her admission that she cannot hide her love; she is not sufficiently master of her utterance to lie.49 Subjectivity, one feels, should be more opaque, more substantial, despite the body’s opacity. As body she is present to the gaze, but her mind is

48

Cf. also ‘Coindeta sui! si cum n’ai greu cossire’ (I am lovely, and so my heart grieves), an anonymous feminine-voiced balada in the troubadour corpus (Bruckner, Shepard and White 130–33). E. Jane Burns considers related issues in the chansons de toile (Courtly Love Undressed 99). 49 ‘[W]oman can conceal nothing’, confesses Nature in Jean de Meun’s continuation of the Roman de la rose. Woman’s speech, observes Kay, is incapable of restraint (‘Women’s Body’ 205).

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transparent, a transparency which can be read as non-existence. Her ami, the good-looking and courteous beloved, is her object. He is in her gaze but she is already in the gaze of the ‘masculine’ reader/listener, which makes the ami the object of an object, a Ken to her Barbie. Her appropriation of subjectivity is only a game, a pretence for the amusement of the canny viewer.50 The girl of ‘Deduxans suis’ has the same swinging, purely grammatical status as the Barbie doll. Her desire for the friend turns her momentarily into a subject or the semblance of a subject, at the grammatical level, but this position cannot be sustained. This is precisely the placement of the women of the chansons de femme within the system. This childhood analogy did not come to mind by chance. The femme, like women in other medieval discourses, is placed at the bottom of the food chain, aligned with children and the low, even the animals. ‘Deduxans suis’ is a chanson de femme of the kind called chanson d’ami by critics.51 In Galego-Portuguese, where the male-voiced cantiga de amor is opposed to the female-voiced cantiga de amigo, the masculine voice speaks of ‘Love’, whereas the feminine voice speaks of ‘the friend’. In the French corpus this opposition is implicit. La femme’s affiliation with the body and the physical, sensual world of narrative and dance confines her speech to the concrete, leaving more abstract matters to the masculine voice. This is how Eve should speak if she follows generic and ‘genderic’ prescriptions – as an object, a body without soul. Mutable Woman and How She Shifts The neat equation which Dante prescribes cannot always be sustained, however. The entrance into composition of the female trouvères, or troveresses, may have had a destabilizing effect on the gender hierarchy of discourse. Female authors may have found woman’s ‘proper’ place a little uncongenial. Whatever the reason, women’s words have a tendency to slip out of their allotted place and take on attributes supposedly improper to them. Eve aspires to nobility – to a soul perhaps. Femininity can slide.52

50 Anne Howland Schotter notes a similar phenomenon in medieval Latin woman’s song. She designates it as ‘an extended use of prosopopoeia, in that it is an attribution of thought and feeling to a group which was historically mute’ (‘Woman’s Song’ 30). 51 Bec says of the chanson d’ami: ‘It puts on the scene a young girl who sings of her joy at having a friend who loves her, or, more frequently, complains of not having one, or that he has betrayed her’ (Lyrique française 62–63). 52 This happens also in other medieval French literary discourses. Krueger traces the ‘obfuscation’ of gender distinctions in Old French romance literature: ‘[T]hese texts often stage the debate about gender in such a way that its foundational categories are called into question and the relationship between gender, language, and power comes under scrutiny […] [T]he neat opposition of male versus female could be obfuscated, questioned, and even subverted’ (‘Beyond Debate’ 81).

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Of course this is not to suggest that femininity is a fixed monolith throughout the medieval period. Ann Marie Rasmussen rightly contests the notion ‘that […] the entire medieval world was governed by a single, traditional system of gender’ (169). What I do suggest, however, is that in this song system there is a prescribed place for women’s voices, and it is outside the pantheon of masculine, courtly, refined and learned discourse. The place of the feminine, allotted by the logocentricism of the songs’ gender discourse, is precisely to be uncourtly, unrefined, unlearned and frequently ignoble – to be body to his soul. Her voice is that of the other who speaks the words that may not be spoken by the man. She is the voice of what is excluded from his speech.53 But she flouts her exclusion. If sexual difference were purely a matter of binary opposition then any movement on the feminine side ought to upset the equilibrium of the whole. If meaning is only achieved through difference, movement anywhere ought to destabilize all the differences and ripple through all the established meanings. Not all shifts would be so momentous. For instance, the femme of the chansons de femme might be pious or transgressive, according to whether she appeared in a chanson pieuse or a chanson de malmariée . Neither of these positions is outside her permitted range and neither, therefore, dislocates her gender or anyone else’s. It is only a performance which moves her into ‘exclusively’ masculine territory, or any movement which blurs or undermines the gender opposition, which threatens to deconstruct the system. That is when her change of ‘meaning’ might be expected to change the meaning of masculinity and upset the apple cart. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler examines how femininity might shift. She considers the transformative consequences of ‘a failure to repeat’ on gender norms maintained by constant reiteration (179). Gender can slide if the norms are not maintained by ‘the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names’ (Bodies that Matter 2). Butler could perhaps be read as saying that gender is itself a genre – a particular style of performance. So singing a different song, singing in a different register, might be one way to fail to repeat the constitutive practice. A song could be a place ‘where gender is constructed and produced […] a place where gender happens’ (Rasmussen 169). If one begins from the point of genre, then gender (viewed as an aspect of genre) is also subject to transformation, perhaps even by the simple act of repetition. Derrida asks: ‘What if there were, lodged within the heart of the law [of genre] itself, a law of impurity or a principle of contamination?’ (225). What if every repetition, every ‘re-citation’ is itself a ‘corruption, contamination […] deformation’ (226)? What if the very act of ‘re-citation’ does not maintain the genre in its presumed pristine state but actually 53 Cf. Earnshaw who argues for the woman’s voice as the carrier of carnival values (Ch. 1, esp. 13–14).

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‘decomposes’ it in the process (226)? A repetition automatically becomes a citation, distancing itself from the previous utterance. Unlike the ‘first fine careless rapture’ of the initial utterance the repetition ‘knows’ itself and splits off, becoming something else, different in kind. Butler herself seems to be suggesting such a possibility: It is not simply a matter of construing performativity as a repetition of acts, as if ‘acts’ remain intact and self-identical as they are repeated in time and where ‘time’ is understood as external to the ‘acts’ themselves. (Bodies 244, n. 7)

So, by breeding the law of genre with the law of gender, I am suggesting that although there is a place where women and their words are meant to stay, yet the very process which supposedly maintains them in their proper place is instead, perhaps, whittling away at them inexorably, creating the possibility of mutation. Something certainly causes the occasional mutation of women’s words, whether by a failure to cite or by re-citation itself. How women sometimes escape the grid imposed by a system which makes a register of femininity is the subject of the final chapter. The grid does not seem to be immutable although it is ‘meant’ to be. There is a variety of ways in which women and their words confound the system of genres and genders, contaminating its inferred purity, ‘the essential purity of [genre’s] identity’ which ‘mixing’ postulates (Derrida 225). As I suggested, women’s writing may be part of what could upset the applecart. This factor might tip the balance, sometimes propelling Eve back into subjectivity, delivering her a soul, because it is harder to see an author as an object. Her own entry into writing might make her less easily designated as purely written. If so, ‘féminité génétique’ comes back into the picture as part of what deconstructs and reconstructs ‘féminité textuelle’, a failure always to maintain femininity in its proper place which acts as a driving force in the negotiation of gender.

3

Desire by Gender and Genre I Low Lusts and High Desires: Pastourelle and Chanson ‘The function of the pastourelle is to express physical desire in a pure state, completely free of all codification, ideology and spiritualization because it is addressed to a creature without a soul or considered as such, whose only reason for existing is to be an erotic object’. (Michel Zink, Pastourelle 117) ‘The idealized woman, the Lady [is] in the position of the Other and of the object’ (Jacques Lacan, Ethics 163).

This chapter outlines the operation of desire in the trouvère system, from the point of view of the masculine subject and his objects, in low- and highstyle song. The following chapter attempts the same operation with feminine subjects and masculine objects. The question of terminology is crucial here, but difficult to resolve in a reading which attempts to contemplate desire from two incompatible perspectives: those of the trouvères and of Lacan. Jean-Charles Huchet’s schema of desire and jouissance, neatly expressed in the epigram: ‘She whom I enjoy (l’autre femme) is not she whom I desire (la Dame)’ (L’amour 49) works well as an account of what the masculine lovers of chanson say or allow to be inferred. Huchet’s configuration does not capture the complexities of feminine desire at any level, however. The dissymmetry of the masculine and feminine positions in relation to desire does not allow either an equivalence in the terms or a reversal of them. The difficulty is compounded when the impossibility inherent in desire is hidden, as Huchet points out in Littérature Médiévale: ‘[M]edieval literature proceeds from a sexual impossible which it designates in attempting to hide it’ (23). There is such a knowledge in the chanson although the lover does not speak it. It is unknown knowledge to which none of us has access.1 In the case of the pastourelle, on the other hand, the narrator denies his desire;

1 In Freud’s Papers Lacan asks: ‘[H]ow would [the subject] achieve recognition for his desires? He hasn’t got a clue about them’ (167).

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he insists that desire has nothing to do with his itch for a shepherdess. One trait is common to all the genres however: a gulf opens up between what subjects demand and the unconscious desires that emerge in the attempt to hide them.2 The subject of the chanson, for instance, resists the sexual bliss with la dame which he ceaselessly demands. As Slavoj Žižek observes, there is nothing we fear more than a Lady who might generously yield to this wish of ours – what we truly expect and want from the Lady is […] yet one more postponement’ (Metastases 96).

Where possible, I will distinguish between demand and unconscious desire – what subjects say and what they do not say (or what they designate by the half-said). Sometimes this proves inadequate, however, and I am obliged to revert to the ordinary usage of ‘desire’ equalling ‘want’ or ‘wish’, as an overarching term covering all these phenomena. The Lacanian sense of desire will be distinguished by the addition of the adjectives ‘unconscious’, ‘unspoken’ or ‘hidden’. There is a potential for confusion, however, between the two accounts. A good place to begin a comparison of these two accounts of desire is to consider the trouvères’ distinction between simple lust or need on the one hand, and fin’amor on the other, vis-à-vis Lacan’s distinction between need, demand and desire. Need, Demand and Desire The Lacanian distinction between need and desire is based on Freud’s earlier distinction between instinkt and trieb, instinct and drive. Need becomes distinguished from desire in its satisfaction. For the infant there is need, although it cannot be properly described even as a ‘need’ before it is answered, because it is the response which draws it into the symbolic; nor should we overemphasize the developmental at the expense of the structural. Any notion of a pre-linguistic ‘need’ must remain speculative for speaking beings. The child is hungry, it screams in discomfort, and miraculously food appears. Its screams are interpreted by another, usually mother, as signs, and thus the child becomes inscribed within a signifying system belonging outside itself. Its screams are returned to it by the other as a message, so mother comes to represents the Other (uppercase) of language. Becoming aware that screams produce food, the child learns to articulate a demand to which the mother responds. But something else happens. The mother’s satisfaction of the child’s needs comes to signify love and this love becomes part of the

2

Lacan, in Desire and its Interpretation, distinguishes between an ‘unconscious circuit [articulated] through another signifying chain profoundly different to the chain that the subject commands […] at the level […] of demand’ (15.4.59).

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child’s demand, a demand to be the object of the Other’s unconditional love. This surplus demand for love can never be fully met, however. A splitting takes place: For the unconditional element of demand, desire substitutes the ‘absolute’ condition: this condition unties the knot of that element in the proof of love that is resistant to the satisfaction of a need. Thus desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second, the phenomenon of their splitting (Spaltung) (Écrits 287).

Thus, desire remains in the realms of the impossible. Desire is alienated from the subject due to its origination in the Other: ‘It is quite simply […] as desire of the Other that man’s desire finds form’, suggests Lacan (Écrits 311). He elaborates: [M]an’s desire is the désir de l’Autre (the desire of the Other) in which the de provides what grammarians call the ‘subjective determination’, namely that it is qua Other that he desires (which is what provides the true compass of human passion) (Écrits 312).

One can see how the sense of a difference between the satisfaction of need and the impossible of alienated desire is worked generically in the songs of the trouvères.3 A fundamental distinction between sexual need and something different and strange – fin’amor – is implicit in the distinctions they make between genres and genders. It is a component of what gives certain songs – that is, chansons – power and prestige in relation to others. In low-style trouvère songs sexual wants are represented as tantamount to need, a simple biological requirement like hunger, without any messy complications. There are assumed to be those – female, peasant or both, or the aristocratic male in his dealings with them – who are exempted from the vicissitudes of desire. The ‘soullessness’ of the shepherdess, described by Michel Zink (Pastourelle 117), places her in this category. Such people can easily gratify their sexual needs (supposedly), but this very possibility is what renders the gratification itself negligible in comparison with the complicated and difficult desires of the chanson – the desire which torments and destroys a lover, as in Gace Brule’s ‘Tres grans amors me travaille et confont’ (A very great love which torments and crushes me) (Rosenberg and Danon 10–11). Chanson focuses on the themes of difficulty and painful struggle since impossibility is rarely spoken unambiguously. The trouvères attempt (but fail) to divide need from desire by genre and gender. They fail because no human desire can be simplified to the status of instinc-

3

It is particularly apparent in the motet form, as discussed in Ch. 1.

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tual, satisfiable need. The irreducible remainder of desire, after need is satisfied, always re-emerges in some form. Desire – Transitive and Intransitive: The Place of the Object Desire, for the trouvères, always hinges on three grammatical positions. The act of desiring, as the trouvères commonly consider it, can be separated out grammatically into its three constituent parts of subject, verb and object: the one who desires, the desiring and the one who is desired.4 That is, the trouvères treat the verb ‘to desire’ as we do in common parlance, as transitive, taking a direct object. This parsing of desire, while it is artificial, allows a discussion about the way the three elements are inflected according to genre. The three operate as a circuit since none can function without the others. They mutually constitute each other. Each is modified by the others but in different ways according to genre. In the songs, intergeneric discourse such as that apparent in the motet ‘Par un matinet l’autrier’, discussed in Chapter 1, suggests two desiring positions whose relation is oppositional. One is the high-style fin’amor, the other the low-style lust for an object. One is what the other is not. But, as we have discussed, this neat binarity cannot be maintained. In Lacanian terms desire is always unconscious desire, and it always carries something of the ‘impossible’ alluded to by Huchet and others.5 This impossibility is tied to the status of the object. Lacan criticized ‘object relations’ theory on the grounds that ‘an object relation is one which conjoins to a need an object which satisfies it’ (Freud’s Papers 209). For Lacan, human desire goes beyond need when the demand passes through ‘the defiles of the signifier’ (Écrits 309). Lacanian desire cannot be parsed into its three constituent parts as we have done here, because what is desired does not inhere in the ostensible object. Desire cannot find a home in any object because what is truly desired comes into being as already lost. Lacan observes: ‘[I]t is of course clear that what is supposed to be found cannot be found again. It is in its nature that the object as such is lost’ (Ethics 52). It becomes an object only in the moment of its loss in the advent of the speaking subject, as Žižek observes.6 There is an obvious loss of transitivity in this model of desire, which, Lacan argues, is born out of a lack intrinsic to language. He asks, in Anxiety, ‘Is 4

In Lacanian theory the notion of an object of desire is problematized, as I will discuss. In fact, the object per se is problematic. Sarah Kay suggests that in Lacan’s theory ‘[the object] can only be positioned relative to the subject via the mediation of the symbolic order. And the reason why we desire objects at all is because we want to fill the aching hole in the symbolic’ (Courtly Contradictions 32). 5 See for instance Bloch, Medieval Misogyny (esp. 143–64). 6 ‘[T]he lost quality only emerged at this very moment of its alleged loss’ (‘Seven Veils’ 199). Bruce Fink comments, with reference to the breast, that at the point when it did give satisfaction it was not yet an object – not separate (94).

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the object of desire out in front?’, to which he replies that what looks like its object ‘ought to be conceived by us as the cause of desire […] the object is behind desire’ (Anxiety, 16.01.63). Ten years later, in Encore, Seminar XX, he conflates the two as ‘object-cause’: the substance of what is supposedly object-like […] is in fact that which constitutes a remainder in desire, namely, its cause, and sustains desire through its lack of satisfaction […] and even its impossibility (Encore 6).

Lacan finds a variety of terms for the impossible ‘object’ (most notably objet (petit) a),7 as he develops it over the years. The placement of this ‘object’ has generic implications for the songs, and we will take this up further on since it is bound up with the disposition of narrative elements in a song. But the ‘object’ is only ever apparently out in front. The hidden ‘impossible’ of desire can be found, differently articulated, in both low and high style. This displacement of the object underlines the difficulty in attempting to speak of desire in two such different fields at once. The difficulty is compounded by the tenuousness of the subject of desire in Lacanian thought. If human desire is desire qua the Other, then the subject, alienated from the desire which drives him or her, can hardly even be called a subject of desire. Satisfiable Lust of the Pastourelle In the pastourelle the narrator presents what he experiences as a simple sexual need or lust for the shepherdess – a pleasurable but trivial itch which one scratches. The classic pastourelle is a narrative genre with a male-voiced, first-person narrator, in which the narrator recounts his attempts to seduce a shepherdess.8 The narrator/subject is constituted by the quality of his lust, but the shepherdess – his object – is also implicated in the process. It is partly her class status as a peasant which devalorizes what the narrator feels towards her.9 In the pastourelle, desire is qualified also by its setting, as an extension of the object. While the narrator is implicitly of the court (he is sometimes referred to as a knight), the scene takes place in the country. The pastourelle brings the court to the country and plays with the confrontations of gender and class which this scenario produces. Pierre Bec places it with the ‘hybrids’ in his typology.10 7

Objet (petit) a is first introduced in Anxiety (Allouch 47–70). I will not be concerned with another form, the ‘objective’ pastourelle (Callahan 9), or ‘bergerie’ as it is commonly called, where the narrator merely observes the shepherds and shepherdesses at play. 9 Cf. Rosenberg, Switten and Le Vot (197). 10 ‘The hybrid character of the pastourelle [consists in its being] at the same time aristocratisante (on the basis of its courtly connotations in particular, and the fact that 8

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The courtly narrator can be considered as off-duty from his courtliness, so to speak, in being away from court. But rather than his lust devalorising him as subject, it instead presents him in a different aspect. We can infer that, fictionally speaking, this is the way a nobleman behaves with shepherdesses, as opposed to the way he behaves with the ladies at court. Michel Zink suggests that the pastourelle arises in contrast to the chanson as ‘a literary exercise which allows them to give body sometimes to their evil thoughts’ (Pastourelle 74). Vis-à-vis the exalted desires of the chanson, it is the lust itself rather than its subject which is devalorized, although there is a range of opinion on this point.11 Pastourelle desire is low, however,not by affiliation with its subject but with its object. The desire, like the genre itself, is characterized by the shepherdess rather than the knight. The country and the shepherdess both stand for the non-courtly, natural world of sexual pleasure, untrammelled by the restraints of fin’amor and the courtly life in general.12 The shepherdess is ‘that kind of girl’, as Kathryn Gravdal puts it, who may pretend to put up a fight but actually enjoys being raped (‘Camouflaging Rape’ 369). In short she can be had. The narrator’s lust can be easily gratified, and this distinguishes it, for the trouvères, from chanson desire. The low object must be constructed not only as one who can be had but also as one not worthy of high desire – which almost amounts to the same thing. She also needs to appear as expendable because of the

the lyric “je” refers almost always to a knight) and archaïque-popularisante (on the basis of the archetypes it presupposes, the scenes of peasant life contained in it and some of its motifs and forms of expression)’ (Bec, Lyrique française 131). 11 W. T. H. Jackson, for instance, suggests that the narrator himself is devalued by sexual fraternizing with peasants: ‘the contrast between this behaviour [of the pastourelle narrator] and that ascribed to the knight in the courtly lyric is so obvious that it must have been regarded at best as satirical, at worst as insulting’ (73). Jackson concludes, this being the case, that ‘the pastourelles are essentially the poems of the mocking bystander […] the poems of the wandering cleric or his disciples’ satirically addressed to both the aristocracy and the peasantry (79). This is a perfect example of the critical urge to haul in satire as a way of ironing out ambiguities and uncertainties. It must be admitted that there is a great deal of ambiguity in the pastourelle scenario. The genre plays with this. For instance, Catherine Léglu remarks on the difficulty of socially placing the toza or touse (girl) in many Occitan pastorelas and French pastourelles. Thus she views the toza as ‘either the mouthpiece or the pretext for a debate about social distinctions, and about the assumptions of higher-lower positions […] as “given” evidence of hierarchy’ (138). This is another example of the way songs play with challenging the generic and social hierarchies. It remains my impression, however, that the confident narrating voice, as much by his position of authority as first-person narrator as anything else, is textually in charge. On this point, see my ‘Voices, “Realities” and Narrative Style’. 12 Cf. Zink, again: ‘The function of the pastourelle is to express physical desire in a pure state, completely free of all codification, ideology and spiritualization because it is addressed to a creature without a soul or considered as such, whose only reason for existing is to be an erotic object’ (Pastourelle 117). The shepherdess is ‘a girl of the fields and woods’, a ‘femme sauvage’ (97).

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possibility of her sexual consumption in the course of the song’s narrative. This again both keeps her value down and also makes it necessary that her value is kept down. Pastourelles have a range of strategies for trivializing the object of the narrator’s lust – and, correspondingly, the lust itself – apart from demonstrating her sexual availability. One of the most obvious of these is the way the pastourelle discourse literally cuts the shepherdess down to size. Diminutives cluster about her, neutralizing, as Zumthor suggests, ‘connotations of respect’ (Medieval Poetics 201). Examples abound, as in the refrain of Richard de Semilly’s ‘Je chevauchai l’autrier la matinee’: ‘ “Ma tres doucete suer” ’ (My sweetest little sister) (Medieval Pastourelle I 80), or Jocelin’s ‘Quant j’o chanteir l’aluete’: ‘ “Douce amiete” ’ (Sweet little friend). Here she is also referred to as ‘tousete’ (little girl) (Medieval Pastourelle I 101). The name of the genre itself, ‘pastorelle’, is the same as the diminutive of ‘pastore’ (young or little shepherdess). She appears as a bite-sized morsel, always to be found when required, in meadows, near forests, in the wild and off courtly limits. ‘Pastore ai trovee’ (I found a shepherdess) is another tag as common as the informal, oft-repeated, introduction, ‘L’autrier’ (the other day), which puts the little escapade in its place. Low desire, like its object, is trivialized. The shepherdess often cues proceedings by singing of her desire in suitably naïve and rustic fashion, as in Thibaut de Champagne’s ‘L’autrier par la matinee’: ‘Ci me tient li maus d’amours’ (the pains of love seize me here) (Rosenberg, Switten and Le Vot 315), or the anonymous ‘Quant voi la flor nouvele’ where her song gives the narrator ideas, although she may not be aware of his presence, thus demonstrating her vulnerability and lack of savoir-faire: ‘Je suis sade et brunete et joenne pucelete; s’ai color vermeillete euz verz, bele bouchete si mi point la mamelete que n’i puis durer; resons est que m’entremete des douz maus d’amer.

‘I’m charming and dark and a young little maiden I have a rosy colour green eyes, a pretty little mouth; my little breasts sting (tingle) so that I can’t bear it; it’s good reason to embark on the sweet pains of love.

‘Certes, se je trouvoie qui m’en meïst en voie, volentiers ameroie; ja por nule nel leroie, car bien ai oï retrere et por voir conter que nus n’a parfete joie s’el ne vient d’amer’.

‘Certainly, if I found someone to set me on the path, I’d willingly love, never for any other would I leave him for I’ve heard it said and said truly that no-one has perfect joy unless it comes from love’. (Medieval Pastourelle I: 294)

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She later puts up a fight but in case we are inclined to take that seriously she pipes up at the end, after she has been raped: ‘It’s thirteen years since I was born, to my knowledge, and never have I had a morning I’ve enjoyed so much’.13 The rhyme scheme, which tends to the low-style monorhyme, allows a rash of diminutives in the first strophe quoted, not all of which can be rendered in English, for instance ‘vermeillete’ (little red). These diminutives, placed in her own mouth, supported by the simplicity of her discourse, place her as unlettered, naïve. And yet, as Gravdal suggests, she is also often presented as duplicitous (‘Camouflaging Rape’ 369). She is a likely candidate for seduction or rape on both counts, since she is easy prey and also rendered unsympathetic by her deceit, but most unlikely to arouse a more desperate desire. ‘Sade’ is also used to describe food, where it can be translated as ‘delicious’. It is tempting to see her as a consumable item, delicious at the time but gone and forgotten in a flash. Pastourelle sees the courtly narrator riding out in search of sexual pleasure, as in the anonymous ‘L’autrier m’iere levaz’: ‘L’autrier m’ier levaz’ pastourelle RS 935, L 266–4, PC 461, 148 Manuscripts: C 138v–39, U 91v Music: in U. Text: Paden I: 17, pp. 58–63. Dialect: French with Occitan colouring (Paden II, 545). Other eds. Marrocco and Sandon 67–8.

1. L’autrier m’iere levaz; sor mon cheval montaz, sui por deduire alaz laz une praierie. Ne fui gaires esloignaz can me sui arrestaz et dessendi en praz soz une ante florie, s’ai Ermonjon choisie – c’onques rose espennie ne fu tals ne cristals. Vers li vois liez et baus, que sa beltaz m’agrie.

13

The other day I had risen; mounted on my horse, I went to enjoy myself along a meadow. I had not gone far when I stopped and dismounted in the meadow beneath a grafted tree in bloom I caught sight of Ermonjon – never was rose in bloom nor crystal the like. Joyful and happy I go towards her, Since her beauty pleases me.

Cf. Gravdal, ‘Camouflaging Rape’ 368–9.

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2. Quant la fui aprochaz dis li, ‘Suer, car m’amaz! Honorade en seraz en tote vostre vie.’ ‘Signer, ne moi gabaz; bien sai, prou troberaz fenne cui ameraz, plus riche et meuz vestie.’ ‘Bele, je ne quier mie en amor seignorie; senz mi plaist et beltaz (dont grant plantaz avaz) et dolce conpaignie.’

When I had come near her I said, ‘Sister, give me your love! You will be honoured all your life.’ ‘Sir, don’t mock me; I well know that you’ll find many a woman to love, richer and better dressed.’ ‘Pretty one, I don’t seek mastery in love; I like good sense and beauty (of which you have abundance) and sweet companionship.’

3. ‘De folie parlaz car ren n’en porteraz, c’autres est affiaz d’avoir ma druderie. Se tost ne remontaz et de ci non tornaz, ja seraz malmenaz – que Perrins nos espie, et s’a plus grant aïe des bergiers s’il s’escrie.’ ‘Bele, ja n’en dotaz, mais a mei entandaz: vos dites grant folie!’

‘You speak folly you’ll get none of it, since another has been promised my love. If you don’t quickly mount again and go away from here, soon you will be harmed – for Perrin sees us, and he’ll have greater help from the shepherds, if he cries out.’ ‘Beautiful one, never fear, but listen to me: you speak great folly!’

4. ‘Sire, al moins je vos pri (kar je remaindrai ci) k’aiez de moi merci (si serai mal baillie).’ ‘Bele, je vos affi, se m’avez a ami, n’i aura si hardi qui oltrage vos die. Por Deu, soiez m’amie!’ ‘Sire, n’en parlaz mie; por de qanques je vi a Limoiges mardi, nel vos creanterie.’

‘Sir, I beg you at least (since I shall remain here) to have mercy on me (for I’ll be in an awkward position).’ ‘Beautiful one, I promise you, if you’ll have me as your friend no one will be so brave as to insult you. For God’s sake, be my friend!’ ‘Sir, don’t speak of it at all; I would not give you my word, not for everything I saw at Limoges on Tuesday.’

78 5. ‘Bergiere, or est ensi: fols sui qant plus vos pri, c’ainz nul n’en vi joïr

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de longe roterie.’ Lors la trais pres de mi; ele geta un cri c’unques nuns ne l’oi. Ne fu pas trop esrie, ainz m’a dit cortesie: ‘Sire, g’iere marrie qant vos venistes ci. Or ai lo cuer joli; vostre geus m’a garie.

‘Now shepherdess. This is how it is: I’m a fool to beg you any more, for I’ve never seen anyone who enjoyed a long rigmarole.’ Then I drew her to me; she gave a cry but no one ever heard it. She was not too enraged, instead she spoke to me courteously: ‘Sir, I was unhappy when you came here. Now I have a cheerful heart; your game has cured me.

6. ‘Perrins m’ait engingnie, car onkes en sa vie si bel ne me servi; por ceu se lou defi d’un mes de coupperie!’

‘Perrin has deceived me, for never in his life has he served me so well; for that I condemn him to a month of cuckoldry!’

7. Et Perrins haut c’escrie: ‘Je t’ai trop bien servie! Tu lou m’ais mal meri – davant moi m’ais honi. Jamaix n’aurai amie!’

And Perrin cried aloud, ‘I’ve served you too well! You’ve paid me badly – you’ve shamed me before my eyes. Never will I have a friend!’

8. ‘Tais, gairs, Deus te maldie! Se j’ai fait trop compaignie a cest chevelier si, de coi t’ai je honi? Il ne m’enporte mie!’

‘Be quiet boy, God curse you! If I’ve kept too much company with this knight, how have I shamed you? He’s not taking me away!’

‘Deduire’ in l. 3 (to pass one’s time, enjoy oneself, amuse oneself, have a good time) carries the quality of the desire appropriate to the pastourelle narrator and has nothing whatever to do with grand passion. It is light-hearted sexual amusement. Ermenjon resists, ‘She gave a cry but no-one ever heard it’ and ‘she was not too enraged’. There is only her inept resistance in the way and this he speedily overcomes. It is a simple and straightforward narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end. The narrator goes out for sexual adventure, finds it and takes it. The last of these three steps in the narrative is the only one

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not generically determined in the classic pastourelle.14 Sometimes something goes wrong, for instance shepherds may show up in force as in strophe 5 of ‘Chevachai mon chief enclin’, also anonymous: Ne vo plux a li tencier, ains l’ai sor l’erbe getee; maix as jambes desploier lai fut grande la criee. Haut crie goule beeie ke l’oïrent li bergier; et Robins li fils Fouchier I ait fait grant asemblee, ki d’un baston de pomier m’ait l’achine mesuree. Pués m’ait dit en reprovier, ‘Vasauls, retorneis airrier; n’en moinrés nostre espousee!’

I didn’t want to argue with her any longer, instead I threw her on the grass; but when I laid bare her legs she gave a great cry. She cried aloud with gaping throat, so that the shepherds heard her; and Robin son of Fouchier gathered a great crowd, and with a stick of apple wood measured my spine. Then he reproved me: ‘vassal, go back where you came from; you won’t carry off our betrothed!’ (Paden, Medieval Pastourelle I: 224)

Sometimes the shepherdess outwits or humiliates the narrator, as in Thibaut de Champagne’s ‘L’autrier par la matinee’ where she taunts him as he makes his ignominious retreat: ‘Knights are extremely bold’ (Rosenberg, Switten and Le Vot 316). She is not always the easy meat she appears. The outcome of a pastourelle cannot be predicted. Sexual satisfaction may or may not arrive. The only thing determined about it is its indeterminacy; the outcome is left in doubt, to be discovered en route. William Paden has run a mathematical breakdown of the pastourelles according to the outcome which indicates a variety of denouements.15 There is, however, no question about the quality of the desire. It is presented as simple need or lust, followed up by swift action. The narrator will carry out his wishes if he can. Within the narrative frame, obstacles, and their insuperability, are contingent rather than essential matters. Impossible Desires of the Chanson In the chanson desire is of a different order. In the pastourelle fulfilment may or may not come to pass. It is a matter of contingency. In the chanson, 14 William Paden defines the ‘classical’ pastourelle as one in which: ’1. The mode is pastoral [with] a country setting [and] a description of the heroine as a shepherdess. 2. The cast includes a man and a young woman. 3. The plot comprises a discovery and an attempted seduction. 4. The rhetoric involves both narrative and dialogue. 5. The point of view is that of the man’ (Medieval Pastourelle I ix). 15 According to this breakdown, 18% of encounters end in rape, 33% in ‘sexual union’ as he puts it, other than rape, 41% no sexual union and 7% where it is not possible to be sure (‘Rape’ 332).

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fulfilment, while it is hoped for and sometimes anticipated, never comes to pass. Ostensibly it may happen but in fact it never does. The inevitable conclusion is that the non-fulfilment of desire in the chanson is a necessity posing as a contingency. This difference affects the circuit by which desire, its subject and its object constitute each other for the trouvères. It erodes the transitivity of the verb ‘to desire’, a transitivity which the chanson lover, nonetheless, desperately maintains. The object is displaced but that may never be said; la dame’s imposture must never be discovered. Chanson is full of the contradictions this entails. The various personages of the song are set up in relation to one another in such a way as to contrive unsatisfaction. Firstly la dame, the ostensible object of desire, must be constituted as unattainable in order for desire to be impossible to fulfil. Zink refers to this necessity in La pastourelle. The chanson as ‘chaste and ethereal’ requires a dame who ‘is bound to be inflexible’ (74). Secondly, la dame must be constituted as of great worth in order for the lover and the desire itself to be accepted as correspondingly worthy: refined, subtle, ineffable. She must be the best. And yet, thirdly, her necessary unattainability requires her to refuse the lover, so she cannot be the best. She must be split.16 The genre’s contradictory requirements necessitate her having both a good and a bad aspect. The lover becomes embroiled in this necessary contradiction in Thibaut de Champagne’s ‘Chançon ferai, car talent m’en est pris’ which begins: ‘I shall make a song since desire has seized me, about the best lady living in all the world. The best? I think I’ve made a mistake. If she were, if God would grant me joy, she would have taken pity on me’ (Brahney 39). The lover must also correspond to the (hidden) requirements that desire be impossible to fulfil, so he therefore is constituted in a variety of ways which effectively prevent him from gaining access to la dame: as timid, despairing, distant from the beloved and so on. He is presented as the passive victim of Love and la dame, like the lover of Thibaut de Champagne’s ‘Ausi conme unicorne sui’ whose battles are not won by fighting, but by humility: ‘suffering is the standard-bearer in this battle I’m telling you about’. Others are introduced who assist him in this prevention of access to la dame: the ‘evil doers’, slanderers, rivals, and the like. These rivals and slanderers are essential to the functioning of fin’amor in the song. Jean-Charles Huchet names them, together with la dame’s husband, as the third term: ‘The Other conquers its alterity thanks to a third term which provides an obstacle to the desire of “je”, henceforth inconsolable’ (L’amour 38).17

16

Cf. Matilda Bruckner on the troubadour’s ‘desire to fix [woman] in the positive mode of their hopes and desires or the negative one of their fears and complaints’ (‘Fictions’ 877). 17 Kay rightly rejects Huchet’s assimilation of lauzengiers to the husband (‘Contradictions’ 218).

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The rivals function, as Sarah Kay suggests ‘as narcissistic doubles or alter egos’ to the lover (‘Contradictions’ 218). In Lacanian terms, the ego is an absolutely fundamental form for the constitution of objects. In particular, it perceives what we call, for structural reasons, its fellow being, in the form of the specular other. This form of the other has a very close relation to the ego, which can be superimposed on it (The Ego 244).

In Écrits he describes the little other as ‘that which is reflected of his form in his objects’ (194). La dame, on the other hand, functions, as Lacan suggests, ‘in the position of the Other and of the object’ (Ethics 163).18 The ostensible object of desire is also the representative of the Law which prohibits its fulfilment. Thus Thibaut’s lover’s predicament of ‘the best’ who is not ‘the best’! As many have remarked in the critical tradition, the representation of desire within the code of fin’amor rarely, perhaps never, includes the unambiguous recording of its fulfilment.19 The gap which separates the lover from sexual possession of his beloved has, in the song’s purview, never been spanned. The lover proclaims his ardent desire but there is always an obstacle and these barriers to love appear to be insurmountable although they are never conclusively deemed to be so. Blondel de Nesle in the chanson ‘Chanter m’estuet, quar joie ai recouvree’, goes so far as to speak of an assurance of ‘joy’ in the near future. He has struck a bargain with his lady: ‘for the beautiful lady whom I have loved so long, who used to war against me for her love, has lately come to terms with me. Now she will be willing to give me … her noble love that I have so desired’ (Goldin, Lyrics 368–9, his translation). But this happy event is always still awaited in the chanson, and it awaits her pleasure, that is the Other’s pleasure, rather than his. Consummation remains infinitely deferred, beyond the confines of the song. The quality of unappeased desire, the state of suspension in which the loving/singing ‘I’ of the song inactively but volubly awaits his lady’s pleasure in alternating hope and despair, is so universal as to appear a generic necessity for the chanson. This position of helpless, yearning uncertainty is what

18 As Eugene Vance suggests, in the songs of the trouvères the lady ‘has the power both to provoke desire in [the lover] and to deny him her favour’ (‘Greimas’ 98). 19 Cf. the work of Huchet, quoted earlier, on the ‘impossible’ of desire. See also A. J. Denomy who comments that one of the crucial characteristics of love for the troubadours is that of ‘a ceaseless desire, a yearning that is never appeased’ (‘An Enquiry’ 176). Roger Dragonetti, in his chapter on style in the chanson, refers to ‘the game of frustrated love’ (55). Henri Rey-Flaud speaks of it as ‘a desire kept in essence as fundamentally impossible’ (10). Kay notes of the troubadours: ‘Even troubadours whose songs seem to celebrate a love already consummated find ways of ensuring that desire remains thwarted’ (‘Desire and Subjectivity’ 218).

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gives the chanson its particular erotic charge. A variety of reasons are offered for this uncertainty and frustration.20 What is fundamental, however, and prior to all arguments, is that it is invariably so, and therefore reasons have to be produced, whether by critics or by the trouvères themselves: reasons which disguise the impossibility endemic to desire. The relation between desire and the signifier is a different one in the chanson from that of the pastourelle. Ink flows, or the voice flows as an alternative to semen, not as an accompaniment to it or a means to it as in the pastourelle. There is an illustration of the instrumental aspect of words in the courtier’s dealings with the peasantry, in Andreas Capellanus’ De Amore.21 Andreas, as for all modes of amatory behaviour, provides a model for sexual dealings with peasants: ‘if the love even of peasant women chances to entice you, remember to praise them lavishly’, advice the narrator of ‘L’autrier m’iere levaz’ fulfils to the letter: ‘Pretty one, I don’t seek mastery in love; I like good sense and beauty (of which you have abundance) and sweet companionship’ (Paden I: 61). But, if fulsome praise fails, Andreas cautions, ‘you should not delay in taking what you seek, gaining it by rough embraces. You will find it hard […] to make them quietly agree […] unless the remedy of […] some compulsion is first applied […]’ (Andreas 223). Words here are purely an initial strategy with no value in themselves. The content is immaterial provided the strategy is successful. If not, one moves on to direct action. Desire in the chanson is diverted to the song itself, or perhaps more precisely, it never leaves it. It arises in and inhabits the song. Perhaps it is the song.22 It is desire, at any rate, that finds its beginning and end in song.

20

For instance, frustration is put down to whether the lady is married, either fictively or historically. Cf. Paden, who argues the case against the contention that ‘the ladies whom the Provençal troubadours loved were the wives of other men’ (‘The Troubadour’s Lady’ 20). Later, in ‘The Lyric Lady in Narrative’ he alters his focus: ‘Perhaps the troubadours make a spectacle not of their lady, whatever her civil status, but of their love; perhaps this love is not usually identified in relation to marriage at all, but simply as desire;’ (114). 21 Andreas’ words cannot be taken as a practical manual on love, however, as Paolo Cherchi reminds the reader: ‘Paradoxically, Andreas’s De Amore has constituted the greatest impediment to the understanding of courtly love. The major responsibility for this fact rests on Andreas’s readers, who take his treatise to be a manual […] rather than an interpretation of it’ (11). Unlike Jackson, Jean Flori sees pastourelle as a reflection of the contempt with which peasant women were viewed in aristocratic circles and cites Andreas as the mouthpiece for this contempt. Pastourelle, Flori suggests, is simply ‘the practical application of the theory of love exhibited by Andreas’ (185). It is striking, however it is interpreted, that Andreas provides a blueprint for a typical pastourelle mise-en-scène. 22 Cf. Paul Zumthor, who suggests that the relationship between desire and song, of chanter and aimer, is one of identity. In ‘On the Circularity of Song’ he remarks: ‘One might well […] state flatly that ‘aimer’ […] (involving the grammatical subject of the song) is included in ‘chanter’. […]. The result is that a line like ‘chanson par amors trovee’ […] is to be considered as magnificently tautological, with each of the terms implying the other two in a closed chain for which ‘chanson’ constitutes the lock’ (185).

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This atmosphere of erotically-charged deprivation is evident in ‘Li nouviauz tanz et mais et violete’, a chanson by the Chastelain de Couci. ‘Li nouviauz tanz et mais et violete’ Chanson RS 985, L 38–9, MW 1507 Manuscripts: M, also in ACKLOPRTUVXa Attribution: Chastelain de Couci in MAKPTXa Music: in all mss. except C Text: Lerond 76–81 Other eds.: Rosenberg, Switten and Le Vot 252–3; Rosenberg and Tischler 204–208 (l. 35 amended, from OPVXa, from ‘Nenil, par Dieu’ to ‘Oïl, par Dieu’ here, as in Rosenberg, Switten and Le Vot, 253). 1. Li nouviauz tanz et mais et violete et lousseignolz me semont de chanter, et mes fins cuers me fait d’une amourete si douz present que ne l’os refuser. Or me lait Diex en tele honeur monter que cele u j’ai mon cuer et mon penser tiegne une foiz entre mes braz nuete, ançoiz qu’aille outremer. 2. Au conmencier la trouvai si doucete, ja ne quidai pour li mal endurer; mes ses douz vis et sa bele bouchete et si vair oeill, bel et riant et cler m’orent ainz pris que m’osaisse doner; se ne me veut retenir ou cuiter, mieuz aim a li faillir, si me pramete, qu’a une autre achiever. 3. Las! por coi l’ai de mes ieuz reguardee, la douce rienz qui fausse amie a non, quant de moi rit et je l’ai tant amee?

The new season and may and violets and the nightingale, all urge me to sing, and my pure heart has impelled me to a new love so sweet that I dare not refuse it. Now may God let me rise to such honour that I might hold her, in whom I place my heart and my thoughts, one more time naked in my arms, before I sail abroad. At first, I found her so sweet and kind I never thought to endure suffering for her; but her sweet face and her lovely little mouth and her smiling eyes, sparkling and bright, captured me before I dared surrender; if she doesn’t want to keep me or let me go, I would rather fail with her, provided she gives me her promise, than succeed with someone else.

Alas! Why did I ever catch sight of her, the sweet creature named False Belovèd, who laughs at me when I have loved her so much? So easily was no man ever betrayed. Si doucement ne fu trahis nus hom. Tant con fui mienz, ne me fist se bien non; As long as I was free, she made me happy; but now I am hers, she kills me for no mes or sui suenz, si m’ocit sanz raison; cause, because I have loved her with all my et c’est pour ce que de cuer l’ai amee! heart! She has no other excuse. N’i set autre ochoison.

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4. De mil souspirs que je li doi par dete ne m’en veut pas un seul cuite clamer; ne fausse amours ne lait que s’entremete, ne ne me lait dormir ne reposer. S’ele m’ocit, mainz avra a guarder; je ne m’en sai vengier fors au plourer; quar qui amours destruit et desirete ne s’en set on blasmer.

Of the thousand sighs that I owe her she will not release me from a single one; and False Love, who never stops meddling, lets me neither sleep nor rest. If she kills me, she’ll have fewer prisoners to watch. I don’t know what revenge to take except to weep, for the one whom Love conquers and disinherits doesn’t know where to lay the blame.

5. Above every joy is the supreme one Sour toute joie est cele couronee que j’ai d’amours. Diex, faudrai i je dont? that I have from Love. God! Will I fail there? Yes, by God, such is my destiny, Oïl, par Dieu: teus est ma destinee, and this destiny the evil ones have given me et tel destin m’ont doné li felon. Si sevent bien qu’il font grant mesprison, though they know well they do great wrong, because he who steals what he cannot give quar qui ce tolt dont ne puet faire don, gains enemies and battles from it. il en conquiert anemis et mellee: He can only lose. n’i fait se perdre non. 6. Si coiement ai ma doleur celee qu’a mon samblant ne la reconoist on; se ne fussent la gent maleüree, n’eusse pas souspiré en pardon: Amours m’eüst doné son guerredon. Maiz en cel point que dui avoir mon don, lor fu l’amour descouverte et moustree. Ja n’aient il pardon!

So secretly have I concealed my pain no one would guess it from my appearance; if it were not for that wicked race, I would not have sighed for nothing: Love would have granted me its reward. But at the moment I was to receive my gift, then was love discovered and exposed. Truly, may they never be forgiven!

‘Li nouviauz tanz’ has a range of tropes relating to the lover’s imprisonment in helpless passivity, for instance in the reference to his condition, in strophe 2, as a state of suspension, neither kept nor released: ‘if she doesn’t want to keep me or let me go’. Of particular interest in this context is the suspiciously apt introduction of an insuperable obstacle in the guise of the ‘wicked race’ who expose true love, just in the nick of time to prevent any sexual activity before the end of the song,23 thus allowing unsatisfaction to remain in circulation within its boundaries. Whenever the resolution of either complete impossibility or imminent success threatens this carefully poised suspension, a hope or an impediment is brought into play. 23

Not all mss. contain strophe 6, however, so ‘the end of the song’ is a mutable category. For a commentary on the different redactions see Rosenberg, Switten and Le Vot (249).

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The resolution of total failure is blocked by mention of a promise: ‘I would rather fail with her, provided she gives me her promise, than succeed with someone else’, just as the resolution of complete success is blocked by the timely machinations of the ‘evil ones’, just ‘at the moment I was to receive my gift’. These evil ones and their machinations function here as a fantasy, a narrative which obscures what Žižek calls ‘the fundamental paradox of the Lacanian object a, which emerges as being-lost’ (‘Seven Veils’ 199). He continues: ‘Narrativization occludes this paradox by describing the process in which the object is first given and then gets lost’ (199). Here in ‘Li nouviauz tanz’, the narrative, although it still manages to function as narrative, is one of simultaneity; the object seems to slip into and out of sight in the same moment of its (blocked) reception. Hope is instantaneously transmuted into nostalgia. The chanson erotic, then, is one of deprivation. It expands and gathers momentum in the oscillation between hope and impediment within the song’s confined space of unsatisfaction. The song acts like a pressure-cooker with the lid on, maintaining intensity, suspending release and preventing closure. It constitutes a space which can neither be escaped nor closed. This becomes apparent if one compares ‘Li nouviauz tans’ with the bald narrative of a pastourelle like Jean Bodel’s ‘L’autrier quant chevauchoie’: ‘I had my way until I got plenty of her in a short time’ (Paden, Medieval Pastourelle I: 73). Or the anonymous pastourelle, ‘C’est en mai quant reverdoie’: ‘I laid her on the ground. Three times I did her the trick’ (Paden, Medieval Pastourelle I: 315). There is no pressure-cooking going on here, no teasingly endless putting-off of the orgasm. The tease is there but it is not endless. The lust of pastourelle never gathers sufficient momentum for it to become seriously erotic. Its narrative structure takes care of that. The closure of success or failure prevents erotic escalation although it does not prevent titillation. The diminutive charms of the shepherdess, her resistance and the uncertainty of the outcome must create a certain sexiness in the eyes of the narrator and his imagined audience. Within the fictive frame of the pastourelle, desire is for its ostensible object: the body of the shepherdess, and for mastery over her. Marcabru’s famous pastorela, ‘L’autrier jost’una sebissa’ is often given as evidence of the genre’s satiric character because of the way the sturdy peasant girl shows up the knight’s pretensions. Charles Fantazzi says admiringly: ‘Courtly makebelieve is exploded by the accurate salvoes of a simple but shrewd country lass. To her very last word she has never once deviated from a strict corporeality of language and imagery that exposes the emptiness of the courtly charade’ (401). Fantazzi’s use of the word ‘corporeality’ unmasks the position allotted to the shepherdess: it is precisely to be body, in opposition to the heady, ungraspable desires of fin’amor which are both ridiculed and valorized. The two attitudes are always in play. The function of the soulless femme is to bring the lover down to the earth that she is.

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Two Orders of Prohibition The work of an older contemporary of Lacan’s, Alexandre Kojève, is of interest here. Kojève reiterated the oppositions set up by the trouvères. In his reading of Hegel, desire for the object – as in the low-style desire of the pastourelle – is designated as ‘animal Desire’, a ‘necessary condition of Self-Consciousness, [but] not a sufficient condition’ (4). What makes desire human, in his understanding of Hegel, is, ‘that it is directed toward another Desire and an other Desire’ (39–40).24 Lacan’s oft-repeated maxim, that ‘man’s desire is […] the desire of the Other […]’ (Écrits 312), carries an echo of Kojève amongst all its possible significations, in its reference to desire’s essential alienation. This is the desire of chanson. The lover is not the source of his own desire, as Thibaut de Champagne’s lover bears witness in ‘Tout autresi con l’ente fait venir’: ‘No man can ever master faithful love but must instead be mastered’ (Brahney 96). In low-style song such as the pastourelle, with a desire which Kojève terms animal or ‘natural’, the subject of desire seeks to assimilate the object as an animal hungers for food (4). This is what the pastourelle narrator seeks in the shepherdess – we are led to understand. She is food to him – note the use of ‘sade’ to describe her. Like Kojève, the trouvères classify this attitude as lower than the desire for desire. They would have approved his distinction, although they problematise it from time to time, as we saw in the motet ‘Par un matinet’. They pose the same distinction and use it as a way of relegating both li vilain and la femme to the ranks of the non-human. Andreas Capellanus makes the distinction explicit in the case of peasants: ‘[Farmers] are impelled to acts of love in the natural way like a horse or a mule, just as nature’s pressure directs them’ (Andreas 223). These two genres represent two orders of prohibition. Slavoj Žižek, in ‘Courtly Love, or Woman as Thing’, notes Lacan’s divergence from ‘the usual dialectic of desire and prohibition’ (Metastases 96). This ‘usual dialectic’, (the Freudian account),25 is to, ‘ “raise the price” of an object by rendering access to it more difficult’ (Metastases 96). The shepherdess’ resistance has that effect. It raises the erotic price for the narrator and his ideal audience by holding up the action, and making the outcome uncertain. But pastourelle 24 See also: ‘in the relationship between a man and a woman […] Desire is human only if one desires, not the body, but the Desire of the other; if he wants ‘to possess’ or ‘to assimilate’ the Desire taken as Desire – that is to say, if he wants to be ‘desired’ or ‘loved’, or, rather, ‘recognized’ in his human value, in his reality as a human individual’ (6). 25 This is a reference to the account in Freud’s ‘The Tendency to Debasement in Love’ (On Sexuality 256): ‘It can easily be shown that the psychical value of erotic needs is reduced as soon as their satisfaction becomes easy. An obstacle is required in order to heighten libido; and where natural resistances to satisfaction have not been sufficient men have at all times erected conventional ones so as to be able to enjoy love’.

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desire is, finally, as diminutive as its object. Ultimately it does not matter whether the narrator gets her or not. That is the significance of contingency in the pastourelle. The possibility of fulfilment equals its unimportance either way. Where desire matters to the trouvères (as in the chanson), the outcome is rigged. There is, however, another, hidden desire invoked in the pastourelle, to which we are alerted by the narrator’s insistence on his own indifference, but, as it appears most clearly in the chronotope, we shall come to it later. In the chanson we encounter a second order of prohibition which, in Žižek’s reading of Lacan, rather than simply raising the price of the object by delaying or problematising the outcome, ‘raise[s] this object itself to the level of the Thing – the “black hole”, around which desire is organized’ (96). ‘Black hole’ is a good term, because it situates das Ding as ‘a beyond-of-the-signified’ (Ethics 54), and also as impossible to imagine (125); therefore in the register of the ungraspable real. The Thing is a reading of Freud’s das Ding, the irreducible other, which Lacan takes up especially in Ethics.26 This Thing, for Lacan, is ‘that place the instinct (drive) aims for in sublimation.27 That is to say’ he continues, ‘that what man demands, what he cannot help but demand, is to be deprived of something real’ (Ethics 150).28 It is this Thing of which the lover demands to be deprived (Ethics 111). He does not seek to attain it; instead, ‘if he is to follow the path of his pleasure [he] must go around it’ (95). Thus the lover’s resort to the machinations of rivals whose function it is to deprive him of the object which appears in the place of the Thing. Such deprivation is a much weightier matter, the trouvères insist, than a sexual fling with an expendable object. The weight of the chanson (and part of what gives it its prestige), is the weight for humanity of the convolutions of the drive in sublimation. In trouvère song the shepherdess may be found (trovee) but not la dame of the chanson. No one can actually take the place of the Thing, only appear to do so as la dame does, in absentia. Any object can be transformed into ‘a thing’ (lower-case), Lacan asserts, as in ‘the sudden elevation of the match box to a dignity that it did not possess before. But it is a thing that is not, of course, the Thing’ (Ethics 117–18). It is because she cannot be found that la dame can remain ‘raised to the dignity’ of the Thing. There is in the chanson, as in the pastourelle, a prohibition. There is a

26

Freud discusses das Ding in an early work: ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’: ‘Thus the complex of the fellow human being falls apart into two components, of which one makes an impression by its constant structure and stays together as a thing, while the other can be understood by the activity of memory – that is, can be traced back to information from [the subject’s] own body’ (331). Thus das Ding is that, in the other, which cannot be understood by reference to one’s own experience. 27 Cf. comments on sublimation by Sarah Kay in Ch. 7 of Courtly Contradictions, especially pp. 260–65. 28 Lacan remarks, in the Anxiety Seminar, that ‘the knight who suffers for his lady’ in ‘what is called courtly love’ prefers ‘the least substantial favours’ and prefers in fact that his lady go ‘in the opposite direction to what one would call reward’ (16.1.63).

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holding back, an ‘amor interruptus’ in Lacan’s words (Ethics 152). In the chanson, however, it is a terminal delay. There can be no ‘happy’ ending for the chanson, or any conclusive ending at all, though that may never be said unequivocally. If it were, the whole fabrication would fall to the ground: the fabrication, that is, that possession of la dame is what the lover wants; the fabrication of her status as sublime object of desire. Sexual possession of her is the aim but not the satisfaction. The lover’s oscillations between hope and despair and the clever manipulation of obstacles in ‘Li nouviauz tans’ are a misdirection or sleight of hand to disguise the truth that the satisfaction is really in missing the target. And yet these manipulations are not completely hidden. Having established his credentials as the helpless victim of external forces, the lover proceeds to undermine them. There is a further layer in which he allows the subterfuge to be glimpsed in order to establish, semi-covertly, that it really is he who constructs the obstacles. Lacan approaches it from this angle in Encore: ‘[Courtly love] is a highly refined way of making up for the absence of the sexual relationship, by feigning that we are the ones who erect an obstacle thereto’ (69). La dame obscures absolute impossibility by her own contrived inaccessibility. Two conflicting disguises are in play: on the one hand, the lover’s preference for avoiding possession of la dame is obscured; on the other this disguise is allowed to be pierced in order to disguise the logical impossibility of fulfilment. Lovers find ways of gesturing obliquely towards their own contradictory manipulations. ‘No torment that is not my joy’ Evidence of this gesturing abound, for instance in the Chastelain de Couci’s ‘L’an que rose ne fueille’: ‘I am right to grieve, because I desire my sorrow, and I love more than ever what I cannot enjoy and know well I shall never reach’ (Lerond 72–5, my emphasis), and the oxymoron, ‘Lady, I have no torment that is not my joy’ (73). See also Gace Brulé’s ‘De bien amer grant joie atent’: ‘Great love cannot do me harm since the more it kills me the more I like it’ (Rosenberg and Danon 34–35). The lover’s claims of innocent bewilderment in the face of unmerited affliction lose force in the light of these statements. Such declarations of tormenting joy sit uneasily with his ‘official’ professions (Žižek, Metastases 96). This is why the lover’s pious hopes in ‘Li nouviauz tanz’ that the beloved ‘will lie once more naked in my arms before I sail abroad’ ring hollow. It is his ‘official’ voice, which he himself allows to be called into question. But in the process of revealing his enjoyment in missing the target, desire’s absolute impossibility is concealed. The complication is that chanson must both say and not say this, hence the value of oxymoron. The ‘secret’ of the lover’s satisfaction in missing the target is not well kept, because this ‘secret’ obscures the deeper secret of a more radical impossibility.

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Lacan speaks, in Ethics, of courtly love as ‘the pleasure of desiring, or, more precisely, the pleasure of experiencing unpleasure’ (152). It is because of the jouissance of experiencing unpleasure that lovers groan willingly under their weight of woe. Our lovers preen themselves on their helplessness à la mode, in the face of la dame’s inhumanity, for instance in the Chastelain’s rhetorical flourishes: ‘now I am hers she kills me for no cause, because I have loved her with all my heart!’, and ‘God! Will I fail there? Yes, by God, such is my destiny’. The pleasure of the fantasy is evident in the grandiosity of ‘such is my destiny’ and also evident is the lover’s enjoyment of his own declarations of unassailable worthiness. His behaviour is impeccable at any rate. Conversely, the degree of the dame’s capricious cruelty and the despicable baseness of the ‘wicked race’, who knowingly and deliberately behave badly, are also matters for enjoyable self-congratulation. One can imagine lovers competitively comparing their ladies: ‘mine’s more heartless than yours!’ There is much enjoyment invested in these calamities. The extent to which the lover half-openly manipulates events to conduce to his tormenting jouissance, while simultaneously insisting on his own status as the spotless victim of inexplicable cruelty is the extent to which he manages to evade the anguish of confronting his own lack in being, and so, in a sense, to evade or at least to deny his desire. Lacan suggests: ‘Desire is a relation of being to lack. This lack is the lack of being whereby the being exists’ (The Ego 223). La dame plugs a gap for him in her inaccessibility, allowing the continuation of the tormenting jouissance which stakes nothing. Fradenburg remarks that ‘what desire wants above all is to keep on desiring’ (Sacrifice Your Love 5). She continues, a little further on: ‘But desire’s futility can also be a joy. We can […] find ecstasy in the very experience of desire’ (6). Undoubtedly, this ecstasy is what our courtly lovers contrive. But perhaps there might be a different direction for desire than this refusal to confront impossibility. Other questions arise from this one. How would it be possible to speak a different desire, one acquainted with impossibility? If desire is ‘a relation of being to lack’ with an ‘object’ which is really its cause, what can be said of it? Certainly it cannot be spoken via the object. Yet Lacan, in an early seminar, posits this speaking of desire as ‘the efficacious action of analysis’ (The Ego 228), a speaking ‘which creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world’ (229). Secondly, how might one act in accordance with such a desire? If desire is alienated in the Other, what room is left for action? What can the lover do but wait in endless suspense? Yet Lacan has something to say here as well: ‘I propose then, that, from an analytical point of view, the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire’ (Ethics 319). It is an ethical question. Lacan speaks of ‘that reconsideration of ethics to which psychoanalysis leads us, the relationship between action and the desire that inhabits it’ (Ethics 313, my emphasis). These ethical questions guide and inform this study’s exploration of the various desires of the system.

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Two songs address these questions, in a negative sense, in demonstrating what happens when the lover is brought up short against his lack. The Cursed Blessing of Consent Something of the chanson lover’s predicament is glimpsed in a song which records the experience of attainment: the lover gets his way and he is not happy – something precious has fallen. The song is not a chanson, although it is designated as such by Hans Tischler (Tischler, Trouvère Lyrics, v. 13, no. 1157). Such events are not recorded in the chanson. Gontier de Soignes’ lover sings, in ‘Li tans nouveaus et la douçors’: ‘That which I complain of above all else, someone else would call a great blessing. I had set my heart on a lady of great worth; too easily I conquered her […] Do you know what disheartens me? She was a woman of great charm; now I think she has less, since I so speedily found satisfaction there […] it would have been more to my taste if she had refused me for a moment and given me later, reluctantly, what I had begged […] Now I ask Gontier to sing out loud and say to her that there is little worth in a castle that falls at the first assault. It should hold out – otherwise no one wants it!’ (my emphasis)

In the last sentence Gontier’s lover is describing the prescribed conditions for the chanson. If the object of desire is not denied no one wants it. Only the unattainable is desired. If it is attained then, paradoxically, it was not really desire and this paradox is reflected in/constituted by the song’s low-style register. It is a rotrouenge with low-style features – refrain, monorhymes – which jibe with its cynical, low-style sentiments. The lover is deprived, by the dame’s consent, of the space of eroticised deprivation, the ambiguous place of pleasurable pain constituted by the endless loop of (un)satisfied desire. What might have been a song of eroticised deprivation became, retrospectively, a song of simple lust, because it was gratified and the object of it became retrospectively of no value. She was not la dame after all but only la femme – the counterpart of the pastourelle shepherdess, someone who could be had – and so the chanson space was foreclosed and in its place appeared the low-style territory of narrative. The lover is piqued, however, because she was supposed to be the nonconsenting dame. It was supposed to be that kind of song. It had been set up that way with the words: ‘I had set my mind on a lady of great standing’, pure chanson territory except for the past tense, the tell-tale trace of narrative. The exordium: ‘The new season, with its sweetness, which brings back to us grass and flowers, causes me to think on love and revives my pain’, also sounds like a typical chanson opening, apart from the low-style versification. But it turned out not to be chanson territory. The song is not in the high style of pure lyric but in the low style of narrative, which allows a past of sexual

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satisfaction or at least the possibility of it, like a pastourelle. That is what allows me to say that it was not the territory of chanson. Therefore what the lover felt is shown not to have been fin’amor since that can never be fulfilled or finished with, and the song indicates a ‘knowledge’ of this lack by its style. The song-space is seen to be the wrong shape for a chanson by the lady’s capitulation and her ‘subsequent’ but retroactive loss of value, both of which fit the song’s low-style shape. It is the distinctions between the chanson and lower-style genres like the pastourelle, indicated here by tense, which allow these implications to emerge. By these means a discourse on desire is generated intergenerically. It is a discourse which hinges, in part, on temporality. It can be inferred that what can be consumed, finished with – in this case the lady – and therefore captured and relegated to the past of narrative, is devalorized.29 Gontier’s words, ‘falls at the first assault’ seem to indicate that the condition la dame’s consent failed to fulfil was, like the Freudian prohibition, one which ‘raises the price’ of the object by making access more difficult, rather than, like the Lacanian prohibition, one which disguises impossibility. Gontier’s lover intimates that he would have welcomed la dame’s consent at a later date, if she had held back for the requisite period. But it must be remembered that this is a post-mortem account, introduced retrospectively from the point of view of low-style cynicism. The lady, having consented, can no longer be perceived as la dame of the chanson, she whose refusal allowed her to be raised to the dignity of the Thing. Although it is her consent which devalues her, this devaluation works retroactively, both on her and the song itself, ‘changing’ it backwards to, and therefore from, the beginning. This song is not a chanson (although it should have been), but it ‘quotes’ the chanson which it fails to be. This ‘quotation’ is itself a commentary on desire in that it calls attention to – and valorizes – the kind of desire from which it differentiates itself. Gontier’s song, by its meaningful mingling of generic traits, draws attention to what is more hidden in the chanson, and in doing so produces a knowledge which is perceived intergenerically. In this respect it has affinities with Lacan’s use of anamorphosis as an analogy for courtly love. An anamorphosis is an image which can only be perceived when certain conditions are met, for instance if one stands in a particular position in relation to it (Ethics 135). Conon de Béthune’s ‘L’autrier avint en cel autre païs’ (Wallensköld 17– 18), identifies itself as the wrong shape for a chanson in the same way: the lover is deprived of his deprivation. Unlike ‘Li tans nouveaus’ it begins in obvious low-style, like a pastourelle, with its ‘l’autrier’ (the other day) plus the enigmatic addition, ‘in another land’ (345).30 It is couched in third-person 29

It would, of course, be possible for narrative to express impossibility or temporal confusion but it would be a very different narrative from the classic pastourelle. 30 In fact the past of pastourelle is another land.

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narrative and frames a dialogue between a knight and a lady. Conon’s lover is distanced from the song by the past tense of narrative, by the use of the third person which leaves his persona out of the frame, and by the alienation of place. This is not the territory of fin’amor, which is here and now rather than there and then. The inclusion of the lady’s direct speech alone is enough to mark the song as low-style, the wrong shape, the wrong country. She is admitted to speech and presence by narrative, as she never is in the chanson, but only on the terms that she is alienated from her speech, hived off into the narrator’s reported past, speaking or spoken through his voice. Like the lady in ‘Li tans nouveaus et la douçors’ she also consents: ‘Friend, I have led you along from day to day with words […] henceforward I shall do what you want’ (17). The lady’s consent leads directly to a reappraisal of her value on the knight’s part.31 He invokes the passage of time and mortality, narrative forces which never assail la dame of the chanson: ‘The knight looked her in the face, saw it very pale and colourless. “Lady,” he said, “[…] your bright face […] has gone […] from bad to worse […] Too late, lady, is this decision taken” ’ (17). She is the reverse of the maiden on Keats’ Grecian urn, who can never fade nor ever be kissed. Being kissed, or not, must surely be intimately connected to whether she fades or not. Fading is a condition of being kissed. The lady ceases to trigger the lover’s desire at the moment she consents. She fades, quite literally, on the spot: ‘Si la vit mult pale et descolorée’ (he saw she was very pale and colourless). What she now elicits from him is aggression. Is anxiety the reason for his evident malice, since by becoming human, ceasing to be an inhuman partner but a willing sexual accomplice, she deprives him of the equivocal jouissance of deprivation? Yes, but even more, by doing so she strips him of the substance of his being. There is a fading on his side as well, with the fall of his sublime object.32 Another postponement would have allowed the Lady to remain raised to the dignity of the Thing. So in the chanson something must always intervene if fulfilment looks probable. If not, and if the lover gets his woman, she ceases to represent the object of his desire, desire being metonymic. Conon’s song ‘knows’ that it is disqualified as a chanson and marks its ‘knowledge’

31 Heather Arden emphasizes the age of la dame as the reason for her dismissal: ‘[S]he has crossed the time zone into physical old age’ (‘Time Zones’ 3), but it is not until la dame consents that he looks again (he ‘looked at her face’) and decides she is too old. One might say that she becomes old in that moment when her acquiescence subjects her to time. 32 Cf. Lacan’s reference to ‘the moment of a “fading” or eclipse of the subject that is closely bound up with the Spaltung or splitting that it suffers from its subordination to the signifier’ (Écrits 313).

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by the indicators of low style. Again, as in ‘Li tans nouviauz’, this knowledge is produced at the intergeneric level and can only be gleaned at this level. So while fin’amor ostensibly sets its sights on sexual fulfilment, what it actually produces is words. Postponement is effected by fast talk. La dame and la pastore receive very different treatment. La dame is eclipsed by a barrage of words detached from action, while la pastore discovers what is excluded in the chanson, the violent alternative to words which is rape. This is what he does when he stops talking. In the pastourelle talk gets the subject into bed. In the chanson it keeps him out of it. La Dame: The Absent Presence In low-style song, I have suggested, the object qualifies desire for the trouvères by lowering it and naming it as other than desire, and thus has a hand in the modification of both desire and the desiring subject, since it is the quality of the desire by which the subject is constituted, and desire itself is constituted by the quality of the object. In the chanson, la dame constitutes the subject and his desire as high in value, but she does it in her own absence, as mentioned earlier; she does it by her absence. We have seen what la dame is not. But discussing what she is is only to continue to discuss what she is not. If chanson desire inevitably eludes gratification, what becomes of its ostensible object? The shepherdess is consumed, if not by the narrator, then by time. She is consigned to the past of narrative. La dame is tipped out of the frame in a different way. Official object of high-style desire, she resists comparison with the shepherdess and her ilk in a variety of ways. In a sense she is not constituted, not an object at all since she must stand in for an incomparable object which has always been lost. Unlike the shepherdess, she is not to be found. No chanson begins: ‘Dame ai trovee’. She is never there, but her absence can be approached from different directions. The first is her unattainability, discussed above. As Lacan notices, She ‘is introduced […] through the door of privation or of inaccessibility’ (Ethics 149). The lover’s insistence on deprivation effectively decrees her absence. She, the ostensible object, is abandoned to an infinitely deferred ‘future’ of unattainable desire rather than to a past of accomplished gratification, the fate of the shepherdess. This ‘future’, while it is posed as temporal is really based on the logic of the desiring subject for whom the object of desire is actually its cause. La dame’s own desire is similarly absent, as Marianne Shapiro comments of the troubadours: ‘[T]he representation of female character as obsessively erotic in almost all of the literary traditions known to the Middle Ages is all but excluded from the troubadour canso’ (‘Provençal Trobairitz’ 563). Toril Moi refers also to the absent desire of la dame: ‘her desire seems either to be non-existent or entirely cultural’ (‘Desire in Language’ 22). Her representation, however, carries the weight of her ambiguity, so much

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so that it is moot whether one can say that she is not after all, in some sense, the place of desire. Zumthor touches on this matter when he speaks of the ‘place’ which is a meaning space […] The space I am speaking of is marked in the text: the ultimate circumstance, the limit toward which the objectless actions […] succeed each other, tend, is a place […] The adverbs of place […] are often interpreted as rhetorical substitutes for the dame. But the relation is really the opposite; the lady is a substitute for the places […] The dame is no more the object of the discourse than the je is its subject. (‘Circularity’ 188)

La dame, as object, is certainly not the endpoint of desire nor the object of discourse. No particular presence inhabits the song, but her absence is so weighty a matter that one must wonder whether it is not a kind of presence in itself. It is not possible to ignore her altogether. The ambiguity of her position – always invoked yet never present – must be acknowledged. Her absence carries her qualities. The ‘black hole’ around which the subject’s desire is structured, referred to by Žižek, has her shape (Metastases 94). This place is the place of la dame’s absence. In these songs it is not the case that any object can come to be dignified as the Thing. Here, only la dame can not be the Thing.33 La dame’s absence is also a matter of her lack of substance, which is to approach the same question from a slightly different angle. Lacan speaks of her as ‘emptied of all real substance’. He is speaking, as usual, of the troubadour’s domna, but the point holds for the trouvères (Ethics 149). La dame, Lacan suggests, ‘is presented with depersonalized characteristics. As a result, writers have noted that all the poets seem to be addressing the same person’ (149). This is borne out in the abstract formality of references to her body. See, for instance, Gace Brulé’s ‘Bel m’est quant je voi repairier’: ‘Cele au gent cors et au cler vis’ (She of the beautiful body and the bright face), or, also by Gace, ‘J’ai oublïé painne et travauz’: ‘Bele est, clere comme solaus, vermeille con rose en esté’ (Beautiful she is, bright as the sun, red as the rose in summer). Nothing said makes her tangible. Unlike the shepherdess, she eludes the grasp of words as well as embraces. It is not here that we can learn what turns on courtly lovers. That is found in the songs’ procedures: their oscillation between hope and despair, their ‘doublespeak’, their fending off of resolution and their chronotopic characteristics, which we shall explore in Chapter 6. La dame is absent in yet another sense. Her inaccessibility and her lack 33 Cf. Kay’s remarks on negativity and the Thing, which is ‘simultaneously a nothing, the gap within or beyond representation, and a powerful something, an irreducible kernel where the pressure of the real is condensed’ (Courtly Contradictions 153). La dame, in her absence, can carry the weight of an unsymbolizable presence: the Thing.

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of substance are both predicated on generic traits which exclude her. As I argued in Chapter 1, the chanson is exclusively lyric. It produces, ‘by itself and without aid that for which it was made’ (De vulgari eloquentia 73). It is a song for one voice only, with no purpose beyond its own making and performance, and prized for its functionlessness. Low-style songs such as the pastourelle, on the other hand, are songs with a purpose (of story-telling) and therefore less noble than the chanson. The narrative of low style allows the shepherdess to be, fictively, on the scene, to be found and enjoyed (or not as the case may be). It provides the co-ordinates of time and space. She and the narrator inhabit the same fictive universe. She speaks and is spoken to. She can be touched, embraced or forced. The pure lyric of the chanson ensures that only the lover is present and only present, formlessly, as a hic et nunc. There is nothing to ground him. Thus the status of chanson as a genre prized as functionless prescribes the solitude of the subject, excluding la dame and with her the possibility of fulfilment.34 The chanson lover does not, any more than la dame, inhabit measurable space/time. The only difference, a significant one, is that his immeasurable place is designated as ‘here’, whereas hers is ‘not here’.

34 Cf. Zumthor’s discussion of the ‘courtly love lyric’ as a ‘form of discourse’ in which ‘[t]he I addresses a thou, which not only never says anything, but which alternates with a She, and is thus relegated to the third-person status of things and removed to a distance, which, in this solitude, nothing can bridge’ (Medieval Poetics 131).

4

Desire by Gender and Genre II Ignoble Desires of the Triumphalist Chanson d’Ami This chapter investigates the sorrows and, more particularly, the joys of lowstyle feminine desire as it appears in the chansons d’ami. Like the lust of the pastourelle, low-style feminine desire is presented by the trouvères as not really desire at all. A knowledge generated intergenerically opposes it to the exalted experience of masculine fin’amor. Like her speech, the desire of the amie is presented as trivial and childlike. The joys of the amie are sometimes underemphasized by scholars. For instance, although Bec allows the variant in which the ‘young girl […] sings her joy at having a friend who loves her’ (Lyrique française 62–3), he then proceeds to describe the unhappy amie who is betrayed and abandoned (63), ignoring the sanguine energy of the more optimistic chanson d’ami heroines. Elsewhere he categorizes the chanson de femme in general as ‘a lyric monologue with sorrowful overtones’ (‘ “Trobairitz” ’ 252). Jeanroy, opening up the topic of women’s song for critical attention, saw happy love as a rarity in the chansons de femme (Poésie 158), although he also acknowledged, in European woman’s song, ‘the heroines [who] congratulate themselves on having a lover to their taste’ (158). Other critics seem to have taken the word of these seminal studies for the sorrowful overtones of woman’s song in general. Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, for instance, notes it without comment (‘Trobairitz’ 221). Here we shall investigate the ‘femininity’ of a significant subset of the chanson d’ami where the amie admits no possibility of a failure in love. Whatever obstacles may appear, she confronts them with complete confidence. It is this confident, defiant attitude to the obstacles rather than any lack of them which prompts my characterization of this subset of songs as sanguine rather than sorrowful. It will be useful to add, therefore, an extra category to Bec’s binary division of the chansons d’ami into the chanson de délaisée and the chanson de départie. We shall call it the triumphalist chanson d’ami. It is always dangerous to generalise the feminine subject of the chansons de femme. While subjects often betray a family resemblance from genre to genre, or from sub-genre to sub-genre as here, there are important differ-

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ences which generalisations ignore. John F. Plummer notes, of the ‘belief in a global tradition of primitive Frauenlieder’ of Leo Spitzer and Theodor Frings, that ‘one wonders whether, having included everything in one group, one would not choose to begin afresh with some distinctions’ (Introduction 8). The necessity for distinctions holds as true within the French corpus as it does in the pan-European context. An examination of the aube in the feminine voice or the chanson pieuse, for instance, would offer different readings of the feminine, in large part because of the differences in the operation of desire in these genres. The terms implicit in the desiring of the trouvères have been referred to earlier: desire itself, the subject of desire and its object. Here, as there, desire appears as transitive, requiring a subject, a verb and an object, although we might interrogate the subject’s claims as to the object and as to the transitivity of desire, as I have with regard to the chanson. In the feminine desire of the triumphalist chanson d’ami, the relationship between the three terms mutates. This mutation is apparent in ‘Deduxans suis’, discussed in Chapter 2, and which I shall now revisit, this time with the focus on desire. The mutation consists in an equalising of the subject and object of desire. Unlike the subjects and objects of songs in the masculine voice, they cannot inflect each other because their equality prevents either from providing an anchor of signification for the other. If signification is an effect of difference posed as opposition then two equivalent terms cannot signify or be signified, just as the signifier cannot signify itself. This inability of the amis to signify or be signified is the effect in ‘Deduxans suis’: ‘Deduxans suis et joliette, s’amerai’ Ballette, chanson de femme, chanson d’ami RS 59a, MW 502, B 469, L 265–455. Manuscript: I 5: 91 Text: Rosenberg and Tischler no. 3, pp, 4–5. Dialect: Lorraine Other eds: Bec II: 166; Doss-Quinby et al. 127–8. Deduxans suis et joliette, s’amerai. 1. Ier matin me levai droit au point dou jour, on vergier mon peire antrai ki iert plains de flours; mon amin plus de cent fois i souhaidai. Deduxans suis … 2. J’amerai mon amin, ke proiét m’an ait; il est biaus et cortois, bien deservit l’ait;

I am charming and pretty so I will love. Yesterday morning I rose at the break of day, I entered my father’s orchard which was full of flowers; my friend I wished for more than a hundred times. I am charming … I will love my friend who has entreated me; he is good-looking and courteous, well has he deserved it;

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mon fin cuer mal greit peire et meire li donrai. Deduxans suis …

my true heart I will grant him in spite of my father and mother. I am charming …

3. Chanson, je t’anvoi a toz fins loialz amans, qu’il se gaircent bien des felz mavais mesdisans, car j’ain tant bien sai ke covrir ne m’an porai. Deduxans suis…

Song, I send you to all true, loyal lovers that they should guard themselves well from the false, evil slanderers, because I love so well that I know I couldn’t conceal it. I am charming…

In songs like this, low-style feminine desire appears as both possible to satisfy (indeed, satisfaction is confidently expected) and simple, as against the difficulty and complexity of chanson desire. In this respect it resembles the lust of the pastourelle. Both genres postulate an object, attainable and suited to the subject’s needs. But in terms of the equalisation of the subject and object of desire, the chanson d’ami looks quite different from the pastourelle. In the pastourelle, we saw that the trouvères devalorized desire to the status of lust by affiliation with its object, the shepherdess, rather than with its subject. This configuration is predicated on the distance between the courtly narrator and the rustic shepherdess, a distance in status based on class as well as gender. This distance is the nub of the pastourelle’s hybridness as Bec notes (Lyrique française 131). In the high-style desire of the chanson the distance is even greater (but in the other direction), between the lover and his ‘inhuman partner’, la dame (Lacan, Ethics 150). In ‘Deduxans suis’ this distance disappears. We can assume that the young lovers are two of a kind, a matching pair. The amie’s point is that her ami is a suitable object for her love – he is good-looking and courteous, she is charming and pretty. Each wants the other. It is a good prognosis for satisfaction. In the song’s own terms she is not devalorized for wanting him, in spite of the fact that sexual activity may be the result of this mutual liking. Nor does he appear to be devalorized, either as a result of being desired or of being available. In fact he does not seem to be very important, aside from his suitability and willingness to comply. The same anodyne ami appears in the rondeau, ‘J’ai ameit et amerai’: ‘J’ai ameit et amerai’ rondeau, chanson d’ami L 265–796, MW 115, B 905, B rond. 143. Manuscript: I 249v Text: Doss-Quinby et al.: 46, p. 182. Dialect: Lorraine J’ai ameit et amerai trestout les jours de ma vie et plus jolive en serai.

I have loved and I shall love all the days of my life and I will be the merrier for it.

DESIRE BY GENDER AND GENRE II

J’ai bel amin, cointe et gai, j’ai ameit et amerai, Il m’ainme, de fi lous sai; il ait droit, je suis s’amie, et loialtei li ferai. J’ai ameit et amerai trestout les jors de ma vie et plus jolive en serai.

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I have a handsome friend, elegant and agreeable, I have loved and I shall love, he loves me, I know it for the truth; he has the right, I am his friend, and will be faithful to him. I have loved and I shall love all the days of my life and I will be the merrier for it.

In her discussion of the chanson de malmariée, Doris Earnshaw concludes that the ‘shadowy’, unspecific character of the friend vis-à-vis the husband indicates his status as ‘more hoped-for than actual’ (98). I see the friend’s vagueness instead as an indication of his unimportance. In the pastourelle the narrator’s stance as hunter constitutes the shepherdess as prey. In ‘Deduxans suis’, however, no harm is intended to the beloved. The amie speaks of her ‘fin cuer’, an emblem of her good intentions. In ‘J’ai ameit et amerai’ the amie announces her intention to be faithful, a similar gesture. Neither ami nor amie will, apparently, be injured by the projected sexual exploits. It is a ‘win-win’ situation. The amie’s naivety is the guarantee of her good intentions. Since in her unsophisticated way she blurts out everything willy-nilly, she could not hide evil intentions any better than she hides her love: ‘I love so well that I know I couldn’t conceal it’ she confesses in ‘Deduxans suis’. The heroine of ‘E, bone amourette’ says the same: ‘I love you, I cannot hide it’ (Doss-Quinby et al. 130). Unlike the canny pastourelle narrator (who can hide his intentions when convenient, with flattery and promises) the amie of the chanson d’ami is constructed as unable to lie; her relation to discourse does not permit it, as we saw in Chapter 2. She is not fitted for the role of predatory subject to an expendable object (the valorized role in the pastourelle pair). This exclusion of the threat of harm to either participant is itself a trivializing factor in the triumphant songs. The blandness of a harmless and unthreatened love cannot move the listener. In the genres emphasising difference between the subject and object of desire, the distance created between them offers the necessary space for an evaluation of subject, object and desire via an opposition. Distance, figured as opposition, works to valorize one at the expense of the other. In the pastourelle, the signification of the shepherdess rests in part on her opposition to the narrator, and her worth is decided accordingly, as what every hunter is after – consumable prey. Here, on the other hand, neither subject nor object can anchor value for the other any more than they can anchor signification, because they are on a par. There is no point of leverage for a comparison. Desire then finds its level in parity with subject and object. It is a bland, vanilla configuration, with no tension between the terms, which is enough to disqualify it as desire in Lacanian terms. If the amie has a desire in the Lacanian sense it cannot be this. In Lacanian

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terms the amie’s suitable ami could be seen as her counterpart – what Lacan calls the semblable – the little other. The parity of ami and amie is one of likeness – a reflection of the ego onto a fellow being. It is of the imaginary – the specular order. This position is taken, in chanson, by the rival or losengier, whereas la dame is no match but an ‘inhuman partner’ (Ethics 150), ‘as cruel as the tigers of Ircania’ (151). She represents the Law of the Other. The distribution of big and little others is radically different in ‘Deduxans suis’. In Lacanian theory human desire is always ‘the desire of the Other’, but for the amie of ‘Deduxans suis’ the Other is not in the place of the ostensible object. The question of feminine desire leads to another which will keep returning: if the amie lacks desire does she also lack subjectivity? I have already suggested that her claims to subjectivity are tenuous. Her visibility – suggested by her placement in a visual field by the narrative and her frequent references to her own appearance – threatens to tip her into the object of an assumed masculine gaze. The system works to maintain her in this position. In terms of the desiring relationship, the equivalence of the partners creates another form of the same difficulty for her: that of maintaining her position as desiring subject to the beloved object. Their equivalence – the lack of a differentiating distance between them – opens a vacuum for a presumed absent masculine subjectivity to fill the place her own subjectivity is missing from. Someone must take up this position since a vacuum in subjectivity – as in nature – is not tolerated. If one fails in the role, another steps in. Doris Earnshaw touches on this phenomenon: The female voice monologue […] must […] be seen as reported or borrowed speech in courtly lyric […] the repertoire […] is the reporting voice and the female voice is a fragment or strain within the entire corpus’. (Female Voice 36)1

This sense of the feminine voice as reported or borrowed seems to demonstrate an inability on the part of the low-style feminine lyric ‘subject’ to maintain her status as subject in the system. Her implied reported status, vis-à-vis the ‘reporting voice’ of the overwhelmingly masculine corpus, can be equated with her objectality. Since ami and amie, being the same, cannot anchor signification or value for each other, the leverage needs to come from elsewhere. The required distance, which is always the distance of difference posed as opposition, is

1

I have argued elsewhere that the feminine voice has some partial escape routes from this emprisonment (see ‘Voices’). Earnshaw’s account is too watertight for my liking. But some sense of an overarching masculine consciousness, in which we as readers are expected to partake, and in which the feminine voice behaves like a fictional character, can illuminate our sense of the subject’s ‘objectal’ status.

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not between participants in this case but between genres and their subjects. When it is compared to the chanson mise-en-scène, the parity of subject and object in ‘Deduxans suis’ and ‘J’ai ameit et amerai’ takes on significance to its detriment. In the light of this comparison the equivalence between ami and amie, seen as the basis for unproblematic sexual satisfaction, devalorizes the chanson d’ami vis-à-vis the chanson where struggle and torment are valorized. La dame, raised to the dignity of das Ding – the irreducibly unlike – gives no possibility for a reflection or an encounter. Desire and Will The desire of the low-style feminine subject of the chanson d’ami demonstrates its difference from chanson desire in yet another way. In ‘Deduxans suis’, love is an act of will, a conscious intention, carried out in the face of hostile forces. The song is a defiance flung at those hostile others. In chanson, desire invokes the Other of the symbolic. The lover is alienated from his desire; la dame is put in charge of the whole affair. Her desire can never be assumed as the desire of the ami can be. It is ceaselessly in doubt.2 In the triumphalist chanson d’ami the ami is compliant. He creates no resistance and no prohibitions. His desire is claimed to be constantly on tap. Here the Other is to be found on the side of the enemies to love, representatives of a sexually oppressive social law – in this case ‘li losengier’ – not as rivals but as prohibitors. It is they, not the ami, who represent the Other through whom her desire is mediated via a prohibition. Significantly there are no rivals. A rival creates a very different balance in those songs where she appears. ‘Cuidoient li losengier’ is an extreme example of the triumphant defiance of the amie towards li losengier: ‘Cuidoient li losengier’ chanson d’ami RS 1287, L84–8 Manuscripts: K 145, N 67, P 116, U 153, X 99, a 93 Attribution: Gillebert de Berneville in KNPXa, none in U Music: in KNPX Text: Marrocco and Sandon no. 24, p. 73. 1. Cuidoient li losengier por ce se il ont menti que je me doie esloignier d’amors et de mon ami. E non Dieu, je l’amerai,

2

Did the slanderers think that because they lied I must keep my distance from love and from my friend? Ah! God, no! I will love him

Cf. Huchet: ‘ “Lai” (there) is the place that holds not only the object arousing desire, but the desire itself, alienated in the most literal sense of the term because it is situated at the place of the Other’ (L’amour discourtois 36).

102 et bone amor servirai nuit et jor, sans fere folor, et g’iere envoisie, Chantant et jolie. 2. Ja ne m’enquier esloignier des mesdisanz dirai si: s’amerai mon ami chier. Dex, car fust il ore ici! Li biaz, li blous au cuer vrai,

HELEN DELL

and serve true love night and day, without falsehood, and I was enjoying myself, singing and merry.

qu’ainz plus vaillant n’esgardai. Sai amors, el mont n’a meillors, s’en sui renvoisie, chantant et jolie.

Never shall I try to run away from the slanderers, Yes! I will say: I will love my dear friend. God, that he were here now! The handsome, the blonde, with such a faithful heart, that I have not seen one more valiant. I know love, The world has nothing better, and I take pleasure in it, singing and merry.

3. J’ai au cuer un mesangier d’amors cortois et joli qui me fet resleëcie. chascon jor parole a mi; il m’a dit que je vaincrai mesdisanz et recrerai. Menteor! Vivront a dolor, et g’iere envoisie, Chantant et jolie.

In my heart I have a messenger of courteous and beautiful love who makes me happy. Each day he speaks to me; he says to me that I will conquer the slanderers and defeat them. Liars! They will come to grief, and I was enjoying myself, singing and merry.

4. Mesdisanz, fol losengier, je ne vos pris un espi. Or croissent vostre enconbrier! Que j’ai le cuer si hardi, mon ami acolerai si tost com je le verrai. A ce tor serez en languor, et g’iere envoisie, chantant et jolie.

Liars, mad slanderers, I don’t give an ear of corn for you! Now may your troubles grow! I have a heart so daring that I will embrace my friend as soon as I see him. At this you will languish, and I was enjoying myself, singing and merry.

5. Chançonete, tu iras a mon ami, si li di, pour Dieu que il n’oublie pas cors dont a le cuer sesi. Ja nel lest pour mesdisanz; je sai maz et recreanz. Or morrez, mesdisaz, huez, et g’iere envoisie, chantant et jolie.

Little song you will go to my friend and say to him that, for God’s sake, he should not forget the body, of which he has seized the heart. Never should he give up for the liars, I know them to be evil and cowardly. Now die, liars, cry for mercy, and I was enjoying myself, singing and merry.

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This is not the weeping, lamenting woman described by Bec. She is more like Michelet’s wild sorceress, being carried off on a black horse spurting fire from his eyes and nostrils: ‘As she left she laughed, the most awful burst of laughter, and disappeared like an arrow’ (qtd in Clément, Newly Born Woman 5). Like the sorceress, this amie cannot be made to weep. She is bent on enjoyment at all costs. Her enjoyment is paired with her intention to transgress, and it carries a note of insistence ill at ease with pleasure. She stresses the beneficial and enjoyable power of love, but, even more, of transgression. Flouting the losengier to their undoing is her delight, but it is a manic delight which I cannot help but find slightly disturbing. In this light her ami looks more credible as the means to her transgressive jouissance than as an object of desire – a necessary deviation on her path to li losengier to ensure maximum annoyance to them. Bec notes that ‘the accent is often placed on the diverse obstacles which prevent the amorous meeting’ (Lyrique française 63). What is striking is the determined enjoyment she takes in confronting these obstacles. It is not she who languishes in the face of the barriers to love. That is the fate of the losengiers: ‘at this you will languish’. Still more striking is that the obstacles, and those who represent them, seem to be taking over the song from the insignificant ami as the objects of her deep interest. As mentioned earlier, the desire which the amie articulates is of a different quality from that of the pastourelle narrator. But, like the pastourelle narrator, these girls express unproblematic intention, ‘I will love’. Unlike him they are presented as true lovers – witness the ‘fin cuer’ of ‘Deduxans suis’ and the ‘I am his friend, and will be faithful to him’ of ‘J’ai ameit et amerai’. ‘I will love my dear friend’, proclaims the heroine of ‘Cuidoient li losengier’. The amie, like the lovers of chanson, addresses herself to the community of true lovers as in ‘Deduxans suis’: ‘Song, I send you to all true, faithful lovers’. The Chastelain de Couci does likewise in ‘A vous amant, plus k’a nulle autre gent’: ‘To you, lovers, more than to any others, it is right that I lament my sorrow’ (Lerond 57). The amie has appropriated some crumbs from the courtly table, although these courtly tags have an air of being thrown in light-heartedly, in a way which robs them of their courtly seriousness, as the comparison with ‘A vous amant’ reveals. But for the amie action is the key. The courtly tags do not disguise this profound difference. Love is represented in these chansons fundamentally as an action linked to a future event. The chanson lover claims la dame as his object but, because of his passivity, his desire takes on the appearance of a condition which afflicts the lover. The amie of the chanson d’ami, like the pastourelle narrator, proceeds by action. Love is a verb, both transitive and intransitive (she will love and she will love her friend), which advances energetically beyond the confines of the song. It could be said to have a future beyond the song simply because it is active. Unlike the masculine chanson lover whose tenuous link to a future is via hope, this subject grapples her

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future to her by intention. Appearances are deceptive, however. There are chronotopic problems here, which we will explore in the next chapter. As with the masculine chanson, the status of the future is dubious. The active/passive binary was gender-linked in the Middle Ages in the way with which we are still familiar today – with the man as the active partner. It is related to the soul/body distinction discussed earlier. Yet here, paradoxically, the activity of the amie seems to be linked to her materiality – her inferior position as sexually-charged body allows her the superior position of activity. She is active matter, like that described in the Destructionis Troiae: ‘the heart of woman always seeks a husband, just as matter always seeks form’ (qtd in Halloran n. 26, 11–12).3 The amie’s activity lowers her again, however, because, in the discourse of desire generated in the system, activity ranks low. ‘Active matter’ flouts Aristotle’s principle of non-contradiction, according to which ‘[i]t is impossible for the same thing at the same time both to be-in and not to be-in the same thing and in the same respect’ (Metaphysics 88).4 This contradiction is what is required, however, to keep the masculine voice of chanson enshrined in the valorized position of ‘passive soul’. The presence of narrative in low style is what constitutes as heroine a subject who makes things happen. In contrast to the hapless chanson lover she will appear as energetic and undauntable. The avowed desire of the amie does not revert to the song but is projected beyond it by the thrust of narrative, or rather, this is how it is presented. It does not appear as trapped within the song, but neither does it appear to have access to the love described by Spitzer as ‘have and have not’ (L’amour 2), the deep space produced by oscillation which opens only in confinement, hence the frequent use in chanson, of the ‘imprisonment’ topos. The amie is not granted the paradoxical freedom of this imprisonment. Her freedom, insofar as she can be said to have it, is action, escape from imprisonment her métier. It is something of a Pyrrhic victory since it is predicated on her inferiority – hardly worth the winning! But it illustrates the instability of the oppositions of value which structure the genre and the gender systems. Worth and power do not sit, comfortable and undisputed, at home at the high-style masculine end of the opposition. Contradictory oppositions such as this, where matter is active and soul passive, unsettle them. High-style masculine desire precludes sexual satisfaction; its position in relation to the song’s discourse is that of an alternative. The song precludes the sex. In the chansons de femme the woman’s discourse is structured by

3 In Lacanian terms this could be construed as seeking the phallus, since the phallus could be said to give form, as ‘the signifier intended to designate as a whole the effects of the signified, in that the signifier conditions them by its presence as a signifier’ (Écrits 285). 4 Cf. Kay’s discussion in Courtly Contradictions, which is where I first encountered the principle of non-contradiction (13).

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her position as what the man is not – in this case, as body to his soul. Her relation to discourse, therefore, is not presented as precluding the fulfilment of her wishes, but rather as fostering it. Sex is her element. Although in ‘Deduxans suis’ love is represented as not yet fulfilled, the lack of fulfilment is not a (hidden) requirement as it is in the chanson. As in the pastourelle, fulfilment is possible, but the heroine’s confident persistence seems to place it on a different axis in relation to the future. The lover of ‘Deduxans suis’ proclaims, ‘My true heart I will give him in spite of my father and mother’, and she will get her man, come hell or high water. She thrives on obstacles; they only add zest to the proceedings. For the chanson lover, obstacles are insuperable because he refuses to address them – unsurprisingly, if his not-well-kept secret is that his satisfaction is gained by missing the target. So it seems there is something stronger than the possibility of fulfilment in the triumphant chansons de femme. Perhaps la femme’s activity can be taken as a guarantee, for us as it is for her, of the inevitability of her triumph. In the pastourelle, the future which narrative postulates is one in which something may or may not come to pass – a swinging future. The heroine of ‘Deduxans suis’, however, does not await the event. She goes out to forge it by pure will. Failure will not be permitted. Possibility has gone round a point to a position of certainty, in the triumphalist variant of the chanson d’ami. Chance seems to be ruled out here. Of the genres and subgenres under discussion, only the pastourelle allows the operation of chance: the narrator may or may not get his shepherdess. Only there does the outcome not matter enough to be rigged; chance is permitted only on the basis of the unimportance of the outcome. A desire not deemed insignificant which yet risked chance and change would be different indeed. And so far this different desire, made significant by its absence, continues to be elusive. The pure lyric of chanson excludes a unilinear narrative, as it excludes fulfilment and simultaneously claims and denies that fulfilment is within reach. It cannot reach a future since any future involves a fulfilment, a closure of some kind, positive or negative, in which a past can coalesce. Fulfilment, in making an ending, makes a past. The chanson oscillates to avoid this fate but its oscillations betray the exclusion of chance. The pastourelle projects a future in which something will happen, there will be an ending, but we do not know what. Chance enters the game. What the amie does is to forge a certain future by intention. That is her guarantee: like the masculine chanson lover she finds a way of excluding chance but it is a different way. In this triumphalist strand of the chanson d’ami, the amie invents a world where, as on Théophile Gautier’s ‘île inconnue’, ‘one loves forever’ and change is excluded. She will have her cake and eat it. The girl in ‘Cuidoient li losengier’ will continue to love and enjoy herself ad infinitum. Each of the three poses and offers an implicit response to the same question as that posed by Lacan:

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Try to imagine what ‘to have realized one’s desire’ might mean, if it is not to have realized it, so to speak, in the end. It is this trespassing of death on life that gives its dynamism to any question that attempts to find a formulation for the subject of the realization of desire (Ethics 294).

For the amie, as for the chanson lover, however, one can distinguish another desire which is not spoken. Her defiance signals the presence of a desire which, unlike her demand, is not a matter of the ego but of the Other of the unconscious. This unspoken desire is directed towards her enemies rather than her friend; he is merely a decoy. Words as Actions If we once again ask, what kind of poetic discourse produces what kind of desiring ‘I’, it seems that the various answers reveal a different relationship between the constituents: discourse, subjectivity, desire and action. A table could be drawn up. In the chanson we find men who talk endlessly but do not act (at the other extreme from the strong, silent heroes of Mills and Boon), and ladies who, though supposedly all-powerful, are both silent and absent, excluded from the discursive field and apparently excluded from desire. In the low registers we find men who speak only as a means or an accompaniment to sexual action. Women – femmes, that is, rather than dames – also speak as an accompaniment and as a spur to sexual action rather than as an alternative. Their words, while lacking finesse, have an immediacy and energy which launch them into transgressive activity, like the words of Moniot de Paris’ malmariée in ‘Je chevauchoie l’autrier’: ‘By God, I will love and I’ll be loved too, and I’ll go frolicking under the trees in the woods and I’ll curse my husband night and day’ (Rosenberg, Switten and Le Vot 349, their translation). Words here are more than a spur to action, however. They seem to include action, even to be a kind of action, which distinguishes them from both high and low masculine voices. Where the pastourelle narrator adopts an instrumental attitude to his words, using them as a weapon, the amie has no such learned distance from her speech. She does not use speech rhetorically as Brunetto Latini points out when he excludes women from ‘the science of rhetoric’ (Treasure 284). She does not really ‘use’ it in any sense but speaks whatever comes into her head. Words, the speaking ‘subject’ and her actions are configured differently in the feminine. There is less separation between them. Performatives, such as curses and the desfiance which these women fling at their antagonists, are particularly appropriate to classification as words which include action. As Benveniste maintains: ‘The utterance I swear is the very act which pledges me, not the description of the act that I am performing. […] The utterance is identified with the act itself ’ (Problems 229). The amie’s declaration of intention appears to be the kind of swearing Benveniste alludes to.

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The heroine of ‘Cuidoient li losengier’ shrieks ‘Never will I run away from the slanderers. Yes! I will say: I will love my dear friend. God, that he were here now! … He [the messenger] tells me that I will conquer the slanderers and defeat them. Liars! They will come to grief … Now die, liars, cry for mercy.’ Here transgressive action and transgressive speech seem impossible to separate and the slanderers will die, of her curses and her disobedient jouissance, equally and without distinction. It seems that they will die of her joy – as well as causing it by their death.5 But instead of rendering the speech of the amie more powerful and destructive as Benveniste’s account might suggest, the amie’s lack of separation from her speech and action seems to render her curses impotent. Her ‘artless’, unlearned speech renders her as powerless, spoken rather than speaking, and leads the listener/reader to listen for a ‘speaker’ beyond the confines of the song – the one who ‘speaks’ her like a ventriloquist. Earnshaw alludes to this effect: [T]he listener or reader must return to the poet beyond the last word of the lyric to find the whole meaning OF WHICH ONLY A PARTIAL MEANING IS GIVEN BY THE SPEAKER. […] It is in this movement of correction that we comprehend the lyric (16).

Earnshaw speaks of a return to the poet however, whereas here we are more concerned with the subjectivities produced by the discourse of the songs themselves, including the presumed ‘authorial’ masculine subject whose attitudes the ear detects behind the unlearned feminine voice of the speaker. We saw in ‘Deduxans suis’ a chanson d’ami of the triumphalist variety. The malmariée of ‘Je chevauchie l’autrier’ and the volatile heroine of ‘Cuidoient li losengier’ are equally triumphant. But the femme is even more likely to repine. Repining in Low Style In the woman’s lament, especially the chanson de délaissée, la femme sings a different tune. At the level of appearances she is here at the closest point to the masculine voice in the chanson register in the introduction of uncertainty, difficulty and disparity between subject and object. At another level there is a similarity in the masculine voice of chanson and the voice of the triumphant amie of the chanson d’ami. That masculine uncertainty masks a different kind of certainty similar to hers, in that they both foreclose the future by eliminating chance and change.

5

The losengier have tried the same with her. As Emmanuèle Baumgartner suggests, their speech is also performative; for them too, ‘to speak is to act upon’ (‘Trouvères’ 172). The amie throws her defiance back in kind.

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Lament might therefore offer, at the level of appearances, a springboard for the woman’s voice to chanson register. Unless the song altered formally as well as thematically, however, la femme would remain bound to the low. She must adopt a more refined, rhetorical language. At this point, therefore, we need to separate out in her speech those thematic aspects which articulate her desire, from the formal characteristics of her discourse. This is an impossible task of course; the two are inextricable. It simply means that we approach the song with two different sets of instruments, as Fredric Jameson expresses it: ‘two approaches [which ask the text] what it means, and […] how it works’ (‘Magical Narratives’ 169). There is the ‘unavoidable shifting of gears’ between semantic and syntactic approaches to which Jameson alludes (169). This is not to privilege either approach as dominant in determining genre, simply to acknowledge their incompatibility (169). The chanson d’ami ‘Lasse, pour quoi refusai’ demonstrates a thematic movement on the femme’s part, from a position of triumph to one of desolation but without any significant corresponding change, either in her commitment to vigorous direct action or in the forms of her discourse. ‘Lasse, pour quoi refusai’ chanson d’ami RS 100, MW 2024, L 990, B 1040 Manuscripts: K 343–344; N 166r–v; P 177r–v; X 224–v Music: in all texts. Contrafactum of ‘Helas! Je sui refusés’, attrib. Gillebert de Berneville (RS 939), see Linker (326) and Doss-Quinby et al. (134). Text: Rosenberg and Tischler, Chanter m’estuet no. 49, pp. 102–4 Dialect: ‘Francien transcription of a Lorraine poem’ (Rosenberg and Tischler 104). Other eds: Rosenberg, Switten and Le Vot 213–14, Doss-Quinby et al. 131–4. 1. Lasse, pour quoi refusai celui qui tant m’a amee? Lonc tens a a moi musé et n’i a merci trouvee. Lasse, si tres dur cuer ai! Qu’en dirai? Forssenee fui, plus que desvee, quant le refusai. G’en ferai droit a son plesir, s’il m’en daigne oïr.

Alas, why did I reject the one who loved me so much? So long he’s dreamed of me and found no mercy there! Alas, what a hard heart I have! What can I say? I was mad, more than mad, when I refused him. I will make amends as he wishes, if he’ll only deign to listen to me.

2. Certes, bien me doi clamer et lasse et maleüree

Truly, I should proclaim myself wretched and ill-fated

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quant cil ou n’a point d’amer,

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tant doucement me pria et n’i a recouvree merci; forssenee fui quant ne l’amai. G’en ferai …

when he in whom there is no bitterness but only great sweetness and freshness, courted me so gently and found in me no pity; I was insane not to love him. I will make amends …

3. Bien deüst avoir trouvé merci quant l’a demandee; certes, mal en ai ouvré quant je la li ai vëee; mult m’a mis en grant esmai. G’en morrai, s’acordee sans grant demoree a lui ne serai. G’en ferai …

He should have found mercy when he asked for it; truly, I acted badly when I refused it to him; this has caused me great dismay. I will die of it, if I am not reconciled to him without delay. I will make amends …

fors grant douçor et rousee,

4. A touz ceus qui l’ont grevé dont Deus si fort destinee q’il aient les euz crevez et les orilles coupees! Ensi ma dolor perdrai. Lors dirai: gens desvee ma joie est doublee, et se mesfet ai, G’en ferai …

To all those who have caused him pain may God send such a dreadful fate that they have their eyes put out and their ears cut off! That way I’ll lose my sorrow. Then I’ll say: fools! My joy is doubled, and if I did wrong, I will make amends …

5. Chançon, va sanz delaier a celui qui tant m’agree. Pour Dieu li pri et requier viengne a moi sanz demoree. En sa merci me metrai, tost avrai pes trouvee, se il li agree, car je trop mal trai. G’en ferai …

Song, go quickly to him who so pleases me. For God’s sake, ask him and beg him to come to me without delay. I will throw myself on his mercy, then I’ll find peace, if he agrees to it, because I suffer such misfortune. I will make amends …

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‘Lasse, pour quoi refusai’ contains some of the same low-style feminine markers as ‘Deduxans suis’, although, since it is a contrafact, less significance can be extracted from its music and versification. We find the same ‘spontaneity’ remarked by critics in the woman’s voice, the same simplicity, expressed lexically and syntactically, in ‘Lasse, pour quoi’ as that which characterizes ‘Deduxans suis’. The rhyme and metrical repetitions and short-term effects are echoed in the melody, all combining to create the ‘instant tunefulness’ of the low-style chansonete (Page, Voices 16). The subject’s discourse is naïve and unlearned. It is also exclamatory, wild and intemperate, as in strophe 4, like the discourse of the heroine of ‘Cuidoient li losengier’. Both songs exhibit a total lack of masculine mezura.6 The circuit of desire takes another turn in ‘Lasse, pour quoi’, however. The beloved’s grievance places him in a position of power vis-à-vis the subject. As with la dame of the chanson, his power of acceptance or refusal becomes the pivot, creating disparity between them. The amie’s desire becomes entangled with another subjectivity which she cannot control. But, unlike the chanson lover, the subject of ‘Lasse, pour quoi’ is placed in this position of distance and uncertainty by her own actions rather than those of her beloved. Her own erratic behaviour rather than that of the beloved ami is the key. The irrational and ignoble is not reversed onto the masculine but stays with the feminine, testifying again to woman’s imperfections. She is still a daughter of Eve, her position less unassailable than the chanson lover who emphasizes his impeccable intentions. He claims, hand on heart, as in ‘Li nouviauz tans’, that ‘she kills me for no cause, only because I have loved her with all my heart! She has no other excuse.’ This subject’s young man, so she laments, has every excuse.7 Here a past of regretted action (the rejection) torments the girl. The future in ‘Lasse, pour quoi’ is conditional upon the lover’s acceptance of her apologies. Death may await her (strophe 3) or peace (strophe 5). Her past actions cast forwards a future of forking paths where the cards are not all in her hands, unlike those others for whom the future is assured by their own will. As in the pastourelle, the future is uncertain and, because of her offence, it now waits on the word of another (as in chanson). In his power of refusal, his present inaccessibility, this other becomes more than he was. Through his

6

Marianne Shapiro notes this quality in the songs of the trobairitz: ‘nowhere in their work does the principle of mezura (patience and discretion in the pursuit of love) appear as a credential of their worth, as it generally does in troubadour lyric’, suggesting a persistent link in women’s song between femininity and what she calls the ‘most dramatic emotions’ (‘Provençal Trobairitz’ 566). 7 Wendy Pfeffer notes the ‘self-loathing’ motif in French women’s lyrics, citing ‘Lasse pour quoi’: ‘The men vent their pain by accusing the lady; the lady may turn against herself, for not having shown her suitor sufficient attention’ (‘Constant Sorrow’ 6).

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withdrawal he can stand in as semblance of the forever lost objet a. Her desire is mediated by the Other via the ami rather than the enemies of love. The subject of ‘Lasse, pour quoi’, however, does not fall back on hope and despair to produce (in fact, to defer) a future, as does the masculine lover of the chanson. She again relies on direct action in accordance with her wishes, and vehemently attacks her fate, sending the song off as a forceful incitement to the beloved. ‘Lasse, pour quoi’ is conditionally triumphant. It waits only on hearing an encouraging word, and everything is set to fly in the accustomed manner. Then, like the girls quoted above, her ‘joy will be doubled’. It is a kind of hybrid between the triumphalist and the délaissée chanson d’ami. There are others, for instance the rondeau ‘Toute seule passerai le vert boscage’: ‘Toute seule passerai le vert boscage’ rondeau, chanson d’ami L 1673, B rond. 175, B 1789 Manuscripts: k, Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Regina 1543 Music: in 1543 Text: Doss-Quinby et al. 186–7 Dialect: Picard Toute seule passerai le vert boscage puisqe compagnie n’ai. Se j’ai perdu mon ami par mon outrage toute seule passerai le vert boscage, je li ferai a savoir par un mesage que je li amenderai. Toute seule passerai …

All alone through the greenwood I’ll go since I have no company. If I have lost my friend through my presumption, all alone through the greenwood I’ll go, I’ll let him know by a messenger that I’ll make it up to him. All alone …

The amie of ‘Lasse pour quoi refusai’, like the amie of ‘Deduxans suis’, disallows any gap between her desires and her actions. To intend or to speak is, literally, to act. This coincidence of desire and action is the key to the energy of her speech. The impulse of energy is not blocked by doubt or hesitation. There is no oscillation. Like the subject of ‘Cuidoient li losengier’, she delights in cursing, and the downfall of her enemies – arguably ‘losengier’ themselves, who caused her earlier refusal by the fear of their malignant surveillence – equals her own joy. As performatives, her curses are already actions. Again, no gap! The command to the song: ‘Go song’, is also already achieved in the utterance, since it is part of the song itself. Where the gap appears in ‘Lasse, pour quoi refuser’ is in the uncertainty created by the lover’s withdrawal and this is the gap which her action – the message – seeks to plug. While this exhortation to the song to plead the lover’s cause is a common topos in songs where true love is at issue, it creates a different impression

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here than, for instance, in ‘La douce voiz du louseignol sauvage’, a chanson by the Chastelain de Couci. There the lover asks: ‘Song, go and carry my message, there where I dare neither to turn nor to turn away’ (Lerond 70). In ‘Lasse, pour quoi’, the emphasis is on closing the intolerable distance between her and her beloved: ‘Song, go quickly to him who so pleases me. For God’s sake, ask him and beg him to come to me without delay. I will throw myself on his mercy, then I’ll find peace if he agrees to it, because I suffer such misfortune.’ Deferral and distance – the gap – appal her and her energy is harnessed to bridging them. For the lover of chanson, the deferral and the distance are what must be preserved at all costs: he does not ‘dare to turn’ there. What if she accepted him? Both are plugging the same gap ultimately, however, in the sense that both refuse the operation of chance. He insists on deprivation whereas she insists on gratification, but both moves obscure lack. The differences in style obscure a certain similarity between them. The valorized object of ‘Lasse, pour quoi’ raises the value of the desire itself and thus of the subject of it, although, as the one who occasioned the trouble she is cast down again. Like the dame of Thibaut’s ‘Chançon ferai, car talent m’en est pris’, who must be ‘the best’ to evoke the grand desire which valorizes the subject, and ‘not the best’ in the light of her necessary rejection of him, this girl copes, in her contradictory identity, with the contradictions of masculine fantasies of desire. These contradictions have obvious generic implications. ‘Lasse, pour quoi refuser’ is torn in two directions in its generic leanings, just as its heroine is pulled two ways, towards desolation and towards action, in relation to her desires. Her desolation may be acquired after the narrative fact, however, unlike the chanson lover’s, as Merritt Blakeslee says of the cansos of the trobairitz: ‘Unlike the masculine canso, the feminine canso is oriented towards the past. […] The narration of events of the past […] increase the narrativity […] of the canso in the woman’s voice’ (‘Chanson de femme’ 72–73).8 In the masculine canso, says Blakeslee, where the feminine object is simply ‘absent […] silent […] and inaccessible’ there is ‘a decreased degree of narrativity’ (70). This is Blakeslee’s sense of the relationship between the presence of narrative and the quality of feminine desire as it is represented in the songs of the trobairitz: that an augmented narrativity is the necessary result of the recital of past events. This is undoubtedly true, but it can be carried further. The difference in the degree of narrativity can be framed as a difference in the positioning of the desired object or, more precisely, the positioning of its loss. In those feminine songs where loss is acknowledged – that is, the laments – it is acknowledged as having already occurred. Thus it draws time to it 8 Cf. also Joan Ferrante on the trobairitz: ‘[T]he women are concerned with […] relationships that have a past’ (‘Notes’ 66).

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in the form of a past. In the masculine voice this loss is occluded by being projected into a future, supposedly uncertain, and consequently bringing with it alternating hope and despair. William Paden sees the difference in narrativity (he is also discussing the trobairitz), as ‘of a cultural order’ (‘Ultrum Copularentur’ 81). He continues: ‘the male lover tends to experience unhappiness before love becomes reciprocal, and the female after, because the cultural model of love calls for the male to be active and the female passive’ (81). I have parsed the active/ passive binary in the other direction from Paden in the triumphalist chansons d’ami, suggesting that the necessary passivity of the masculine chanson lover obliges the amie to be active in opposition to him, against the grain so to speak. In the laments, upon which the trobairitz draw, she encroaches upon his ground of passivity but from another direction.9 In the main the trobairitz have chosen the lamenting voice in their cansos for reasons which the nonlamenting voice makes obvious by its lack. Bruckner draws attention to what is lacking: ‘Though all is not doom and gloom, among the troubadours and the trobairitz […] the preponderance of sorrow and pain in troubadour lyric in general […] reflects what Clifford Davidson observes about the function of separation in love poems of whatever type: the most moving are not those in which erotic gratification is close’ (‘The Trobairitz’ 218).

It is the separation which moves us – the distance between desire and its gratification. In the triumphalist chansons d’ami no loss of any kind is acknowledged. The comparison with the lamenting amie (and the trobairitz) shows up this trait. The triumphant amie appears as immaculate, a transgressive Virgin Mary unspotted by life’s vicissitudes. Nothing can touch her or mark her. Her past is not a past of loss. Loss cannot even be imagined so the future looks like more of the same – not a future at all in that it cannot envisage anything new. There is, in fact, no break between past and future. Nothing can change her so in her songs time appears as in some sense collapsed. Both past and future lack a dimension – the dimension of lack, without which the triumphant amie fails to look quite human. In Lacanian terms, this lack of a lack bears on her desire:

9

Bruckner, in her comment on Paden’s remarks, nuances the opposition. She notes that ‘the trobairitz play with the opposition of active and passive roles’ and adds that, in any case, ‘the poetic system […] overrides the (apparent) difference of gender’ (‘The Trobairitz’ 218). Paden goes on to note that, in spite of their differences, ‘The unrequited lover and the abandoned mistress correspond because the model of love is dominated by the model of poetry, in which they are both unhappy speakers’ (‘Ultrum Copularentur’ 81). Another view is that of Jennifer Smith who suggests that ‘the trobairitz locate themselves along a time continuum that often refers to the past as a means of confirming the present’ (‘Subjects’ 190).

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It is […] the assumption of castration which creates the lack from which desire is instituted. Desire is the desire of (de) desire, desire of the Other […] that is to say, subject to the Law. It’s a fact that the woman must pass through the same dialectic – although nothing seems to oblige her to: she must lose what she doesn’t have (Éc. II 332).

The masculine lovers of chanson also appear to lack this lack although they hide it more adroitly. Our amie again gives the impression of not knowing enough to know what to hide; this inability, as it appears in the songs, is almost akin to autism. In the triumphalist songs the Other of the Law is represented by the enemies: li losengier, sometimes the parents. The ami is not credible in that position. It is only when a gap – a lack – opens up, by reason of his rejection of her, his separation from her or the appearance on the scene of a rival, that he can inhabit this position. We cannot believe in the triumphant amie’s desire or we cannot believe it is what she proclaims. If the feminine is pulled two ways in the chansons d’ami, towards triumph and lament, the identity of the heroine of these chansons in general is also pulled in two directions. As active matter the amie is compromised by her contradictory coding, revealed in another refusal – a refusal or inability to be consistently coded. One other thematic in the chansons de femme seems to offer the potential for transformation to feminine-voiced chanson. This is the appearance of obligation, the suggestion that a feminine lover should behave appropriately, for instance, in the chanson fragment ‘Mout m’abellist’: ‘For in every season a lovely maiden must indeed rejoice and have a cheerful heart’ (Doss-Quinby et al. 116–18, their translation).10 A very few songs in the trouvère repertoire can be considered as feminine-voiced chansons and these I shall turn to in Chapter 7.

10 Marianne Shapiro notes a similar tendency in the songs of the trobairitz to ‘include defense by axiom or sententia’ (‘Provençal Trobairitz’ 565).

5

Chronotopes of Desire I Case-Study of a Malmariée: Feminine Space-Times ‘to speak of Matter as changing is to speak of it as not being Matter’ (Plotinus, Enneads 199). ‘[W]hat if these “commodities” refused to go to “market?” ’ (Luce Irigaray, This Sex 196).

The next two chapters address positions of desire in relation to issues of time, space, causation, chance and change: Chapter 5 focusing on the feminine, and Chapter 6 on the masculine. Like Chapter 4, this chapter stays with the low-style chanson de femme, represented this time by the chanson de malmariée, here making its first appearance. Chapter 6 returns to the ground of the pastourelle and the chanson. Of the chansons de malmariée, we shall examine, as with the chansons d’ami, those which Bec designates ‘songs with joyful content’ as opposed to those ‘of serious content’ (Lyrique française 74). I have chosen the malmariée because her situation is made extreme by the presence, either in the foreground or the background, of a jealous, volatile and dangerous husband. More is at stake here than in the chanson d’ami. The joyful malmariée resembles the amie of the chanson d’ami at her most defiant and transgressive. Those representatives of the law who abound in the chanson d’ami – li losengier – may still be present, but the husband takes over the limelight as villain-in-chief. The maris is opposed to the ami, as Bec notes, ‘one negative, the other positive’ (Lyrique française 73). They are well-placed for antithesis. There is only one of each, whereas the losengier are always represented as a group.1 Husband and friend are linked in that they unwillingly share a sexual tie with the subject, but they are different in every other respect. The husband stands for all that is rejected

1

As Sarah Kay notes, speaking of the troubadour corpus, the husband, like the friend, ‘is grammatically singular, the lauzengiers plural. This suggests a qualitative difference between lauzengiers and husband’ (‘Contradictions’ 218).

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in fin’ amor. He is, in Bec’s words, ‘churlish, jealous, old, evil, violent, ugly, avaricious, impotent, etc.’ while the friend is all that could be desired: ‘young, handsome, courteous, amiable, passionate in love, etc.’ (Lyrique française 70). It seems clear, however, that there is a dissymmetry in the antithesis. Here again I will discuss the songs ‘of joyful content’ because in these songs the heroines betray such confidence that the operation of chance is ruled out. Whatever happens they will get their man. The absence of chance makes for a specific chronotope, altering the integration of narrative elements. None of the genres in question is completely without narrative elements, so the question becomes: which configurations of gendered desire are allied to which kinds of narrative? All the narratives under consideration are tiny, and only the pastourelle can really lay claim to the title of narrative in the sense of a story in the telling, a sjuzet.2 Particularly in the chanson but also in the chanson de femme, narrative elements surface only in fragments. Here and there in the lyric mass, particles of a story rise to the surface. Lyric is narratively inflected at times or has narrative implications. Zumthor’s term ‘latent narrativity’ carries a similar intent to what I am calling here ‘narrative implication’ (‘Narrativités latentes’ 40).3 Zumthor’s idea is that ‘all language known as literary (or poetic) is fundamentally narrative’ but that the narrative aspect ‘appears only sporadically or indirectly’ (40). Speaking of trouvère song (he seems to mean, in particular, the chanson, although he does not specify), he suggests that a superficial absence of sequence refers, at a deeper level, to ‘a narrative scheme […] composed of a situation, transformation(s), ordeal(s) and resolution’ (41). The way these narrative shreds surface or are inferred in different genres and the particular forms of chronotope they evoke seem to be intimately linked to the positions in which their subjects are constituted in relation to desire. Space and time, like other generic characteristics, are constituted in accordance with desire and the desiring position of the subject. There is another level that is also of interest, beyond the kind of deep narrative structures Zumthor finds in trouvère song: structures of ordeal, transformation and so on. Women’s songs, like men’s, are riven by inconsistencies which gesture at a level of the not told or the not known. It is possible to speak of the unconscious of a song as that level which may sometimes be revealed against the claims of the lyric voice. In Chapter 3, this appeared in the lover’s unspoken desire to be thwarted of his ostensible aim: la dame. In the chansons de femme, hidden desire can be found partly through an exami-

2

‘In the telling’ because songs must always be considered as primarily oral. They have the texture of the singing voice. 3 Cf. Dickey, who suggests, ‘The speakers in the lyric poems also express inherently narrative […] identities. In […] the troubadour love songs […] the atemporal orientation predominates, but temporal viewpoints are never entirely absent’ (301).

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nation of the chronotopic character of songs. So my analysis of these songs moves through different layers from the top downwards, and encounters many contradictions. The deepest level is akin to that analysis which takes place on the analyst’s couch, in that it probes the knots that gather defensively around hidden desire, and reveal it through their own strategies of defence.4 At the surface level of analysis, low-style feminine desire of the active kind is consonant with explicit narrative since, like pastourelle, it is on the path of the sexual achievable, unlike chanson desire which follows a detour of endless irresolution and so thwarts narrative movement. Active feminine desire, it seems, because it is allowed a future, is also allowed a past. Where a future of fulfilment is possible a past is also possible: the past is implicit in the future, in that for there to be a future the past must have already happened. Therefore, where there is a past, there can also be a future. Each implicates the other. It is possibility which allows a story because it generates its own essential medium – the passage of time. As Thomas Mann put it, ‘narration – like music – need[s] time to do it in’ (Mann, quoted in Hartocollis 4). Only where nothing may happen is time not required. In Her Place In Chapter 2, we considered the containment and subsequent visibility of la femme brought about by fragments of narrative scattered through her songs. Her visibility compromises her subjectivity vis-à-vis the less visible chanson lover, because it places her on the side of matter against masculine soul. He stresses always his station at the looking end of the gaze but he himself cannot be looked at as body, because the virtual absence of narrative hides him. The ‘je’ of the chanson is ‘preserved from narrative contamination’ as Zumthor notes of the Chastelain de Couci’s ‘Li nouviauz tanz et mais et violete’ (‘Le je’ 14). La femme, on the other hand, is always on the brink of metamorphosing into that which is looked at – the object. Her capacity to look and to desire is always in doubt.5 Narrative, in this respect, equals space rather than time. It is what allows her to be looked at. Narrative sets up a mundane and measurable space in which la femme is vulnerably visible, remaining trapped, like the shepherdess in her rural stage setting, even when she is the lyric subject. She is too well in focus, snapped up too easily by the gaze of any passing sexual predator. La dame, on the

4

Cf. Paul Strohm: ‘Thus, my persistent attraction to Freud, and the bold entry he affords into the issue of what the text “represses,” the possibility that the text possesses an unconscious, comprised by what it has repressed or declines to say’ (Theory xiii–iv). 5 Again feminist film theory can offer illumination, cf. Kaja Silverman’s critique of classic cinema as sustaining an impression of a feminine ‘incapacity for looking […] on the one hand […] with what might be called a “receptivity” to the male gaze […] on the other’ (Acoustic Mirror 31).

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other hand, represents another kind of space: the container for the lover’s immeasurable space/time of sublimated desire, the rim beyond/within which is the space of das Ding. She is excluded from the song because only in her absence can she contain it. Irigaray suggests, [t]he maternal-feminine remains the place separated from ‘its’ own place […] She is or ceaselessly becomes the place of the other who cannot separate himself from it’ (qtd in Casey 327).

But also, suggests Casey, ‘the concept of the masculine [envelopes] that of the feminine’ (Irigaray, qtd in Casey 328). It seems a woman is always too far out: la dame, or too far in: la femme. Woman must be either that sublime object: the Thing or a commodity, a just plain thing. The place in the middle, that of humanity which both contains and is contained, remains the province of man, that is to say he claims a position of apparent centrality and stability, supported symbolically by her dual positioning according to genre. This is how he can appear whole. The question of his claimed wholeness will be taken up again in the next chapter. La femme’s objectal status in the songs makes her relation to time and change problematic. In ‘Thinking the New’, Elizabeth Grosz cites Bergson’s take on matter, in Matter and Memory: Bergson […] claims that a distinction between subjective and objective (or duration and spatiality, life and the nonorganic) can be formulated in terms of the distinction between the virtual and the actual. Bergson suggests that objects, space, and the world of inert matter exist entirely in the domain of the actual. They contain no virtuality. Matter has no hidden latency, no potentiality, no hidden becoming. […] If everything about matter is real, if it has no virtuality, the proper ‘medium’ or milieu of matter is spatial. (Grosz, Becomings 24–5)

This is the matter of Plotinus, which Irigaray takes up in Speculum of the Other Woman: ‘No: if there is to be a Matter at all, it must be always identically as it has been from the beginning: to speak of Matter as changing is to speak of it as not being Matter’ (Enneads 199).6 Matter exists, in a sense, 6 Butler suggests the position is rather more complex than it appears here. She claims that ‘within these classical contexts […] to be material means to materialize’ (Bodies 32). This is not the matter without potentiality described by Grosz. But it is the crudest version of the dichotomy which finds its way into the songs of the trouvères. In Kay’s reading of the Roman de la rose, Woman’s changeable nature aligns her with ‘the material world of nature’ in contrast to the ‘permanent […] domain of the supernatural’ (‘Woman’s body’ 215). In the songs, curiously, I am finding that contradictory requirements produce a woman who, while fickle, is ultimately changeless and inert. I associate her fickleness in particular with the inability of masculine commentators to make women conform to ‘Woman’, however this generic form is interpreted.

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although, for Plotinus, ‘it has no title to the name of Being’ (Enneads 168), but it cannot become, and matter is evoked by the feminine. Her being differentiated in this way, as Lacan points out (Encore 85), provides the generating opposition by which soul, appropriated to the masculine, comes into being. To be so named is already to be defamed, named as matter. Julia Kristeva links space, Grosz’s ‘domain of the actual’, with feminine subjectivity: ‘Father’s time, mother’s species’, as Joyce put it; and indeed, when evoking the name and destiny of women, one thinks more of the space generating and forming the human species than of time, becoming or history. (Kristeva ‘Women’s Time’ 33)

Whether on a literal level, as physical envelope for masculine becoming (the womb), or as ‘the face of perfect beauty which acts as the barrier for desire’, as Peter Gunn puts it (‘One’ 7), women figure symbolically as the space for man. How then do we read the femme of the chansons de femme? Her entry into narrative is ambiguous because, while it embodies her, making her available to the gaze and accessible to sexual and other attentions, it also makes her active. Narrative generates activity, it is temporal yet it cannot function without a body. Sex, the element of the femme, needs both bodies and a narrative to arrive on the scene. It ‘takes time to do it in’. This is again the problem of ‘active matter’. La femme is constituted inconsistently in response to conflicting generic and ‘genderic’ principles. Firstly, it is in the low-style genres that a narrative is generated, and the feminine subject finds her ‘proper’ place here in low style. The masculine chanson lover with his endlessly replenished jouissance of unsatisfied desire remains in splendid isolation from the mundaneness of explicit narrative. The femme must be active to leave that valorized space of passivity open for him. Secondly, the desire appropriate to low-style song is on the path of the achievable. It is narrative desire and draws a story in its wake. La femme must move, she must act, and she does, but when she moves and acts there is always a contradiction. She should not be able to act, as she should not be able to speak. This is again the problem of the impossibility of feminine subjectivity in the terms the system has allotted to her. The contradiction seeks a solution – a solution to the problem of ‘Woman’ and the problem of her representation. The woman of the chansons de femme must be seen to ‘work’, to make sense, her ambiguity neutralized. One solution which the songs might be seen to provide is to pre-empt her activity as her speech and her desire are pre-empted – as unimportant and trivial. Thus she does not really speak, desire or act at all. Her actions, like her words and desires, are only a form of ‘soulless’ mimicry. Matter cannot matter and this not mattering follows her around, acting as a souring agent to all she says

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and does, withholding that Aristotelian drop, the soul. Her activities cannot be acts in the fully human sense, the acts of a ‘souled’ being. This is what her relegation to low style articulates. She is generically restricted – disqualified – though in some of her songs she flouts the conditions of her apartheid; she is sometimes out without a pass. Active Time The joyous malmariée, like the girl of the triumphalist chanson d’ami, is supremely active – vehement and headstrong, rebellious and rash. She is her older, married sister. Her narratives are an outpouring of goings-out and ‘goings-on’, in response to the desperate attempts of others to keep her in. Unlike the shepherdess, who stays put, patiently awaiting the arrival of the narrator, the malmariée is always escaping from the control of her husband and ranging the town where she seeks solace with the friend. She goes from one man to another and then back again. As she boasts in ‘Soufres maris’: ‘tomorrow you’ll have me and my friend tonight’ (Doss-Quinby et al. 18–16). The malmariée’s songs, however, are not pure narratives like the pastourelle. Different genres reveal different interactions of lyric and narrative elements and consequently different organizations of space/time. The chronotopic character of the song depends to some extent on her position within it. If the femme is the main lyric subject, the one supposedly in charge of the progress of the song, she has considerable temporal and spatial mobility. As a character, at the whim of a self-interested narrator, her scope visà-vis the present and future is much more limited, although, like the shepherdess of the pastourelle, she can sometimes influence events within the fictive frame. La dame is not a character in this sense. She is not prey to narrative because she appears always in the ‘future’ as the excluded object of hope. The time-frame of the shepherdess is all within the past and must be concluded before the narration begins. She is, naturally, excluded from the time of the narrating, since the pastourelle is narrated in the past tense. It is what Genette calls ‘subsequent’ narrative (Narrative Discourse 216). The shepherdess must remain glued to her rural set like a stage prop, waiting to be first found and then abandoned. She is necessarily left behind in whatever condition the narrative has placed her. Monologue, on the other hand, gives the femme room to move because there is no one to cut her off.7 What then does she do with this scope which seems to leave the way open for the fulfilment of her desires? In some respects the mobile femme of the monologue has the range of the pastourelle narrator. But where the time of the pastourelle narrator 7

The presence of a third-person narrator does not always cramp her style, however. I have written elsewhere about the difference which the form of narration makes to the scope of the feminine character (‘Voices’).

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encompasses only the past of his narrative and – clearly distinguished from it – the present of his narration, the woman of feminine-voiced monologue, due to the stronger presence of lyric in the mix, addresses herself also to the future. One such mobile heroine is the malmariée of ‘Por coi me bait mes maris?’: ‘Por coi me bait mes maris?’ Ballette, chanson de malmariée RS 1564; MW 417; L 265–1346; B 1515 Manuscript: I f207r Music: no music in source (music recovered from Guillaume de Machaut, motet 16) Text: Rosenberg and Tischler 2–3 Dialect: Lorraine Other eds Doss-Quinby et al. 153–4, Bec II: 166–7, Rosenberg, Switten and Le Vot 181–2. Por coi me bait mes maris? Laisette!

Why does my husband beat me? Poor wretch!

1. Je ne li de rienz meffis, ne riens ne li ai mesdit fors c’acolleir mon amin soulete. Por coi me bait mes maris? Laisette

I’ve done nothing wrong to him nor said anything against him, only embraced my friend alone. Why does my husband beat me? Poor wretch!

2. Et s’il ne mi lait dureir ne bone vie meneir, je lou ferai cous clameir a certes. Por coi me bait mes maris? Laisette!

If he won’t leave me alone to lead a happy life I’ll have him called a cuckold for sure. Why does my husband beat me? Poor wretch!

3. Or sai bien que je ferai et coment m’an vangerai, avec mon amin geirai nüete. Por coi me bait mes maris? Laisette!

Now I know well what I’ll do and how I’ll take vengeance, I’ll go and lie with my friend naked. Why does my husband beat me? Poor wretch!

This malmariée stands at the cross-roads of the present, looking, Januslike, in both directions. In strophe 1 she indicates a past: ‘I’ve done nothing wrong to him nor said anything against him, only embraced my friend alone’. In strophe 2 (the present), she considers her options and lays down a condition: ‘If he won’t leave me alone …’. Strophe 3 is where she decides on

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her future actions, unconditionally. This represents a change. Her husband is no longer in a position to assuage her wrath and must take the consequences. This is the temporality of events: the fabula, but with ‘events’ here compassing the future as well as past and present. This is what Genette calls ‘prior [narrative] (predictive narrative, generally in the future tense)’ (Narrative Discourse 217). There is another temporality in play, however: that of disclosure. This is the temporality of the telling (the narrating, which corresponds to the enunciation), which, even where it occurs simultaneously with the fabula, is distinct from it. ‘Por coi me bait’ is a narrative of sorts, but one which, unlike the narratives of pastourelle, can occur simultaneously with the events it narrates, like a sports commentary.8 The ‘narrating’ femme reports on events as they occur, if ‘events’ here can be taken to include her own decisions, intentions, etc. These might more properly be considered a matter for description rather than narration, but if one is considering the narrative of lyric then some expansion of scope is required. In ‘Por coi me bait’, the malmariée’s narration is not trustworthy. The distinction between fabula and sjuzet, if applied in present and future tense ‘narration’ as well as past, allows a second set of events to surface. Strophe 1 begins ‘straight’, with the femme apparently bewildered by her husband’s beatings. But already her untrustworthiness appears in the distinction between events and disclosure. She has ‘only embraced her friend alone’, a fault we suspect she knows usually rates a beating.9 A shadowy second set of events emerges. In this set her behaviour begins to look like deliberate provocation and a provoked and incensed husband comes into view wielding the stick. The repeated refrain question ‘Why does my husband beat me’, becomes progressively more tongue-in-cheek as her transgressions mount. It is overtaken by the events of the narration and becomes increasingly out of date in relation to them. We read this overtaking as irony. A question remains about whose irony it is. Whose tongue is in whose cheek? The malmariée, like her chanson d’ami sister, has trouble maintaining her role as independent subject in charge of a narrative. She is the subject (object) of the statement but is she the enunciating subject? For Susan Johnson she is unproblematically both (‘Role’ 226). But if not the second, then the irony could be reallocated to the shadowy masculine ‘absent subject’ who ‘knows her better than she knows herself ’ – that is, all the (mainly masculine) participants of the trouvère game, and ourselves as an extension of the game as latter-day readers and listeners. The meta-narrative would then belong to him/them/us, leaving her as simply the witless, unknowing actor. We/they/he would be the ones who ‘fill in the gaps’ in her story. How do we read the 8

See Fleischmann (Tense 266), for a discussion of forms of present-tense narration. See also Genette’s reference to ‘simultaneous’ narrative (Narrative 217). 9 Cf. Susan Johnson’s discussion of this song in her dissertation (‘Role’ 225–6).

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split in the story? This is a question I will leave open for now and return to a little later. ‘Go-future’ of the Active Femme Linguists distinguish between the kinds of futures postulated by different tenses. The ‘go-future’ tense is the one formed from the auxiliary ‘to go’ plus infinitive: ‘Je vais chanter’, for instance (Fleischman, Future 18). Suzanne Fleischman lists various interpretations of the go-future proposed by different linguists. All are pertinent for the future of the active femme but we shall confine our attention to the four most important: (a) IMMEDIATE or PROXIMAL FUTURITY [i.e. the futurity expressed by such terms as ‘immediate future’, ‘futur prochain’, etc.] (b) INCEPTIVE PRESENT: an event that begins in present time and is prolonged into the future, i.e. a future event nascent in the present […]. (c) INTENTIONALITY or INTENTIVE PRESENT: the acknowledgement in present […] time, of an intent to perform an action […]. (f) PRESENT RELEVANCE: an aspectual notion signaling the establishment of a connection between ‘now’ and ‘not-now’; a chronologically nonpresent […] event is viewed as psychologically linked to present time (18).

The chansons de femme do not employ the ‘go-future’ tense more frequently than others. The form was not in common use in French until the fifteenth century (Future 82), but the femme sits in relation to the future in the way described in these interpretations of go-future. Fleischman comments a little further on: [I]f one announces an intent to carry out an action, the projected action is obviously relevant at the moment of utterance and therefore also inceptive […] in the sense that its psychological (possibly also temporal) beginnings are located in present time. It is also predicated to occur at some future moment, possibly in the near future, perhaps even imminently (19–20).

This is what the active femme seems to do: she conceives (or gives birth to) an imminent future (inceptive present) by her intentions (intentionality or intentive present). Thus the future is psychologically and temporally linked to the present (present relevance). It is those intentions themselves which set events in train. There is no gap between her intention and the inception of the future; to think is to act for her, with no time left for hesitation. The future takes hold immediately (immediate or proximal futurity). Her future is a ‘go-future’, not in the sense that it is made from a compound including the auxiliary ‘to go’ but because it is already on the move, embryonic in the present. Her thought, as we imagine it, is, like her speech, performative.

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The Future of Desire as Will In the previous chapter we saw the amie’s desire as will. Here the malmariée makes a future out of her desire but, as in the chansons d’ami, it is a desire indistinguishable from will and this desire as will constitutes a particular form of futurity. For the amie, will as desire is indistinguishable from will as power. Fleischman notes the involvement of modality in the making of a future: By now it is universally acknowledged that future is rarely, if ever, a purely temporal concept; it necessarily involves an element of prediction or some related modalization. […] The future tense of all languages that operate with this category […] is always partly temporal and partly modal. […] Mattoso Camara […] sees the emergence of an explicit future paradigm […] as responding to the need to introduce modality (desire, will, obligation) into the general nonpast category’ (Future 24–5).

In a note she quotes C. C. Fries: ‘A certain range of ideas [desire, hope, intention, resolve, determination, compulsion, necessity, or possibility] furnish the grounds upon which the future is predicted’ (Fries, qtd in Future 163 n. 9). These formulations reveal how the different modalities (desire, hope, intention, compulsion, etc.) not only predict but actually project different futures. In the chanson de malmariée, desire as will is the modality which seems to institute the malmariée as futural, putting her always ahead of herself. In the sense postulated by Camara her desire (as demand) is what makes an explicit future tense necessary. She makes a temporal future paradigm out of the modality of desire. But it is a strange desire which cohabits with certainty, an oxymoron in Lacanian terms. The attitude of intentive desire projects a future which is certain in the active chansons de femme. The subject knows what is going to happen because she is the one who is going to do it. In one sense, the future can only be a prediction: ‘Any future of time is only logical expectation, which may prove to be in error’ (J. Feld, qtd in Fleischman, Future 20). But the femme is undeterred by this temporal logic. She is incapable of doubt. For her the future is certain: ‘Now I know what I’ll do’. She ignores the possibility of error as she ignores the possibility of defeat. She’ll do it or die in the attempt, still intending, still acting. ‘Error’ seems an irrelevant concept, as does ‘prediction’, since the intention has already begun the action. The femme of ‘Por coi me bait’ does not predict, nor can she be mistaken. The femme’s conviction is based on her self-representation as causal agent of future events, usually referred to by philosophers as ‘efficient cause’. In Aristotle’s Physics this kind of cause is: ‘the source of change or rest. For example, a deviser of a plan is a cause, a father causes a child, and in general a producer causes a product and a changer causes a change’ (Physics 39).

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Our humble heroine finds herself in the position of the father of change when one would expect her, in accordance with Aristotle’s views on generation, to find herself as ‘material cause’, the mater-materia of Isidore’s etymology. In Aristotle’s words: One way in which the word ‘cause’ is used is for that from which a thing is made and continues to be made – for example, the bronze of a statue, the silver of a bowl, and the genera of which bronze and silver are species. (Physics 39)

In Generation of Animals, as discussed above, the man is the actor, the woman the raw material from which a child is made by external forces (Aristotle, Generation 109). Aristotle’s thought is deeply gendered, beyond the specifics of procreation. In procreation men and women simply perform the functions natural to the principles of their existence, for the man, that of efficient cause and for the woman, that of material cause: ‘the male as possessing the principle of movement and of generation, the female as possessing that of matter’ (Generation 11). It is a matter of principle. Aristotle’s ‘changer’ and ‘producer’ are indeed fathers, intrinsically masculine. The meaning, supposedly intrinsic, of masculine is this. The feminine lurks in the raw material: ‘the bronze of the statue’. But in the active chansons de femme the femme’s paradoxical position as active matter gives her intentions, apparently, an ambiguous potency. Her low desires and childish intransigence, expressions of that raw materiality which is the crux of her sensuality, result in agency, the freedom and power to change the future. As she acts out, in these songs, the position accorded her in the system, she reveals the contradictions of that position. Thus her certainty, in songs like ‘Por coi me bait’, makes it possible to speak of a narrative of the future, conceived in the intention, which is what we find in strophe 3: ‘Now I know what I’ll do and how I’ll take vengeance, I’ll go and lie with my friend naked’. This is Genette’s ‘predictive narrative, generally in the future tense’ (Narrative Discourse 217). The future must be enacted outside the song’s boundaries (simply because it is the future), but it is not in doubt because it has already begun at the very moment at which she conceives the intention. The temporal shape of the song is altered by the permeability of its borders. Its present is open to the future so it does not have the clear temporal borders of classic past-tense narrative like the pastourelle. The femme can simply keep walking. But where is she walking to? In the chanson the inert hopes and despairs of the lover seal off the future by removing the possibility of intended action. Hope is as inactive as despair. It postulates a future which unavoidably comes about, in isolation from the desires or actions of the lover, although his inertia is ambiguous since his refusal to act is an act in itself, ensuring the maintenance of his fantasy. In the chanson the future is always in the field of the Other. It is a third-person

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future, belonging to la dame – although again, behind the scenes, his desire for non-fulfilment is manipulating events. It is presented as an ‘if ’ future, conditional to the core and with the conditions referred elsewhere, beyond the lover’s control. In active chansons de femme, as in the chansons de malmariée, the future seems to be first-person. The malmariée insists that no-one can take it from her – neither ami nor maris. The ami is not privileged over the maris in this respect. In ‘Por coi me bait’ there is no question of waiting for his acceptance as the chanson lover, supposedly, waits for la dame. His compliance, like his domesticated, co-opted desire, is assumed. In Being and Time Heidegger conceives of a future apparently analogous to the malmariée’s. For Heidegger the future, ‘Zukunft’: ‘is not something else coming towards Dasein [the being of humans or the human being], but Dasein coming towards itself ’ (Inwood 77): Here ‘future’ [means] the coming in which Da-sein comes toward itself in its ownmost potentiality-of-being. Anticipation makes Da-sein authentically futural in such a way that anticipation itself is possible only in that Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general (Heidegger, Being and Time 299).

If the malmariée is always ahead of herself, is she futural in Heidegger’s sense? Is she this authentic Dasein? There are holes in her authenticity. As Heidegger’s authentic Dasein, ‘I do not first decide who I am and then decide what to do; I wait to find out who I am from what I do, from the world around me’ (Inwood 78). The malmariée reveals her limitations in the light of this criterion. She is never able to find out anything about herself. She cannot make discoveries just as she cannot doubt, hesitate or be mistaken. Nothing can take her by surprise. Nothing touches her, nothing hurts her or changes her, not even frenzied beatings. This inability to feel, to change or to discover, allies her with inorganic matter. She is like a machine: something which moves without life. She is again subjected to the impossibility of her position of subjectivity as opposed to the masculine. In the Aristotelian ontology it is not the function of matter without soul to change or to move. All changing is done by the masculine efficient cause. To put matter in charge of a song and a narrative is like asking the mountain to dance. The resulting ontological anachronism was no doubt a source of amusement to the trouvères. Or at least one can say that it must either be ludicrous or threatening and therefore it must be ludicrous in order to prevent it becoming threatening. If space is the element of matter and time of spirit, then matter apparently moving into futurity under its own steam must be either laughable or terrifying. While changing the world around her as she goes singing and wielding vengeance, the active femme is not herself subject to change. She lacks

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that dimension. It is precisely her fixity of purpose which makes the future certain, leaving nothing whatever to chance. That is why one can speak of a narrative of the future. The future looks open but it is closed, killed by its own certainty. She welds time to the actual and produces herself thereby as an automaton. In Lacan’s thought the term ‘automaton’ is ‘the return, the coming-back, the insistence of the signs’ (Fundamental Concepts 53). I thought at first that this had nothing to do with what I was discovering in the chansons de femme but I have revised that opinion as I hope to show presently. Her will is almost frightening, linked as it is to sexual pleasure. It is an odd conjunction. Her sensuality is anything but relaxed. It has instead a certain rigidity, as in ‘Jai ne lairai por mon mari ne die’: ‘Jai ne lairai por mon mari ne die’ Rondeau, chanson de malmariée L 265–826, MW 132, B Rond.149, B 1004 Manuscript: I 250r Music: in G Rond. I: 100–01 Text: Bec II: 10, p. 16 Dialect: Lorraine Other eds.: Doss-Quinby et al. 183 Jai ne lairai por mon mari ne die li miens amins jeut aneut aveuc(ke) moi; je li dis bien ainz qu’il m’eüt plevie: jai ne lairai por mon marit ne die c’il me batoit ne faixoit vilonie, il seroit cous, et si lou comparroit. Jai ne lairai por mon marit ne die Li miens amins jeut aneut avec(que) moi.

I won’t, for my husband, stop saying that my friend lay last night with me; I told him before he was pledged to me: I won’t, for my husband, stop saying If he beat me or shamed me, he’d be cuckolded and paid for it. I won’t, for my husband, stop saying that my friend played last night with me.

Under no set of circumstances or chances will this juggernaut of a woman be deflected. Time changes nothing because her will is fixed. Her ultimatum, given before her betrothal, ties her to a fixed response, like the ultimatum of ‘Por coi me bait’; that is the catch with ultimatums. Her not stopping remains true in all times, those enunciated and those of the enunciation and of any possible ‘future’. It is determined for eternity, thus it does not really invoke time, or rather, it invokes a future of the predetermined, without a shred of chance. Not really a future at all! Kristeva’s evocation of feminine time as repetitive or eternal (almost spatial) comes to mind. The malmariée’s temporality suggests that, for her, the two, the repetitive and the eternal, are identical. Refrain creates here an eternity of repetitions which spatializes time. The malmariée can be supremely active yet never get anywhere. This is the significance of Lacan’s use of ‘automaton’ as the ‘return […] of the signs’ (Fundamental Concepts 53). The subject is bound to an endless repetition. For Lacan, what is ‘beyond the automaton’ is the real (Fundamental Concepts 53). He translates Aristotle’s term ‘tuché’ as ‘the encounter with the real’ (53, his emphasis). In the light of this distinction the ques-

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tions raised in Chapter 3 assert themselves again. These were: firstly, might there be a desire beyond the balking at the impossible which characterized the desire of the chanson lover? Secondly, how might one speak of such a desire? And thirdly, how might one act in accordance with it? It is clear that the malmariée also does not arrive for this encounter, ‘an appointment’, says Lacan, ‘to which we are always called with a real that eludes us’ (53). It is difficult to be sure of the temporal implications of refrain-songs like the rondeau, given the different status of refrain and strophe words. The repetition of the refrain, and its ‘borrowed’ or citational status, give a different quality to the refrain words.10 But here the special relationship between strophe and refrain seems either to neutralize time, make it inert, or, on the contrary, to increase its dynamism. The ‘unstoppability’ of the refrain form, which enacts the subject’s unstoppability, makes time go all the faster, but round in circles. This is also true in ‘Ne mi bateis mie’, a chanson de rencontre where the inactivity and consequent disinterest of the observer/narrator allow the malmariée some scope:11 ‘Ne mi bateis mie’ Ballette, Chanson de rencontre (embedded chanson de malmariée) RS 1184, MW 1859, B 1353 (one other source) Manuscript: I 5:16. Attribution: none Text: Rosenberg and Tischler 4, pp. 5–6 Dialect: Lorraine Other eds: Bartsch 46; G Rond. 1: 116–17; 2: 111 Ne mi bateis mie, maleüroz maris, vos ne m’aveis pas norrie!

Do not beat me, miserable husband, I was not raised in your household.

1. L’autrier par une anjornee chivachoie mon chamin; novelette mariee trovai leis un foilli, batue de son mari, si en ot lou cuer doulant et por ceu aloit dixant cest motet par anradie: Ne mi bateis mie …

The other day at dawn I was riding on my way, a newly-wedded woman I found beside a leafy wood, beaten by her husband and her heart was grieved for it and so she went singing this song in indignation: Do not beat …

10

See Ardis Butterfield for a discussion of this point (‘Repetition’, esp. 20–23). Note the ‘go-future’ construction in the second-last line of strophe 1. In some songs the going and the singing are separate, concurrent activities but that seems unlikely here. 11

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2. Elle dist: ‘Vilains, donee suix a vous, se poice mi; mais par la virge honoree, pués ke me destraigniés ci, je ferai novel ami, a cui qui voist anuant; moi et li irons juant, si doublerait la folie.’ Ne mi bateis mie … 3. Li vilains, cui pas n’agree la ranponne, si li dit: ‘Pace avant’; grande pamee li donait, pués la saixit par la main et se li dit: ‘Or rancomance ton chant, et Deus me dont dolor grant se je bien ne te chastie!’ Ne me bateis mie …

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She said: ‘They have given me to you, wretch, against my will, but by the honoured virgin since you mistreat me so I will get a new friend, whomever it may annoy. I and he will go to play and so our wantonness will be doubled.’ Do not beat … The wretch did not care for this mockery so he said: ‘Come here!’ A great blow he has given her, then he has seized her by the hand and said to her: ‘Now start your song again, and God give me great woe if I do not beat you properly!’ Do not beat …

The husband’s taunt in strophe 3: ‘Now start your song again’, leads directly, as it must in refrain-form, to a reprise of her declaration in the refrain. Susan Johnson comments: ‘The refrain itself becomes the point of contention […]. The final appearance of the refrain can be read as the woman’s defiant response to this threat and a challenge to his right to carry it out’ (‘Role’ 228). But there is also the aspect of the inexorability of defiance and punishment to be considered. There is no possibility for her ever to stop her transgressive song because of the inexorability of refrain form nor, therefore, any reason for him to stop beating her (nor, again, for her to stop singing and so on). Each leads inevitably around to the other. The interaction between refrain and strophe creates a repetition: a notionally unending cycle without any change. It throws a spanner in the works to prevent stoppage, but also to prevent things going in a different direction. Unbearable Circles In the world of song, form tells a story too. Fredric Jameson describes such a process: [I]t has become possible to grasp […] formal processes as sedimented content in their own right, as carrying ideological messages of their own, distinct from the ostensible or manifest content of the works. (Political Unconscious 99)

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The form here provides its own temporality of endless, unstoppable cyclicity which coincides with the malmariée’s claim that no amount of beatings will get in her way to love and sexual pleasure. She makes this way of hers out of will but the way goes in circles. Her will leads her in a painful repetition. She is herself the spanner caught in the works of refrain-form, which consigns her to an endless round of beatings. Refrain enacts here something unbearable. The story the form tells, although it coincides with the malmariée’s claims, includes also this unbearable repetition without change which she does not tell – a lethal circularity. Her adoption of the position of causal mastery over the future from her state of marital enslavement sends her round in circles. But perhaps determinism is itself a form of enslavement, dooming her to an endless repetition of the same, as Grosz suggests: The extent to which one remains committed to determinism is precisely the degree to which one refuses the open-endedness of the future. In seeking an open-ended future, one is […] required to […] accept the role that the accidental, chance, or the undetermined plays in the unfolding of time. (Grosz ‘Thinking’ 18)

The malmariée’s time is really space. She returns at each revolution to the same point.12 Another impossibility opens up in the malmariée’s machinations, brought to light by the juxtaposition of desire with the temporal. It is her claims to agency themselves which thwart purposive movement because she cannot bear to be blown by the winds of chance like any flotsam or jetsam in the world of objects. She cannot bear to place her will in doubt. Whose Desire? Which Desire? This impasse offers itself to a different diagnosis of desire. Temporality leads straight back to a desire which subverts the claims of the desirer. It suggests that the chanson de malmariée, like the chanson, carries other, hidden levels of desire. If space and time are constituted in accordance with desire, then desire in these songs is circular.13 Her ostensible desire is for the friend but he, when all is said and done, cannot fill his place as the object of that mighty desire. The amie’s treatment of her ami, suggested, for instance, 12

A complete revolution re-inscribes the centre of a sphere, whatever one puts in that centre, as Lacan observes (Encore 42). It is instead the quarter-turn that makes the difference. See Lacan’s schema of the changing discourses, which he works in seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (29). 13 Most chansons de femme use the refrain-form, with its association with the dance. All are entangled with circularity but in different ways which carry different implications. Not all circles are deadly.

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in her threat: ‘I will get a new friend’, is distinctly cursory, a cursoriness endemic to these songs of the active amie. He is never of any account in himself. One friend is very much like another; one can easily replace another. His desire is not consulted and his willingness to comply is taken for granted. He is a commodity to be acquired and displayed. In comparison with those who attempt to control her he is a lightweight. The stick-wielding husband and the evil mesdisant are the ones who attract her attention. One might ask, with Freud and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, what it is that she really desires. If her desire was simply for the friend, why does she reject subterfuge? Why not ‘a bit on the side’? She does not engage in secret manoeuvres. She does not carry out her infidelities under cover of night but in full view of her enemies. She parades them tantalizingly before those same enemies, not only after, but even before she commits them, thus ensuring that her path is barred and trouble inevitable. An unseen transgression would be no use to her. She wants her defiance seen and acknowledged. Her threat to ‘get a new friend’ designates him as her weapon against her enemies. He is the matter in this equation – her doll – acquired to prove that she matters. Nor does she attempt any kind of détente, any way out of the constant round of beatings and transgressions. She neither advances beyond the husband’s retributions nor retreats to obedience. This endless, unchanging repetition seems to be her satisfaction, just as the repeated thwarting of his ostensible desire seems to be the satisfaction of the chanson lover. The malmariée’s attention is focused on her enemies, and it is their attention which she seeks to attract. Their watching, for instance the gaze of the spying husband in ‘Au cuer les ai, les jolis malz’, is at the heart of her transgressive jouissance: ‘Au cuer les ai, les jolis malz’ Ballette, chanson de malmariée RS 386, L 265–154, MW 410, B 193 Manuscripts: I 4: 13 Text: Rosenberg and Tischler 2, pp. 3–4 Dialect: Lorraine Other eds.: Doss-Quinby et al. 151–2 Au cuer les ai, les jolis malz. Coment an guariroie?

In my heart I feel them, the beautiful pains. How could I heal them?

1. Kant li vilains vait a marchiet, il n’i vait pais por berguignier, mais por sa feme a esgaitier que nuns ne li forvoie. Au cuer les ai …

When the wretch goes to market he doesn’t go there to bargain but to keep an eye on his wife for fear someone may seduce her. In my heart …

132 2. Vilains, car vos traites an lai, car vostre alainne m’ocidrait, bien sai c’ancor departirait vostre amor et la moie. [Dieus,] j’ai a cuer … 3. Vilains, cuidiez vos tout avoir, et belle dame et grant avoie? Vos aveireiz lai hairt on col, et mes amins lai joie. Dieus, j’ai a cuer …

HELEN DELL

Wretch, stand back because your breath will kill me. I know it well: your love and mine will come to an end. God, in my heart … Wretch, do you think you can have it all, beautiful lady and great wealth? You will have the halter round the neck and my friend will have the joy. God, in my heart …

What her husband is asked to witness is her sexual pleasure with another man, and, even more to the point, the other man’s sexual pleasure with her. She rubs the husband’s nose (or his neck) in it: ‘You will have the halter round the neck and my friend will have the joy’. The rondeau ‘Soufrés maris, et si ne vous anuit’ demonstrates the same trope: ‘Soufres maris et si ne vous anuit’ rondeau, chanson d’ami L 265–1636, MW 352, G rond. 52, B rond. 193, B 1749 Manuscript: a 108v Music: in a Text: Doss-Quinby et al. 50, pp. 184–6 Be patient, husband, and don’t be annoyed, tomorrow you’ll have me and my friend tonight. Je vous deffenc k’un seul mot n’en parles, I forbid you to say a single word, be patient husband, and don’t be annoyed, soufres maris, et si ne vous anuit, the night is short, you’ll have me back by la nuit est courte, aparmains me rares morning when my friend has had his pleasure. quant mes amis ara fait sen deduit. Be patient husband … Soufres maris … Soufres maris et si ne vous anuit, demain m’ares et mes amis anuit.

The husband will get her second-hand, after the friend has finished with her, with his semen still inside her. This is the form her enjoyment takes. She lends herself as the proxy for their homosocial (possibly homoerotic) transaction. Irigaray suggests that the masculine exchange of women bears a hidden homosexuality: ‘Woman exists only as the possibility of mediation, transaction, transition, transference – between man and his fellow-creatures, indeed between man and himself ’ (This Sex 193). The malmariée objectifies herself, in ‘Soufres maris’, in the same way as the amie of ‘Deduxans suis’ who says: ‘I am charming and pretty’: as an object for masculine consumption and exchange. This seems to be for her a

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measure of her importance, rather than her ultimate unimportance, as Irigaray’s idea would suggest. The opposition in ‘Au cuer les ai’ is not between her and the husband. She does not say: ‘I’ll have the pleasure and you’ll have the halter’ but ‘he’ll have the pleasure of me and you’ll have the halter’. In both songs she is the object exchanged between two men, or held back in the case of ‘Au cuer les ai’, or perhaps fought over. The friend has the pleasure. Her pleasure seems to consist in being (and being seen as) the object of masculine attention, whether it is expressed as the husband’s possessive rage or the friend’s sexual delight. The same phenomenon of exchange is implicit in ‘Vous arez la druerie’, a chanson de malmariée rondeau: ‘You will have the pleasure, my love, from me, that my husband never has’ (Doss-Quinby et al. 187). In Adam de la Halle’s play, Li gieus de Robin et Marion, Marion adopts a similar position when she sings ‘Robin loves me, Robin has me’: ‘Robins m’aime, Robins m’a’ chanson d’ami L 2–64, B 1633 Manuscripts: W 39 Attribution: Adam de la Halle (from Le jeu de Robin et Marion) Music: in W Text: Axton 347–8 Robins m’aime, Robins m’a Robins m’a demandée, si m’ara. Robins m’acata cotèle d’escarlate bonne et bele, souskanie et chainturele, a leur i va! Robins m’aime, Robins m’a; Robins m’a demandee, si m’ara.

Robin loves me, Robin has me, Robin has asked for me so he shall have me. Robin bought me a little coat of scarlet, good and beautiful, a tunic and a little belt, a leur i va! Robin loves me, Robin has me; Robin has asked for me so he shall have me.

Do we see her therefore, as subject or object? If the malmariée is simply an object of masculine fantasy, written to titillate masculine sexual rivalry and perhaps articulate masculine homoerotic bonds, then her own desire leaves the scene. If, on the other hand, we see her as subject then we must ask: Is to be this object of exchange or rivalry what she wants? Is she getting what she wants? As a desirer, is she efficient or inefficient?14 As usual, the question of the femme’s desire is predicated on the shaky 14 Cf. the pertinent questions asked by Evelyn Burge Vitz of medieval narratives: ‘To what extent do characters “get” what they wanted? And in what sense “get”? Passively “receive” or actively “cause,” that is, “procure for themselves”? Are the characters competent to effect their will’ (Medieval Narrative 177).

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ground of her subjectivity. The question might be better phrased: whose is her desire? rather than: what is her desire? Jessica Benjamin, in The Bonds of Love, suggests: Perhaps no phrase of Freud’s has been quoted more often than ‘What does woman want?’ To my mind, this question implies another: ‘Do women want?’ or better yet, ‘Does woman have a desire?’ By this revision I mean to shift attention from the object of desire, what is wanted, to the subject, she who desires. The problem that Freud laid before us with all too painful clarity was the elusiveness of woman’s sexual agency. He proposed, in fact, that femininity is constructed through the acceptance of sexual passivity. (Bonds 86–7).

La femme claims to have desire but is her desire, in fact, to be desired? Lacan suggests that it is in order to be the phallus, that is to say, the signifier of the desire of the Other, that a woman will reject an essential part of femininity, namely all her attributes, in the masquerade. It is for that which she is not that she wishes to be desired (Écrits 290).

The women of these songs seem to be stuck in this place of negation, of positioning themselves to be the signifier of the phallus, the desire of the Other, in spite of their claims to active desiring on their own account. They protest their active desire but things conspire – the circularity produced by the strophe/refrain relationship and their self-placement in object position – to throw the authenticity of their activity into doubt. Their self-placement in order to signify the desire of the Other could be read as a mark of their ignorance typical in feminine low style. They do not know that they disqualify their desire to have by this placement. This brings up again the question of the split subjectivity of the songs. I suggested earlier that we could read the irony of ‘Por coi me bait mes maris’ as a split between an ignorant feminine object and a knowing masculine subject, the puppeteer behind stage, pulling the strings, the unseen ventriloquist. Burns et al. allude to such a possibility in their questioning of the chansons de toile: ‘Are they then examples of men singing in drag? Of men speaking for women, that is to say, “in their place,” ’ (‘Feminism’ 240)?15 The absent masculine subject would then be the one amused by her ignorance, the one who arranges for her to say more than she knows or intends. But there is another version of the split to be considered: in this 15 This is a possibility they reject in favour of a more nuanced view: ‘To speak of a woman’s voice in this and other “women’s songs” is then to describe voices that occupy an unstable and shifting place, voices that defy absolute categorization as either masculine or feminine’ (242).

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version the split is between her stated demand and a hidden desire which she does not know or does not tell. An interpretation must take both these splits into account. There is a third possibility: that the amie’s light-hearted, throwaway lines are a kind of mimicry, of the kind Irigaray postulates, if one can read mimicry as a ludicrously exaggerated performance of ‘femininity’ with a less serious purpose than Irigaray has in mind: ‘One must assume the feminine role deliberately. Which means already to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus to begin to thwart it’ (This Sex 76). This is a problematic reading in songs possibly composed by men; Irigaray is speaking of possible discursive strategies for women writers. And yet these songs can sound a little like an insouciant refusal to take the whole business of subjective lack – supposedly confined to the feminine – seriously, a masquerade that is more of a joking indicator of lack than an attempted concealment of it. In Sarah Kay’s reading of him, Žižek suggests that ‘[woman] “puts on” a series of symbolic masks’ (Žižek 85). These masks do not threaten her subjectivity, since all subjectivity is merely ‘a void which is only invested with meaning retroactively’ (85). If the derogation of subjective lack to the feminine is a misogynistic ploy aimed at facilitating a masculine imposture, then here is a woman who ‘doesn’t give a damn!’ Perhaps that misogynistic ploy overreaches itself. This is an attractive reading, but I must nonetheless leave it aside in this study and focus instead on the other two. The malmariée’s protestations are fervent, but she protests too much. Her claims to omnipotent action are too large to be believed. But do we (as ‘masculine’ observers) read her fervour as the mark of a compromised subjectivity? Do we smile at her imperious claims as at the antics of a child, or as if a doll had waved her arms and issued orders? Or, reading it differently, does the vehemence of her claims suggest instead a contrary desire (the desire to be the phallus, to signify the Other’s desire), which is not spoken or known. ‘Her part in the disorder’?: The Hysteric and the malmariée The malmariée’s vehemence is like that of the belle âme described by Lacan: The moi, the ego, of modern man […] has taken on its form in the dialectical impasse of the belle âme who does not recognize his very own raison d’être in the disorder that he denounces in the world. But a way out is offered to the subject for the resolution of that impasse when his discourse is delusional (Écrits 70).

The way out is provided by

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all the pleasures of a profuse culture which will give him the wherewithal to forget his own existence and his death, at the same time to misconstrue (méconnaître) the particular meaning of his life in false communication. (70)

In ‘Intervention on Transference’ Lacan elaborates on the belle âme in the case of Freud’s patient Dora, in words which to some extent fit the malmariée’s position. Dora’s position is that of a sop offered to Herr K. in exchange for his turning a blind eye to Dora’s father’s affair with Frau K. She is made ‘the object of an odious exchange’ (‘Intervention’ 96), in Freud’s words an ‘object of barter’ (qtd in Gallop, Feminism 132). Lacan reports their dialogue, which Dora begins: ‘This is all perfectly correct and true, isn’t it? What do you want to change in it?’ To which Freud’s reply is […] wanting nothing of the Hegelian analysis of the protest of the ‘beautiful Soul,’ which rises up against the world in the name of the law of the heart: ‘Look at your own involvement,’ he tells her, ‘in the disorder which you bemoan’ (‘Intervention’ 96).

In the case history of Dora, Freud comments: Dora’s reproaches against her father had a ‘lining’ or ‘backing’ of selfreproaches […]. She was right in thinking that her father did not wish to look too closely into Herr K.’s behaviour to his daughter, for fear of being disturbed in his own love-affair with Frau K. But Dora herself had done precisely the same thing. […] During all the previous years she had given every possible assistance to her father’s relations with Frau K. (Case Histories I 67)

One cannot leave aside Freud’s own biases in the case of Dora. He was himself conscious of the ‘great defect’ of Dora’s analysis ‘which led to its being broken off prematurely’ (Case Histories 160). This defect, he tells us, was his failure to ‘master the transference in good time’ (160), a failure, that is, to understand the nature of the relation between them, to which Lacan refers as a ‘dialectic’ (‘Intervention’ 93). Freud himself makes protestations which suggest, in the words of Steven Marcus, ‘a less than complete understanding of himself ’ (‘Freud and Dora’ 67). So quick at spotting Dora’s prevarications, he is less clear-sighted about his own role, despite his efforts to understand it. Charles Bernheimer suggests Freud resists his own desire for and identification with Dora (Introduction 17). Freud’s account of Dora accentuates a dilemma, characterized by Claire Kahane: ‘Dora stands in the middle of a contemporary, interdisciplinary questioning of the relation between interpretation and sexual difference’ (Introduction 20). It is the words of the case-historian, Freud, which we read as Dora’s. The student of the chansons de malmariée faces a similar

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dilemma. Like Dora’s, the malmariée’s words are filtered through an unseen masculine subjectivity. So the question returns: if men write these songs (as they often, perhaps always, do), does the femme represent only a masculine desire for her to be as she is? Is this woman simply a figure seen in the distorted reflection of a masculine gaze, a reversed image of his desire, with her own desire nowhere to be seen? Is her objectality simply what he requires for his subjectivity? It is true that men write femininity to their own advantage. As Lacan remarks ‘when one is a man, one sees in one’s partner [a woman] what one props oneself up on, what one is propped up by narcissistically’ (Encore 87). This, however, is not the whole story. Men may benefit from the system of sexual difference but they also are written into it. Subjectivity for women and men ‘extends […] well beyond the discourse that takes its orders from the ego’ (Lacan, Écrits 141). Masculine egos are not in charge of the writing of subjectivity. Their claim to write it for themselves and for women is also false. Human desire, according to Lacan, is distinguished from need by its ‘paradoxical, deviant, erratic, eccentric, even scandalous character’ (Écrits 286). Desire is scandalous. Nevertheless, despite the scandal, and despite the hindrances of masculine ‘interpretations’ of femininity, something recognizable of the vicissitudes of feminine desire comes through and is carried in these songs. There is something to be heard beyond the discourse ‘that takes its orders from the ego’, something beyond misogyny.16 The malmariée’s desire does not leave the scene, leaving her as simply a helpless, incomplicit victim of misogynistic discourse. Like Dora, the malmariée is shamefully mistreated but, also like Dora, she connives at her mistreatment. Her distressing position is analogous to Dora’s: As is true for all women, and for reasons which are at the very basis of the most elementary forms of social exchange (the very reasons which Dora gives as the grounds for her revolt), the problem of her condition is fundamentally that of accepting herself as an object of desire for the man. (Lacan, ‘Intervention’ 99)17

Women desire, but they must negotiate their desires in a world where they 16 E. Jane Burns observes that ‘we cannot read the speech of female protagonists as an unproblematic expression of female desire – mediated as it is’ (Bodytalk 38). No, but feminine desire is there nonetheless, and I believe it can be read despite the interference. 17 Dora’s solution is an ‘idolatry for Frau K.’: ‘Dora is driven towards the solution which Christianity has given to this subjective impasse, by making woman the object of a divine desire, or else, a transcendent object of desire, which amounts to the same thing’ (Lacan, ‘Intervention’ 99). Our malmariée is restricted in her choice of solutions by, among other things, a generic exclusion. Adopting the ‘Christian’ solution would require la femme and la dame to cohabit in the same genre, the same song.

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function as objects of desire and of exchange between men, the matter oiling the social machine. Dora negotiates this impasse by a bi-sexuality of desire and identification. She identifies with Frau K. as the object of her father’s desire, but also with her father as the desiring one, as Juan-David Nasio suggests (118–19). Lacan comments: But this homage [Herr K.’s] could be received by her as a manifestation of desire only if she herself could accept herself as an object of desire, that is to say, only once she had worked out the meaning of what she was searching for in Frau K. (‘Intervention’ In Dora’s Case 98).

Dora investigates Frau K. in the hope of discovering what it is to be a woman. Feminine subjects are obliged to negotiate the incompatibility of being and having. It is the nature of all human desire that it carries this ambiguity. For all human subjects, desire is a desire to be desired, but for those on the feminine side the ambiguity comes in an extreme form because of the woman’s function as an object of exchange between men.18 The malmariée, in her unconscious desire, places herself, like the hysteric, in the position of the desirer – the one to whom she matters. This is the husband who represents the Other. From this place she regards and desires herself as a worthy object. Like Dora her desire ‘is to sustain the desire of the father’ (Fundamental Concepts 38). The brutish husband here represents the Other as the ami does not. Catherine Clément wrote: ‘Implicit in the very ambiguity of the expression “woman desire” is her desire both to be and to have’ (Newly Born Woman 54). The malmariée seems to try to make a having of being. She tries to make her objectality active – to make an agency out of it. This is what traps her between action and stasis – time and place – and sends her round in circles. Any desire, it seems to me, is experienced as a desire to have. It involves a desperate need to grasp something which always eludes the grasp. The desire of these malmariée women (what they burn to hold), however, is to be the desired object, or at least to attract the serious attention, of those Others who matter, those representatives of the law: parents, husband and mesdisant.19 These embody the Other as the friend does not. The husband’s (phallic) stick is bigger and harder and he is in fact much more significant to her than the friend. Perhaps that is why it is the malmariée’s songs which demonstrate the distinction so strongly. The friend is a little other, her counterpart, her pigeon pair. He does not have the distance from her which could evoke desire. He cannot represent 18 Cf. Juliet Mitchell’s comment that the hysteric (as woman novelist) both is feminine and refuses femininity (‘Femininity’, Mary Eagleton, Feminist Literary Theory 155). 19 I think this is the significance of the Freudian designation of the drive as ‘masculine’: ‘When, libido [is] described […] as being ‘masculine’ the word [is] being used in this sense, for a drive is always active even when it has a passive aim in view’ (On Sexuality 141, n. 1).

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the big Other. He is the one whose desire she can take for granted, and it therefore does not have the force to figure as desire. A desire which one can assume is always turned on has the same value as a desire which is always turned off. It cannot function in an economy. He can therefore fill the place of the one who does not desire her. This lack of force allows her to avoid the question of her own position as an object of masculine desire, the question raised by Lacan. The friend is safe. She can ‘play’ sexually with him. They can play together like children. She returns to him to avoid the question but then returns again to the husband because the question will not be avoided. The husband does not play. He is very much in earnest and he is anything but safe. He has the disparity she needs for her desire, being more like a father than a husband. His age is a stock attribute as Bec points out (Lyrique française 70). The desire of the enemies, representatives of the law (with the husband in the foreground), is the desire she desires. As with the masculine lover of the chanson, her desire is not what she claims. She, in her different way, is efficient in her inefficiency because her aim is not her satisfaction. There is method in her madness. That is what seals the future from them both and keeps them going round in circles. They do not wish to take the risk of going beyond. Not Breaking the Circle The femme discussed in this chapter exhibits a resistance to the possibilities of chance and time, a resistance which is articulated as circularity in the songs’ form. She is bound to repetition without change. She cannot become in the Bergsonian sense: Thus the living being essentially has duration; it has duration precisely because it is continuously elaborating what is new and because there is no elaboration without searching, no searching without groping. Time is this very hesitation (Bergson, qtd in Grosz, ‘Thinking’ 25).

The malmariée is not equipped to hesitate. Somewhere in this space, which opens via the refusal of chance and change and the conflicts of her desire, is where she gets stuck, and it is the ambiguity of her subjectivity which is the temporal sticking point. It is only subjects who can become, but as lyric subject/first-person narrator the malmariée functions not as a subject but only as an automaton: an object which moves in parody of subjectivity. If this reading of the unconscious side of the malmariée’s desire is accepted, then the question of her subjectivity is further complicated because her desire makes her a subject, yet it leads her into object position. Oddly enough, it is when the femme is left without an explicit narrator to tell her story, and must take up the reins of narrative

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herself, that these rifts in her desire appear. Like Dora’s, her narrative is incoherent, broken, devious. But it is when she supposedly speaks for herself (although she never really can), and has a certain spatial and temporal scope denied her as a character, that her desires reveal their underside. The malmariée allows the co-option of her desires but makes her protest nonetheless. She insists on her subjectivity while playing along in the role of object. There is an unbearable tension in this position. To be exchanged one must be first owned and the owned must be objectified. Yet, as Othello laments, no-one can own the appetites of these creatures which men call their own – unless, that is, those appetites comply.20 Clément sees the transgressions of the hysteric as contained: a failed rebellion. Here is Jane Gallop’s comment: Clément declares that the role of the hysteric is ambiguous: she both contests and conserves […]. The hysteric contests inasmuch as she ‘undoes family ties, introduces perturbation into the orderly unfolding of daily life, stirs up magic in apparent reason […].’ But the hysteric’s contestation is contained and co-opted, and, like any victory of the familiar […] this containment serves to strengthen the family (Gallop, Feminism 133).

‘Dora’s outbursts burst nothing’ (Feminism 135). Such outbursts only immunise the family organism from further threats. It is worth noting that Hélène Cixous disagrees: ‘[I]t is that very force which works in the dismantling of structures […]. Dora broke something’ (qtd in Feminism 135). In the case of the chansons de malmariée discussed above, Clément turns out to be right. One would need a different, less circular kind of song to break anything.21 Like the hysteric’s, the malmariée’s transgressions don’t change the status quo. Her transgressive leap over the borders inscribed by the marriage laws to a lover of her own choice is contained and co-opted. She is seduced from her quest, like Atalanta, by the power of the husband’s stick. She retains her prior position, now somewhat modified, as an object of exchange (or withholding) between lover and husband, in which she is branded as the guilty party. Ultimately the laws prevail and her rebellion results only in punishment. Can this be all she wants? The women of these songs desire ultimately, it seems, in accordance with their role in the masculine economy of exchange. They desire as owned objects and as victims. What if they desired differently? That is the topic of the final chapter.

20

A man can perhaps prevent the deed but ‘no-one can extinguish the desire’ of women, laments Ami, in Jean de Meun’s Rose (qtd in Kay, ‘Women’s Body’ 212, her translation). 21 The genre does not allow for breakage. She would need to break out of her generic restrictions to break anything else.

6

Chronotopes of Desire II The Contained and Containing Heart: Masculine Space-Times ‘das Ding [the Thing] is at the center only in the sense that it is excluded. That is to say, in reality das Ding has to be posited as exterior […] something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me’ (Lacan, Ethics 71)

This chapter returns to ground already covered in Chapter 3, the pastourelle and the chanson, but from a different angle. In Chapter 3, an exploration of desire led inevitably to questions about the representation and operation of space and time in the songs. Here, it is hoped, an explicit exploration of those spatio-temporal issues may lead to a fuller understanding of masculine desire. The stated demand of the masculine subject of trouvère song has two aspects which aim in different directions. In the high mode he looks upwards to la dame, who stands in place of the Thing and defers fulfilment. In the low mode, with a lust which he insists is not a desperate matter, he looks downwards to the shepherdess, an unsouled object, who can slake his lust but is not important in herself. She can, and indeed must, be replaced – a disposable item. These two aspects do not divide him, as a woman is divided in the system, into separate entities. It is she who must divide in order for man to remain one. The system presents him as the same entity, whole and undivided, in spite of the generic division of his sexual cravings. He has two strings to his bow: the first with the ladies at court; the second with the girl in the meadow outside the walls. This divergence is explained in terms of the different feminine objects to which he aspires. The divergence is seen, in the pastourelle, as another measure of his versatility. He behaves (and sings, since there is a generic aspect to the divergence), appropriately to the situation and to the object.1 1 Cf. Cherchi, who suggests that mezura (the courtliness of the troubadour) ‘prescribes the acts that are appropriate for each age, as well as the kinds of speech and tone one

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The position of the masculine protagonist of this chapter is one of centrality. He both contains and is contained, as the chapter title suggests. In the pastourelle the shepherdess – a version of la femme as character – is contained by narrative, placed there for him to consume. This is her fate, the fate of the feminine object of low-style desire, although she sometimes avoids it. She is prey to his hunter and his aim is her consumption. In the chanson the position is more complicated. La dame, by her absence from the song, could be said to contain both it and him, since the song and its characteristic desire are predicated on her inaccessibility. But the chanson chronotope undoes any neat generic division. It retains the ambiguity of the masculine position as contained and containing. This quality of radical ambivalence, of having it both ways, is a hallmark of the chanson, undoing many binaries. It is the spatial equivalent to strategies of deferral, a kind of displacement. This ambiguity is discussed in the second section of this chapter. The ‘Other Day’: Time for Sex in the Pastourelle ‘L’autrier’, the ‘other day’ so often opens the scene of the pastourelle that its presence is almost a generic signal. It marks out the spatial and temporal trappings of the song. It will tell of unimportant events of the past, events which are now concluded. The telling is predicated on the story’s conclusion and the fact of conclusion signals its unimportance. The ‘other day’ of the past is matched by the ‘other place’ – not the court – of the song’s setting. It is a song of elsewhere. I will call this chronotope ‘holiday time’,2 the chronotope of away from home and the usual constraints of home. It is not the holiday of the bourgeois – a periodic respite from work – but an effect of the difference in status existing between the courtier and the shepherdess which cuts him loose from ethical responsibility. Holiday time bears some resemblance to Bakhtin’s ‘adventure time’, although they are far from identical. Chance plays a part in both, but a different part. In the adventure time of the Greek romance, Bakhtin argues: ‘This logic is one of random contingency’ (Dialogic Imagination 92). It is a world where initiative belongs everywhere exclusively to chance. It goes without saying that in this type of time, an individual can be nothing other than completely passive, completely unchanging. […] As we have said earlier, to such an individual things can merely happen. He himself is deprived of any initiative (105). must use for particular circumstances’ (Andreas 47). For Andreas, appropriateness of speech and action to the object and the circumstances is the key to winning love (see Book 1 On Love). This sense of appropriateness is at the heart of generic distinctions for the trouvères, but they cannot resist challenging their distinctions. 2 See William Powell Jones’ reference, in 1931, to pastourelle as ‘courtly love on holiday’ (Pastourelle 31).

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But the reader/listener cannot write off the protagonist as mere moving matter: It is nevertheless a living human being moving through space and not merely a physical body […]. While it is true that his life may be completely passive – ‘Fate’ runs the game – he nevertheless endures the game fate plays. And […] he keeps on being the same person and emerges from this game […] with his identity absolutely unchanged (105).

Adventure time and holiday time make an illuminating comparison, both in their similarities and in their differences. Unlike Greek romance, the pastourelle is a game of skill as well as chance. The narrator brings all his rhetorical skill to bear on the situation and it makes a difference.3 His fast talking often gets him his way. He is very far from passive, taking the initiative in the contest with the shepherdess. He does much more than endure, but chance also plays a part in the outcome. The proximity of redoubtable peasant protectors for the shepherdess, for instance, or her own degree of self-protective skill, are factors he cannot control. He remains unchanged, however, but without being passive, unlike the chanson lover who is presented as utterly changed and yet completely passive. In the pastourelle, passivity is distinguished from stasis but the other way around. The narrator remains unchanged, not vis-à-vis the workings of Fate, but because the incident is too trivial to change him and because, like a ship-board romance, it happens on holiday, away from his true life – at court. No responsibilities are carried across into his true home. Unlike la malmariée who claims causal mastery and refuses to acknowledge the role of chance, the narrator of the pastourelle is not presented as an automaton. He appears to move through space and time as a human subject and yet remain unchanged. It is partly his shrewdness, partly his amusement, often at his own expense, which persuades the audience he is no machine. Perhaps it is the very combination of chance and intention that marks him out as human. Things may go right or wrong. He can get it wrong, make a fool of himself or run away in a cowardly manner and recollect it all for his audience with humour, as in ‘Or voi yver defenir’ where the narrator relates the shepherdess’ trickery and her final taunting words: ‘You’ve lost your joy! you stupid gaper, now gape!’ (Paden, Medieval Pastourelle I 235). Yet the narrator’s humanity does not involve any kind of reflection. In the pastourelle the narrator looks back, but this looking back has no ethical dimension. In ‘Or voi yver defenir’ he has been shamed and humiliated but appears unaffected by it. It is just an amusing story. Again unimportance comes into the equation. The unimportance of the object and the claimed disengagement of desire mean that no ethical attitude is required. This object 3

See Christopher Callahan (‘Hybrid Discourse’ 5).

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is not sublime. Shame and humiliation are out of place in holiday time. The narrator does not change, because what he does with an unsouled object does not matter, nor what she does or says to him. The holiday chronotope is outside the life of ethical choices and their consequences. This attitude of the narrator’s, like everything else about these songs, is not universal. Generalizations are always dangerous in this repertoire. Occasionally the behaviour of the shepherdess brings the narrator ‘to his senses’ – to a sense of responsibility for his actions. This seems to be the case in the final strophe of ‘L’autrier mi chivachoie’, where she resists in a decisive manner: ‘Sire, or de grant folie (ke j’ai ne lou ferai, je ne vos doute mie) mout bien me deffendrai.’ Kant j’antendi deffendre lai vairoie, boin grei l’an so; a Deu la commandoie.

‘Sir, now from such great wantonness (For I won’t do it, I don’t fear you at all) I’ll defend myself very well.’ When I heard her forbid me to see her, I was grateful; to God I commended her. (Paden, Medieval Pastourelle I, 250–1).

It is tempting to see the shepherdess’ unexampled probity as the explanation offered for his change of heart (for a moment before he was determined to have her). She has – to enter a different register – ‘saved him from himself ’, not by guile but by her integrity, and he is grateful to be saved from wrongdoing. In so doing she has not acted like a shepherdess. She has made things matter, not by firing him up further in accordance with the Freudian prohibition touched on in Chapter 3, but by putting herself beyond the limits of his acceptable lust. When shepherdesses turn moral, giving evidence of soul, it is no longer holiday time. It is not chanson time either, however, because, although she is no longer a shepherdess, she is not la dame either. Typically, however, like the malmariée, the pastourelle narrator is not changed by his encounter. The malmariée, who is always right and never looks back, does not appear quite human; but he, by finding an unsouled creature to slake his lust on and a place of no constraint, can appear human while emerging unscathed and unchanged from his pleasures. This is presented as his masculine privilege. He, on the whole, will do just the same next time and take his chances on the outcome again. The chanson lover, on the other hand, is presented as utterly overthrown and transformed by his encounter with the sublime object, as in Thibaut de Champagne’s ‘Ausi conme unicorne sui’: Ausi conme unicorne sui qui s’esbahist en regardant quant la pucele va mirant.

I am like the unicorn who is bewildered when he gazes at the maiden.

CHRONOTYPES OF DESIRE II

Tant est liee de son ennui, pasmee chiet en son giron; lors l’ocit on en traïson. Et moi ont mort d’autel senblant Amors et ma dame, por voir; mon cuer ont, n’en puis point avoir.

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So overjoyed is he in his torment that he falls fainting in her lap; then they treacherously kill him. And me have they killed in the same way, Love and my Lady, in truth; they have my heart and I can’t reclaim it. (Brahney 102–5)

These extreme metaphors indicate a seismic shift from which there is no return, although, as so often, there is a tang of impeccability – a kind of moral preening – which erodes the sense of peril. Feminine desire is not as easily partitioned as the masculine. There is no holiday time for the femme. Although she does not always matter as an object, it seems that there is no situation for her in which her desires are not of paramount importance to her. Holiday time, although it is elsewhere, is still mundane. There are no apparent temporal deviations here. This is the space-time of the object, the material shepherdess, the space-time in which she can be found and successfully seduced – the time for sex. The pastourelle chronotope, like pastourelle desire, is affiliated with the object rather than the subject. It can be traced by its spatio-temporal co-ordinates. For instance, two pastourelles by Thibaut de Champagne begin: ‘I was wandering the other day without companion on my palfrey, thinking of making a song, when I heard, I know not how, beside a bush the voice of the prettiest child that any man ever saw’ (Paden, Medieval Pastourelle I, 133, his translation), and ‘The other day in the morning between a wood and an orchard I found a shepherdess singing to amuse herself ’ (Paden, Medieval Pastourelle I, 135, his translation). These co-ordinates, however, are not simply mundane. They gesture at the mundane and measurable while, at the same time, conveying a significance beyond it, symbolizing a place where one is freed from sexual constraint. The pastourelle takes place in a kind of land of Cockaigne, but not one freed from all mishaps. The narrator’s will may be constrained by the operation of chance. Pastourelle time is also the space-time of action. It’s an action drama. Sex, like music and narrative, requires temporal progression and causal sequence. Sex requires narrative itself. The pastourelle (as song) cannot be other than narrative, although it can be seen how easily it is turned into drama.4 It requires the convergence in space and time of the two engaged in it – the stage, so to speak, and also the kind of energy by which events are generated. The pastourelle requires plenty of activity to move things along. See for instance two strophes of the anonymous pastourelle ‘L’autrier a doulz mois de mai’: 4

As in Adam de la Halle’s Le jeu de Robin et Marion.

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Lors m’escriai a haut ton, sens poent d’arestence: ‘Li lous enporte un mouton!’ et Robins s’avance, s’ait deguerpie la dance; la blonde laissait, et elle se rescriait de jolit cuer amerous: se j’avoie ameit un jor, je diroie a tous bones sont amors.

Then, without a pause, I cried out loud: ‘The wolf is stealing a sheep!’ Robin ran off, abandoning the dance; he left the blonde girl behind and she sang out with a glad and loving heart: if I had loved one day, I would tell everyone that love is good.

La pastourelle enbraissai, ki est blanche et tendre; desor l’erbe la getai, ne s’en pout desfendre. Lou jeu d’amors sens atendre li fix per delit, et elle a chanteir se prist de jolit cuer amerous: se j’avoie ameit trois jors, je diroie a tous bones sont amors.

I embraced the shepherdess, who was white and tender; I pushed her down to the ground, and she could not protest. With no delay I played her the pleasant game of love, and she began to sing with a glad and loving heart: If I had loved three days, I would tell everyone that love is good. (Rosenberg, Switten and Le Vot 205, their translation).

If this is compared with the nebulous and wavering progression of a chanson, it becomes clearer that the narrative means are not provided there for any sexual activity to take place. Everything that happens in ‘L’autrier a doulz mois de mai’ moves the action forward. It is a fast-paced, knockabout little scenario. While the narrator and the shepherdess of pastourelle must converge in space-time for the action to develop, they inhabit it differently. The difference between them is that he is ‘just passing through’ – on holiday. He enters, generates the necessary activity and moves on. As a souled being he does not belong, whereas she remains glued to the spot. Even where she turns the tables on him she usually does it in situ. She must stay whereas he simply leaves the scene. The pastourelle narrator sets out his narrative from a point beyond its ending, unlike la femme of low style whose story is often still going on as she tells it. Pastourelle has the flavour of an amused post-mortem account, almost a dirty joke: ‘a funny thing happened to me …’. All is known (by the narrator) about the resolution of the story. Everything has already happened. The past fills the song to the exclusion of all else, unlike the songs of la femme which spill over into the present and future. The narrator, unlike the femme, does not inform us of his future intentions. The audience simply waits to be told what has already happened. But because whatever happened was

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relatively unimportant – hence the amusement – we do not wait on the edge of our seats. The pace is not frantic. The tempo of audience expectation matches the tempo of the story: both move at an amble like the narrator in the anonymous ‘Hyer matin a l’enjornee’: Hyer matin a l’enjornee toute m’enbleüre chevauchoi aval la pree querant aventure’

Yesterday morning at dawn at an amble I was riding down the meadow seeking an adventure (Paden, Medieval Pastourelle I: 124–5, his translation).

The tempo of the events (the fabula), could be expressed by the formula speed = time distance travelled if distance is extended to cover action and speech as well as movement.5 It is the time it takes for the narrator to arrive on the scene, engage in dialogue with the shepherdess, have his way with her (or not) and take his leave. In this case the tempo is marked largo. The narrator is never presented as discomposed or hurried by his desire in any way although he acts as swiftly as he needs in carrying out his will. His activity, that is to say, is measured to the needs of his seduction or rape of the shepherdess rather than to the urgency of his desire. It is instrumental rather than affective. All this leisureliness is his way of insisting that his desire is not of any moment – not desire at all. The narrative energy of ‘Hyer matin’ equals the energy of the lust: both are less than urgent. It is a necessary aspect of the trouvère corpus that the least excitement is generated in the genre where, because of the undetermined nature of the denouement, the most could be generated, except, of course, that the outcome is not predetermined precisely because it is of no significance. In the chanson, conversely, where audiences must have learned that fulfilment will not follow, uncertainty is endemic because impossibility is never allowed to be spoken. Ostensibly, a possible way is left open to la dame. Although the tempo of the pastourelle is leisurely, the temporal movement is unproblematically forwards. Pastourelle time is, ostensibly, the least problematic of those we shall encounter. The distance measured by time, however, has a gap, between the fictive events and the telling of them in song, and the identity of the narrator depends on his being able to leap this gap. The

5

Gérard Genette discusses narrative tempo in Narrative Discourse, where he uses a similar definition: ‘By “speed” we mean the relationship between a temporal dimension and a spatial dimension (so many meters per second, so many second per meter)’ (87). I am concerned here only with tempo within the fictive frame, not (as he is), with the ratio of the time of the events recounted to the time taken to read or sing the song.

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narrator as a character within the frame of fictive events – the subject of the statement (énoncé) – is temporally distinguished from, but temporally joined to, the narrator of the performance: the subject of the utterance (énonciation), or the ‘narrating’, in Genette’s term (213). He is, as Terry Eagleton phrases it, ‘strung out along the chains of the discourses’ (Literary Theory 169). He tells us, in effect: ‘I, who speak to you now, am identical to the ‘I’ to whom these things happened’. But in truth there are two ‘I’s here. Lacan illustrates this split with the paradoxical statement: ‘I am lying’: It is quite clear that the I am lying, despite its paradox, is perfectly valid. Indeed, the I of the enunciation is not the same as the I of the statement, that is to say, the shifter which, in the statement designates him. (Fundamental Concepts 139)

It is a formal demarcation between the ‘I’ of the enunciation and the ‘I’ of the statement. The claimed identity of the two is what holds together the time of the pastourelle. This is the time of first-person narrative. Time needs to be imagined running like a ribbon between the two, justifying their claim to be identical and then using their ‘proved’ identity as itself proof of the existence of time by its ‘proof ’ of the narrator’s continuous existence. This is time which presents itself as natural – commonsense, no nonsense. In reality it is not unproblematic. Its logic is circular in that time is invoked to guarantee being, while being is invoked to guarantee time. Something of the power and mastery of the story-teller appears as a result of his capacity to bridge this divide from the fictive space of the enunciated to the space of the performance, the enunciation. His temporal versatility is mirrored in his spatial mobility (emblematized by his horse) by which he moves freely between the court and the country and exploits his class superiority for sexual privileges. He goes among the peasantry and takes his pleasure. He can move while they must stay where they are, spatially and temporally, while time rolls on and the scene changes. They are locked in the space-time of the narration while he moves to the space-time of the narrating, back among his peers. Theirs is the fate of the non-narrating character, the fate to which the shepherdess is subjected in her role as the object of low desire. The pastourelle narrator shares this capacity to move with the ‘narrating’ femme of the low-style chansons de femme. The difference is that for him there appears no contradiction. For her, movement looks inauthentic because she appears as an object (moving matter), while he moves naturally since he appears as a human agent, in charge of his act. As mentioned above, man’s versatility is also measured by his ability to respond to different desires and different objects in appropriate ways. In his containing aspect, vis-à-vis the shepherdess, he moves, free to come and go. The apparently unproblematic appearance of time here is in accordance

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with the narrator’s apparently unproblematic – and insignificant – desire. The possibility of sexual fulfilment allows a narrative of conclusion. His desire and its object are left behind, closed off temporally and spatially in the story, while he moves away, unthreatened and unchanged. Time does bend in the pastourelle, however. The pastourelle, like the chanson, plays with deferral but in accordance with a different prohibition. In the pastourelle, fulfilment is delayed in order to heighten excitement, as in the Freudian construction of prohibition. These delays can ruffle the temporal surface of the fictive narrative, but any temporal deviations occur only in the fictional frame. They are excluded from the enunciating time, the time of the performance, where everything has been sorted out. The separation between the ‘now’ of telling and the ‘then’ of the events related in this kind of narrative puts a stop to any temporal distortions leaping the gap between. The generic trait whereby pastourelle narration is predicated on the conclusion of events sees to that. One such rift in narrative time comes about through the trope of the mutability of the shepherdess’ desire. An extra narrative trajectory with a different before and after, lying across the main trajectory and at odds with it, follows the desire of the shepherdess. She frequently protests vociferously before the sexual act, which often amounts to rape, only to thank the narrator politely immediately afterwards.6 She is presented, that is, in accordance with the view that whatever women say they really want to be raped, as in the thirteenth-century Clef d’Amours: Never would a woman dare say with her own mouth what she desires so much; but it pleases her greatly when someone takes her against her will, regardless of how it comes about. A maiden suddenly ravished has great joy, no matter what she says (qtd in Gravdal Ravishing Maidens 5).7

Nonetheless in the pastourelle the shepherdess is obliged to say it (afterwards) in order for her desire to be established or confirmed. Anne Howland Schotter confirms the prevalence of this attitude to women’s desire in her study of rape in the medieval Latin comedies: ‘Most of the comedies that deal with rape justify it explicitly with assumptions that it is women’s true desire’ (‘Rape’ 242).8 6

Cf. Calin (70). See also Gravdal’s account in ‘Camouflaging Rape’ (363–4). 8 She notes one exception, in Pamphilus which ‘complicates the misogynistic attitude by attending to the woman’s feelings and by including her voice’ (242). The representation of rape has now become a topic for close examination by feminist scholars. See for instance the collection of essays in Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, to which Schotter’s essay belongs. The ‘woman’s inconstancy’ topos clearly assists the shepherdess’ change of heart, as it does for the lady of Chrétien’s Yvain, as Kay points out: ‘[H]er alleged inconstancy as a woman is invoked to justify her reversal from hostility to passion’ (Courtly Contradictions 53). 7

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Such a change of tune occurs in a number of pastourelles, some of which Gravdal discusses (Ravishing Maidens 111–13). She comments: In no fewer than twelve pastourelles does this same technique appear: a scene of forcible rape is interrupted by coos of female pleasure or followed by the victim’s thanks and request for more of the same (111).

This mutability of desire is demonstrated in the last three strophes of ‘Enmi la rousee que nest la flor’: … Ele me respont: ‘Sire champenois, par vostre folie ne m’avrois des mois car je sui amie au filz dame Marie Robinet le cortois, qui me chauce et lie et si ne me let mie sanz biau chapiau d’orfrois.’

… She answered: ‘Knight of Champagne, you won’t ever have me for your lust. I am the sweetheart of lady Mary’s son, courteous young Robin, who gives me shoes and belts and never leaves me without a fine gold-trimmed garland.’

Quand vi que proiere ne m’i vaut noient, couchai la a terre tout maintenant, levai li le chainse si vi la char si blanche, tant fui je plus ardant, fis li la folie. El ne.l contredist mie, ainz le vout bonement.

When I saw that I’d be urging in vain, I pulled her right down on the ground, lifted her shift, saw her white flesh, burned all the hotter, and did her the lusty thing. She made no protest but went along with delight.

Quant de la pastore oi fet mon talent, sus mon palefroi montai maintenant, et ele s’escrie: ‘Au filz sainte Marie, chevalier, vos conmant; ne me oublïez mie, car je sui vostre amie, mes revenez souvent.’

When I’d done what I liked with the girl, I jumped back up in the saddle and she cried out: ‘I commend you, knight, to holy Mary’s Son! I am your sweetheart, don’t forget me, but come back often.’ (Rosenberg, Switten and Le Vot 201, their translation).

The ruffling of clear, unidirectional narrative seems to occur as a by-product of the construction of the shepherdess as duplicitous (as here, perhaps), or as not knowing her own mind or being new to the game of love. It is also a by-product of the means used to delay and make uncertain the outcome of pastourelle. Her ‘no’ comes before the act and her ‘yes’ after it, a reversal of the conventional logic whereby desire produces action. This reversal itself undercuts the agency of her desire – her capacity to have desire – while, at the same time, emphasising her helplessness. It mimics a logic of causation

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in which the effect produces the cause, a destabilising logic which may be neutralized by the shepherdess’ invitation to restore the proper sequence: her ‘come back often’ which puts her desire before the following encounter. The narrator’s logic is the more familiar kind with the ‘yes’ beforehand and an implicit ‘no’ afterwards, seeing that the act is over. No next time is envisaged from his point of view. This ‘next time’ is not in keeping with the metonymy of the ‘next thing’. For him the next time would equal the next shepherdess; this one has been used up. The ‘other day’ of holiday time is always gone by and the shepherdess with it. The narrator is a Don Juan; it is consistent with his position and the genre itself for him to love and leave, moving on to the next object. But the shepherdess inhabits a different chronotope. Like the femme of low style she projects her desires into the future, militating against the tendency of narrative for completion. For her, as for the triumphalist amie, the future is not separate from the past. The next thing is simply the same thing again. If she likes it she wants it to continue. This is the fixed desire of matter. She is not in a position to narrate a future, however, having no access beyond the frame of fictive events where, as a character, she belongs. But she attempts it. It is her speech which imports lyric into the narrative, for instance in the refrain, so often introduced as her song, as in ‘An mai a douls tens novel’ by Bestourné: An mai a douls tens novel, ke florissent arbrexel et prei renverdissent, desduxant sor un ruxel m’en alai per grant rivel; truis pastoure jolie c’a;pot ces aignialz gardant et en sa pipe chantant son dorelot: ‘J’ai ameit et amerai, hé, dorelot! Et s’aimme aincor, Deus! de jolif cuer mignot.’

In May in the sweet new season, when shrubs blossom and meadows turn green, playing beside a brook I walked along with great delight; I found a pretty shepherdess who was tending her sheep and singing to her pipe her refrain: ‘I have loved and I shall love, O dorelot! And I love yet, God! with a pretty, graceful heart.’ (Paden, Medieval Pastourelle I: 104–5, his translation)

The inclusion of the shepherdess’ words allows a generic detour into lyric. She wants to make a different song, where love is maintained and repeated endlessly (‘I have loved and I shall love … and I love yet’), but she is curtailed. She tries for the freedom of lyric, the kind she enjoys in the chansons de femme (although Chapter 5 demonstrated her subversion of the freedom she demands). ‘An mai a douls tens novel’ allows a flirtation with the trajectory of the object’s desire – if only for the purposes of undercutting it – but in the process the second trajectory unsettles the temporal logic of the first.

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The effect is for the logic of the shepherdess’ desire to reverse the narrator’s, disturbing its equilibrium. In doing so she upsets the generic stability of the pastourelle with her desire for a sequel which undoes completion. She has loved and shall love and loves yet. No break for her between past and future, but his narration cannot begin until the story is over. In her kind of song, narration and events can coincide. She can do it all at once, whereas, for the pastourelle narrator, events must conclude before narration begins. Her will to love carries her through. It is his low desire, corresponding to her status as low object, which provides the chronotope, however, whether he gets his shepherdess or not. His position of loving and leaving ultimately wins the day – as it must do – since his narration is predicated on completion. In the chanson de malmariée, lyric and narrative cannot be easily pulled apart. They do not naturally form themselves into separate blocks. Narrative elements are fragmentary and although a kind of narrative can be stitched together, in ways which I have discussed above, the story is not so explicit. In the pastourelle, where narrative has a more tenacious hold, the process whereby lyric is incorporated does not diminish narrative’s domination. When the shepherdess is given speech of her own, the narrative is sometimes torn in two directions by contending desires which open up the dramatic dimension of the genre, but one of these paths of desire (hers), will inevitably be terminated by the close of the narrative. The juxtaposition of narrative and lyric in strophe and refrain can work in diametrically opposed directions. In the chanson de malmariée this juxtaposition detours the freedom of forward progress by its circularity, as we have seen. In the pastourelle, where everything tends – ultimately – towards completion, the lyric of refrain is harnessed for its narrative value. The shepherdess’ song is exploited for narrative ends (although she resists this cooption) in the same way as the narrator’s words of persuasion are exploited for sexual ends. Pastourelle narrative makes for endings in the same way as low desire – or lust – makes for sexual satisfaction. The generic and the sexual ends are in tandem. Susan Johnson has explored the role of the refrain in Old French song in her dissertation and in an article devoted to the subject of refrain in the pastourelles à refrain, that is, those with a single refrain. In the article she demonstrates how the shepherdess’ song, as refrain, is put to work to tell a story by juxtaposition with the strophe (‘Pastourelles à refrain’). The anonymous pastourelle ‘L’autre jour moi chivachai’ (Paden, Medieval Pastourelle I: 246–9, his translation) is such a song. It has a refrain which changes in the last instance, demonstrating fulfilment and completion. The initial refrain, attributed in the text to the shepherdess: ‘Ai, ai, ai, ai, j’ai a cuer les malz dont je morrai!’ (Ai, ai, ai, ai, I have at heart the pain of which I’ll die!) (249), is a cry of sexual frustration and despair. In the final strophe the narrator ‘embraced her at once’, so much so that ‘it pleased her well’.

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The final refrain, again presented as the shepherdess’ speech, is an inarticulate, stuttering cry of sexual gratification: ‘Ai, ai, ja, ja, j’ai, j’ai santit les malz dont je guerrai!’ (Ai, ai, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve felt the pain of which I’ll be cured!) (249). The sexual and narrative completion produced by the device of the changing refrain is a reversal of the procedure in ‘Ne mi bateis mie’. There the malmariée’s refrain, ‘Do not beat me, miserable husband, I am not in your service’ remains unchanged, but affects the narrative in a different way, revealing an unspoken temporal dimension of interminable circularity. Johnson discusses both pastourelles with changing refrains and those ‘in which the refrain does not change, and it is the context which changes [the refrain’s] meaning’ (85). In the pastourelle, however, both kinds of alteration assist narrative development and closure, although in some of the longer songs ambiguity allows for the delaying of the denouement which, when it comes, also clarifies the ambiguity and brings the refrain to its final interpretation (86). If, as Lacan suggests, ‘desire is a metonymy’ (Écrits 175), the pastourelle takes a single slice of the metonymic process for its scenario. It does not engage with the next object. It does, however, leave the way open for it by the devalorisation of the object which can be consumed – the shepherdess – although at the price of a vitiation of desire to the level of lust. Nothing prevents the next move in the play of desire, although it must be presented as desire of an ambling, insignificant cast. The narrator avoids the pain of desire by disclaiming it from the outset. There is something of an impossibility, however, in the pastourelle miseen-scène beyond the claims of the narrator, an impossibility which shows itself in the chronotope. It is the desire which is made evident in narrative. It is that very propulsion towards the finish with the shepherdess left behind that uncovers its workings. Lacan speaks of this quirk of desire under the signifier in Ethics: It is precisely to the extent that the demand always under- or overshoots itself, because it articulates itself through the signifier, it always demands something else; that in every satisfaction of a need, it insists on something else; that the satisfaction formulated spreads out and conforms to this gap; that desire is formed as something supporting this metonymy, namely, as something the demand means beyond whatever it is able to formulate (294).

Pastourelle desire is only meaningful in opposition to the desire of the chanson: as what the courtier does when he is not desiring an unattainable object. In its own way, however, the narrative of the pastourelle etches desire’s impossibility in a way which is obscured in the chanson, in that it demonstrates that the object will never be enough – a residue remains, requiring yet another shepherdess. Furthermore, by its devalorisation of a desire which can

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be fulfilled it demonstrates the impossibility of an unending succession of shepherdesses ever being sufficient to fill the gap in desire. Each succeeding shepherdess indicates desire’s metonymy in that she demonstrates that she wasn’t sufficient. Implicit in each ending is another beginning, which seems, momentarily, despite the narrator’s disclaimers, to offer the hope of a paradisal scenario, a shepherdess who would really satisfy. Like the collector’s passion, or the passion of a Don Juan – a collector of women – it demands just one more, a ‘one more’ which might be different; or a ‘one more’ which might complete the set? ‘The wondrous sphere that can have no end, that shoots its center through every place and whose circumference has no fixed place’: The Desiring Space/Time of the Chanson In the chanson, desire does not take a narrative path and avoids the destructive fate of satisfaction. The metonymic movement is arrested at the point of the ostensible object’s carefully contrived inaccessibility. This contriving puts a stop to the more radical impossible of desire. In Chapter 3, two songs demonstrated the process by which a past tense narrative of sexual fulfilment – or la dame’s definite acquiescence – introduced into a song, works retroactively to devalorize the lover’s desire and the object of it. Pastourelle escapes this fate only because the narrator claims to know all along that the shepherdess is not the object of his desire. It is the ambiguity, the generic uncertainty of those hybrid songs, which present the afflictions of desire in a particularly vivid way. The promise of fulfilment in Conon de Bethune’s ‘L’autrier avint en cel autre païs’, led to la dame’s immediate decay. She faded: ‘Si la vit mout pale et descoulouree’ (he saw she was very pale and colourless). Consummation led to the devalorisation of the object and of the desire itself, and to a fading of the subject. Since the fate of fulfilled desire is this mortality, the chanson excludes time as it is excluded from the garden of Guillaume de Lorris’ Roman de la rose. (Charles Dahlberg’s translation is used here.) On the outside wall of the Rose’s garden, along with all the vices which are banished from it, Old Age is portrayed, in the pitiful condition to which Time has reduced her: ‘Time […] who parts from us and steals away so quickly, seems to us to be always stopped at one place, but he never stops there at all’ (Dahlberg 35). The dreamer continues: Time, who changes everything, who makes all grow and nourishes all, who uses all and causes it to rot […] Time, who has it in his power to age all mankind, had aged Old Age so cruelly that, in my opinion, she […] was returning to her infancy (36).

To subject desire to narrative, with its metonymic compulsion, is to allow the corrosions of stealthy time into the garden of courtly love. But it is time’s

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retroactive corrosiveness which is at issue. In Jean de Meun’s section of the Rose, which is harnessed to a narrative of fulfilment, Old Age enters the garden as la Vieille. She speaks with the same voice as the disillusioned lover of ‘L'autrier avint en cel autre païs’, a voice of cynicism which retroactively devalues love: ‘Fair son, whoever wants to enjoy loving and its sweet ills which are so bitter must know the commandments of Love but must beware that he does not know love itself ’ (225). Lee Patterson suggests that La Vieille introduce[s] the ambivalences of temporality into the poem in a fully human form. The temporality to which she witnesses is time as experienced and experience as time – the experience, in fact, of a lifetime (‘Feminine Rhetoric’ 327).

La Vieille laments her past, a past in which she gave love to an unworthy beloved who mistreated her, rather than selling to the highest bidder. Looking back has turned bitter the sweet ills of love, has destroyed the ambiguity inherent in the oxymoron ‘sweet ills’. This is the ambiguity whereby the lover sustains a jouissance which obscures lack, a lack which is revealed in the achievement of the goal. La Vieille, with her shattered body and shattered dreams, casts back a miasma of the bitterness of hindsight which achievement of the goal brings. La Vieille’s position demonstrates the ambiguity of feminine desire in particular in that she looks back as the devalued object as well as the cynical subject of desire. But this temporality is not necessarily ‘time as experienced’. Her recounted history of desire is not the past she lived – that has been retroactively devoured – but the past her bitter disappointment has ‘back-projected’ in its place. As in many a science fiction story, past time is ‘disappeared’ by machinations in the present. Lacan addresses this question in Ethics: ‘the question of the realization of desire is necessarily formulated from the point of view of a Last Judgement’ (Ethics 294). La Vieille speaks from the ‘point of view of a Last Judgement’ and desire is among the damned, as it always must be from this point of view. There can be no future after the last judgement, only a past, and desire needs the idea of a future to work its magic. The chanson, like the first part of the Rose, banishes the temporality of retroactive annihilation by playing games with time and space. Time in the chanson exists but it is not harnessed, as sequence, to the needs of an ending, being instead harnessed to deferral. This paradox appears in the numerous metaphors which represent space and time as immeasurable, like the one from the Roman de la rose, quoted in the heading to this section. Immeasurable space/time avoids the loss which becomes apparent in satisfaction: the loss of the illusion cast by the sublime object. Impressions of a logical, temporal and causal development are provided in the chanson but this sense of a development does not stand up to closer

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examination. Zumthor’s masterly examination of one hundred chansons in Toward a Medieval Poetics bears out this tendency. He notes how the absence of narration in chanson makes it ‘unusual for the order in which the elements are arranged to be meaningful in itself’ (147). In the section on the vocabulary of the chanson he remarks on the way in which ‘repetitions, echoes, and alternations […] constitute a series of phonic and semantic links from stanza to stanza, but without conferring any necessary idea of succession’ (153). Moreover the distinction between temporal and causal links cannot be maintained. Conjunctions such as ‘quant’ (when) and ‘puis que’ (since) are ambiguously poised between temporal and causal applications (Medieval Poetics 176): It can be seen that finality, concession, and temporal posteriority are almost excluded from the system; the fundamental relationships […] imply statement rather than deduction and surface continuity rather than phenomena arising from the depths. This is no more than a question of nuances but is a feature undoubtedly linked to the structure of the chanson as both cause and effect (177).

This conflation of cause and effect with its exclusion of finality and temporal posteriority can be seen as a way of sustaining the jouissance which obscures the lover’s lack and prevents the fall of the sublime object. The chanson chronotope invokes something of the paradox of divinity, something akin to the ‘wondrous sphere’ of the quotation at the start of this section (Roman de la Rose 316).9 Augustine contemplates a similar paradox in Book I of the Confessions: Do heaven and earth, then, contain the whole of you, since you fill them? Or, when once you have filled them, is some part of you left over because they are too small to hold you? […] Or is it that you have no need to be contained in anything, because you contain all things in yourself and fill them by reason of the very fact that you contain them? (Confessions 23).

This is the paradox of chanson, in which the container cannot be distinguished from the contained, a paradox which interested Lacan and for which he formed the neologism extimité, translated as ‘extimacy’, for instance in Ethics where it refers to the ‘ “intimate exteriority” that is the Thing’ (139).10 This is the spatial aspect of the confusion of cause and object. But it is not

9 Sneyders de Vogel traces this paradox to Bonaventure, Vincent de Beauvais and Gerson (‘Le cercle’ 246–7). 10 Cf. Spitzer, who speaks of the ‘ “obstacle” which the mystics know: this obstacle is that which prevents, in us, the mystic union – the distance is paradoxically consubstantial with the desire for union’ (L’amour lointain 21). It seems to me that the distance is consubstantial with the union.

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enough to suggest that the chanson is simply a way of talking about mystical love for God. As Sarah Kay notes: ‘all of the theories of the origin of the lyric necessitate a displacement from the putative model (e.g., the love lyric is like mystical writing but different from it)’ (‘Contradictions’ 210).11 Courtly texts, she elaborates in Courtly Contradictions, ‘enfold secular concerns within clerical structures’ leading to widely varying interpretations of their intent (306). The ambiguity, however, remains insoluble because there is no way finally to decide which predominates: the secular or the religious preoccupation. One cannot be sure which is the text and which the gloss. It is the sublime object, la dame, who provides the chanson with its immeasurability. Such objects ‘will appear imbued with a kind of eternal value’ suggests Kay (Courtly Contradictions 262). Contained and Containing: ‘Extimacy’ of the Metaphoric Heart Something like this strange immeasurability of the heart is articulated in Lacan’s account of das Ding: das Ding [the Thing] is at the center only in the sense that it is excluded. That is to say, in reality das Ding has to be posited as exterior […] something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me (Lacan, Ethics 71).

This ‘extimate’ space/time of the chanson must be presented metaphorically rather than mundanely – that is, narratively – and therefore as somehow beyond ordinary human experience.12 In this spatial aspect of the chronotope, the ‘heart’ has a wide semantic range as an organ of perception, thought, affect, memory, even perhaps the vital force. The heart might be thought of as Eros itself, that ‘irreducible reserve of libido’ to which Lacan refers in Anxiety (16. 1. 63). This organ sometimes appears separate from the life of the body in space/time, as in Conon de Béthune’s chanson: ‘Ahi! Amours! com dure departie’: Ahi, Amors! com dure departie me convendra faire de la millor ki onques fust amee ne servie!

11

Ah Love! how hard a parting I must make from the best who ever was loved or served!

Kay cites Jean-Charles Huchet as the source of this comment. For Gillian Rose, in ‘As if the Mirrors had Bled’, ‘real’ [that is, mundane] space, is privileged by geographers over metaphorical space, and ‘this distinction between real and non-real space is characterized as a performance of […] masculinist power’ (58). In chanson, because of its particular requirements, the reverse is true. For the trouvères it is la femme, incapable of metaphor, who is trapped in the mundane. 12

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Dieus me ramaint a li par sa douçour si voirement que j’en part a dolor! Las! k’ai je dit? Ja ne m’en part je mie! Se li cors vait servir nostre Seignor, li cuers remaint du tot en sa baillie.

May God in his goodness return me to her as truly as I part from her in sorrow. Alas! What have I said? I do not part from her at all! If the body goes to serve our Lord the heart remains entirely in her keeping. (Wallensköld 6–7).

Unlike the body of the low-style femme, the metaphoric heart of the chanson lover suffers no mundane limitation. It can be both container and contained. Conon’s lover’s heart is contained by la dame, ‘in her keeping’, while the heart of Gace Brule’s ‘Pour verdure ne pour pree’ is the container for love: ‘Love has enclosed itself in my heart for a long sojourn’ (Rosenberg and Danon 162–5). Refusal of the mundane allows a chronotope which blurs the distinction between container and contained. But the escape is only partial. The heart, an aspect of the souled essence of man, can exist in this rarefied atmosphere but sometimes at the price of a painful tearing away from the body’s mundane existence.13 An understanding of the human subject as a being split between soul and body has this effect. The immeasurable soul’s escape from limitation exacts its pound of flesh from the body. Metaphors of alienation and fragmentation abound, like those in Thibaut de Champagne’s ‘Por ce se d’amer me dueil’: … c’est sa grant biaute veraie qui en plusieurs sens m’essaie, que ce que j’ai se ce conbat a moi. C’est cuer et cors et oeil dont la voie, mès le cuer a, qu’est de greigneur pouoir. Or me doint Dex les autres vueille avoir!

… it is her great, true beauty, which through many senses assails me, that puts me in combat with myself. It is heart and body and eyes which see her, but she has my heart, which has the greatest power. Now God grant me that she might want the others! (Brahney 22–23)

The lover refers to this disunity in the next strophe as a ‘great wound’ which la dame has inflicted. Mention of the body, here as elsewhere, alludes discreetly – perhaps jokingly – to the possibility of sexual fulfilment. The lover’s heart – which the lady has ‘in her prison’ – and the body, would be reunited in her in the sexual act. But this would be to restore heart and body

13

I cannot help but think of Strephon, the half-fairy in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, who complains that his body can creep through a keyhole but his legs are left kicking behind.

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to the mundaneness of sex.14 The heart’s ambiguous spatial status is apparent in ‘Por ce se d’amer me dueil’. It is both container since it harbours a vision of her beauty and yet it is contained since she has it in her prison. Fulfilment would rob the lover of the precious experience of ‘extimacy’, the ambiguity of containing and contained would be resolved. So the pious sentiments of Thibaut’s lover: ‘God grant me that she might want the others’, are untrustworthy. Mundane space/time, which is measurable, cannot be openly avoided in chanson: that would be to reveal the refusal of fulfilment and this refusal must be concealed. It can, however, be endlessly confused and reversed and so robbed of definition. It is the voice of the low-style femme, speaking in concrete terms because she cannot master the figures of rhetoric, that makes space and time measurable. Her milieu, like her discourse, is the mundane world of matter. In both the pastourelle and the low-style chanson de femme, anchors of time and place provide the co-ordinates for narrative. In Gace Brulé’s chanson ‘Les oxelés de mon païx’, temporal and spatial markers are offered in a semblance of anchoring but the lens is artistically blurred by the filter of the lover/singer’s operations of perception and memory: Les oxelés de mon païx ai oïs en Bretaigne. A lors chans m’est il bien avis k’en la douce Champaigne les oï jadis, se n’i ai mespris.

The little birds of my land I have heard in Brittany. When I hear their song, it is my belief that in sweet Champagne I heard them once, if I am not mistaken. (Rosenberg and Danon 4–9)

These references to place and time could perhaps be taken as anchors for the desiring subject, as, in fact they are by Rosenberg: ‘The reference is to a period, some time between 1181 and 1186, spent at the court of Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of Brittany, half-brother of Marie de Champagne’ (Rosenberg, Switten and Le Vot 256). Yet these supposed anchors, filtered through the self-doubting memory of the subject, have the effect of a swirling mist, confusing times and places until no time or place remains in focus. The ultimate effect is of a long-ago and faraway place which only perhaps ever existed, ‘if I am not mistaken’. The question of which is ‘my land’ is not clear. It seems not to be Brittany

14 Simon Gaunt draws attention to the alternative of a sacrificial union which is far from mundane, in the ‘eaten heart’ motif in medieval literature: ‘One possible reading of the story, then, is that it explores the lady’s unconscious desire to devour her lover […] So what then of the lover? Is his unconscious desire to be eaten?’ (Martyrs 95). In this reading, union equals a destruction which spares the lover the loss of the sublime object, at a fatal cost.

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since Brittany is distinguished from ‘my land’. Champagne may well be ‘my land’ but that ‘once’, obscures it in a dreamlike, uncertain past.15 Whether or not this first strophe sheds some biographical light on Gace, ‘my land’ seems in its haziness to represent the kind of space towards which chanson lovers gesture, the time/space of the sublime object which is not geographically accessible. An illusion of place, like the illusion of a unilinear temporality, is offered but it resists all attempts to locate.16 Oscillating Time Time appears in the Chastelain’s song ‘Li nouviauz tanz’, discussed in Chapter 3, as eccentric, a product of affect, which oscillates with the mood of the lover. The song begins in a future projected by hope: ‘Now may God let me rise to such honour that she, in whom I place my heart and my thoughts, will lie once more naked in my arms, before I sail abroad’. By the final strophe the tense has mysteriously moved to the past of disappointment: ‘if it were not for that wicked race, I would not have sighed for nothing: Love would have granted me its reward. But at the moment I was to receive my gift, then was love discovered and exposed. Truly, may they never be forgiven!’ The song creates the impression of a narrative. There appears to be a temporal/causal progression, but the nature of this progression is occluded. The wicked race of those who expose love is invoked but no narrative substance is given to their interventions. They seem merely to provide an excuse for the movement from future to past, from a before to an after. The lover’s movement from hope to despair requires the appearance of the temporal and causal progression which narrative provides. Something in the nature of an occurrence is gestured at but it remains narratively empty. In fact it is simply that hope invokes a future, while despair and disappointment invoke a past. Time zigzags as a correlate of affect. It is, however, ordered insofar as it must be contained within the song’s own temporality, a beginning invoking the song’s own future and an ending invoking its past.17 The song’s temporality may be seen as self-referential, as Zumthor implies in his reference to ‘the structure of the chanson as both cause and effect’

15

Cf. Emmanuèle Baumgartner, who suggests that in examining the canso of the troubadours, even when it appears to offer precise geographical markers, ‘it is better […] to guard against an exclusively referential interpretation’ (‘Terre estrange’ 8). 16 Baumgartner considers this song. She suggests that the birds’ songs ‘abolish distance, at once spatial and temporal between the lover and his lady, between Bretagne and Champagne’ (‘La terre estrange’ 12). It seems to me that the chanson insists both that there is and that there is not a spatial/temporal distance between desiring subject and desired ‘object’. That is the quality of ‘extimacy’. 17 This last reading is dependent on a particular ordering of strophes which is, however, not uniform in the mss. See Rosenberg, Switten and Le Vot (249). The springtime exordium in strophe 1, however, places it securely as the beginning.

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(Medieval Poetics 177). There is here the appearance of an aftermath of disillusionment, but the claim to disillusionment here is disingenuous. The illusion is precisely what remains intact. In the place of cynicism, nostalgia raises its head. Susan Stewart maintains that the past [nostalgia] seeks has never existed except as narrative, and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack. […] This point of desire which the nostalgic seeks is in fact the absence that is the very generating mechanism of desire (Stewart 23).

In ‘Li nouviauz tanz’, however, it is an absence which might be said to cover a lack for the lover, by preventing a confrontation with the disillusionment of fulfilment. The lover stakes nothing in action. ‘De bone amour et de lëaul amie’ adopts a different strategy. Deferral is introduced at an earlier point without any semblance of narrative direction or narrative substance at all to create a before and an after. It does not reach that stage of temporal division. This lover is too wavering to require even the disguise of a thwarting occurrence, such as the intervention of rivals or mesdisant. He does his own thwarting in advance of any supposed action. Nor is he hampered by the conflict between body and heart; without the semblance of narrative he is all soul. ‘De bone amour et de lëaul amie’ Chanson RS: 1102, L: 65–25, MW: 2052 Manuscripts: OCHLU, za (complete version) Attribution: Gace Brulé in C Music: in LOU Text: Rosenberg and Danon 236–41 Other eds.: Rosenberg, Switten and Le Vot 260–1, Rosenberg and Tischler 217–19. 1. De bone amour et de lëaul amie me vient sovant pitiez et remembrance,

qu’ele de touz ne face son plaisir et de toutes, mais ne puet avenir que de la moie aie bone esperance.

From good love and from loyal friend tenderness and remembrance often come to me so that never for a day of my life will I forget her face or her appearance; therefore, if Love no longer wishes to refrain from having her way with all men and all women, it cannot happen that I will have good hope from mine.

2. Coment porroie avoir bone esperance a bone amor et a leal amie, ne a biaus yeuz n’a la douce semblance que ne verrai jamés jor de ma vie? Amer m’estuet, ne m’en puis plus sosfrir,

How could I have good hope for good love or loyal friend, nor for beautiful eyes or sweet appearance that I will never see again in my life? I must love, I can no longer refrain,

si que jamais a nul jor de ma vie n’oblïerai son vis ne sa semblance; por ce, s’Amors ne se vuet plus sosfrir

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celi cui ja ne vanra a plaisir; siens sui, coment qu’il m’en doie avenir, et si n’i voi ne confort ne aïe. 3. Coment avrai je confort ne ahie encontre Amour, vers cui nus n’a puissance? Amer me fait ce qui ne m’aimme mie, donc ja n’avrai fors ennui et pesance; ne ja nul jor ne l’oserai gehir celi qui tant de maus me fait sentir; mais de tel mort sui jugiez a morir dont ja ne quier veoir ma delivrance. 4. Je ne vois pas querant tel delivrance par quoi amors soit de moi departie, ne ja n’en quier nul jor avoir poissance; ainz vuil amer ce qui ne m’aimme mie. N’il n’est pas droiz je li doie gehir por nul destroit que me face sentir; n’avrai confort, n’i voi que dou morir, puis que je voi que ne m’ameroit mie. 5. Ne m’ameroit? Ice ne sai je mie, que fins amis doit par bone atendance et par soffrir conquerre haute amie; mes je n’i puis avoir nulle fiance, que cele est teus, por cui plaing et sopir, que ma dolor ne doigneroit oïr; si me vaut mieuz garder mon bon taisir que dire riens qui li tort a grevance. 6. Ne vos doit pas trop torner a grevance se je vos aing, dame, plus que ma vie, que c’est la riens ou j’ai greignor fiance, que par moi seul vos oi nommer amie. et por ce fais maint doloros sopir qu’assez vos puis et veoir et oïr, mais quant vos voi, n’i a que dou taisir, que si sui pris que ne sai que je die.

she whom my love will never bring pleasure; I am hers, whatever happens to me, Although I see neither comfort nor help. How shall I have comfort and help to encounter Love, against whom no-one has any power? She makes me love one who doesn’t love me at all, I shall never have anything but pain and suffering; nor will I ever dare to reveal it to her who makes me feel so much pain; but to such a death am I doomed to die that I do not wish for deliverance. I do not go seeking such a deliverance that Love would thereby leave me, nor do I ever wish to have such power; rather I wish to love one who does not love me at all. Nor is it right that I should confess it to her for any torment that she makes me feel; I will have no comfort, I see only that I must die, Since I see that she would never love me. Never love me? I don’t really know that, because a true lover only conquers a noble beloved by faithful waiting and by suffering; but I can have no trust in that, for she is such, she for whom I lament and sigh, that she would not deign to hear my sorrow; so I do better to keep my good silence than to say anything to cause her offence. It must not offend you too much if I love you, lady, more than my life, since this is the thing in which I have the greatest trust, that by me alone I hear you named friend. And for that I give many sad sighs, because I can often see and hear you, but when I see you I can only be silent, for I am so overwhelmed that I don’t know what to say.

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E1. Mes biaus conforz ne m’en porra garir; de vous amer ne me porrai partir, n’a vos parler, ne ne m’en puis taisir que mon maltrait en chantant ne vos die. E2. Par Deu, Hüet, ne m’en puis [plus] soffrir, qu’en Bertree est et ma morz et ma vie.

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But good comfort cannot cure me from loving you, nor make me leave off speaking to you, nor make me refrain from telling you of my ill-treatment in song. By God, Huet, I can no longer refrain from it, for in Bertree is my death and my life.

The amie of Chapters 4 and 5 is always to be found, like the shepherdess, in her place. Even as lyric subject she is brought to life by the materiality of her presence. She is there to be looked at. Narrative gives her form which she emphasizes by her self-reference. It is the agency associated with looking which is tenuous in the amie. In the purer lyric of ‘De bone amour’ the lover is all soul, a perceiving, remembering, suffering but bodiless essence, unlike the torn lovers of Conon and Thibaut. This soul cannot be pinned down like the body. It looks but it cannot be looked at since nothing embodies it. It appears as always present to itself and this continuous presence keeps it always in the present. There is something resembling temporal movement but it moves with the lyric subject. It has sequence but the point of reference, ‘I’ is always ‘now’ and ‘here’. There is only one space/time, an expansive temporal modality of now and here, an amorphous space/time of cogitation and affect including memory and expectation, wherein the ‘I’ zigzags about, avoiding any decisive moves, while maintaining the appearance of logical progression. This is the temporality of the Rose’s garden in its purest state ‘in which’ as Emmanuelle Baumgartner suggests, ‘nothing […] commits one to any action. […] time [is] suspended, fixed in an eternal present’ (‘Play’ 27). ‘De bone amour et de lëaul amie’ offers an excellent example of this trait of non-commitment to action: ‘I must love, I can no longer refrain, she whom my love will never bring pleasure; I am hers, whatever happens to me, although I see neither comfort nor help…I will have no comfort; I see only that I must die, since I see that she would never love me. Never love me? I don’t really know that, because a true lover only conquers a noble beloved by faithful waiting and by suffering; but I can have no trust in that, for she is such, she for whom I lament and sigh, that she would not deign to hear my sorrow’, and so on. The intricate versification of ‘De bone amour’ actively promotes this kind of dithering. The rules that Gace has set himself in this chanson, the coblas capfinidas which require ‘the first line of each stanza [to] contain [the] last rhyme word of [the] previous stanza’ (Gaunt and Kay, Troubadours 292), lend themselves very easily to the articulation of uncertainty and ambivalence. When the capfinidas word is introduced for the second time it constitutes a

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challenge to its first appearance, as in the interrogations posed by strophes 2, 3 and 5, thwarting any decisive action on the lover’s part. He does not even contemplate any. This lyric temporality of ‘presentness’ draws in past and future by a process of distension, similar to that described in Book XI of Augustine’s Confessions: ‘the mind “distends” itself in the present towards the past, which is made present by means of the memory, and toward the future, which is made present as expectation’ (Vance, Mervelous Signals 35), but past and present remain ‘wholly within the mind’ (35).18 In strophe 1 of ‘De bone amour’, for instance, remembrance ‘comes to me’. Remembrance of things past visits the subject’s present and becomes another ingredient in the zigzagging emotional stew we have observed. It is not separate from the lyric present. Similarly ‘she would not deign to hear my sorrow’ presents a fantasized future, the truth of which will never be tested, of la dame’s harsh treatment, which is also added to the mix. Narrative of the kind found in the pastourelle separates, or creates the illusion of separating the narrator from the past he or she is describing. The narrative space/time is clearly distinguished from the space/time of performance or of composition. It emphasizes the logical distinction between the enunciating ‘I’ and the ‘I’ of the statement while insisting they are one and the same. Without narrative, without action, there is nothing to distinguish the two ‘I’s of the chanson, as Zumthor points out: ‘the utterance is almost completely coterminous with the enunciation’ (Medieval Poetics 158). This is the crux of the subject’s ‘presentness’. This supposedly seamless ‘I’ is simply a limitless centre of desire pulsating with alternating hope and despair – limitless because it is unbounded by the effects of narrative. There are, of course, little narratives in many chansons, unlike this one, but they are vestigial, and, like the narrative shreds of ‘Les oxelés de mon paix’, they remain unanchored in the particulars of place and time while offering the semblance of an anchor. There is one exception: the time of first seeing la dame is said to be so momentous an occasion that it creates a temporal break which is also a break in subjectivity, a point of no return, as in Thibaut de Champagne’s ‘Ausi conme unicorne sui’: ‘Lady, when I stood before you and saw you for the first time, my heart leapt so that it remained with you when I left …’ (Brahney 102–5). It is to the time following this break that the chanson chronotope refers. What replaces narrative direction in ‘De bone amour’ is an increasing resonance within the desiring space/time, caused by the dual operations of repetition and alteration of significant semantic material in the absence of release. For instance, to take the most obvious example, love and its deriva18 See the study by Dolly and Cornier on the ‘unifying power’ of memory in the songs of Thibaut de Champagne (‘Aimer’ 336).

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tives and close relations (such as ‘amie’) occur eighteen times, each with its own nuance deriving from repetition and alteration, its particular state of sameness and difference in relation to other occurrences. For instance, the phrase ‘love one who does not love me at all’ is a repetition but also an alteration because of the altered context. The first time Love is the culprit who brings about this state of affairs, the second time it is the lover’s own wish. In fact the repetition is an alteration in itself simply because it is not the first occurrence. Différance intervenes. It has now a different resonance in that each occurrence increases the reverberation of the phrase, although it may not matter very much in which order they occur. The song becomes an echo chamber.19 The echoing in ‘De bone amour’ is a product of the rules of versification, but it can occur in other ways.20 This closed economy is sexually highly charged because every echo increases the resonance, heightening the tension. The result is the pressure-cooked erotic described in Chapter 3. In the chanson, while there may be the semblance of a before and an after as in ‘Li nouviaus tanz’, the song maintains a chronotope of temporal and causal oscillation which equals stasis in its deferral of action, fulfilment or resolution. The various strategies mentioned (there are others), effectively block both past and future. They block the placing of desire in a past tense narrative, like la Vieille’s cynical autobiography, or that of the equally cynical ‘lover’ of ‘L’autrier avint en cel autre païs’ discussed in Chapter 3. Past tense narrative (except for the empty past of songs like ‘Li nouviauz tans’) is inimical to the aim of chanson. Narrative and fulfilment are correlated. Where you find one you find the other, although it is difficult to articulate a causal link between them, given the confusing nature of causation and its imbrication with time and desire. While the chanson lover is offered to the reader/listener as the exemplary ‘passive soul’ made possible by opposition to the femme of the lowstyle chansons de femme, constituted as ‘active matter’, nonetheless the two look surprisingly alike, a likeness which appears in the explorations of their respective chronotopes. At the level of unconscious desire both genres thwart the corrosions of time and the operation of chance by a rigidly defined chronotope which excludes the possibility of an open-ended future, although they tackle these strategies of exclusion in different ways. Both find ways to repeat rather than advance. Unlike the pastourelle both are rigged. Both the low-style femme and the chanson lover are belles âmes who present themselves as impeccable victims of the machinations of assorted evildoers. La femme defies, while the chanson lover abases himself, but neither accepts any responsibility for the state of affairs or takes any purposive action. 19

Cf. Zumthor (Medieval Poetics 153). Cf. Zumthor’s argument for the equivalence of central signifiers, such as ‘chanter’ and ‘aimer’ (‘Circularity’ 185). 20

7

Desiring Differently: The Chanson in the Feminine Voice Analysis can have for its goal only the advent of a true speech and the realization by the subject of its history in its relation to a future. (Lacan, Écrits 88) As long as we speak of the relations of repetition with the real, [the] act will remain on the horizon (Lacan Fundamental Concepts 50).

This chapter is concerned with those few songs in the chansonniers which, on the basis of their discursive forms, might be classified as feminine chansons.1 I shall consider these songs in the light of the criteria developed in the course of Chapters 2, 4 and 5, criteria relating to discourse, desire and the chronotope. I shall not take up directly the question of authorship here, but remain in the realms of textual femininity, leaving that work to others. Nevertheless, I take it for granted that at least some of the songs attributed to women were in fact composed by women, in the North as in the South.2 The question of authorship does not allow itself to be entirely ignored, however, so we will return to it. Doss-Quinby et al. include four feminine chansons in their anthology under the rubric chanson d’amour. This genre, they suggest, ‘treats a single subject, fin’amors – the true perfect love elaborated by the troubadours’ (114). I, however, prefer the simple term chanson, the northern equivalent of the 1

There is, unfortunately, not space also to examine in detail the jeux-partis. For examples see Doss-Quinby et al. (72–113). See Doss-Quinby’s 1999 study, ‘Rolan, de ceu ke m’avez’, for an overview of all the northern jeux-partis which include one or more women’s voices. 2 In this I follow a path, at least part of the way, taken by Simon Gaunt in relation to the trobairitz: ‘I am going to assume that the cansos attributed to trobairitz are by women’ (Gender and Genre 165). But I cannot go as far as Wendy Pfeffer when she states: ‘Specifically, I am inclined to see all anonymous chansons de femme as the work of women’ (‘Complaints’ 130). This is to ignore the question of misogyny in the chansons de femme, although, of course, it is not impossible for women to write misogyny! It also bypasses the question of register, as one would expect from one of the editors of Songs of the Women Trouvères, who find register an unhelpful concept for the chansons de femme. See Doss-Quinby et al. (7–11).

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Occitan canso, as I argued in Chapter 1. Its being simply the song gives it the status it seems to have enjoyed for the trouvères. Other genres are marked as lesser creations by the necessity for that extra designation. The gendering of the voice, as in chanson de femme, has the same diminishing role.3 The four chansons are: ‘La froidor ne la jalee’ (114), ‘Mout m’abelist quant je voi revenir’ (116), ‘Onque n’amai tant que jou fui amee’ (120) and ‘Plaine d’ire et de desconfort’ (123). On the same basis of discursive form, however, I shall also consider some songs Doss-Quinby et al. place under different rubrics, for instance ‘Jherusalem, grant damage me fais’ and ‘Chanterai por mon corage’, which they classify as chansons de croisade. They are indeed chansons de croisade, but this may not necessarily disqualify them as chansons, although the introduction of a motif extraneous to fin’amor may work to marginalise them as such.4 Some masculine chansons introduce the crusade motif .5 On formal grounds, the plainte funébre ‘Par maintes fois avrai esteit requise’ (124) can also be considered a chanson, likewise a song which Doss-Quinby et al. characterise as a chanson d’ami: ‘L’on dit q’amors est dolce chose’. Lastly I shall look at a song which is difficult to place formally, but which is of interest on thematic grounds: ‘Qui de .ii. biens le millour’ (138). This is also designated as a chanson d’ami by Doss-Quinby et al.6 The designation of chanson is not meant to entail an equivalence between feminine and masculine chansons. Some of these songs have characteristics which appear different, in some respects, from anything I have encountered elsewhere in the system.7 Nomenclature raises problems, however, and can result in taxonomic tangles. Difficulties of classification arise from the impossibility of finding a way of speaking the relation between masculine and feminine discourse. Can one call a song a chanson when it is not equivalent to the masculine version? It is, after all, the feminine words sifted out of the canzone which give it its

3

See discussion on Jakobson’s concept of marking, Chapter 2 above. Grimbert picks up the dimishing mark in Bec’s terminology: ‘Bec, in 1995 anthology of the songs of the trobairitz, classifies their songs as ‘Le Grand chant courtois féminin’, implying that this genre is, by definition, ‘masculin’ (‘Songs by Women’ 119). 4 Bec places them with the hybrids (Lyrique française 35). 5 See for instance ‘A vous amant, plus qu’a nulle autre gent’ by the Chastelain de Couci which contains a number of references to his impending departure on God’s work of the crusade. Rosenberg, Switten and Le Vot give this song the double designation of chanson d’amour, chanson de croisade (250). This seems an appropriate approach for ‘Jherusalem, grand damage me fait’ and ‘Chanterai por mon corage’. 6 Chanson d’ami is defined by Doss-Quinby et al. as ‘a lyric monologue, in the form of a chanson à refrain or chanson avec des refrains, in which an apparently unmarried woman yearns for a lover – present or past’ (127). I do not consider either of these criteria on their own as sufficient grounds for excluding a song from the chanson category. 7 This chapter relies on the body of critical work on the trobairitz since the troveresses have been, until quite recently, overlooked. Songs of the Women Trouvères is a landmark work, being the first anthology of this material.

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character (at least according to Dante). That is, it is the marked status of the feminine voice which allows the masculine its unmarked status, its illusion of universality, Jakobson’s ‘basic meaning’. Simon Gaunt approaches the question from another angle. Speaking of the songs of Castelloza he asks: ‘How is a woman to write cansos when the conventions of the genre require that she be silent? […] Are the conventions of the canso as set out by Castelloza so rigidly androcentric that women cannot express themselves within the genre?’ (Gender 177). On both counts – that her speech is, ipso facto, inappropriate, and that what the genre demands of her is silence – she ought to be excluded. For her to sing chanson at all is to subvert the conditions of the genre. Yet sing she does and in doing so, suggests Gaunt, ‘affirms the possibility of the female subject position’ (177). I am seeking here above all a difference in quality, however, rather than a difference in name or a shift in relation. That quality, in the broadest sense, is a song’s capacity to persuade me that its lyric subject is a desiring, suffering subject who has staked something of herself in her desire. To return to the questions raised in Chapters 3 and 5, I am looking for any indication that she has gone beyond the automaton, and arrived for that appointment suggested by Lacan: ‘an appointment to which we are always called with a real that eludes us’ (Fundamental Concepts 53). The problem has been the lack of credibility in the lyric subject of the chanson de femme, a problem she shares with the masculine chanson lover. Masculine lovers attempt to convince us of the chasm separating masculine fin’amor from feminine sensuality, but this distinction founders in the light of my research. The meaning effect provided by the opposition fails. So the feminine chanson might bring to light something different from both. I believe it does. A different difference emerges, at odds with the masculinefeminine, high-low binarisms so dear to the trouvères. In the course of these chapters I have noted a number of the characteristics which mark the typical chanson de femme as low style. Firstly, in the low-style chanson de femme, the femme’s relation to discourse offers her as a ‘soulless’ being. She is presented as ignorant, not in charge, or even aware of her discourse, spoken rather than speaking. The childlike exuberance of her speech stems from the effect of a lack of conscious constraint. This relation to discourse works in the system to place her subjectivity in doubt and to suggest the presence of a masculine subjectivity which speaks her words through her. The masculine chanson lover is offered, in contrast, as a master-subject, fully in charge of his utterance. He, even when presented as struck dumb by desire, nonetheless shows his mastery of discourse in the song itself. Secondly, in the triumphalist chansons d’ami I have examined, low-style feminine desire appears as possible to fulfil, unproblematic, active rather than passive, confident, practical, down to earth, sensual, everything which evokes the material. Her sexual demands are presented as a matter of simple need.

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The triumphalist femme is self-assured, her ‘desire’ occasions her no anxiety. These songs demonstrate no lack at the explicit level, the friend providing all that heart could wish for. In her position vis-à-vis the friend there is no point at which desire, in the Lacanian sense, could come into play. It is on the other side, vis-à-vis li losengier or, in the chanson de malmariee, li maris, that a hidden desire is working. The apparent absence of the amie’s desire, like her relation to discourse, places her subjectivity in doubt. Even where obstacles appear, when the lover is absent or alienated, as in ‘Lasse, pour quoi refuser’, although the necessary distance is created, the modus operandi of the amie does not alter. She rushes to plug the gap. Thirdly, the chronotope which emerged in the chansons de malmariée is one in which lyric and narrative elements combine in such a way as to blur the boundaries between past, present and future. This apparent temporal openness nonetheless closes the future because it excludes the operation of chance. It is a future of the same. The malmariée, while she claims the potency to organize a future according to her wishes, is presented as herself moving through time without change like an automaton. We are looking in the feminine chansons for qualities which differentiate them from the mass of chansons de femme in any or all these three respects. In reality the three aspects of femininity in the songs are not separate. Each is implicated in the other two, so a change anywhere would be significant. One can foreground different aspects at different times, but in truth they cannot be prised apart. One cannot speak of her desire without its discursive and chronotopic aspects coming into play. The division is constantly undermined. The feminine voice in these few songs which satisfy, formally, the chanson criteria, adopts a discourse which in some ways resembles the discourse of the masculine chanson. The forms are similar, although the material is differently organized and bears traces of the low-style chanson de femme.8 It is not possible to offer any general account of the feminine chanson. It is possible that their authors (whoever they were) tested the waters, experimenting with a range of strategies to blend chanson de femme discourse (examples of which were at their disposal, as they seem to have been for the trobairitz),9 with the discourse of the masculine chanson.10 They had also the figure of la dame, clearly not as a model of speech but as a position from which one might

8 On this point see Doss-Quinby et al. (35) and the entire section of their Introduction entitled ‘Fin’amors and the Women Trouvères’ (35–44). 9 Cf. Bec Trobairitz (252–9). 10 Cf. Kittye Delle Robbins of the trobairitz: ‘[T]here is no one single method of expropriation which is continually employed: the persona may be, in various configurations, the introjected lady of the male tradition, the male-poet reinvented as female, the new androgynous creation which incorporates many elements of both, or something else again’ (‘Woman/Poet’ 12A).

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attempt to speak – the words one might imagine for her.11 None of these strategies is unproblematic. One could not therefore expect any unanimity.12 And of course, in addition, the songs are far too few for any patterns to emerge decisively. Nonetheless it is possible to discern here, as in the lowstyle chanson de femme, but differently, something of feminine subjectivity and the pain of feminine desire. ‘But what if the “object” started to speak?’: Feminine Discourse in the Chanson This poignant question (Irigaray, Speculum 135), is echoed in the feminine chanson. In these few songs the ambiguous feminine subject/object of low style takes the reins of her discourse in a new way. These songs cannot be dismissed as ‘the silliness of women’ – spoken rather than speaking. The meaning-generating opposition by which men speak and women are spoken falters in the presence of these chansons. ‘Par maintes fois avrai esteit requise’ demonstrates a significant difference from the chanson de femme norm in the subject’s relation to her discourse. ‘Par maintes fois avrai esteit requise’ chanson, plainte funèbre RS 1640, L 57–1, MW 2344 Manuscripts: U and C Attribution: Duchesse de Lorraine in C Text: Rosenberg, Switten and Le Vot: 355–7 Other eds. Rosenberg and Tischler 503–4, Doss-Quinby et al. 124–7. 1. Par maintes fois avrai esteit requise c’ains ne chantai ansi con je soloie; car je suix si aloingnie de joie que j’en devroie estre plus antreprise, et a mien voil moroie an iteil guise con celle fist cui je sanbler voroie: Didol, qui fut por Eneas ocise. 2. Ahi, amins! Tout a vostre devise que ne fis jeu tant con je vos veoie? Jant vilainne cui je tant redotoie m’ont si greveit et si ariere mise c’ains ne vos pou merir vostre servise.

Many a time I have been asked why I no longer sing as I was wont to; it’s because I am so far from joy that I should be in a still worse plight, and, if I could I would die in the same way as she whom I would like to resemble: Dido, who for Aeneas was killed. Ah friend! Why didn’t I do what you wanted when I could still see you! Evil people whom I so much feared have so oppressed and put me in the wrong that I couldn’t reward your service..

11 Cf. Gravdal on the trobairitz: ‘[T]he trobairitz frequently choose to mimic the troubadours by imitating their construction of the Domna and inventing a discourse for her, giving her a voice’ (‘Metaphor’ 413). 12 See Bruckner (‘Fictions’ 876–7).

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S’estre poioit, plus m’an repantiroie c’Adans ne fist de la pome c’ot prise. 3. Ains por Forcon ne fist tant Afelisse con je por vos, amins, s’or vos ravoie; mais ce n’iert jai, se premiers ne moroie. Mais je ne puis morir an iteil guise, c’ancor me rait Amors joie promise. Si vuel doloir an leu de mener joie: poinne et travail, ceu est ma rante assise. 4. Par Deu, amins, en grant dolour m’a mise mors vilainne, qui tout lou mont gerroie. Vos m’at tolut, la riens que tant amoie! Or seu Fenis, lass, soule et eschise, dont il n’est c’uns, si con an le devise. Mais a poinnes m’en reconfortiroie se por ceu non, c’Amors m’at an justise.

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If it were possible I would repent more than Adam did for the apple he took. I would do more for you, friend, than Afelisse did for Forcon, if now I had you again; but that will never be unless I die. But I cannot die like this, for Love has yet promised me joy. and yet I wish for sorrow instead of living joyfully, pain and trouble is the debt I must settle. By God, friend, evil death, which makes war on the whole world, has thrown me into great distress. It has stolen you from me, whom I loved so much! Now am I a Phoenix, abandoned, alone and deprived, although they say there’s only one. But I might recover from pain except for this, that Love has me in its power.

The attribution, in C only, is to the duchess of Lorraine,13 who may have been the daughter of Thibaut de Champagne, mentioned above.14 The song has all the earmarks of a chanson, although, as gradually becomes apparent, it is also a plainte funèbre, an Occitan genre rare in Old French.15 It has four strophes of seven decasyllabic lines with no refrain. The absence of a refrain gives us the chanson in its most austere form. Refrain became a more common phenomenon in the trouvère chanson as the genre moved further from its Occitanian origins and took on more of the characteristics of the North.16 Many composers of the thirteenth century, such as Thibaut de Champagne (1201–1253), composed chansons with refrain. In ‘Par maintes fois’, however, there is no opportunity for the deadlier circularities of refrain to take hold. Nor is there a returning textual and

13 She is credited also with a long, mainly third-person narrative chanson avec des refrains with elements of the chanson de rencontre: ‘Un petit davant lou jour’ (DossQuinby et al. 155). 14 ‘[T]hree women held this title over the course of the thirteenth century: Gertrude de Dabo, Catherine de Limbourg, and Marguerite de Champagne’ (Doss-Quinby et al. 28). Wendy Pfeffer offers persuasive arguments for Marguerite, daughter of the trouvère Thibaut IV, as the author of ‘Par maintes fois’ (‘Complaints’ 128). 15 Doss-Quinby et al. offer the figure of four for plaintes ‘occasioned by the death of a lover’ (124). 16 Cf. Rosenberg, Switten and Le Vot (3).

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musical tag for the ear to catch hold of, one which, as Christopher Page suggests, offers an association with the more easily accessible forms characteristic of low style. In the austerity of ‘Par maintes fois’ everything is excluded that might suggest such an association, except the woman’s voice itself. If we review Klinck’s criteria for the woman’s voice: ‘love poetry which is (a) in a woman’s voice, (b) contrastive to male-voice love lyric, (c) apparently simple, (d) outspoken, (e) openly sensual’, the contrast is very apparent (‘Oldest Folk Poetry’ 243). So apparent is the contrast that one could almost argue that ‘Par maintes fois’ is too orthodox an example of a masculine-style chanson. It is almost as if it set out precisely to ally itself with the valorized masculine form. The rhyme scheme is coblas unissonans, that is, the same rhyme-endings are present in each stanza, an expert feat of versification. The author has counted syllables, one of Brunetto Latini’s criteria for ‘good poetry’.17 This song cannot be used, therefore, as something which signifies the goodness of masculine ‘good poetry’ on the basis of an opposition. The reference to classical literature (Dido), and the bestiary reference to the phoenix,18 also represent a claim to high style as does the reference to Fouque and Afelisse, characters of epic and romance. These references and the reference to Adam also serve to lift the prevailing chronotope out of the realms of the mundane and place it in the territory of myth. ‘Par maintes fois’ follows the thread of the chanson de femme type in which the woman laments that she did not ‘reward the service’ of her cavalier when she had the chance because of fear of the ‘jant vilainne’, those evil-tongued ‘losengier’ who stand in the way of true love. As was suggested earlier, the material of the chanson de délaissée is the likeliest source for a feminine song of fin’amor. The same topos is found in ‘Lasse, pour quoi refusai’ but articulated in the wild, ‘spontaneous’ and ‘untutored’ language of the low-style femme. There it is presented in the polymetric lines of low style, with refrain, and a rhyme scheme which, apart from the refrain, has essentially only one rhyme ending, in masculine and feminine form, as Rosenberg, Switten and Le Vot point out (210). Monorhymes and simple rhyme schemes are also low-style features. The lover of ‘Par maintes fois’ employs the topos of reluctance to sing while in the act of singing. This is reminiscent of Jean Erart’s plainte funèbre ‘Nus chanters mais le mien cuer ne leeche’, which begins ‘No more can any

17

‘If you wish to write good poetry, you must count all the syllables in your poems’ (qtd in Stevens, Words and Music 22). 18 Cf. Thibaut de Champagne’s phoenix, in ‘Chanter m’estuet, car ne m’en puis tenir’ (Brahney pp. 84–5, ll. 25–8). Pfeffer points out the resemblance as an argument for the the identity of the author of ‘Par maintes fois’ as Thibaut’s daughter (‘Complaints’ 128). He certainly favoured the bestiary as a source for metaphors; see also his unicorn metaphor in ‘Ausi conme unicorne sui’ (Brahney 102).

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singing gladden my heart’ (Rosenberg, Switten and Le Vot 320). Gace Brulé begins his chanson ‘Chanter m’estuet ireement’: ‘I must sing bitterly. Alas! how will I be able to sing if I cannot often see my sweet friend’ (Rosenberg and Danon 31). These disclaimers in the exordium which suggest an author’s inadequacy or the inadequacy of song itself to meet the gravity of the situation only draw attention to the masterly rhetoric which appears in the body of the song, giving the lie to the disclaimers.19 The low-style femme displays no such falsely modest disinclination. She is more given to confessing instead that she cannot prevent herself from speaking, like the girl in ‘Deduxans suis’ who is so vulnerable because she cannot hide her love: ‘Because I love so well that I know I couldn’t conceal it’. She ‘runs at the mouth’ as we say. The discourse of ‘Par maintes fois’, in contrast, speaks of the careful choices of rhetoric although, at the same time, it retains something of the exclamatory outcry of the délaissée, in ‘Ahi! amins’ and ‘Par dieu, amins’ and in its interrogation: ‘Why didn’t I do what you wanted when I could still see you?’ In ‘Lasse, pour quoi’ the effect of an absence of rhetorical skill appears also in the performative nature of the amie’s utterance. For the low-style femme, words are a kind of action. For the masculine chanson lover, the words are all. They are not actions but precisely take the place of action. For the pastourelle narrator, words are instrumental. They are considered, a means to an end – a strategy – not, as for the femme, the action itself. For the subject of ‘Lasse, pour quoi’ there is no gap between thought and action. To intend is to speak is to act, and this is the basis of the wild exuberance of her speech. An audience reads this lack of a gap as a marker of the spontaneous, naïve, unlearned utterance, another indication that words pour out of her without conscious control. The subject of ‘Par maintes fois’ does not inhabit this world but, instead, a world where thought, speech and action are separate. Despite vestiges of the exclamatory style there is a net loss of that unrestrained ebullience which characterizes the speech of the low-style femme. In the world of ‘Par maintes fois’ change and loss intervene between past and future. She sings, in retrospect, of regret for a failed action. She hesitated for fear of the losengier. The subject of ‘Lasse pour quoi’ also hesitated. But for the subject of ‘Par maintes fois’ the time for action seems past. Any action is now apparently denied her. Death has intervened. Thus the song replaces action, like a masculine chanson but on a note of regret for a past action, as in the chanson de délaissée. A story unfolds behind the present of the utterance.

19

Cf. Gravdal (‘Metaphor’ 418). Gravdal suggests the inexpressibility topos is transformed in the songs of the trobairitz: ‘[T]heir appropriation of the trope of speechlessness is moralized and polemicized: should a woman have the right to speak/compose?’ (418). I do not think it carries that connotation in ‘Par maintes fois’. This subject confidently claims the right to speak.

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Despite the chanson de femme-style exclamations in ‘Par maintes fois’, one is not tempted to postulate another subjectivity as the ventriloquist behind this woman’s utterance. The firm assumption of mastery in the exordium would discourage any such attempt. ‘Sing’ here has its frequent signification of ‘make’. ‘Chanteir’ in ‘Chanteir m’estuet por la plux belle’ (I must sing for the most beautiful),20 is very close to ‘Chançon ferai’ in ‘Chançon ferai, car talent m’est est pris’ (I will make a song for desire has me in its grip).21 Singing a song and making a song are almost synonymous in chanson discourse. Perhaps they are not quite synonymous and the choice of ‘sing’ over ‘make’ in ‘Par maintes fois’ indicates, in the feminine voice, a residue of ‘artlessness’, evoking a degree more of a spontaneous outpouring and a degree less of an author’s supposed rhetorical detachment. Bec notes this quality in the trobairitz.22 ‘Par maintes fois’ includes a claim to an autonomous existence for the subject outside the boundaries of the song, in the implication that her singing was once a common occurrence: ‘as I was wont to’. References such as this draw an implied authorial presence into the song. The ‘I’ of pure lyric claims authorship, attempting to glue the identity of the author to the identity of the song’s fiction. The subject of ‘Par maintes fois’ also claims public acknowledgement of her mastery of the art of song-making: ‘Many a time I have been asked’, suggesting that her skills are in demand. The ‘artless’ cry of the low-style femme implies an artful masculine ‘authorial’ subjectivity in charge of her artless cries. It is he who appears to fill the void left when the feminine subject fails in her subjectivity and is relegated to the status of character. In ‘Par maintes fois’ there is no sense of a gender mismatch between singer and author and no sense of a failure in subjectivity. The lyric subject presents herself authoritatively as authorial subject: the claim of authorship is included in her authority. It is difficult to leave the question of authorship out of the frame because of this claim to authorship of the lyric ‘I’ of chanson. The scribe of C may have justified his attribution on this basis. Feminine authorship is plausible when the feminine lyric subject is able to project herself beyond the song as its author.23 It becomes immediately more difficult to confine the discussion to the lyric subject when an author appears in this way, especially when she is graced with a name. The attempt is worth 20

Gautier de Dargies (Rosenberg and Tischler 263). Thibaut de Champagne (Rosenberg and Tischler 352). 22 ‘The women troubadours, by contrast, never make the least allusion to their role as poetesses. Admittedly, their lyricism is inscribed in the framework of a poetico-musical act which is well known: allusions to ‘chant’, to the ‘chantar’, to the ‘canso’ are frequent, but we never find the term ‘trobar’, or ‘trobairitz’ (‘Contribution’ 241). 23 Cf. Jennifer Smith on plausibility: ‘It would seem that the most ‘plausible’ trobairitz lyrics are those where the scribe has demonstrated a willingness to ascribe them to a female author’ (‘Subjects’ 170). 21

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persevering with, nonetheless. That the song can be read this way is testament to its discursive mastery; testament, that is, to a discourse which is recognizable to masculine ears as their own tongue.24 Perhaps this song is, of those chosen here, the most recognizable as ‘masculine’. The subject’s subjectivity is maintained in another way also. She is not made evident as a specular object by any of the markers common to the low-style chanson de femme. Like the masculine lover of ‘De bone amour et de lëaul amie’ she is all soul. She cannot be located in time and space by specific references, as the subject of ‘Deduxans suis’ is located ‘yesterday morning’, in ‘my father’s orchard’. Nor does she make reference to any physical traits, like the girl of ‘Deduxans suis’ who presents herself as ‘charming and pretty’. Curiously, Jean-Charles Huchet bases his claims of masculine authorship of the songs of the trobairitz on this point: ‘The marks of gender […] which feminize the lyric ‘je’ [are] independent of all reference to a body which, in the real, would support her gender’ (‘femme troubadours’ 73). It is the reference to her own body which places the feminine voice in the low-style chanson de femme register, at the bottom of the food chain. This would be an unlikely strategy on the part of a female author since it emphasises her objectality at a point where she is demanding acknowledgement as authorial subject.25 Such an author would be more likely to distance herself from this territory by leaving her body out of the frame, although she might still employ a measure of chanson de femme ‘spontaneity’. The anthology edited by Bruckner et al., Songs of the Women Troubadours, contains only two songs which really qualify as low-style chansons de femme: the anonymous balada ‘Coindeta sui si cum n’ai greu cossire’ (130) and the anonymous alba ‘En un vergier sotz fuella d’albespi’, whose feminine voice is presented framed by a sympathetic third-person narrative voice like that of the chansons de toile (134).26 ‘Coindeta sui’ begins with precisely the self-reference which places the song in low style and the speaker’s subjectivity in doubt: ‘I am lovely’. Visibility as a lovely body emphasises her objectality.

24 This raises the question again of what must be excluded in women’s speech to make it recognizable to men. Doris Earnshaw suggests that ‘[i]t is probable that the model of female speech that valorises assertiveness and rationality gave the incentive to participation in public song to women of wealth and rank in Occitania’ (159). Earnshaw gives a low figure for attributions to female authors in the northern chansonniers: three troveresses (155), as against Doss-Quinby et al.: eight. Earnshaw contended that in the Old French low-style songs the female voice did not provide a suitable model of speech to encourage female authorship (155–60). It seems, however, that some troveresses found the courage to compose despite a different model for speech. 25 ‘The “feminine” of misogynistic fantasy is hardly a position with which to identify’ as Sarah Kay notes (Subjectivity 102). 26 Doris Earnshaw comments on the effect of mimesis produced by the frame (36).

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The Comtessa de Dia certainly refers to her body in the canso ‘A chantar m’er de so q’ieu no volria’, but precisely to interrogate the chanson de femme topos which links feminine beauty with loving and being loved, as in ‘Deduxans suis’: ‘I am charming and pretty, so I will love’.27 The Comtessa grieves instead: ‘Mercy and courtliness don’t help me with him, not does my beauty, or my rank, or my mind; for I am every bit as betrayed and wronged as I’d deserve to be if I were ugly’ (Bruckner et al. 7, their translation).28 The phoenix reference in ‘Par maintes fois’ also emphasises the nonvisual. Bestiary figures are usually cited for attributes which go beyond the physical. Here it is in her destiny that the subject claims a resemblance: ‘Now am I a Phoenix, abandoned, alone and deprived’. Nothing in her discourse embodies this subject or puts her in a gaze whch would objectify her for another. Her self-references instead emphasise the intellect and the refined desires of fin’amor. Like her masculine counterpart, she is placed at the looking and desiring end of the gaze rather that the looked-at and desired – the end of the subject, not the object. The discourse of ‘Par maintes fois’ cannot provide the opposition in which masculine discourse ‘recognizes itself by the difference’ as Matilda Bruckner expresses it (‘Fictions’ 872). The meaning effect of masculinity provided by the presence of an opposing femininity cannot be derived from this song. But if she will not play body to his soul what can constitute his soul? This question raises another. If feminine discourse worked simply to ape masculinity it might be accommodated without threat within the hierarchical structure of the system. Nothing is shaken up by straight impersonation. It simply underlines the superiority of a masculine discourse which invites the compliment of imitation. That would make of the work of female authors the mere ‘exercices littéraires’ which Jeanroy thought them to be (qtd in Kay, Subjectivity 85). It would place them, like the low-style femme, as ‘soulless’ mimics. Again, perhaps ‘Par maintes fois’, in the orthodoxy of its forms and topoi, is the most vulnerable to this thrust of those discussed here. Sarah Kay tackles this issue from the perspective of the dilemma it poses for female authors, in this case the trobairitz. She asks: From what subject position could a woman compose? The ‘feminine’ of misogynistic fantasy is hardly a position with which to identify. Yet the ‘mixed’ gender is by definition exclusive; although it sanctions certain ‘female’ traits (softness, beauty, sexual passivity), these are not ones which make for articulateness, whilst others of its characteristics (lordship and 27 Cf. also the chanson de malmariée motet text ‘Je suis jonete et jolie’: ‘I am young and pretty so I have a loving heart’ (Bec II: 6, p. 13, and the heroine of ‘E, bone amourette’ who proclaims: ‘For I am young, charming and sweet, full of laughter: so I will love my whole life long’, Doss-Quinby et al. 21, pp. 129–30, their translation). 28 Kay notes: ‘[The Comtessa] enumerates the qualities of a domna which she possesses which have not “worked” for her’ (Subjectivity 103).

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power) are transplanted from a masculine ethos. How easy would it be for a woman to write from within a masculine role? […] If the women writers uncritically use the same gender system as the men, then ascription of their texts to biological women is of only contingent interest and does not imply anything about their poetry. Only if they use this gender system ironically, or attempt to reform it, will their status as subjects be distinguishable from the masculine model (Kay, Subjectivity 102).29

This study is not searching for female authors, but Kay’s question is for me nonetheless important in this context. It could be reframed as: what subject position can these textual women occupy which neither remains unproblematically in the low-style feminine register nor simply apes the masculine discourse of chanson? Only a song which avoids these alternatives can achieve a repositioning of femininity in the system. If the binary opposition is to be challenged, a third possibility needs to appear. No simple reversal is sufficient. In this light it is interesting to note that in the self-references of ‘Par maintes fois’ the subject shifts gender. In the reference to Dido and Afelisse she identifies as feminine whereas in her reference to Adam she adopts the masculine position. Of course this may stem from an understandable reluctance to identify with Eve, the original source of feminine iniquity. The subject of ‘A chantar m’er de so q’ieu no volria’ boldly takes the position of Seguis, the masculine lover, and assigns the role of feminine beloved, Valenssa, to her amics.30 The feminine subject of ‘La froidor ne la jalee’ likens herself to ‘Yseut the queen’ (Doss-Quinby et al. 115), the subject of ‘L’on dit q’amors est dolce chose’ to Pyramus, the masculine figure (DossQuinby et al. 136).31 Both the subjects of the songs of the trobairitz and the subjects of these northern songs favour a certain sexual ambiguity, which suggests a refusal to choose between activity and passivity, lover and beloved.32 Or perhaps it is a tacit acknowledgement of the link, maintained since Aristotle, between activity and the masculine producing a lack of confidence in speaking the lover’s words from feminine lips; an acknowledgement that a taboo is being broken. The subject of feminine chanson in the North claims the right and 29

The ‘mixed gender’ is the gender of the domna, beloved of the troubadour lover/ subject. 30 Cf. Bruckner et al. (Women Troubadours 7). See also p. 144. Smith comments: ‘[T]he female voice assume[s] the superior and active position in her figuration of their relationship’ (‘Subjects’ 180). 31 See textual note, also 136. 32 Bruckner explores the play of subject/object positions in the work of Castelloza and the Comtessa de Dia (‘Fictions’ e.g. 889). Kittye Delle Robbins speaks of the ‘androgyny’ of the positions assumed by the trobairitz’ (‘Woman/Poet’ 12A). See also H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., who notes the androgyny of ‘the hind and her voice’ in the lais of Marie de France (‘Voice’ 161).

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the power to speak, however, like her masculine counterpart. She also laments her powerlessness in love. Where a difference appears – the third possibility mentioned above – it is in how she wears her misfortune and her powerlessness in desire. Daring to Speak Desire: The Root in the Body The difficulty in speaking desire was already apparent in the other genres I have considered. It is to that which Lacan alludes in Ethics: ‘desire is formed […] as something the demand means beyond what it is able to formulate’ (294). The demand postulates an object but no object which can be postulated can account for desire: ‘If I say that objet a is that which causes desire, that means that it is not the object of desire, it is neither the direct nor the indirect object’ (RSI, 21.1.75). Demand demands an object but desire crystallizes around a lack. It cannot be spoken via the object. Can it be spoken at all? For Lacan, in RSI, it was ‘forever impossible to speak […] as such’ (21.1.75). It seems also, however, that Lacan, at an earlier stage (1954–5), found it both possible and efficacious to say something of it: ‘the subject should come to recognize and to name his desire’ (The Ego 228). The difference appears to be between speaking and naming. Naming, here, means, I think, recognizing desire as one’s own: to christen it, so to speak. In a few of the feminine chansons there is such a naming of desire. In this naming a different quality in the subject’s relation to loss is revealed. Therefore it is with those low-style songs involving loss that a comparison can reveal the most subtle distinctions. Questions of distance come up in the comparison. There are distances which are geographic, distances which are temporal and distances involving the status of the participants. These last are crucial here. Earlier, we questioned the claims of the low-style amie and malmariée on the basis that the ami cannot be sustained in his position as representing the Other of desire, of which Lacan writes: ‘man’s desire is the desir de l’Autre (the desire of the Other) […] it is qua Other that he desires’ (Écrits 312). This ami has not the distance in status to equip him for this position. Instead he is revealed as a (lower case) other, the counterpart of the ego though not a rival. It is those enemies of true love, li maris and the li losengier who represent the (upper case) Other. Therefore I took the parity of the amie and her ami as a sign that desire, in the Lacanian sense, was absent from this relation. In masculine chanson, la dame is in the place of the Other and those other figures: the mesdisant and losengier resemble rivals, little others, as Kay points out. They take the position of ‘competitors/scapegoats’, thus revealing their ‘narcissistic origin’. They are the lover’s ‘doubles’ (‘Contradictions’ 227). Thus, in Lacanian terms they connect with the lover along a purely imaginary axis. In the triumphalist chanson d’ami there are no rivals. This is also the case in the chansons de malmariée we have examined.

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The chanson de croisade ‘Chanterai pour mon courage’ (implicitly a chanson de départie), although it adopts more temperate language than ‘Lasse, pour quoi’, still places the ami and amie in parallel. Here the distance between them is purely geographical. A third party is therefore required to carry the responsibility for the separation. ‘Chanterai por mon corage’ chanson, chanson de croisade, rotroenge, RS 21, L 106–4, B 552 Manuscripts: C 86; K 385, M 174c, m; O 28a, T 128, X 248 Attributions: Guiot de Dijon (in M), ‘Dame de Fayel’ (fictional) in C Text: Marrocco and Sandon, no. 19, pp. 68–9 Other eds. Doss-Quinby et al. 141–6, Rosenberg and Tischler 293–6. 1. Chanterai por mon corage que je vueill reconforter, car avec mon grant damage ne quier morir n’afoler, quant de la terre sauvage ne voi nului retorner ou cil est qui m’assoage le cuer, quant j’en oi parler. Dex, quant crieront Outree, Sire, aidies au pelerin por cui sui espoentee, car felon sunt Sarrazin.

I will sing for my heart which I wish to comfort, for in my great distress I do not want to die or go mad when I see no-one returning from the savage land where he is who soothes my heart when I hear him spoken of. God, when they shout ‘Onwards’ Lord, help the pilgrim For whom I am afraid, For the Saracens are cruel.

2. Sofrerrai en tel estage tant quel voie rapasser. Il est en pelerinage, dont Dex le lait retorner! Et maugre tot mon lignage ne quier ochoison trover d’autre face mariage; folz est qui j’en oi parler! Dex, quant crieront …

I shall endure in this state until I see him come back. He is on pilgrimage, God permit that he return! And in spite of all my family I have no desire to look for another to marry; whoever suggests it is mad. God, when they shout …

3. De ce sui au cuer dolente que cil n’est en Biauvoisis qui si sovent me tormente; or n’en ai ne qier ne ris. S’il est biaus, et je sui gente Sire Dex, por quel feis?

What makes my heart grieve is that he is not in Biarvoisis for whom I am often in torment; now I have from him neither joy nor laughter. Since he is handsome and I am beautiful Lord God, why have you done this?

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Quant l’uns a l’autre atalente, por coi nos as departis? Dex, quant crieront …

When each desires the other why have you separated us? God, when they shout …

4. De ce sui en bone atente que je son homage pris, et quant la douce ore vente, qui vient de cel douz pais ou cil est qui m’atalente, volentiers I tor mon vis; adont m’est vis que jel sente par desoz mon mantel gris. Dex, quant crieront …

My solace is that I have his pledge, and when the soft wind blows which comes from that sweet country where he is whom I desire, willingly I turn my face towards it; then it seems to me that I feel him under my grey mantel. God, when they shout …

5. De ce sui mout deceue que ne fui au convoier; sa chemise qu’ot vestue m’envoia por embracier; la nuit, quant s’amor m’argue la met delez moi couchier mout estroit a ma char nue por mes malz assoagier. Dex, quant crieront …

What makes me sad is that I didn’t go with him; he sent me the shirt he wore for me to embrace; at night, when love for him presses upon me I put it beside me in bed and hold it close to my naked flesh to soothe my sorrows. God, when they …

‘Chanterai por mon corage’ retains the neat parity between ami and amie common in low style: ‘Since he is handsome and I am beautiful, Lord God, why have you done this? When each desires the other why have you separated us?’ This is what gives the two the look of children play-acting love. As in ‘Deduxans suis et joliete’, ami and amie are suitable candidates for a successful sexual liaison: respectively handsome and beautiful, each wants the other. He is the little other in this scenario. The Other is represented by the prohibitors of love. The suitability and mutuality of their relationship give it an inertia which is troubled only by the tension of an external threat.33 God, not the ami, is the fly in the ointment here, the one who separates and prohibits, taking the place usually reserved in the low-style songs for husbands and losengier. Here, assisted by the chanson de croisade thematic, it is God who represents the law. He is the ultimate Other, an unbending force against whom the amie can rail and defy, the rock against which she 33

Bruckner notes a similar mutuality in the Comtessa de Dia’s ‘Ab ioi et ab ioven m’apais’. She comments: ‘[T]he relationship between the lovers is based here not on hierarchy, but rather on correspondence, mutuality, and equality’ (‘Fictions’ 878). This song is a little like the triumphalist chanson d’ami in the sense that it does not leave much room for desire.

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can fling herself. He is the one who matters here, the one without lack who could remove all obstacles if he chose. ‘Jherusalem, grant damage me fais’ is also couched in the style of chanson, apparently in coblas doplas with some strophes missing (Doss-Quinby et al. 147). Like ‘Chanterai por mon corage’, it too, however, speaks of a love inexusably interrupted by God, in which nothing lacked until the departure of the beloved: ‘I could almost be angry with God who has taken from me the great joy that I had’. It is in the nature of the chanson de départie to idealize the love which has been severed by cruel circumstance and some masculine chansons de croisade reveal the same tendencies. ‘A vous amant plus qu’a nulle autre gent’, attributed to the Chastelain de Couci, unusually also articulates something of a greater parity and mutuality between the lovers, akin to the départie ethos, for instance: ‘she who was my lady, my companion, my friend’ (Lerond 58).34 But, as Blakeslee suggests, it is more commonly a feminine position (72). In two feminine chansons, however, the threat to love seems to lie closer to home. It appears sometimes as an impossibility rooted firmly in human desire, not displaced on to other forces except for ‘Love’ itself. To that extent desire’s impossibilities in these two songs are less hidden. In ‘La froidor ne la jalee’ neither husband nor losengier rate a mention. Sometimes it is the ami, sometimes ‘Love’ itself who holds her fate in the palm of his hand. ‘La froidor ne la jalee’ chanson RS 517, L 265–973, MW 801 Manuscript: C 136r–v Attribution: (une dame) Dialect: Lorraine Text: Doss-Quinby et al.: 14, pp. 114–16 Other eds. Rosenberg and Tischler 84–6. 1. La froidor ne la jalee ne puet mon cors refroidir, si’m’ait s’amor eschaufee, dont plaing et plor et sospir; car toute me seux donee a li servir. Muels en deüsse estre amee ….….….… de celui ke tant desir, ou j’ai mise ma pensee. 34

Neither cold nor frost can cool my body down again since his love has so inflamed me, I lament and weep and sigh for it; because I have given my entire being to serving him. I should be better loved for it ….….….…. by him I so desire, on whom I have fixed my thoughts.

Anne Amari Perry comments that in this song, the Chastelain de Couci employs a terminology of masculine companionship transferred to heterosexual love (‘symbolique du coeur’ 242).

182 2. Ne sai consoil de ma vie se d’autrui consoil n’en ai, car cil m’ait en sa baillie cui fui et seux et serai. Por tant seux sa douce amie ke bien sai ke, por rien ke nuls m’en die,

HELEN DELL

Quant li plaist, se m’ocie!

I know no counsel for my life if I don’t have counsel from another for he has me in his power, he whose I was and am and will be. So much am I his sweet friend I know well that not for anything people might say to me will I love anyone but him, who fills me with dismay. If he wants to let him kill me!

3. Amors, per moult grant outraige m’oceis, ne sai por coi; mis m’aveis en mon coraige d’amair lai ou je ne doi. De ma folie seux saige quant je.l voi. De porchaiscier mon damaige ne recroi. D’ameir plux autrui ke moi ne li doinst deus couraige.

Love, by this great harm you are killing me, I don’t know why; you’ve put it into my heart to love there where I shouldn’t. In my madness I’m wise when I see him. I don’t retreat from pursuing my harm. May God never give him the idea of loving someone else more than me.

n’amerai fors lui, dont seux en esmai.

4. Ensi, laisse! k’en puis faire, cui Amors justice et prant? Ne mon cuer n’en puis retraire, ne d’autrui joie n’atent. Trop ont anuit et contraire le amant: Amors est plux debonaire a l’autre gent k’a moi, ki les mals en sent, ne nuls biens n’en puis traire.

So, alas! what can I do about it, whom Love rules and possesses? I can neither take back my heart from him, nor expect joy from any other. Too much trouble and opposition do lovers suffer: Love is kinder to other people than to me who feel the pain of it and can draw from it no good.

5. Ma chanson isi define, ke joie ait vers moi fineir; car j’ai el cors la rasine ke ne puis desrasineir, ke m’est a cuer enterine, sens fauceir. Amors m’ont pris en haïne por ameir.

My song ends here, since joy has ended for me; because I have in my body the root which I cannot uproot. It is wholly implanted in my heart, truly. Love has taken to hating me for loving.

DESIRING DIFFERENTLY

J’ai büt del boivre ameir k’Isoth but, la roïne.

183

I have drunk the bitter potion that Iseult the queen drank.

The subject of ‘La froidor ne la jalee’ speaks at times as one who has run up against an impassable barrier to fulfilment in love, not in the form of a husband, li losengier or even God, but of something inescapable in human subjectivity. ‘Love’ can sometimes take this place of subjective inescapability, a place different from that occupied by God in ‘Chanterai por mon corage’ since there the chance remained of a relenting: ‘God permit that he return!’ It is this inescapable impossible, when it appears, which makes love matter as it does not in most chanson de femme, even in the two chansons de croisade where the narrative conditions are grim enough. There, if conditions were only more benign, all would supposedly be well, as also for the masculine lover of chanson. In ‘La froidor’ nothing could make everything well. God could make things worse if he chose, by suggesting to the ami that he love elsewhere, but there is no sense that he could make them better. Here is a subject who looks like a subject, that is, one capable of desire, capable of assuming her fate. She has ‘drunk the bitter potion’. She is inhabited by the root in the body which can never be uprooted.35 The song is short on narrative substance, as if the specifics are irrelevant, although it throws out hints of dire emergency: ‘in my madness I’m wise’, ‘you’ve put it into my heart to love there where I shouldn’t’, ‘I don’t retreat from pursuing my harm’, and so on.36 There is not here, however, that ‘increased narrativity’ referred to by Blakeslee (73). There is a certain resemblance to the masculine chanson. On one occasion she refers, negatively, to the possibility of love not foundering: ‘May God never give him the idea of loving someone else more than me’. It seems this hasn’t yet happened. As in the masculine chanson, the threat is poised in the future – thus the ‘decreased narrativity’ of masculine chanson (Blakeslee 70). Yet the hope which might appear as a logical concomitant of this threat – at least it hasn’t happened yet! – is absent. This song seems plunged into unmitigated despair. The dominant flavour in ‘La froidor ne la jalee’ is that of a crushing blow that has already fallen, despite the lack of narrative detail. The subject appears to be painted into a corner. Her question: ‘So, alas! what can I

35

Cf. Gace Brulé: ‘A very great love binds me which in my heart has taken root and flowered, and I do not wish to oppose it in any way’ (Rosenberg, Danon and van der Werf 5, their translation). Also by Gace: ‘Within my heart grows a vine all ready to flower: a great love, true and faithful for anyone deigning to fulfill it’ (255, their translation). Both these contrast, however, with the desperation of ‘the root which I cannot uproot’. No flowers in this distressing metaphor, which suggests instead the invasion of an unwanted, horrifying force. 36 Cf. Castelloza ‘Ia de chantar non degra aver talan’: ‘I always love what brings me harm’ (Bruckner et al. 17, their translation).

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do about it?’, seems made rhetorically, only for the lugubrious pleasure of reciting a litany of the woes of love and the impossibility of any redress: she cannot take back her heart, she cannot expect joy from another, Love is kinder to others than to her, she feels only pain and derives no benefit from love. The subject of ‘L’on dit q’amors est dolce chose’ speaks in a similar vein: ‘They say that love is a sweet thing, but I don’t know the sweetness of it; all its joy is shut away from me nor have I known any good from love’ (DossQuinby et al. 134). For neither of these women is love ennobling as it often is in masculine chanson, for instance in the refrain of ‘Compaignon, je sai tel cose’ attributed to Gace Brulé: I always remember this: whoever lives a life of love is right, since honor and worth thereby come to him’ (Rosenberg and Danon 71, their translation). The jouissance of impeccable intentions – and their rewards – is absent. Only one of the chansons I examine here speaks somewhat in this vein: ‘Mout m’abelist quant je voi revenir’ attributed to Maroie de Diergnau: ‘Mout m’abelist quant je voi revenir’ chanson RS 1451, L 178–1, MW 964 Manuscripts: M 181–v; T 169r Attributions: Maroie de Diergnau (in M and T) Music: in MT Text: Doss-Quinby et al. 116–18 Mout m’abelist quant je voi revenir

Great is the pleasure I take upon the return yver, gresil et gelee aparoir, of winter, when hail and frost appear, car en toz tans se doit bien resjoïr For in every season a lovely maiden bele pucele, et joli cuer avoir. must indeed rejoice and have a cheerful heart. Si chanterai d’amors por mieuz valoir, So I will sing of love to increase my ardor, car mes fins cuers plains d’amorous for my true heart full of amorous desir desire ne mi fait pas ma grant joie faillir. will not let my great joy falter. (Doss-Quinby et al. 116–18, their translation)

Maroie’s song ends here after just one strophe although space is left, the editors tell us, to ‘accommodate four more stanzas’ in M, so presumably ‘Mout m’abelist’ was the typical five strophes (116). We cannot know how her song played out but the exordium is certainly upbeat and reveals something like the moral preening seen in masculine chanson; but it is differently expressed. In ‘Mout m’abelist’ it takes the form of a moral imperative: ‘a lovely maiden must indeed rejoice’. In masculine chanson the lover claims

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the rewards of ‘honor and worth’ which loving well provides, as in the refrain quoted above: ‘I always remember this: whoever lives a life of love is right, since honor and worth thereby come to him’. He is worthy of the pleasure of his reward; he has earned it. Here, conversely, rejoicing itself appears as an obligation which the maiden must undertake without reward, rather than a reward exacted as of right for noble service. The subject of ‘Mout m’abelist’ takes up a less confidant position. It is an uneasy conjunction which makes a duty of rejoicing, binding it to a law.37 Hers is a legal pleasure, not permitted but prescribed by a harsh, superegoic voice. Here the law which enjoins enjoyment seems to be represented by a notion of feminine courtliness which the ‘bele pucele’ strives to achieve. Her rejoicing strives to establish her credentials to courtliness, transmuting the optimism of the triumphalist chanson d’ami into a more anxious enjoyment. Perhaps it indicates a less than confident approach to the ‘men only’ terrain of fin’amor, an uncertainty about how the feminine subject should wear the courtly mantle. The low-style amie is also under an obligation, however, to defy and transgress a law. For each there is a prescribed response, binding each morally and generically in one move. In ‘La froidor ne le jalee’ the unmitigated bleakness destroys that tension between hope and despair so familiar in the masculine chanson, the oscillation described earlier, and which briefly appears in ‘Par maintes fois’ – surprisingly in a plainte funèbre.38 This oscillation is what buoys up and carries sublimated desire in masculine chanson. Oscillation is replaced here by a bitter irony: ‘In my madness I’m wise’, ‘I don’t retreat from pursuing my harm’. The blow here appears, perhaps because of the non-specificity of its conditions, to be the wound of love itself. Desire’s impossibilities, that is, appear without disguise and nothing appears to carry it forward. It seems bogged down in gloom. In these moments of bitterness she seems to acknowledge her own implication in the disaster, her ‘part in the disorder’ as Lacan puts it (Intervention 96), most unlike the triumphant, defiant girls of Chapter 4. ‘Love’ here seems at times distinguishable from her own desire, at others indistinguishable. Where it is an affliction imposed from without, as in ‘Love … you are killing me, I don’t know why’ and ‘Love has taken to hating me for loving’ she appears like the masculine lover who, hand on heart, insists on the purity of his motives, or like the ‘belle âme’ of ‘Por quoi me bait’ who cannot 37 Cf. the Comtessa de Dia, in ‘Ab ioi et ab ioven m’apais’: ‘The lady who has faith in virtue surely ought to put her faith in a knight of heart and worth’ (Bruckner et al. 3, their translation). There is the same insistence on obligation. Cf. also the anonymous ‘Quan vei los praz verdesir’: ‘A lady who waits for love should have a noble soul’ (Klink, Anthology 75). 38 Tilde Sankovitch notes in the songs of the trobairitz the ‘almost exclusive insistence on pain and suffering [which] separates her from the prevailing troubadour model […] based on a recurrent joi-dolor antithesis’ (‘Lombarda’s Reluctant Mirror’ 186).

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conceive why her husband beats her. Where she acknowledges her implication something unlike either emerges. Here she might be said to name her desire in the Lacanian sense (The Ego 228). We suggested earlier that the triumphant amie of the chanson d’ami does not acknowledge love’s impossibilities – or any limitations whatsoever. She lacks the lack which inaugurates desire. In Lacanian terms she has not assumed castration, the lack-in-being of the speaking subject: ‘It is […] the assumption of castration which creates the lack from which desire is instituted. Desire is the desire of (de) desire, desire of the Other […] that is to say, subject to the Law. It’s a fact that the woman must pass through the same dialectic – although nothing seems to oblige her to: she must lose what she doesn’t have’ (Lacan, Éc II 332).

Could it be said of the subject of ‘La froidor ne la jalee’ that she has assumed castration, has lost ‘what she doesn’t have’? It is not clear. She certainly seems to have encountered that ‘doesn’t stop not being written [which] is the impossible [of] the sexual relationship’ (Encore 94). The difficulty is that whatever she has passed through has left her in a place so dismal as to make one wonder that there is energy left for desire, except that she does not – cannot – escape it. She has very little room to move. There is a strong sense of fixity, even a deathliness in her discourse. Although she speaks of burning: ‘since his love has so inflamed me’, it is the cold of the exordium, although negatively invoked, that leaves the strongest impression: ‘Neither cold nor frost can cool my body down again’. There is one reference to movement, also negatively framed, but it is undercut with bitterness: ‘I don’t retreat from pursuing my harm’. One longs, by contrast, for the brimming optimism of the low-style femme. The subject of ‘Plaine d’ire’ ends her song with a self-destructive malice: ‘So do I seek and pursue my death’. Something seems to be ending here rather than generating or regenerating as in masculine chanson. In ‘La froidor ne la jalee’ the subject also speaks of an ending in a way which carries conviction, unlike the inauthentic endings of masculine chanson: ‘My song ends here since joy has ended for me’. But the joy she names cannot be found in any reference to the past. Perhaps she has indeed lost what she never had. At any rate she appears to take on, with open eyes, a humanity from which something of inestimable value is found to be missing. This is what is different from the songs examined earlier in this study. But it leaves a bitter taste of melancholia. Love seems not to enliven; rather, it has a killing touch. If this is desire, it is of the bleakest kind, completely without illusion. There is certainly no dewy-eyed idealism regarding the ami. It does seem, at least, that such a subject has faced the bitterness of the feminine position, that of having to negotiate desire from the position of the object of

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masculine desire and masculine exchange. For Gravdal, citing Shapiro, trobairitz song refers to the ‘extratextual dimension’. The women’s songs point to ‘the importance of the relations that unite poetic superstructure to social infrastructure’ (‘Metaphor’ 414). Unlike the troubadours who assume a position of feminine helplessness, the trobairitz sing of the inescapable, lived helplessness of medieval women. Indeed, but the assumption of subjectivity sometimes apparent in ‘Ne froidor ne jalee’ stems, I believe, from an acknowledgement of the subject’s own implication in her fate, however grim the external circumstances. A victim is without desire (and therefore without subjectivity), because to acknowledge desire is to accept a measure of implication. This is why neither the low-style chanson de femme nor the masculine lover of the chanson inspire confidence in the subjectivity of their ‘subjects’. The subject of ‘La froidor’ laments: ‘he has me in his power, he whose I was and am and will be’. A similar bleakness inhabits ‘Plaine d’ire et de desconfort’: ‘I am conquered by the one I thought to have conquered. Now things go badly for me because he is his and I too am his, thus we are both his if it is as I believe.’ (Doss-Quinby et al. 123). This subject has attempted to reverse the positions and acknowledges her failure. Implicit in her utterance is a different proposition: ‘he should be mine and I should be mine’. That is to say, the power of possession should rest with the sublime object. This sounds like the voice of the powerless domna invoked by Kay and the sense of powerlessness is borne out elsewhere in the song. ‘Plaine d’ire’ puts the case of the powerless feminine lover forcefully. ‘Plaine d’ire et de desconfort’ chanson RS 1934, L 265–1326, MW 1087 Manuscript: U 47v–48r, C 191r–v Music: in U Text: Doss-Quinby et al. Dialect: Lorraine 1. Plaine d’ire et de desconfort plor: en chantant m’en rededui. Sachiez de fi qu’ai grant tort,

se por ceu non q’ensi recort m’ire et mon duel et mon enui.

Full of anger and sorrow I weep: in singing I find pleasure again. Know truly that I have committed great wrong, because I was too daring when neither my heart nor my mouth refrained from anything which might bring me joy except for this, that it is thus that I declare my anger and my sorrow and my grief.

2. Dame cuidoie estre d’autrui, mais bien sai que folie fis,

I thought I was the lady of another, but well I know that I acted foolishly

car assez trop hardie fui quant mon cuer ne ma boiche mui a rien qui tenist a deport

188 car conquise sui par celui cui je cuidoie avoir conquis. Or en est devers moi li pis, car il siens est et je si sui: ensi somes sien ambedui, s’il est ensi com je devis. 3. Trop ai vilainement mespris cant malgré suen soie me faz, qu’il n’a cure, ce m’est avis, ne de moi ne mon solaz; desqu’il ne m’ainme, je me haz, et s’amie serai toz dis, encor soit il mes enemis: ensi ma mort quier et porchaz.

HELEN DELL

because I am conquered by the one I thought to have conquered. Now things go badly for me because he is his and I too am his, thus we are both his if it is as I believe. I was shamefully mistaken when, in spite of him, I made myself his, because he doesn’t care, that’s what I think, neither for me nor my comfort; since he doesn’t love me I hate myself, yet I will always be his friend, even if he is my enemy: so do I seek and pursue my death.

She is not the sublime object of desire (la dame), which she has attempted to be: ‘I thought I was the lady of another … I am conquered by the one I thought to have conquered’. She has not conquered him. Her gift of herself has ruled out that possibility. As Gontier de Soignes observes: ‘there is little worth in a castle that falls at the first assault. It should hold out – otherwise no one wants it!’ The object which can be attained is summarily desublimed.39 The ami belongs only to himself. But because of her own desire and her ‘foolish’ action she also belongs to him – as a possession of no worth. Yet, as Gravdal observes, when the feminine lover does not ‘yield her sexual favours’ she too is ‘abandoned for another’ (‘Metaphor’ 418). This is the case of the lover of ‘Onqes n’amai tant, que jou fui amee’ (Doss-Quinby et al. 120), who did not love when she was loved and so lost her man to another woman: ‘By my pride I have lost my friend’. It is a classic ‘doublebind’ (‘Metaphor’ 418). Neither by pursuing her own jouissance, like the free-wheeling lowstyle amie, nor by posing as the unattainable dame can she succeed in love. It is no wonder these songs are sorrowful. The songs discussed in Chapters 4 and 5 can be optimistic only by ignoring the impasses of feminine desire which these songs reveal. I see the disymmetry between mastery in discourse and bitterness in desire in the feminine chanson as the same old difficulty which women’s desire always encounters, ‘that of accepting herself as an object of desire for the man’ (Lacan, ‘Intervention’ 99). Neither as sublime nor as debased object can her own desires thrive. Both ‘Plaine d’ire et de desconfort’ and ‘La froidor ne la jalee’ revolve around the question of possession – the question of who belongs to whom and where the power resides in the relation of desirer/desired. Neither la dame nor la femme is meant to desire, in the sense

39 The verb ‘to desublime’ follows on from Fradenburg’s usage in Sacrifice Your Love (e.g. 97).

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that their desire gets in the way of the ‘meaning’ of desire generated across the system of genres – the ‘meaning’ of women as objects of masculine desire.40 Both these songs indicate something of the situation of the feminine subject who, as object of masculine desire, struggles to enunciate her own desire, not because the songs represent the ‘sincere’ outpourings of a woman but because they reflect the difficulties inherent in the feminine symbolic position.41 In shouldering their desire, that is by acknowledging their implication, these textual women overturn the binary which presents them purely as objects to the masculine subject, a binary which the low-style chanson de femme ultimately maintains. The enunciation of desire is won but not without cost. Nonetheless these subjects speak. There are consolations for the woman who finds her voice: ‘Full of anger and sorrow I weep, in singing I find pleasure again’, sings the subject of ‘Plaine d’ire’ while the subject of ‘L’on dit q’amors est dolce chose’ cries, in the aphoristic mode of refrain: ‘She leaves behind her sorrows who dares to lament, sooner can she extinguish her pain’. This lamenting is not mere inarticulate tears but the enunciation of desire in song. This is borne out in strophe 1: ‘Miserably defeated is she who dares not weep nor in weeping speak her sorrow’. There is a satisfaction in speaking the sorrow of desire in spite of its impasses. Trobairitz Castelloza sings the same tune: ‘I want to plead my cause before I let myself die, since in beseeching I find such sweet succour when I beseech the man who causes me such anguish’ (Gender 175). Simon Gaunt, whose translation this is, argues that ‘in defending her right to language, she defends her right to desire’ because of the ‘inextricable relationship’ between language and desire (177). Speaking her desire makes of her a subject, as Gaunt maintains (176). Lacan postulates the ‘inextricable relationship’ in this way: it is the speaking of desire which brings it fully to birth: If desire doesn’t dare to speak its name, it’s because the subject hasn’t yet caused this name to come forth. […] But it isn’t a question of recognising something that would be entirely given, ready to be coapted. In naming it,

40

La dame must be perfect, suggests Bloch: ‘the condition of her perfection is that she be self-sufficient, self-contained, complete – or that, being desired, she herself should not desire’ (Medieval Misogyny 147). This makes of her a ‘virgin’: ‘To the extent that the woman of the lyric seduces but is never seduced, she represents a virgin’ (151). 41 The notion of authorial sincerity is, at bottom, a denial of the rhetorical skill which underpins the trouvère and troubadour traditions, whether male- or female-authored, as Robbins (‘Woman/Poet’ 12B) and Bruckner (‘Fictions’ 866) point out. Wendy Pfeffer seems to be suggesting a greater sincerity in feminine-authored songs: ‘In this personal expression of emotion [‘Par maintes fois’], we have a marker not only of the woman’s voice, but of the woman’s hand in composition’ (‘Complaints’ 129). I do not think the idea of these chansons as ‘personal expression[s] of emotion’ is sustainable.

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the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world. He introduces presence as such and by the same token, hollows out absence as such. (The Ego 228–9)

One would not choose not to speak. It is in daring to name desire that these women persuade the reader/listener that they are desiring subjects and thus, potentially, authors of their songs. Female authorship becomes plausible when desire ‘dare[s] to speak its name’. The daring – and the achievement – are twofold: daring to speak at all and daring to name desire. Even if she spoke only the words of the masculine lover there would be a différance, because desiring is paradigmatically linked to the masculine. Lacan’s words echo the refrain of ‘L’on dit q’amors’: ‘She who dares lament’.42 Here the significance of speaking desire in the feminine chanson is evident. A ‘new presence’ does indeed appear ‘in the world’. The lack of idealism regarding the friend opens up another aspect of desire in the feminine chanson. It is not driven by any inherent qualities in the beloved. He does not appear except in his harmful effects, but not because he is summarily dismissed with a tag (‘handsome and courteous’ for instance), like the ami of low style. Here too, however, he himself is unimportant but for a different reason. It seems that the subject of ‘La froidor’ in her disillusionment is made bitterly aware that the one ‘I so desire, on whom I have fixed my thoughts’ is not in himself the bearer of all good, as la dame is, supposedly.43 In ‘Onqes n’amai tant que jou fui amee’ the ami sits in a place close to la dame’s: ‘for Love provided me well with the best and handsomest man in all the country’, although here too there is a difference. This woman was once loved. She was provided with the ami himself. Love provides the masculine chanson lover only with the honour of worshipping la dame. It does not guarantee her acquiescence. ‘Onqes n’amai’ evokes a past rather than a future of love. ‘La froidor’ suggests a different relation to the object from that in the other songs we have examined, in either the masculine or the feminine voice. It looks, at times, like desire without a credible semblance in the place of objet (petit) a. Neither this subject nor the subject of ‘Plaine d’ire’ relinquishes her desire. The subject of ‘Plaine d’ire’ says: ‘yet I will always be his friend’, while her counterpart in ‘La froidor’ insists: ‘not for anything people might say to me will I love anyone but him, who fills me with dismay’. No reason is offered because there is none to give. There is no reason in this desire 42

Jennifer Smith draws attention to the social dimension of the trobairitz’ desire which cannot be ignored: ‘The trobairitz lyrics […] demonstrate clearly the textual nature of the ‘love’ in question, and a focus on textual participation as a means to the attainment of status within a community united by shared language and values’ (‘Subjects’ 176). 43 Fradenburg speaks of the fine lovers’ ‘devotion to the figure of the Lady/finamen and the Law that s/he embodies’, as if lovers of both sexes place themselves in an identical position vis-à-vis their beloved objects. It is not the case here.

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and, since narrative in songs of love is usually there to give a raison d’être for desire, there is no narrative substance because nothing can explain it. Nothing causes it since it is itself the cause. The topos of the irrationality of love is not confined to the feminine side. Thibaut de Champagne’s lover, in ‘Chanter m’estuet car ne m’en puis tenir’ laments: ‘Reason tells me to take my thought away, but I have a heart like no other; always it tells me: “Love, love, love!” No other reason does it offer’ (Brahney 84–7). Love is amoral, guided by no law but her whim: ‘for she does good or ill as she pleases’ (87). But la dame is invested with the power to make all well if only she would: ‘Lady, have mercy, you who know all good! … Help me, you who can do it!’ (87). It appears, however, that in ‘La froidor ne la jalee’ and ‘Plaine d’ire et de deconfort’ no one is invested with this power of being able to ‘do it’, to make all right again. Here the credibility of the Other of desire is exploded.44 This Other is the one who knows, to whom the subject poses the question: ‘What [do you] want of me?’ (Écrits 313). In masculine chanson (as in Thibaut’s song) la dame takes this place of the Other, or rather shares it with Love. La dame is both Other and the semblance of objet a.45 In the chanson de malmariée it is the husband whom the malmariée defies. But in ‘La froidor’ and ‘Plaine d’ire’ the Other is not fully represented since the credibility of the ami as sublime object of desire is eroded and there is no one else, no other omnipotent, all-knowing prohibitor, to take his place. In the moment when the subject of feminine chanson acknowledges her own implication in her fate – to the extent that she does acknowledge it – she also acknowledges the lack in the Other. She acknowledges that her desire is subject to a law that has no real existence. It is a ‘law unto itself ’ in that its authority is not displaced anywhere; nothing clothes it. It is given no substance and its emptiness is revealed. Thus the femme who names her desire in chanson appears as both powerless and responsible in relation to it: powerless in that she is still in subjection to the ‘desire of the Other’ since that is how desire functions, yet responsible since the Other is found to be lacking and her desire is revealed as her own. She is not, therefore, equivalent to the masculine chanson lover who hides his cherished mastery (itself an illusion), under the trope of helpless passivity. He is manipulating events to position himself as the noble bearer of unmerited affliction. Her subjectivity consists in her willingness to shoulder responsibility for her desire despite her powerlessness in the face of it. Nor is she equivalent to the masculine chanson lover when he abandons his position of helplessness to gesture at his own manoeuvres in order to hide desire’s 44 Cf. again Fradenburg, on ‘the Lady/finamen and the Law that s/he embodies’ (Sacrifice Your Love 41). The beloved amis does not embody the Law here. 45 Cf. Lacan: ‘The idealized woman, the Lady […] is in the position of the Other and of the object’ (Ethics 163).

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radical impossible. In the bitterness of ‘La froidor’ and ‘Plaine d’ire’ these pyrotechnic displays of half-saying and double-saying are absent. The question remains of what propels desire in the face of an impasse which appears to be sometimes acknowledged. If no one appears in the place of objet a, and the law – the place of the Other – is seen to be empty, what can move the subject in desire? That she is moved to speak is established. It is not so clear, in ‘La froidor’ and ‘Plaine d’ire’, what the future is – or if there is a future – for feminine desire beyond the naming of it. How, in other words, might she act in the face of her desire? If she abandons the deadly repetitions of the malmariée can she chance herself to what Lacan calls ‘a true act [that] always has an element of structure, by the fact of concerning a real that is not self-evidently caught up in it’ (Fundamental Concepts 50). So we shall now return to the question of the temporality of desire – the idea of a future with something of the real – for the desiring woman. ‘Too late’, ‘just too late, ‘almost too late’: Modulations of Time in the Feminine Chanson Different desiring structures are intimately linked to different temporalities. We have already encountered some of the various appearances of time in the feminine voice, and examined those feminine songs, the laments, where loss is acknowledged as having already occurred. These songs draw a past to themselves in the form of an increased narrativity, as Blakeslee observes. We have also looked at the low-style amie for whom intention, speech and action are not separable and who excludes the possibility of chance and change. No wildcards permitted! I discussed the circularity of the malmariée’s manoeuvres, a temporality of ‘eternal recurrences’ as Kristeva has it, which subverted the subject’s claims to direct forward movement in pursuit of her desire. Thus her future is foreclosed. The triumphalist amie inhabits a temporality where past, present and future coalesce because nothing is left to chance or allowed to change, a temporality reminiscent of Kristeva’s feminine eternal: ‘a monumental temporality […]. All-encompassing and infinite like imaginary space […]’ (‘Women’s Time’ 34). As Kristeva intimates, this is essentially a world without time. In the triumphalist chanson d’ami it appears as a seamless world without lack and without desire. This world lacks also the concomitants of time: doubt, hesitation, reflection, choice, regret, longing, nostalgia, haste. In this world there are no missed opportunities because there are no gaps in which they could occur. As we saw in Chapter 6, the femme (represented by the shepherdess) tries, against the efforts of the narrator, to make a lyric of narrative, wanting everything to continue forever, stalling resolution and finality. In the previous section of this chapter we noted that the subjects who speak desire in ‘La froidor ne la jalee’ and ‘Plaine d’ire et de desconfort’ appear to be grounded,

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finding no way forward for their desire. A fantasy is lacking. They speak of death and ending in a way which is all too convincing. The impasses of feminine desire overwhelm them and Love touches them with the finger of death. I would like now to examine a song which demonstrates a different temporality, in that it sits with its past and its future differently. It demonstrates a kind of movement – a movement involving choice: ‘Qui de .ii. biens le millour’. It is in an unusual form for chanson; Doss-Quinby et al. place it under the rubric of chanson d’ami but it is unusual there too. It has quite short lines (seven syllables) allied to long strophes (eleven lines plus a refrain of five lines). There is a slightly abstract quality to it, as if the song pursued the threads of both sides of a jeu-parti on a question of fin’amor, as if, indeed, the subject were debating with herself.46 It picks up on the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feminine behaviour in love, as in ‘L’autrier estoie en un vergier’ (Rosenberg and Danon 268), sometimes attributed to Gace Brulé, where the debate between ‘la bone’ and ‘la fause’ is played for laughs, ending in a fist fight which ‘Gace’ hurries to cut short. In ‘Qui de .ii. biens le millour’, the voice of only one woman sorts through, earnestly, the possibilities for feminine desire. ‘Qui de .ii. biens le millour’ chanson? RS 1999a, L 265–1528, MW 489, B 1593 Manuscript: f 123r Text: Doss-Quinby et al. 25, pp. 138–9 Dialect: Picard Qui de .ii. biens le millour laist, encontre sa pensee, et prent pour li le pïour, bien croi que c’est esp[ro]vee tres haute folour.

One who of two leaves the better, against her desire, and takes for herself the worst, I do believe she shows the greatest folly.

1. Cause ai d’avoir mon penser a ce que serve ai esté Ai! et sui de vrai ami, sage, courtois, bien secré g[ou]vrené par meureté, et gentil, preu et hardi, et qui sur tous a m’amour. Dont sui souvent eno[ree] d’autrui amer, sans secour.

I have cause to think that he whose servant I have been, Ah! and still am, is a true friend: wise, courteous, very discreet, of mature conduct, and noble, worthy and bold, and who over all others has my love. I am often honoured with the love of another, but in vain.

46 Doss-Quinby notes the abstract nature of the jeu-parti: ‘[T]he question is posed in abstract terms, as a polemic exercise’ (Rolan 506).

194 Mais pour mon mieuls sui donnee, s’en ferai demour. Qui de .ii. biens le millour … 2. Lasse! il m’est trop mal tourné a dolour et a grieté quant je ai si mal parti qu’il me faut cont[re] mon gré, par droite necessité de corps eslongier cheli a qui m’otroi sans folour, et sans estre au[trui] voee de coer; mais c’est vains labours, car tant ne doit estre amee foelle con la flours. Qui de .ii. biens le millour … 3. Or m’ont amours assenee; mais, si c’a leur volenté est mieuls qu’il n’affier a mi. Tous jours doi av[oir] fondé mon desir sur loiaulté, en espoir d’amour qu’ai ui, car tout passe de valour chus dont s[ui en]amouree; d’un si gracieus retour saige doi estre avisee, se j’ai chier m’onnour. Qui de .ii. biens le millour …

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But I am bestowed to my advantage so I will remain with him. One who of two leaves the better … Alas! it’s turned out very badly for me, to sorrow and to grief, since I chose so badly; now I must, against my will, by right necessity withdraw from him to whom I surrender myself without folly, and without any vow to another from the heart; but it is a vain endeavour, for a leaf should not be prized like the flower. One who of two leaves the better … Now Love has dealt me a blow but, since that is its will it’s better that it doesn’t concern me. I should always have based my desire on loyalty, in hope of the love I now have, because he passes all in value, the one I love; I should be thought wise if, with such good fortune, I cherish the honour that has come to me. One who of two leaves the better …

This song interests me because its subject puts back together the two feminine halves which the system usually keeps divided. She insists on being both la bone and la fause, an insistence which amounts to a rejection of either. She refuses moral caricature.47 There is a generic aspect to this refusal as well, although la bone and la fause do not perfectly correspond to la dame and la femme. It is more that when a woman is singular – unlike all other women in her perfection – she may be called la dame, but conversely, la dame 47 Bruckner notes a similar refusal in the songs of Castelloza and the Comtessa de Dia: ‘They refuse the kind of separation Bernard de Ventadorn makes in his famous song Can vei la lauzeta mover between domna and femna, positively and negatively valorised’ (‘Fictions’ 877). Cf. Castelloza’s ‘Amics, s’ie.us trobes avinen’: ‘I don’t know how to act with you: I’ve studied, with good and bad intent, your hard heart’ (Bruckner et al. 21, their translation).

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is always on the brink of being revealed as la femme, one who shares the common lot of women as imperfect daughters of Eve. Bloch notes that the ‘discourse of antifeminism is characterized by the speech act “all women are …,” [whereas] that of the courtly lover is haunted by “this one woman is” ’ (Medieval Misogyny 148). But he wonders whether the two are ‘so different after all’ (148). By explicitly joining the two, this subject – and this author – make apparent the dialectic of the two discourses, which is what Bloch seems to be getting at: that one woman (la dame) escapes, precariously, the opprobrium devoted to femininity as a whole only so long as she remains unlike all the others. In this song the subject reflects on her desire, alluding to a choice. This quality of reflection is what makes the difference. The issue is more or less the same as for the malmariée, between a good man (‘wise, courteous, very discreet’), and a bad. This woman, however, made the wrong choice, something the malmariée – who cannot be mistaken – could not do. The malmariée is always married off against her will by malign others. This woman made her own choice: she prized the leaf over the flower (‘for a leaf should not be prized like the flower’). This choice she now regrets. She chose her ‘advantage’ – presumably financial – over loyalty: ‘I should always have based my desire on loyalty’. The voice of the self-blaming délaissée surfaces here but it surfaces in a different way from the voice of the amie of ‘Lasse, pour quoi’. This is an amie of a different colour. Regret opens the way for a different kind of response, one of reflection – not nostalgia, as in ‘Li nouviauz tanz’ – and thus leaves open the possibility for a different kind of feminine desire and a different kind of song. Unlike the headstrong malmariée, the subject of ‘Qui de .ii. biens le millour’ can consider another path than the one she chose. She can become, in the sense in which Grosz employs the term, because she can make a discovery – she can discover herself – even if it is too late to save the affair. She can contemplate her past, a first-person past, and not only the path she took but another, ephemeral path – the one she might have taken. This subject is not ‘ignorant’ because ignorance cannot be ‘wrong’. Only the knowing can make mistakes because a mistake, a wrong action, can only occur in an ethical landscape which makes the distinction. It is only after an encounter with the serpent that Eve can discover the distinction between good and evil choices. A loss of innocence is required for that knowledge. It is a knowledge that opens time; a past and future emerge separable from the eternal present. Time is what makes this space for reflection and allows for an ethic of personal responsibility in a world she cannot govern. Only from a place of reflection on the past can a wrong choice come into view. Bergson observes: Thus the living being essentially has duration; it has duration precisely because it is continuously elaborating what is new and because there is no

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elaboration without searching, no searching without groping. Time is this very hesitation (Bergson, qtd in Grosz, ‘Thinking’ 25).

The new is elaborated, it would appear, by reference to a past. Lacan offers a rather different emphasis which reinstates the subject’s history: ‘Analysis can have for its goal only the advent of a true speech and the realization by the subject of its history in relation to its future’ (Écrits 88). Forrester glosses this quotation as follows: The reorganization of the past and the future go hand in hand; their articulation will come to depend upon the transferential function, whereby the past dissolves in the present, so that the future becomes (once again) an open question, instead of being specified by the fixity of the past. (Forrester 206)

Unsticking the past can free up the future. It may be in fact because it is too late that she can change. For the subject it is always too late, since subjectivity comes after the Fall – that is, the entry into language – since when the object has always already been lost. ‘Too late!’ may be the feminine subject’s version of impossibility. The past which regret opens up allows a becoming. It opens the future while, at the same time, it whisks it away in the form of the beloved object of desire, with a ‘no longer’: ‘Now love has dealt me a blow; but since such is its will, it is better that it not concern me.’ This ‘no longer’ of the song, like the ‘too late!’, refers to a different temporal modality. The future, as we discussed earlier, is projected according to modality. Here responsibility makes a different modality of the past – it becomes a first-person past – and thus puts the future on a different footing by creating a different trajectory. The modality of responsibility in this song breaks the cycle of repetition which traps the malmariée. It makes a space out of ‘no longer’, for a different kind of song: a ‘no longer this but that’ temporal opening to a future no longer captive to the past; no longer circular. In fact it is not clear, after all, that it is quite too late in ‘Qui de .ii.’. The movement of tense suggests ambivalence. In strophe 3, ‘Love has dealt me a blow’ suggests that the time for action is past. In strophe 1 it sounds as if she has already made her decision: ‘But I am bestowed to my advantage so I will remain with him [le pïour]’, and, in any case, she is now committed and her actions are henceforth constrained: ‘now I must by right necessity withdraw from him [le millour]’. But this was not a vow ‘from the heart’, and her musings in the last three lines of the final strophe suggest she is strongly attracted to changing the situation, oscillating between conditional and indicative: ‘I should be thought wise if, with such good fortune, I cherish the honour that has come to me’. Earlier in this strophe she says: ‘I should always have based my desire on loyalty, in hope of the love I now have’. If she stays where she is (with ‘le piöur’), the present of inertia (‘I am bestowed

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to my advantage’ and ‘by necessity’), the future of inertia (‘so I will remain with him’), and the smooth passage between them, will not be disturbed. But a decision in favour of ‘le millour’ (‘if … I cherish the honour that has come to me’), would decisively alter the temporal canvas and create a new narrative and a new future. The ‘necessity’ which forecloses the future would founder in the light of an act. In this debate the jury is still out, but the arguments for change seem to be growing stronger as the song progresses, presenting very forcefully the merits of ‘le millour’ and the good fortune of his love which still seems available – but for how long? Would-be lovers do not hang around forever! There is always a rival – another woman waiting in the wings to snap him up – although she is not mentioned here. The jury would remain out, I think, unless and until this woman acted. Only an act can separate past from future. Eve’s encounter in Eden culminates in an act and only from there can a place for truth come into being. A debate will not settle the matter. She must act in uncertainty and allow the act itself, as Lacan suggests, to ‘generate certainty’ (Anxiety 19.12.62): ‘all human activity expands into certainty […]. To act is to tear its certainty from anxiety’ (19.12.62). Perhaps something of a ‘Too late!’ is necessary for change – a becoming. It also seems that something of haste is required for a decision to be reached in time – an ‘almost too late’ perhaps. A temporal gap yet remains. Lacan’s ‘sophism’ on the three prisoners offers something of a parallel. The three prisoners are given a chance of freedom if they can solve a puzzle relating to their identity. In their attempts time ‘modulates’ ‘in the Sophism’s Movement’. There are three ‘evidential moments’: ‘the Instant of the Glance, the Time for Comprehending and the Moment of Concluding’ (‘Logical Time’ 10). John Forrester says of the third step, when each of the prisoners moves to the door to offer his explanation: Here, following the time for understanding […] we find a moment of selfassertion, of judgement. Following the time for understanding is a reflection upon being already late […] The moment of being already (too) late presents itself logically as an urgency in the moment of concluding. From hesitating, a pulsation leads immediately to being too late. […] Hence, the need for precipitation (Forrester 180–81).

There is no certainty without action: [T]he certainty […] is engendered in the act itself, rather than prior to the act. And the possibility of truth, of being right, is founded upon the precipitation that induces certainty, while error would be based upon an inertia of the subject, unwilling to seize the moment to conclude (181).

‘Qui de .ii.’ captures the subject in the ‘second evidential moment’, ‘prior to the act’ – if any act is forthcoming. It is in her hands. She has the wherewithal.

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If it occurred this would be a true act, bringing with it a subjectivity beyond the reflections of the ego. Peter Gunn contrasts the assertion of the ‘moment of conclusion’ with the assertion of the ‘time for comprehending’: Having moved through an assertion referred to the other in the form: ‘If the other acts at some time then I will understand what I have been’ at a certain time the prisoner’s initial question ‘What am I?’ becomes a subjective assertion of an anticipated certainty, an anticipation of becoming in the form: ‘It is only if I act now that I have the possibility of becoming what I then will have been’. […] this is the moment to assert, and then to act to appropriate, the subject’s own subjectivity’ (‘Logical Time in Lacan’ 14).

Something of this difference between the ‘what I have been’ which is a reflection from the other and the future perfect ‘what I then will have been’ which is a subjective assertion carried in an act, is captured in the ambiguity of tense which infects ‘Qui de .ii.’. The ambiguity indicates a knowledge of this difference, a knowledge belonging to the song. The subject hovers between a reflection from the other and a different form of ‘reflection’ which could culminate in an act. We must leave the subject in this crucial moment where the song leaves her. In ‘Par maintes fois’ the temporal gap is on the negative side. This time only comes into view when it is gone. It is the time of ‘when I could still see you’ in ‘Ah friend! Why didn’t I do what you wanted when I could still see you!’ It is the poignancy of realizing too late one’s failure to act in the time when it is only almost too late, one’s refusal to seize time by the forelock. The time stretched out interminably in inertia until it was suddenly gone. The subject of ‘Par maintes fois’, as we have seen, inhabits a world of missed opportunities. ‘Par maintes fois’ is, of course, a special case as a plainte funèbre, yet it, strangely, also seems to leave an opening. Unexpectedly, since the beloved amins is now dead – which might be thought to induce a certain finality – this song displays the typical, deferring oscillations of the chanson in the masculine voice. They are most evident in strophe 3: ‘I would do more for you, friend … if now I had you again; but that will never be unless I die. But I cannot die like this, for Love has yet promised me joy. (But) I wish for sorrow instead of having joy, pain and trouble is the debt I must settle.’ There is an echo in the final two lines of the song: ‘But I might recover from pain except for this, that Love has me in its power’. This is highly reminiscent of the oscillations of ‘De bone amour’. Here, as there, a kind of stasis is produced by the speed of the oscillations, forestalling any commitment to action or any resolution, but it is very different from the bogged down stasis of ‘La froidor ne la jalee’. This oscillation, especially: ‘I wish for sorrow instead of living joyfully, pain and trouble is the debt I must settle’, functions as the fending off of satisfaction in favour of a jouissance

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of suffering which is so familiar in masculine chanson. It is like the relation to time of the obsessional, of which Lacan says: In fact the obsessional subject manifests one of the attitudes that Hegel did not develop in his dialectic of the master and the slave […] since [the slave] knows that he is mortal, he also knows that the master can die. From this moment on he is able to accept his labouring for the master and his renunciation of pleasure in the meantime; and, in the uncertainty of the moment when the master will die, he waits. Such is the intersubjective reason, as much for the doubt as for the procrastination that are character traits of the obsessional subject (Écrits 99).

Not until she has paid her debt can the subject of ‘Par maintes fois’ consider joy, which can always be put off again, keeping sublimated desire spinning endlessly like a top. This sentiment is echoed in the (slightly smug) final two lines: ‘I might recover from pain except for this, that Love has me in its power’. Love is master here, thus excusing her from action. This is an ending as unconvincing as any in masculine chanson, and could not contrast more strongly with the too-convincing endings of ‘La froidor’ and ‘Plaine d’ire’. The ‘but’, ‘might’ and ‘except’ of ‘Par maintes fois’, signifiers involving doubt or irresolution, offer an occluded promise of continuing oscillation. The game is not over although, as in ‘De bone amour’, it is not a game that can lead to an act but only to endless procrastinations, a time emptied of action. For Lacan the obsessional subject is in a sense, already dead. He cannot find himself in his labour (Écrits 100): He is in the anticipated moment of the master’s death, from which moment he will begin to live, but in the meantime he identifies himself with the master as dead, and as a result of this he is himself already dead (100).

The oscillations of ‘Par maintes fois’ take action out of the subject’s hands and Love stands in as the law she is subjected to. In ‘Par maintes fois’, narrative serves to introduce the object of desire retrospectively. As in Lacan’s account of Hamlet, the object of desire as such [is] designated as such […] because it is precisely as object of desire that it had been neglected up to a certain moment […] precisely in the measure that as object it has just disappeared, that as one might say the retroactive dimension […] of the imperfect […] the ‘il ne savait pas’, which means: at the last minute did he not know, a little more and he would have known (Anxiety 28.11.62).

The subject of ‘Par maintes fois’ in the past allowed another consideration to override the value of the amis: fear of li losengier. Like Hamlet, just too late to save the day, she makes her discovery: ‘a little more and he would

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have known’. It is the smallness of the gap which wrings the heart but it is a discovery which could not have been made until just too late. In spite (and because) of the ‘just too late’ the subject of ‘Par maintes fois’ does not appear ready to ring down the curtain on desire. Nor does Hamlet, suggests Lacan: ‘it is along this path [of retroactive recognition] that there is placed the return of Hamlet, that which is the high point of his destiny’ (28.11.62). Something is released for Hamlet in this recognition which carries him on to his destiny when the object is removed from sight. It seems that, as for Hamlet, there is still a destiny for the subject of ‘Par maintes fois’ but for her, unlike Hamlet, it looks like a destiny of obsessional procrastination; no destiny at all! There is no high point; nothing is released. She will not act because, like the masculine chanson lover, her sorrowful enjoyment is sustained in inaction. Fathers, Mothers, Children It can be seen that discourse, desire and temporality in the feminine chanson are inflected according to which model predominates in the writing of the song, although each offspring is unique. Each of these songs goes beyond its model, if only in the appropriation of different discursive forms by the feminine voice. The subject of ‘Par maintes fois’ occupies a position close to that of the masculine chanson lover. It is, perhaps, ‘fathered’ by it,48 and produces faithfully its obsessional time of eternal waiting, inflected by oscillation substituted for action, just as it produces faithfully its characteristic topoi and discursive forms.49 There is the sexual ambiguity noted above, however, to complicate the placing of this subject. This ambiguity is best not called androgyny, since that suggests a fixed position on a spectrum. It is less stable, more fluid, than that. The subjects of ‘La froidor ne la jalee’ and ‘Plaine d’ire et de desconfort’ carry through the implications of the lamenting chanson de femme, the pain of women, who, as objects of desire, sublime or otherwise, insist on their own desire but find themselves with no way around its impasses. But they go further, in acknowledging that in these tormenting desires there is something recognizable as their own. They dare to name it and a new presence enters the world. In ‘Mout m’abelist’ something can be seen of the optimism of the triumphalist amie, although this subject’s ‘joie’ has more weight, it is suggested,

48

Cf. the suggestion that the Duchesse de Lorraine may have been the daughter of trouvère Thibaut IV de Champagne (Doss-Quinby et al. 29), who favoured the extensive use of bestiary imagery. 49 Although, as I contend, the positioning of the words, as coming from a woman’s lips, is a difference in itself.

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than the flighty joys of the low-style amie, and this weight comes to it via the masculine chanson. It lays claim to the eroticized ‘grant joie’ of the grand chant which, in the masculine chanson, bears the tensions of sublimated desire. Yet it bears the marks of a seemingly bland submission to obligation, an obedience which seems to put it in a rather different relation to the law than that of the masculine chanson. This law looks like an Other which regulates the behaviour and the demeanour rather than one which, like the more radical Others of the masculine chanson, is said to conquer the heart and overthrow the reason, and the subject’s submission bears the marks of this difference. It is less convulsive and fragmentizing – less dramatic. It also appears as more docile – more demure and industrious, with its resolutely ‘cheerful heart’ – as if it is more used to being ordered around and has learnt its role well. ‘Mout m’abelist’ bears the marks of an acute awareness of the possibility of social disapproval.50 It sounds as if this feminine voice knows it breaks a taboo in speaking courtly words and waits for the blow. This awareness is also evident in some of the jeux-partis which include a woman’s voice. For instance, in ‘Dame de Gosnai, gardez’, the Dame argues: ‘I would rather act disadvantageously while heedful of [my friends’] approbation and opinion. To this I will always adhere; Never shall I be reproached for having refused advice’ (Doss-Quinby et al. 85). Jeux-partis sometimes situate the lady with the choice of offending against a law of fin’amor or of offending against the social mores by which a woman’s reputation in the world is safeguarded. 51 The approval of one ensures the disapproval of the other, as in this case, where Gillebert responds: ‘[T]rue lovers of the land will be asked to pass judgment on you for having infringed the commandments of Love’ (85). Reproach awaits her in either direction. The community of true lovers looks, in this context, dishearteningly like another version of that law, represented by her guardians, which dictates her conduct and orders the disposal of her body. It seems that approval and disapproval are closely regarding, and regarded by, the subject of ‘Mout m’abelist’. The difference is that in jeu-parti, the context of game and competition surrounding the debate form, and the sense of fun which it engenders, lessen the effect of this sense of social scrutiny. As Doss-Quinby et al. suggest, ‘[t]he purpose of the debate was not to display genuine convictions’ (74). In this context, judgements are part of the game and seem, therefore, less a matter of life and death. Also, as in ‘Par maintes

50 Cf. Doss-Quinby: for the troveresses, ‘[f]ear of social disapproval is an important issue’ (‘Rolan’ 511). 51 The same question of conflicting codes and how a woman negotiates between them occurs in ‘Je vous pri, dame Maroie’ (Doss-Quinby et al. 74–8), where Maroie and Margot debate the question of whether a lady should ‘reveal her feelings or … remain silent’ if her lover is too timid to make a declaration of love (76).

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fois’, an authority is generated for the subject by the presumption of a female author, in this case one judged worthy to take part in such a contest. In ‘Mout m’abelist’ the confidence which might be gained in the utterance of courtly sentiments seems eroded by an anxiety about assuming that position. The contradictions for the feminine subject who aspires to the code of fin’amor are evident. Sadly, we will never know in what direction she took her ‘joie’. This ‘joie’, however, as far as it goes, looks lightweight in comparison with the bitter revelations of ‘La froidor’ and ‘Plaine d’ire’. These songs can, to some extent, be placed in relation to their models, although they go beyond them. It is more difficult to place ‘Qui de .ii.’. Its author, as I mentioned earlier, explicitly brings together the domna and the femna, the singular and the generic forms of femininity found in the song system, and la bone and la fause, the positive and negative forms of femininity which are not quite co-extensive with them. This subject is not based directly on any of the models available: la femme of low style, the masculine chanson lover or the imagined discourse of la dame. As I suggested earlier, there is something of the debating intonation in her voice reminiscent of the jeu-parti, but, because the debating voices are united, a more complex subject, able to bear the questions of feminine desire, comes into view. These questions can be more deeply plumbed. This complexity mitigates the abstract quality of jeu-parti; a more denselytextured subjectivity is woven by combining the two voices. The question becomes ‘embodied’, so to speak, in the dialectic. Both question and questioner gain substance. The voices of ‘Qui de .ii.’ have also a resource in each other, even though they are opposed, which shows up, by comparison, a loneliness evident in the monologue of ‘Mout m’abelist’, as its subject seems to struggle in the face of a harsh law to justify her claims by cheerfulness. Why does this cheerfulness ring so hollow? In the loneliness of this one strophe, perhaps it is in the feeling that the subject, like Deborah Kerr in The King and I, ‘whistles a happy tune’ to convince herself she is not afraid. One senses the presence of an Other, frightening to her, who doubts her right to speak the courtly. A different kind of loneliness assails the subject of ‘La froidor’ who cries: ‘I know no counsel for my life if I don’t have counsel from another’. She makes no attempt at cheerfulness; for her there is no one to placate. This subject, in spite of her cries, is beyond the counsel of others, as she immediately reveals: ‘I know well that not for anything people might say to me will I love anyone but him, who fills me with dismay’. This sounds like the accepted loneliness of one who acknowledges her own desire; the painful acceptance that there is no one who can counsel her. In ‘Qui de .ii.’ the subject’s speech more manifestly puts paid to the notion of Woman as one who can be contained in a set; she cannot be generalized. Perhaps this is why she cannot be easily placed generically. Her voice does not fit generic or registral specifications, although it carries some echoes. The

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forms of her discourse are unfamiliar in any genre. This subject’s song of desire, while its topoi are familiar, comes out of the blue. It is not recognizable, particularly in the constitution of its changing temporal landscapes and their ethical ramifications, as the offspring of any of its possible models.

Afterthoughts ‘ “[T]hat’s not it” and “that’s still not it” ’1 What then becomes of femininity when la femme leaves her supposedly natural habitat of low style? In a system which relies for its effects of meaning on binary oppositions favouring masculinity, what position can she then take up vis-à-vis the masculine? Moreover, if, as Lévi-Strauss contends, a ‘structure is made up of several elements, none of which can undergo a change without effecting changes in all the other elements’ (Structural Anthropology 279), what happens to that ‘masculine’ when it cannot be signified by contrast to the feminine? These are the questions with which I began this exploration, the questions Chapter 7 hoped to find answers for. But the situation has changed in the process of writing the book, especially the final chapter. I now want to interrogate my own questions. Those questions, I now feel, still privilege to some extent the sexual binarism set up by the trouvères. It is privileged in the assumption that femininity must take up a position in relation to masculinity, either the one the system affords or another. ‘Meaning’ must be preserved. In the trouvère system this position is provided generically. The emptiness of femininity is occluded by generic differentiation, as I have argued. Each genre or subgenre provides a woman who figures as ‘Woman’, and these generically differentiated manifestations, no matter how different they are, are elided back into Woman unless one keeps the differences in focus. Embedded in this assumption is another: that one can only speak from a place. Both these assumptions have been put in doubt. I have spoken of a different subject position for the subject of ‘Qui de .ii.’, but perhaps this term ‘position’ is a last-ditch attempt to place her in a relation to the masculine subject which she cannot occupy. Her refusal of the split between la dame and la femme (or la bone and la fause) perhaps indicates an inability to be entirely ‘placed’. If a position implies a relation, as indeed it would seem to, this is the case. I think now that, initially, I still cherished the desire to recuperate femi-

1 Kristeva, ‘La femme’ (137). Cf. Lacan: ‘I’m asking you to refuse what I’m offering you, because that’s not it!’ (qtd Fink 190, n. 15).

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ninity, to prove that, like man, these textual women had a soul. It was perhaps an attempt to place woman as man’s equal, in spite of my declared scepticism. But if there is no sexual relation and no ‘Woman’, what position could femininity take up? The subject of ‘Qui de .ii.’ cannot be tied to a place. There is a protean quality to her subjectivity which offers potential for all kinds of unexpected futures but offers nothing which can be manhandled into a definition of femininity. The notion put forward by Lévi-Strauss suggests that a reshuffling of elements might result in a different set of relations between man and woman. But what if any relation fails? This seems to be what my research has shown, an ultimate inability to ‘place’ femininity securely in any relation. This is to say she cannot be placed, completely, anywhere at all. So I have found a kind of response to my original questions, but it will probably always remain unsatisfactory, especially to anyone who attempts to see woman inscribed in her rightful place vis-à-vis man, whether this place is conceived of as equal, inferior or superior, oppositional or complementary. The truth is that the symbolic cannot account for the sexual relation. It cannot be said. Nor can it account entirely for Woman. ‘[T]here is always something in her that escapes discourse’ as Lacan observes (Encore 33). Without the limit provided by an exception Woman cannot be defined (78): ‘If [a speaking being] inscribes itself there it will not allow for any universality’ (80). This turns out to be the problem I have faced all along. Even when one hears a woman’s voice singing high, it is not possible to account for the move satisfactorily in words. How she got there, or even where she has got to, cannot be entirely explained. You cannot quite catch her at it or make meaning of it; it is meaning that fails. As usual she escapes; a maddening uncertainty intervenes, a kind of blankness. Those on the feminine side must live to some extent in the dark, without the reassuring presence of a universal law governing feminine nature entirely. This difficulty has shown up all along but in ‘Qui de .ii.’ it is laid bare in a particularly compelling way. Something wavers there in the illusion of a generalized femininity – the Woman – which most songs manage to maintain unless one interrogates their claims by looking more broadly at the system. This subject’s lack of moral definition is particularly interesting since it is in the moral dimension that women are so urgently required to prop up masculinity. One might say she was ‘de-moralized’ in the sense that she cannot be placed in a moral category. It seems that at the moment when a woman, by making her own reflections, enters an ethical dimension she can no longer be morally placed; that is, she can no longer be relied on to obey a law, either in the sense of acting according to society’s strictures or in the sense of being placed precisely within a moral category.2 Her ‘moral’ nature,

2 Helen Solterer comments on the similar difficulties of the narrator of the latethirteenth-century Poissance d’amours: ‘Just as the female entity did not conform exactly

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prescribed in the songs by genre, deserts her. The subject of ‘Qui de .ii.’ does not ignore the voice of society: ‘I should be thought wise if, with such good fortune, I cherish the honour that has come to me.’ But because her chief interlocutor is herself, the voice of societal approval is more distant and less crucial than her own. This is the significance of transferring something of the jeu-parti structure to monologue. Hers is a reflexive voice; that is what allows her to carry out her own reflections rather than identifying herself via reflections from elsewhere, as the jeu-parti subject seems bound to do. As I have suggested, the position of la femme in low style as ‘active matter’ flouts Aristotle’s principle of non-contradiction, whereby ‘[i]t is impossible for the same thing at the same time both to be-in and not to be-in the same thing and in the same respect’ (Metaphysics 88). Nonetheless, ‘active matter’ can still be placed in an oppositional relation to the masculine ‘passive soul’. No matter how illogical, it is still sayable and the trouvères found ways of saying it. Like Aristotle, they spoke to maintain the ‘fantasy by which they tried to make up for what can in no way be said (se dire), namely, the sexual relationship’ (Encore 82). The tendency of the subject of ‘Qui de .ii.’ is to elude placement by the signifier. Nothing said of her places her in relation to man. A ‘good/bad’ woman cannot generate an opposition of any kind. Perhaps that is why one does not know what the subject of ‘Qui de .ii.’ will do, unlike the defiant subject of ‘Por coi me bait mes maris’. We know exactly what she will do because she tells us; she is absolutely sure, whereas the subject of ‘Qui de .ii.’ does not know herself what she will do and will not until she does it. We know also that the malmariée of ‘Ne m i bateis mie’ is bound to the circles of her suffering which always elude the unexpected. She can do no other. Both are stuck on a circuit. The subject of ‘Qui de .ii.’ might do anything because the future is, perhaps, open to her. The masculine subject of chanson attempts to displace himself as a way of masking his procrastinations but that is a different matter. ‘Qui de .ii.’ has the liveliness which comes with the introduction of chance and genuine uncertainty in contrast to the deadliness of repetition and evasion. In Chapter 2 I explored the anxiety caused in men by the inability of the signifier satisfactorily to account for Woman. But it can also be an uneasy place for a woman to occupy, as the efforts of feminist medievalists (and the experience of this author) indicate. The debate on essentialism among feminists in the wider world also bears witness to the need of we who are women to place ourselves securely vis-à-vis men. A kind of freedom can emerge from our inability to do so, however. Kristeva observed: On a deeper level […] a woman cannot ‘be’; it is something that does not even belong in the order of being. It follows that a feminist practice to the conventional lineaments of sexual identity, so too she breaks through the grid of men’s governance’ (Master 52).

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can only be negative, at odds with what already exists so that we may say ‘that’s not it’ and ‘that’s still not it.’ In ‘woman’ I see something that cannot be represented, something that is not said, something above and beyond nomenclatures and ideologies (‘La femme’ 137).

It is a strange place to leave a project, but all my avenues of research for this study have led, unexpectedly, to this point. It has been the great recurrent stumbling-block. It has not been possible for anyone to place woman securely within the trouvère song system. Every attempt, whether by the trouvères themselves or by their latter-day readers and listeners of every persuasion, is foiled and this project has been to some extent the recounting of this failure, by me among others, to write the sexual relation which ‘cannot be written’ (Encore 35): The ‘doesn’t stop not being written’ […] is the impossible […] and it is with this that I characterise the sexual relationship—the sexual relationship doesn’t stop not being written’ (Encore 94).

I had not realized, oddly enough, until the project led me to this point, that the impossible of the sexual relation entailed my own inability to write it. I also have ‘not stopped not writing it’ but the realization has come late. Perhaps it is rather that the quality of the knowing has changed. I have alluded to the impossible of the sexual relation often enough but it is only through my own failed attempt to write it that this impossible has become for me that Proustian knowledge, dragged forth from obscurity, which I can call my own. The point is not that the system readjusts to hide the renegotiations, the re-relatings of gender. That was always suspected.3 The sexual relation can be renegotiated, re-presented, re-written in a variety of ways which efficiently cover the tracks of their history. The point is that, however the relation is presented, it will continue to miss the mark since there is no mark to hit. That is a point so much more difficult to grasp than to say. This knowledge has come at the end of the writing process; I believe it bears out the value of my methodology, which worked itself out in the writing. The approach which I called kaleidoscopic has presented matters in a certain order. When one walks around a tree certain conjunctions of leaf and branch and the sky between are available only from particular vantage points. This is something like what I have attempted here, the particular conjunctions being provided by an encouragement of the ‘systematic play of differences … of the spacing […] by which elements relate to one another’ (Derrida, qtd in Culler, Deconstruction 96). For instance, it was the chapters on the chronotopes of desire which best uncovered, retrospectively, the unconscious desires of lyric subjects. Similarly, the going back and forth between mascu3

I mentioned that possibility in the Introduction.

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line and feminine desires allowed both the differences and the underlying similarities between them progressively to emerge. The methodology is what has made it possible to separate the binarisms of the trouvères’ account of desire from the different story told by the characteristic procedures of their songs. This was not an easy matter; their account is both subtle and seductive. Looking at desire across the courtly/uncourtly divide in tandem with looking at it across the masculine/feminine divide has proved valuable, again as a way of interrogating the trouvère account of what constitutes the courtly and its appropriation by masculinity. I wish to honour the order in which things were presented to me where I can, since for me it bears out the value of the process. For the most part, this order has necessarily been eclipsed since it was at war with the logic of the finished product; the first worked retrospectively, from the end to the beginning, while the second was obliged to work from the beginning to the end. But now I seem to have encountered something in femininity which cannot be placed in a relation, something which eludes the methodology of progressive re-relatings, although it was that methodology that brought me to this point where it fails. It is difficult to know what to do with such a knowledge, how to live with it. One cannot prove the equality or superiority of the feminine against the antagonists of women if the sexual relation fails to hold up. Neither can be demonstrated, although the lack of proof in itself cannot stop a woman simply getting on with life. If such knowledge offers no encouragement it also has no preventative power. One possible response to this non-relation might be to embrace, as Kristeva suggests, the practice of negativity, of saying over and over again ‘that’s not it’ and ‘that’s still not it’, not simply as a failure to say but as a kind of liberation, a continual sidestepping of generalizing nomenclature and ideology.4 Without the encumbrance of the name of Woman, one, like the subject of ‘Qui de .ii.’, might do anything – an exhilarating and alarming thought; a different kind of subjectivity. Lacan offers his sense of what this liberation might open up: The not-whole becomes the equivalent of that which, in Aristotelian logic, is enunciated on the basis of the particular. […] But we could, on the contrary, be dealing with the infinite. […]. When I say that woman is notwhole and that that is why I cannot say Woman, it is precisely because I raise the question […] of a jouissance that, with respect to everything that can be used in the function Φx [the phallic function], is in the realm of the infinite (Encore 103).

4 Cf. Marguerite Duras: ‘[W]omen have never known what they were’ (Interview 175). Kristeva acknowledges that the name of woman is still a political necessity: ‘[W]e must use ‘we are women’ as an advertisement or slogan for our demands’ (‘La femme’ 137).

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With a woman we could be dealing with the particular, the ‘one by one’ alluded to earlier in Encore (10), or, on the contrary, with the infinite, but that cannot be placed in a relation, cannot be spoken. Of that feminine jouissance in the realm of the infinite I have also not written because I have not found it in the songs, unsurprisingly if it cannot be spoken or known. Lacan impudently relates that ‘woman knows nothing of this jouissance […] in all the time people have been begging them on their hands and knees […] to try to tell us, not a word!’ (Encore 75). Earlier in Encore he suggests that in this jouissance she is ‘absent from herself somewhere, absent as subject’ (35). She is not ‘being’ anyone. So I am left at the end, with nothing to say and that is a good place to end.

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INDEX The letter ‘n’ following a page number indicates a reference in a footnote. absence, 50 and desire, 93–4, 105 see also dame, la active matter, 104, 114, 119, 125, 206 chanson lover, 165 active time, 120–3 active/passive binary, 54, 104 in triumphalist chanson d’ami, 113 activity and desire, 14, 103–4 la femme, 14, 105, 119 joyous malmariée, 120–3 and feminine desire, 117 la femme, 123 see also active/passive binary Adam de la Halle ‘Fi maris, de vostre amour’, 46 Li gieus de Robin et Marion, 133 adventure time, 142–3 ‘Ahi Amours! com dure departie’ (Conon), 157–8 alienation, 86, 101 from the subject, 71, 73 in the Other, 89 of place, 92 amant see lovers ami, 188, 190 in chanson d’ami, compliance, 101 in chanson de malmariée, 115–16 as decoy, 106 and maris, 126 as means to jouissance, 103 as object, 66, 98 as the Other, 114, 178 parity with amie, 100, 178–9, 180 unimportance, 99, 130–1 amie, 163 in chanson de femme, 195 confidence, 103–4, 111–12 defiance, 101–3, 106, 107n desire, 96, 98–9, 99–100

compared with that of pastourelle narrator, 98, 103 discourse, 186 naivety, 99 parity with ami, 100, 178–9, 180 pleasure, 103 self-reference, 195 subjectivity, 96–7, 100 and transgression, 185 triumphalist, 101–3, 105, 113, 192, 200–2 unable to lie, 65, 99 as unlearned, 106–7 unlearned, 114 amor interruptus, 88 anamorphosis, 91 Andreas Capellanus, 14–15 On Love, 13, 82 Anselm, Saint, 55 anxiety, 57, 58, 92, 197, 206–7 Aquinas, Thomas, Saint, 55 Aristotle, 58, 59 De anima, 12, 54–5 Generation of animals, 11–12, 125 masculinity and femininity, 11–12 Physics, 124–5 soul/body complementarity, 54–5 ‘Au cuer les ai, les jolis malz’, 131–2 aube, 97 placement, 32 Augustine of Hippo, Saint, Confessions, 156, 164 ‘Ausi conme unicorne sui’ (Thibaut), 36–7, 38, 38–9, 80, 144–5, 164 authorial subjectivity, 174 automaton, 127, 139 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 28 adventure time, 142–3 chronotype, 5n reported speech, 31–2

230 ballate, 35 ballette, 62–4 anonymous, 40–1 Baumgartner, Emmanuèle, 107n, 160n Bec, Pierre, 10, 11, 115 chanson d’ami, 66n féminité textuelle, 45 the husband, 116 interférences registrales, 28 joy of the amie, 96 placement of chanson de femme, 48n register, 26 trobairitz and chanson de femme, 6n typology of registers, 32, 33 and feminine register, 45–6 pastourelle, 73 women troubadours, 174 belle âme, 135–6 Benjamin, Jessica, 134 Bestourné, 151 binarism, 9–10 binary opposition, 9–10 Blakeslee, Merritt, 112, 183 Bloch, R. Howard definition of misogyny, 57n discourse of anti-feminism, 195 linking women to matter, 53 misogynist attitudes, 54n perfection of la dame, 189n trouvères and troubadours, 30n Blondel de Nesle, 81–2 body, 11–15 see also matter Bogin, Meg, 47 borrowed speech see voice, borrowed Bruckner, Matilda, 113n female voice, 42 fiction of femininity, 47 masculine discourse, 176 Burns, E. Jane, 4, 15 Butler, Judith L., 51n performativity, 57 shifts in femininity, 67 soul/matter dichotomy, 54n theorisation of the body, 59n Butler, Lance St John register, 28 speaking in a register, 45n Butterfield, Ardis, 7, 30n canso, compared with chanson, 5–6 cantiga de amigo, 65, 66

INDEX

cantiga de amor, 65, 66 cantilena, 34–5, 36 cantus coronatus, 34 canzone, 23, 24, 33–5 Capellanus, Andreas see Andreas Capellanus Casey, Edward S., concept of sexual difference, 118 castration, Lacan, 50, 114, 186 cause, 55 of desire, 73, 89, 93 related to time, 117 see also efficient cause; material cause ‘C’est tot la gieus, en mi les prez’, 39 Champagne, Thibault de see Thibaut de Champagne chance, 105, 142–3, 206 elimination, 107, 116, 169 change, 57–8, 122, 124–5, 126–7 in feminine chanson, 197 lack of in malmariée, 169 pastourelle narrator, 143–4 of meaning, 67 changing refrain, 152–3 chanson, 2, 23, 36–7 behaviour of subjects, 31 chronotope, 154–7 desire, 154 feminine discourse, 170–8 the future, 125–6 impossible desires in, 79–85 language, 35–6 lyricism, 35 origins, 24 placement, 33, 34–5 prestige, 40 prohibition, 87–8 rhyme, 40 size, 34 structure, 36 themes of difficulty and struggle, 71–2 unknown knowledge, 69 versification, 29 vocabulary, 36, 156 see also feminine chanson; sotte chanson chanson d’ami, 4, 11, 22, 66 triumphalist, 96–114 low style feminine desire, 168–9 see also ‘Deduxans suis’ chanson de croisade, 167, 179, 181

INDEX

chanson de délaissée, 96, 107, 111 chanson de départie, 96, 181 chanson de femme, 4, 22 la femme in, 119–20 future, 126 as low style, 168 placement, 48–53 presentation of la femme, 14 role of women, 52–3 women’s speech, 61 chanson de malmariée, 4, 11, 22 chronotope, 169 chronotopic character, 120 desire in, 140 desire as will, 124 hidden desire in, 130–1 joyful, 115, 116 lyric and narrative, 152 narrator, 139–40 presentation of la femme, 14 chanson de toile, 4, 134 anonymity, 40–1 chanson d’histoire, 23 chanson lover passivity, 14, 84, 103, 113, 191 pleasure, 184–5 chanson lyric, 14, 24 and narrative, 105 chanson pieuse, 97 chansonete, 34 chansonniers, 24, 25n songs with attribution, 40 ‘Chanterai por mon corage’, 179–81 Chastelain de Couci, 88, 103, 112 ‘La douce voiz du louseignol sauvage’, 43 ‘Li nouviauz tanz et mais et violete’, 83–5, 88, 89, 93, 160–1 choice, 140, 193 and desire, 195 Chrétien de Troyes, 5 chronotope, 5 and absence of chance, 116 chanson, 142, 156, 164, 165 chanson de malmariée, 169 desire feminine space-times, 115–40 masculine space-times, 141–65 measurable, 95, 117, 159 mundane, 117–18, 145, 159 in pastourelle, 142–54 refusal of the mundane, 158

231

see also holiday time Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 35 circular time, 130, 153 Cixous, Hélène, 50n, 62, 140 Clément, Catherine, 138, 140 complementarity see gender, complementarity Confessions (St Augustine), 156, 164 Conon de Béthune, 91, 154 ‘Ahi Amours! com dure departie’, 157–8 consent see desire, attainment Course in General Linguistics (Saussure), 1 courtly love, 4, 23, 88, 89 see also fin’ amor ‘Cuidoient li losengier’, 101–3, 105 Culler, Jonathan, 8n dame, la, 14 absence, 93–5, 142 in chanson, 80, 87 non-consenting, 90–3 perfection, 189n as silent, 61 in sottes chanson, 30 splitting, 80 Dante Alighieri, 23, 24, 62 De vulgari eloquentia, 23, 33–6 generic implications of gender, 60–1 Dasein, 126 De amore (Andreas), 13 De anima (Aristotle), 12, 54–5 ‘De bone amour et de lëaul amie’ (Gace Brulé), 161–5 De vulgari eloquentia (Dante), 23, 33–6 ‘Deduxans suis et joliette, s’amerai’, 62–6, 97–8, 99, 105 demand, and desire, 70–2, 87 Derrida, Jacques, 17, 21 gender transformation, 67–8 genre, 27 normative power of genre, 59 desire attainment, 90 bitterness, 188–9 in chanson d’ami, 97–114 distinguished from need, 3, 70–2, 137 enunciation, 178–92 gendering, 7 and jouissance, 3n, 69 as joy, 89

232 desire, cont. Lacan on, 15–22, 72–3, 86, 113–14, 153 mutability, 150 in non-courtly genres, 3n parsing, 72 pastourelle, 85, 86–7 transitive and intransitive, 72–3 and trouvères, 1–7 as unconscious knowledge, 4–5 as will, 124–9 see also feminine desire; fin’ amor; masculine desire despair, 81–2, 94, 113, 152 in ‘La froidor ne la jalee’, 183–4, 185 in ‘Li nouviauz tanz’, 88, 160 determinism, 130 Dia, Comtessa de, 176, 185n différance, 21, 165, 190 difference and différance, 21 and meaning, 12, 48, 67 in narrativity, 113 and opposition, 9 in quality, 168 and signification, 7–8 see also sexual difference diminutives as feminine speech markers, 46, 47, 75, 76 and la femme, 47 Ding, das see Thing, the discourse, 9–10, 29–30, 48 of antifeminism, 195 of complementarity, 51 intergeneric, 22, 91 in ‘La froidor ne la jalee’, 186 mastery, 188–9 of rape, 58–9 and shepherdess, 75–6 see also feminine discourse; masculine discourse distance, between subject and object, 99 ‘domna, la see dame, la drama, 145 Duchesse de Lorraine, 171 Earnshaw, Doris, 51 chanson de malmariée, 99 female voice, 62n, 100 meaning given by speaker, 107 model of female speech, 175n

INDEX

effeminacy, 57n efficient cause, 124, 126 ego, 100 Lacan, 10–11, 81, 135, 137 enjoyment, 88, 89, 185 and transgression, 103, 131 ‘Enmi la rousee que nest la flor’, 150 enunciation, 122, 148 of desire, 178–92 of feminine desire, 189 Erart, Jean, 172–3 eroticism, of unappeased desire, 81–2, 83–5, 90, 165 espacement, 21 essence feminine, 15, 44, 57 masculine, 12, 158 Eve, 55, 56, 61, 66 daughters of, 110, 195 discovery of choice, 195 subjectivity, 68 exclamations, as feminine speech markers, 46, 173 extimacy, 156–7, 159, 160n fabula, 147 feminine authorship, 174–7, 190 feminine chanson, 11, 22, 166–203 feminine desire, 137–9 in chanson d’ami, 97, 98, 168–9 distinguished from masculine desire, 2–3, 12–13 enunciation, 189 in triumphalist chanson d’ami, 97, 98, 168–9 see also amie feminine discourse, 60–2, 106–7, 107–14, 176 in chanson, 170–8 in trouvère system, 67 feminine object, 72–95, 141–2 ignorance, 134 feminine register, 45–7, 175, 177 feminine speech markers diminutives, 46, 47, 75, 76 exclamations, 46, 173 feminine subjectivity, 15, 208 ambiguities, 56–7, 139–40 amie, 100, 110 in chanson, 191–2 in chanson de femme, 61–2, 64–6

INDEX

compromised by visibility, 117 and desire, 133–5, 170, 187 in doubt, 61–2, 168–9, 175 impossibility, 119, 126 malmariée, 139–40 in Qui de .ii., 202, 205 and registration, 45–6 feminine vocabulary, 60–1 feminine voice, 25, 42, 43, 62n, 159, 169–70 in chanson d’ami, 66 effect of logocentricism, 67 La Vieille, 155 marked, 168 popularising tendency, 45–6 position in trouvère system, 48–53, 52 as reported, 100 see also feminine chanson femininity, 16, 42–68, 204–9 shifts, 66–8 in songs, 13–15 split, 13 feminist analysis, 51 of Lacan, 17–18 feminist theory, 65 féminité génétique, 10, 68 féminité textuelle, 10, 45, 68 femme, la activity, 14, 105, 119, 125 certainty, 124–5 in chanson de femme, 119–20 discourse, 106–7 and conduct, 61, 62 low-style, 173–4 as object, 117–18 passivity, 14 relation to time and change, 118–19 representation in chanson d’ami, 66 chanson de femme, 62 pastourelle, 14 resistance to possibilities of chance and time, 139 subjectivity, 133–5 ‘Fi maris, de vostre amour’ (Adam), 46–7 fin’ amor, 3–4, 23, 81 impossibility of fulfilment, 91–3 refined desires, 176 Fink, Bruce, 44 first-person narrative, 148 Fradenburg, L.O. Aranye, 18, 190n desire, 89

233

feminine materiality, 12n Freud, Sigmund, 136 ‘Froidor ne la jalee, La’, 181–4, 185–7, 200, 202 fulfilment, 105 in chanson d’ami, 168–9 in chanson de femme, 104–5, 117 and consent, 90–3, 154 correlated with narrative, 165 and extimacy, 159 fin’ amor, 81 impossibility, 15–16 in chanson, 79–80, 95 inaccessibility of la dame, 88 in pastourelle, 79, 87, 105, 149, 154 promise of, 154 in Roman de la Rose, 155 sexual, 93, 149, 152–3, 154, 158 future, 164, 195, 196 certain, 127 in chanson, 160–1, 165 in chanson d’ami, 103–4, 113 la dame and, 120 and desire, 117 immediate, 123 and joy, 81 in ‘Lasse, pour quoi refusai’, 110–11 in linguistic theory, 123 in pastourelle, 105, 146, 151–2 unattainable desire, 93 and will, 105, 124–9 see also go-future tense Gace Brulé, 44, 71, 94, 158, 161–4, 173, 183n, 193 ‘Les oxelés de mon paix’, 159–60 Gallop, Jane, 51, 140 Gaunt, Simon, 1, 50–1, 168, 189 gaze availability of la femme, 119 looked-at and desired, 64, 65–6 amie, 100 la femme, 117 looking and desiring, 176 gender complementarity, 16, 51–2, 54–5 and desire, 2–3, 7, 73–4 and genre, 27, 71–2 shifts, 177 see also femininity, shifts transformation, 67–8 see also sexual difference

234 Generation of animals (Aristotle), 11–12, 125 generic differentiation see genres, differentiation genres, 2 arrangement, 32–3 and desire, 91, 98, 165, 189 distance between subject and object, 99 differences, 49 differentiation, 29–30 and gender, 27, 71–2 hidden desire in, 4–5 hybrid, 7 modification, 2 and narrative, 14, 119–20 normative power, 59 and register, 25–32, 37 term validity, 25–32 use of terminology, 25–32 see also generic differences Gieus de Robin at Marion, Li (Adam), 133 global prefiguration, 26 go-future tense, 123 Gravdal, Kathryn, 58–9, 170n, 173n rape in pastourelle, 74, 76 song, 187 Grimbert, Joan Tasker, 45n, 48n, 167n Grocheio, Johannes de, 34 Grosz, Elizabeth, 118 determinism, 130 Guillaume de Lorris, Roman de la Rose, 23, 37, 118n, 154–5 Halle, Adam de la see Adam de la Halle Halloran, Susan M., 51–2 heart contained and containing, 158–9 separate from body, 157 Heidegger, Martin, 126 hidden desire, 4–5, 34, 87, 116 high style see style, high holiday time, 142–3, 145–6 homoeroticism, 132, 133 honestas, 35, 41 hope, 84 and despair, 81, 88, 94, 113, 160, 185 and future, 125–6, 160 and la dame, 120 and nostalgia, 85 in pastourelle, 154

INDEX

Huchet, Jean-Charles, 19, 80 authorship of trobairitz songs, 175 femininity, 57n schema of desire and jouissance, 69 sexual difference, 52–3 Huot, Sylvia, 31 husband see maris, li husbands, 106 see also maris, li hybrid genres, 7 hysteria, and malmariée, 135–9 immediate future, 123 impossibility in desire, 15–16, 71, 72 chanson, 79–85 object, 73 see also inescapable impossible inescapable impossible, 183 inorganic matter, 126 intentionality see tense, intentive present intentive desire, 124 inter-registral interplay, 7, 48 intergeneric awareness, 30 intergeneric dialogue, 31 intergeneric discourse, 22, 72, 91 intergeneric interplay, 7 intertextuality, 30 Irigaray, Luce, 118–19, 135 ‘J’ai ameit et amerai’, 98–9 ‘Jai ne lairai por mon mari ne die’, 127 Jakobson, Roman, 23–4, 168 Jameson, Frederic, 28, 108, 129–30 Jauss, Hans Robert, 25 Jeanroy, Alfred, 32, 96 jeu-parti, 35, 193, 201, 202, 206 in Bec’s typology, 32 in Page’s typology, 33 Johnson, Susan M., 122 jouissance, 3n, 89, 155, 156 of deprivation, 92 and desire, 3n, 69 and ‘l’autre femme’, 3n, 69 of suffering, 198–9 of unsatisfied desire, 119 joy, 81, 88–90, 186, 200–1 in chanson d’ami, 11, 66n, 96, 107 of the shepherdess, 149 Kay, Sarah, 9n, 65n, 80n, 87n, 115n alignment of woman and nature, 15n

INDEX

feminine composers, 176–7 function of rivals, 81 Lacanian object, 72n origin of the lyric, 157 pleasure from contradiction, 7n splitting of ‘woman’., 13n troubadours and unrequited desire, 81n Klinck, Anne, 46 criteria for the woman’s voice, 172 placement of chanson de femme, 48 woman’s song, 47 Kojève, Alexandre, 86 Kristeva, Julia feminine eternal, 192 phonotext, 40 practice of negativity, 206–7, 208 ‘La froidor ne la jalee’, La Halle, Adam de see Adam de la Halle Lacan, Jacques, 5 absence in the real, 50 action and desire, 89–90 anamorphosis, 91 anxiety, 57, 197 automaton, 127 belle âme, 135–6 castration, 50, 114, 186 courtly love, 89, 91 la dame’s absence, 94 desire, 15–22, 72–3, 86, 113–14, 153, 178 and absence, 93 and death, 106 distinguished from need, 3 and speech, 189–90 and metonymy, 153 realisation, 155 speaking of, 89 as unconscious knowledge, 4–5 distinction between desire and need, 70–1, 137 ego, 10–11, 81, 135, 137 enjoyment see Lacan, Jacques, jouissance extimacy, 156–7 femininity, 48 Hamlet, 199 illusion of autonomy, 61–2 imaginary, 16, 100 jouissance, 89, 208 lack, 50, 56–7, 89, 186 language, 8–9, 27, 51

235

love, 16 masquerade, 134 need, distinguished from desire, 3 object, 72n, 73, 87, 139 of desire, 72–3, 178, 188, 199–200 lost, 85 masculine, 100 on object-relations theory, 72 object–cause, 73 objet (petit) a, 73 obsessional subject, 199 other, 81, 87, 100 Other, the, 10, 52n, 54, 71, 81, 86, 89, 114, 178 phallus, 49, 134 psychoanalytic theory, 18–19 realisation of desire, 105–6 registers, 87 repetition, 127 sexuation, 56–7 signification, 26 by opposition, 8–11 sophism, 197 soul, 53–4, 54 splitting, 92n subjectivity, 57 sublimation, 87 symbolic ordering, 8, 16–17 place of woman, 49–50 sexual difference, 45 the Thing, 87, 156, 157 tuché, 127 unconscious knowledge, 4–5, 10–11 unknown knowledge, 69n Woman, 44, 48, 50, 56–7, 205, 208–9 differentiation, 53 lady, the see dame, la lament, in chanson d’ami, 107–8, 114 Laqueur, Thomas, 57 effeminacy, 58n structuralism, 8 ‘Lasse, pour quoi refusai’, 108–11, 111–12, 172, 173 Latini, Brunetto, 61, 172 counting of syllables, 63–4 ‘L’Autrier a doulz mois de mai’, 145–6 ‘L’Autrier m’ier levaz’, 76–8 Leupin, Alexandre, 7n, 10n, 18n Levi-Strauss, Claude, 204, 205 ‘Les oxelés de mon paix’ (Gace), 159–60 logocentricism, 48, 50, 62, 67 Lorraine, Duchesse de, 171

236 losengier, li, 101, 103, 107n, 115 love, 16 as act of will, 101 as an action, 103–4 in the canso, 33–4 in chanson, 34, 35, 40, 103 in chanson d’ami, 25, 96 in chanson de départie, 181 in chanson de femme, 96 in chanson de malmariée, 25, 130 courtly/non-courtly opposition, 31 feminine chansons, 181, 183–7 surplus demand, 71 La Vieille, 155 see also courtly love; fin’amor lovers, 31 attainment of desire, 90–3 in chanson, 80, 158 passivity, 165 complaint, 2 desire, 71 distinguished from sweethearts, 62 jouissance, 89 masculine, 168 in masculine chanson, 14 sufferings, 43 unknown knowledge, 69 see also chanson lover low style see style, low lust and desire, 5 and fin’ amor, 72 in pastourelle, 72–5, 85, 144, 152–3 lyric and narrative, 116, 120, 151 in chanson de malmariée, 152, 169 juxtaposition, 152 see also chanson lyric malmariée allied with inorganic matter, 126 character, 120–3 first-person future, 126–7 and masculine subjectivity, 137 narrative, 122–3 temporality, 127, 130 maris, and ami, 126 maris, li, 13 and ami, 115, 120, 126, 132 as Other, 138 in ‘Por coi me bait mes maris’, 121–2 as vilain, 115

INDEX

marking, 23–4, 167, 168 Maroie de Diergnau, ‘Mout m’abelist quant je voi revenir’, 184–5, 200–2 masculine chanson, 11, 16, 32, 43 la dame in, 61 privileged position, 11 masculine desire, 104–5 distinguished from feminine desire, 2–3, 12–13 masculine discourse, 175, 176 masculine lovers, 168 masculine object, 98–104 masculine subjectivity, 12–13, 16, 56 absence, 100 as filter, 137 see also authorial subjectivity masculine voice, 3, 24, 66 in chanson, 104 and loss of desired object, 113 and passive soul, 104 in pastourelle, 24–5 unmarked, 168 masculinity, 11–12, 20 masquerade, 134 material cause, 55, 125 matter, 12–13, 53–5, 58, 118–19 active, 104, 114, 119, 125 chanson lover, 165 inorganic, 126 mother as, 55 women aligned with, 62–6 meaning, 27, 67 and difference, 12, 48, 67 of femininity, 13 and opposition, 9, 42, 48, 168, 170 and signification, 57–8 of songs, 30, 48 in trouvère system, 21–2 see also signification melody, 29–30 chanson, 36–7, 40 chansonetes, 110 dance songs, 63 lower-style songs, 36, 40 metaphor, and space, 157–60 metonymy and desire, 92, 153, 154 the next thing, 151 metre, 36 chanson, 40 mezura, 110, 141n

INDEX

misogyny, 54n, 135, 176–7 definition, 57n in discourse, 16, 57 European medieval literature, 53 modality, 124 see also temporal modality monorhymes, 76, 90, 172 mother as matter, 55 as Other, 70 ‘Mout m’abelist quant je voi revenir’ (Maroie), 184–5, 200–1 mouvance, 58 narrating, 122, 148 exclusion of shepherdess, 120 voice, 74 narrative, 64–5 in chanson de malmariée, 120–3, 169 and chanson lyric, 105 and the chronotope, 117 and desire, 14, 69–70, 73–9, 86–7 first-person, 195, 196 chanson de malmariée, 126, 139–40 pastourelle, 24, 73, 74n, 148 and genres, 14, 119–20 impression in ‘Li nouveauz tanz’, 160–1 in ‘Li tans nouveaus et la douçors’, 90–1 low style, 104 malmariée’s, 122–3 pastourelle, 24, 73, 74n, 148, 164 past tense, 120 temporality, 119–20 tense future, 124 past, 92, 120, 154, 165 third-person, 91–2, 120n, 125–6, 175 untrustworthy, 159 see also prior narrative; subsequent narrative narrator chanson de malmariée, 139–40 pastourelle, 14, 24–5, 27–8, 69–70, 73–9, 143–54 effect of shepherdess’s resistance, 86–7 as hunter, 99 ‘Ne mi bateis mie’, 128–9, 130 need contrasted with demand, 70–2

237

and desire, 3, 70–2, 137 nomenclature problems, 167–8 nostalgia, 85, 161 ‘Nouviauz tanz et mais et violete, Li’ (Chastelain), 83–5, 88, 89, 93, 160 object, 5 of desire, 178, 199–200 feminine, 72–95, 141–2 ignorance, 134 masculine, 98–104 objectality, 15, 65, 100, 117–18 malmariée, 138 object–relations theory, 72 obligation, 114, 185, 201 obsessional subject, 199 On love (Andreas), 82 opposition, 7–11, 42, 52, 99–100 to masculine subjectivity, 62, 65 and meaning, 9, 48, 168, 170 and stabilising difference, 9 and subjectivity, 11–12, 31 see also binary opposition oscillating time, 160–5 ‘Osteis lou moi’, 3 other, 67 ami as, 138–9, 178, 180 little other, 100 Other, the, 10, 49, 80–1, 89, 100, 186 in chanson, 101, 111, 125–6 in chanson d’ami, 134 in chanson de femme, 191 in ‘Chanterai por mon corage’, 180 God as, 180–1 husband as, 138 of the Law, 114 in masculine chanson, 201 mother as, 70–1 in ‘Mout m’abelist’, 201 in triumphalist chanson d’ami, 101, 114 see also Lacan, Jacques, Other Paden, William, 6n, 113 definition of pastourelle, 79n Page, Christopher, 29, 35 on Grocheio, 34n musical rhythm, 36 typology, 32, 33, 45 ‘Par maintes fois avrai esteit requise’, 170–8, 200 authorial presence, 174–5

238 passivity chanson lover, 14, 84, 103, 113, 191 and desire, 119 in pastourelle, 143 shepherdess, 14 pastourelle, 11, 22 behaviour of subjects, 31 chronotope, 142–54 definition, 79n desire in, 85, 86–7, 98, 153–4 hybrid character, 73–4n as low style on masculine side, 24 narrative, 148, 164 narrator, 14, 24–5, 27–8, 69–70, 73–9, 143–54 effect of shepherdess’s resistance, 86–7 as hunter, 99 passivity in, 143 prohibition, 86–7, 149 rape in, 74–9, 149–50 register, 27–8 satisfiable lust, 73–9 time, 145–50 versification, 29 performatives, 106, 107n, 111, 123 performativity, 57, 68, 173 sexual difference, 58 phallus, 17, 49, 134 Physics, Aristotle, 124–5 place, 204 see also space ‘Plaine d’ire et de desconfort’, 186, 187–92, 200 plainte funèbre, 171, 185 pleasure of the amie, 103 chanson lover, 184–5 of desiring, 89 and feminine courtliness, 185 of the Other, 81 see also sexual pleasure Plotinus, 118–19 ‘Por coi me bait mes maris’, 121–2, 124, 125, 206 possession, 188–9 predictive narrative, 122 presentness, 164 prior narrative, 122 prohibition, 86–8, 101, 144 pastourelle, 149

INDEX

Proust, Marcel, 18, 207 psychoanalytic theory, 18 application to art, 18–19 ‘Qui de .ii. biens le millour’, 193–8, 202–3, 205, 206 rape, in pastourelle, 74–9, 149–50 refrain, 30, 128, 152–3 changing, 152–3 ‘Deduxans suis’, 64 ‘Jai ne lairai’, 127 juxtaposition of narrative and lyric, 152 in lower-style songs, 36 rondeaux, 37–8, 128–9 and time, 127, 128 register, 22 and genre, 25–32, 27–9, 37 term validity, 25–32 trouvère system, 24–5 use of terminology, 25–32 see also feminine register repetition, 29, 127–8, 164–5 in chanson, 36 and gender, 67–8 reported speech see voice, reported rhetoric, exclusion of women, 61 rhyme chanson, 40 dance-songs, 63 ‘Lasse, pour quoi refusai’, 110, 172 in lower-style song, 36 and opposition, 29 ‘Par maintes fois’, 172 rhyme patterns see versification rhyme schemes ‘Deduxans suis’, 64 ‘Quant voi la flor nouvele’, 76 rivals in chanson, 80–1, 87, 100, 161 in chanson de femme, 178, 197 as prohibitors, 101 ‘Robins m’aime, Robin m’a’, 133 Roman de la Rose (Guillaume), 23, 37, 118n, 154–5 rondeau, 37–8 anonymity, 40–1 temporal implications, 128 Saussure, Ferdinand, 7, 20, 48 Course in General Linguistics, 1 sexual difference, 12, 16–17, 27, 49

INDEX

approach of Huchet, 52–3 logocentric organisation, 48–9 performativity, 58 see also gender, complementarity sexual impossible, 15, 69 sexual pleasure in chanson de femme, 127 in low-style song, 34 of the malmariée, 130, 132–3 in pastourelle, 74, 76, 144, 148 sexuation, 56–7 see also sexual difference Shapiro, Marianne, 110n Dante’s division of style, 34n shepherdess, 64–5 availability, 90, 142 as available, 74–5 chronotope, 151–2 distance from subject, 98 duplicity, 150–1 integrity, 144 naivety, 75 narrative language of seduction, 27–8 as object, 73, 75, 85, 86, 95 consumed by time, 93 outwits narrator, 79 passivity, 14 in pastourelle erotic, 85 signification, 99 as soulless, 141 soullessness, 71 timeframe, 120 signification, 97 and meaning, 57–8 slanderers see losengier, li Solterer, Helen, 56 song system see system song-space, 91 sophism, 197 sotte chanson, 30 ‘Soufres maris et si ne vous anuit’, 132–3 soul, 12–15, 53–60, 163 soul/matter dichotomy, 54n in medieval thought, 55–6 space, 13, 20, 62, 64, 126 and the chanson lover, 160 contained and containing, 158–9 and desire, 116, 130 of eroticised deprivation, 90 and feminine subjectivity, 119 of la dame, 95 of la femme, 117–18, 119

239

of malmariée, 130, 139 and matter, 159 measurable/immeasurable, 95, 117–18, 155, 159 mundane, 117, 145, 157n, 159 and pastourelle narrator, 143, 148 for reflection, 195 of unsatisfaction, 85 see also distance; song-space space-time, 14 see also chronotope splitting, 71, 92n, 134–5 femininity, 13 la dame, 80 masculine, 21 of women, 13, 141 statement, 122, 148, 164 strophe, 29 and refrain, 63, 128–9, 134 juxtaposition of lyric and narrative, 152 structuralism, 8–9 structure, 9, 21, 204 of chanson, 156, 160 narrative, 85 and sexual difference, 52 style high, 3 and chanson, 23 and desire, 5, 93, 98, 101, 104–5 vocabulary, 60 see also chanson; dame, la levels of style discourse, 32n, 34 low and desire, 86, 93, 98 diminutive forms, 34–5 and feminine voice, 24–5, 40 form, 36 and love, 34 and lust, 5 and masculine voice, 24 melody and rhyme, 29 and purpose, 35, 95 repining, 107–14 sexual wants, 71 see also chanson de femme; feminine chanson; femme, la subject, 13 amie as, 163 in chanson, 70 chanson d’ami, 104, 106 chanson de femme, 96–7

240 subject, cont. la dame as, 93 feminine, 64–5, 66, 96–7, 168, 176–7 acknowledgment of desire, 191 enunciation of own desire, 189 see also chanson de femme la femme as, 119–20 malmariée as, 122, 124, 139 masculine, 141–2 absent, 65, 134 parity with object, 99, 101 in pastourelle, 99 and register, 30 and signifier, 10–11, 17, 29 see also narrator subjectivity, 17, 50, 164, 174, 198 and desire, 106–7, 133–5, 170, 187 and the Fall, 196 and love, 183 in ‘Par maintes fois’, 174–5 split, 134–5 see also feminine subjectivity; masculine subjectivity sublimation, 118, 185, 199, 201 Lacan, 87 sublime object, 88, 92, 118, 144, 156–7, 187, 188 time/space, 160 subsequent narrative, 120 sjuzet, 116, 122 synchrony, 8, 32, 44 syntax, paratactic, 64 system, 1–4, 23–68 binarism, 9–10 and desire, 189 meaning in, 21–2 and sexual relation, 16 song genres, 7–8 temporal gap, 198 temporal modality, 163, 196 temporality, 91 and desire, 130–5, 139–40 of desire, 192–200 of disclosure, 122 of malmariée, 127, 130 of narrative, 119–20 see also fabula, sjuzet; time tense, 91, 122 ambiguity, 198 future, 124–5 go-future, 123

INDEX

inceptive present, 123 intentive present, 123, 124 and modality, 124 movement, 196 past, 90, 92, 124, 154, 165 in pastourelle, 120 present, in chanson de malmariée, 121–2 Thibaut de Champagne, 145, 191 ‘Ausi conme unicorne sui’, 36–7, 38–9, 80, 144–5, 164 ‘Chançon ferai, car talent m’en est pris’, 80, 112 ‘Chanter m’estuet car ne m’en puis tenir’, 191 daughter, 171, 172n ‘De grant travail et de petit esploit’, 44 la dame, 14 ‘L’ autrier par la matinee, 75, 79 ‘Por ce se d’amer dueil’, 158–9 ‘Tout autresi con l’ente fait venir’, 86 Thing, the, 91, 92, 118 Lacan, 87, 156, 157 third-person voice, 65 time, 112–13 and cause, 117 in chanson, 155–6 in chanson d’ami, 113 eccentricity, 160 and eternity, 127 and history, 119 modulation in feminine chanson, 192–200 in ‘Les oxeles de mon païs’, 159–60 in pastourelle, 145–50 and pastourelle narrative, 148–9 and refrain, 127, 128 and spirit, 126 and tense, 123 and La Vieille, 155 see also active time; chronotope; circular time; holiday time; oscillating time; space-time; temporality Todorov, Tzvestan, 26 ‘Toute seule passerai le vert boscage’, 111–12 triumph in chanson d’ami, 105, 107, 108, 111, 114 compliance of the ami, 101 exclusion of threat of harm, 99

INDEX

no loss acknowledged, 113 in chanson de femme, 105 trobairitz, 4, 47, 174 troubadours, 5–6 trouvère system see system trouvères compared with troubadours, 5–6 desire and, 1–7 troveresses, 4 typology, 32–41, 60, 73 unconscious knowledge, 4–5, 10–11 unmarked masculine, 24 unpleasure, 89 utilitas, 35, 41 Vieille, la, 155, 165 versification, 29 Virgin Mary, 44, 113 vocabulary cantus coronatus, 34 canzone, 34, 60 chanson, 36, 156 feminine voice, 46 voice borrowed, 31n, 100, 128 chanson, 35 and register, 30, 45–7 reported, 31–2, 32n, 51, 92, 100 rondeaux, 37 see also feminine voice; masculine voice; third-person voice Will and desire, 101–6 as desire, 124–9

241

Woman, 15, 61, 118–19, 204, 205 as deformed male, 54 differences elided, 49 Lacan, 44, 48, 50, 56–7, 208–9 split, 13 women alignment with matter, 62–6 association with dance, 64 desire see feminine desire and nature, 15n as objects of exchange, 12, 53, 132–3, 138, 140 splitting, 13n, 141 in trouvère song, 44 see also femininity words excluded from rhetoric, 61 see also dame, la; femme, la words see discourse Zink, Michel, 25, 80 anonymity of dance-songs, 40–1 pastourelle erotic, 71, 74 simplicity and rusticitas, 31 Žižek, Slavoj, 70, 85, 86–7, 135 Zumthor, Paul, 22, 75, 117, 160 la dame as place of desire, 94 chanson lack of narrative, 156, 164 global prefiguration, 26 latent narrativity, 116 notion of ‘faint’, 6 register, 28 relationship between desire and song, 82n rondeaux, 37 typology of registers, 32–3, 45 and feminine register, 46

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