Polyphony and the Modern 9780367655150, 9781032006642, 9781003129837

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Polyphony and the Modern

Polyphony and the Modern asks one fundamental question: What does it mean to be modern in one’s own time? To answer that question, this volume focuses on polyphony as an index of modernity. In The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch showed that each moment in time is potentially fractured: People living in the same country can effectively live in different centuries – some making their alliances with the past and others betting on the future – but all of them, at least technically, enclosed in the temporal moment. But can a claim of modernity also mean something more ambitious? Can an artist, by accident or by design, escape the limits of his or her own time and somehow precociously embody the outlook of a subsequent age? This book sees polyphony as a bridge, providing a terminology and a stylistic practice by which the period barrier between Medieval and Early Modern can be breached. Jonathan Fruoco is a Research Fellow affiliated to the CEMA, Sorbonne University. His research focuses on the linguistic and cultural evolution of medieval England, with a particular interest in the work of Geoffrey Chaucer and its connection with French and Italian courtly poetry. He has recently published Les faits et gestes de Robin des Bois (2017) and Chaucer’s Polyphony: The Modern in Medieval Poetry (2020).

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Routledge Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture

Avid Ears Medieval Gossips and the Art of Listening Christine M. Neufeld Zöopedagogies Creatures as Teachers in Middle English Romance Bonnie J. Erwin Before Emotion The Language of Feeling, 400–1800 Juanita Feros Ruys Forging Boethius in Medieval Intellectual Fantasies Brooke Hunter Sanctity and Female Authorship Birgitta of Sweden & Catherine of Siena Edited by Unn Falkeid and Maria H. Oen Tracing the Trails in the Medieval World Epistemological Explorations, Orientation, and Mapping in Medieval Literature Albrecht Classen Vernacular Verse Histories in Early Medieval England and Francia The Bard and the Rag-picker Catalin Taranu Polyphony and the Modern Edited by Jonathan Fruoco For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Medieval-Literature-and-Culture/book-series/ RSML

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Polyphony and the Modern Edited by Jonathan Fruoco

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First published 2021 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Jonathan Fruoco to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. With the exception of Chapter 1, no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Chapter 1 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 9780367655150 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032006642 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003129837 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003129837 Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

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Contents

Introduction: Towards Modernity

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J O N ATH A N FRUO CO

PART ONE

Machaut and Musical Polyphony 1

The Polyphony of Function: Mixing Text and Music in Guillaume de Machaut

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U R I S M I L A N SKY

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The Multilevel Polyphony of Machaut’s Livre dou Voir Dit and its Afterlife

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R O S E M A R I E MCGE RR

PART TWO

Polyphony in Medieval Europe 3

Cemeteries and Tombstones as Polyphonic Places in the French Medieval Quest of Lancelot

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L A U R E N C E DO UCE T

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Polyphonic Effects in the Fixed-Form Verse of Eustache Deschamps: A Critical Practice

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L A U R A K E N DRICK

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“Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse”: Liminal Polyvocality in the Occitan Literary Use of Dante

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PA O L A M . R ODRIGUE Z

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Novelistic Perspectivism in Béroul’s Roman de Tristan TE O D O R O PATE RA

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7 Textual Voices in Compilation: Reading the Polyphony of Medieval Manuscripts

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AMY HENEVELD

8 Wolfram and the Ambiguity of the Religious Question in the Willehalm

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PATR I C K D E L DUCA

PART THREE

From Medieval England to the Early Modern 9 Chaucer’s Speech and Thought Representation in Troilus and Criseyde: Encoded Subjectivities and Semantic Extension

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Y O S H I Y U K I NAKAO

10 Chaucer and the Streams of Parnassus

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PA U L S TR O HM

11 “‘Tis more ancient than Chaucer Himself”: Keats and Romantic Polyphony

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C A R O L I N E B E RTO N È CH E

PART FOUR

Towards Modernity

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12 Evelina’s “Pollyphony”

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A N N E R O U H E TTE

13 The Whirl of the Red, Green, and Blue: Christopher Anstey and the Particoloured Poem

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P E TE R M E R C H AN T

14 Towards Modernity: Nova et Vetera in Paul Claudel’s Book of Christopher Colombus

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J E A N - F R A N Ç O IS P O ISSO N - GUE FFIE R

List of Contributors Index

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Introduction Towards Modernity Jonathan Fruoco

One is never entirely sure of what a collection of essays will look like. There is always a possibility that, though connected to a unifying theme, the different chapters will sound cacophonic to the reader. Strangely enough, that is precisely the kind of effect I hoped to produce with Polyphony and the Modern. The impetus for this book was my desire to push further my research on dialogism and polyphony, which started during my doctoral dissertation. I have shown elsewhere (see Fruoco, 2020) how polyphony allowed us to build bridges between literary periods and how, in Geoffrey Chaucer’s case, it even gave us a unique opportunity to look at the heart of his poetry, and how a linguistic sensibility inherited from a larger European tradition influenced his narrative choice, aestheticism, enunciation, and his philosophical perspective. But saying that polyphony is a wonderful tool to connect different eras usually separated by solid academic walls is one thing – showing it is another. I, therefore, organised a conference on “Polyphonies, Art, and Territories: Medievalism and Modernity” in February 2018 at the Université Grenoble Alpes1 that was meant to start developing a reflection on the link between medieval literature, the Early Modern, Romanticism, and Modern literature. Several of the contributions of the conference have found their way into this book but were then followed by original chapters written specifically to continue the debate on polyphony’s utility as a chain connecting several centuries of European literature. In fact, as E.R. Curtius once wrote, “[w]e have modernised the railroads, but not our system of transmitting tradition” (1990, p. 16). These new chapters not only represent different times but also different languages, and genres showing, in the end, that Guillaume de Machaut’s poetry might have something in common with Paul Claudel or Christopher Anstey. Lyrical and narrative poetry have in common with the modern novel an orchestration of meaning through multilingualism, for as Thomas Farrell observes, it is the “function of the novel (and of novelistic discourse generally) […] to defrock the pretensions of sacredness attributed to the past by those currently in power” (1996, p. 5). The novel is the ultimate rejection of DOI: 10.4324/9781003129837-1

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“established social hierarchies maintained by the authority of the monologic voice” (Ibid.). There are, of course, several possible ways of apprehending the concept of polyphony. Generations of critics have looked at it through Bakhtin’s work and often connected polyphony to the notions of carnivalesque and folklore. Others, however, have taken an approach structured by language sciences and theorised various types of discursive interactions around the notion of dialogism, originally coined by Bakhtin as dialogichnost’ (dialogism) and dialogizatzija (dialogisation) (see Bres and Mellet, 2009, p. 4). The concept of polyphony only appears in his 1929 book on Dostoevsky and is borrowed from V.L. Komarovich’s A Raw Youth. For Bakhtin, talking about polyphony made things clearer as it developed an analogy with polyphonic music. Although it was originally a metaphor, polyphony became strongly associated with the artistic use, the novelistic exploitation, of the dialogic possibilities of discourse. Although not defined by Bakhtin, dialogism was rapidly perceived as being at the heart of language use; it is effectively the orientation of discourse towards other discourses, whether it is interdiscursive (the speaker encounters the discourse previously held by other speakers), interlocutive (the speaker directly addresses an interlocutor) or intralocutive (the speaking subject enters a dialogic relationship with his own enunciation). According to Bakhtin, discourse is structurally determined by the interdiscursive and interlocutive lines (Perrin, 2004, p. 266). The richness of Bakhtin’s linguistic philosophy comes from its sociological perspective. Linguistics is in this regard a global science encompassing different subjects connected socially by the need to interact. Yet Bakhtin’s terminology remains wonderfully flexible and allows critics to approach texts on their own terms, which is especially useful in a study such as ours, which covers different centuries, languages, and genres. Starting with medieval literature, the first chapters of this book will attempt to identify what was the driving force of the polyphonic effect. Understanding its linguistic specificities is one thing, identifying concretely how medieval authors and thinkers approached polyphony is another. As we will see, the contributors of Polyphony and the Modern have mainly been inspired by the musical association of polyphony. And in fact, discussing polyphonic literature implies an understanding of the importance of scholastic debate and its relationship with music in medieval times. The first half of the thirteenth century saw the institutionalisation of disputation in urban universities and the growth of scholastic culture. Theologians would then be focused on three different activities: lectio, disputatio, and predicatio. Lectio was in many ways the most factual aspect of their activities, but disputatio, however, was perceived as the pursuit of truth; it allowed multiple interpretations of texts and discussions about subjects, traditionally closed to debate, in an “exercise in logic and

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Introduction: Towards Modernity 3 hermeneutics” (Novikoff, 2013, p. 135). It became so popular in universities that it eventually crossed the threshold between monastic and scholastic learning, which spread the techniques of debate and argumentation amongst “audiences not directly trained in the schools and universities” (Ibid, p. 134). Quodlibetical disputations were especially popular as it turned disputatio into drama performed in front of an audience. The staged exchanges disseminated ideas in the public sphere and, more importantly, in the arts.2 The performative aspect of quodlibetical disputations is, of course, interestingly similar to contrapuntal polyphony. Polyphonic music appeared before the development of scholastic learning: The Musica enchiriadis, probably written in the ninth century, is, for example, thought to be the first treatise to describe polyphonic music and states that the vox principalis is placed above the vox organalis, both moving in harmony with the chant at the interval of a fourth, a fifth, or an octave. The apparition of consonantia and of part-writing allowing the independence of each voice in vocal counterpoint was still far, however, and owes much to Parisian scholasticism. Indeed, as Richard Taruskin explained, the burgeoning of polyphonic composition followed the exact same trajectory [as scholastic education] […] it reached its first great, transfiguring culmination in the cathedral schools of Paris, and in a new form it radiated from the cosmopolitan centre throughout Western Christendom, receiving a special ancillary cultivation in the universities. (2005, p. 149) The performance of disputatio started to affect the arts, and in fact, “counterpoint, like disputatio is a cultural expression of dialectic and rhetoric. Broadly speaking, the hermeneutic principles that Abelard applied to theology and that Gratian applied to law, polyphony applied to music” (Novikoff, 2013, p. 148). Musical polyphony was, in other words, strongly associated with scholastic culture and helped disseminate a form of dialogism in the arts. The first two chapters of this book will look more closely at the musical beginning of literary polyphony and will provide a solid base for the following essays. In Chapter 1, “The Polyphony of Function: Mixing Text and Music in Guillaume de Machaut”, Uri Smilansky will explain why Machaut has long been considered a master of polyphony in both literary and musical contexts. On a purely literary level, his importance in popularising the “debate poetry” tradition; his large-scale ventriloquising of characters in his Voir dit; and his constant reuse, reimagining, and reinterpretation of both his own work and that of other authors acted as conduits of such interests to other authors and attracted attention to the multiplicity of voices within his oeuvre. This is perhaps less surprising in a poet-musician, as the hierarchical nature of fourteenth-century music

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created an in-built multiplicity of voice-types within musical polyphony, and genres such as the motet were constructed around the real-time contrasting of different texts, often originating from different contexts and exposing different ideas. His interest here, though, is not in intrinsic but in extrinsic polyphony, that is, the polyphonic possibilities created by performance and exponentially increased by the mixing of text and music. To manifest this point, he chooses an inherently monophonic composition: a virelai declaimed in the first person and set to a single musical line. By considering the different demands of competing functional contexts for the performance of such songs, Smilansky will demonstrate the polyphony of voices embedded even within a simple, single vocal utterance. This second layer of polyphony, above and beyond the contents and framing of any single work, will lead back to the importance to both literary and musical scholars of appreciating the many modes of engagement and types of delivery that are central to the consumption of cultural artifacts in the Middle Ages. Then, building on Smilansky’s opening essay, Rosemarie McGerr will focus, in Chapter 2, on “The Multilevel Polyphony of Machaut’s Livre dou Voir Dit and its Afterlife”. Musicologists have long recognised Guillaume de Machaut’s supreme contributions to the polyphonic lyric, but Machaut’s Livre dou Voir Dit (The Book of the True Tale) takes the concept of literary polyphony to new heights. This late work claims to present the true story of the relationship between the poet and a young woman who is also a poet and whose name appears inscribed in the poem in an acrostic. In addition to embedding ten of Machaut’s polyphonic lyrics, along with a musical notation for each voice, this work embeds letters between the two poets that discuss their work and their love. What emerges is a multilevel, integrated musical and literary polyphony that resonates with several later literary and musical genres, as well as Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism. Six other chapters will then attempt to move away from Machaut’s musical polyphony and try to see how dialogism is reflected in the work of other medieval French, Italian, and German poets. In Chapter 3, Laurence Doucet tries, for instance, to define “Cemeteries and Tombstones as Polyphonic Places in the French Medieval Quest of Lancelot”. Lancelot, who is associated with death from the beginning of Chrétien de Troyes’s Le Chevalier à la charrette (the “charrette”, or cart, belonging to the lexical field of death), is usually the one who finds extraordinary tombs. Cemeteries in the Arthurian world are never simple places; they belong to ancient cults as well as to Christian practices. More importantly, they are social places, dedicated to prayer and were defined by Michel Foucault as heterotopias. However, the knight’s encounter with tombs and cemeteries opens a door to another world and helps reveal parts of the secret of Lancelot’s origins and magical connivance. Through an interdisciplinary method

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Introduction: Towards Modernity 5 and a comparative approach, this chapter thus proposes to examine the different voices that are expressed on these tombs, turning liminal cemeteries into polyphonic spaces. Another major medieval French poet will be at the centre of Chapter 4, in which Laura Kendrick addresses “Polyphonic Effects in the FixedForm Verse of Eustache Deschamps”. In this chapter, Kendrick opens the discussion to a different poet, whose work was quite familiar to Geoffrey Chaucer: Eustache Deschamps. She argues that there are links between what Chaucer does in the Canterbury Tales and Deschamps’s work. Indeed, the medieval French poet opened up fixed verse forms like the balade and its variant, the chanson royale, to reported exchanges of opinion among groups of paysans, whom he named individually, and claimed to have encountered by chance on his journeys in the countryside. These exchanges of opinions, reported in direct and indirect discourse, usually involved serious issues like the conduct of the on-going war against the English, pillaging, oppressive taxation... Kendrick notes that there are some links with slightly earlier anonymous complaint poems in English in which one sometimes also hears peasant voices. Even official French prose chronicles of the late fourteenth century, like that of the abbey of Saint-Denis, begin to make much greater use of direct discourse to report the speeches of dissonant voices. In Chapter 5, Paola M. Rodriguez takes a look at the “Liminal Polyvocality in the Occitan Literary Use of Dante”. The insistent materiality of the word, its polysemy and the necessity of its etymology and interpretation lies at the heart of Dante’s use of the values and subsequent poetic processes of courtly love. As noted by previous critics such as Teodolinda Barolini and Albert Russell Ascoli, Dante’s authority and position as a writer is fuelled and built upon his activity as reader. Indeed, for Dante, the semiotical and interpretive activity of the reader is one and the same with the productive activity of the writer. Both texts wherein the presence of courtly love is conspicuously present, La vita nuova and the fifth canto of Inferno, show an inherent dialogic and interpretive flexibility, a willingness to create anew from pre-existing structures. In La vita nuova, the prosimetrum form espouses a continual exposition and interpretation, each moment of sensitive reception in verse explained and interpreted in the prose while in the fifth canto of Inferno the archetypical courtly lovers, Paolo and Francesca, are allowed, in polyvocal theatrical fashion, to explain their woes in the first person. Both forms allow for fluidity of informational exchange and interaction wherein the material form of writing, its ability to break and fissure, is needed to sustain the continual movement of polysemy. The inner workings of courtly love itself are inherently semiological and phenomenological; the lover must express sighs and tears in order for them to be read as signs by the beloved. However, Dante reinforces the situation of dialogue between former meaning and present use, allowing each to inform the other. Such an interaction emphasises the necessity

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for interpretation and temporal manipulation, the interaction of two entities. Furthermore, this interaction inherently carries the ability – and necessity – of allowing different interpretations, or constellations, to co-exist. Dante’s use of courtly love involves historicity and intertextuality, the interaction of past and present, spirit and word, the acceptance of language’s mortality yet ultimate capacity for achieving perfection embodied in the creation of a vernacular written tradition. This chapter will propose Dante’s use of courtly love as the means of creating polysemy and polyvocality through the written word by continually building on sinking material structures in order to create a vernacular poetics built on the contradictory concept of intelletto d’amore. Chapter 6 focuses on “Novelistic Perspectivism in Béroul’s Roman de Tristan” and identifies Béroul’s work as one of the first modern novels. Teodoro Patera shows how its expressive force, which contributed to that affirmation, is probably caused by the problematisation of the real and upheaval of the notion of truth exposed by the text. This upheaval reflects a cultural transformation that happened during the twelfth century, a time when the relation between appearance and essence was profoundly questioned. Béroul’s version of the Tristan legend would, in that regard, show the realisation of the inevitability of a subjective vision of things through things (Howard Bloch), the substitution of the force of truth by the force of persuasion, the act of a subject addressing another without their communication necessarily referring to the world (Marie-Louise Ollier). Language is thus revealed in its incapacity to tell the truth, which would no longer be an essence but a dialectic (Jean-Charles Huchet). What the enigmatic Béroul depicts in this text is, in other words, a subject inclined by its enunciation to conform to the real. One example especially representative of this tendency can be found in one of the most famous episodes of the novel, the spied-on meeting scene during which Tristan and Isolde manipulate King Marc’s conscience by a fabulous linguistic virtuosity. The characters’ speech confers to things a perverted form, which allows the reader/spectator to witness a multiplication of truths. We call that tendency “deconstructionist perspectivism”. Nonetheless, the text exploits a different sort of perspectivism, one that critics have seldom studied, and which is, in Patera’s opinion, the most revealing aspect of the modernity of Béroul’s novel. The manifestation and verbalisation of a subjective point of view do not only deconstruct truth in this text or create a fantastical real and denounce language’s inability to tell things. One may find in this text a much subtler form of perspectivism, a narrative strategy that allows each character to “re-tell the story” from his/her own microcosm. It is no longer a rhetorical manipulation of the real that answers to a desire to persuade the other. Language does not mask the real any longer but rewrites the real through a process allowing the character’s movements to appear; his/her encounter with the story in which he/she is a protagonist. It is thus in this

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Introduction: Towards Modernity 7 reconstitution of truth from a subjective microcosm that one must look for the modernity of Béroul’s Tristan. It is a “novelistic perspectivism”, the sort of perspectivism that Bakhtin taught us to notice in the construction of a universe in which voices and heterogeneous intentions merge. Amy Heneveld offers in Chapter 7 an interesting look at another form of literary polyphony, one that questions the use and reuse of manuscripts. In “Textual Voices in Compilation: Reading the Polyphony of Medieval Manuscripts”, Heneveld states that modern editors and publishers rarely present medieval texts in the context that medieval readers would have encountered them – as a part of longer collections that contain anywhere from five to 300 works. In particular, the thirteenth century saw the rise of compilation manuscripts in the vernacular that were compositional wonders in their own right. It is difficult to know who consulted these manuscripts and how they were read, yet their contents hint at a form of reading which privileged the comparative and the polyvocal over the linear and univocal approaches suggested by modern editions of medieval texts. Compilation manuscripts present a range of sometimes contradictory medieval voices that would have created consonant and dissonant meanings for the medieval reader. The compilers used rhetorical tools such as contrast and repetition to weave an elaborate web of words intended to be ethically sorted out by the reader into a convincing harmony of meaning. Short of reproducing the manuscripts themselves as facsimiles, how might modern editions best represent the complex and meaningful contexts of the medieval texts they want to publish in order to allow for a better understanding of medieval reading methods that celebrated this textual polyphony? The last chapter of this section of Polyphony and the Modern takes us to Germany. In Chapter 8, Patrick del Duca takes a closer look at “Wolfram and the Ambiguity of the Religious Question in the Willehalm”. The Willehalm novel, composed by Wolfram von Eschenbach at the beginning of the thirteenth century and adapted from the anonymous chanson de geste Aliscans, distinguishes itself from its source and from other medieval texts by its conception and representation of Pagans. Far from presenting them as the children of the devil who must be exterminated, the novel gives a much more nuanced and revised image. Is it nonetheless possible to conclude – as it has been suggested before – that the author shows tolerance, foreshadows Lessing and a modern thought open to the other, ready to accept even religious alterity? This is the question this chapter offers to answer by interrogating the notion of tolerance and ambiguity in the Middle Ages and studying the famous passage often qualified as the “tolerance speech”, a long monologue, in which Wolfram puts in Gysburg’s mouth words urging Christians not to kill Pagans, the author’s humanity can be perceived in a vision that is both Christian and eschatological.

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The third part of Polyphony and the Modern takes us to England and gets us progressively to the Early Modern period thanks to three studies on Chaucer and his impact on his successors. Chapter 9 invites the reader to dive into the linguistic specificities of Chaucer’s dialogic thinking. Yoshiyuki Nakao studies “Chaucer’s Speech and Thought Representation in Troilus and Criseyde: Encoded Subjectivities and Semantic Extension” in an attempt to describe how and why Chaucer’s speech and thought representation is not necessarily closed to one particular subjectivity but open to alternatives and redefining subjectivities, and likely to produce dynamically extended meanings. Troilus and Criseyde is a case in point. Few systematic studies have been conducted about Chaucer’s speech and thought representation and much less about the semantics of it. Nakao identifies some seminal studies of his speech/thought representation. But the studies he refers to still leave much to be reconsidered theoretically and semantically. Here, Nakao has first distinguished subjectivities encoded in Chaucer’s narrative performance and sets them up hierarchically. He then categorises Chaucer’s types of speech and thought representations. Combining these two, Nakao describes how and why Chaucer’s speech and thought representation is susceptible to different subjectivities and allows for a semantic extension. Paul Strohm follows Nakao and, in Chapter 10, writes eloquently about “Chaucer and the Streams of Parnassus”. Indeed, Strohm offers here to draw together the concepts of “polyphony” and “modernity”. He poses the question of modernity and what it means to be “modern” in one’s own time, then goes on to treat polyphony as a possible index of modernity, as a marker or litmus, of modernity in varied cultural situations. This chapter especially tries to see whether Chaucer enjoyed an extra-temporal affinity with the writers of what we now call the “Early Modern” period, the years circa 1580–1610, although Strohm finds that most Early Modern ways of dealing with Chaucer were actually ways of not dealing with him. Still, this chapter presents one particular celebration of Chaucer’s “presentness” in a seldom-cited work of Robert Greene. In Greene’s Vision (1592), the poet addresses Chaucer’s stylistic accomplishment in a narrative cast in a medieval dream vision. Strohm regards Greene’s varied “streams of Parnassus” as an evocation of what we would now, since Bakhtin, call Chaucer’s polyphony, expressed in the unmerged voices of his tellers and the generic difference and stylistic antagonism of the tales they tell. Chaucer’s connection with the Early Modern continues in Chapter 11, “‘Tis more ancient than Chaucer Himself”, in which Caroline Bertonèche looks at the link between Chaucer, Keats, and Romantic Polyphony. “Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?”: The question is asked by John Keats in the last verse of To Autumn. From spring to autumn, we have here a cycle, or the end of a cycle, the four seasons – another of Keats’s poems – of an annus mirabilis (1819) that Keats chose

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Introduction: Towards Modernity 9 to end in music (ll.23-24, 28–34). As Helen Vendler remarked in The Odes of John Keats (1983), this musicality is a dissonant and muted polyphony – an English polyphony rather than a Romantic one. It is unsurprisingly through Chaucer that Keats’s poetry reached that polyphonic state: If he preferred Chatterton to Milton and Shakespeare to Milton, he also preferred Chaucer to Milton, precisely because Milton poisoned Keats’s mind through a fragmentation of writing that prevented him from completing The Fall of Hyperion. A Dream (1820). What this chapter offers to study is not so much Milton’s “miltonisms” but rather Keats’s debt to Chaucer. Bertonèche tries to perceive, in this formal and geographical proximity between both poets, an affiliation that would define his romanticism around a unique production composed at the crossroad of different linguistic areas, genre variations, and babelisation of languages (English, French, and Italian). The final part of this book then brings us back to our time and concludes a centuries-long polyphonic journey. Anne Rouhette proposes to focus on “Evelina’s ‘Pollyphony’” in Chapter 12. The eponymous protagonist of Burney’s epistolary novel is recurrently defined by her “simplicity”, a term which, in keeping with eighteenth-century conceptions of femininity, is used in a supposedly laudatory sense – she’s incapable of duplicity – but ultimately proves to be much more complex than what may first seem. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the heroine’s identity, mirrored as it is by those of three young girls of her age, all named “Polly” and all reflecting a greater or lesser extent on Evelina herself. This chapter aims at exploring this multiplicity by focusing on the questions raised by the novel’s handling of epistolarity, by its heroine’s behavior and in particular by the way she expresses herself. Following Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism and linguistic theories of irony and free indirect discourse, Rouhette examines the various voices heard in Evelina, sometimes coming from the “simple” heroine herself, to reveal a discreet but unmistakable polyphony underneath an apparent monophony and articulate a reflection on the fundamental alterity within the self as portrayed by Burney. Chapter 13 keeps us in the eighteenth century as Peter Merchant writes about “The Whirl of the Red, Green, and Blue: Christopher Anstey and the Particoloured Poem”. A hundred years before Robert Browning’s “red, green, and blue that whirl into a white” made The Ring and the Book the most consciously kaleidoscopic of Victorian poems, the center of the whirling world was a hundred miles away from Browning’s Paddington, in the city of Bath. The principles of polyphony and chromatic co-ordination were writ large not only in the massive segmented circle of John Wood’s Circus but also, at the very time the Circus was approaching completion, in Christopher Anstey’s poem The New Bath Guide (1766). Anstey’s poem is shaped by sharply marked differences between the voices, idioms, and

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meters that it interlaces. The component parts are equally valuable and weighty, and so dovetailed one into another that although each is independently apprehensible all can be harmoniously combined. This chapter attends to the dynamics of The New Bath Guide and considers some of the pointers which it offered to the subsequent development of “polyphonic narrative”, as C.S. Lewis would term it, in poems and novels alike. Last but not least, Jean-François Poisson-Gueffier concludes Polyphony and the Modern by stepping back into the twentieth century with Chapter 14, “Towards Modernity: Nova et Vetera in Paul Claudel’s Book of Christopher Colombus”. This novel, which puts on the dramatic scene the eponymous character contemplating the representation of his life, comprises allusive yet determining references to the medieval literature and civilisation: the mention of Saint Brendan, the presence of allegorical squares, and an inquiry related to the symbolic meanings of names. If these elements are not considered as indifferent ornaments but as signs, their range light the Book and confer it another dimension. The way Claudel inserts these signs in the language and the dramatic action, along with the symbolic system which they carry, gears down the value and direction granted to the Book, Life, and Travels of Christopher Colombus. The discovery of the New World becomes a meeting of the Earth under the sign of Christendom and opens new scenic horizons. Paul Claudel has designed a dramatic space as new as primitive America, uniting in the same gesture nova and vetera, the medieval material and the innovations of the modern drama. This chapter thus aims at presenting the paradox of medieval references thought of as absolutely modern and opens prospects for the question of memory of works and polyphony. As I mentioned at the beginning of this Introduction, Polyphony and the Modern was thought of as a polyphonic book on polyphony, meant to reconnect different periods of times, languages, and genres. Looking back on this journey, I have tried to play the role of Harry Bailly in the Canterbury Tales, guiding scholars on the road and inviting them to exchange essays. The only thing that remains to do is invite readers to join them and continue the centennial tradition of debate and dialogue.

Notes 1 Paul Strohm and Juliette Dor had been invited as our keynote speakers. Sadly, Professor Dor could not make it to Grenoble, but she was kind enough to send me her essay so that I could read it during the conference. In Chapter 10, Paul Strohm mentions Juliette Dor’s paper, which could not be included in this volume. I thank her nonetheless for accepting my initial invitation, and for her kindness and generosity. 2 See Symes (2007, Chapter 3). See also for elements about the dissemination of quodlibetical disputations in the theatre in Bloemendal et al. (2012).

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Works Cited Bakhtin, M. and Daria, O., trans. (1978). Esthétique et théorie du roman. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Bakhtin, M., Emerson, C., and Holquist, M., eds. and trans. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination. Fours Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. and Isowlsky, H., trans. (1984). Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bakhtin, M. and Emerson, C., ed. and trans. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bakhtin, M. and Aucouturier, A., trans. (1984). Esthétique de la création verbale. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Bakhtin, M., Emerson, C., Holquist, M., eds., and McGee, V.W., trans. (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M., Holquist, M., ed., and Liapunov, V., trans. (1999). Toward A Philosophy Of The Act. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bloemendal, J., Eversmann, P., and Strietman, E. (2012). Drama, Performance and Debate. Theatre and Public Opinion in the Early Modern Period. Leyde: Brill. Bres, J. and Verine, B. (2002). Le bruissement des voix dans le discours: dialogisme et discours rapporté. Faits de langues, 19, pp. 159–169. Bres, J. and Mellet, S. (2009). Une approche dialogique des faits grammaticaux, Langue française, n°163, pp. 3–20. Curtius, E.R. and Trask, W.R. (1990). European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Farrell, T. J., ed. (1996). Bakhtin and Medieval Voices. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Fruoco, J. (2020). Chaucer’s Polyphony. The Modern in Medieval Poetry. Kalamazoo; Berlin: Medieval Institute Publications, De Gruyter. Novikoff, A. J. (2013). The Medieval Culture of Disputation: Pedagogy, Practice, and Performance, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Perrin, L. (2004). La notion de polyphonie en linguistique et dans le champ des sciences du langage, Questions de communication, 6. Nancy: Éditions universitaires de Lorraine, pp. 265–282. Symes, C. (2007). A Common Stage. Theatre and Public Life in Medieval Arras. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Taruskin, R. (2005). Music from the Earliest Notation to the Sixteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Part One

Machaut and Musical Polyphony

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The Polyphony of Function Mixing Text and Music in Guillaume de Machaut1 Uri Smilansky

Guillaume de Machaut was a master of both musical and literary polyphony.2 Indeed, an engagement with a multiplicity of voices can be seen as a major part of his art, attested to by his large-scale ventriloquising in the Voir dit, constant reuse, reimagining, and reinterpretation of both his own works and those of others, as in his importance in popularising the “debate poetry” tradition.3 Within the musical sphere his silhouette stands out even more sharply. As the first named composer in the French tradition for whom a large (and likely complete) corpus of vernacular polyphonic music survives, Machaut is the first port of call for many historical and stylistic analyses of fourteenth-century music.4 However, parallel appreciation does not necessarily translate to disciplinary cooperation. Although Machaut’s various historiographies are slowly heading towards partial convergence, disciplinary etiquettes and traditions are not always easy to synthesise (Leach, 2011, ch. 1; 2012). While most authors acknowledge the influence of Machaut’s literary eminence on his music, this mostly takes the form of a romanticised authenticity of sentiment, or of the assertion of greater design opportunities when approaching composition.5 Codifying the influence in the other direction is harder, as the non-verbal, at best proto-linguistic character of music – combined with the multiple technical prerequisites of working with it – places obstacles in the way of engagement. My analyses here do not aim at establishing a monolithic new approach to the structure of “cantus” as a cross-disciplinary entity. Instead, each discipline is used to destabilise the tendencies towards unification in the other. Thus, this contribution highlights the various polyphonies and multiplications of voices arising from both abstract and functional characteristics of medieval cultural consumption. These are then used as bridges between Machaut’s musical and literary activities, suggesting avenues of cross-fertilisation. It will be suggested that the very notion of “polyphoneous modernity” explored in this volume may be the result of such disciplinary integration. As “polyphony” is a common musical term denoting the simultaneous sounding of more than one musical line, it is worth clarifying my usage. That interpretation is signalled by specifying “musical polyphony”. DOI: 10.4324/9781003129837-2

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Otherwise, I consider this to mean the creation of a dialogue between competing and contrasting elements, each operating according to its own logic, but coming together to form an artistic whole whose complexities exceed the sum of its parts. This acts as an antonym to “singularity”, whether applied to narrative voice or to the use of multiple elements as amplification devices of a single structure or idea. This definition allows for the expansion of polyphonic thought to treat concepts such as structural, registral, and functional planning. By doing so, I hope to make notions of multiplication and divergence useful for both musicological and literary analysis, as well as suggest methodological tools for creating polyphonies between them. On the musicological side, I believe an awareness of the existence of some registral and functional polyphonies can warn against the search for singular musical ontologies, as well as encourage further understanding of the potential relationships between text and music. While clearly relevant to modern performance practice, analysing the many additional complicating factors on which it relies are beyond the scope of this contribution. On the literary side, deeper engagement with text-delivery through a wide range of performance styles (musical or otherwise) can open up further avenues for poetic interpretation, as well as isolate elements that differentiate Machaut’s creative practices from those of his literary colleagues. A joint awareness of the musicality of texts and the syntax of notes would hopefully encourage future analytic approaches where specialists in the two fields can cooperate and work against each other on a more equal and stable footing. The chapter follows a tripartite structure, beginning with a short exposition of structural polyphonies in fourteenth-century French music. These involve elements of style and fashion that intrinsically directed both composer and audience towards the multiplication of meaning inputs. I then consider the polyphonies of performance. The term resonance will be proposed as an expansion of mouvance and variance to encompass also changing consumptive contexts, with Machaut’s virelai De bonté, de valour (V10) being used as a case study. The final section examines some of the broader questions arising from viewing the relationship between text and music as non-linear and polyphonic.

Structural Polyphonies in Fourteenth-Century Music It is perhaps not entirely surprising that as a poet-musician, Machaut showed such interest in multiple polyphonies. Indeed, it can be argued that the techniques and expectations arising from contemporary musicianship led him in this direction, shaping his literary style. Fourteenth-century musical composition technique was highly structured and hierarchical in nature (Lefferts, 2011). This created in-built multiplications of voicetypes and polyphonic relationships between different musical elements.

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The Polyphony of Function 17 I will only sketch out a selection here, arranging them into three categories: textual, temporal, and hierarchical polyphonies. Literal textual polyphony was an integral part of the motet genre.6 In a motet, two (or more) texts are set simultaneously, creating interest through the creation of dialogue or juxtaposition of different registers and opinions. In aligning the texts, the musical setting attracts attention to specific words or phrases, making individual sections more or less audible. This adds new input into their linked reading and creates a more layered polyphony in the process (Boogaart, 2001). Furthermore, motets draw on pre-given melodic materials – mostly Gregorian chant – for their fundamental tenor voice. On top of creating a further polyphony with the implied text of the original melody, the reworking technique itself is polyphonic. The pre-given series of pitches (called color) was rhythmicised by repeating a shorter rhythmic pattern (talea) (Machaut, 2017, pp. 7–10). This causes recurring materials to sound different in each iteration, especially when more than one color is needed to complete a cycle of talea repetitions.7 The technique can be amplified to include the more intricate rhythms of the other, freely-composed voices, in which case multiple taleae can be made either to coincide or create polyphoneous structural friction.8 Whichever arrangement is used, a polyphonic relationship between melody and rhythm is set up, whereby the integrity of both pregiven material and single voice logic is maintained while a unique structure for each motet is created. As the incorporation of ancient, sacred chant into new musical compositions attests, fourteenth-century musical practices continued earlier traditions of incorporating a temporal polyphony into cultural production. We assume original performers had a deep, intimate knowledge of the liturgical function of the old materials (Clark, 1996). This would have resulted in polyphonic tension between new and old, the familiar and the unfamiliar. Through knowledge of the liturgical context, a more specific polyphony was created every time a motet was experienced, be that in written form or in temporally delineated performance. This placed in conversation an ever-changing present involving specific objects, places, and people with recurring days and services in the church year and the stories and morals there contained. While less specific than the use of chant, wider citational practices operated in the same way (Butterfield, 2002, ch. 6). This is, of course, not the sole domain of musical composition, and may well have played a significant part in the crystallisation of vernacular poetry in the early part of the fourteenth century (Plumley, 2013). Nonetheless, the possibility of quoting text or music only or both elements together allows sung texts to offer a wider range of allusion strengths, subtler techniques with which to do so, and more materials to refer to. Indeed, the prevalence in thirteenthcentury motet-composition of “motet families” in which works share some of their music or some of their text, and the prevalent use of refrains

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suggest this kind of play may have been integral to the idea of composing musical polyphony.9 The notion of hierarchical polyphony relates to the assignation of roles to different voice-types within musical polyphony. Having explored the slow-moving tenor in motet composition, the two higher, texted voices that are appended to it are called the motetus and triplum. The former usually sets a shorter text and moves in a relatively calm manner in the middle of the range, while the latter sets a longer text, and tends towards quicker movement and a higher range (Machaut, 2017). When a fourth voice is added, this is called a contratenor, which acts as a second tenor in terms of range, movement speed, and organisation, but uses newly composed melodies rather than borrowed ones. Within the secular song repertory, the cantus voice is (usually) the only text-bearing voice, containing also the main melodic and modal contents of the composition. In a two-voiced texture, a tenor is added, somewhat lower in range, slower-moving and more stable than the cantus, here containing freely composed materials without strict rhythmic repetition. The third voice would be either a contratenor or triplum, which operates either within the same general range of the tenor (former) or the cantus (latter). These voices are relatively independent, and while they can couple themselves to the structural duo in order to amplify its contents, they can also undermine it, be more angular in their melodies and rhythms, and raise the level of dissonance. A four-voice texture combines both third-voice possibilities (Plumley, 1996). It is thus possible to see the cantus voice as literally containing the song’s contents (through both musical behaviour and the declamation of the text); the tenor as supporting the cantus, supplying harmonic and contextual background; and the contratenor and/or triplum as offering a more independent commentary on the primary two voices. The same kind of hierarchies apply also on the single sonority level, though the technicalities of this are not important here. Suffice to say that for certain pitch combinations to be considered satisfactory, each voice type must occupy a pre-defined position within it. It seems to me more than likely that these various structuring techniques and musical conventions influenced musicians’ conceptions of narrative planning, pushing them towards an instinctive non-singularity of voice. Thus, while a structure based on the summation of multiple voices may have been seen as a sign of particular sophistication for a poet, poetmusicians would have had an in-built infrastructure with such techniques and considerable experience in the procedures involved. Using them in non-musical compositions would have seemed more natural for Machaut than for many of his literary contemporaries. In performance, even the hierarchical relationships described above would have taken on different characteristics depending on whether the three musical lines of a Machaut song were all sung or all played on different instruments with different timbres.10 A further lack of fixed

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The Polyphony of Function 19 performing pitch and the potential for ornamentation and improvisation made even a close reading (inasmuch as such an idea is relevant to the medieval context) of a single musical text likely to have had many different sounding manifestations.11 This clearly is where we should turn to next.

The Polyphonies of Performance Some features of medieval consumption of written cultural artefacts have enjoyed considerable analysis, from consideration of silent reading versus communal performance (Coleman, 1996) to the demonstrative and participative role of manuscript anthologies in the performance of cultural identity and further artistic production (Taylor, 2007).12 Changing the viewpoint from which this element of medieval culture is looked at, one can fine-tune the work-performer-audience relationship into a number of categories: group performance, where the narrative is played out; author performance; professional performance (which can be broken down further to the kind of profession involved: clerk or minstrel), and audience performance, where a separation exists, but with the “audience” group also participating. Every mode of engagement places the written artefact with a different interpretative framework, giving it a different meaning. A reader ventriloquising a poem, for example, is likely to make imaginative choices according to meaningful associations from his or her own emotional experiences, making the reading more intimate. Similarly, different degrees of audience engagement are likely when comparing an author’s first presentation of a new work to another entertainer’s presentation of the same, now familiar piece.13 Musical performance complicates this topic at all levels. The artificiality of musical performance attracts attention to the training and professionalism involved. When musical polyphony is performed, the plurality of performers problematises the authenticity of delivery. The inability to locate expressive content solely within the person delivering the text introduces the need to explore non-verbal modes of expression and draws attention to the gap between authorial and performative authenticity. The practicalities of performance also involve many more nonartistic influences. Its specialist nature and potential use of instruments and multiple performers highlight issues of price and availability more keenly than single-reader poetic or literary presentation. This material multiplication serves to shift audiences’ focus away from the written object, which may not even be present.14 Nevertheless, the multiplication of sound-possibilities is bound by practical and cultural appropriateness. The Echecs amoureux, for example, describe a clear differentiation between instruments appropriate for use in more attentive listening (soft), and those appropriate for the accompaniment of dance (loud) (Heyworth et al., 2013, pp. 256–257).15 L. 4297 specifies that before dancing commenced, attentive listening was directed towards “Danses,

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estampiez, [et] chansons”, suggesting the possibility that a single work could function in both contexts. Crucially, had a piece been played twice in an evening, the change of function would have caused it not only to sound, but also to be listened to differently each time. We also have evidence of fluidity between musical and non-musical appreciation. Machaut’s complete-works manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds français 843, for example, reproduced the musical section of its exemplar while intentionally omitting the music itself (Earp, 1995, p. 95).16 Other sources transmit musical works by Machaut without their texts.17 Another common technique was to compose new text over existing musical settings, thus transplanting them into a new linguistic context, or between the sacred and secular realms (Falck, 1979; Butterfield, 2002, ch. 6). A similar registral transformation can be seen in the reworkings of two of Machaut’s songs for solo organ in early fifteenth-century Italy, probably for liturgical use (Robinson, 2017). In the current context, however, the importance of all this is in the ability of a single piece to be delivered in multiple performance contexts. Each tolerates a different range of performance styles and levels of audience engagement, and results in context-specific effects and meanings. Taking this into account in analysis imbues the very notion of “meaning” with an inherent polyphony. Musical performance presents us with another ontological challenge, namely, its position between “art” and “function”. While the notion of pure “art music” in the romanticist mould is obviously inappropriate here, one can nonetheless draw a blurry line between contexts where intent, analytical listening formed the focus of the activity, and ones in which hearing may be essential, but listening played a secondary, minor role.18 For example, military signal-music needed to be heard and understood clearly, but its content was not listened to for artistic merit or for its level of execution. On the other extreme, if we imagine Machaut’s motet 18 to have been incorporated into the celebration of Guillaume de Trie’s enthronement as bishop (to whom its text is dedicated), it is likely that it would have been listened to intently (Robertson, 2002, pp. 53–68). Dance, as both participation and spectator sport, sits in-between these two extremes. During a dance, I would argue functionality and clarity are paramount, with any artistic input being a secondary bonus. Lawrence Earp has argued for Machaut’s early virelais to be understood as dance songs (Earp, 1991). Nevertheless, their mediation through written down, author-bound books problematises this functionality. By the very fact of their notation, these songs were separated from their ephemeral, functional context. Their inclusion in collected-works manuscripts further suggests their artistic value as in some way equivalent to these manuscripts’ other contents. While perhaps still maintaining their original function, they have come down to us not as dance accompaniment, or even as a more general functional aid to the operation of courtly

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The Polyphony of Function 21 society, but as objects for artistic appreciation. This is but one “performance” of a written down musical-poetic text, which does not negate any other, or even comment on its original function.19 It is emphasised here to underline the multiplication of such “performances”. Whether imagined, sounding in space, or as a written artefact, there is no reason to assume conceptual singularity in function or consumption of such works. As a result, and contrary to some scholarly analysis of musical ontologies, music compounds the inherent polyphony of textual performativity.20 We have Huot’s (1987) contextualisation of meaning within the physical organisation and presentation of manuscripts, and Zumthor’s (1972) and Cerquiglini’s (1989) respective notions of mouvance and variance. The analysis above suggests it would be useful to have a term acknowledging the role of delivery and performativity in determining interpretative flexibility. For this, I would like to propose resonance. By attracting attention to the different performance and consumption techniques that operate within every instance of sounding realisation, such a term enables the determination of appropriate parameters for analysis in each case. It thus offers an analytical framework for exploring polyphoneous meanings in performance and their relationship to the text performed. The resonance of a text’s reading thus embodies the implications of the polyphony of contexts, functions, and resulting engagement levels to which its type and specifics are deemed to be relevant. Demarcated also through various parameters such as performance style, technique, and location, it is never singular. In order to illustrate how the notion of resonance affects interpretation, I will now turn to my case study. Setting texts to music places them in dialogue with a host of new parameters. These include changes in delivery speed; the rhythmic organisation of the music and its relation to word stress-pattern, melodic, and mensural behaviour; cadential arrangement; and formal repetitions as well as the flexibilities of the repeated materials. As with different poetic and literary types, the genre and technique of musical settings privileges different parameters in each instance. In musical polyphony, for example, this includes harmonic patterning, the creation of harmonic tension, and the use of dissonance come more to the fore.21 The practical effects of these new polyphonies and the importance given to each is, once again, governed by each work’s range of resonance. The different demands and consumption patterns of musical performance result in this resonance being different from that of the text alone. To make my case study both manageable and targeted, it will look at but one parameter of a single song, that is, the rhythmic arrangement of the first strophe of De bonté, de valour (V10). To simplify the discussion and distance it from musical polyphony, I chose a monophonic song here. Earp’s assertion regarding the functionality of early virelais discussed above makes such a work particularly apt in these circumstances. As

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I aim to present flexibility, examining more parameters of the entire song would have been preferable, but a lack of space makes this impossible here.22 Table 1.1 presents the first strophe of this song, along with a range of patterning information from poetic structure, via rhythmic organisation and word-stress arrangement.23 The strophe’s text is clearly structured, consisting mostly of a list of attributes directed towards an initially unspecified object of admiration. Perhaps for variety’s sake, the structure of the list changes throughout the strophe. The refrain (ll. 1–5, 17–21) places two short attributes per line, the two couplets (ll. 6–8, 9–11) are compounded into a single list and incorporate longer sentences at times stretched over two poetic lines, and the versicle (ll. 12–16) presents one (sometimes compound) item in each line. The dedicatee is first identified as a third-person “dame” in l. 3, and is referred to again at the end of l. 5. The couplets open with a change of gear, with the lady exhorted directly in the second person (l. 6), before returning to attribute-listing. A last direct reference is made just before the repetition of the refrain (l. 16). While verses with the first rhyme “-our” enjoys relatively stable line-length (six-syllable lines in the refrain and versicle, three-syllable line in the couplets), those with the second rhyme “-ée” are less stable, alternating between five- and eight-syllable lines in the refrain and versicle, and between five- and six-syllable lines in the couplets. Thus, an attentive resonance for the reading of this song would likely translate the combination of content and structure into a relatively fast-flowing performance, where large syntactical units can remain intact, perhaps only taking two or three breaths in the process of delivering the entire strophe considered here. Though such delivery undoubtedly attracted different levels of attention, we have no need to consider each as a different resonance. However, other options are available. Using the same text (without its musical setting) for coordinating dance, for example, is an entirely different matter. Such a resonance can be imagined as part of dance tuition, or at courtly performances where singers are not forthcoming or where dancers became too out of breath to intone the melody.24 It implies a much noisier performance context, involving communal movement and multiple foci of attention. The text’s contents are not listened to in anywhere near the same level of detail, with meaning and even intelligibility becoming secondary preoccupations. Instead, it is structure that is important. While commentators usually consider purely textual transmission of dance-related materials only as evidence of a lost musical tradition, it is rhythm, not musical pitch, that is required to support a dance function.25 If we assume the rhythmic organisation of this song mirrors the structure of a known dance, a strict, measurable declamation would suffice to coordinate a group of dancers. Musical content can make this structure more easily audible, but is not essential. The rhythmic arrangement of V10 offers basic groups of six short rhythmic units, arranged into groups that form a “sentence

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The Polyphony of Function 23 Table 1.1 Text and rhythmic organisation of first strophe of V10 line Rhyme Text and its length in scheme the musical setting

Musical Rhythmic form organisation

Number Stress of units placement

A

X Y: Y Z:

12

5, 10

1

a6

~ · | · | ~ De bonté, de valour,

12

5, 10

a6

~ · | · | ~ De biauté, de doucour,

Z Y: Y Z:

2

12

2, 7

b5’

· | · | ~~ Ma dameest parée;

Y Y: Z Z:

3

12

5, 10

a6

~ · | · | ~ De maniere, d’atour,

X Y: Y Z:

4

4, 7, 13

b8’

~ · | · | · | ~~ De sens, de graceest coronnée.

Z Y: Y Y: Z Z: 18

5

10

1, 7

b5’

· | · | ~· Dame desirée,

Y Y: Z Y→

6

11

4, 9

b6’

| · | · | ·| Richement aournée

(Y): Y Y: Y

7

9

4

a3

· | ~ [~] De coulour,

Y: Z [Z]:

8

10

1, 7

b5’

· | · | ~· Bien endoctrinée,

Y Y: Z Y→

9

11

3, 6, 9

b6’

| · | · | ·| De tous a droit loée

(Y): Y Y: Y

10

9

4

a3

· | ~ [~] Par savour.

Y: Z [Z]:

11

12

4, 10

a6

~ · | · | ~ Jounete sans folour,

X Y: Y Z:

12

12

4, 10

a6

~ · | · | ~ Simplette sans baudour,

Z Y: Y Z:

13

12

(2) 4, 7

b5’

· | · | ~~ De bonne[h]eure née,

Y Y: Z Z:

14

12

4, 7, 10

a6

~ · | · | ~ Parfaiteen toutehonnour,

X Y: Y Z:

15

1, 8, 13

b8’

~ · | · | · | ~~ Nulle n’est a vous comparée

Z Y: Y Y: Z Z: 18

16

5, 10

a6

~ · | · | ~ De bonté, de valour,

X Y: Y Z:

17

b

b’

a

A

12

(continued)

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Table 1.1 Cont. line Rhyme Text and its length in scheme the musical setting

Musical Rhythmic form organisation

Number Stress of units placement

~ · | · | ~ De biauté, de doucour,

Z Y: Y Z:

12

5, 10

b5’

· | · | ~~ Ma dameest parée;

Y Y: Z Z:

12

2, 7

20

a6

~ · | · | ~ De maniere, d’atour,

X Y: Y Z:

12

5, 10

21

b8’

~ · | · | · | ~~ De sens, de graceest coronnée.

Z Y: Y Y: Z Z: 18

18

a6

19

4, 7, 13

~ Three counts X Three short notes (one count each), one syllable. | Two counts Y Short note (one count) followed by longer note (two counts), two syllables. · One count Z Single long note (three counts), one syllable. [ ] Pause in music.

structure” in the pattern: 6 5 5 5 6 5 6 5.26 When adding pitch to the mix, the danced version operates in exactly the same way. Indeed, as details of syntax, word-stressing, and text-clarity are secondary, the dance element can be just as successful without the text, using instruments instead. In this resonance, therefore, text and music are both subordinate to an external function, one which can be fulfilled by either parameter individually or by the performance of both simultaneously. Considering both text and music in an attentive resonance dramatically changes the relationship between the two elements. Here, the effects of the specified rhythms on the text’s reading become more important. In the new declamation pattern, for example, the elongated, unstressed first syllables of ll. 1, 2, 4, and 5 create a stronger sense of build-up and anticipation towards the first attribute (and stressed syllable) of each line. The changed rhythmic pattern of the second attribute in ll. 1, 2, and 4 strengthens the audibility of poetic lineation by making the coupling clear, while making sure the extended list does not become overly repetitive and mechanical.27 This rhythmic patterning also creates a mirroring effect between the arrangement of ll. 1–3 and 4–5, suggesting a subdivision of the refrain and versicle into AA’. Similarly, a marked contrast is achieved between the couplets and their surroundings. The couplets begin with the kind of quick declamation used to begin only l. 3, creating a surprise at the beginning of the new form-part and linking the three locations that mention the song’s subject explicitly. The continuous flow of their declamation blurs the poetic lineation, contrasting them with the alignment of rhythmic phrase to poetic line in the rest of the song. All this is achieved by a simple patterning of only two rhythmic options: the timespan of three of the short rhythmic units described above is assigned either a single syllable (that is, a slower declamation, show in Table 1.1

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The Polyphony of Function 25 using ~ above a syllable), or is divided into two syllables in a short-long, iamb-like combination (· | above two syllables).28 These combinations neatly form into pairs resulting in a pattern reminiscent to the modern 6/8 time-signature.29 Still, the avoidance of longer note-values in the original means there is no technical reason to group units of three into larger patterns.30 In setting the text to music, Machaut chose to follow this rhythmical organisation rather strictly, opting for a syllabic, one-note-per-syllable organisation. The only exceptions are the beginnings of ll. 1 and 4 (musical repetitions reproducing this in lines 12, 15, 17, and 20), where a single long note was divided into three shorter ones all sung on the same syllable (marked in the table as X as opposed to Z for the single note norm). These points mark the beginnings of the internal repetition within the now poetic-musical A section, strengthening the effect discussed above. This is highlighted further by the melodic repetition of ll. 1–2 in ll. 4 and the beginning of 5. Perhaps the introduction of quicker movement here was designed to support the already mentioned anacrusis effect. The musical repetitions once again change the structural relationships between the form parts. They highlight the connection between all couplets or all versicles throughout the song, creating a stronger structural meta-flow that only partly corresponds to the narrative flow of the reading. Similarly, they attract attention to the linking of versicle and refrain and separation between them and the couplets. Furthermore, the strong cadences at the end of each couplet and the versicle conflict with their syntactical arrangement, creating tension between form and syntax. Melodic and modal choices also affect the reading as they contribute to the marking of important locations, to the general flow of the lines, and to the alternation between stable and unstable sections. Analysing such parameters requires more extensive technical contextualisation, so I avoid it here. A resonance where a capable performer presents this song to an attentive audience (or, for that matter, a silent reading of both text and music) creates its own set of implications. Text clarity becomes paramount, with rhythmic arrangement subservient to its stress patterns. Thus, a new polyphony arises between normative medieval mensural patterning (in this case, the 6/8 arrangement described above) and the arrangement of word-stresses.31 In some areas the two will coincide, while in others they will diverge. The song begins with the latter option. The rhythmic disorientation created by this effect serves to separate each attribute of the list and to draw attention to the fact that we do not yet know to what or whom they refer. The first place where the use of a recognisable mensural unit allows a performer to inject a sense of rhythmic expectation heralds l. 3 of the text, where the song’s dedicatee is first presented. After a return to the irregular list pattern, the next set of more stable groupings sets l. 5 of the text, where the lady is referred to again, and which begins by praising her “sens”. The translation of this term is problematic, but its connotation of understanding and sensibility (Leach,

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2011, pp. 88–92, 102–103) matches the introduction of more regular stress-patterns at this point. This association is bolstered at the beginning of the musical B-part. Here, the direct exhortation to the lady is presented with the utmost clarity, matching the overall time-signature. Yet another rhythmic irregularity signals the immediate return to attribute-listing in l. 7. At the musical repetition (l. 9, the half-way point of the strophe) the pattern reverses itself: the majority of the setting matches the mensuration, with exceptional irregular deviations. The text here is “Bien endoctrinée” (“well instructed”), followed by the assertion that the lady is lauded “by right”. The matching between mensuration and word-stresses links this back to the setting of “sens”, associating the probity and understanding of the lady with the more “correct” stress-pattern of the music. The versicle text – which uses the A-part music – maintains more regularity in its word-stresses, an effect that fits well with the longer phrase-length of its list. The only departure from this regularity highlights the word “vous” (l. 16), namely, the lady in question. Once again, words are highlighted by deviating from an overall pattern in the relationship between stress and mensural patterns. The specifics of foreground and background are reversed, creating a pleasing structural mirror-image which flips again with the repetition of the refrain text (to the same music). All the main syntactical and structural elements are thus supported by the meta-pattern resulting from the polyphony between text and musical rhythm, adding new elements to the purely textual reading. While an outcome of the musical setting, this is not part of its intrinsic nature: The music of each form-part was seen to accommodate opposing stresspatterns. New flexibilities will come to the fore when performing the second and third strophes. More importantly, there is nothing more “intrinsic” about this reading than the dance-song version. The song is designed to accommodate and be appreciated as both, with each manifestation of resonance operating according to its own rules. Furthermore, all my resonance-based interpretations relied on some prior knowledge or real-time analysis on behalf of consumers. As such, the materials heard form only part of the equation. Techniques such as quotation, the use of special notation, or other non-integral visual elements further stratify consumption, excluding or including listeners according to levels of exposure, ability, and experience.32 This creates an interpretative polyphony between readings of a single performance; on top of the polyphony between performances are changing resonances. But how can these notions influence purely literary analysis? I contend that adjusting the parameters for interpretation according to the formal and structural flexibilities appropriate in different performative contexts can enrich our understanding of both the function and effect of the texts analysed. As has been demonstrated with V10, assessing the degree to which single texts can act as vessels for multiple narrative content, for rhythm, or for encoding action allows for greater subtleties in commenting on the range of their meaning and reverberation in society. Awareness of

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The Polyphony of Function 27 the changing performance parameters and the new polyphonies created by musical settings would bring commentators closer to a culture in which the boundaries between musical and non-musical settings were less strictly observed. This greatly increases the expressive potential of any text, regardless of the form in which it has survived down the centuries.

Words Set to Music Rather unfairly, an earlier comment slighted musicological enquiries into positivistic ontologies. Semantically, we are yet to understand all the various parameters of medieval musical construction and expression, making such enquiries extremely worthwhile. I only allowed myself the comment as I have spent much energy on such tasks myself: I am keenly aware of the pitfalls of trying to define such patterns and the near impossibility of achieving objectivity when doing so (Smilansky, 2017). It is worth stressing once more, however, that while many such analyses take for granted a highly attentive resonance for the consumption of the musical artefact, this is not obvious, and music functioned differently in many other, no less valid or important, contexts. Influential analyses attempted to codify the patterns and measure the effects of parameters ranging from harmonic leading to modal and mensural structures to text-music relationships.33 Even within these realms, agreement is elusive, and analytical frameworks often remain detached from interpretative exploration.34 Be that as it may, there should be no expectation for such efforts ever to amount to a full semantic, protolinguistic system. Even in later styles where word-painting or soundmimicry was an aesthetic ideal, both abstracted musical tagging and audible imitation remain descriptive. They act to signify a phenomenon, object, or character, and can be manipulated to signify a change of mood. Very rarely, if ever, can they be used syntactically to form a sentence, let alone an argument. One has to acknowledge that in song, the musical experience undoubtedly encodes proto-linguistic, affective, and syntactical elements, but cannot form an independent, unrelated narrative to that of the poem.35 Instead, music functions as an interpretative layer, commenting, interacting, supporting, or undermining the poetic form and syntax. This has already been explored in the example of V10, and similar polyphonies have been mentioned within the set-up of medieval musical polyphony. Musical settings, therefore, are not obliged to match text structures. Indeed, such behaviour would place music as but a textamplification device. While this undoubtedly happened, constraining music to fulfil only this function reduces its artistic potential, as well as its affective and cultural significance. We find multiple points of friction between text and music in the surviving materials. The analysis of V10 above can be read as an attempt to explain away many such “problems”. More widely, these revolve around issues of understandability and coordination. Examples of the former

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include the polytextual motet model or the stretching out of texts over long time-spans, making them hard to follow. Coordination issues underline mismatches between cadential behaviour, mensural organisation, and the placing of special harmonic or melodic “events” on the one hand, and word-stressing or syntactical organisation on the other. If we regard music as merely amplification, we are forced to consider medieval composers as primarily setting single texts, ignoring structural repetition.36 Even within these constricted boundaries, they would seem rather inept. The alternative would be to find a different model of analysis, which is where polyphony comes into its own. According to the polyphonic model, the very codification of formal organisation and strophic structures creates the in-built expectation for singular musical settings not only to function within various resonances but to be meaningful for multiple narratives and syntactical arrangements within each text-oriented performance. Continuing in this vein (and with obvious parallels to the relationship between content and lyrical structure), just as music can support and solidify the presentation of a text, it can challenge, undermine, or interpret it in multiple ways. Indeed, the same music can be relied upon to do both within a single song and its presentation. The interaction between the two elements thus enables richer gradients of expression. A strong musical cadence can be weakened by being matched with an unstressed syllable, or a syntactical caesura can be undermined by the avoidance of a musical arrival point, forcing the text-declamation on. Such occurrences morph from problems to local colours, used to create a whole larger than the sum of its parts. Of course, a lot of this is down to the performer, widely defined. With no notion of urtext or copyright, medieval performances were geared towards momentary, contextual success rather than adherence to a set of authoritative instructions. Both performers and audiences, therefore, had no expectation for sounding music to faithfully mirror even those few elements specified by the notation.37 Common changes included ornamentation, improvisation, and the addition, subtraction, or replacement of texts and voices.38 Once more, we should remember that Medieval performance involved a wide range of locations and levels of attentiveness, from signals that attracted no qualitative assessment or background music to be ignored entirely, to attentive, private performance where a single audience member gives the performer his or her full attention.39 In short, Medieval performers were actively encouraged to contribute to music’s mouvance, and had the means and license to introduce variety and change not only between resonances, but also in repetitions within a single performance.40 Indeed, in a still semi-oral performing tradition they may never have had a score to stick to in the first place. When performed together in a resonance privileging attention and subtlety, music’s function is to change a text’s poetic performance, attracting greater attention to the relationship between its structure and

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The Polyphony of Function 29 contents and providing a wider range of artificial tools (in both senses) to its delivery. The text, in turn, lends some of its syntactical richness to the necessarily proto-linguistic musical artefact, injecting variety into its more restricted possibilities, and enables it to remain vibrant and flexible throughout its many repetitions. While each makes sense independently, the polyphony of their structures and emphases transforms their combination into a new and separate work of art. In a performative resonance calling for background music, these subtleties become meaningless, with pleasantness and unobtrusiveness becoming central and repetition barely noticed. When functioning as dance accompaniment, the resonance highlights rhythm and structure, to the point where either text or music can be totally subsumed by the other. Both the explicit and hidden polyphonies of musical-poetic practice have much to contribute to discussions of medieval style-development and modern modes of analysis. These are relevant to the literary and the musical spheres and, of course, to the fruitful cooperation between them. At the beginning of this contribution, I suggested it was natural for musical engagement to encourage literary polyphonies of voice and opinion. Machaut’s clear interest in this can thus be attributed to his musical “medievality” rather than necessarily resorting to an intentional literary concept of modernity. Understanding his proficiency in setting motets and their inherent polyphony of texts, or the musically polyphonic song and its voice hierarchies, informs not only the vocal polyphonies he achieved within single dits, but also larger, metapolyphonies as are evident in his Behaingne-Navarre-Lay de Plour series (Machaut, 2016). On a smaller analytical scale, I contended that an awareness of the transformation undergone by poems as they were set to music can enrich the analysis of poetry that did not receive this treatment. The wider definition of the notion of polyphony was shown to include the possibilities of performance. Having surveyed the implications of this for notions of ontological singularity, I proposed the term resonance as a starting point for the integration of this multiplication into a subtler analytical model. Finally, I discussed polyphonic text-music relationships within a simple instance of an attentivelistening resonance. Here, I championed intentionality in characteristics that have hitherto mostly been treated as problematic inconsistencies between musical and textual organisation. This proved advantageous for engaging positively with the relationship between repeating music and changing texts, and for allowing meaningful interpretation also when clear manuscript readings do not conform to post-medieval expectations. I hope this attempt at translating original functionalities into inter-disciplinary technicalities will provide a resonating chamber for future engagement with the potential manifestations of any given courtly text, musical or otherwise.

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Notes 1 would like to thank Regina Schmidt, Nicole Rebertson, Marc Lewon, Jonathan Fruoco, Ardis Butterfield, Karl Kügle, and Grantley McDonald for their various contributions to this chapter. It builds on a paper presented at the “Performing Medieval Texts” conferences (Oxford, 2013), and was written as part of the project “Music and Late Medieval European Court Cultures” (malmecc.eu). This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 669190. 2 See Earp (1995) with updates in (among others) McGrady and Bain (2012) and Leach (2011). 3 On debate poetry, see Cayley (2012), Palmer and Kimmelman (2017), and Machaut (2016); on the Voir dit, see Machaut (1998), Kelly (2014) and McGerr’s contribution to this volume; on borrowing, citation, and reworking, see Boogaart (2001) and Plumley (2013). 4 See, for example, Plumley (1996), Maw (2004; 2013), Fuller (1986; 1992) or the rare counter-example of Diergarten (2015). 5 See Earp (2012). 6 See Machaut (2017), but also Leach (2010) and Maw (2006). 7 See Motets 4, 7, 9, 14, 19, and 22. 8 See Motets 4, 13, and 15. 9 For earlier motets see Ludwig (1910) and Everist (1994). For refrains, see Butterfield (2002), and in Machaut’s motets, Boogaart (2001) and Rose-Steel (2011). 10 Instrumentation is never prescribed. For a historiographically problematic debate on Medieval instrumentation, see Leech-Wilkinson (2002). 11 For Machaut’s awareness of these issues, see letter 10 of his Voir dit (Machaut 1998, pp. 124–125). 12 See also McGrady (2006) and Kelly (2014, ch. 5) for Machaut in particular. 13 For novelty and repetition, see Ingham (2015), Margulis (2014). For listenership and atmosphere, see Filippi (2017) and the themed volume 15 of Emotion, Space and Society (2015). 14 See Alden (2007), Smilansky (2011). 15 For these categories, see Bowles (1954, pp. 120–130). As movement and dance create their own sounds, the use of loud instruments makes functional sense. 16 The manuscript is available digitally at gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b 90591729/f1.image. 17 For example, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds italien 568 or Prague, Narodni knihovna. XI.E.9. Many sources lack residual texts, providing, therefore, only the first strophe of a balade or first two lines of a rondeau. 18 For relevant models of medieval musical engagement, see Haines (2012), Filippi (2017). On attentiveness in Johannes de Grocheo (Paris, c. 1300) see Mullally (1998, p. 21–22). 19 For manuscript-compilation as written performances affecting single texts, see Huot (1987). 20 For musicological tendency to singularity, see footnote 4. Further attempts at deciphering the intrinsic effect of sounding music include Earp (2012),

13

The Polyphony of Function 31

21 22 23

24 25 26

27 28 29

30 31

32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39

Gossen (2006), Bent (1998), and Leech-Wilkinson (1991). This even applies to Latartara (2008), where data was mined from two different performances. While slowly changing, attitudes to using performance (actual or theoretical) have been summarised thus: “Performances have been allowed almost no place, as yet, in the scholarly study of medieval music. Because performances cannot be historically correct they have been set aside as necessarily outside the bounds of scholarship, interesting, but unreliable” (Leech-Wilkinson 2003, p. 252). See Leach (2000). V10 is discussed also in Bain (2005, pp. 78–80). A relevant analysis on another virelai appears in Brown & Mahrt (1997). This follows V10’s earliest surviving version in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds français 1586, ff. 152r-v available digitally at gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ btv1b8449043q/ f310.image.r=%22Guillaume%20de%20Machaut%22. Musical editions based on this source are appended to this chapter. Machaut’s Remède de Fortune specifies participative performance for a danced virelai (Machaut, 2019, pp. 274–275). For the “lost tradition”, see Earp (1991, pp. 137–140). The first appended transcription bars and lineates according to this sentence structure. For later correspondence of dance “tempi” with “bars”, see Smith (1995). Maw (2002) presents Machaut’s typical rhythmic figures for masculine and feminine lines. This relates to rhythm only, not to iambic stress-patterns. Modern barring often indicates inbuilt stress-patterning as well as numerical control. The degree to which this applies also to Medieval “mensuration” is still open to debate. See Boone (2000). See discussions of mensuration in V33, see Maw (2002, p. 80) and Smilansky (2013). The second appended transcription offers a barring based on following wordstresses. I find untenable Earp’s (2012, pp. 212–215) and Maw’s (2002; 2004) suggestion that metrical and mensural structures not only encode stress patterns, but that these are always stronger than word-stress and syntax. Such pronouncements demonstrate the danger of not integrating resonance into one’s analytic framework. They are useful in a dance, but not in an attentive resonance. See Stone (2003), Smilansky (2011, pp. 141–146; 2015). See footnotes 4 and 21 above. See Fuller (2013). See also Gossen (2006) and Leach (2012). For continuing difficulties with interpreting strophic song, see Lippman (1999, pp. 65–79). For positive views of repetition, see Margulis (2014) and Ingham (2015). That is, pitch (partially) and rhythm, not dynamics, timbre, articulation, or affective characterisation. See Pesce (2011, pp. 289–290). See the themed volume 7 of the Basler Jahrbuch für Historische Musikpraxis (1983) and Berentsen (2016). See Leech-Wilkinson and Durante (1981), Baroncini (2002; 2004) and Smilansky (forthcoming).

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40 For the need to adjust the musical notation to underlay subsequent strophes in Machaut’s only complainte and strophic L1, see Machaut (2019, pp. 558–559).

Works Cited (1983) Basler Jahrbuch für Historische Musikpraxis, vol. 7. (2015) Emotion, Space and Society, vol. 15. Alden, J. (2007). Reading the Loire Valley Chansonniers. Acta Musicologica, vol. 79, pp. 1–31. Bain, J. (2005). Tonal Structure and the Melodic Role of Chromatic Inflections in the Music of Machaut. Plainsong and Medieval Music, vol. 14, pp. 59–88. Baroncini, R. (2002). Zorzi Trombetta and the Band of Piffari and Trombones of the Serenissima: New Documentary Evidence [trans. Hugh Ward-Perkins]. Historic Brass Society Journal, vol. 14, pp. 59–82. Baroncini, R. (2004). Zorzi Trombetta da Modon and the founding of the band of piffari and tromboni of the Serenissima. Historic Brass Society Journal, vol. 16, pp. 1–17. Bent, M. (1998). The Grammar of Early Music: Preconditions for Analysis. In: ed. C.C. Judd, Tonal Structures in Early Music. New York: Garland, pp. 15–59. Berentsen, N. (2016). Discantare Super Planum Cantum: New Approaches to Vocal Polyphonic Improvisation, 1300–1470. PhD diss., Leiden University. Boogaart, J. (2001). Encompassing Past and Present: Quotations and Their Function in Machaut’s Motets. Early Music History, vol. 20, pp. 1–86. Boone, G.M. (2000). Marking Mensural Time. Music Theory Spectrum, vol. 22, pp. 1–43. Bowles, E.A. (1954). Haut and Bas: The Grouping of Musical Instruments in the Middle Ages. Musica Disciplina, vol. 8, pp. 115–140. Brown, P. and Mahrt, W.P. (1997). The Interplay of Language and Music in Machaut’s Virelai ‘Foy Porter’. In: ed. N. van Deusen, Tradition and Ecstasy: The Agony of the 14th Century. Ottawa: The Institute of Medieval Music, pp. 235–250. Butterfield, A. (2002). Poetry and Music in Medieval France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cayley, E. (2012). Machaut and Debate Poetry. In: D. McGrady and J. Bain, eds., A Companion to Guillaume de Machaut. Leiden: Brill, pp. 103–118. Cerquiglini, B. (1989). Éloge de la variante: Histoire critique de la philologie. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Clark, A.V. (1996). Concordare cum materia: The Tenor in the FourteenthCentury Motet. PhD diss., Princeton University. Coleman, J. (1996). Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Diergarten, F. (2015). Komponieren in der Zeiten Machauts: Die anonymen Liedsätze des Codex Ivrea. Würzburg: Würzberg University Press. Earp, L. (1991). Genre in the Fourteenth-Century French Chanson: The Virelai and the Dance Song. Musica Discipina, vol. 45, pp. 123–141. Earp, L. (1995). Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research. New York: Garland. Earp, L. (2012). Declamation as Expression in Machaut’s Music. In: D. McGrady and J. Bain, eds., A Companion to Guillaume de Machaut. Leiden: Brill, pp. 209–238.

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The Polyphony of Function 33 Everist, M. (1994). French Motets in the Thirteenth Century: Music, Poetry and Genre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Falck, R. (1979). Parody and Contrafactum: A Terminological Clarification. The Musical Quarterly, vol. 65 (1979), pp. 1–21. Filippi, D.V. (2017). ‘Audire missam non est verba missae intelligere…’: The Low Mass and the Motetti Missales in Sforza Milan. Journal of the Alamire Foundation, vol. 9, pp. 11–32. Fuller, S.A. (1986). On Sonority in Fourteenth-Century Polyphony: Some preliminary Reflections. Journal of Music Theory, vol. 30, pp. 35–70. Fuller, S.A. (1992). Tendencies and Resolution: The Direct Progression in “Ars Nova” Music. Journal of Music Theory, vol. 36, pp. 299–58. Fuller, S.A. (2013). Contrapunctus, Dissonance Regulation, and French Polyphony of the Fourteenth Century. In: J. A. Pereino, ed., Medieval Music in Practice: Studies in Honor of Richard Crocker. Middleton: American Institute of Musicology, pp. 113–152. Gossen, N. (2006). Musik in Texten, Texte in Musik: der poetische Text als Herausforderung an die Interpreten der Musik des Mittelalters. Winterthur: Amadeus. Haines, J. (2012). Performance Before c. 1430: An Overview. In: C. Lawson and R. Stowell, eds., The Cambridge History of Musical Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 231–247. Heyworth, G., O’Sullivan, D.E., and Coulson, F., eds. (2013). Les Eschéz d’Amours: A Critical Edition of the Poem and its Latin Glosses. Leiden: Brill. Huot, S. (1987). From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ingham, P.C. (2015). The Medieval New: Ambivalence in the Age of Innovation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kelly, D. (2014). Machaut and the Medieval Apprenticeship Tradition: Truth, Fiction and Poetic Craft. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer. Latartara, J. (2008). Machaut’s Monophonic Virelai Tuit mi penser Intersections of Language Sound, Pitch Space, Performance, and Meaning. Journal of Musicological Research, vol. 27, pp. 226–253. Leach, E.E. (2000). Fortune’s Demesne: The Interrelation of Text and Music in Machaut’s Il Mest Avis (B22), De Fortune (B23) and Two Related Anonymous Balades. Early Music History, vol. 19, pp. 47–79. Leach, E.E. (2010). Music and Verbal Meaning: Machaut’s Polytextual Songs. Speculum, vol. 85, pp. 567–591. Leach, E.E. (2011). Guillaume de Machaut: Secretary, Poet, Musician. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Leach, E.E. (2012). Poet as Musician. In: D. McGrady and J. Bain, eds., A Companion to Guillaume de Machaut. Leiden: Brill, pp. 49–66. Leech-Wilkinson, D. (1991). Not Just a Pretty Tune: Structuring Devices in Four Machaut Virelais. Sonus, vol. 12, pp. 16–31. Leech-Wilkinson, D. (2002). The Modern Invention of Medieval Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leech-Wilkinson, D. (2003). Rose, lis Revisited. In: E.E. Leach, ed., Machaut’s Music: New Interpretations. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, pp. 249–262. Leech-Wilkinson, D. and Durante, S. (1981). Il Libro di Appunti di un Suonatore di Tromba del Quindicesimo Secolo. Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, vol. 1, pp. 16–39.

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Leffert, P.M. (2011). Compositional Trajectories. In: M. Everist, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 241–262. Lippman, E.A. (1999). The Philosophy and Aesthetics of Music. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Ludwig, F. (1910). Repertorium organorum recentioris et motetorum vetustissimi stili. Halle an der Salle: Niemeyer. Machaut, G. de, Palmer, R.B., trans., and Leech-Wilkinson, D., ed. (1998). Le Livre dou Voir Dit (The Book of the True Poem. New York: Garland. Machaut, G. de, Palmer, R.B., Leo, D., Smilansky, U., eds. (2016). The Debate Poems: Le Jugement dou Roy de Behaigne, Le Jugement dou Roy de Navarre, Le Lay de Plour. In: R.B. Palmer and Y.M. Plumley, eds., Guillaume de Machaut: The Complete Poetry & Music, vol. 1. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications. Machaut, G. de and Boogaart, J., ed. (2017). The Motets. In: R.B. Palmer and Y.M. Plumley, eds., Guillaume de Machaut: The Complete Poetry & Music, vol. 9. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications. Machaut, G. de, Palmer, R.B. Leo, D., and Smilansky, U., eds. (2019). The Boethian Poems: Remede de Fortune, Le Confort d’Ami. In: R.B. Palmer and Y.M. Plumley, eds., Guillaume de Machaut: The Complete Poetry & Music, vol. 2. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications. Margulis, E.H. (2014). On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maw, D. (2002). Meter and Word Setting: Revising Machaut’s Monophonic Virelais. Current Musicology, vol. 74, pp. 69–102. Maw, D. (2004). “Trespasser mesure”: Meter in Machaut’s Polyphonic Songs. The Journal of Musicology vol. 21, pp. 46–126. Maw, D. (2006). Machaut and the ‘Critical’ Phase of Medieval Polyphony. Music & Letters, vol. 87, pp. 262–294. Maw, D. (2013). ‘Bona Cadentia Dictaminum’: Reconstructing Word Setting in Machaut’s Songs. Music and Letters vol. 94, pp. 383–432. McGerr, R. (2021). The Multilevel Polyphony of Machaut’s Livre Dou Voir Dit and its Afterlife. In: J. Fruoco, ed., Polyphony and the Modern. Abingdon-onThames: Routledge, pp. 37–61. McGrady, D. (2006). Controlling Readers: Guillaume de Machaut and His Late Medieval Audience. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McGrady, D. and Bain, J. (2012). A Companion to Guillaume de Machaut. Leiden: Brill. Mullally, R. (1998). Johannes de Grocheo’s ‘Musica Vulgaris’. Music & Letters, vol. 79, pp. 1–26. Palmer, R.B. and Kimmelman, B. (2017). Machaut’s Legacy: The Judgement Poetry Tradition in the Later Middle Ages and Beyond. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Pesce, D. (2011). Theory and Notation. In: Mark Everist, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 276–290. Plumley, Y.M. (1996). The Grammar of Fourteenth-Century Melody: Tonal Organization and Compositional Process in the Chansons of Guillaume de Machaut and the Ars subtilior. New York: Garland.

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The Polyphony of Function 35 Plumley, Y.M. (2013). The Art of Grafted Song: Citation and Allusion in the Age of Machaut. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robertson, A.W. (2002). Guillaume de Machaut and Reims: Context and Meaning in his Musical Works. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robinson, R. (2017). The Faenza Codex: The Case for Solo Organ Revisited. The Journal of Musicology, vol. 34, pp. 610–646. Rose-Steel, T. (2011). French Ars Nova Motets and their Manuscripts: Citational Play and Material Context refrains in Ars Antiqua motets. PhD diss., University of Exeter. Smilansky, U. (2011). A Labyrinth of Spaces: Page, Performance and Music in Late Medieval French Culture. In: F. Andrews, ed., Ritual and Space in the Middle Ages: Proceedings of the 2009 Harlaxton Symposium. Donington: Shaun Tyas, pp. 130–147. Smilansky, U. (2013). Text, Meter, Mensuration Choices and Un-notated Upbeats, machaut.exeter.ac.uk/?q=node/2117. Smilansky, U. (2015). L’essor du compositeur-célébrité: stratégies et techniques de l ’auto-définition musicale au 14e siècle. Revue Analyse Musicale, vol. 78, pp. 13–21. Smilansky, U. (2017). The Ars Subtilior as an International Style. In: S. Morent, S. Leopold and J. Steinheuer, eds., Europäische Musikkultur im Kontext des Konstanzer Konzils. Thorbecke: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, pp. 225–249. Smilansky, U. (forthcoming). Performing Cultural Capital: Le Remède de Fortune as Event, Text and Book. Smith, A.W. (1995). Fifteenth-Century Dance and Music: Twelve Transcribed Italian Treatises and Collections in the Tradition of Domenico da Piacenza. Hillsdale, New York: Pendragon Press. Stone, A. (2003). Self-reflexive Songs and their Readers in the Late Fourteenth Century. Early Music, vol. 31, pp. 180–193. Taylor, J.H.M. (2007). The Making of Poetry: Late-Medieval French Poetic Anthologies. Turnhout: Brepols. Zumthor, P. (1972). Essai de poétique médiévale. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Manuscripts Mentioned Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, français 843. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, français 1586. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, italien 568. Prague, Narodni knihovna. XI.E.9.

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Appendix First strophe of V10 (MS C, ff. 152r-v):

First strophe of V10 re-barred, aligning word-stresses with bar beginnings:

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The Multilevel Polyphony of Machaut’s Livre dou Voir Dit and its Afterlife Rosemarie McGerr

Guillaume de Machaut’s achievements as a composer of music and poetry reflect his deep understanding of the discourses of the medieval cathedral, university, and court – and his ability to set them in dialogue. His works show his expertise in Latin as well as French, religious as well as secular traditions, narrative as well as lyric poetry, and polyphonic as well as monophonic forms of music. As musicologists such as Daniel LeechWilkinson (1990), Anne Walters Robertson (2002), and Elizabeth Eva Leach (2011) have detailed, Machaut’s compositions include important developments in both courtly and liturgical polyphonic lyric. His Messe de Nostre Dame (Mass for Our Lady) adds a fourth voice to the traditional three of earlier liturgical polyphony and is the earliest unified Mass liturgy by a single composer. His twenty-three motets are both polyphonic and polytextual, combining different musical voices and verbal texts, often in French as well as Latin. Although many of Machaut’s polyphonic courtly lyrics use a single verbal text, he also composed double-texted and triple-texted ballades. Machaut’s works show his ability to create dialogue within and between his own artistic creations, as well as dialogue with the works of other artists, and his supervision of manuscripts of his poems suggests he recognised the importance of the illustrations he included, adding a visual dimension to his musical and verbal poetics. Le Livre dou Voir Dit (The Book of the True Poem), written late in Machaut’s career (ca. 1363–1365), demonstrates more fully than his other works his ability to employ polyphony on several different levels within the same work and create a multi-dimensional text that encourages readers to appreciate diverse perspectives on the issues raised, including the composition process itself.1 While some readers have found this multiplicity of perspective perplexing, scholars such as Maureen Boulton (1989, pp. 89–90, 93) and Brooke Findley (2012, p. 88) have begun exploring the Voir Dit’s relationship to Bakhtin’s theory of the polyphonic novel. The Voir Dit integrates both literal polyphony and other forms of diversity of voice within its first-person narrative frame. Among the sixtytwo lyric poems the work embeds, eight have polyphonic musical settings (Leech-Wilkinson, 1993, pp. 43–73; McGrady, 2012, pp. 129–130). The narrative also embeds forty-six prose letters, as well as allegorical visions, DOI: 10.4324/9781003129837-3

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retellings of myths, and a program of illustrations (Leech-Wilkinson and Palmer, 1998, pp. xci–xciii; McGrady, 2012, pp. 106–126). Most importantly, the work presents many of the lyric poems and prose letters as compositions sent to the narrator by a young woman. As a result, the Voir Dit might be said to depict polyphony that envisions simultaneous performances of different voices, as well as a polyphony of different voices that develops across the work linearly. In effect, the Voir Dit explores the nature of polyphony itself. Le Voir Dit builds on several models for its multilevel use of polyphony. One that deserves greater exploration is the medieval lyric tradition of dialogue between poets, including women. Some poetic dialogues take the form of alternating stanzas, while others involve response to one entire poem by another: In both cases, the second poet’s work echoes the rhyme scheme, stanza structure, and musical setting of the first poet’s work.2 The Voir Dit describes just such an exchange between the narrator and another male poet and embeds the pair of poems with their musical setting, so we should explore the relationship of that exchange to the dialogue between the narrator and lady that is the focus of the work. Another model that deserves further examination is the exchange of letters by Peter Abelard and Heloise of Argenteuil in the twelfth century. Machaut most likely knew the set of Latin letters written by Abelard and Heloise after they became members of monastic communities, in which they discuss love, ethics, and theology, as well as Abelard’s composition of lyric poems at different points in their relationship, but Machaut may also have known the set of Latin letters that some scholars attribute to the lovers earlier in their relationship, which contain lyric poems by both writers.3 These collections of letters offered Machaut models for a work that would expand upon the lyric dialogue genres. The Voir Dit’s claim that it presents the letters and poems exchanged between the narrator and a young woman, as well as an account of their actions, gives the work as a whole a higher level of polyphony than other narratives that depict dialogue about love among characters, one that fulfills Bakhtin’s theory of the polyphonic novel. The combination of both models in the Voir Dit may well have inspired Jean-Jacques Rousseau when he composed his epistolary novel Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (Julie, or the New Heloise), for Rousseau studied manuscripts of Machaut’s works before writing this novel.

The Voir Dit and Dialogism in Medieval Lyric Genres Although some readers have suggested similarities between the Voir Dit and the epistolary novel, these discussions have not examined the links between the exchange of letters in the Voir Dit and the lyric exchanges that play such an important role in this work.4 Machaut’s inclusion of dialogic and polyphonic forms of lyric in the Voir Dit offers important evidence for the theme of dialogism – engagement between voices

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The Multilevel Polyphony of Machaut 39 representing different perspectives – in this work. The Voir Dit presents itself as the true account of the love relationship between a well-known poet and composer and a young woman, who fall in love by means of the poems and letters they compose. The work clearly explores the relationship between truth and artistic representation, whether verbal, musical, or visual.5 The young woman writes to the narrator first, sending him a rondel expressing her love for him, though she knows him only through his songs (VD, ll. 203–215). When the narrator sends a rondel of his own in response (VD, ll. 374–386), she sends another rondel (VD, ll. 475– 487) and a letter asking him to respond with another poem of his own, to set their poems to music, and to give his guidance on improving her poetry (VD, Letter 1). When their relationship begins to attract notice by people beyond their most intimate associates, the lady asks the narrator (now also lover) to compose a work that will tell the true story of their relationship and include all the letters and poems that they exchange. Of the lyric poems in the work for which musical notation appears, all but one have polyphonic settings (Leech-Wilkinson, 1993, p. 43). Most of these polyphonic settings are for lyric poems that present the words of one speaker, so they are not polytextual; yet the musical settings reflect traditions of performance by multiple singers, and the Voir Dit focuses on the performance of song by the human voice. For example, in Letter 2 the lover asks the lady to learn the music for the songs he sends her. In Letter 3, the lady responds that she will sing the ballade he has sent, “Plourez dames” (“Weep, ladies”) (VD, ll. 673–696), along with him as best as she is able when they meet. The musical notation for this ballade appears with one texted voice and two untexted voices, but the narrative does not detail if the lady envisions that they will sing different musical lines or sing in unison, with the other “voices” performed by instruments. One of the lover’s descriptions of a polyphonic lyric he sends the lady suggests that the additional lines of music could be played on instruments, rather than sung: In Letter 10, the lover describes “les tenures” (“the tenor parts”) of “Le grant desir que iay de vous veoir” (“The Great Desire I Have to See You”) as very sweet and asks the lady to “savoir la chose einsi comme elle est faite” (“learn the piece exactly as it has been written”), but to have someone arrange for “les orgues […] cornemuses . ou autres instrumens” (“the organ, the bagpipe, or the other instruments”) to perform the song with her. In Letter 31, however, the lover writes that he is sending her a new setting for a rondel that adds tenor and contratenor parts and asks the lady to learn it, without indicating that any instruments should participate. In Letter 33, the lover explains he has delayed sending the music for the three-voice rondel “Dix et sept” (“Ten and Seven”) to Toute Belle until he has heard the song performed, which again suggests the importance of polyphonic performance of the song, even if it has a single verbal text, which he cannot accomplish alone. The lover’s repeated requests for Toute Belle to learn the music for the polyphonic songs he sends gives her a role in performing polyphony, even if he has composed the music. These

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kinds of details suggest that the work as a whole explores the nature of creating polyphony – both composing it and performing it. The most elaborate example of polyphonic lyric in the Voir Dit and discussion of its creation is the double ballade “Quant Theseus / Ne quier veoir”, which the narrator composes in an exchange with another poet, identified as Thomas Paien.6 The Voir Dit describes the process of this exchange in the narrative frame, as well as in several of the embedded letters. In Letter 32, the lady explains that she is sending back to the lover a letter that includes a ballade another poet had sent him, which she found among other things the lover sent her. In Letter 35 the lover explains that he received this ballade from “T. Paien”, has now written a response ballade, and is sending her both ballades. It is not until right before Letter 37, however, that the Voir Dit includes the texts of both ballades (VD, ll. 6494–6541) and the information that the lover-narrator has composed music for the two poems that creates a double ballade in four voices to please his lady (VD, ll. 6475–6491). As the narrator explains, his response poem duplicates the meter, rhyme scheme, and concluding stanza line of the ballade by Thomas Paien, thus creating dialogue between the verbal texts, which are interlinked on formal and thematic levels; but Machaut’s setting of each ballade to different musical voices and addition of another musical voice to each ballade demonstrates his ability to envision the dialogue of the whole work as including both more diversity and engagement than the verbal level alone achieves. In Letter 37, the lover describes both ballades as having been written for the lady; he also asks the lady to learn them “car ie y ai fiat les chans a .iiij. et les ay pluseurs fois ois . et me plaisent moult bien” (“for I’ve composed the songs in four parts and have heard them several times and they pleased me quite well”). In Letter 35, the lover depicts this poetic exchange as a rivalry and challenging task for him to accomplish, since Paien had the advantage in composing his ballade first, and in Letter 37, the lover asks the lady to indicate which ballade she judges to be the better one. In Letter 38, she expresses her judgment that the lover’s poem is the better of the two, but she then explains that she is sending him a rondel and ballade that she has composed out of love for him. In other words, though the lover presents the exchange of poems between the two male poets as a matter of competition between them (despite the lover’s claim that he composed the song to please the lady), the Voir Dit suggests that the lover’s dialogue with his lady through poems and letters offers the potential for creative partnership, rather than rivalry – creating polyphony of different sorts. The Voir Dit’s highlighting of a polyphonic double ballade created from poems in which one poet responds to another poet links the work as a whole most explicitly to the dialogism that scholars have identified as a major cultural development in the later Middle Ages. For example, Stephen Nichols describes polyphonic music as part of a wider cultural phenomenon in thirteenth-century France of representing differing voices within single works; yet he finds that this dialogism is also reflected in

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The Multilevel Polyphony of Machaut 41 thirteenth-century manuscript collections of lyric poems by different poets, which reveal that dialogue through imitation and contrafacture had been part of lyric tradition even earlier (Nichols, 2014, pp. 29–30). Yolanda Plumley discusses the relationship of “Quant Theseus / Ne quier veoir” to earlier motets, jeu-parti lyrics, and exchanges of poems that create implicit, if not explicit, debate between individual voices (Plumley, 2013, p. 367). While the Voir Dit presents this double ballade as an explicit exchange by Machaut and Paien, John Haines compares it to Machaut’s creation of implicit dialogue with thirteenth-century trouvère monophonic lyrics by inserting quotations from them into his motets (Haines, 2012, p. 282). Jacques Boogaart analyses these in detail, showing how extensively Machaut engaged with trouvère lyrics, especially those of Thibaut de Champagne, when Machaut composed these polyphonic and polytextual works (Boogaart, 2001, pp. 13–33). Haines discusses the wide circulation of manuscript copies of troubadour and trouvère lyrics in north-eastern France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (Haines, 2004, pp. 7–48). Though the numbers of texts attributed to women poets in these manuscripts is small compared to those attributed to men, the collections show that women did participate in several forms of lyric dialogue or debate, such as the tenso, partimen, jeu-parti, and response poems, so Machaut had models for poetic dialogue between men and women in the collections of lyrics that circulated in the fourteenth century, including a poem of alternating stanzas attributed to Blanche de Castille and Thibaut de Champagne.7 A possible model for exchange of whole poems between women and men is “A chantar m’er de so qu’eu no volria” (“I must sing of what I’d rather not”) by the Comtessa de Dia, which survives in fifteen manuscripts, including a collection of Occitan lyrics that circulated in northern France, where it appears with its musical setting.8 The speaker of this lyric is a woman who describes the song as her messenger to her beloved: “Per qu’ieu vos man lai on es vostr’estatges / Esta chansson que me sia messatges” (“That is why I send there to your dwelling / This song, that it may be my messenger”) (stanza 5). The speaker protests against the beloved’s deceitful treatment of her, despite her faithfulness, and demands to know the reason, suggesting she expects a response: “Ieu vuoill saber, lo mieus bels amics gens, / Per que vos m’etz tant fers ni tant salvatges” (“I want to know, my fine and noble friend, / Why you are so cruel and harsh with me”) (stanza 5). The speaker repeatedly refers to her beloved as “amics” (“friend”) (stanzas 2–5), as do most of the speakers in poems by women in the Occitan lyric tradition, and in stanza four she also asks her beloved to remember either “nostres covinens” (“our agreement”) or possibly “nostres partimens” (“our exchange of stanzas”), depending on the source.9 Even if the “partimens” reading never had manuscript circulation, this poem suggests a challenge to another poet for a response, though none of the surviving manuscript copies has a response explicitly paired with it.

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The pair of poems attributed to Bernart Arnaut and Lombarda de Toulouse offers verification that the response poem form of dialogue or debate between men and women was part of Occitan lyric tradition. This poetic dialogue now survives only in a thirteenth-century collection of lyrics that was made in Italy, but the dialogue may have circulated more widely during the fourteenth century.10 Bernart’s poem (“Lombards volgr’eu eser per Na Lonbarda” [“I’d like to be a Lombard for Lady Lombarda”]) appears first and lays claim to Lombarda’s love, while Lombarda’s poem (“Nom volgr’ aver per Bernard Na Bernarda” [“I’d like the name Lady Bernarda for Bernard”]) responds in ways that echo yet challenge his part of the dialogue: She questions his poem’s depiction of her as a mirror and ends up claiming her own name and identity, while arguing that Bernart’s poem has not revealed the truth about his love. While her poem uses the same rhymes and overall stanza structure as Bernart’s, Lombarda’s response omits one stanza, perhaps to reject the expectation that her voice will completely mirror Bernart’s. This exchange of poems has attracted significant critical commentary about its depiction of gendered discourse: For example, Tilde Sankovitch (1989, pp. 183–193) argues that Lombarda’s poem subverts Bernart’s poem in ways that correspond to the arguments of Luce Irigaray, revealing the artificial qualities of fin’amors discourse by echoing it ironically.11 Lombarda’s irony makes most sense in the context of a known tradition of poetic dialogism of the sort Nichols describes. Since Thibaut de Champagne was the grandson of Marie de Champagne and great-grandson of Eleanor d’Aquitaine, the granddaughter of the first known troubadour and patroness of courtly lyric in her own right, Thibaut represents an important link between the lyric traditions of the troubadours and the trouvères, and Machaut’s quotations of Thibaut’s poems in motets suggest Machaut had access to collections that included poems influenced by Occitan lyric traditions, including response poems. Though the description of the poetic exchange that creates the double ballade in the Voir Dit provides readers with an important point of comparison for the exchanges of lyric poems between the lover and the lady throughout the work, the traditions of poetic dialogue between men and women poets also provide an important context for these exchanges. As Leach points out (2011, p. 105), the Voir Dit presents several of the lyric exchanges between the lover and lady as pairs, and some pairs share identical rhyme schemes, as if they were composed in the kind of exchange the narrator has with Thomas Paien. Judith A. Peraino describes the lady and lover of the Voir Dit as at times appearing to be “two equal participants in a scholastic dialogue or jeu-parti” (2011, p. 286). The lady begins the dialogue by sending the rondel expressing her love (VD, ll. 203–215). The lover describes the rondel he includes in his first letter to Toute Belle as composed “par tel rime” (“in the same lyric form”) as her poem (VD, ll. 366–367). The lady soon expands the plan for composing response poems to include polytextual and possibly polyphonic performance: In

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The Multilevel Polyphony of Machaut 43 Letter 5, the lady explains she has written a lyric poem that responds to one he has just sent her and asks the lover to set both poems to music if he thinks that they might be sung together. As Leech-Wilkinson notes (VD, p. 720, n. 6), the lady’s description suggests a double-texted format similar to the exchange of poems between Machaut and Paien for which Machaut composed the musical setting in four voices: Leech-Wilkinson argues that the positioning of the lady’s request so early in the work suggests that it might be read as the inspiration for Machaut’s exchange with Paien, as well as Machaut’s composition of an independent tripletexted polyphonic ballade (“De triste cuer / Quant vrais amis / Certes ie di”) that has similarities to a passage in Letter 8 of the Voir Dit. Letter 5 goes on to describe the lady’s response poem to the lover’s chanson balladee (VD, ll. 1104–1169 and 1304–1350) as part of her apprenticeship in composing lyric poetry: She explains that she has only been able to complete one stanza of her response to his accomplished lyric and asks the lover to offer corrections to improve her work. The Voir Dit does not include musical notation for this (potential) pair of poems, but suggests that the process of completing such a polyvocal work takes considerable skill. In his next letter, the lover compliments the poems the lady has sent him, yet offers to help her enhance her skills: “se ie estoie un iour avec vous ie vous diroie et apenroie ce que ie napris onques a creature. par quoy vous les feries mieux” (“if I could spend one day with you, I would instruct you, teaching what I have never taught anyone; and in this way you would compose even better”) (Letter 6). As the Voir Dit continues, it presents more of the lyric poems exchanged by the lover and lady in terms of response pairs. For example, the narrator describes some of the poems he receives from Toute Belle as responses to the poems he sent her: “[…] chascun fait me respondi” (“She responded to each work in kind”) (VD, l. 1752). Even when the lady’s poem does not follow the exact rhyme scheme as the one his lyric used, but echoes his words in other ways, the narrator describes the lady’s poem as a response that even outdoes his own poem: “Mais elle y fist tele response / Que mon ouvrage efface et ponse” (“But the lady composed a response / That overshadowed and effaced my accomplishment” (VD, ll. 2889–2890, describing the pair of rondeaux at ll. 2891–2906). Though at lines 3000–3002 the narrator states that the lady uses the same meter and rhyme in her response poem (VD, ll. 3003–3010) to his rondel (VD, ll. 2991–2998), the rhymes do not match exactly, which may suggest that some differences in the two poems might be considered desirable, combining verbal engagement and difference in a way that might provide a verbal parallel to the principles of musical polyphony. As the relationship of the lover and lady develops, however, some of the poems they exchange do follow the tradition of responding with the same rhyme sounds, as well as lyric form: Examples include the pairs of rondeaux at ll. 1820–1845, 1846–1861, and 2420–2437.12 The question of how “such paired lyrics were delivered in performance” is an intriguing one

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(Plumley, 2003, p. 244), since the Voir Dit does not offer this information. Though the manuscript copies of the lover’s rondel at ll. 1846–1853 indicate that it has a musical setting, no music survives, so it is not clear if these paired poems could be performed as different voices within a polyphonic setting similar to the polyphonic settings of other rondeaux in the Voir Dit or might be sung in sequence. When the lover and lady finally meet in person, the narrator describes a scene in which the lady sings to him and he sings for her in return (VD, ll. 2601–2608). On the other hand, he also describes his performance of a ballade he composed for the lady in the same scene in terms of recitation (VD, ll. 2639–2640). The pair of poems by the lover and lady for which the Voir Dit presents the most potential for polyphonic performance is the pair of rondeaux that each composes containing an anagram of the other’s name. The lover discusses his rondel and its music in four letters. In Letters 25 and 31, he indicates that he will send her the music for the rondel that contains her name as soon as he can; then, in Letters 33 and 35 he explains he has composed the music for the rondel and describes it as one of the best things he has composed in seven years, which he has achieved because of his love for her. Finally, in Letter 35, he tells her he is sending her the rondel with the music, which appears immediately afterwards for readers of the Voir Dit (VD, ll. 6336–6343). This focus on the process of composition of verbal text and polyphonic music has clear parallels with the discussion of the double ballade the lover composed with Thomas Paien. Just as the lover’s discussion of his achievement in the double ballade does not silence the lady but leads her to send him a ballade in response, the narrator’s depiction of his achievement with the rondel is not the last word about his lyric poem: The lady sees the rondel as an opportunity for poetic dialogue with the lover, this time more clearly in the form of a response poem. The rondel the lady composes has the same structure and rhymes as his, except for accommodating the anagram of the lover’s name, instead of the lover’s anagram of her name (VD, ll. 9043–9050). In Letter 46, she explains, “ie ne le sceusse fairese il ne venist de vous” (“I would not have known how to compose it had this not come from you”), and Leech-Wilkinson’s note (VD, p. 751 n. 6) interprets this comment as depicting the rondel on the lady’s name by the lover as the model for her poem. The pairing of these two rondeaux might therefore suggest that the lady’s rondel could be sung to the same musical setting as the lover’s rondel or could play a role in the three-voice setting that the lover has composed for his rondel, which would make a work that is polytextual as well as polyphonic. The musical setting given for the lover’s rondel has an unusually high level of interweaving of the three voices, similar to what occurs in the double ballade, but no surviving copy of the lyric integrates the verbal text of the lady’s rondel.13 Nonetheless, given the models of response poems in the troubadour and trouvère traditions, as well as the discussions of paired lyrics and polyphony within the Voir Dit, medieval readers may

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The Multilevel Polyphony of Machaut 45 well have recognised the potential for polyphonic performance of both poems involved in this exchange of rondeaux. The lady’s rondel becomes the last lyric poem included in the Voir Dit. It completes the lyric frame of the work – a frame that begins with her first rondel, which inspires the exchange of poems that becomes the lyric expression of the lady’s relationship with the narrator. Nevertheless, this lyric is part of a pattern of on-going dialogue, rather than a final word. The Voir Dit’s depiction of Toute Belle as a person who seeks dialogue and who gives voice to her own views in her songs, as well as her letters, is essential for understanding the distinction between the voice of the narrator-lover, who does not fully recognise the unresolved contradictions in his account, and the Voir Dit’s exploration of ideas about love, art, and truth as a work by Guillaume de Machaut.14 The lady’s lyric poems play a vital role in creating what Findlay calls “the radically dialogic nature of the text” (p. 97); and it is important to recognise the lady’s construction of the lyric frame in the Voir Dit as an extension of the lyric dialogism that medieval women helped to shape in the troubadour and trouvère traditions.15

The Voir Dit and the Letters of Peter Abelard and Heloise d’Argenteuil The Voir Dit interweaves the performance of polyphony of several kinds, whether singing the lyrics the narrator has given polyphonic settings, composing lyric poems that create dialogue with other lyric poems, or expressing views in letters that reflect different perspectives on issues. As Maureen Boulton (1989, p. 93) and Deborah McGrady (2012, p. 140) have argued, the Voir Dit becomes a polyphonic work, in which the poems, letters, and narrative poetry become “voices” that must be heard in relationship to each other. Machaut’s linking of letters and poems in the same work might well reflect his knowledge of the collection of Latin letters that names the authors as Peter Abelard and Heloise of Argenteuil and depicts them as having taken monastic vows, as well as the collection that does not name the authors but depicts them in ways that have led some scholars to attribute them to Abelard and Heloise at an early point in their relationship.16 The letter collection that circulated widely is the one that names the authors as Abelard and Heloise and begins with a letter from Abelard to a male friend about the suffering Abelard has experienced (also known as the Historia calamitatum). When this letter becomes known to Heloise, she sends Abelard a letter that expresses her love and concern for him as both his wife and abbess of Paraclete Abbey, which is under Abelard’s supervision, but her letter also takes issue with details in his account of their relationship. The letters that follow debate the nature of their relationship in the past and now that both have entered the clergy, as well as reforms to the Benedictine Rule that would be appropriate for nuns (and

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perhaps others pursuing spiritual ideals). As a result, some scholars have come to depict this collection of letters as “history’s first epistolary novel” (Powell, 2000, p. 257). The potential role that the letters of Abelard and Heloise may have played in influencing Machaut comes from what they reveal about the important role that exchanging letters and lyric poetry played in the earliest part of their relationship. In the letter to his male friend, Abelard describes his desire to pursue an amorous relationship with Heloise, even before he has met her, partly because her advanced level of learning and skill in literary expression would allow them to enhance their relationship through written correspondence: Tanto autem facilius hanc mihi puellam consensuram credidi quanto amplius eam litterarum scientiam et habere et diligere noueram, nosque etiam absentes scriptis internuntiis inuicem licere presentare et pleraque audacius scribere quam colloqui, et sic semper iocundis interesse colloquiis. Knowing her knowledge and love of letters I thought she would be all the more ready to consent, and that even when separated we would enjoy each other’s presence by exchange of written messages in which we could write many things more boldly than we could say them, and so need never lack the pleasures of conversation. (Luscombe and Radice, 2013, pp. 26–27) In the same account, Abelard refers to receiving a letter from Heloise in which she expresses her joy at learning she is pregnant with their child: “Non multo autem post, puella se concepisse comperit, et cum summa exultatione mihi super hoc ilico scripsit, consulens quid de hoc ipse faciendum deliberarem” (“Soon afterwards the girl found that she was pregnant, and immediately wrote me a letter full of rejoicing to ask what I thought she should do”) (Luscombe and Radice, 2013, pp. 32– 33). Though his account does not refer to other letters they exchanged, the description of one part of their correspondence does suggest that Abelard’s ideas about letters as a form of intimate expression did play a role in their relationship and provided an important precedent for the exchange of letters with Heloise that followed. Abelard’s account of the affair also refers to his having written love songs about Heloise that apparently did not remain secret but circulated for many years afterwards: […] si qua invenire liceret, carmina essent amatoria, […] quorum etiam carminum pleraque adhuc in multis, sicut et ipse nosti, frequentantur et decantantur regionibus, ab his maxime quos vita similis oblectat.

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The Multilevel Polyphony of Machaut 47 […] when inspiration did come to me, it was for writing love songs, […] A lot of these songs, as you know, are still popular and sung in many places, particularly by those who enjoy the kind of life I led. (Luscombe and Radice, 2013, pp. 28–31) Heloise herself refers to these songs and their widespread circulation in her first letter to Abelard responding to his account of their relationship: Duo autem, fateora tibi specialiter inerant quibus feminarum quarumlibet animos statim allicere poteras, dictandi videlicet et cantandi gratia [...] pleraque amatorio metro uel rithmo composita reliquisti carmina, que pre nimia suavitate tam dictaminis quam cantus sepius frequentata, tuum in ore omnium nomen incessanter tenebant,ut lillitteratos etiam melodie dulcedo tui non sineret immemores esse. You had besides, I admit, two special gifts with which you could at once win the heart of any woman – the gifts of composing verse and song. […] You have left many songs composed in amatory verse and rhyme. Because of the very great sweetness of their words as much as of their tune, they have been repeated often and have kept your name continually on the lips of everyone. (Luscombe and Radice, 2013, pp. 136–137) Several scholars, including Patrick Walsh (1993, pp. xv–xvi and 192– 193) and David Wulstan (2003, pp. 34–48), have argued for identifying some of the Latin love poems in the thirteenth-century Carmina Burana collection as Abelard’s compositions, so it may be that some of his love lyrics circulated in France into the fourteenth century. Abelard’s skills in composing religious lyric poetry and music were well known in the following centuries. Heloise herself requested that Abelard put his skills in lyric poetry to use again during the later period of their lives to compose liturgical lyrics for the nuns of Paraclete Abbey: Though Heloise’s letter does not survive, Abelard repeated passages from her letter in his prefaces to the hymns that he sent her.17 In addition, six of Abelard’s lament lyrics based on Bible texts survive with notation (Huglo, 1979, pp. 356–361). Though Heloise does not refer in this letter collection to poems she composed, there is a Latin lyric in the Carmina Burana collection that may be by Heloise herself, a lament in a woman’s voice that reflects Heloise’s experience of giving birth outside of marriage (Ruys, 2003, pp. 91–99). The exchange of letters and poems between the lover and lady in the Voir Dit includes several kinds of echoes of the letters exchanged by Abelard and Heloise, despite important differences. To begin with, the Voir Dit depicts a love relationship between an older man who is an

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established poet and composer and a young woman who becomes his student, though the situation in Machaut’s text is the reverse of the earlier relationship of Abelard and Heloise, in that it is the young woman in the Voir Dit who seeks out the relationship with the man, while Abelard sought out the original relationship with Heloise. Nevertheless, as Heloise first writes to Abelard in their exchange to offer consolation in response to his account of his suffering, the woman in the Voir Dit sends her first communication to the narrator at a time when he has suffered and feels rejected, as he explains in his introduction: Car iestoie descongneus Et de ioie despourveus, Mais doucement sui confortez Par elle . et fu mes confors tels For I was unappreciated And deprived of joy, But was sweetly comforted By her, and the following was my consolation. (VD, ll. 43–46) He later describes the “doleurs et les grans meschies” (“sorrows and great misfortunes”) (VD, l. 864) he suffered. The messenger who brings the lady’s rondel explains she has learned of the narrator’s suffering (VD, ll. 143–145) and wishes she could travel to console him personally, but must send her rondel instead (VD, ll. 169–180). In addition, the messenger’s description of the lady as surpassing all other women in intelligence (VD, ll. 117–118) echoes Abelard’s description of Heloise’s reputation as supreme among women in learning, which led him to seek her out (Luscombe and Radice, 2013, pp. 24–25). There are also parallels in the ways both sets of letter writers use forms of address that explore the multiple roles the writers play in their relationships. In her first letter to Abelard, Heloise begins, “Domino svo immo patri, conivgi svo immo fratri; ancilla sva immo filia, ipsivs vxor immo soror; Abaelardo Heloysa” (“To her lord or rather her father, husband or rather brother; from his handmaid or rather his daughter, wife or rather sister; to Abelard from Heloise”) (Luscombe and Radice, 2013, pp. 122–123). In his response, Abelard avoids the implications of hierarchy and intimacy, beginning, “Heloyse dilectissime sorori sve in Christo Abaelardus frater eivs in ipso” (“To Heloise, his dearly beloved sister in Christ, from Abelard her brother in him”) (Luscombe and Radice, 2013, pp. 142–143). Though Heloise’s addresses assert her unique relationship to Abelard, Abelard’s addresses stress their relationship to God. To Heloise’s “Vnico svo post Christum vnica sva in Christo” (“To her one and only after Christ, she who is his alone in Christ”) (Luscombe and Radice, 2013, pp. 158–159), Abelard responds, “Sponse Christi servus

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The Multilevel Polyphony of Machaut 49 eivsdem” (“To the bride of Christ from Christ’s servant”) (Luscombe and Radice, 2013, pp. 178–179). Heloise nonetheless adheres to the depiction of their relationship as unique: She begins Letter 6 “Svo specialiter sva singulariter” (“To him who is hers especially from her who is his uniquely”) (Luscombe and Radice, 2013, pp. 218–219). The correspondents in the Voir Dit likewise explore the meaning of their relationship through complex forms of address that borrow from different discourses as they work through the positions of student and teacher, fellow poets, and lovers. The language moves between hierarchical terms and terms of greater intimacy or equality, reflecting the issues in courtly discourse about love discussed by earlier women poets, such as the Comtessa de Dia, who used “amics” (“friend”) to address the beloved, rather than terms that suggest a power hierarchy.18 The lady in the Voir Dit begins her first letter “Treschiers sires et vrais amis” (“Most dear lord and true friend”) (Letter 1), while the lover begins his response, “Ma treschiere et souvereinne dame” (“My most dear and sovereign lady”) (Letter 2). Though his first letter describes her in terms of sovereignty, he ends the letter with the request that she not use “sir” in addressing him: ie vous suppli quo se iamais vous me escrisiez aucune chose / que vous ne mapellez signeur . quar qui de son serf fait son signeur / ses annemis monteplie . Et par dieu cest trop plus biaus noms damy ou damie . Quar quant signourie saute en place amour se fuit I beg that if ever you write me you do not call me sir, for whoever makes a lord from his slave multiplies his enemies. And by God the title “darling” or “friend” is a much more beautiful name, for when lordship leaps ahead love takes flight. (Letter 2) As Root points out (1997, p. 227, n. 17), this argument for preferring the title of friend might echo Abelard’s account in his first letter that Heloise preferred the name of friend to that of wife (“amicam dici quam uxorem”) (Luscombe and Radice, 2013, pp. 42–43), yet Abelard also calls Heloise his “amicam” earlier in his account (Luscombe and Radice, 2013, pp. 34–35). Nevertheless, the lover’s explicit commentary on forms of address does not resolve the issue of how to define their relationship. Though they sign their letters with “amy” or “amie” (“friend”), the lady and lover both use forms of address that might appear to conflict, but reveal different aspects of their relationship. In the address of her second letter, the lady removes hierarchical language: “Tres chiers et dous amis” (“Very dear and sweet darling” [or friend]) (Letter 3). In the same letter, however, she asks the lover to treat her as he would someone with a different kind of intimacy: “vostre suer et a vostre compaigne et amie” (“your sister, your companion and friend”) (Letter 3). In later letters, she begins using more intimate language,

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calling the lover “Mes tresdous cuers et ma tresdouce amour”) (“My very sweet heart and my very sweet love”) (Letter 9), and he responds similarly: “Mon tresdous cuer et ma tresdouce amour” (Letter 15). The lover’s addresses then also complicate this depiction of intimacy by adding his own references to the lady as his sister: “Mon tresdous cuer et ma treschiere suer . et ma tresdouce amour” (“My very sweet heart and my very dear sister and my very sweet love” (Letter 21, as in Letters 35, 37, and 41). She responds with an echo of her earlier combination of apparently different roles for him in Letter 3: “Mon dous cuer . frere . compains . et vrais amis” (“My sweet heart, brother, companion, and true friend”) (Letter 28). The lover sometimes returns to discourse that suggests the lady’s sovereignty, despite his instructions to her or his concerns about her faithfulness: “Mon tresdous cuer ma douce amour et ma souvereinne dame” (“My very sweet heart, my sweet love, and my sovereign lady”) (Letter 31, as in Letters 33, 42). The lady continues to emphasise intimacy with the equality of friendship: “Mon tresdous cuer . ma tresdouce amour . et mon treschier amy” (Letters 38, as in Letters 29, 32, 34, and 43). While the lover combines the address of sister and lady in Letter 45, the lady’s last letter returns to the discourse of intimacy: “Mon tresdous cuer . ma tresdouce vraie et loial amour” (“My very sweet heart, my very sweet true and loyal love”) (Letter 46). As a result, the different forms of address suggest a multiplicity of voices that come into play – a kind of polyphony – in the dialogue between the lovers as they put different discourse traditions into conversation to define their relationship. Another possible echo of the letters of Abelard and Heloise in the Voir Dit comes in the ballade the lady composes after receiving the musical setting for the pair of ballades by Machaut and Paien. The lady’s ballade includes the line “Je sui de li en tous lieus honnouree” (“Because of him I’m honored everywhere”) (VD, l. 6572), which parallels Heloise’s description of Abelard’s love songs about her: “Et cum horum pars maxima carminum nostros decantaret amores, multis me regionibus obreui temporea nuntiauit” (“And as most of these songs told of our love, they soon made me widely known”) (Luscombe and Radice, 2013, pp. 136– 137). Heloise does not indicate, however, that she also composed songs. While the parallels between the Voir Dit and the letters attributed to Abelard and Heloise are significant, there are also parallels between the Voir Dit and the anonymous Latin love letters between a male scholar and his younger female student that some scholars have argued might have been written by Abelard and Heloise early in their relationship.19 The Epistolae Duorum Amantium survive only in a 1471 manuscript copy that is often incomplete: No other copies of these letters have been identified, so it does not appear that the letters were well known during the fifteenth century or earlier. Debate about these letters extends to whether they represent correspondence by historical individuals or might be the result of a rhetorical exercise: The monk at the abbey of Clairvaux

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The Multilevel Polyphony of Machaut 51 who made this copy includes them in a collection of letters he presents as models for letter writing, so he sometimes records only the salutations and closings. At the same time, the scholarship, eloquence, and ethical concerns expressed in the letters echo what we know of Abelard and Heloise from their other writings, so some medieval readers may have made the association, if copies were known.20 If the letters are not by Heloise and Abelard, the collection still suggests a model for correspondence between a medieval man and woman that provides an opportunity for learning, eloquence, and expression of different perspectives on issues such as love and truth. Peter von Moos suggests several similarities between the Epistolae Duorum Amantium and the Voir Dit, both of which he reads as fictional collections of letters (2003, p. 7, 8 n. 26, and 35; 2008, p. 34 n. 23, 36, 42, and 44). Some of the parallels may reflect shared traditions of discourse, but the parallels are suggestive nonetheless. For example, the man in the Epistolae describes the woman as “clarissima stella mea” (“my brightest star”) (Letter 4, as in Letters 6 and 20).21 He also describes her in terms of jewels and gold: “Preciosissime gemme sue, suo naturali splendore semper radiant aureum eius purissimum: letissimis amplexibus eadem gemmam circumdare et decenter ornare” (“To his most precious jewel, ever radiant with its natural splendor, her purest gold: may he surround and fittingly set that same jewel in a joyful embrace”) (Letter 10, with echoes in Letters 22 and 103). Likewise, the narrator of the Voir Dit describes his lady in terms of precious jewels and gold, as well as a star: Cest lescharboucle qui reluist Et esclarcist loscure nuit Cest en or li fins dyamans Qui donne grace a tous amans Cest li saphirs, c’est li esmaus Qui damours puet garir les maus Cest droitement la tresmontainne Qui cuers au port de joye mainne Cest lesmeraude qui resioie Tous tristes cuers et met en ioie. Cest li fins rubis doriant Qui garist tous mauls en riant. She’s the carbuncle who illumines And brightens the dark night. She’s the pure diamond set in gold Who bestows favor on every lover. She’s the sapphire, she’s the enamel Who can assuage the ills of love; She is rightly the polar star

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Rosemarie McGerr Who guides hearts to the harbor of joy. She’s the emerald who brightens the spirits Of every sad heart, brings them happiness. She’s the pure ruby of the east Who with her smile heals every ailment. (VD, ll. 119–130)

The man in the Epistolae also describes the woman as someone who provides comfort and healing: For example, “lassate mentis unico solamini” (“only solace of a weary mind”) (Letter 2), “in omni egritudine unico remedio suo” (“his only remedy in every affliction”) (Letter 31), and “Summo lassorum animorum solamini” (“To the greatest comfort of weary spirits”) (Letter 105). There are also parallels in the Epistolae duorum amantium to the variations in address that explore different aspects of, but also different perspectives on, the lovers’ relationship in the Voir Dit. Though the man in the Epistolae sometimes addresses his beloved as his “domina” (“lady”) (Letters 6, 8, 36, 61, 72, 87, and 108), he also calls her “Cordi suo” (“his heart”) (Letter 15), “Anime” (“soul”) (Letters 24, 47, and 51), “Amate” (“one loved”) (Letter 42), “Dilectissime sue” (“his most beloved”) (Letters 59, 63, and 64), and “dulcissima” (“sweetest”) (Letters 30, 31, 67 and 68), as well as “Amice nobili ac multum amabili” (“noble and very lovable friend”) (Letter 40). For her part, the woman addresses the man as “Amori suo precordiali” (“her heart’s love”) (Letter 1), “dilecto” (“beloved”) (Letters 7 and 21), and “Thesauro suo incomparabili” (“her incomparable treasure”) (Letter 25); but she also addresses him in terms that stress friendship, equality, and reciprocity: She describes herself as “eius amica” (“his friend”) (Letter 57), calls him “Amico” (“friend”) (Letter 58), and also uses paired addresses such as “Par pari” (“equal to equal”) (Letter 18), “Amans amanti” (“lover to lover”) (Letter 48), “Dilecta dilecto” (“beloved to beloved”) (Letter 62), and “Fidelis fideli” (“Faithful to faithful”) (Letter 100). In Letter 36, the man writes that he must no longer call the woman “dulcis” (“sweet”) or “cara” (“dear”), but “domina” (“lady”) because she has become distant and superior to him; yet in other letters the man begins to use forms of address suggesting reciprocity that echo hers: “Anime sue, anima eius” (“To his soul, her soul”) (Letter 65) and “Dulcissime dulcissimus” (“To his sweetest, her sweetest”) (Letter 68). The letters of the man and woman therefore offer a dialogue between voices that reflect multiple roles in their relationship. Perhaps the most significant parallel between the Epistolae duorum amantium and the Voir Dit is the inclusion of lyric poems by both the man and woman in the correspondence. Beginning in Letter 20, the man includes a poem that depicts his beloved as the star who will guide him from the darkness of grief into light. The letters then include an explicit exchange of poems between the man and woman: Letter 38a presents a poem by the man to which the woman responds with her poem in the

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The Multilevel Polyphony of Machaut 53 same style in Letter 38b and the man responds to her with his poem continuing the style in Letter 38c. The woman sends her own lyric poems in Letters 66, 69, and 73, addressing her beloved. These are not isolated compositions, but part of the dialogue between the lovers. For example, the poem in Letter 69 begins, “Littera vade meas et amico ferte querelas” (“Go, letter, and take my complaints to a friend”). To the woman’s poem in Letter 73, the man responds in his next letter: “Nunc demum intellgo dulcissima quod ex toto corde et ex tota anima mea es” (“Now at last I understand, sweetest, that you are mine with all your heart and all your soul”) (Letter 74). She sends another poem in Letter 82, and he sends poems addressed to her in Letters 87, 108, 111, and 113. This last poem becomes the final voice of the collection, but it is not clear if this reflects the scribe’s choice or the choice of the authors. These poems explore expressions of love by means of yet another discourse, that of Latin lyric, in different metrical forms and genres such as lament and expressions of praise (Mews, pp. 111–113; Newman, 2016, p. 46). Though the poems, as well as the prose parts of the letters, often borrow language from the Song of Songs and the woman’s poem in Letter 66 refers to the singing of the Muses, the letters contain no references to performance of the lyric poems. Nevertheless, the poems add to the forms of dialogue in the letters and provide an interesting parallel with the exchanges of poems in the Voir Dit.

The Voir Dit and the Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau It is therefore perhaps not coincidental that, as we have noted, scholars have begun to associate both the letters of Abelard and Heloise and the Voir Dit with the epistolary novel. Though associating the Voir Dit with the epistolary novel may not seem to have such clear evidence, JeanJacques Rousseau may have made an association between the letters of Heloise and Abelard and the letters of the lovers in the Voir Dit while composing his epistolary novel, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse. Rousseau’s novel was originally entitled Lettres de deux amans, habitans d’une petite ville au pied des Alpes. Recueillies et publiées par J. J. Rousseau, which encouraged readers to interpret the letters as historical documents, but Rousseau added the reference to Heloise to the title, and the novel text also gives clues about its inspiration in the medieval letter collection: Julie’s lover and tutor Saint-Preux refers in Letter XXIV to Julie having read the letters of Abelard and Heloise and compares their affair to that of the medieval lovers.22 The Latin letters of Abelard and Heloise had appeared in French translation, so Rousseau’s readers could access them easily (Bueler, 2001, p. 280; Sheriff, 2008, pp. 201–202). Although Rousseau’s Confessions indicates he began work on the novel in 1756 and describes the origins of the novel in his personal passion for a woman, his accounts of his methods of literary composition offer fewer details about influences and borrowings from other authors than his discussions

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of his musical compositions (Bueler, 2001, p. 279). As scholars such as Peggy Kamuf have shown, Rousseau’s novel engages with the letters of Abelard and Heloise in significant ways, especially in the representation of feminine desire and its relationship to the legitimacy of social orders governed by men (Kamuf, 1987, pp. 97–122). Nevertheless, Rousseau’s work on additional medieval sources may have given him inspiration not yet considered by literary scholars. Specifically, there may be more evidence for a link between the Voir Dit and Rousseau’s novel than modern readers have understood, for Rousseau had been studying medieval manuscripts containing Machaut’s works since the 1740s in order to prepare his articles on different aspects of music theory, history, and performance for Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie published in 1749 (Boynton, 2011, p. 116). Rousseau continued work on manuscripts of Machaut’s works during his composition of the Dictionnaire de musique, which he published in several editions in the 1760s. In this work, Rousseau discusses Machaut’s use of quotations from lyrics by Thibaut de Champagne in motets, which reveals Rousseau’s knowledge of Machaut’s polyphonic works; Rousseau also refers to medieval manuscripts containing Machaut’s songs in two additional passages, under “mesure” and “valeur des notes” (Dauphin, 2008, p. 180, 429, and 744; Boogaart, 2001, pp. 1–2). As Jacques Boogaart and Susan Boynton have argued, since Rousseau refers to other manuscripts in the French royal library, the manuscripts of Machaut’s works that Rousseau consulted most likely would have included ones in the royal collection, two of which contain the Voir Dit (Boogaart, 1 n. 1; Boynton, 2011, 116).23 With an interest in Machaut’s polyphonic works, Rousseau would have found it imperative to study the lyric poems included in the Voir Dit, which represent some of Machaut’s most important polyphonic lyrics. The Voir Dit’s use of exchanged letters may well have reminded Rousseau of the more famous letters of Abelard and Heloise and provided a model for a “translation” of an epistolary account of a famous love story into more modern terms. The Voir Dit’s discussion of composing works of art based on experience of love may also have provided a model for Rousseau’s discussion of emotional authenticity in his own novel. The narrator-lover of the Voir Dit argues, “ie ne say ne ne weil faire de sentement dautrui . fors seulement dou mien et dou vostre . Pour ce que qui de sentement ne fait . son dit et son chant contrefait” (“I cannot nor would wish to make my theme any feelings other than yours and mine, for whoever does not compose from his own feelings produces counterfeit work”) (Letter 8). Rousseau’s description of composing Julie likewise argues that the work reflects his own experience of love. For example, in the Confessions (Book 9), he explains, Le retour du printemps avait redoublé mon tendre délire, et dans mes érotiques transports j’avais composé pour les dernières parties de la

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The Multilevel Polyphony of Machaut 55 Julie plusieurs lettres qui se sentent du ravissement dans lequel je les écrivis […] Quiconque en lisant ces deux lettres ne sent pas amollir et fondre son cœur dans l’attendrissement qui me les dicta, doit fermer le livre: il n’est pas fait pour juger des choses de sentiment. The return of Spring had redoubled my tender delirium, and in my amorous transports I had composed several letters for the last Parts of Julie which feel the effect of the rapture in which I wrote them […] Anyone who reads these two letters and does not feel his heart soften and melt in the emotion that dictated them to me, ought to close the book; he is not fit to judge about matters of feeling.24 The letters in Rousseau’s novel “document” the voices of both lovers, as well as friends and family, as they struggle with the social restrictions on expressing their true feelings. As Stewart and Vaché explain, “Rousseau never forgets that the essence of correspondence is exchange” of the characters’ responses to each other’s ideas and manners of expressing their experiences (Stewart and Vaché, 1997, pp. xix–xx, emphasis original). Machaut’s polyphonic songs, with their interweaving of multiple voices into new forms, clearly impressed Rousseau, a musician as well as scholar, philosopher, and author of literary narratives. As Rousseau studied the manuscripts of Machaut’s works, the Voir Dit offered a model for transforming the love story Rousseau found in the letters of Abelard and Heloise into an epistolary novel that reflects his own ideal of presenting different perspectives on love through the voices of contemporary characters expressed through their letters. Whereas Abelard succeeds in limiting Heloise’s expressions of her passionate love for him, forcing her to focus on their professional roles, the lady in the Voir Dit persists in using her songs, as well as her letters and messengers, to express her love for the narrator-lover, despite the doubts others raise about her faithfulness, and Julie’s letters express her true feelings for Saint-Preux, despite the social and moral limitations that pressure her to remain silent.

The Voir Dit and Bakhtin’s Concept of Narrative Polyphony Through the Voir Dit’s integration of lyric poems, polyphonic music, and prose letters into a poetic narrative, but even more because it presents voices that remain in dialogue for readers to assess independently, Guillaume de Machaut achieves in this work the heteroglossia that Bakhtin describes as polyphonic in his theory of the novel. Bakhtin argues that the novel’s narrative poetics of dialogism involves “a plurality of unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 6). Although he describes Dostoevsky as the “creator of the polyphonic novel” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 7), Bakhtin recognises musical polyphony as the “graphic metaphor” for the novel’s narrative poetics (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 22), which suggests he understood

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the importance of composers like Machaut for developing the artistic representation of dialogic interaction of voices as a model for narrative polyphony. Despite Bakhtin’s focus on the development of the novel in later periods, he also discusses medieval forms of dialogism and their relationship to carnivalistic discourse: He specifically refers to the dit along with the debate and dialogue as medieval forms of dialogic and carnivalistic literature that led to the “novelistic literature of the Middle Ages” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 136). Elsewhere, Bakhtin argues that “the most profound and perfected models of this genre [the chivalric romance], such as Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, are already authentic novels” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 377). The multilevel polyphony of Machaut’s Voir Dit challenges readers even more explictly than other medieval narratives to listen for the different voices at play in the work and appreciate the different perspectives they represent as we contemplate issues such as artistic representation of love and truth. Rousseau’s admiration for Machaut’s polyphonic music suggests that Rousseau also found the Voir Dit a potential model for a polyvocal account of differing perspectives on the challenges of expressing love and truth within social and artistic restrictions. As a result of Machaut’s integration of musical polyphony, lyric dialogue, and letter exchange in the narrative depiction of differing voices in the Voir Dit, this work stands as a pivotal achievement that heralds the issues and forms of polyphony associated with the “modern” in later times.

Notes 1 Citations come from Guillaume de Machaut, Le Livre dou Voir Dit (The Book of the True Poem), edited by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and translated by R. Barton Palmer (1998). 2 These lyric forms appear extensively in Occitan, Arabic, and Hebrew beginning in the twelfth century and in other European languages in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. See, for example, Meneghetti (1999, pp. 181–196) and Cayley (2006, pp. 12–51). 3 For the first collection, see Luscombe and Radice 2013. For the anonymous letters, see Könsgen 1974, Chiavaroli and Mews 2008, and Newman 2016. 4 For example, Root argues that the Voir Dit has “the form of an epistolary novel” (1997, p. 120); and Newman calls the Voir Dit a “precursor to the epistolary novel” (2016, p. 51). Kany describes the Voir Dit as “a new novelistic genre” and calls the work an “epistolary romance” that is “startling in its modernity” (1937, pp. 20–21). Though Kany makes one reference to the work’s use of tenso as “poetic correspondence” (1937, p. 20), he focuses on the letters. 5 Critics continue to debate how much the work reflects historical events; the narrative repeatedly offers different perspectives on what constitutes truth at the same time that it suggests historical accuracy by offering dates and places for events, so the work itself complicates the issue. The rubrics call the narrator “lamant” (“the lover”), yet several illustrations identify him as

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6 7 8 9

10

11

12

13

14 15

16

17

“Guillaume”, as does an anagram poem the lady composes (VD, ll. 90439050); the rubrics call the young woman “la dame” (“the lady”), while the narrator-lover calls her “Toute Belle” (e.g., VD, l. 12, 664 and 1561), but also identifies her as “Peronne” in an anagram the lover explains he has inscribed in a rondel he has set to music (VD, ll. 6336-6343 and Letter 31). At the end of the work (VD, ll. 9071-9081), the narrator instructs readers how to discover both his name and the name of his beloved in a final anagram. On this double ballade, see Leach 2009, pp. 91–112; Haines 2012, pp. 279– 294; and Plumley 2013, pp. 367–374. See, for example, Bruckner et al. 2000 and Doss-Quinby et al. 2001 (with the exchange by Blanche and Thibaut on pp. 109–111). See Rosenberg et al. (1998, pp. 96–99) and Bruckner et al. (2000, pp. 3–6). Quotations taken from Rosenberg’s edition. Rosenberg and Bruckner use “covinens”, as does Angelica Rieger (1991, p. 593). Rieger labels “partimens” a misreading (1991, pp. 20–21). Nevertheless, “partimens” appears with source citations in Bartsch (1868, col. 68) and in later editions, including Goldin (1973, p. 184) and Bogin (1980, pp. 84–87). The unique copy of this poem appears in Chansonnier H (Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. Lat. 3207). No musical notation for this poem appears in the manuscript. See Rieger (1991, pp. 242–254) and Bruckner et al. (2000, pp. 62–65). Labbie (1995, pp. 13–26) and Poe (2013, pp. 165–182) offer additional arguments for how Lombarda’s poem responds to Bernart’s and other fin’amors lyrics. The narrator also presents the rondeaux at ll. 3067–3077 and 3088–3098 as a response pair, but does not specifically depict the matching pairs of rondeaux at ll. 3035–3050 and 3051–3066 as poems the lovers exchanged, despite the labels in the manuscripts. See Leech-Wilkinson (1993, pp. 53–57) and Plumley (2012, pp. 170–182). Sarah Jane Williams discusses the two-voice setting of the rondel in manuscript E and variations in the surviving musical scores for Machaut’s other lyrics (1968, p. 253). The two-voice setting of the lyric thus appears in the manuscript copy of the Voir Dit in which the musical settings appear during the text of the work, rather than in a separate section: see McGrady (2012, pp. 130–138). Findley highlights the different perspectives the lady and narrator-lover express (2012, pp. 83–115). See also Boulton (1989, pp. 91–92). Though the Voir Dit does not give conclusive evidence for the historical identification of Peronne, Findley (2012, pp. 85–86) addresses the issue of women as lyric poets during Machaut’s time. See also Higgins (1991, pp. 145–200). On the circulation of the letters that name Abelard and Heloise in the fourteenth century, see Luscombe and Radice, 2013, pp. xxxviii–civ. Ewald Könsgen (1974, pp. xxviii–xxxi) details his unsuccessful search for the source of the unique manuscript copy of Latin letters between an unnamed but highly educated and rhetorically sophisticated man and woman that was made by Jean de La Véprie, a fifteenth-century monk at Clairvaux. Ziolkowski (2008, pp. 34–70) discusses the 133 hymns attributed to Abelard and their circulation.

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18 Rieger (1991, pp. 39–44) discusses the use of “amics” (friend) by women lyric poets to describe the beloved in the Occitan tradition. 19 For an analysis of the debate about attribution of these letters to Abelard and Heloise, see Ziolkowski 2004, pp. 169–200; and Newman, 2016, pp. ix–xvii. 20 On evidence for knowledge about the relationship of Abelard and Heloise in medieval Europe, see Dronke 1976. 21 Quotations from the Epistolae duorum amantium come from The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard, which includes the Latin text edited by Ewald Kõnsgen and English translation by Neville Chiavaroli and Constant J. Mews 2008. 22 On the title of the novel, see Stewart and Vaché, 1997, pp. xii–xiii. On the references to Abelard and Heloise within the novel, see Stewart and Vaché, 1997, p. xv; and Sheriff, 2008, pp. 232–233. 23 On the Voir Dit manuscripts in the royal collection, see Leech-Wilkinson and Palmer 1998, pp. xciv–xcv; and McGrady, 2012, pp. 79–87. 24 Quotations taken from Rousseau, Les Confessions, 2, p. 162; and The Confessions and Correspondence, p. 368.

Works Cited Bakhtin, M., Emerson, C., and Holquist, M., eds. and trans. (1981). Discourse in the Novel. In The Dialogic Imagination. Fours Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 259–422. Bakhtin, M. and Emerson, C., ed. and trans. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bartsch, K. (1868). Chrestomatie provençale: accompagnée d’une grammaire et d’un glossaire. Second edition. Elberfeld: R.L. Friderichs. Bogin, M. (1980). The Women Troubadours. New York: W.W. Norton. Boogaart, J. (2001). Encompassing Past and Present: Quotations and Their Function in Machaut’s Motets. Early Music History, 20, pp. 1–86. Boulton, M. (1989). The Dialogical Imagination in the Middle Ages: The Example of Guillaume de Machaut’s Voir Dit. Allegorica, 10, pp. 85–94. Boynton, S. (2011). Silent Music: Medieval Song and the Construction of History in Eighteenth-Century Spain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bruckner, M.T., Shepard, L. and White, S., eds. (2000). Songs of the Women Troubadours. New York: Garland. Bueler, L.E. (2001). The Tested Woman Plot: Women’s Choices, Men’s Judgments, and the Shaping of Stories. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Cayley, E. (2006). Debate and Dialogue: Alain Chartier in his Cultural Context. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Chiavaroli, N., and Mews, C.J., trans. (2008). The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France. Second edition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dauphin, C., ed. (2008). Le dictionnaire de musique de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Bern: Peter Lang. Doss-Quinby, E., Aubrey, E., Grimbert, J.T., and Pfeffer, W., eds. (2001). Songs of the Women Trouvères. New Haven: Yale University Press. Dronke, P. (1976). Abelard and Heloise in Medieval Testimonies. Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press.

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The Multilevel Polyphony of Machaut 59 Findley, B.H. (2012). Poet Heroines in Medieval French Narrative: Gender and Fictions of Literary Creation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Goldin, F. (1973). Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouvères: An Anthology and a History. New York: Anchor Books. Haines, J. (2004). Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haines, J. (2012). Case Study: Guillaume de Machaut, Ballade 34, ‘Quant Theseus / Ne quier veoir.’ In: C. Lawson and R. Stowell, eds., The Cambridge History of Musical Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Higgins, P. (1991). Parisian Nobles, a Scottish Princess, and the Woman’s Voice in Late Medieval Song. Early Music History, 10, pp. 145–200. Huglo, M. (1979). Abélard, poète et musician. Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, 22, pp. 349–361. Kamuf, P. (1987). Fictions of Feminine Desire: Disclosures of Heloise. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Kany, C.E. (1937). The Beginnings of the Epistolary Novel in France, Italy, and Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press. Könsgen, E. (1974). Epistolae duorum amantium: Briefe Abaelards und Heloises? Leiden: Brill. Labbie, E.F. (1995). The Vacant Mirror in Lombarda’s Tenson. Romance Notes, 36, pp. 13–26. Leach, E.E. (2009). Machaut’s Peer, Thomas Paien. Plainsong and Medieval Music, 18(2), pp. 91–112. Leach, E.E. (2011). Guillaume de Machaut: Secretary, Poet, Musician. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Leech-Wilkinson, D. (1990). Machaut’s Mass: An Introduction. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Leech-Wilkinson, D. (1993). Le voir dit and La Messe de Nostre Dame: Aspects of genre and style in late works of Machaut. Plainsong and medieval music, 2(1), pp. 43–73. Luscombe, D., ed., and Radice, B., trans. (2013). The Letter Collection of Peter Abelard and Heloise. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Machaut, G. de, Palmer, R.B., trans., and Leech-Wilkinson, D., ed. (1998). Le Livre dou Voir Dit (The Book of the True Poem. New York: Garland. McGrady, D.L. (2012). Controlling Readers: Guillaume de Machaut and His Late Medieval Audience. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Meneghetti, M.L. (1999). Intertextuality and Dialogism in the Troubadours. In: S. Gaunt and S. Kay, eds. The Troubadours An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 181–196. Newman, B., trans. (2016). Making Love in the Twelfth Century: “Letters of Two Lovers” in Context. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Nichols, S.G. (2014). New Challenges for the New Medievalism. In: R.H. Bloch et al., eds. Rethinking the New Medievalism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 12–38. Peraino, J.A. (2011). Giving Voice to Love: Song and Self-Expression from the Troubadours to Guillaume de Machaut. London: Oxford University Press. Plumley, Y. (2003). The Marriage of Words and Music: Musique naturele and musique artificiele in Machaut’s Sans cuer, dolens (R4). In: E.E. Leach, ed. Machaut’s Music: New interpretations. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK, and Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, pp. 231–248.

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Plumley, Y. (2012). Self-Citation and Compositional Process in Guillaume de Machaut’s Lyrics with and without Music: The Case of ‘Dame, se vous n’avez aperceü” (Rondeau 13).’ In: D. McGrady and J. Bain, eds. A Companion to Guillaume de Machaut. Leiden: Brill, pp. 159–184. Plumley, Y. (2013). The Art of Grafted Song: Citation and Allusion in the Age of Machaut. New York: Oxford University Press. Poe, E.W. (2013). Lombarda’s Mirrors: Reflections in PC 288.1, as a Response to PC 54.1. In: D.E. O’Sullivan and L. Shepard, eds. Shaping Courtliness in Medieval France. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, pp. 165–182. Powell, M. (2000). Listening to Heloise at the Paraclete. In: B. Wheeler, ed. Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth-Century Woman. Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 255–286. Rieger, A. (1991). Trobairitz: Der Beitrag der Frau in der altokzitanischen höfischen Lyrik. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Robertson, A.W. (2002). Guillaume de Machaut and Reims: Context and Meaning in his Musical Works. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Root, J. (1997). “Space to speke”: The Confessional Subject in Medieval Literature. New York: Peter Lang. Rosenberg, S.N., Switten, M., and Le Vot, G., eds. (1998). Songs of the Troubadours and Trouveres: An Anthology of Poems and Melodies. New York: Garland. Rousseau, J.-J., Leloir, M., and Claretie, J., eds. (1889). Les Confessions. 2 vols. Paris: H. Launette. Rousseau, J.-J., Kelly, C., ed. and trans., Masters, R.D., and Stillman, P.G., eds. (1995). The Confessions and Correspondence, including the Letters to Malesherbes. Hanover and London: University Press of New England [for Dartmouth College]. Rousseau, J.-J., Stewart, P., and Vaché, J., trans. and eds. (1997). Julie, Or the New Heloise: Letters of Two Lovers Who Live in a Small Town at the Foot of the Alps. Hanover: University Press of New England. Ruys, J.F. (2003). Hearing medieval voices: Heloise and Carmina Burana 126. In: M. Stewart and D. Wulstan, eds. The Poetic and Musical Legacy of Heloise and Abelard: An Anthology of Essays by Various Authors. Ottawa: Institute of Medieval Music, pp. 91–99. Sankovitch, T. (1989). Lombarda’s Reluctant Mirror: Speculum of Another Poet. In: W.D. Paden, ed. The Voice of the Trobairitz: Perspectives on the Women Troubadours. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 183–193. Sheriff, M.D. (2008). Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and Deviant Women in Eighteenth-Century France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Von Moos, P. (2003). Die Epistolae duorum amantium und die säkulare Religion der Liebe. Methodenkritische Vorüberlegungen zu einem einmaligen Werk mittellateinischer Briefliteratur. Studi Medievali, 3rd ser. 44, pp. 1–115. Von Moos, P. (2008). Vom Nutzen der Philologie für den Umgang mit anonymen Liebesbriefen: Ein Nachwort zu den Epistolae duorum amantium. In: M. Schnyder, ed. Schrift und Liebe in der Kultur des Mittelalters. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 23–48. Walsh, P. (1993). The Love Songs from the Carmina Burana. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Williams, S.J. (1968). Vocal Scoring in the Chansons of Machaut. Journal of the American Musicological Society, 21(3), pp. 251–257.

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The Multilevel Polyphony of Machaut 61 Wulstan, D. (2003). Secular lyrics from Paris and the Paraclete. In: M. Stewart and D. Wulstan, eds. The Poetic and Musical Legacy of Heloise and Abelard: An Anthology of Essays by Various Authors. Ottawa: Institute of Medieval Music, pp. 34–48. Ziolkowski, J.M. (2004). Lost and Not Yet Found: Heloise, Abelard, and the Epistolae duorum amantium. Journal of Medieval Latin, 14, pp. 169–200. Ziolkowski, J.M., trans. (2008). Letters of Peter Abelard, Beyond the Personal. Washington: Catholic University of America.

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Part Two

Polyphony in Medieval Europe

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Cemeteries and Tombstones as Polyphonic Places in the French Medieval Quest of Lancelot Laurence Doucet

Death is very present in the story Le chevalier à la charrette, first told by the Champagne region poet, Chrétien de Troyes. The poem itself is bathed in mystery: The identity of the knight is not exactly mentioned, and moreover the charrette (“cart”) is a direct reference to death. This adventure was later on, during the thirteen century, re-written in prose: The first adventures and quests of Lancelot are detailed and the knight has to deal with several issues which are, on the whole, in relation to mysterious graves. This is the purpose of this chapter: Examine the different cemeteries in the Lancelot stories and the voices of the authors expressed by the epitaphs. Let us examine the poem and the following prose romance and study how the authors take into account both the narration of tombs and death in the two quoted opuses.1

Tombs as Social Places In the Middle Age, cemeteries used to be placed in the town centre, delimited by crosses or a wall. There was, in other words, a kind of frontier between the land of the dead and that of the living, as well as a place dedicated to prayer and meditation. But, as it also belonged to the life of the town, it was not materially separated from everyday life. The Dictionnaire des lieux et pays mythiques defines cemetery as, in the medieval reality, a place where dead people are buried. It is a hybrid place that deals with daily reality and the cult of the dead. Indeed, the editors of this dictionary speak about a “polyphonic reality”. There is, therefore, an alliance between the profane and the sacred (daily occupations and devotions to the dead) that characterises the medieval cemetery as a polyphonic border, according to the Bakhtinian formula. The world of the dead and the world of the living are contiguous and there is a belief in the possible exchanges between the two (Battistini et al., 2011, pp. 301–303). But it is not so obvious: Graves are correlated to the ancient cults as well as to the Christian faith. Besides, taken independently of religious popular beliefs, death can often be perceived as a way to access another unknown world. The cemetery is a closed place, unpleasant and often DOI: 10.4324/9781003129837-4

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difficult to access. Anne-Marie Cadot (1980, p. 35) underlines the anxiety of the night, of the death that the cemetery can cause, especially if it opens with a frightening vision of the manifestations of the “Other World”. The Christian religion has also seized these natural and ancestral fears. The cemetery in the Arthurian world is never a simple place; it belongs to ancient cults as well as Christian places. Cemeteries and graves are, in essence, polyphonic, but there are narrative aspects of the epitaphs that can be a supplementary way to consider this polyphony. Laurent Perrin (2004, p. 265) writes that “the notion of polyphony can be applied to several facts that can be handled on various levels and with different points of view with respect to the adopted theoretical options”.2 The notion, from its Bakhtinian origins, is here facing the questions of cemeteries, graves, and the nature of the epitaphs which are written on tombstones. But let us now examine the corpus and the adventures of Lancelot to better understand these “polyphonic places”. All the adventures of Lancelot often take place in cemeteries and are in relation to “the world of death” and even the crossing of a bridge formed by a giant sword (the bridge of the sword) is similar to a descent into Hell (a katabasis).

An Opening in the Afterlife: The Presence of Death in the Poem The Knight of the Cart plunges the reader into a world full of riddles, unspoken words, and dangers. From the first verses of the story, the violent abduction of Guinevere leads some of the Knights of the Round Table into an unknown country in which they are quickly joined by an anonymous knight who seems ready for adventure and passionately launches a search for “his” Queen. The thematic organisation is extremely well calculated and gives a rhythm to the story. Once the prologue has been completed, Daniel Poirion explains in his edition of the Chrétien de Troyes poems, two series of adventures are set up, respectively of seven and five trials (1994, pp. 1240–1241). It is during the seventh test of the first series that Lancelot arrives near a cemetery reserved for certain Arthurian heroes and discovers the tomb that is intended for him. Lancelot reaches a chapel in a very beautiful place. The knight enters to pray; when he leaves the chapel, he sees a very old priest. He asks what is hidden behind the walls and the hermit priest leads him to the cemetery: Et cil respont qu’il i avoit un cemetire; et cil li dist: « Menez m’i, se Dex vos aïst. - Volentiers, sire.3

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Cemeteries as Polyphonic Places 67 We can here notice that this place is not near a town or a village but in the forest and only a hermit priest is living there.

Epitaph Revealing the Future Lancelot, then, discovers tombs with rather strange epitaphs that already announce the death of certain knights: […] Lors l’en moinne. El cemetire aprés le moinne antre les tres plus beles tonbes qu’an poïst trover jusqu’a Donbes, ne de la jusqu’a Panpelune; et s’avoit letres sor chascune qui les nons de ces devisoient qui dedanz les tonbes girroient. Et il meïsmes tot a tire comança lors les nons a lire et trova: «Ci girra Gauvains, ci Looys, et ci Yvains. Aprés ces trois i a mainz liz, des nons as chevaliers esliz, des plus prisiez et des meillors et de cele terre et d’aillors.4 It is a surprise to discover that the epitaph is not speaking about the past but about the future: Ci girra is essential in these lines for it is a way to show the certainty of the event. Even though the graves are empty, the epitaph remains a prediction.

Lancelot Enters in the World of the Dead The knight then notices a tomb more beautiful than the others, “made of marble, which seems like a work of art, the most beautiful of all” (“de marbre, et sanble estre de l’ueve, sor totes les autres plus bele”, l. 1878); he speaks to the hermit, not well disposed to give an explanation, and who reminds him that the inscriptions are quite significant. He recommends that Lancelot abandons the idea of looking inside the tomb because it is so exceptional that the slab can only be lifted by seven men (“car set homes molt forz et granz”, l. 1898). An inscription is included: Et sachiez que c’est chose certe qu’au lever covandroit set homes plus forz que moi et vos ne somes. Et letres escrites i a

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Lancelot takes up the challenge of lifting such a heavy slab without any reflection and achieves it. The hermit finally gives up on finding out the name of the knight. It is, in fact, the only solution because Lancelot could not yet reveal it, but in the same dialogue, we can notice that the hermit is also enigmatic concerning the identity of the man who is able to open the tomb. We are in the presence of a form of enigma that does not reveal the identity of the knight concerned. Different voices are heard from ancient prophecies and future revelations: The hermit seems to be a smuggler, an interpreter of ancient knowledge. Sire, or ai grant envie Que je seüsse vostre non; Direiez le me vos? — Je, non, Fet li chevaliers, par ma foi. - Certes, fet il, ce poise moi; Mes se vos le me diseiez, Grant corteisie fereiez, Si porreiez avoir grant preu. Dom estes vos, et de quel leu? - Uns chevaliers sui, ce veez, Del rëaume de Logres nez: A tant an voldroie estre quites; Et vos, s’il vos plest, me redites An cele tonbe qui girra? - Sire, cil qui delivrera Toz ces qui sont pris a la trape El rëaume don nus n’eschape.6 The whole prophecy is then revealed: Lancelot comes into contact with the world of the dead and saves the kingdom of Gorre by his magic action but also discovers the position of his future burial site. Lancelot appears, in other words, as a psychopomp knight who manages to open a way of communication between the living and the dead.

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The Prose Narration In the prose novel, the narrator, while not forgetting the essential episode of the tomb in Chrétien de Troyes’s poem (Lancelot delivering the prisoners of the kingdom of Gorre), constantly seeks to give roots to Lancelot and relate his narrative to the story of the Grail and of Joseph of Arimathea. The graves that Lancelot will open repeatedly allow him to discover the remains of the first heroes of the Grail quest. These episodes echo and prepare the knight for his future trials. Lancelot sees his quest punctuated by hardships and difficult readings in front of more or less enigmatic tomb inscriptions, from which strange voices arise to tell him his origins. Lancelot is confronted with his lineage in the prose novel and the motif of the magical tombs is regularly encountered. The episodes echo each other in a repetitive pattern: • • •

•

Arrival in a cemetery, deep into the forest. Lancelot discovers tombs bearing the names of Knights of the Round Table. A tomb, in particular, is remarkable, either by its epitaph or by its inscription, which reveals to Lancelot his past or future in a veiled way. By raising it, the knight accesses secret information.

The Test of the Painful Guard The step of discovering the graves in the romance is somewhat different from the Knight’s version in the Charrette. In the romance, the hero does not reveal his name: He calls himself the White Knight (we find the reference to the equipment given by the Lady of the Lake for his knighting by King Arthur). Before the trial of the tombs, he has the surprise and joy of receiving the visit of a young lady. He recognises her for she is sent by the Lady of the Lake (Le Livre du Graal, TII, La Marche de Gaule, p. 326, §318). Finally, she predicts that the following day he will know both his own name and his father’s. This announcement is essential for Lancelot and sounds like a prophecy relayed by the envoy of the Lady of the Lake: The time has come for Lancelot to know his origins. And indeed, everything happens as she announced. After an extraordinary battle, Lancelot manages to defeat his adversaries and delivers the castle’s inhabitants; they, then, bring him to a cemetery surrounded by battlements. On most of those can be seen the heads of knights, with their helmets, just above the inscriptions: “Cigist cil, et cil; et véeés la sa teste” and on other tombs surmounted by empty battlements, one can read “si gerra cil” (Le Livre du Graal, TII, La Marche de Gaule, p. 337, §329).

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In the middle of this cemetery, a tomb surpasses all others by its work and its beauty; an inscription explains: “Ceste lame n’ert ja levée par main d’ome ne par esfors, se par celui non qui conquerra cest doulerous chastel et de celui est li nons escris ci desous”.7 A new test then awaits Lancelot: The opening of the grave. Despite its weight, he manages to lift it one foot above his head and discovers the inscription (Le Livre du Graal, TII, La Marche de Gaule, p. 339, §331): “Ci gerra Lanselos des lac, li fix al roi Ban de Benuyx”.8 The words and the situation are different from the Chevalier à la charrette: They come from two different imaginaries (one Celtic, the other Christian). But in both cases, the voices of secret authors or masked narrators are in dialogue with the voice of the poet.

The Holy Cemetery Lancelot underwent an exceptional ordeal by opening Galahad’s tomb in the Holy Cemetery. In the midst of several tombs, one is particularly noticeable: It is covered with a thick blade, surmounted by a magnificent monument. It is necessary, according to the hermit living in this place, to raise this gravestone to carry out the adventure. Lancelot succeeds and discovers the body of a knight in arms. Lancelot is confronted with the origins of the Grail, written on the grave, revealing not the future but the past: “Ci gist Galaad li haus roi de Gales, li fils de Joseph d’Arimathie”.9 Galahad, in this quote, is the first son of Joseph of Arimathea, first Christian king of Gorre. Lancelot has managed a first step: He has raised the stone. This episode sounds like an echo of the opening of the tomb to the Painful Guard (“Douloureuse Garde”); on the other hand, Lancelot comes out of it having learned that he is not the best knight in the world. Lancelot is helped throughout his life by messages on gravestones, including when he learns the future birth of his son: “ja ceste tombe ne sera pas levée devant que li pupars de qui li grans lyons istra y vendra, et cil levera volentiers et legierement, e cil grans lyons ert engendres des liepart en la bele fille le roi de la terre forraine”.10 He does not understand the meaning of the message but follows the indications of the villagers: He must raise the grave to save them. His future is revealed: He will have a son with the daughter of King Pelés.

Ban of Benoic’s Tomb In the prose Lancelot, the knight rides in the Perilous Forest when he is challenged by a dwarf; he tells him to move away because only the Good Knight is able to travel in the forest. Of course, Lancelot continues on his way and arrives in front of an old house, near a spring. In front of it, there is a tomb “de marbre vermeil qui estoit entre. II pierres. Et d’encoste la tombe avoit. II lyons, si gardoient la tombe en tel manière que bus n’i pooit avenir”.11

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Cemeteries as Polyphonic Places 71 The hermit tells Lancelot the story of his ancestor but reveals that he cannot be saved because of his love for the Queen. He will discover in Corbénic, inscribed on the marble tombs, the future birth of his child and his role in the quest for the Grail, a message he does not yet understand (Le Livre du Graal, TIII, La Seconde partie de la quête de Lancelot, p. 229, §209) and, near the fountain that boils, the story of his ancestor (Le Livre du Graal, TIII, La Seconde partie de la quête de Lancelot, pp. 514–515, §467–468). The inscriptions stand for predictions; however, the prose novel links Lancelot’s story to that of his ancestors and the Grail. This addition is done in a very interesting way through the stones and cemeteries and thus maintains the symbiosis between Lancelot and the underground world, unveiled in Chrétien de Troyes’s poem. Yet, at each opening of the tomb, Lancelot himself learns that he is moving away from the “celestial” ideal. This narrative line produces breaks guiding the reader throughout the genealogy of Lancelot, then related to the history of the Grail. However, the motif is exhausted in a certain way by removing some of the secret magic of the author’s poems. The inscription belongs to another form of writing, more in connection with writing of divine origin, which, like the voice of Simeon’s grave, guides the quest of the knight. The writing of the knight facing the inscription on the tomb also leaves no room for doubt: It is a prophetic inscription, close to the Celtic geis.

The Language and the Authors “The so-called polyphonic approaches seek to show that the meaning of utterances and discourses, far from simply expressing the thought of an empirically speaking subject, consists above all in staging a plurality of abstract enunciative voices” explains Laurent Perrin (2004, p. 268). Charles Bally’s distinction between a talking and a modal subject deals with a central aspect of this dissociation between actual enunciation and the alleged enunciation, a dissociation that we find today in various forms in certain linguistic approaches and in discourse analysis around the question of ethos. So we can now point out the issues of the different epitaphs: Genealogy is explained or future and identity are revealed. Epigraphy is, etymologically speaking, the science of what is written in order to communicate information to the widest possible audience and for the longest duration. It is a testimony that must persist over time and is therefore based on non-putrescible media; it uses very specific techniques that allow the text to be engraved in the support, although some inscriptions are in relief (Favreau, 1997, p. 50). On tombs, epitaphs can send a message of memory and honour the deceased. In the Arthurian Matter, as well as in ancient narratives, the tombs of some heroes even compete with each other by their handcrafted wonders. But the grave is also the place to address a challenge, to launch the spirit of revenge.

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To describe the inscription on the slide – the tombstone – discovered by Lancelot, Chrétien de Troyes speaks of “written letters” (Le Chevalier à la Charrette, l. 1905) which are in the field of epigraphy and could be translated by “engraved inscription”. We find this use in all cases of epigraphic inscriptions either on mysterious tombs or on any other support that may bear an inscription (chapel wall, Perilous Seat, stone). The future is used in all the predictions as well as a formula of exclusion. The secret lies in this episode where the reader is made to believe that he will finally gain some understanding of the mysteries surrounding the knight. Yet it is not so simple. The revelation of the name of Lancelot is constantly rejected or postponed and the inscription under the tomb remains enigmatic: One can only suppose that the author comes from the Other World. The tombs of the Knights of the Round Table are an invitation to a journey into the future; no one doubts that they will die but we learn that they will all be buried in this place, whatever their country of origin may be. The epitaphs serve as prediction and the opening of the heavy slab announces Lancelot’s destiny, who seems to want to ignore it – or does not understand it. Catalina Gîrbea (2007, pp. 296–297) remarks that the philosopher Michel Foucault considers cemeteries to be heterotopias; Foucault’s concept of heterotopy indeed designates different spaces relative to the rest of the world, other places, constituting discontinuities charged with meanings, which give them a form of autonomy. For the French philosopher, cemeteries and islands are examples of heterotopias. In the works of fiction, it has already been noticed that these inscriptions contributed to the progress of the story. Carine Giovenal (2011, p. 208) proposes to see in the discovery of this writing a way to advance the story. Beyond the plot of the narrative, these inscriptions are the mark of the ability of a particular hero, Lancelot and no one else, to understand the message and act accordingly. These magical traces are not only “the celebration of the sacredness of writing and the role of the writer, guarantor of memory and ethics” (Ibid.). These traces, engraved in the stone, whose origins are unknown, full of immemorial magical modes, show the presence of a powerful writer. The use of epigraphic practices that celebrate the past to announce the future then reverses habits and rather leads to seeing in these tombs an ancient form of megaliths, like those used by Merlin to announce an upcoming event. As the works evolve, the prose stages motifs of secret writing that move away from Chrétien de Troyes’s approach. The mystery lies less in the secrecy of the meaning of these writings than in the (unknown) writer who inscribed on the graves Lancelot’s family history. The importance of the discovery of his name seems almost to fade away from the terrible announcement that he is not the best knight in the world and the prediction of the arrival of the “celestial” knight, his lineage, is disturbing: In any case, his relationship and his love for Guinevere will suffer. Mikhail Bakhtin has analysed Dostoevsky’s novels and the literature he called “carnivalesque” – where the narrator’s voice often appears

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Cemeteries as Polyphonic Places 73 masked by his characters and, more abstractly, by specific ideological (folkloric) points of view. Merlin, Celtic gods, or God are potentially the signatories of these mysterious epitaphs. Their divine origin seems to be proven in the prose novel. Epigraphy is not related to magic; on the other hand, in Lancelot’s story, when mysterious inscriptions predict the future and reveal the past, the inscriptions are no longer part of memory duties and are an opening to another world, with, according to the texts, a more and more Christian interpretation.

Conclusion In the case of the “Lancelot Tombs”, the writing, always anonymous, is an indication of what will happen and how: It is a form of “textbook” for the elected knight who knows how to act. It is a predictive sentence that warns others not to be tempted by a selective test for celestial chivalry. In this case, one cannot doubt that the author is relaying a divine sentence: It is not his own voice. One can suppose that some of these inscriptions are the work of Merlin, who is used to sending prophetic messages on stone (remember the case of the Perilous Seat). The prophecy is written on tombs in verse or prose in two stages. First, the announcement of the names of the knights who will be buried with the sacred formula “ci girra”. The difference with a classical epitaph is the use of the future to designate the name of the deceased. On the slab that can only be raised by an elected knight, the poem presents an inscription first stated as a warning “never do this”. Then, it indicates who will be able to take up this challenge. The formula uses a simple grammatical structure that clearly predicts future actions. On the other hand, a mystery remains around this future which does not give precise temporal conditions: There is no precise deadline; one just waits for the arrival of the “best knight in the world” without indication of the day, month, or year. It is not a “historical” future (Schmitt, 2001, pp. 422–423) but an “indicator”, a writing close to a prophecy: The tomb will be opened but by the “right” person. It is an affirmation that allows, in a certain way, to hope, at least for the inhabitants of the kingdom of the Painful Guard, for better days. Chrétien’s poem contains some very sober and effective lines; there is no redoubling of the patterns of tombs and predictive epitaphs, as in the prose novel in which the engraved inscriptions are longer and threatening. It is important to point out that the different texts on the tombs are anonymous: In any way, we can be sure that the author of the story is not the one who invents or creates these texts. He is not the speaker (“locuteur” in French), and the one who is responsible for these writing takes different masks. The essence of Lancelot’s adventure is the confrontation of an unusual support (a slab), writings of the prophetic type and the very nature of the hero: This episode becomes a code to decipher. These empty tombs

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support mysterious writings that are not part of the usual epigraphy: They announce an event to come and not a memory of the past. Thus, when Lancelot enters the cemetery and discovers these extraordinary tombs, he is faced with a questioning and a power from another world. More than an epigraphic way, the epitaphs of the tombs reveal secrets concerning the genealogy of Lancelot: Written in the stones, they come from a mysterious voice relayed by an author. The magic can intervene on the tombs without relying on secret writing: The epitaphs on the funerary stones of Pallas and Camille are not coded but the echo of a magic practice is in the use of the blood of dragon or the presence of a flammable stone. There is thus again a commutative combination of the “magical writings” and “magic grave” (heavy slab) motifs. Chrétien de Troyes, explains Jonathan Fruoco (2015, p. 62), has changed the romance genre by producing literature written in Old French, rather than Latin, and which merges the voices from the Antiquity with those of the Matter of Britain and courtly love poetry. During the thirteen century, the authors of Lancelot adapt, assimilate, and reinterpret the story. They have both worked in order to agree with this new genre. They deal with polyvocality. The theme of death is treated according to the imaginary of tombs: Both places have an epitaph revealing some secrets and that may be considered as polyphonic places and voices.

Notes 1 All quotes come from the edited texts listed in the bibliography and I propose my own translations. 2 propose here my own translation. 3 Le chevalier à la charrette. ll. 1858–1902. “He replied that it was a cemetery; then he said, ‘Take me there and God help you! – willingly Lord’ ”. 4 Le chevalier à la charrette, ll. 1862–1876. “On each of them was written the name of the one who would rest there one day. He himself began to read the names one after the other and was able to decipher: here will lie Gawain, here Loholt, here Yvain”. 5 Ibid., ll. 1903-1915. “Yes, know well, it’s a certain thing, it would take seven men stronger than you and me. There is an inscription which says: ‘He who raises this slab by himself alone will release those who are held prisoners in this land from which no one can go out, even a clerk or gentle man, once he has entered it. No one has come back yet. Foreigners are imprisoned while the inhabitants of the country come and go, enter and leave at leisure’ ”. 6 Ibid., ll. 1924-1942. “Lord, I have a great desire to know your name; could you tell me?” “Me, no!” says the knight. “Really, I regret it, he does; but if you told me, it would be a great courtesy, and then you might find it advantageous. Where are you from, from which country?” “I am a knight, you see, and by birth I belong to the country of Logres. But you, please, repeat to me who will be lying in this tomb?” “–Lord, the one who will deliver all those who are trapped from which no one escapes”. 7 Le Livre du Graal, TII, La Marche de Gaule, p. 337, §329. “This blade will never be raised by the hand of man, nor by force, except by him who conquers this painful castle; and his name is written below”.

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Cemeteries as Polyphonic Places 75 8 “Here will lie Lancelot of the Lake, the son of king Ban of Benoic”. 9 Le Livre du Graal, TII, Galehaut, p. 1350, §417. “This is Galahad, the noble son of the King of Gales, the son of Joseph of Arimathea. Galaad is the youngest son of Joseph of Arimathea and first Christian King of Gales” (Le Livre du Graal, TI, Joseph d’Arimathie, pp. 542–543, §588–590). 10 Le Livre du Graal, TIII, La Seconde partie de la quête de Lancelot, p. 229, §209. “This blade will not be lifted in front of the leopard from which the great lion is born; this one shakes with a good heart and without difficulty, the great lion will be generated by the leopard and the beautiful daughter of the king of the Foraine land”. 11 Le Livre du Graal, TIII, La Seconde partie de la quête de Lancelot, p. 515, §468. “A vermeil marble tomb was placed between two stones. On either side of the blade stood two lions; they were the guardians of the grave so that no one could approach it”.

Works Cited Battistini, O., Poli, J.-D., and Ronzeaud, O., eds. (2011). Dictionnaire des lieux et pays mythiques. Paris: R. Laffont. Cadot, A.-M. (1980). Le motif de l’âtre périlleux: la christianisation du surnaturel dans quelques romans du XIIIe siècle. Marche romane, 30, pp. 27–36. Favreau, R. (1997). Epigraphie médiévale, (L’atelier du médiéviste 5). Turnhout: Brepols. Fruoco, J. (2015). Geoffrey Chaucer: polyphonie et modernité. Paris: Michel Houdiard Éditeur. Fruoco, J. (2020). Chaucer's Polyphony. The Modern in Chaucer's Poetry. BerlinKalamazoo: De Gruyter, Medieval Institute Publications. Giovenal, C. (2011). Gravé dans la pierre: la force contraignante de l’écrit dans quelques romans arthuriens. In: C. Gîrbea, ed. Temps et mémoire dans la littérature arthurienne: actes du Colloque International de la Branche Roumaine de la Société Internationale Arthurienne. Bucharest: Éditions Universitaires de Bucarest, pp. 207–216. Gîrbea, C. (2007). La couronne ou l ’auréole: royauté terrestre et chevalerie célestielle dans la Légende arthurienne (XIIe-XIIIe siècles). Turnhout: Brepols. Perrin, L. (2004). La notion de polyphonie en linguistique et dans le champ des sciences du langage. Questions de communication, 6, pp. 265–282. Poirion, D., ed. (1994). Chrétien de Troyes/ Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Schmitt, J.-C. (2001). Le corps, les rites, les rêves, le temps: essais d’anthropologie médiévale. Paris: Gallimard. Walter, P., ed. (2001). Le livre du Graal. I, Joseph d’Arimathie; Merlin; Les premiers faits du roi Arthur. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Walter, P., ed. (2003). Le Livre du Graal. II, Lancelot: de “La Marche de Gaule” à “La première partie de la quête de Lancelot”. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Walter, P., ed. (2009) Le Livre du Graal. III, Lancelot: la seconde partie de la quête de Lancelot. La Quête du saint Graal. La Mort du roi Arthur, Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

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Polyphonic Effects in the FixedForm Verse of Eustache Deschamps A Critical Practice Laura Kendrick

After the English translation of writings by Mikhail Bakhtin beginning in the late 1960s, literary scholars have associated polyphonic verbal effects with modernity and with the development of the prose novel (Bakhtin, 1968; 1981). I would argue that even lyric poetry – which might seem to exclude it – explored the possibilities of polyphony in the last quarter of the fourteenth century. My examples will be drawn from the lyrics of the most prolific poet of the time, Eustache Deschamps,1 who wrote consistently in and even helped to define2 the short, fixed forms of late fourteenth-century French verse (balade, chanson royale, rondeau, virelai, lai), all conventionally voiced by a first-person speaker. In the preceding generation, Deschamps’s mentor, Guillaume de Machaut, had used fixed-form verse to convey amorous discourse through a single, firstperson voice, usually that of the male poet-as-lover, for example in his collection of lyrics without musical notation known as La Louange des dames (Praise of Ladies). However, Machaut also indicated that some of his fixed-form lyrics should be performed polyphonically. He did this by writing multiple vocal parts, harmoniously superposing different voices singing in counterpoint the same words of the lyric set to different melodies. Like Philippe de Vitry, author of a treatise on the new art of polyphonic musical composition, the Ars nova,3 Machaut created polyphony by adding musical parts; he combined poetry with instrumental music and song in a newly complex fashion that emphasised parodic contrast in various ways.4 On the other hand, Deschamps’s experiments in creating polyphonic effects were entirely verbal. He provided no musical notation whatsoever for any of his verse but, instead, argued that fixedform poetry was itself, when read aloud, a kind of music involving vocal modulations.5 Just as Deschamps stressed the music implicit in the oral performance of words crafted into fixed-form lyrics, he experimented with, but without theorising, the possibilities of implicit kinds of polyphonic superposition of different “voices” within a single enunciation. After a brief inventory of types of polyphonic effects in Deschamps’s lyrics, I will provide, in the following pages, more detailed analysis of these effects in selected examples. DOI: 10.4324/9781003129837-5

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Polyphonic Effects in the Fixed-Form Verse 77 Deschamps created poetic polyphonies by using the first-person speaker of fixed-form courtly lyrics against the grain of generic expectations – not to express amorous sentiments, but rather, to express contemporary social problems and, by means of scholastic and rhetorical techniques, to introduce dissonant, dialogical, bi-, or even poly-vocal effects into the first-person enunciation typical of fixed-form lyrics. Many of his balades are devoted to critical arguments on moral issues framed as debates or dialogues between a first-person speaker and an externalised “other”, usually unnamed, whose questions and counterarguments the first-person speaker reports. Sometimes Deschamps’s reporting is entirely implicit and he devotes an entire lyric to the first-person monologue of an “other” who is of a different gender, social estate, or mentality from himself, yet whose speech the poet represents in verse, usually in the dialect of Paris and the surrounding region.6 Deschamps sometimes created bi- and polyvocal effects within the same enunciation by means of macaronic combinations of languages, speech registers, or regional dialects. Many lyrics rely heavily on irony, whereby what the first-person speaker says (flattery or praise, for example) and what the poet really means (criticism or blame) are opposed and superimposed in the same enunciation. In other lyrics, Deschamps created polyphonic effects through parody of a burlesque nature, often by re-using in vulgar or pejorative contexts recognizable bits of an authoritative, canonical text. Deschamps also greatly developed the polyphonic potential, as well as broadened the subject matter, of the “amorous” lyric genre of the pastourelle, which had once been a first-person report of an encounter between a gentleman riding in the country and a shepherdess whom he meets by chance and attempts to seduce, often citing her verbal responses. Deschamps replaced the limited pastourelle theme of sexual encounter with the larger one of social and ideological encounter in order to report the voices and views, the material concerns and difficulties, of contemporary shepherds and common working people of both sexes whom he claimed to have met by chance on his path while riding through the French countryside. Deschamps’s multiplication of voices to create pastoral discussions and debates in the form of the five-stanza chanson royale will be discussed after analysis of the different rhetorical ways Deschamps used to produce bi- or polyvocal effects in his shorter fixed-form lyrics, especially the three-stanza balade.

Contradictory Dialogue or Debate Between a First-Person Speaker and an Externalised “Other” Balade 100 in the section rubricated “Balades de moralitez” (“Moral balades”) in the manuscript of Deschamps’s collected works (Paris, BnF fr. 840) presents what would seem to be the poet’s doubts about the effectiveness of his lyric lessons. He begins the first stanza of the balade with an

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expression of astonishment and incomprehension – “Trop me merveil” – that, like “trop m’esbahie”, often announces his attempt to come to terms with a situation through composing a poem about it: Trop me merveil de rude entendement Qui oit et voit, et si ne veult entendre Ce que je di et pour son sauvement. — Vous estes sot qui le cuidez aprandre; Congnoissance l’a de tous fait le mendre; Il vous oit bien, mais il ne lui en chaut, Autant vaudroit batre son cul au chaut Ou enseignier a harper dix mulès Que de parler a lui ne bas ne hault: Chantez a l’asne, il vous fera des pès.7 (OcED, vol. 1, pp. 210-11, ll. 1-10) In this case, what astonishes the poet is the crude understanding of those who, although they hear and see, do not want to listen to what he is saying to them for their own good. Deschamps externalises and exemplifies his own internal debate over the problem of the reception of his moral balades by figuring it as an argument between two speakers, himself (the moralising poet) and an unnamed interlocutor (or alter ego) who addresses him respectfully as “vous”, but berates him for his folly in rustic terms, mustering a colourful series of proverbial-sounding expressions in support of this critical view, which ends with the refrain: “Sing to the ass [i.e., donkey] and he’ll fart for you”. The second stanza of the balade returns to a more “official” register as the moralising poet accuses his contradictor of speaking foolishly and repeats church doctrine on the necessity for people to pursue virtue, avoid vice, and seek heavenly rewards by using their God-given reason, which is lacking in brute beasts interested only in earthly matters: — Que dictes vous? Vous parlez folement; Ne doit pas homs a toutes vertus tendre Et eschiver les vices telement Que de nul mal ne se face reprandre? Esperit a de raison; si doit tendre Aux biens de Dieu; la regarder le fault; Beste bruthe sanz esperit default De ce regart, en terre est touz ses fès.8 (ll. 11-18) These justifications for trying to teach virtue via poetry are abruptly dismissed and denigrated by the contradictory voice as being well “snorted”9 but worthless preaching:

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Polyphonic Effects in the Fixed-Form Verse 79 — C’est bien romflé; vostre preschier n’y vault. Chantez à l’asnes, il vous fera des pès. (ll. 19-20)

Dialogic Monologue by an “Other” Different from the Poet in Gender, Social Status, or Culture In a manuscript clearly intended to present the collected works of a single poet, we tend to read fixed-form lyrics devoted entirely to monologues of persons different from the poet as being implicitly reported or ventriloquised. We suppose some combination of the voice of the poet with that of the alter ego or “other” he is imaginatively creating or recreating. For example, in balade 1144, with no preliminary introduction by the poet, we are treated to the cautionary monologue of a laundress on the unpredictability of the weather, which she exemplifies from her personal experience of hanging out washing on a day when the early morning sunshine seemed to promise fine drying weather, only to have her clean laundry spoiled by a sudden storm later in the day: Jamais nul jour n’auray fiance ou temps Ne ou souleil pour essuer buée Qui lieve main a raix trop esclairens, Car laidement en ay esté trompée, Si que je voy une obscure nuée Soudainement obscurer ce souleil Et tant plouvoir que toute fu gastée: L’en ne doit pas par tout jugier de l’œil.10 (OcED, vol. 6, pp. 72-73, ll. 1-8) In the second stanza, the laundress blames her “foolish look” (“foul regart”) at the promising rays of the morning sun for causing her to lose her good sense and to be blamed by her mistress for it: “En ce regart ay je perdu mon sens / Et de ce m’a ma maistresse blasmée / … / Par foul regart ay esté assotée” (ll. 9-15).11 The laundress’s mea culpa takes on the bivocality of parody here because of the echoes associated with “foul regart”, a term conventionally associated with moralising discourses warning against succumbing to temptation. Behind the laundress’s practical warning – not to be tricked by a foolish look at the rays of the morning sun into believing that the day will be fine – we hear these moralising discourses warning against being seduced by a foolish look, which leads to foolish belief, to seduction and sin.12 In the third stanza, the laundress points out that she is not the only one fooled by a look at the morning sun, for shepherds drive their animals to pasture thinking the day will be fine, only to return soaked and limping. Having learned her lesson the hard way (“trop m’en dueil”), she sums it up with the refrain of

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the balade: “L’en ne doit pas par tout jugier de l’oeil”. For good measure, this laundress reformulates her lesson in a concluding envoy addressed to “Prince”, wherein she cautions that “whoever wants to do laundry or heat with flames should be very diligent to know for sure that the weather is stable, for one shouldn’t judge everything by its look”: Prince, il convient ester moult diligens Qui veult buer et cuire, trop m’en dueil, Sçavoir de vray que li temps soit constans: L’en ne doit pas par tout jugier de l’œil. (ll. 25-28) It is probably not sheer chance that, in the order of the manuscript of Deschamps’s collected works, the laundress’s advice on making sure the weather will be fine before starting to do laundry appears between two balades that provide two very different perspectives on the risk of sudden storms in crossing the sea. The first, balade 1143 to the refrain of “Au grant peril et fortune de mer”, is a monologue spoken by a person who states his own opinion (“je ne croy”, l. 5) that man can do nothing to counter the great dangers and tempests of the sea. His concluding advice to princes (“Prince”) is that it is better to avoid such peril by conducting war on land. The raging seas and shipwrecks evoked in balade 1143 are followed in balade 1144 by the laundress’s cautionary advice to be sure of fine weather before doing laundry; then, in balade 1145, a chivalric voice pronounces an inspirational harangue on brave hearts’ indifference to the weather, as reiterated in the refrain, “Vaillant cuer puet en tous temps faire guerre”. This optimistic voice, who believes that the bold can force good fortune, concludes by advising the prince (“Princes”) that England will be his if he crosses the English Channel without delay. Balade 1145 must have been written in the late summer or autumn of 1386, when the French prepared, delayed, and finally renounced a large-scale military invasion of England. The scribe who copied the works of Deschamps placed balades 1143–1145 side by side on folios 303v–304r of the volume (Paris, BnF MS. fr. 840), probably because he found them close together in the collections and papers Deschamps left behind at his death and recognised their common focalisation on the dangers of sudden storms. This gives us a glimpse of Deschamps’s polyvocal practice of elaborating and juxtaposing different voices and discourses on a subject. Although each balade is a monologue, only the first seems to be spoken in the poet’s own character, if we judge from other balades in which Deschamps expressed aversion to the discomforts and dangers of travelling by sea.13 The other two lyric monologues, those of the foolish laundress and the bellicose knight, more clearly belong to alter egos whose views the poet ventriloquises. Deschamps multiplied different voices and commentaries on the abortive French invasion of England by writing other balades in the form

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Polyphonic Effects in the Fixed-Form Verse 81 of reported dialogues or of polyvocal discussions.14 His balade 1059, to the refrain “Of the crayfish that moves by retreating” (“D’escrevice, qui en alant recule”), imitates beast fables and their talking animals (OcED, vol. 5, pp. 350–351). The speaker first reports the lion’s decision to summon an army to cross over and attack the leopard, and then the assembled army’s hesitations about the crossing due to winter weather, dangerous winds, and the lack of both provisions and pay. The speaker cites the stag’s polite questioning of how it will be possible to make such a crossing in ferocious winter weather – “Je me merveil comment / L’en passera, car l’iver est trop fiers” (ll. 9-10) – and then he cites the lesser animals’ comments, descending in rank and speech register to end with the dog’s blunt refusal to participate unless paid for it: “If I have no money, they push me down on my butt” (“S’argent n’ay, on m’acule”, l. 14). In a concluding envoy addressed to “Noble lyon”, the speaker urges the king of beasts (the French king) to provide for his troops, rather than being given the name “of the crayfish that moves by retreating”. Balade 1060, immediately following, introduces new, more pejorative perspectives and opinions on the ill-prepared naval invasion. The balade opens with the voice of a look-out, who calls the attention of another person (the reporting poet) to what he sees and describes below them: Avant! Avant! tirez vous ça! Je voy merveilles, ce me semble. — Et quoy? Guette, que vois tu la? — Je voy .xm. ras ensemble Et mainte souris qui s’assemble Dessus la rive de la mer Pour nagier par dessus un tramble, Mais de paour les voy trambler.15 (OcED, vol. 5, pp. 351-52, ll. 1-8) A third voice, that of a man who looks like a peasant (“uns homs qui villains ressemble”, l. 10) intervenes to announce that these rodents will never make the crossing, for he knows them well from having been pillaged by them; they are bold at pillaging and starving everyone in the area, but tremble from fear now (ll. 9-16). When asked why he thinks that none of these rodents will make the crossing, the peasant explains: Their vessel is not stocked with provisions; it’s a hard winter; the sea is high; the winds are strong; many are leaving, seeking only to retreat (ll. 17-24). The envoy addressed to “Princes” is spoken by the poet-reporter, who repeats the look-out’s reaction to what the peasant has just told him: “Prince, the look-out cried, / ‘Whoever could make them cross / would do a great service to the people!’ ” (“Princes, la guette s’escria, / ‘Qui les pourra faire passer, / Grant bien pour le peuple fera!’ ” ll. 25-27). In short, the naval invasion of England would save the French peasantry from the pillaging French army, figured as voracious rodents. The

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poet-reporter seems to judge that getting this army to make the crossing would be very difficult, for he concludes by repeating the refrain that the look-out and the peasant have spoken before him: “But I see them trembling from fear” (“Mais de paour les voy trambler”). Here, as in many other polyvocal balades wherein the same refrain concludes the speeches of different characters, it is hard to say who has the last word, as the different voices seem to blend in the refrain of the envoy.

Dialogical Monologue that Combines Two Languages, Speech Registers, or Dialects Harking back to schoolish, goliardic traditions, Deschamps sometimes wrote fixed-form lyrics combining Latin with French, intermittently switching between the official, authoritative language of the church and the vernacular. One such example is balade 1185 to the refrain of “I’m an old woman without gratifications” (“Vetula sum sine muneribus”) (OcED, vol. 6, pp. 140-141).16 In the first stanza, the female speaker reminisces about how, until the age of 20, she was loved, desired, honoured, and showered with gifts by many men for her beauty. In the second stanza, the old woman (who says she was deserted even before turning thirty) describes in detail her current state of deprivation: Homme ne truis qui me die: oscula, Car ma couleur et ma face est ridée Par viellesce; plus ne suis puella; Moins qu’a trente ans m’a chascun delaissée; Si ne suy je pas du vouloir lassée Mais preste en tout; qui amer me vouldroit, De ses joyaulx du temps passé raroit, De meisque in suis manibus; Or va trop pis mon fait qu’il ne souloit: Vetula sum sine muneribus.17 (ll. 11-20) In the third stanza (ll. 21-22), she berates those who call her “fetida … par dedenz desroutte … afolée” (“stinking… broken down inside… damaged”). She asks why she is maligned so, and promptly answers her own rhetorical question by blaming the lying rustic “Cydrac” for condemning her (with all women): “Quare? Quia. Cydrac m’a condempnée / Ly faulx villains: son ame soit dampnée, / Son livre aussi, tout homme qui le croit!” (ll. 24-26). Her revenge is to curse Cydrac, his book, and every man who believes it. In solidarity with all women, she attacks the misogyny of a fashionable, encyclopaedic French prose compilation of dogmatic, conservative “wisdom” that is framed as a lengthy dialogue in which the oriental king Bocus puts a series of questions to the Christian philosopher Sidrach, who answers each one.18 The old woman

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Polyphonic Effects in the Fixed-Form Verse 83 concludes with an envoy of experience-based advice addressed not to the conventional “Princes” but to adolescent girls. She urges them, while they are enjoying “peace, praise, honour, and glory” to “pluck” men bare and take everything they have, because old age will come soon and make them like her, “an old woman without gratifications”: Juvencule, in etate prima Sit vobis pax, laus, honor, gloria; Plumez, prenez cunctis hominibus, Car assez tost viellesce vous vendra, Qui en tel point com je sum vous rendra: Vetula sum sine muneribus. (ll. 31-36) Although we may attribute the sentiments expressed in this monologue to an old woman, there is no indication in the poem that she is a nun who has mastered Latin; rather, she seems to have spent her youth collecting lovers and precious gifts. She is made of the same well-known misogynist materials as the old female duenna (“la Vielle”) of Jean de Meun’s section of the Roman de la Rose,19 which the poetess Christine de Pisan, over a century later, found so unjust to women that she felt compelled to criticise the opinions of certain erudite royal and papal secretaries who praised it.20 In Deschamps’s balade 1185, the monologue of his female “other” is bilingual and implicitly bivocal and dialogic, not only because we hear in counterpoint in the background words and phrases of Jean de Meun’s earlier text but also because we hear the goliardic voice of Deschamps in the Latin rhyme words and in whole verses, such as the refrain. In spite of these contrasting voices, which render its interpretation more complex, the monologue of Deschamps’s Vetula – like that of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath – captures sympathy today21 and was probably not entirely unsympathetic or merely laughable to some of Deschamps’s contemporary listeners and readers. Switching between different speech registers within the same monologue or enunciation can also create polyphonic effects. For example, an effect of bivocality is created by sudden switches between two different, diametrically opposed speech registers and intentions – one blasphemous, the other pious – in a series of three balades without envoys, all crafted according to the same pattern: three stanzas of ten octosyllabic verses using exactly the same rhymes and rhyme scheme and the same refrain: “Par la mort dont Dieux vint a vie” (“By the death from which God came back to life”). As Deschamps explains in his rondeau 1048, he wrote balade 1047, while balades 1045 and 1046 were written by two of his friends, all for the purpose of discouraging the practice of swearing perjurious oaths that took in vain the name, body, and actions of Christ. The three balades use the same listing and shifting techniques, but balade 1047 changes the sense of blasphemous phrases to a pious one more abruptly

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and effectively than the other two balades. Our surprise is greatest the first time this occurs, in the penultimate line of the first stanza. For the first eight lines, the speaker seems to be reporting blasphemous oaths he has heard some unlucky wretch swear, here enunciated in a series, one per line, most beginning with “par” (“by”): Las! bien est li mondes confus, Quant la teste Dieu jurera, Et sa forcelle uns malostrus, Et par les pas que Dieux passa, Par la sueur que Dieux sua, Par Dieu qui fut mort par envie, Par cil dont la char fut traye, Par le baptesme d’icellui Fut le peuple d’enfer ravi, Par la mort dont Dieux vint a vie.22 (OcED, vol. 1, pp. 274-75, ll. 1-10) The preterit verb “fut” (“was”) at the beginning of line nine forces us to change our understanding of the syntax of the enunciation and suddenly turns what the speaker had presented as a series of blasphemous oaths sworn by a vulgar “other” into his own serial testimony to Christ’s salvation of mankind in accordance with Christian doctrine. The second and third stanzas work in the same way as the first to repeat the transformation of perjury into piety, although the turn introduced by “Fut” now occurs earlier, at the beginning of the sixth line, the half-way point of each stanza. In effect, in the second and third stanzas, we know in advance what will happen, and thus we hear simultaneously, in each new phrase beginning with “Par”, both blasphemous instrumentation of and pious testimony to salvation history. An example of the bivocal effects produced by intermittent dialectswitching is offered by balade 884, to the refrain of “So my horses will be all eaten up” (“Ainsi seront tuit mignez mes quevaulx”) (OcED, vol. 5, pp. 69–70). This balade is one of many monologues Deschamps wrote to complain of the high cost of keeping horses in Paris. Here he uses rustic Picard pronunciations – which are indicated by dialectal spellings, such as “mignez” (mangés) and “quevaulx” (chevaulx) in the refrain – to contrast with the more prestigious dialect of the region around Paris (the official dialect of the monarchy and its scribes) and thereby to give this complaint a comically pathetic bivocality that may remind the audience of the difficulties of those who come from the countryside to serve at court (as Deschamps did). In balades of complaint about not being paid, Deschamps often used different sorts of code-switching, as well as punning double senses, to make his point with an incongruous bivocality meant to amuse and move his listeners. For example, in balade 1301, to the equivocal refrain of “Crier me fault: ‘Oublie, oublie!’” (OcED,

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Polyphonic Effects in the Fixed-Form Verse 85 l. 7, pp. 56–57). Deschamps advertises his own humiliation by imitating the familiar chant of the medieval street vendor of wafers, which were called oublies because they were made from dough left over at the end of the day. Deschamps, the royal officer, imagines himself carrying through the streets of Paris (ll. 9-12) a box full of his written “supplicacions” (“requests” for payment of wages long overdue) as well as a box “pour les ras” (“for the rats”) full of the king’s written promises to him of monetary gifts. Although he says that he has “often served” these papers to the head paymasters (“Generaulx” [des finances], ll. 13-14), they have always been ignored. So he complains that he is ruined and will be reduced to carrying boxes full of these forgotten papers (oubliés) all over Paris like a vendor of wafers (oublies) hawking his wares – unless his lords, to whom the envoy is addressed, take pity on him and right the situation: “Mes seigneurs, je suis desconfis, / Se vo pité n’y remedie, / Car, comme oublier par Paris, / Crier me fault: ‘Oublie, oublie!’” (ll. 25-28).23

Bivocal Effects of Verbal Irony Deschamps often used the bivocal effects of verbal irony to render his criticism more indirect, less confrontational.24 He wrote whole balades in the ironic mode, with only their exaggerated praise and positivism or their dubitative, contradictory refrains to emphasise the gap between overt and covert senses, between what his speaking persona says and what Deschamps the poet-courtier means to imply. One such example is balade 1370, to the refrain of “If this is so, God knows it well” (“S’il est ainsi, Dieu le scet bien”) (OcED, vol. 7, pp. 213–215). With a voice of honey, the voice of flattery, the speaker begins with flowing praise of all the virtues that currently reign in the courts of kings, princes, popes, and cardinals: Amour, paix et humilité, Atrempance et devocion, Abstinance avec charité, Vertu, toute perfection, Crainte de Dieu sanz fiction, Sont au jour d’ui es cours royaulx Des princes, pappes, cardinaulx, Justice, equité et tout bien, Et pour ce n’aviennent nulz maulx: S’il est ainsi, Dieu le scet bien.25 (ll. 1-10) As the refrain insinuates, God knows perfectly well how things really are in the courts of the powerful – that is, exactly the opposite of what has been claimed. The second and third stanzas of this balade and even its envoy addressed to “Prince” are written in the same way and to the same

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indirectly critical, ironically bivocal effect. Probably even before arriving at the refrain of the first stanza, though, Deschamps’s audience would have been tipped off to its critical intent by the extravagant optimism of this monologue, which is uncharacteristic of Deschamps or of the mood of the late fourteenth century during the Hundred Years’ War and the Great Western Schism. Deschamps’s audience would have perceived the implicit blame in such praise and been able to discern a different music, a dissonant, sarcastic vocal counterpoint to the sweetly seductive voice of flattery. The scribe of Deschamps’s collected works labelled balade 219 “Balade with a double meaning” (“Balade a double entendement”) (OcED, vol. 2, pp. 44–45). This balade is another monologue entirely devoted to extravagant praise of the virtues of the times, but with the difference that the first-person speaker says at the outset – that, when people ask him for his opinion of the times, he responds with nothing but praise. After reciting what he tells them, he then swears, in the refrain, “I’m not saying all that I think” (“Je ne di pas quanque je pence”): L’en me demande chascun jour Qu’il me semble du temps que voy, Et je respons: c’est tout honour, Loyauté, verité et foy, Largesce, prouesce et arroy, Charité et biens qui s’avance Pour le commun; mais, par ma loy, Je ne di pas quanque je pence.26 (ll. 1-8) The impression of bivocality in this balade comes not only from the difference between what is said and what is meant, but also from the speaker’s “doubling” of himself. After telling his current audience (now us) the truth about how he praises the times to others when they ask his opinion, he cites himself by reproducing the habitual spiel of extravagant praise he gives others, which he continues throughout the entire second and third stanzas and the envoy, interrupted only by the cautionary refrain he directs, as with a wink, at us: “Je ne di pas quanque je pence”.

Polyvocal Parody One of Deschamps’s most complex polyvocal lyrics is chanson royale 1166, a poem of five stanzas and an envoy to the refrain of “Everything is going topsy-turvy” (“Tout va ce que devant derrier”) (OcED, vol. 6, pp. 106–108). The poet indirectly criticises the contemporary multiplication of financial officers of various sorts by parodying the formulaic list of the ancestors of Christ. This list was known as “Liber generationis” from the opening words of the Vulgate Gospel of Matthew (1.1-16) and

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Polyphonic Effects in the Fixed-Form Verse 87 was repeated in the Gospel of Luke (3.23-38) in a somewhat different version. The poet first announces that “Liber generationis is back in season today, because one sees many identified whose names one can hardly say”: “Liber generacionis / Est au jour d’ui bien en saison, / Car l’en voit pluseurs defines / Dont l’en ne scet dire leur nom” (ll. 1-4). Then he begins asking questions about these persons by imitating the elliptical Latin formula for announcing each new generation in the Gospel of Luke: “qui fuit x, qui fuit y…” (“who was [the son] of x, who was [the son] of y”…).27 However, the speaker deliberately twists the sense of this lapidary Latin formula for stating blood relationships in order to turn it into a question about identity: “qui fuit x?” (“who was x anyway?”). As the poem progresses, the speaker increasingly poses this question in French: “Qui fut Natham?” (l. 10), “Qui fut Pharès?” (l. 16). Switching rapidly back and forth between Latin and French, the speaker asks who different Biblical ancestors were: “Qui fuit Sadoch et Naason?” (l. 5). But he also switches rapidly back and forth between past and present by next asking “Qui est cilz au bleu chaperon?” (“Who is this one in the blue hood?”); it is as if he were calling attention to a contemporary visual representation of the lineage of Christ with each ancestor labelled by name.28 Although the speaker reports the answers he receives to the series of questions he poses, it is not clear to whom he is speaking. There seem to be two different responders (ll. 7-8): “L’un respond qu’il est receveur, / Et l’autre dit contreroleur” (“One answers that he is a receiver of monies, / And the other says [he is] a controller of accounts”).29 The responders identify each Biblical character by his office or occupation, none of which is exalted and all of which are anachronistic, having to do with the collection or management of money for the French crown: Qui fuit Naon? grenetier, Qui fut Natham? impositeur: Tout va ce que devant derrier. Qui fuit Boos li esbahis? Sergens de l’imposicion. Qui fuit Eber li hais? Generaulx en conclusion.30 (ll. 9-15) In the speaker’s envoy to “Prince”, he uses the first person to insist that pride and avarice cannot last long without falling, and then he attributes the conclusion drawn in the refrain to the judgment of the tax-collector and the stone mason (“impositeur et maçon”, l. 59), thus suggesting that these two have been interlocutors who responded to his questions: Prince, je di que de raison Orgueil ne puet durer foison

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By his disorganised, digressive, excessive parody of the Gospel of Luke’s version of Christ’s ancestry – wherein he overturns the sense of its elliptical Latin formulae by using them to pose questions in French, questions to which he ventriloquises responses given by unnamed alter egos in a confusing variety of voices – Deschamps implied criticism of the proliferation of contemporary financial officers, as if they were as hard to sort out (and had as little legitimacy) as the long list of the male ancestors of the virgin-born Christ (son of no man, but of God).31 It would be a long while before another major vernacular author parodied Liber generationis to satirical ends, as did Rabelais for the genealogy of his gigantic hero Pantagruel (Saulnier, 1965, pp. 13–15) and James Joyce for the genealogy of his anti-hero Bloom (Gabler, 1984, ll. 1855-1869).

Pastoral Discussions and Debates In the courtly forms of balades and chanson royales, Deschamps created a new sort of pastourelle narrative32 by reporting his own chance encounters with groups of peasants, usually guarding their flocks, engaged in discussion about the effects of contemporary events and actions such as military campaigns and the heavy taxation and pillaging that accompanied these. Deschamps presents himself as a passive participant listening and observing discretely rather than interjecting his own opinion; if he expresses a personal opinion at all, he reserves it for the envoy addressed to “Princes”, where he summarises popular opinion, corroborates it, and/or draws a conclusion by way of counsel. He usually begins, however, by calling attention to the location of his pastoral encounter by naming nearby towns or rivers. For example, in chanson royale 1009 to the refrain of “Whenever anyone sees men armed, everyone flees” (“Qui voit gens armez, chascun fuit”)(OcED, vol. 5, pp. 268–270), Deschamps situates himself between the towns of Damery and Epernay, where “I saw” (“Vi”) a group of shepherdesses and shepherds in a pasture near Ay (a town beside a stream by the same name), guarding their sheep, cows, and calves: “Entre Espargnay et Damery / Vi pastoures et pastoureaulx / En la praerie pres d’Ay, / Gardans moutons, vaches et veaulx” (ll. 1-10). This triangular space, about twenty kilometres north of Deschamps’s hometown of Vertus, must have been familiar territory to him. In chanson royale 1009, as is often the case, Deschamps identifies by his given name the first peasant speaker, who provokes the ensuing discussion wherein other peasant speakers, also identified by their given names, present their own variant or contrasting opinions in an orderly

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Polyphonic Effects in the Fixed-Form Verse 89 discussion or peasant “parlement”. Here “Lohiers” provokes one of the others with a pressing request: Je vueil chevauchier sur les champs, Car bergiers ne sont que meschans Tant comme ilz gardent les moutons. Pains bis, prunelles et boutons, Frommaige et let est leur deduit; Je te pri que nous nous armons: Qui voit gens armez, chacun fuit.33 (ll. 6-12) Rather than remaining a poor shepherd, Lohiers wants to join the great troop of armed “varlets” (young men who serve knights and squires) that, all “provisioned” with poultry, skins of freshly killed sheep, and stolen horses, have reached Chouilly (a few kilometres to the east of Epernay) on their way to be lodged at Chalons-en-Champagne (ll. 13-20). Lohiers urges the other shepherd: “Laisse tout: après eulx alons. / Telz gens sanz paine ont leur pain cuit; / Nous ferons quanque nous voulrons: / Qui voit gens armez, chascun fuit” (“Drop everything! Let’s follow them! / Such people have their baked bread without effort; / we’ll do whatever we want. / Whenever anyone sees men armed, everyone flees”) (ll. 21-24). Lohiers’s anonymous companion shoots back a question in response (ll. 25-27): “Voire, mais sçavoir vueil de ty, / Sotart, se nulz a guerre a yaulx, / Et ou ilz vont. Or le me di!” (“True, but I want to know from you, stupid, if anyone is at war with them and where they are going. Tell me that now!”) When Lohiers answers that they are going to do battle in Germany (ll. 2831), his anonymous companion accuses him of lying because, rather than fight violent enemies, these soldiers prefer to do harm to their friends, who are good to them, so that there is not a single goose or a capon left after they pass: “Certes, tu mans: / Leurs ennemis sont trop felons; / A leurs amis, qui leur sont bons, / Chascuns de ces gens d’armes nuit; / N’y demeure oe ne chapons” (ll. 31-35). Whereas Lohiers used the refrain to mock the cowardice of peasants, his contradictor uses it to justify them for running away, arguing that running away is the “right” response to “enemy acts”, which is what the pillaging – “taking cows and pigs” – of these soldiers is: “Qui voit gens armez, chascun fuit. // C’est bien drois: car fait d’ennemi / Font, prannent vaches et pourceaulx” (ll. 36-38). A shepherd named Guichart next intervenes to give his opinion on the shameful, evil times, which are ruled by great and small robbers, gluttonous destroyers of earthly life: “Lors dist Guichart: ‘C’est tout honny: / Mal temps ont moutons et aigneaulx; / Larrons regnent et larronciaulx, / Destruiseurs du monde et gourmans’” (ll. 39-42). Guichart goes on to identify the smaller sort of robbers as dishonest fellows from many regions (ll. 43-46): “ribauls, truans, … savetiers et chartons …garçons” (“vagabonds, beggars, … shoe repairers and carters, … lowly, crude

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men” who take arms, call themselves “escuiers” (“squires”), and pillage day and night. He concludes that God will “pay” for everything (“Dieu paiera tout”), presumably at the Last Judgment, and counsels avoiding these armed men: “or les laissons, / Qui voit genz armez, chascuns fuit” (ll. 47-48). The fifth and last stophe is entirely devoted to the intervention of a shepherd named “Ayaux” who counsels all the shepherds, including himself, to continue watching over “our” animals and to be honest men (“prodomes”). He goes on to predict that, before the feast of Saint Rémy (of nearby Reims, on October 1st), many of these soldiers will be killed with knives or hung by royal justices for their great crimes: — Gardons noz bestes, je vous pri, Soions prodomes, dist Ayaux, Qu’avant qu’il soit la saint Remy, Maint seront occis de cousteaulx Ou panduz par juges royaulx Pour leurs meffaiz qui sont trop grans. (ll. 49-54) The last words of this chanson royale, which lacks an envoy, are not those of Deschamps addressing “Princes” to comment upon the discussion he has just reported, but those of Deschamps still reporting the voice of the shepherd Ayaux, who contrasts the way wars are conducted now, destroying everything (“L’en gaste tout”, l. 59), with the way they were conducted by “Roland, Charlemagne, Arthur and the other barons”. As testimony to the worthiness of these historic figures, Ayaux recalls “the great stories we have about them, which illuminate the Church”: Ainsis ne guerria Rolans, Charles, Artus ne les barons Dont les grans histoires avons, Par les quelz l’Eglise reluit; L’en gaste tout, en gré prenons: Qui voit genz armez, chascun fuit.34 (ll. 55-60) Although he finally counsels resignation to being pillaged (“en gré prenons”, l. 59), Ayaux’s contrast between past and present rulers as military leaders implies criticism of current ones. Like chanson royale 1009, chanson royale 366 (OcED, vol. 3, pp. 45– 47) reports peasant reaction to being pillaged by “friendly” troops during the early stages of the French military expedition to Gueldre in late August and early September of 1388. In chanson royale 366, however, the location is different. Deschamps reports meeting several people from Stenay, just after crossing the Meuse river on the road coming from Buzancy (ll. 1-4), and he cites the discussion he overheard between two of them,

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Polyphonic Effects in the Fixed-Form Verse 91 who remain unnamed, about the damages done by the pillaging soldiers of king “Kill-joy” (“roy Rabajoye”, l. 23), a sarcastic reversal of the traditional battle cry of French kings: Montjoie! (Mounting joy!). In the fifth stanza, one of the peasants says that what particularly irritates him is how the soldiers boast of their pillaging, as if it were an act of valour; he also compares the present disorder with better managed military expeditions in the past and suggests that perhaps God wants to assemble all these sinners to punish them (ll. 41-50). The only joy the two peasants take is in the hope that the king and his army will never return, which they express in a refrain that rings like a curse: “Ja piet n’en puist il retourner” (“May he never be able to return a single foot”).35 Chanson royale 1009 has no envoy, but ends with the reported words of an honest shepherd. In the envoy of chanson royale 366, Deschamps addresses the king (“Princes”) to counsel reforms in the management of the army – paying the troops well, ensuring that justice is done against pillagers – in order to merit God’s help in battle and to put an end to the people’s resentful refrain, which he cites in conclusion: Princes, vueillez si advertir: Bien paier, justice tenir, Et voz gens d’armes contenter, Tant que Dieux vous puist secourir, Et que ce mot face fenir: Ja piet n’en puist il retourner. (ll. 51-56) In the course of carrying out his various official duties, Deschamps often had to ride through the countryside, where it is not unlikely that he encountered, along his path, working people engaged in discussion, such as shepherds keeping company together as they pastured their animals. It is difficult to tell to what extent his reported peasant voices are sheer inventions and to what extent they were drawn from the real encounters of a royal officer “on the road” who seized the opportunities of such encounters to inform those in power – in the inventive form of lyric reporting – of the views and complaints of peasants in specific locations.36 Whatever the source of his reported peasant voices, they surely served as alter egos enabling Deschamps to criticise royal action or inaction indirectly. As we have seen, polyvocality and polyphony – multiple voices and superimposed voices – are hallmarks of Deschamps’s critical practice.

Notes 1 Eustache Deschamps was born about 1340 into a family named Morel in the town of Vertus in the wine-producing region of Champagne; he owned land there and regularly returned to stay at the house “in the fields” (des champs) from which he took his name. After studying the liberal arts and civil law,

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Laura Kendrick he pursued an official career of continuous administrative and judicial service to the French royal line. On his life, see Œuvres complètes d’Eustache Deschamps (hereafter cited as OcED), vol. 11, pp. 9–99; Boudet and Millet, 1997, pp. 9–20; Laurie, 1998a, pp. 1–72; Laidlaw and Scollen-Jimack, 2014, pp. 23–41. Written in 1392, Deschamps’s prose treatise on the art of writing fixed-form poetry, L’art de dictier et de fere chançons, balades, virelais et rondeaulx (OcED, vol. 7, pp. 266–292), sets the parameters for these different forms and exemplifies them with extracts drawn from his own verse. Although most of Philippe de Vitry’s compositions have not survived, Deschamps probably knew them. In his balade on people from Champagne, he included Philippe de Vitry, along with Machaut, as poets who greatly esteemed music (“poetes que musique ot chier”) (OcED, vol. 8, p. 178, l. 29). Furthermore, Deschamps’s lyric pastourelles owe a good deal to Philippe de Vitry’s “Dit de franc Gontier” (Piaget, 1898, pp. 63–64), which innovates by diverging from the initial theme of bucolic love to convey the overheard monologue of a woodcutter who considers the advantages of his simple, free life. The poet reports the woodcutter’s philosophising by citing him in the first person and then concludes with a succinct comparison, addressed to his own courtly audience, on the worthlessness of the “serf at court” as compared to the “free Gontier”, whom he judges to be worth his weight in gold. Maw (2006, p. 262) argues that Machaut complicated “consensual” polyphony, whereby different voices sing the same words, by introducing “critical” polyphony, whereby there was more contrast between the different voices, that is, between the main one singing the words and the other, usually wordless, “voices” (those of musical instruments playing or human voices singing different melodies), with the result that “it was music itself that commented on the verbal expression of the poem, a parodic and abstractive voice symptomatic of aestheticism” (p. 262). In L’art de dictier, Deschamps explains the difference between two kinds of music, “artificiele” and “naturelle”. One is a musical art learned through theory-based teaching, the last of the seven liberal arts. The other music is called “natural [innate] because it cannot be taught to anyone unless his own heart is naturally so inclined, and it is a music made with the mouth in pronouncing versified words, sometimes in lais, sometimes in balades, sometimes in simple or double rondeaux, and in … virelais”. (“L’autre musique est appellée naturele pour ce qu’elle ne puet estre aprinse a nul, se son propre couraige naturelment ne s’i applique, et est une musique de bouche en proferant paroules metrifiées, aucunefoiz en laiz, autrefoiz en balades, autrefoiz en rondeaulx cengles et doubles, et en …virelays”.) (OcED, vol. 7, p. 270). This natural music is produced by pronouncing versified words in a pleasant voice without singing (“par voix non pas chantable”) (p. 271). All English translations from the prose and verse of Deschamps in this chapter are my own. I have punctuated my English translations to clarify the sense, sometimes differently from the punctuation provided by the editors of the OcED. I.S. Laurie provides a suggestive treatment of the multifaceted complexity of Deschamps’s lyric verse and the first suggestion, to my knowledge, that it might be considered polyphonic. He makes his case by close analysis of one poem, virelai 554 (OcED, vol. 4, pp. 8–10), the lyric monologue of a fifteenyear-old girl who touts her own attractiveness, to the refrain of “Aren’t I,

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aren’t I, aren’t I beautiful?” (“Sui je, sui je, sui je belle?”). Focusing on the formal, generic, stylistic, and linguistic discordances and “disconcerting” elements he perceives, Laurie argues that these “enrich the poem and render it more complex” (1998b, p. 97). In conclusion, he suggests a comparison with “those late medieval polyphonic compositions which juxtapose not only different lines of music but also disconcertingly different poetic texts: love lyrics, Latin psalms and drinking songs”, and he goes on to propose that “there is a case to be made for Deschamps as a considerable artist in verbal polyphony … not only in the time-honoured sense of the number of separate voices to be heard in any one poem … but also that these voices are all heard at the same time, each of them carrying a different message” (1998b, p. 106). “I am astounded by the crude understanding / of the person who sees and hears but doesn’t want to understand / what I say for the purpose of saving him”. / “You are a fool if you believe you can teach him; / discernment is what he possesses least of all; / he hears you well, but it doesn’t matter to him; / you’d just as well spank his bottom immediately / or teach ten mules to play the harp / as speak to him quietly or loudly. / Sing to the ass and he’ll fart for you”. There is considerable similarity between Deschamps’s figurative, proverbial-sounding expressions of the futility of trying to teach the thickheaded and a pictorial representation entitled “The Ass at School” designed by Bruegel the Elder in 1556. The centre of the picture is occupied by a schoolmaster spanking a bare-bottomed child in the midst of bunches of inattentive children seated on the floor roundabout while, behind the schoolmaster, an ass looks into the room, places a hoof on a sheet of music on the window ledge and appears to study it. For a reproduction of this engraving, see www. metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/392427 (accessed 8 June 2020) or Gibson, 2007–2008, p. 34. “What are you saying? You speak foolishly. / Shouldn’t man strive toward all the virtues / and avoid the vices so well / that he can be reproached for no sin? / He has a reasonable spirit; thus he ought to strive / for the heavenly goods of God; he must direct his attention there. / A brute beast without a spirit is lacking / in this regard; all his attention is directed to the earth”. The medieval French verb ronfler (here spelled with an “m”) literally means to snore or make loud nasal noises in sleeping, which is certainly, in this case, pejorative (an ironic compliment). There is no evidence that ronfler suggested a bombastic style of delivery yet, as it would do later. “Never again will I have confidence in the weather / for drying laundry, nor in the sun / that rises in the morning with very bright rays, / for I was rudely fooled by it / when I saw a dark cloud / suddenly hide the sun / and rain so much that everything was ruined. / One shouldn’t judge everything by its look”. “By this look I lost my good sense, / and my mistress blamed me for it. / … / By a foolish look I was befooled”. For example, in Geoffroi de la Tour Landry’s widely read moral treatise written for his daughters in 1371, “fol regart” (looking at the forbidden fruit) is explained as the “fourth folly” of Eve, which leads to desire and temptation, causes her fall into “folle plaisance”, and ultimately leads to the fall of humankind. The danger of a foolish look as the first misstep on a slippery path is brought home with additional examples such as that of the Biblical king David who, “by a foolish look in regarding Uriah’s wife, fell into

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Laura Kendrick the fornication of adultery and then into homicide…” (“par un fol regart de regarder la femme Urie, il cheyt en fornication d’avoultire, puis en omicide”) (Montaiglon, 1854, pp. 89–90). See, for example, balade 84 (OcED, vol. 1, pp. 187–188). See Raynaud (OcED, vol. 11, pp. 48–51) and Laurie (1998a, pp. 17–18) for other poems they associate with the French preparations to invade England in 1386, preparations that mobilised Deschamps himself. “Approach! Approach! Look over there! / I see a wonder, it seems”. / “What is it? Look-out, what do you see there?” / “I see ten thousand rats together / and many mice assembling / on the seashore / to traverse on a poplar trunk, / but I see them trembling with fear”. have emphasised bilingual code-shifting by putting the Latin in boldface characters. For examples of code-shifting between Latin and French in a bawdier vein on the subject of masculine impotence, see balades 1225 and 1226 (OcED, vol. 6, pp. 224–226), the first a dialogue between an old woman and an old monk in which both speakers mix Latin with French, the second an old man’s macaronic monologue of complaint. “I find no man who says to me ‘kiss me,’ / because my complexion and my face are wrinkled / with age; I’m not a young girl anymore. / Before the age of thirty, everyone had left me; / yet I am not tired of desiring, but completely ready. / Whoever would like to love me / would recover his precious gifts of times past, / and from my hands into his. / Now my initiative doesn’t get the results it used to. / I am an old woman without gratifications”. Le livre de Sidrach, also known as La Fontaine de toutes sciences du philosophe Sidrach, or simply Le Rommant de Sydrach, was compiled anonymously in the late thirteenth century in France and is now available in a critical edition (Ruhe, 2000). In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the text, expanded or reduced in number of questions, was often recopied and even translated into Occitan and Italian, and it was frequently printed in the late fifteenth through the sixteenth centuries. According to the inventory of the royal library made by Gilles Mallet in 1373, Charles V owned no fewer than four manuscript copies of it (as compared to three of the Roman de la Rose), and one of these, richly covered and clasped with her insignia, belonged to his queen, Jeanne de Bourbon. “Cidrac” is the spelling (as in Deschamps’s balade) used three times out of four by Gilles Mallet to identify this work. See inventory entries 347, 488, 509, and 1113 (Van Praet, 1836). Jean de Meun’s character of the Old Woman takes vengeance on the lovers who have abandoned and insulted her as she grew older by means of a long monologue telling the story of her life to her young charge and teaching her to use “Bel Acuel” (“Fair Welcome”) to attract and “pluck” men bare of everything they have. See especially verses 12,893–12,948 (Poirion, 1974, pp. 355–356). Christine de Pizan both provoked an epistolary debate over the morality and misogyny of Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose and, in late 1402, compiled the letters into a manuscript to be presented to the queen of France for her judgment (critical edition: Valentini, 2014). For example, Deborah Sinnreich-Levi not only finds that about one in thirty of Deschamps’s lyrics (50–60 out of 1500) are spoken by women’s voices, a surprisingly large number, but she goes on to argue that these self-portraying women do not simply exemplify the clerical misogynist tradition; they are,

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instead, “sympathetic, intelligent, clearly spoken (if occasionally vulgar), and interested in determining their own fates… smart enough to know when it is life’s vagaries or controlling men who have shaped their existences. And they take their vengeance when they can” (Sinnreich-Levi, 1998, p. 123). “Alas, the world is all mixed up / when a wretch will swear / by God’s head and breast / and by the steps God took, / by the sweat He sweated, / by God, who was put to death out of jealousy, / by Him whose body was betrayed, / by His baptism / were the people forcefully saved from hell, / by the death from which God came back to life”. Deschamps also elaborated the pun on “oublie” (“a small, thin wafer made of leftover dough” or “forgetful negligence”) to complain that he has never received his fair share of rewards (figured as main course dishes during meals at court). See balade 809 (OcED, vol. 4, pp. 325–326) to the refrain of “At court, I’m always served with wafers (forgetting)” (“Je suis a court tousjours serviz d’oublie”). Deschamps defends himself against those who accuse him of being overly bold with his poetic criticism. For example, in the envoy of chanson royale 348 (OcED, vol. 3, pp. 71–72), he compares himself to an archer shooting into the air rather than directly at his target, so that his falling arrows (words of criticism) strike only those who recognise that they are targets (because the criticism hits home) yet do not protect themselves (by changing their habits). “Love, peace and humility, / temperance and devotion, / abstinence along with charity, / virtue, every perfection, / fear of God without pretense/ are nowadays in the courts of kings, / princes, popes, and cardinals, / justice, equity and every good, / and for this reason no wrongs happen. / If this is so, God well knows it”. “People ask me every day / for my opinion on the times, / and I answer, ‘There’s nothing but honour, / loyalty, truth and faith, / generosity, prowess and order, / charity and the advancement / of the common good’. But, by my faith, / I’m not saying all that I think”. In deluxe medieval manuscripts from the ninth century on, the columnar layout of this list emphasised its repetitive syntax and produced an impression of vertical descent by beginning each new line with “qui fuit”; the son’s name thus appeared at the end of a line, immediately beneath his father’s name on the preceding line. There were many such visual representations, whether in the media of medieval wall or ceiling painting, painted sculpture, stained glass, tapestry, or manuscript illumination. The masculine genealogy of Christ as delineated in Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels was often combined with the Old Testament prophecy of Isaiah (11.1) to enable the incorporation of the Virgin Mary into visual representations of Christ’s ancestry known as Jesse trees, which tended to exalt these ancestors by depicting them as, or linking them with, images of kings (both Biblical and medieval) and prophets. Some depictions identified the profusion of Christ’s ancestors by labels (or phylacteries) inscribed with their names. Joan Holladay (2019) discusses the fashions in and politics of depicting the ancestry of the powerful in the late medieval period. “contreroleur” verified account rolls and books by checking them against the second copy he kept. Deschamps, in his office of bailiff of Senlis (part of the king’s domain), complained of being subject to such financial officers of

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Laura Kendrick the crown. For other lyrics in which Deschamps criticised the growing predominance of financial officers, see Kendrick (2020). “Who was Naon?” “Officer of the salt tax and salt storehouses”. / “Who was Natham?” “Receiver of collected monies”. / “Everything is going topsyturvy”. // “Who was Boos the astonished?” / “Officer of tax collection”. / “Who was Eber the detested?” / “High official responsible for special tax revenues”. In the Vulgate Bible, the genealogy given in the Gospel of Luke moves backward in time from Jesus and names only the men in his lineage, but it introduces doubt about the truth or legitimacy of this history by observing at the outset (3.23-24) that Jesus “was thought to be the son of Joseph / who was [the son] of Heli / who was [the son] of Matthat …” (“putabatur filius Ioseph / qui fuit Heli / qui fuit Matthat …”). On the basis of several hitherto unpublished, anonymous examples, a case has been made that the pastourelle genre was becoming a locus for experimentation in the mid-fourteenth century, even before Deschamps: “Dialogue involving one or more shepherds and shepherdesses dominates…. However, in most aspects of the subject matter, dramatic situation, and form, the latter [Middle French] type notably diverges from its predecessor. The earlier pastourelles always treat of love; by contrast, the later works can embrace a wide variety of subject matters. Moreover, while in the majority of the Old French works of this type the narrator is an amorous adventurer, in the Middle French he is always simply an auditor/observer” (Kibler and Wimsatt, 1983, p. 28). “I want to ride through the fields, / for shepherds are only wretches / as long as they guard sheep. / Brown bread, wild plums and buds, / cheese and milk are their delight. / I urge that we take up arms: / When anyone sees men armed, everyone flees”. That the church shines with the examples of Roland, Charlemagne, and Arthur may be an allusion to their depictions in stained glass as well as to their warfare against infidels rather than other Christians. Deschamps did not invent the expression “Ja piet n’en puist il retourner”, which Froissart, in his Chronicles, reported peasants saying under their breath against the duke of Burgundy’s pillaging soldiers two years earlier, in 1386 (Luce et al., 1869–1975, vol. 13, pp. 77–78). The locations of Deschamps’s reported peasant discussions correspond to stages in the progress of the French military expedition to Gueldre as narrated by Froissart (vol. 15, pp. 111 et 174): the army was to gather at Chalons-en-Champagne (chanson royale 1009, “Chaalons”, l. 20), and it was via the bridge at Mouzay, about four kilometres south of Stenay (balade 336, “Setenay”, l. 2), that the king and his army crossed the Meuse river. For analysis of several more of Deschamps’s lyrics reporting peasant debates, see Kendrick (2005).

Works Cited Bakhtin, M. and Isowlsky, H., trans. (1968). Rabelais and his World. Boston: M.I.T. Press. Bakhtin, M., Emerson, C., and Holquist, M., eds. and trans. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination. Fours Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Polyphonic Effects in the Fixed-Form Verse 97 Boudet, J.-P. and Millet, H., eds. (1997). Eustache Deschamps en son temps. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Gabler, H.W., Steppe, W., and Melchior, C., eds. (1984). Ulysses: a Critical and Synoptic Edition. New York and London: Garland Publishing. Gibson, W.S. (2007–2008). Asinus ad lyram: from Boethius to Bruegel and Beyond. Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, 33(1–2), pp. 33–42. Holladay, J.A. (2019). Visualizing Ancestry in the High and Late Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kendrick, L. (2005). L’invention de l’opinion paysanne dans la poésie d’Eustache Deschamps. In: M. Lacassagne and T. Lassabatère, eds., Les « dictez vertueulx » d’Eustache Deschamps: forme poétique et discours engagé à la fin du Moyen Âge. Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, pp. 163–182. Kendrick, L. (forthcoming). Poésie et persuasion politique: le cas d’Eustache Deschamps. In: E. Anheim and P. Boucheron, eds., De Dante à Rubens: l’artiste engagé? (1300–1640). Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne. Kibler, W. and Wimsatt, J., eds. (1983). The Development of the Pastourelle in the Fourteenth Century: an Edition of Fifteen Poems with an Analysis. Medieval Studies, 45(1), pp. 22–78. Laidlaw, J. and Scollen-Jimack, C., eds. (2014). Eustache Deschamps, ca. 1340– 1404: anthologie thématique. Paris: Classiques Garnier. Laurie, I.S. (1998a). Eustache Deschamps: 1340(?) – 1404. In: D.M. SinnreichLevi, ed., Eustache Deschamps, French courtier-poet. New York: AMS Press, pp. 1–72. Laurie, I.S. (1998b). Verbal Polyphony in Deschamps. In: D.M. Sinnreich-Levi, ed., Eustache Deschamps, French courtier-poet. New York: AMS Press, pp. 97–107. Luce, S., Raynaud, G., Mirot, L. and A., eds. (1869–1975). Chroniques de Jean Froissart. 15 vols. Paris: Société de l’Histoire de France. Maw, D. (2006). Machaut and the “Critical” Phase of Medieval Polyphony. Music and Letters, 87(2), pp. 262–294. Montaiglon de, A., ed. (1854). Le livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry pour l’enseignement de ses filles. Paris: Jannet. Piaget, A., ed. (1898). Le chapel des fleurs de lis par Philippe de Vitri. Romania, 27(105), pp. 55–92. Poirion, D., ed. (1974). Le Roman de la Rose. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion. Queux de Saint Hilaire, Marquis de, and Raynaud, G., eds. (1876-1903). Œuvres complètes d’Eustache Deschamps. 11 vols. Paris: Firmin Didot. Ruhe, E., ed. (2000). Sydrac le philosophe. Le livre de la fontaine de toutes sciences. Wiesbaden: Reichert. Saulnier, V.L., ed. (1965). Pantagruel. Geneva: Droz. Sinnreich-Levi, D.M. (1998). The Feminist Voice of the Misogynist Poet: Deschamps’s Poems in Women’s Voices. In: D.M. Sinnreich-Levi, ed., Eustache Deschamps, French courtier-poet. New York: AMS Press, pp. 123–130. Van Praet, J.B.B., ed. (1836). Inventaire ou catalogue des livres de l ’ancienne bibliothèque du Louvre fait en 1373. Paris: de Bure frères. Valentini, A, ed. (2014). Le Livre des epistres du debat sus le Rommant de la Rose. Paris: Classiques Garnier.

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“Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse” Liminal Polyvocality in the Occitan Literary Use of Dante Paola M. Rodriguez

The literature in lingua d’oc, written by Occitan troubadours and collected in the chansonniers distributed and in circulation in the North of Italy during the late 1200s, is continually quoted and referenced in the works of Dante and effects a central and distinct influence on the development and eventual establishment of Dante’s ideas on literary exegesis and language. Evidence of this can be found in the continual reference to Occitan authors in De vulgari eloquenita as well as in the textual and organisational procedures, specifically the use of the prosimetrum, in the Vita nuova. Previous criticism has long highlighted the many ways in which Provençal troubadour literature surfaces in Dante’s works, from the use of similar topoi, to the adoption of Provençal lexicon relative to courtly love, to the quotation of troubadour poems. Such a continual adoption and authorial admiration and use presents with it a set of exegetical conditions that mark Dante’s evolution as an author and that give rise to a particular set of qualities in Dante’s textual structure. In the process of using Provençal literature within his work, Dante often adopts a multi-layered and polyvocal approach based on textual elements, especially material textuality and exegesis, that attempt to unite different voices across time and space. Multilingualism, the ability to use different languages, as well as different semiological systems such as Provençal topoi and the use of the Occitan language itself, is foregrounded as a necessary procedure for the creation of constellations of meaning. By tracing the influence of Provençal language and literature in Dante, the reader is also capable of reaching the heart of the rules, the foundation of Dante’s theory of exegesis and interpretation and, therefore, of Dante’s theory of a literary language. Furthermore, at the centre of Dante’s creation of a specific literary exegesis through the use of Provençal literature is the use of love, amore, and the topoi and lexicon associated with the idea of love in troubadour poetry. Dante’s use of the Occitan language, within the wider use of Provençal poetical topoi and themes, is well attested, not only in the De vulgari eloquentia, wherein sizable quotes of Provençal poetry are quoted, but also in such works as the poem Aï faux ris and quite prominently in DOI: 10.4324/9781003129837-6

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Liminal Polyvocality in Dante 99 Purgatorio canto 26, where none other than Arnaut Daniel is presented as the non plus ultra of the vernacular poets. A connection can be drawn from Dante’s invocation of the Provençal poetic tradition to the authorisation of Florentine Italian as a language of literary worth. The vernacular engraved onto the written page, as Daniel’s Occitan was undoubtedly experienced by Dante, holds an intrinsic place within the Dantean linguistic thought. As such, it is not an accident that it is precisely the Occitan language that is prominently presented within Dante’s otherwise predominantly, and knowingly so, Italian vernacular output. Within the Provençal influence, it is possible to separate different threads of references: the use of themes and topoi common in Provençal troubadour poetry (impossible love, yearning for the beloved, etc), poetic techniques (use of different languages particularly, but also the prosimetrical forms found in the vidas), and the use of Occitan language itself. In Ai faux ris, a rarity in the Dantean canon, the lyric subject, who seems to be a wandering troubadour, uses old French, Italian, and Latin in alternation, one language per line, to express a lover’s lament. Although whether langue d’oil is used instead of langue d’oc or whether it is a pastiche language has previously been disputed, the poem seems to indubitably follow in the path of such troubadours as Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, active in the north of Italy during the late 1200s, the period of Dante’s exile and most intense contact with troubadour literature, whose multilingual games included the Descort, a poem written in five languages (Edinger, 2010, p.90). The itinerant lifestyle was directly associated to the troubadour, whose art was inherently cosmopolitan, wandering from court to court and performing at the whim of royal patronage. Already, the contact with troubadour literature seems to foster in Dante a conception of language as a heterogeneous entity, as well as a wish to concentrate on, or attempt to achieve, a language of use and comprehension, one which acknowledges difference and attempts to speak to the largest public possible. A common practice of the time in central Italy was to collect within a single chansonnier different poems from both Occitan language and native Italian troubadours, forming connections both literary and linguistic between the Occitan, scuola siciliana and siculo-toscani, or Tuscan poets. The books that thus circulated were a pastiche themselves, containing both poem and exegetical response, either as in the vidas where the troubadour’s poems were encased with a prose introduction, or, as in the compiling of Northern Italian and Provençal poets within the chansonniers, showcased an exegetical response, echoing the other Provençal technique of the tenzone, letters in verse of response and answer between two poets, that replied in verse across time and space. Such native Italian “troubadours” as Percivalle Doria wrote in both Occitan and Sicilian, while Raimbaut de Vaqueiras from France was the first poet to set to paper a poem in the dialect of Genoa, the contrasto, or dialogue in verse, Domna tant vos ai preiada. Furthermore, Vaqueiras’ descort,

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Eras quan vey verdeyar, provides a multilingual blueprint for Dante’s Aï faux ris, presenting six different languages in one poem. Dante’s use of this Provençal poetic structure can be posited as one actively aware of the semiological possibilities in fragmentation and counterpoint. This has been analysed by Eszter Draskóczy (2017) as “horizontal”, different vernaculars mixed, and “verticle”, Latin mixed with other vernaculars, juxtaposition of languages, although I would argue that in Aï faux ris Latin is mixed on a par with the vernaculars, as one more vernacular, especially considering the fact that Dante, as others of his generation, experienced Latin not only as a written language, and thus of a higher category, but also as a sometime spoken and still quite used language. As Draskóczy remarks, the functionality, the need to communicate, is what is posited as the reason for using multiple languages. As in the De vulgari, the use of language is what ultimately characterises and gives meaning to the language itself and this can be seen in Dante’s handling of the Italian vernacular as a language that is of value because of its use among the public, which will acquire even more value when transplanted onto the written page. Dante’s reception of the Provençal tradition, already one steeped in multilingualism and in polyvocality, added yet another layer of linguistic play by introducing the use of the Italian vernacular as both avatar and inheritor. Furthermore, the interplay between spoken and written word, already present in Vaqueiras and Daniel, would provide an interesting and fertile locus of linguistic renovation for Dante. Jelena Todorović (2016) has previously and expertly outlined the connections and exchanges in central Italy during Dante’s poetic coming of age, connections that made language a necessarily multi-layered and allegorical/metaphorical entity, capable of signifying to an audience from diverse geographical and linguistic areas. To this can be added the interplay of living and dead voices, of the space between spoken and written, as evidenced in the use of Daniel’s voice in Purgatorio and in the dynamics of Ai faux ris, where the troubadour’s performance is committed to paper. Not only was the Provençal troubadour’s art one of constant motion to and from diverse courts, it was also, necessarily, a multilingual one, playing off and on the material signifier as well as a multimedial one. In Aï faux ris, Dante’s adoption of troubadour writing practices reflects certain essential and recurring ideas of language use found in other works, particularly the De vulgari. If indeed, as Furio Brugnolo (1983) notes, the poem was written during Dante’s period of exile from Florence, the use of the Provençal topos of the spurned and inconsolable lover seems to be used in a metaphorical or layered way – “significato nascosto”, or hidden meaning – in order to express Dante’s personal condition of spurned citizen of Florence, the disdainful lady. This type of “linguistic artifice”, the use of previous topoi for a different and present reason, allows Dante to revive previously existing texts, adapting them to present circumstances and playing on and with the material foundation, the

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Liminal Polyvocality in Dante 101 written transmission, of the text. The material presence of the troubadour chansonniers, both their use of language and their commonplaces (the disdainful lady, the inconsolable lover, the use of a particular lexicon), are particularly important in the case of Dante’s use of troubadour literature since it is in their material and written form that they were undoubtedly known by him. The material, then, is adopted and adapted by Dante in a twofold process: An acknowledgement of difference – difference of language but also difference of temporal-spatial circumstances – and an acceptance and unification of said differences, a transcendence of difference that nevertheless cannot and does not negate them. As Daniel Heller-Roazen suggests, Dante seems to emphasise difference, or alterity, in order to essentialise, to work off of the deconstruction of a text and, in consequence, of a language, in order to create a new construction, “que la langue est non seulement porteuse et expression d’altérité, mais qu’elle est à la fois faite et défaite par les altérités, qui la décomposent au moment même de sa composition”1 (Heller-Roazen, 2003, p. 80). By uniting the pieces cobbled from previous troubadours, received most certainly in written and collected form in the chansonniers, Dante creates a new poem by using previously existing texts in a subversive and personal way. The use of different languages is added onto the use of Occitan poetical conventions, highlighting the wish to communicate particularly in Dante’s use of the envoi: Cançon, or poez aler por tot li monde, nanque locutus sum in lingua trina, ut gravis mea spina se sacca per lo mondo, e ciaschun la senta: forse n’avrà pietà chi me tormenta.2 (Brugnolo, 1983, pp. 35-78) The use of rhetorical figures reminiscent of Occitan poetry is enforced with the use of different languages to create an aesthetic of communication, of constant re-use of materiality. Such an aesthetic contains much that recalls the acceptance of materiality as vehicle for transcendence found in La vita nuova, a work deeply tied to Dante’s Provençal exegesis. The urgency of communication in the use of multiple languages, the better to announce the lover’s lament, and the use of an envoi, “cançon, or poez aler por tot li monde / nanque locutus sum in lingua trina” (“song, now you are able to go through the entire world/ for you are spoken in three languages”), further links this poem to the way in which Provençal troubadour poetry is used in La vita nuova. As in Aï faux ris, La vita nuova uses the phenomenological procedures of troubadour courtly love as a semiotical generator wherein the material of courtly love, its themes and vocabulary, are re-used and adapted, given new life while retaining their form. The beginning of the Vita nuova shows explicitly this renovation from within through the unification of events past

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and present. As Todorović and Gilda Caiti-Russo have highlighted, in Dante’s La vita nuova the refashioning of the Occitan genres of the vidas and razos allows Dante’s single narrative voice to acquire two different layers, both poet and commentator (Caiti-Russo, 2016, p. 176). Aided by the prosimetrical form, Dante presents past poems couched within a commentary provided by the present Dante, who looks back at his previous writings, providing an interpretation for the reader. The activity of the vidas and razos, both short prose texts that explained the poet’s life and the theme of a particular poem respectively, in the chansonniers was an exegetical and interpretative one wherein a different scribe/commentator, most likely Uc de Saint Circ, would explain the circumstances of poetical creation and/or the life of the poet. Dante takes this a step further by having himself comment on his own poems, a circumstance that reflects the aesthetic of material heterogeneity providing a single, essential meaning as in the multilingual lover’s lament. This is further reflected in his opening statement: In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria dinanzi a la quale si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica la quale dice: Incipit vita nova. Sotto la quale rubrica io trovo scritte le parole le quali è mio intendimento d’assemplare in questo libello; se non tutte, almeno la loro sentenza.3 (Dante, 1995, p. 23) As Caiti-Russo remarks, Dante’s vocabulary in this passage reflects the activity of the scriptoria (Caiti-Russo, 2016, p. 176), of the workshops where the chansonniers were made, the libro de la mia memoria, the assemplare or gathering of the words into a book that will eventually be able to be interpreted and from which a sentenza, or learning/meaning, will remain in the reader’s mind. Out of the union of past and present, of creation and commentary, a liminal vocality will be created, aided by the written page, from which a transcendent sentenza will live on. In this perspective, the repetition allowed by materiality in Dante’s procedure, the recalling of past events expressed in a form gathered from previously existing texts, opens a path for liminality and interpretation, for the possibility not only of redemption but also of transcendence. The very tools of writing, the page and the book, are emphasised as the necessary loci from whence the act of transcendent re-interpretation is developed. Central to this process of material redemption and liminal transcendence through interpretation is the concept of love, represented in La vita nuova by the words dolcezza and pietá. As previously seen in the poem Aï faux ris, the troubadour themes of love proved a particularly fertile ground from which Dante could build his exegetical/interpretative procedure in which the material and heterogeneous are capable of providing transcendence. The themes of courtly love are aided by such devices as repetition, as in the recollection of the past, and the use of messengers, such as Beatrice in

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Liminal Polyvocality in Dante 103 La vita nuova, and the emphasis on communication, seen already in the multilingual troubadour imitation of Aï faux ris. The ability to interpret and create an exegesis, to repeat a previously existing form, is an integral part of Dante’s conception of language as an instrument of use. Caiti-Russo remarks on the image of the beloved: In La vita nuova this place is held by Beatrice, who eats her lover’s heart as being a borrowing from the vida of Guillem de Cabestaing, once again revealing Dante’s expert ability to adapt and use a sign without giving up the past uses and history of the sign. The very action of eating the lover’s heart, its physicality and sense of restructured materiality, further emphasises the aesthetic of repurposing the written text. The use of such a potent love allegory, with the underlying meaning and association to the impossible love of Cabestaing, allows for continual interaction between its place in La vita nuova and its previous existence in Cabestaing’s vida. In both cases, a past life is remembered and repurposed, the temporal void being filled by the written, and thus reflected, exegesis. The teleological drive forward is continually refreshed by the backward glance at the previously existing text. The constellation of meaning sustained by Dante through the use of Provençal troubadour borrowings sustains and refuses to negate all previous semiotic existences, allowing them to exist and interact with the meaning assigned to them by Dante. In this way, Dante sustains the model of vernacular poetry inherited from the troubadours – the platonic love for a faraway beloved – in order to enact, to produce, the exegetical reading necessary for the transcendence of the material. Indeed, without the vernacular materiality itself, without the use of the previous troubadour texts, it would be impossible for Dante to build his conception of exegetical transcendence. It is precisely the jagged and interrupted quality of the reception of the written word that allows Dante to fully exploit the bodily movement and presence of the embodied word. Testament to such concern with the encasement of the word can be seen in both Inferno and Purgatorio, particularly so in the case of Dante’s encounter with Francesca and Arnaut Daniel, characters that are intensely and actively imbued with the Provençal love lyric tradition. One, Francesca, is a Florentine inhabitant of the romance, a genre taken up by the Northern French trouvères under the heavy influence of the Occitan troubadours, while the other was the seminal representative of Occitan literature in the Dantean cosmos. In both cases, the question of material communication – and its relationship to the teleological – lie at the crux of Dante’s response to the Occitan literary influence. Dante’s materiality, his bodily presence amongst the disembodied, is continually invoked in the Commedia, and particularly so before the encounters with Francesca and Daniel. Francesca immediately highlights his condition as a living being visiting the realm of the dead, “O animal grazïoso e benigno / che visitando vai”, while in the Purgatorio canto 26 the spirits immediately note his carnality, “coliu non par corpo fittizio”.

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In both cases, it is Dante’s condition as still human, still carnal, that will ultimately allow both Francesca’s and, in the Daniel canto, Guinizzelli’s redemption by embodying and re-interpreting their stories, by making a disembodied and unchained voice into a written text of purpose and fertility. The images of the spirits wafting in the wind, in both Inferno 5 and Purgatorio 26, further enhance the metaphysical movement of communication as one that moves from airy abstractness into material meaning. As in the re-use and adaptation of Provençal material in the case of the La vita nuova, the interrupted voice and its translation onto the material body of Dante creates a linguistic locus where the opposing voices are allowed to exist in counterpoint to each other, where the history of those without materiality is redeemed and revived by its interaction with the carnal. The figure of Beatrice, the faraway beloved, completely incarnates the use of Occitan troubadour love material effected by Dante, being a figure marked by the transcendence of the material that, nevertheless, achieves immortality precisely because of her materiality. Beatrice responds to the figure of the “donna angelicata”, the angelical woman, described as seeming to not be of this world, “ella non parea figliuola d’uomo mortale ma di Deo” (“she did not seem to be born of a mortal but of God”). The effects of Beatrice are described as giving “beatitudine”, her “saluto”, or greeting, capable of saving the beloved’s soul. In this sense, Beatrice seems to be a messenger similar to Virgil in La Divina Commedia whose figure guides Dante towards transcendence, a force that embraces and fills the void between earthly and divine. The words “nobiltà”, nobility, “dolcezza”, sweetness, and “gentilezza”, a term close in meaning to good breeding or well educated, are deeply connected to Beatrice in La vita nuova, further enhancing the interactive and social qualities of Beatrice; the material presence of Beatrice is both redeemed and given value by the inherently relationary qualities that said presence engenders – its use, then, gives Beatrice’s presence its value. Barbara Kuhn remarks on the figure of Beatrice’s metaphysical role in La vita nuova, one directly related to her description as a being of another world, an angel/messenger, a force capable of connecting the beyond with the mortal world. The concept of dolcezza, according to Kuhn, is intimately linked with the angelical and the angelical language, the language described by Dante in De vulgari eloquentia as one that has no need for words, the perfect language (Kuhn, 2015, p.14). The love inspired by Beatrice, then, allows Dante to go beyond, beyond the confines of time but also beyond the confines of earthly life. Such an ability, however, is carried out and through the use of earthly language; love in La vita nuova operates through and by the interaction of one being with another and said interaction is necessarily one deeply connected to language. The thought of love makes the narrator speak, “tutti li miei pensier parlan d’amor / e hanno in lor sì gran varietate” (“all my thoughts speak of love / and have great variety amongst themselves”), creating a heterogeneous stream of linguistic

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Liminal Polyvocality in Dante 105 expression. Once again, it is precisely the human and heterogeneous that needs to exist in order for the act of transcendence to occur and therein lies the novità that Dante signals in his “libello”. By accepting and taking on the description of the unreachable beloved and the theme of unrequited love, Dante lays the foundation for a poetry based on action and reaction, for a poetry based not on the faraway, but in the here and now, continually renewing itself by its reaction and its dissolution of temporal and spatial boundaries. The poesia di lode, poetry of praise, has often been singled out by previous criticism, particularly Teodolinda Barolini as well as Kuhn, as being the lynchpin to the exegetical language ideas exposed in La vita nuova. Within the poetry of praise, love becomes a system of exchange wherein the signs read by the lover are interpreted and an exegesis is created, wherein the recollection of value and meaning allows for the lover to be transformed. This use of love as a process wherein one receives and interprets signs can be seen in Donne ch’avete: “I’ vo’ con voi de la mia donna dire, / non perch’io creda sua lauda finire / ma ragionar per isfogar la mente” (“I wish to speak to you of my beloved / not because I believe I am able to completely praise her / but in order to speak and so to calm my mind”). Love is received by Dante, who in turn must relate it to others, to “coloro che sono gentili”, to those who are noble, and will undoubtedly understand and be able to interpret the “beatitudine” of Dante’s message. The web of communication allows for the signs of love to be continually interpreted and renewed; its effect fed by the gaps inherent in human communication. Beatrice is described as “maraviglia ne l’atto che procede”, a marvel in the action, and the effect or the action that Beatrice has caused is emphasised as that which makes Beatrice a marvel, “maraviglia”. The supernatural, then, is a direct consequence of what occurs in the natural world, the purpose to which Dante’s love is put, his ability to praise and provide an exegesis for others of his love experience, is that which will allow for constant renewal and immortality. Infinity, the dissolution of temporal predicaments, can be achieved through the web of voices and semiotic interaction set forth in the Occitan imitation of the La vita nuova. The interweaving of interpretations and the communicative urgency of the amatorial transcendence achieves, paradoxically, a dissolution of boundaries through heterogeneity and multiple semiotic layers, a process that will continue in the instances of Occitan presence in La Divina Commedia. In the fifth canto of Inferno, Dante presents with full force the themes of courtly troubadour love that effect so much meaning in La vita nuova. The phenomenology of courtly love and the ideas surrounding dolcezza and pietà, seen in the Vita Nuova, are foregrounded prominently in the fifth canto where, once again, they will be used to outline exegetical structures of transcendence and to create the multi-layered meaning and constellations already noted in Dante’s use of Occitan material. As Kuhn remarks, the idea of courtly love espoused by Dante and represented by

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Beatrice is intimately related to the concept of dolcezza and the “language of angels”. In both of these concepts Dante seems to lay out a metaphysical structure wherein the materiality of Occitan courtly love is capable of transcending and going beyond the mortal and physical by the angelical language’s liminal openness to exegesis and therefore renewal. The “sweetness” of angelic communication is the direct result of its ability to create a web of connection, by its deeply social and human effect that allows the mere mortal to continually refine and better itself and thus reach, or at least be allowed a glimpse, of eternity. The fifth canto shows a polyvocal web of communication that allows the figures of Paolo and Francesca to express their respective situation and emotion in the first person and where Dante openly expresses grief at the fate of a sinner, perhaps one of the few instances in the Inferno where deep pietà is shown to a sinner. The exchange of communication between the two lovers and Dante immediately presents a locus of communication and interpretation, a space wherein exegesis can occur. The canto begins with Dante’s entrance into the circle where those who were unable to control their excessive passions, “che la ragion sommettono al talento”, “those who submitted reason to passion”, must suffer winds which force them to move continually, “la bufera infernale che mai non resta”, “the infernal gale that never stops”. The entire canto is suffused with descriptions and actions which highlight auditory sensations and the act of listening and speaking. Upon entering, Dante hears the “dolenti note”, the lamenting sounds which physically affect him, “molto pianto mi percuote” (“much weeping shakes me”), seemingly presenting the effect sounds can have upon the listener. That Paolo and Francesca are located among those who were unable to have ragione, unable to temper their emotions, allows Dante to set an open path for the exposition of previous concerns surrounding courtly love. Their description as a pair of doves, “quali colombe dal disio chiamate / con l’ali alzate e ferme al dolce nido” (“as doves called from their leisure / with raised wings to the sweet nest”), and the use of “dolce” in conjunction with their description highlights their qualities as figures of exegesis and liminality. Their description calls to mind the descriptions of Beatrice in La vita nuova, where the materiality of their presence is tinged by the liminal and the possibility of transcendent communication. Like Beatrice, the lovers, notwithstanding their fallen status – which Beatrice is never given – offer Dante the possibility of renewal and exegetical possibility. Furthermore, the lovers are used, similarly to Beatrice, in order to put forth Dante’s ideas regarding love as a speech act, of love as the instigator of language with a purpose. The repetition of “amor” three times, “amor ch’al cor gentil” (“love to the noble heart”), with reference to the stilnuovo of Guinizzelli, “amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona” (“love who forgives no lover’s love”), with an emphasis on the sound in the alliteration suggesting change and renewal in the repetition, and finally “amor condusse noi ad una morte” (“love that led us both”) (Francesca and

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Liminal Polyvocality in Dante 107 Paolo) to one death, with the suggestion of the end of a cycle as well as transcendence, emphasises the putting forth of a linguistic structure that reaches for the beyond through the heterogeneous urgency of communication. This metaphysical purpose is further enforced by the narration of Francesca wherein the loose and purposeless reading of a book of courtly romance leads to the final act of perdition: “noi leggevamo un giorno per diletto / di Lancialotto come amor lo strinse / soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto” (“we were reading one day for pleasure / of Lancelot and how love overcame him / we were alone and without any suspicion”). The lack of purpose in the lover’s reading allows for all to go awry, the process of exegesis is stunted and cannot produce the seeds of further communication: “Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse / quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avanti” (“Galahad was the book and who wrote it / that day we did not continue our reading”). That Francesca is allowed to narrate the story of the lover’s downfall is both a signal of the web of communication effected in the fifth canto and the act of salvation that transforms the purposeless reading into a speech act, into a structure of transcendence. The presence of courtly love in the fifth canto presents clearly the interaction allowed by materiality wherein what was lost is regained and renewed by the exegetical reading. “Il libro Galeotto” that caused the downfall of the lovers is also the material constellation that allowed Francesca to interact and communicate with Dante. Dante’s pietà, caused by the condition of lost grace by two characters who are noble and perhaps deserve better, is the foundation upon which the communicative interaction is based. Said interaction opens the space for the exegetic action to occur, eventually leading to the beatitudine of Paradiso. Once again, the polyvocality of heterogeneous sources is precisely what allows for the angelic language of the beyond to be created, the constant renewal of the transmission of information creating liminal spaces wherein the abstract and eternal are glimpsed. In this sense, reason is borne from the fragmented communication between mortal entities that necessitates an interactive exegetical conversation. The confusion of the mortal linguistic system, where the separate function of its parts is retained while allowing each to communicate amongst themselves, is portrayed in the fifth canto in the interaction between Dante and Francesca, standing in for the material of courtly literature, which allows Dante to accept the essence whilst allowing him to renew tradition from within. Francesca’s fall unleashes Dante’s pity and allows him to extract the vital heart of the courtly tradition, her recounting of her story and Dante’s interpretation of it effecting the transcendental extraction and recuperation. The situation of fragmented interaction and the recollection of previous written material reflects the view of language found in De vulgari eloquentia wherein Dante undertakes a systematic analysis and eventual ordering of the vernacular. The vernacular, portrayed as an entity that needs organization and help, is posited as capable of perfection by

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adopting the poetic traditions of its illustrious predecessors, namely Latin and Provençal, and putting them to a higher use, in this case the unity of speech necessary for the inhabitants of the Italian peninsula to understand each other. The vernacular’s very fragmentation and elusiveness, found in Dante’s description of the vernacular as a panther, carries within it the liminality necessary for its continual re-invention and existence. Furthermore, Dante highlights its use, its existence in the mouths and in the streets, and its place as a tool of communication as directly tied to both its liminality and fragmentation. Sarah Kay notes that Dante knowingly highlights the foreignness of the Occitan language in its opposition to the Italian vernacular: “they are palpably transformed from native (or near native) utterances to fragments of an alien idiom: such linguistic divergence sharpens awareness that quotation implies relation between different subjects” (Kay, 2013, p. 161). The need to communicate posits a relationary and analogical connective structure, like Dante’s insistence in conversing and understanding the motives and the story of Francesca, shows the need for a purposeful language as well as the wish to communicate through language. Furthermore, the characters speak in the first person, with their own voices and own language. Francesca speaks Italian and Daniel Occitan. Here, again, is the metaphysic of the counterpoint, spirit/flesh and first person/Dante’s narration, posited as the instrument of redemption and completion. As Kay points out, the very speech of Daniel, “Ieu sui Arnaut / que plor e vau cantan”: “I am Arnaut who goes singing and weeping”, has its locus in the vidas, where Arnaut’s lyric “I” becomes a disembodied “I”, a semiological entity unto itself capable of being understood by Dante in its abstractness without having to understand each word, one who speaks in his original language but whose words become constellations of different meaning, locuses of interaction, organised and re-cast by Dante. The interaction within and between the self (Dante) and the other creates a relational aesthetic of multiple layers within a single language or word, the polyvocality into a single overarching narrative that uses and re-uses the previous material shell to further the essential spirit, the sentenzia, and thus, reach the ultimate meaning. At the end of the fifth canto, Dante seems to reflect on this unity of purpose between spirit and body by emphasising the way in which his poetic person expresses pity, “e caddi come corpo morto cade” (“falling like a dead body to the ground”). As in the previous repeated use of “amore”, linguistic repetition is used by Dante, this time auditive repetition, in order to foreground the necessity of sustaining the material shell in order to allow for the creation of eternal and renewed meaning. The alliteration, “caddi come corpo morto cade”, seems to reflect the physicality of the event, the corporality of the pity expressed. The sound, directly connected to the material expression of language, highlights the downward motion, the fall towards the earth of Dante, expressing it materially at the same time as in the narration. The fall is precipitated out of pietà,

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Liminal Polyvocality in Dante 109 for while Francesca has told her tale, Paolo cries, “piangea”, and this causes such pity in Dante that his senses fail him, and he falls to earth, “sì che di pietade / io venni men così com’io morisse” (“as from pity / I fainted as if dead”). The phenomenological aspects of this exchange are explicitly foregrounded, the material expression the vehicle from which Dante’s pietà will open the path for the liminal inter-exegesis between the lovers and Dante. In following Beatrice, Dante has indeed created a new ontology, one which allows spirit and body to interact, allowing the material of communication and representation to continually renew itself. That this renewal is signalled by a fall to earth is particularly significant as it reflects the structure of transformation and re-construction so necessary for Dante. The fall of the body, like the loss of language in the De vulgari, creates the analogical movement whereby the renewal of dialogue will occur, and balance will be continually sustained. The unity of spirit and body, or the will to create unity, effects a breakdown, troubles and inquires a structure. This, in turn, leads to the something “new” built precisely on the analogical and metaphorical use of the fragmented and re-organised structure, an interpretation which bends and moves, building continually on sinking entities. Indeed, the Occitan troubadour manuscripts have, by this point, been fully interpreted and their exegesis, the writing committed to paper by Dante, has allowed for the lingua degli angeli to take flight in the pair of lovers/doves.

Notes 1 That language is not only the carrier and expression of alterity, but that it is also at the same time made and destroyed by the differences which decompose it at the same time as its composition. 2 Song, now you are able to go through the entire world / for you are spoken in three languages / in order that my terrible pain / may be known throughout the world and all may hear it / perhaps the one who torments me shall pity me. Translation by Paola M. Rodriguez. Poem quoted from Furio Brugnolo. “Note sulla canzone trilingue Aï faux ris attribuita a Dante” in Retorica e critica litteraria, ed. L. Ritter Santini, E. Raimondi, Il Mulino: Bologna, 1983, pp. 35–78. 3 In that part of the book of my memory where it is possible to read, there is a heading which says: Here begins a new life. Under this heading I find written the words which is my wish to gather in this little book; if not all, then at least their teaching. Extract from La Vita Nuova. ed. Kenneth McKenzie. NY: D.C Heath & Co. Publishers.

Works Cited Alighieri, D. and Chiavacci Leonardi, A.M., ed. (1991). La Divina Commedia. Milan: Mondadori. Alighieri, D. and Botterill, S., ed. and trans. (1996). De vulgari eloquentia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Alighieri, D., Cervigni, D.S., and Vasta, E., trans. (1995). Vita Nuova. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Barolini, T. and Lansing, R., trans. (2014). Dante’s Lyric Poetry: Poems of Youth and of the Vita Nuova. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Brugnolo, F. (1983). Note sulla canzone trilingue Aï faux ris attribuita a Dante. In: L. Ritter Santini and E. Raimondi, eds., Retorica e critica litteraria. Bologna: Il Mulino, pp. 35–78. Caiti-Russo, G. (2016). Des Chansonniers Occitans Au Livre De La Mémoire: La « Vida » Nuova de Dante. Revue Des Langues Romanes, CXX(1), pp. 175–187. Draskóczy, E. (2017). “Locutus sum in lingua trina”: Aspects of using different languages in Dante. In: P.N.A. Hanna and S. Levente, eds., The Poetics of Multilingualism – La Poétique Du Plurilinguisme. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publisher, pp. 41–60. Edinger, M.G.B. (2010). La Polysémie De La Parole: Décodage De La Lyrique Multilingue En Langues Romanes Chez Raimbaut De Vaqueiras Et Dante Alighieri. Master’s Thesis. University of British Columbia. Heller-Roazen, D. (2003).Des Altérités De La Langue. Plurilinguismes Poétiques Au Moyen Âge. Littérature 130, pp. 75–96. Kay, S. (2013). Parrots and Nightingales: Troubadour Quotations and the Development of European Poetry. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kuhn, B. (2015). L’“angiola Giovanissima” e Il Linguaggio Degli Angeli: La Musica Della E Nella Vita Nova. Dante e L’arte 2, pp.11–42. Todorović, J. (2016). Dante the Scribe and Dante the Commentator II: The Old Occitan Poetry Collections and the Vita Nova. In: J. Todorović, Dante and the Dynamics of Textual Exchange: Authorship, Manuscript Culture, and the Making of the ‘Vita Nova’. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 102–134.

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Novelistic Perspectivism in Béroul’s Roman de Tristan Teodoro Patera

The ideological status of the Roman de Tristan by Béroul has been the subject of lively debate. Scholars have continually identified in this novel a “paradox”: In contrast with Christian morality and with the rules of feudal system, the adulterous lovers Tristan and Isolde have the support of the narrator, of the Cornish people, and even of God.1 In this chapter I go into more detail on this view. My purpose is to show that Béroul’s romance can appear to be a paradoxical text only when we observe it from a modern and rationalistic perspective. Where would the reading of this text lead us if, instead of inquiring into the ideology of the author, we focused on characters and their voices – that is, on what only mattered to a medieval reader or audience? In other words, what would happen if we read the manuscript Fr. 2171 of the National Library of France just as a story and an aesthetic object rather than as the vestige of the culture of an ancient society? The turn to affect has involved a reappraisal of fictional characters in literary criticism and theory (cf. Anker and Felski, 2017). The anthropological and ethical implications of the identification of readers with literary characters were stressed.2 Until recently, both traditional philological practices and various forms of post-structuralist criticism interested in literary representations of social and cultural domination concentrated less on texts than on contexts. According to these genres of critique, texts express or hide surreptitiously a view that is tied to a specific historical, social, or political framework. Literary texts reflect something. There is thus the risk of forgetting that, before all else, literary texts narrate and seduce.3 They do so through their characters and their power of identification. Secondly, there is the risk of forgetting that narration and seduction entail flexible psychological patterns that are quite inconsistent with rigid, monolithic ideas/ideologies. Literature is indeed the place par excellence of flexibility (cf. Bottiroli, 2013). This renewed interest in character and identification invites us to investigate their archaeology by analysing the way in which these notions were involved in the beginning of the history of European novels. In this respect, Béroul’s Roman de Tristan is of the greatest interest. Indeed, this romance does not simply present itself as a tale inspired by the legend of DOI: 10.4324/9781003129837-7

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Tristan and Isolde, but it has in a way a metanarrative nature. It goes into dialogue with the myth to which it refers and stimulates reflection on the power of storytelling. The romance by Béroul can be read as a discourse on the power of seduction that emanates from the legend of Tristan and Isolde over the narrator, the protagonists themselves, and the ideal reader. Considering this “erotics of art” (cf. Sontag, 2001 [1966]; Iser, 1989) can help to look at the complex issue of the ideological position of Béroul in a different light.

Perspectivism: Telling One’s Own Story At the outset, it should be noted that subjectivism is a constituent element of Béroul’s work. Characters manipulate events and render the notion of truth elusive. Thomas d’Angleterre’s version of the Tristan legend is antithetical to this kind of subjectivism. In Thomas’s version courtoise, the psychological investigation of the characters assumes a leading role, to the detriment of the account of events. However, events, even though secondary to psychological inquiry and restricted to a small number of episodes, have an ontological status. To the contrary, a deconstruction of the idea of the real event occurs in Béroul’s version. Scholars have repeatedly detected this paradigm and stressed the rhetorical ability of Tristan and Isolde to manipulate language in order to replace reality with an image of reality, and thus deny their adulterous relationship.4 And yet, subjectivism in Béroul’s Tristan is more sophisticated than a rhetorical deconstruction of the truth. It is not just a matter of manipulating events through rhetorical art. Subjectivism is in this romance a heuristic tool, a means of knowing the world and entering into communication with otherness. To illustrate this, I will focus on the first episode of Béroul’s manuscript, Le rendez-vous épié. This episode is particularly representative of Béroul’s poetics. Tristan and Isolde are going to meet secretly in the garden. The dwarf Frocin has informed King Mark about the secret meeting, and Mark is spying on the scene from the top of a tree. However, Tristan and Isolde can detect the presence of the king because his shape is reflected in a water stream. The two lovers thus manage to subvert Mark’s beliefs. The first readable line of the episode reads “Que nul senblant de rien en face” (“to give the impression of having noticed nothing”).5 That refers to Isolde’s attempt to conceal her true state of mind (she was excited to see Tristan; she is now nervous because she is aware that the king is in the tree). The term senblant is repeated a few lines below: “Or fait senblant con s’ele plore” (“She then pretended to cry”). The repetition stresses the strategy of appearance-making that characterises the whole scene. Isolde reproaches Tristan for having called her in middle of the night, which makes her position particularly compromising, as the three barons felons led the king to suspect that she and his nephew have a relationship. The

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Novelistic Perspectivism in Béroul 113 queen shows off not only her acting skills by pretending to be deeply grieved, but also some remarkable rhetorical skills: Par Deu, qui l’air fist et la mer, ne me mandez nule foiz mais. Je vos di bien, Tristan, a fais, certes, je n’i vendroie mie. Li rois pense que par folie, sire Tristan, vos aie amé; mais Dex plevis ma loiauté, qui sor mon cors mete flaele, s’onques fors cil qui m’ot pucele out m’amistié encor nul jor!6 (ll. 16-25) It is, of course, Tristan to whom Isolde lost her virginity. Isolde deconstructed, in the space of twenty-five lines, two different realities through two different kinds of performance. In the first case, it is a matter of creating an appearance (the senblant) that cancels reality and masks a mood. Isolde is happy to see Tristan, but as she perceives Mark’s reflection in the water, she plays the desperate falsely accused wife. In the second case, however, the means of deconstructing reality is not the creation of an image but the pure logic of discourse. Isolde does not lie, but she utters a rigorous truth; she admits her love for the man to whom she has lost her virginity. In the first case we have a reversal of truth, while the second is rather an issue of the impossibility of truth. As Marie-Louise Ollier argued, in this romance, truth does not entail the coincidence of appearance and essence, but of the correctness of a reasoning; truth is a matter of persuasion, a desire to convince (Ollier, 1987, p. 309). Truth is partial and subjective. And yet, that is not the only form of subjectivism figuring in the text. The struggle for persuasion against a mute recipient – Mark in the tree, the pure target of a rhetorical performance that aims to manipulate his conscience – shows the two protagonists in a strongly egotistic attitude. The concern of each is to create a positive self-image in the eyes of Mark and to regain his affection. In a kind of self-expansion, both Tristan and Isolde are committed to ennoble their own portraits: Je quidai jadis que ma mere amast mot les parenz mon pere; et disoit ce, que ja mollier n’en avroit ja son seignor chier qui les parenz n’en amereit. Certes, bien sai que voir diset. Sire, mot t’ai por lui amé. E j’en ai tot perdu son gré.7 (ll. 73-80)

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The fleeting reference to the mother figure evokes the background of Isolde, a queen with a refined education who is now defamed by the accusations of the barons. After a few lines, Tristan addresses her by “fille de roi, franche, cortoise” (“Ah, Yseut, you, the daughter of a King, noble, well-bred, and loyal”; ll. 101-102), and, still later, Isolde complains that “Tote sui sole en ceste terre” (“I am totally alone in this land”; l. 174). Isolde gives a glimpse of the destiny of a queen torn from her land to satisfy the desire of a king. On the other hand, Tristan enhances his chivalrous value. He claims his superiority over the barons, who show a lack of courage and readiness to defend the kingdom of his uncle. Tristan asks Isolde to intercede with King Mark for him, so that he can take back his equipment and look for another lord to serve. Tristan is aware that anyone would be honoured to welcome him: Bien sai n’i osez mais remaindre; Fors a vos ne sai a qui plaindre. Bien sai que mot me het li rois. Engagiez est tot mon hernois. Car le me faites delivrer: si m’en fuirai, n’i os ester. Bien sai que j’ai si grant prooise, par tote terre ou sol adoise bien sai que u monde n’a cort, s’i vois, li sires ne m’avot.8 (ll. 201-210) Béroul gives the floor to the characters. Characters express themselves from their singular points of view. It is possible to discern the difference between the general approach of this scene, which aims at the deconstruction of the truth in the eyes of Mark, and the two last statements of Tristan and Isolde, evoking a model that they feel they embody, the model of the franche and courtoise queen and that of the brave knight. In this second part of the episode, the persuasive strategy operates through self-storytelling. This narrative performance should not be confused with the rhetorical deconstruction of reality contemplated in the previous lines (ll. 22-25). The analysis of this performance can reveal the deep ethical-poetic substratum of the polyphonic dynamic in the novel. It is not about manipulation of signs; it is not about confusing appearance and essence. The voices of Tristan and Isolde recreate here a legitimate coincidence between the characters and their ideal models. They tell who they feel they are, affirming an identity that cannot find space in the grim Cornish court. The assertion of not guilty, which was based on a logical-linguistic contortion, is replaced by the claim of an authority and a prestige that transcends the pettiness of Mark’s court:

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Novelistic Perspectivism in Béroul 115 Se li felon de cest’enor, por qui jadis vos conbatistes o le Morhout quant l’oceïstes, li font acroire (ce me senble) que nos amors jostent ensemble, sire, vos n’en avez talent, ne je, par Deu omnipotent, n’ai corage de drüerie qui tort a nule vilanie.9 (ll. 26-34) When Isolde denies the adulterous relationship, she evokes one of the great undertakings of Tristan, the killing of Morholt. Béroul’s text is rich in references to past events, and among all, this is the most common. If at first Isolde points out the value of Tristan, then she places herself at the centre of a mythical portrait: Mot vos estut mal endurer de la plaie que vos preïstes en la batalle que feïstes o mon oncle. Je vos gari.10 (ll. 50-53) Tristan insists on the episode with Morholt and on the difference between him and the barons: Mot les vi ja taisant et muz, quant li Morhot fu ça venuz, ou nen i out uns d’eus tot sous qui osast prendre ses adous. Mot vi mon oncle iluec pensis, mex vosist estre mort que vis. Por s’onor croistre m’en armai, combati m’en, si l’en chaçai.11 (ll. 135-142) Here as elsewhere, Tristan and Isolde sketch a mythical past that gives them specific heroic traits. Memory and analectic references hold a key position in Béroul’s text and in the construction of characters.12 Memory works in this romance in two different ways. On the one hand, it recalls parts of the legend that are not present in the romance (at least in the only manuscript that we have), while on the other hand it recalls some moments of the story that have been related even at a short distance, such as the case of The rendez-vous épié. Each character participating in that event reformulates the episode by emphasising some nuances rather than

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others. Once the two lovers leave, Mark, left alone and retracing the episode, regrets having believed the dwarf and confesses to the deep emotion that the story raised in him. Mark is convinced he grasped the truth: Or puis je bien enfin savoir, se feüst voir, ceste asenblee ne feüst pas issi finee. S’il s’amasent de fol’amor, ci avoient asez leisor, bien les veïse entrebaisier. Ges ai oï si gramoier, or sai je bien n’en ont corage. Porqoi cro je si fort outrage? Ce poise moi, si m’en repent: mot est fous qui croit tote gent.13 (ll. 298-308) The king offers his wife and nephew even more than they asked for. He leaves indeed the lovers “la chanbre tot a lor voloir” (l. 297), which proves the success of Tristan and Isolde’s performance. The continuation of the story clearly shows that subjectivism is not just a matter of rhetorical manipulation of reality. Indeed, Isolde goes back to the palace and sums up what happened in the garden to her governess Brangain, who has found the queen quite shocked and asks her for the reasons: Ele respont: “Bele magistre, bien doi estre pensive et tristre. Brengain, ne vos vel pas mentir: ne sai qui hui nos vaut traïr, mais li rois Marc estoit en l’arbre, ou li perrons estait de marbre. Je vi son onbre en la fontaine. Dex me fist parler premeraine. Onques de ce que je i quis n’i out mot dit, ce vos plevis, mais mervellos conplaignement et mervellos gemissement. Gel blasmé que il me mandot, et il autretant me priout que l’acordase a mon seignor, qui, a grant tort, ert a error vers lui de moi; et je li dis que grant folie avoit requis, que je a lui mais ne vendroie ne ja au roi ne parleroie.

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Novelistic Perspectivism in Béroul 117 Ne sai que je plus racontasse. Conplainz i out une grant masse; onques li rois ne s’aperçut ne mon estre ne desconnut, partie me sui du tripot.14 (ll. 345-369) In her account, Isolde describes the events with enough precision, but the emotional disposition of the character gives a certain pathos to the story, while the scene of the garden highlights a purposeful and selfcontrolled queen. Isolde exaggerates somewhat the extent of her performance by insisting on the “mervellos complaignement et mervellos gemissement”, then reiterated in the sentence “conplainz i outune grant masse”. The rewriting of Isolde, which is a sign of the singular emotional universe of the character, creates a change from the comic tenor of the scene in the garden to a poetic perspective that aims to show an inner world. It seems to me that this change illustrates how, in this romance, repetition entails aesthetical-ethical implications of great importance. Tristan also tells the scene of the garden to his master Governal, but Tristan’s version of the episode is not provided in the text: Tristan ravoit tot raconté a son mestre com out ouvré. quant conter l’ot, Deu en mercie que plus n’i out fait o s’amie.15 (ll. 381-384) In the following meeting with Isolde, Mark once again calls up the scene in the garden. He insists on the deep emotional response that the exchange between his wife and his nephew has raised in him: Sire, estiez voc donc el pin? – Oïl, dame, par saint Martin. Onques n’i ot parole dite ge n’oïse, grant ne petite. Qant j’oï a Tristan retraire la batalle que li fis faire, pitié en oi, petit falli que de l’arbre jus ne chaï. Et quant je vos oï retraire le mal q’en mer li estut traire de la serpent dont le garistes, et le grans bien que li feïstes, et quant il vos requist quittance de ses gages, si oi pesance;

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The manipulation of the consciousness of Mark yields an outcome that goes far beyond the expectations of the two lovers. We can see that line 485 recalls the serpent, the dragon that terrorised Ireland and from which Tristan received a mortal wound. But in truth the scene of the garden included a specific reference only to the Morholt, which is probably the batalle that Mark recalls at line 480. From a philological point of view, this passage could be placed in the list of the numerous discrepancies that Béroul’s text presents (cf. Le Gentil, 19531954; Hasonet, 1961, pp. 503–533; Vàrvaro, 1963, 15ff; Saly, 1994, pp. 135–148; Raynaud de Lage, 1964; Paradisi, 2007). Yet, a different impression is given from a hermeneutical point of view concerning the interaction between the performances of the characters. Tristan and Isolde manipulated the consciousness of Mark to such an extent that, in Mark’s stream of consciousness, the image of the Morholt recalls the dragon, thus focusing on the two major feats of Tristan. Tristan is symbolised as a hero. Even more than Tristan and Isolde, Mark puts the two lovers on a transcendental level in a mythical world. Tristan is the one who kills monsters and liberates people, while Isolde is the one who heals his mortal wounds. Based on these considerations, we can now define more precisely the subjectivism in Béroul’s Tristan. Characters have in this novel the capacity to filter and refigure reality. This process works in two different directions. It is undeniable that the text represents a manipulation of the facts, a rejection of the reality of adultery. Tristan and Isolde forge this reality by means of rhetorical skill. Language does not follow the truth. Huchet noted that in Béroul’s Tristan, unlike Platonism and Patristics, the truth does not coincide with an essence but with a dialectic (Huchet, 1990, pp. 90–91). According to Huchet, the modernity of this novel derives precisely from a view of human language as affliction, from the awareness that humans comply with difficulty with the truth. According to Ollier, as we have seen above, the status of truth is opaque in this novel; truth is not about an objectively distinguishable and clearly referential utterance but falls within the desire to persuade (Ollier, 1987, p. 299). This scholar sees in this phenomenon a discovery of the twelfth century, which enhanced the value of fictional writing – its capacity to convey a multifaceted truth that one can utter only through a language “able to enunciate opposites” (Ibid., p. 316). Also, in the opinion of Howard Bloch, Béroul’s Tristan is a “novel of countless partial half-truths” and marks the rise of a “subjective vision” (Bloch, 1974, p. 81).

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Novelistic Perspectivism in Béroul 119 Indeed, the whole scene in the garden shows the performative truth that Tristan and Isolde reinvent in the eyes of Mark. I would call this trait deconstructionist subjectivism. The dislocation of the signs, their incapacity to grasp the object, and the rhetorical manipulation of reality are certainly some meaningful aspects of Béroul’s work. These aspects partake of the strategy of the ruse, which has been widely studied (cf. Blakeslee, 1984; Bonafin, 2000; Franceschini, 2001; Machta, 2010; Segre, 2006). In the comic game of reversal, Tristan and Isolde can always get away with it and avoid the traps of their enemies. However, as we have seen, this text hints at a more tenuous form of subjectivism. The same story is restaged from different perspectives. The multiple narrations bring out the singular voices of the characters, their particular points of view, and their emotional and cognitive positions on the events. In this case, the performance of the characters does not address either a deconstruction of the truth or a manipulation of the signs of reality by means of language. It is not about either a desire to persuade or a practical purpose. Béroul lets the reader see the internal movements of the characters, their way of filtering the world. In this respect, repetition has an esthetical-ethical function.17 The romance gives way to the representation of affects, and thus to the identification of the reader. At the same time, by virtue of this emotional and recontextualising repetition, the novel attains an internal cohesion despite its intrinsic dissemination. It seems to me that one should trace the modernity of Béroul’s Tristan in this romanesque perspectivism to more than an idea of elusive truth. It is the perspectivism that Mikhail Bakhtin considers to be a key factor in narrative art. For Bakhtin, the freedom of the hero is part of the design of the author. Bakhtin speaks of a “hero’s discourse about himself and his world” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 53). A novel can build a universe where various voices interweave. In the “architecture of the novel”, the hero constitutes a “centre of value”, an emotional and cognitive microcosm that elaborates the events through its particular “intonations”.18 These intonations enter into a relationship with those of the others. It is not a question of a relativism cancelling the idea of truth, but of a truth that is connoted as a process, as a dialectic of identity and alterity, as a floating architecture in which the reader cannot avoid floating.19

Narrative Conflicts Perspectivism allows characters to write their own story and to make them meet (collide) with the stories told by the other characters. This is not a matter of altering facts, but of imposing one’s own version. This struggle for the affirmation of one’s writing is particularly potent in the episode of La fleure de farine. The barons are sure that Tristan and Isolde are having an illicit relationship: “Qar bien savon de verité” (“now that we know for a fact”,

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l. 615). Mark does not know whether to believe them or not: “ne set qu’il die, sovre erre” (“at a loss for words he paced back and forth”, l. 612). The barons persuade him to ask the dwarf Frocin, a fortune-teller, to inquire into the relationship between his wife and his nephew. As was customary at the time, Tristan sleeps in the same room with the king and the queen: “Entre son lit e cel au roi avoit bien le lonc d’une lance” (“Between his bed and the king’s there was at least the length of a lance”; ll. 694–695). Frocin scatters some flour over the floor between the two beds, white space on which he wants to fix his (and the barons’) truth, the evidence of the guilt of the two lovers: “la flor la forme des pas tient” (“flour retains the shape of footprints”; l. 706). But Tristan, pretending to sleep, notices the dwarf’s stunt and, as soon as the dwarf and the king leave the room, jumps between the beds. A leg injury that Tristan sustained the day before opens again: Tristan se fu sus piez levez. Dex! Porqoi fut? Or escoutez! Les piez a joinz, esme, si saut, el lit le roi chaï de haut. Sa plaie escrive, forment saine; le sanc qui’en ist les dras ensaigne. La plaie saigne, ne la sent, qar trop a son delit entent. En plusors leus li sanc aüne. Li nains defors est. A la lune bien vit josté erent ensemble li dui amant. De joie en trenble, et dist au roi: «Se nes puez prendre ensemble, va, si me fai pendre.20 (ll. 727–740) The voice of the narrator is unquestionably biased: (Dehez ait il), conme boçuz.21 (l. 640) Dehé aient tuit cil devin! Qui porpensa tel felonie con fist cist nain, qui Deus maudie?22 (ll. 646–468) The narrator does not hesitate to accuse Isolde of lack of readiness: “Ha! Dex, que deul que la roïne / n’avot les dras du lit ostez!” (“In God’s name, how unfortunate that the queen did not remove the sheets from the bed!”; ll. 750-751). Removing the sheets would have meant not fixing the blood trails – that is, not writing the story of the barons and the dwarf.

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Novelistic Perspectivism in Béroul 121 However, the dwarf does not really get what he wanted. He does not get the footprints in the flour that “la forme des pas tient”, a sign that would have definitively written his side of the story. The dwarf obtains instead an ambiguous, liquid proof: On the one hand, Isolde with the bloody sheets, and on the other, Tristan with a bleeding injury. That is to say that truth is inferred, drawn out through an interpretation of the signs, but not in full view of the king and the barons. Tristan and Isolde are convicted and condemned to burning at the stake. Yet, they keep writing their story and, in a way, create a “reading community” around their story. Despite the evidence of guilt, Tristan continues to show strong arrogance and is willing to fight anyone who accuses him and the queen of adultery: Qar il n’a home en ta meson, se disoit ceste traïson que pris eüse drüerie o la roïne par folie, ne m’en trovast en chanp, armé.23 (ll. 799–803) Tristan, “héros démesuré, capable d’exploites insensés” (Szkilnik, 2009, p. 9), denies the evidence. He places himself and the queen in an indistinct space that seems to transcend the guilt-innocence dichotomous schema into which the barons want to force the two lovers. To what is all this confidence attributable? Several scholars have insisted on the good faith of the protagonists.24 In the interview with the hermit in the forest, Tristan and Isolde explain that their uncontrollable passion is due to the filter (ll. 1381-1386, 1409–1416). And yet, filter does not seem a sufficient reason. It should be noted that the incident of the filter is only mentioned in the episode of the hermit, who (besides God) is the only one to have knowledge of this event. Another aspect of Tristan and Isolde’s story is stressed much more than the filter and is the narrative node about which the protagonists manage to reach a broad consensus: Their mythical background that was repeatedly evoked in the episode of the garden. In the famous episode of the forest of Morois, Mark, sneaking up on the lovers sleeping together but with a sword separating their bodies, refers once again to the fight of Tristan against the Morholt: Et, quant vendra au departir, prendrai l’espee d’entre eus deus dont le Morhot fu del chief blos.25 (ll. 2036–2038) Once the effect of the filter is over, Tristan and Isolde repent and send a letter to Mark asking for forgiveness. The letter mentions the other

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enterprise of Tristan, the killing of the dragon that plagued Ireland. Thanks to this killing, Tristan could get Isolde’s hand in marriage for Mark: Rois, tu sez bien le mariage de la fille le roi d’Irlande. Par mer en fui jusqu’en Horlande, par ma proece la conquis, le grant serpent cresté ocis, par qoi ele me fu donee.26 (ll. 2556–2561) In fact, the letter, which a chaplain reads to Mark and his barons (l. 2552 ff.), involves a broader metadiegetic movement containing all of Tristan’s heroic career, from fighting against Morholt to more recent events. Once again, Tristan and Isolde tell the legend of Tristan and Isolde, the story of a mythical couple. From the perspective of the story of the mythical couple, the barons’ hostility is not attributable to adultery, but to an atavistic hatred of Tristan because of his heroic value. As was recalled in the scene of the garden, the barons, none of whom were able to raise their swords against the Morholt, do not want there to be close to Mark “home de son linage” (l. 125). If the two lovers insist on their mythical prehistory, the people-chorus, towards whom the identification of the listener-reader is conveyed, recognises the value of this “other story”: Ahi! Tristan, si grant dolors sera de vos, beaus chiers amis, qant si seroiz a destroit mis! Ha! Las, quel duel de vostre mort! Qant le Morhout prist ja ci port, qui ça venoit por nos enfanz, nos barons fist si tost taisanz que onques n’ot un si hardi qui s’en osast armer vers lui. Vos enpreïstes la batalle por nos trestoz de Cornoualle et oceïstes le Morhout. il vos navra d’un javelot, sire, dont tu deüs morir. Ja ne devrïon consentir que vostre cors fust ci destruit.27 (ll. 844–859) Tristan killed the Morholt, and he would have died without Isolde’s care. The voice of the people, grateful to Tristan for having freed them

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Novelistic Perspectivism in Béroul 123 from tyranny, claims for the two lovers the role of guarantor of the social fabric. Emmanuéle Baugartner has emphasised the importance of this “création d’un passé qui n’est pas vraiment resté à loisir ni rigoureusement inséré dans la chaîne des causes et des conséquences, mais qui surgit lorsqu’il en est besoin, d’un coup de baguette magique” (Baumgartner, 2001, p. 272). The memory of this past is a gesture that participates in the construction of the fictional character as a centre of value, an ethical, emotional, and cognitive position. In the movement of memory, the pechié of Tristan and Isolde is mitigated by their constant identification with a superior model that runs through the text. Tristan and Isolde live in their adultery, but at the same time they write a different story by drawing on the prestigious archetype that they embody. The text refers to another text; the two heroes are simultaneously here and elsewhere. Béroul’s romance is thus built on the gap between the model – in absentia – to which heroes refer and their unfortunate condition – in praesentia – in the Cornish court. The concept of deconstructed truth is not enough to explain the ethical status of the two heroes and the overall judgment given by the text on their conduct. Two truths coexist: Tristan and Isolde are guilty; they are not guilty. This coexistence is possible because there is a further truth that transcends the two others, the truth of myth, which is always far beyond the struggle of mutually exclusive opposites (cf. Campbell, 2004 [1949], p. 82). Béroul’s romance integrates myth not in the usual sense of rewriting or re-functionalising it, but rather placing myth at the heart of the text, creating a dialogue with it. Cornish people, a reflection of the ideal listener/reader, gather around the myth of Tristan and Isolde, recognising in that story a guarantee of community cohesion. The reference to a transcendent authority, of which the silent God is a sign, lends to the hero a hubris that puts them above any moral or social ideology. The contrast between the two truths, adultery or innocence, is overcome by the only truth that everybody – narrator, God, people, kings, and barons – recognise: Tristan killed the Morholt and the dragon of Ireland, and Isolde promptly saved him from a mortal wound. The two protagonists of Béroul’s Tristan impose themselves as storytellers and protagonists of another story. The truth of myth takes over from the immanent truth; this new truth can withstand the coexistence of contradictory assertions. The memory of the character who enacts his singular emotional point of view becomes the memory of the text, which duplicates itself. The reflexivity of the character involves the reflexivity of the text. Identity and textuality can only exist as re-writing of the self, as a dynamic refiguration. Through memory, Tristan and Isolde go beyond their sin – their pechié28 – without cancelling it; through memory as a formal strategy, the text goes beyond its punctual contents without cancelling them. The listener/reader is entrapped in this game.

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In his A la recherche d’une poétique médiévale, Eugéne Vinaver has brilliantly illustrated the mechanism of the playful coexistence of antithetical assertions typical of medieval poetry, to which he referred as “the torment of contradiction” (Vinaver, 1970, p. 195). Medieval poetry is alien to the rationalist view that will later impose itself in modernity. Medieval poetry rather inclines towards a polycentric movement aiming to incorporate opposites. According to Vinaver, medieval texts demand their listeners/readers not only use a “vertical memory”, which links subsequent actions, but also a “horizontal memory” – that is, the control of a “thematic context”, a system of themes and motifs that are always present in the linear chain of events. Medieval texts opt for a specular aesthetic that makes the listener-reader engage in a constant semantic permutation. There is no centre, there is no unity. This formal decentralisation involves an ideological decentralisation. Through this a-logical system of references, the text constantly reconfigures itself and lays the foundations for a possible peaceful coexistence among elements that would appear contradictory in a logical-rational-linear system (cf. ibid., pp. 74–85). Therefore, listening to and reading a medieval text comes with an experience of fluidification of semantic boundaries. This mechanism has much in common with the modes of the production of signification in the myth, in the sense in which this production is understood in Jungian psychology (cf. Vigna, 2010, p. 11). It is about a pre-dialectic way of thinking capable of composing the opposites, maintaining a relation between them. By virtue of an analogic, polycentric, and constantly reconfiguring logic, Béroul can approach the sin of Tristan and Isolde through the benevolence of God and of the narrator. Their sin is overlooked, even though it is not cancelled. This impossibility to signify univocally makes Béroul’s manuscript a novel that deserves less to be questioned about its ideology than about its ethics-poetics of flexibility.

Notes 1 “En effet le roman de Béroul cultive un paradoxe, sans en donner jamais de façon explicite la solution: ces deux héros manipulateurs, qui ont consommé régulièrement l’adultère, ne cessent même lorsqu’ils sont pris en flagrant délit, et conservent la sympathie du narrateur, du peuple, et de Dieu même” (Boutet, 2012, p. 16). See also Bertoluccci Pizzorusso 2001; Boutet 2017, pp. 417ff. 2 In France, the delayed translation of the well-known book by Martha Nussbaum Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Nussbaum, 2010) provoked different reactions. See “Après le bovarysme”, Acta fabula, mars 2012, vol. 13, n°3. URL: www.fabula.org/revue/sommaire6828.php 3 In Rita Felski’s terms, literary texts have a force of “attachment”. They “tie”, they “build”, they are “world-making”. See Felski, 2015; 2017. 4 Scholars focused on the famous scene of the escondit of Isolde. See Liborio 1981; Sargent-Baur 1984; Ollier 1987, Huchet 1990, pp. 89ff; Lacy 1999; Boutet 2012.

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Novelistic Perspectivism in Béroul 125 5 Reference editions: Poirion 1995 for the old French text; Stewart 1992 for the English translation. 6 “In the name of God, creator of sky and sea, never send for me again. I can tell you, Tristan, and I stress the point, that I would certainly not appear. Tristan, my lord, the king thinks that I have loved you as a mistress would. But I swear my faithfulness before God and let Him place a scourge upon me if anyone, save the man who took my maidenhead, ever had my love but a single day!” 7 “In my childhood my feeling was that my mother greatly loved my father’s kinsfolk, and her view was that no wife could ever truly love her husband without loving his kith and kin. I am sure that what she said was right. My lord, for his sake my love for you was strong, yet, by so loving, I have completely lost his favour”. 8 “I am well aware that you dare not stay here further, but to whom else but you can I make my plea, since I know the king hates me so? All my armour and weapons are held as a surety. Please see that they are released, and I shall flee this land, for no longer day I stay. I am confident that I enjoy such great renown in all lands under the sun; I am confident that there is no court in the world whose lord would not do me honour, if I went there”. 9 “Though the wicked barons of this realm, whose place you took to fight and slay the Morholt, lead him to think – or so it sees – that we are in love united, my lord, such is not your intention. And for my own part – I swear by God Almighty – I have no desire for an illicit love which would result in my disgrace”. 10 “You had to endure much pain from the wound you received in the battle you fought with my uncle. I it was who cured you”. 11 “I saw them once keep very quiet when the Morholt came to these shores; there wasn’t a single one of them here who dared to take up his arms. I saw my uncle in a state of great turmoil then, he would rather have been dead than alive. I took up my arms to enhance his reputation, fought the Morholt and drove him from this land”. 12 On the function of memory in Béroul’s romance, see Illingworth 1985; Pitts 1987; Saly 1994; Chiron and Pomel 1996; Maddox 2001. 13 “At last I know for certain that If the tales had been true, this meeting of theirs would never have ended as it did. Had their love for each other been adulterous, the opportunity was certainly there, and I would surely have seen them kissing. But the lament I heard was such that now I know such is far from their mind. Whatever made me believe such a wild accusation? I am deeply sorry for it and repent. A man who places his trust in everybody is a fool”. 14 “She replied: “My dear governess, well might I be downcast and dejected; Brangain, I will hide nothing from you: I do not Know who it was who sought to betray us today, but King Mark was up in that tree where the marble slab is; I saw his shadow in the spring. God saw to it that I was the first to speak. I assure you, never a single word was said about what I had gone for there; instead there was much lamenting and great wailing. I reproved him for sending for me, and in turn implored me to reconcile him with my lord, who most wrongly had misconstrued his relationship with me, but I told him that his request was the height of folly, that never again would I come to him and never speak on this matter with the king. What else is there to say? Well, there was a lot of lamenting. The king never noticed a thing, nor did he read my mind; I got away with it”.

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15 “In turn Tristan had been telling his companion everything he had done. When he had finished, Governal thanked God that Tristan had gone no further with his beloved”. 16 “My lord, were you in the pine tree, then?” “I was, my lady, I swear by St Martin! Never was there a word spoken, trivial or otherwise, than I did not hear. When I heard Tristan recount the battle I had him fight, I took pity on him, and all but fell out of the tree. And when I heard him tell of the pain he had to bear at sea from the wound inflicted by the dragon, which you cured, and all the kindness you did him, and when he asked you to redeem his pledges, it made my heart heavy with grief; you refused to redeem them, and neither of you would approach the other. Up there in the tree I was so seized with compassion, all I could do was smile to myself”. 17 In his book consecrated to Béroul’s work, the Italian philologist Alberto Vàrvaro emphasised the importance of the association of the force of feelings and repetitions (Vàrvaro, 1963, p. 58). 18 “The centre of value in the world of aesthetic vision is not man in general, man in his abstraction and in relation to abstract values such as good and evil, but rather a concrete human being, a concrete individual, a mortal human being. All spatial and temporal moments as well as all values such as good and evil, beauty and ugliness, truth and falsehood, become concrete moments only when they are correlated with concrete values in the architectonics of the concrete individual as a mortal human” (Ponzio, 2015, pp. 142–143). On the notion of “intonation”, see Sini, 2011, p. 106. 19 “The truth [pravda] of the event is not the truth that is self-identical and self-equivalent in its content [istina], but is the rightful and unique position of every participant – the truth [pravda] of each participant’s actual, concrete ought”. (Bakhtin, 1999, p. 46). 20 “Tristan got to his feet. God, why was this? Listen and I shall tell you! Putting his feet together he judged the distance, leapt, and came down heavily on the king’s bed. His wound opened and bled profusely, and the blood stained the sheets. Though his wound bled, he could not feel it, so bent he was on his pleasure. The blood gathered into several pools. The dwarf, outside, could clearly see by the moon light that the two lovers were Lying together. He quivered with joy at the sight and said to the king: “If you can’t catch them together now, then hang me by the neck”. 21 “And the hunchback (a curse be upon him!)” 22 “A curse upon all magicians of his ilk! Could anyone have ever devised such wicked plans as did this dwarf? May God damn him!” 23 “For there is no man in your household, if he made this treacherous accusation that I had had formed an adulterous relationship with the queen, who would not for this find me in the field, armed for battle”. 24 On the influence of the reflexion of Peter Abelard on the topic of intention, see Hunt 1977; Payen 1978; Sargent-Baur 1988; Bennett 1996. 25 “And when it is time to take my leave, I shall take the sword from between the two of them, the one that cut off the Morhold’s head”. 26 “King, you know well the circumstances surrounding your marriage with the King of Ireland’s daughter. I went across the sea to Ireland, and won her by my valour, by killing the great crested dragon, and for this she was given to me”.

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Novelistic Perspectivism in Béroul 127 27 “Alas, Tristan, what great grieving there will be for you, fair and dear friend, when you are brought to this pass. Alas, what sorrowing there will be over your death! When the Morholt came here to these shores to take away our children, he soon had our barons fall silent; there was not a single one brave enough to dare take up arms against him. You it was who undertook the battle for all of us in the land of Cornwall and slayed the Morholt. He gave you a wound with his javelin, my lord, which was almost the death of you. Never should we allow you to be put to death now”. 28 On the meaning of this word in Béroul’s Tristan, see Caulkins 1972.

Works Cited Anderson, A., Toril, M., and Felski, R. (2019). Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies. Trios. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press. Anker, E.S. and Felski, R., eds. (2017). Critique and Postcritique. Durham: Duke University Press. Bakhtin, M. and Emerson, C., ed. and trans. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bakhtin, M., Holquist, M., ed., and Liapunov, V., trans. (1999). Toward A Philosophy Of The Act. Austin: University of Texas Press. Baumgartner, E. (2001). ‘A la cour, il y avait trois barons’ (Béroul, v. 581). Medioevo Romanzo 25, pp. 269–283. Bennett, P.E. (1996). Jugement de Dieu: parole d’auteur. Béroul et le débat sur l’intentionnalité au XIIe siècle. In: D. Buschinger, W. Spiewok, and G. ReinekeVerlag, eds., Tristan und Isolde: unvergängliches Thema der Weltkultur. XXX. Jahrestagung des Arbeitskreises “Deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters”. Wodan, 57(3): Tagesbände und Sammelschriften, 33; Greifswalder Beiträge zum Mittelalter, 44, pp. 13–25. Béroul, and Stewart G., ed. (1992). The Romance of Tristan. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Bertolucci Pizzorusso, V. (2001). Béroul e il suo Tristan. Medioevo Romanzo, 25, pp. 211–220. Blakeslee, M.R. (1984). Tristan the Trickster in the Old French Poems. Cultura Neolatina, 44, pp. 167–190. Bloch, R.H. (1974). Tristan, the Myth of the State and the Language of the Self. Yale French Studies, 51, pp. 61–81. Bonafin, M. (2000). Le maschere del trickster (Tristano e Renart). L’immagine riflessa, 9, pp. 181–196. Bottiroli, G. (2013). La ragione flessibile: modi d’essere e stili di pensiero. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. Boutet, D. (2012). Vérité et responsabilité. Textuel, 66, pp. 11–23. Boutet, D. (2017). Poétiques médiévales de l’entre-deux, ou le désir d’ambiguité. Paris: Champion. Campbell, J. (2004). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Caulkins, J.H. (1972). The Meaning of ‘pechié’ in the Roman of Tristan by Béroul. Romance Note, 13, pp. 545–549. Chiron, P. and Pomel, F. (1996). Le jeu de la réversibilité dans le Tristan de Béroul. In: D. Buschinger and W. Spiewok, eds., Tristan Und Isolde. Unvergängliches Thema Der Weltkultur. Greifswald: Reineke-Verlag, pp. 83–94.

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Felski, R. (2015). The Limits of Critique. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Felski, R. (2017). Postcritical Reading. American Book Review, 38(5), pp. 4–5. Franceschini, B. (2001). Ephémeros. Per un’analisi dei caratteri nel Tristano di Thomas e di Béroul. Cultura Neolatina, 61, pp. 275–299. Hanoset, M. (1961). Unité ou dualité du Tristan de Béroul?. Le Moyen Âge, 67, pp. 503–533. Huchet, J.-C. (1990). Tristan et le sang de l’écriture. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Hunt, T. (1977). Abelardian Ethic and Béroul ’s Tristan. Romania, 98, pp. 501–540. Illingworth, R.N. (1985). Thematic Duplication in Béroul’s Tristran. Zeitschrift Für Romanische Philologie, 101, pp. 12–27. Iser, W. (1989). Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Antropology. London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lacy, N.J. (1999). Where the Truth Lies: Fact and Belief in Béroul’s Tristran. Romance Philology, 52(2), pp. 1–10. Le Gentil, P. (1954). La légende de Tristan vue par Béroul et Thomas: essai d’interprétation. Berkeley, University of California Press. Liborio, M. (1981). La complicità dell’arte: il Tristano di Béroul. In: C. Sibona, ed., Strategie di manipolazione. Semiotica, psicanalisi, antropologia, scienza delle comunicazioni. Ravenna: Longo, pp. 79–85. Machta, I. (2010). Poétique de la ruse dans les récits tristaniens français du XIIe siècle. Paris: Champion. Maddox, D. (2001). L’auto-réécriture béroulienne et ses fonctions. Medioevo Romanzo, 25, pp. 181–190. Nussbaum, M.C. (2010). La connaissance de l ’amour: essais sur la philosophie et la littérature. Paris: Cerf. Ollier, M.-L. (1987). Le statut de la vérité et du mensonge dans le Tristan de Béroul. In: D. Buschinger, ed., Tristan et Iseut, mythe européen et mondial. Göppingen: Kümmerle, pp. 98–118. Paradisi, G. (2007). La costruzione del racconto nel Tristan di Béroul. In: A.P. Fukass, ed., Parole e temi del romanzo medievale. Rome: Viella, pp. 39–66. Payen, J.-C. (1978). Ordre moral et subversion politique dans le Tristan de Béroul. In Mélanges de littérature du moyen âge au XXe siècle: offerts à Jeanne Lods. Paris: Collection de l’École Normale Supérieure de Jeunes Filles, pp. 473–484. Pitts, B.A. (1987). Writing and Remembering in Béroul’s Roman de Tristan: The Role of Ogrin in the Second Hermit Episode. Tristania, 13, pp. 1–18. Poirion, D., ed. (1995). Béroul, Le roman de Tristan. In: C. Marchello Nizia, ed., Tristan et Yseut: les premières versions européennes. Paris: Gallimard. Ponzio, A. (2015). Philology and Philosophy in Mikhail Bakhtin. Philology, 1(1), pp. 121–150. Raynaud de Lage, G. (1964). Faut-il attribuer à Béroul tout le Tristan? Le Moyen Âge, 70, pp. 33–38. Saly, A. (1994). Images récurrentes dans le Tristan de Béroul. In: A. Sally, ed., Structure et Sens. Études Arthuriennes. Aix-en-Provence: Centre universitaire d’études et de recherches médiévales d’Aix, pp. 135–148. Sargent-Baur, B. (1984). Truth, Half-Truth, Untruth: Béroul’s Telling of the Tristan Story. In: L.A. Arrathoon, ed., The Craft of Fiction. Essays in Medieval Poetics. Rochester: Solaris Press, pp. 393–421.

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Novelistic Perspectivism in Béroul 129 Sargent-Baur, B. (1988). La dimension morale dans le Roman de Tristan de Béroul. Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale, 31(121), pp. 49–56. Segre, C. (2006). Personaggi, analisi del racconto e comicità nel romanzo di Tristano. In: P.L. Gradin, ed., Los caminos del personaje en la narrativa medieval. Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo, pp. 3–18. Sini, S. (2011). Michail Bachtin: una critica del pensiero dialogico. Rome: Carocci. Sontag, S. (2001). Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. New York: Picador. Szkilnik, M. (2009). Avant-propos. In: L. Harf-Lancner, et al., eds., Des Tristan en vers au Tristan en prose. Paris: Champion, pp. 7–15. Vàrvaro, A. (1963). Il Roman de Tristan di Béroul. Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo. Vigna, F., ed. (2010). Jung e le immagini. Bergamo: Moretti & Vitali. Vinaver, E. (1970). A La Recherche d’une Poétique Médiévale. Paris: Nizet.

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Textual Voices in Compilation Reading the Polyphony of Medieval Manuscripts Amy Heneveld

Medieval writers and compilers participated in a tradition that was at the foundation of their creative activity and yet often goes unmentioned when we consider medieval texts today: The experience of vocal polyphony. The particulars of this practice varied, but polyphony was probably widely experienced during prayer and worship in religious houses, which were also houses of learning. Layered voices carried medieval intellectuals through their days, weaving a background of sound that supported their physical and mental endeavours. Much like many of the oral singing traditions still alive today, medieval polyphony probably included improvisation and inspired a sensory awareness that influenced how people perceived and represented the world around them. Listeners were bathed in polyphonic vibrations. Buildings were built to accommodate polyphonic resonance and books were written to transmit the more refined forms of this art. Yet like the paint that has vanished from the grey stone walls of our now silent cathedrals, we forget polyphony was there at all. The fact that we often forget the prevalence of polyphony in the Middle Ages – we cannot, after all, hear or even fully imagine the medieval soundscape – might explain why we sometimes find it difficult to understand the complexity of medieval literature. In particular, medieval compilation manuscripts often defy analysis and have only relatively recently entered into our attempts to understand medieval literary culture. In this chapter, I propose that polyphony, as a concept and a practice that was alive during the medieval period, proves useful for understanding how medieval books were composed. I will argue that though the voices of a medieval book did not ring out at the same time, their simultaneous resonance in the mind of the reader created meaning. In order to capture this meaning, we may need to retrain our inner ears and eyes to perceive polyphonically.

From “Novele” to the Modern: Polyphony as Practice In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, “newness” was a trope of medieval French song, suggesting that poets then, as now, often composed DOI: 10.4324/9781003129837-8

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Textual Voices in Compilation 131 with the idea that they were creating something new. Expressed by the reoccurring phrase “chanson novele”, the creative heart of the poet, like the equally prevalent “fleur novele” that heralds spring, captured the renewal of creative inspiration and activity. One might ponder, however, what “new” signifies in this context, given that poetic composition was understood as a process of recombination and rearrangement more than that of imaginative creation. The inventio at the heart of the medieval creative process did not mean the same thing as “invention” does today. Both songs and romances privileged citation, such that writing involved the act of compilation: Songs were grafted into stories and these were compiled into diverse anthologies, our first vernacular books. The Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole, for example, described by the author Jean Renart in the prologue as a “novele chose”, typifies the newness that medieval works propose, offering a romance that includes lyrical insertions woven into the fabric of the story. Modern editions of medieval texts and songs often miss the “newness” of this approach entirely, however, because of the ways they tend to neutralise the innovative moves of the writers they publish. Today’s editors and publishers publish trouvère lyrics, for example, in catalogue form, taking them out of their diverse medieval contexts. They rarely present longer medieval texts as they existed in the Middle Ages, when they were often transmitted as part of longer collections containing anywhere from five to 300 works. Jean Renart’s Roman de la Rose (2000) that I just mentioned, for example, only appears in a manuscript from Picardie now at the Vatican, in between two of Chrétien de Troyes’s romances and Raoul de Houdenc’s Meraugis de Portlesguez. Sadly, this means that today’s readers have no access to medieval books as literary objects with their own complex realities, as artefacts of their own modernity. What was their modernity? Brigitte Cazelles defines modernity as being about one’s perspective: “La modernité est donc avant tout affaire de perspective, face à un pouvoir créateur conçu ici en termes de reproduction – aux dires des exégètes médiévaux – et là en termes d’innovations”1 (1990, pp. 9–10). Modernity in general might best be described as a vantage point: one of standing in the present while looking at the past and moving towards the future. Walter Benjamin’s description of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus comes to mind (1991), in which the writer sees this new angel as the Angel of History, being blown backwards by the storm of progress, facing the destruction of the past while unwittingly entering a violent future. This modern angel stares fixedly out of the image at the viewer, unable to close its wings, “abolishing the past behind it”. Indeed, twentieth-century modernity is defined by a break from the past, a break imagined since the Renaissance in terms of human progress: “In the Western tradition’s clichéd narratives of intellectual and cultural progress, the modern begins in the Renaissance, which in turn reanimates the intellectual and literary heritages of the ancient world as horizons of our own” (Holsinger, 2005, p. 13). In contrast, medieval writers, rather

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than seeking a break from the past, privileged continuity and connection with it. In the same volume of essays on medieval modernity as Cazelles’s article, Brian Stock defines tradition as firmly rooted in the present of geographical place and time. Tradition and modernity, far from being “mutually exclusive”, become “mutually interdependent” (Stock, 1990, p. 38). Modernity can then be a return to, or an interpretation of, tradition. “Tradition is said to be created by the consciousness of modernity, much in the way that oral culture is set in relief by writing. But in the Middle Ages, modernity was more often than not the creation of tradition” (Stock, 1990, p. 40). Cazelles summarises this vantage point as one of being “rooted in the past”, thanks to the art of memory. Like the return of spring in medieval song, this consistent renewal of tradition, through the mind’s recalling and redacting, is cyclical, allowing modernity to happen over and over again. If we have lost sense of this notion of modernity it is no wonder. The breakneck speed of change endemic to a post-industrial society causes us to forget the possibility of a modernity that resembles a composed and balanced moment of being in the present rather than an inevitable, destructive, and blind backwards flight. For modernity to be the creation of tradition, cultural traditions must be solidly rooted in the present and grounded in geographical location, something that, since the industrial revolution, has been in decline. Yet certain practices seem to cling on, defying progress and calling us back to rooted, creative living in the present. Traditional polyphonic singing is such a practice, perhaps precisely because it encompasses a diverse set of creative acts (listening, remembering, improvising, to name a few) that allow for both renewal and continuity. Polyphony, as a process, defined by Eric Sachs most broadly as “simultaneous otherness” (Sachs, 1977, p. 177), stands at the crossroads of tradition and innovation because it carries the past into a present moment of creation. Intermingling voices bring a learned tradition to an instance of exchanged sound, creating meaning at that interstice of the modern where the traditional and the new collide. If medieval writings and the books that contain them could be read with this polyphonic model in mind, their innovative, vital character might be easier to grasp.

Polyphony as Thought Process Nobody has a good idea of where and when polyphonic music was born, though it exists in a wide array of traditional cultures around the world. The word is traditionally used to describe the multipart musical traditions of Western medieval music, both improvised and written, though it did not exist in English before the eighteenth century, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Some musicologists speak of polyphony as beginning at the same time as its written musical notation, while others acknowledge the fact that polyphonic music, as a practice, existed before

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Textual Voices in Compilation 133 its written expression, as a form of performance, ritual, and prayer. As a more general term, its usefulness today is now disputed in favour of other terms such as “multipart”, “polyvocal”, or even “multilinear”, though it can be broadly defined as “the performance and perception of more than one note at a time” (Sachs, 1977, p. 175). The term “multipart music”, which encompasses polyphony, is interesting because its meaning includes the important cultural, theoretical, and aesthetic aspects of singing practices that interest us here. According to the International Council for Traditional Music’s study group, multipart music is a cognitive process that involves the creation not just of multiple musical lines played or sung together, but also of a culture of music making. Multipart music in this sense might also include the role of the listener, though the focus is generally on the roles of the performers themselves (Macchiarella, 2011, p. 9). Medieval writers tend to describe the experience of multipart singing from the listeners’ or the composer’s point of view (Weiss and Taruskin, 2008, pp. 50–53). Keeping in mind this sense of multipart music as a dialogic exchange that is inclusive of both sides, I will use the word “polyphony” throughout this article since it is one of the organising principles of this book and because it is generally used to describe the multipart music of the historical period I am interested in. Noting that polyphony is hard to define, Pärtlas refers to it as a “sound outcome” or a “sound object” that is often contrasted with monophony: “Polyphony and harmony (homophony) are very often opposed as two forms of ‘simultaneous otherness’, which differ by the prevalence of ‘horizontal’ or ‘vertical’ musical thinking” (Pärtlas, 2016, p. 47). The opposition here between two types of thinking points to a potential distinction between medieval perceptions of polyphony and the ways we perceive it today, leading to our current tendency to see polyphony as antithetical to harmony. Medieval listeners, in contrast, appreciated the vertical perception of multiplicity that created an aesthetically pleasing sensation of unity in diversity. Indeed, for medieval listeners, polyphony seems to have meant harmony: Harmonia est diversarum vocum apta coadunatio. Harmony was defined as separate voices aptly united into one. This medieval sensitivity to unity in diversity offers us an understanding of harmony as comprehensive of difference, bound together by the energy of concordia, or love. The idea of concord as the binding force that gathers together the “simultaneous otherness” of the world helps us grasp how medieval writers and composers understood the harmony they were making through their use of diversity. Andrew Hicks, in his discussion of how medieval thinkers thought about harmony, defines concord broadly not only as the binding force of love but also as a cognitive process: Cosmic concord is “not a ‘real’ feature of certain worldly phenomena but an epistemological avenue toward the understanding of worldly realities through the anagogic function of analogy” (Hicks, 2017, p. 19). In other words, concord serves as a tool for witnessing the higher levels of unity

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present in the world. For the Middle Ages, the polyphonic was intrinsically harmonious because it brought together multiple currents, reflecting the divine, complex unity found in Nature, as well as the beauty and the diversity of the cosmos. It is interesting that John Scotus Erigena, writing his De divisione naturae in the ninth century, makes the leap not from the unity of the cosmos to polyphony, but from the consonance of a musical line to the unified will behind creation: Just as a melody consists of notes of different character and pitch, which show considerable disagreement when they are heard individually and separately, but provide a certain natural charm when they are combined in one or another of the modes, in accordance with definite and reasoned principles of musical science; so the universe, in accordance with the uniform will of the creator, is welded into one harmonious whole from the different subdivisions of nature, which disagree with each other when they are examined individually. (Weiss and Taruskin, 2008, p. 60) This passage is striking for how it represents the change in perception of the listener who witnesses the sound of notes both separately and simultaneously and recognises that if in the first instance they seem disparate, in the second they resonate harmoniously and pleasingly. In the second half of the passage, the “uniform will of the creator” replaces the listener, who must imagine how to bring the individual disparities into unity, miming the creative, unifying act of the universe. Polyphony helped medieval thinkers imagine a diverse yet unified world, while reflecting the complex universe they were a part of. Polyphonic practices changed over time and in the twelfth century, a passage in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus disparages the excessive use of polyphony, comparing overenthusiastic singers to sirens. He writes: “the ears are almost completely divested of their critical power, and the intellect, which pleasurableness of so much sweetness has caressed insensate, is impotent to judge the merits of the things heard” (Weiss and Taruskin, 2008, p. 62). The argument here is that taking too much pleasure in music leads away from devotion. John of Salisbury opposes the pleasurable sensations of the body to the mental faculties of discernment. Weiss and Taruskin cite this passage as an example of the lack of sensitivity to sound expressed by certain members of the clergy, but the passage ought not to be read as a complete disparagement of the beauty of music or polyphony, nor its spiritual usefulness. It is taken from Chapter 6 of the Policraticus, which is entitled Music, Instruments, Melodies, Their Enjoyment and Proper Use, and which begins with the following passage: One should not slander music by charging it with being an ally of the frivolities of courtiers, although many frivolous individuals

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Textual Voices in Compilation 135 endeavour by its help to advance their own interests… Because of the great power exercised by it, its many forms, and the harmonies that serve it, it embraces the universe; that is to say, it reconciles the clashing and dissonant relations of all that exists and of all that is thought and expressed in words by a sort of ever varying but still harmonious law derived from its own symmetry. By it the phenomena of the heavens are ruled and the activities of the world and men are governed. Its instruments form and fashion conduct and, by a kind of miracle of nature, clothe with melodies and colourful forms of rhymes and measures the tone of the voice, whether expressed in words or not, and adorn them as with a robe of beauty. (I.6) As we can see, John of Salisbury in fact praises music as relevant to our comprehension of the unity of the universe. What he criticises further on in his text are those who use music only for pleasure and forget the spiritual relevance of their endeavours. Music’s capacity to “embrace the universe” suggests that polyphony was not to be excluded from appropriate, measured vocal expression. On the contrary, its use could ideally represent the unity of creation. Furthermore, he goes on to say that “the soul consists of musical harmonies”. He refers to Plato’s Timaeus in which the soul is created from a mixture of the Same and the Different and of Being, in different ratios, referred to as intervals, before the creation of time [35a-b]. This suggests that the harmonies referred to, of the soul and of the music that mirrors it, are not linear, but indeed, creative mixtures in perpetual movement, holding the material, both the body and the world, in much the same way that polyphony can hold a multiplicity of sounds in one moment of consonance, given the right intervals and measured carefulness. This passage in the Timaeus helps explain John of Salisbury’s insistence on remembering the cosmic forces one is conjuring when one sings vocal polyphony, on remembering the intellect when engaged in vocal play. The role of the intellect in the creation of medieval polyphony also links it to a tradition of book learning. Writing about twelfth- and thirteenthcentury Notre-Dame polyphony, when cantors and scribes were in close contact, Vasco Zara notes that the use of sequences “finds its roots” in the commentary tradition of the gloss: The polyphonic adding of the organa, which only expands the sacred text’s syllables, can thus be brought back to the same source: the melodic improvisation of the added voices does not modify the initial melodic profile, but rather expands it; it is a commentary. Each syllable-sound is ornamented, explored, “exploded”, but at the same time it is unchangeable, as it is the foundation of the piece, and also because it is the word of God. It should then be noted that the superimposition is not vertical, but horizontal: it is the superimposition

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Here, Zara describes the ways that medieval singers and composers horizontally expanded musical notes and text in order to remember them or accentuate their meaning, much as commentary expands upon a passage of text. Though Zara stresses the importance of the horizontal relationship between expanded lines and the rhythmic patterns required for memorisation, the vertical alignment of polyphony is never far off. The notes expanded upon sound against a supportive lower voice that accentuates the divine message that remains unchanged, much as a commentary engages with different levels of the divine word through interpretation. This accords with the medieval hermeneutic tradition that sought to determine the four levels of meaning behind divine teachings: historia (the literal sense), allegoria (the interior or hidden meaning), tropologia (the moral sense), and anagogia (the prophetic) (De Lubac 1961; cited in Robertson, 2011, p. 18). Later simplified to the first three, these levels of exegesis were interdependent, aligned both vertically, tending towards the spiritual, and horizontally through time, corresponding to human development. These parallels between the activities of textual commentary and composition and those of musical arrangement and ornamentation suggest that polyphony may have been the expression of a broader cognitive process that expanded the capacity of the mind to retain information, make connections, and interpret, using both word and sound. Indeed, Chailley (1984) situates the origins of both polyphony and all of French literature, including French popular song and theatre, with the invention of musical tropes in the ninth century. He traces the etymology of the word trobador, the troubadour or trouvère who knows how to “find” a melody and a text, from the word tropator, maker of tropes. This implies that both musical and written composition were conceived around the same principle of combination, the same ideal of creating a harmony from disparate elements, as if fitting diverse puzzle pieces beautifully together. Interestingly enough, musicologists today speak of polyphony as a musical texture or style. The word text comes, of course, from the world of weaving. The Latin verb texere means to weave together, braid or fabricate. In the Middle Ages, this word was initially associated with the first exemplary and irreplaceable book, the Bible, to which the word testament attests. As for how this relates to the weaving together of manuscripts, we must not forget that the Bible, the most sacred of books, is in fact a compilation, and though one could not alter it or rewrite it, it served as a potent example for how to read and compose. Its contents were extremely well integrated into a medieval writer’s brain, forming a baseline of narrative and spiritual material with which to work, much

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Textual Voices in Compilation 137 as sacred song was for the musical composer. The stories were read and reread, stored away in the mind and meditatively considered. The four different versions of Jesus’s life and death in the New Testament seem to demand this comparative approach, as do the tales and proverbs in the Old Testament. The tradition of Biblical exegesis encouraged this positive approach to the diversity of books, teaching how difference could be a sign of variety, not of contradiction, encouraging textual interpretation that was aware of the “immensity and depth of revelation” (Azzam, Collet, and Foehr-Janssens, 2007, pp. 56–57). Thus, the parts of the Bible, as in a polyphonic piece of music, were aligned vertically and simultaneously in the reader’s mind, representing at once a weaving and a building, rising up and stretching out into time. This further connection between a musical texture and literary texts, both the results of compositional acts, suggest that the practice and/or experience of polyphony may have inspired how people wrote and organised literary material.

The Medieval Book as Polyphonic Is it going too far to claim that medieval compilation manuscripts were intentionally polyphonic? In a discussion of the mobility of medieval texts, Nichols, in an article on illuminated manuscripts, states that the medieval manuscript was never a neutral space: It is a performative space that implies an engagement with the act of representation itself. He sees within it, using Wittgenstein, a representational imperative: “En clair, la mobilité textuelle dans la civilization du manuscrit n’était ni accidentelle, ni determiné par une mauvaise technologie: elle était intentionnelle” (Nichols, 1995, pp. 20–21). In the critical discourse about medieval writing, this intentional mobility is apparent since Paul Zumthor’s famously formulated mouvance (1981) and Bernard Cerquiglini’s variance (1989), now largely accepted by medievalists. Medieval literature, which was, especially at its origins, the written transmission of oral material, was not fixed in the sense that today’s literary works are definitive once printed. Our printed editions, perhaps by their very nature, do little to help today’s readers comprehend the polysemous nature of the medieval manuscript. In order to understand it better, let us take a brief look at the history of the medieval book. Though each vernacular carries its own story, in general the first vernacular manuscripts sought to preserve oral narrative and poetic traditions as well as render into other languages writings that had up until then only been accessible in Latin. In the eleventh century, just as the practice of polyphony was gaining momentum as a traceable form, the rare event of a scribe writing or copying a text in the vernacular began to spread. The vernacular book was thus modern in the sense that, as scribes forged ahead, writing down their newly fixable mother tongues, they were forced to innovate, both in terms of what to write down and how to

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write it (Short, 1987, p. 14). The twelfth century saw the rise of written French and, though some manuscripts were already compiled of a variety of texts, more texts survived in individual collections of folios. One of the earliest from this period, London BL Cotton Nero A v (I) consists of two translations by Philippe de Thaon while the most diverse compilation, London BL Harley 4388, compiled for a woman, contains didactic texts such as the Proverbes of Sanson de Nantuil and the Disticha Catonis (Short, 1987, p. 20). The list of surviving French books from the thirteenth century, especially the second half, shows a dramatic increase both in the number of texts in manuscripts and in the diversity of their contents. From the extremely inclusive BNF f. fr. 837, which famously encompasses almost 250 individual works, to smaller collections that reflect more individual or group literary prerogatives, these collections defy categorisation. Strategies of compilation vary, but overall the books’ compositional principles suggest a form of reading that privileged the comparative and the polyvocal over the linear and univocal. Thirteenth-century anthologies also reflect the richer meaning that reading as a process carried with it in the Middle Ages (Robertson, 2011). Like compiling, lectio in classical Latin means to select, to pick, and to declaim. The voice was present in the sounding of the word and the senses were awakened. It was a bodily experience: “Mais le plus souvent, quand legere et lectio sont employés sans spécification, ils désignent une activité qui, comme le chant et l’écriture, occupe tout le corps et tout l’esprit… La lectio divina était nécessairement une lecture active”2 (De Lubac 1961; cited in Robertson, 2011, p. 7). Words were tasted with the mouth, literally with the “mouth of the heart”, seen with the eyes, and heard with the ears. Reading was both interior, a form of prayer, and exterior, something done together, during meals, at a monastery, or with family. One of the last summa on how to read for monks, written by Guigo II at the end of the twelfth century, describes the act of reading as four steps that lead to contemplation: lectio, meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio (Robertson, 2011, p. xvii). Reading is thus a vertical process that goes from seeking to tasting: “Reading seeks the sweetness of the blessed life, meditation finds it, prayer asks for it, contemplation tastes it”. Again, we see in this citation a horizontal activity, the act of reading, that has layers and develops through the senses, like polyphony, into the higher spheres, building to harmony and understanding. The same author in the same work also clearly aligns reading with the act of listening: Listening belongs in a certain manner to reading, and that is why we usually say that we have read not only those books that we have read to ourselves or [aloud] to others, but also those that we have heard read by masters. (Robertson, 2011, p. 208)

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BnF f. fr. 837 Let us now consider several examples to see if thirteenth-century compilation manuscripts bear the traces of this type reading – or listening. To start with the most remarkable, BNF f. fr. 837 is, literally speaking, hard to miss, with about 250 individual works; so hard to miss in fact that in 1932 Henri Omont published a facsimile edition of the book, and it was thus presented as a unit at a time when editors were hard at work publishing medieval manuscripts in pieces (Omont, 1932). The volume defies all attempts at clear categorisation while offering a plethora of organising principles, leading to a variety of potential readings and meanings. It is as though each attempt to fix a harmony within its diversity escapes the reader, who nevertheless, as he or she is reading, captures strands of meaning, and weaves a unity in spite of, or because of, the complexity. Like a polyphonic line of singing, the book represents a unity that is ever moving. Sylvie Lefèvre compares the collection to a “paradoxical string of rosary beads”, on which works are strung one next to each other in order to create contrast (Lefèvre, 2005, p. 208). Keith Busby has examined the groupings of fabliaux, noting how they play on argumentative opposition (Busby, 1999). Building on both of these linear readings, I have read into the arts of love in this manuscript, alongside others, observing how a discourse on love is woven into such collections in a way that builds towards a final crescendo at the end of the volume, as if the unifying force of love was being called upon in order to crown the arrangement of oppositional themes (Heneveld, 2010). Overall, however, the manuscript seems to present a disordered mix, from the scabrous to the pious, of mostly shorter texts, except for the section of Rutebeuf’s works towards the end of the collection (Azzam, 2005). In terms of its polyphony, BNF f. fr. 837 is interesting, however, because of how it assembles shorter works that capture the voice (Azzam, Collet, and Foehr-Janssens, 2005, p. 668). Small groups of dits appear, including 15 works of Rutebeuf which are labelled with the title Ci commencent li dit Rustebuef (ff. 283v° to 314v°). The first work in the manuscript is also entitled a dit, though in other manuscripts it isn’t, labelled in a hand that is different from the rubricator or the scribe (Foehr-Janssens, 2005, p. 158). Other works that suggest an attempt to capture the voice are assembled in the volume, like the complaintes and saluts d’amour, which preserves three-quarters of the existing repertoire for this type of love letter, which records the voice of a lover speaking to his lady (Collet, 2005, p. 179). Though there is no music in the manuscript, refrains and songs are indicated by initials and paragraphs, thus displaying a conscious demarcation of the voice in the manuscript’s visual signs (Butterfield, 2002, p. 184). Another poem, the Concile d’apostoile (Collet, 2005, p. 183), is a list of both animal and human sounds, which Fritz calls an “echo chamber of the cries and clichéd expressions of the

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city” (2016). Numerous other texts are linguistic parodies or bilingual experimental plays on the sound of different languages and forms (Collet, 2005, p. 185, n. 23). Is the book an attempt to capture the diversity of the voice, and if so, can the texts be read polyphonically? It’s impossible to be sure, but because of the nonsensical nature of some of the texts it seems hard to imagine any other kind of reading than one that strove to capture the voice in all of its variety, especially as it expresses the lower half of the body. Folios 170–173 contain, for example, in this order Du con qui fu fez à la besche, Li ABC Nostre Dame, Li Jugemenz des cons, La Patre nostre glosée, and Le Pardon de foutre. Later on in the collection we find, on folios 215–216, in this order, Du vit et de la couille, La nouvele requeste d’amors, and an Ave Maria en françois. Such rapid vacillation or movement between two registers, from low to high, combined with a linguistic play between French and Latin, suggest that, in addition to linear contrast, the uncontrollable aspects of the voice create a pleasurable cacophony when read polyphonically. This vertical exploration of the voice runs from bodily desires to higher sentiments, from between the legs to the heart and soul, much as such themes are sometimes contrasted in the motet (Huot, 1997, p. 7). Rhetorically, BnF f. fr. 837 is an example of the medieval principle of varietas, of how to capture the unity of diversity. An oft-repeated injunction in advice to medieval writers, this principle must of course be used judiciously, though limits are not necessarily prescribed. Carruthers, in her discussion of the term, examines how Augustine, in his commentary on Psalm 44, praises the way in which “all these manifold tongues express one faith: “Quo modo autem uarietas uestis in unitate concordat sic et omnes lingua ad unam fidem”” (Carruthers, 2009, p. 47). In his gloss of Psalm 44, Augustine analyses the image of the gold dress as a metaphor for how a variety of languages may transmit the unified meaning of a single faith: Varietas in linguis, aurum in sententiis. The diverse works in manuscript 837 seem to point to this same possibility. The multiple voices in compilation are covered with the gold of a unified meaning, which clothes the diversity like a beautiful dress. This is the same image that John of Salisbury uses to praise the unifying capacity of music in the previously cited passage from the Policraticus (“a robe of beauty”). The beginning of Psalm 44 also contains an interesting metaphor that distinctly conjoins two objects that are also linked in BnF f. fr. 837: The tongue and the pen. Lingua mea calamus scribae velociter scribentis. Augustine’s commentary on this line is an apology for the use of metaphor and a defence of reading the invisible in the visible; it ends with the line cum in uno sint omnia: All is in one. He explains that the word of God, which cannot sound, must be captured in the multiple, fast-moving pen of the written word, but that the reader or listener must not stop there, at the image of the transcriber. The reader ought to strive to capture the meaning of such an image, moving with the swiftness of the

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Textual Voices in Compilation 141 mind (In Psalmum 44 Enarratio, 6). Here we understand that the work of metaphor is a kind of polyphony, where the various images, in word and sound, invite the meaning that is layered above them.

BnF f. fr. 25566 Another very famous manuscript, famous primarily because it holds the first compilation of French song gathered around the name of a single writer and composer, Adam de la Halle, is the BnF f. fr. 25566, known as W to musicologists. This collection, compiled in the region of Arras towards the end of the thirteenth century, has also been read in a variety of ways. These readings converge more than those of the previous manuscript we considered, mostly around the figure of an author-poet whose works figure at the beginning of the manuscript and who was tightly woven into his literary community. Sylvia Huot’s reading of the collection focuses on the careful arrangement of Adam’s corpus, showing how it moves through “a hierarchy of literary types”, and then from “song to dit” (1987, pp. 68–69). It also moves from “monologue to dialogue and from monody to polyphony”, just as the collection as a whole moves “from the lyric, with its focus on self, to drama and narrative, with a focus on the social context within which that lyric self-operated as poet, lover, singer and fellow citizen” (Huot, 1987, p. 70). This argument, that the manuscript serves as a kind of monument to the poet – the section of Adam’s work ends with his congé and a poem on death (the rubric reads Ce sont li ver de le mort) – is further supported by the fact that, in between Adam’s chansons and jeux-partis (folio 23v) and then again between his jeux-partis and his rondeaux (folio 32v), there is a notated liturgical song that relates thematically to Easter, with a slight musical variation in the second version of the final alleluia (Gégou, 1960). This hymn, twice punctuating the collection of Adam’s work, reminds the reader of the power of the book to preserve the voice: Adest dies hec tercia Passi redemptoris Qua surrexit caro pia Et si vobis oris Non sufficit testimonium Ecce locus sudarium Lapis signum foris Hic sepultus et occultus Erat fons dulcoris Alleluia This is the third day after the pious flesh of the redeemer who had suffered arose and if the testimony of your mouth

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Though on one level the words of the song describe the death and rebirth of Christ, they can at the same time be read as a reminder to the reader that the book holds the sweetness of the poet’s word even after his death. The word of the mouth, which may not suffice, finds, in the material traces of death (sudarium, lapis signum foris), the means by which to remain. The book becomes an embodiment of this sweetness, the envelope for a vanished sound. The repetition of this hymn accentuates the ways in which, when reading or listening to songs, other melodies or themes may have been called upon or called up in the memory of the reader. This virtual polyphony is aligned with the work of Adam himself, who was one of the first recorded poets to bring polyphony to vernacular song, and in the manuscript, his motets close the section of his lyric works, following the rondeaux and just before the Jeu du pelerin. BnF f. fr. 25566 works with textual polyphony in another way, combining voices from a geographic area and a particular creative community. Ardis Butterfield connects the collection with the Artesian puy, a meeting of local musicians and poets that allowed for collective performances and enjoyment of literary works (Butterfield, 2002, p. 138). She traces the shared refrains in the manuscript, between Adam’s works and the other texts it contains, suggesting that the authors of all of them were using a shared body of refrains, which in turn suggests a shared approach to composition and a common taste for contrast and diversity (Butterfield, 2002, p. 140). What interests me in the structure of the collection is the way in which an important author corpus, a model, is shown in relation both to those writing and composing before and after him. The last text in the manuscript is a congé by Jean Bodel, an Artesian poet who died in 1210, before Adam de la Halle’s time. Another of Jean Bodel’s works, the Jeu de Saint Nicolas, is the first work after Adam’s corpus. Two of his texts thus frame the part of the collection after Adam’s works, tying Adam to his literary heritage. Richard de Fournival, who died in 1260, is referred to as a maistre in the rubrics to his works, of which there are four in the manuscript. Thus, the book combines the writings of those that influenced Adam with his own influential texts, linking the past to the future, inscribing tradition within modernity. The shared refrains between Adam’s compositions and the text at the middle of the collection, Jaquemart Gielée’s Renart le Nouvel, whose centre is at the exact centre of the manuscript as a whole, creates a somewhat vertiginous spiralling of new and old, demonstrating how literary innovation is nourished by a literary tradition that was composed and performed together. The

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Textual Voices in Compilation 143 awareness of time in the volume, from life to death (from the chansons to li ver de le mort, the three versions of li .iij. mort et li .iij. vis), from love to leaving (the three congés, one at the end of Adam’s corpus, f. 66v67v and the other at the end of the collection are surrounded by didactic works on love), trace a vertical path that is only matched by the horizontal exploration of themes through repetition. Reading becomes an experience of layering, through time and poetic friendships, much as polyphonic singing develops the relationship between those engaged in vocal exchange. This accentuates the obvious, if oft-forgotten, truth that singing together and reading together builds community.

Cologny, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Codex 82 Another thirteenth-century manuscript I have been reading for a while, the Bodmer 82, which is much less well known than the two famous collections I have discussed above, also forms a polyphony that builds community. This simple book, which contains five literary texts, the Roman d’Eles, the Lai d’Havelock, a lover’s debate entitled the Donnei des Amants, the Lai de Desiré, and the Lai de Nabaret, was probably read at Wilton Abbey, one of the wealthiest of medieval English abbeys in the Middle Ages, where many noblewomen were educated. The manuscript has a clear didactic program, but as I was searching for a structure to the collection as a whole, I realised something interesting: All five texts contain echoes of another, separate narrative not included in the collection – the life of the patron saint of the abbey, Saint Edith. As though Edith’s ghost presides over the volume, certain episodes of the different texts contained in the manuscript, which is a homogenous codicological unit copied by a single scribe, correspond to narrative elements in the life of Saint Edith and her mother Wulfrith who, in the tenth century, chose to remain at the abbey instead of marrying King Edward of England, Edith’s father. The Lai de Nabaret, for example, which is a short tale describing how a proud wife replies to her husband who tells her she dresses too finely, mirrors an episode in Edith’s life in which she stands up to Bishop Ætholwold, who reprimands her for wearing clothes that are too lavish (Dockray-Miller, 2009, pp. 111–113). The wife in the lai tells her husband that he should dress like a jaloux with a long beard and braids if he thinks she dresses too well, while Edith replies to the Bishop that the Holy Spirit does not consider outer appearances when he chooses where to reside. In both cases, these women have the last word. As for the Lai d’Havelok, which tells the story of a king who invaded England from Denmark, it mirrors another legend associated with the abbey when an army of the dead, called up by the hero’s wife, wins the final battle; an army of the dead also defends Wilton from invasion in an episode of Edith’s life. The Donnei des amants, the lover’s debate that first caught my attention in the manuscript, demonstrates how to say no to an educated suitor in a

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way that would have served Wulfrith when she was saying no to the king. In the Lai de Désiré, two children born out of wedlock are celebrated, much as Edith herself was when she was born at the abbey (Millar, 19141920, p. 136). The only text in the Bodmer 82 manuscript that doesn’t seem to echo an event in the Life of Saint Edith is the Roman d’Eles, which opens the collection, but this treatise on knighthood would have had its own practical and didactic purpose for the women there who wanted to either avoid bad men or find a good one, and Edith’s life speaks to this truth as well: Don’t compromise yourself or your beliefs for the love of a man. These echoes only appear to a reader well-versed in the life of the saint who was the founding and sustaining patron of the abbey. Goscelin (2004) writes that he based his life of Saint Edith on the stories that the nuns themselves passed down between them, and whoever compiled the manuscript seems to have been similarly familiar with the stories about Edith that were being told for the edification and the pleasure of the women living there. This connection of all the works to the saint’s life only appeared to me as I began to read the manuscript as a whole and learn more about its context. The works, juxtaposed in my mind as in a polyphonic piece of music, revealed meaning where the disparate texts resonated together. After reading these descriptions of material texts, one might wonder what the notion of textual polyphony adds to the concept of intertextuality, which has been defined, described, and celebrated now in literary studies for over 40 years. I think the term polyphony has an advantage over the term intertextuality because it captures aspects of the aural nature of medieval society and also includes the interactive side of literature, the importance of interpersonal relationship. I also think it gives us a more accurate glimpse of how the medieval brain worked, and may tell us something about our own brains: If polyphonic singing is such a wide and varied practice across time and cultures, perhaps the very nature of the human brain is polyphonic, with many thoughts running parallel, many ideas echoing and knocking into one another, encouraging us through both consonance and dissonance to grow and change. The first vernacular books created meaning in this way as well, as collections that mirrored the complexity of the human mind. The manuscript becomes a fertile space that produces a newness rooted in tradition: “[le] manuscritmatrice, cet espace de représentation constitue également un espace où l’on peut penser des œuvres préexistantes et projeter la pensée comme un nouveau sens, une nouvelle signification”3 (Nichols, 1995, p. 33).

Polyphonic Reading, Polyphonic Listening Compilation manuscripts present a range of sometimes-contradictory medieval voices that created consonant and dissonant meanings for the medieval reader. The compilers used rhetorical tools such as contrast and

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Textual Voices in Compilation 145 repetition to weave an elaborate web of words intended to be ethically sorted out by the reader into a complex network of meaning. Though it is tempting to want to identify a single, overarching way of reading medieval vernacular compilation manuscripts, I do not mean to offer such a catchall solution here. Individual collections still demand to be read in their own particular ways, and every manuscript is a specific reflection of both the place and time that saw it made and the subsequent readers or listeners that received it. As Christiane Marchello-Nizia so eloquently put it: “On ne peut parler, à la limite, que de chaque manuscrit dans son unicité, et l’on ne sait rien de plus que ce que chaque manuscrit nous enseigne sur lui-même”4 (Marchello-Nizia, 1978, p. 44). To draw some general conclusions, however, I do think writers and scribes, when composing and compiling, were playing with the notion that different texts could inhabit a single space, creating a harmony of contrasting meanings, in a present moment of reading. Medieval manuscripts, when read with this polyphonic eye, begin to appear as rich weavers of meaning. The connections I have been tracing between polyphonic singing and literary production and reception are more apparent in an oral culture, or one just on the brink of becoming more fixed in the written word. When we listen to stories, we hold on to episodes that might find echoes in other stories or in our lives, and these might resonate simultaneously. Robert Bringhurst refers to medieval polyphony in an essay on indigenous Canadian storytelling, likening it to the motet, and the motet to a forest: In polyphonic music, several voices sing or play at once. They sometimes say very similar things in several different ways; they sometimes contradict each other. Each voice has its own melodic line, its own simultaneous path through music space. Dissonance can occur; it may even be sought, though it is rarely expected to last. Some voices may say more than others, but no one voice is allowed to dominate the whole. Shakespeare can tell two or three stories at once. So can some oral poets I have met. Polyphony is not a distinctively European phenomenon, either in literature or in music… And the motet is something like the forest: a supple, flexible, trim and selfpolicing form with room for many voices. In its earlier days it was one of the forms that passed freely through the wall between pagan peasant cultures and the church. (Bringhurst, 2008, pp. 33–34) In this more recent comparison between storytelling and singing, polyphony serves as a model for a creative practice that is grounded in the past, rooted in the soil, built from the ground up, while branching out into higher layers of meaning and into the future of creative transmission. If today polyphony as the creation of harmony out of diversity helps us understand an oral storytelling tradition, it is not surprising that it also

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helps us understand early vernacular books, the first attempts in a given language to preserve and transmit an oral culture of word and song. To come back to the question of the difference between our modernity and a medieval one, why do we no longer define harmony as diversity? I think it is because we stopped perceiving the simultaneous sounding of notes as a whole and started interpreting music as either being structured vertically or horizontally, but not both at once. Somewhere along the line we started preferring the linear progression of a piece of music or a story to the myriad ways it develops a unified complexity. This speaks to a basic change in how we perceive diversity: Medieval listeners and readers were looking for the relational, for the inherent connection between disparate elements, while aesthetic sensibilities today prefer to witness the development through time of a particular theme or idea. Our pleasure has become more analytical and less ethical, more cerebral, perhaps, and less embodied. This accords with the fact that, as a society today, we tend to privilege the notion of progress and improvement over that of pleasure in the relationships present in any given moment. Our focus on this diachrony over meaningful synchrony reflects, and has effects on, how we read as well. Becoming conscious of how to read, and more generally perceive, “polyphonically” might be a remedy to our very modern problem of fleeing always towards the future, no matter how destructive the past and in spite of the fullness of the present. Perhaps we have trouble making sense of medieval books not because they are too diverse in their content but because we have lost the capacity to make the kinds of mental connections that medieval readers and listeners inherently made. The multitude of voices in them indicates that medieval readers were versed in a kind of polyphonic reading that privileged the relationships between disparate elements, perceiving unity through diversity, not in contrast to it. In addition to opening up doors for new readings of medieval texts in their contexts, medieval compilation manuscripts also have something to teach us about our own contemporary ways of making meaning. Perhaps we can allow polyphony to teach us something broader about our own human diversity: we might learn to explore it and enjoy it, especially at a time when we are witnessing a frightening trend towards the homogenisation of people and cultures, tracking dying languages and vanishing species. As a response to this death of varietas on a global scale, perhaps polyphony can teach us again how to value and desire that unity that is at once a multiplicity, a multiplicity lived together and created in community. Perhaps we can learn again to accept, enjoy, and preserve our own complicated beauty.

Notes 1 “Modernity is first and foremost a question of perspective, in front of a creative power here conceived in terms of reproduction – according to medieval exegetes – and there in terms of innovations”.

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Textual Voices in Compilation 147 2 “But most of the time, when legere and lectio are used unspecifically, they refer to an activity, like singing or writing, which occupies the whole body and mind… The lectio divina was necessarily an active reading”. 3 “ [the] matrix-manuscript, this space of representation, constitutes also a space where one may consider pre-existing works and project one’s thought as a new meaning, a new signification”. 4 “We may eventually talk of each manuscript in its unicity, and we know nothing more than what each manuscript teaches us about itself”.

Works Cited Augustine. Enarrationes in psalmos. www.clerus.org/bibliaclerusonline/it/djs. htm#a Augustine and Chrétien, J.-L., trans. (2007). Discours sur les Psaumes. Paris, Les Éditions du Cerf. Azzam, W. (2005). Un recueil dans le recueil: Rutebeuf dans le manuscrit BNF, f. fr. 837. In: M. Mikhaïlova, ed., Mouvances et jointures: du manuscrit au texte medieval. Medievalia 55. Orléans: Paradigmes, pp. 193–201. Azzam, W., Collet, O., and Foehr-Janssens, Y. (2005). Les manuscrits littéraires français: Pour une sémiotique du recueil médiéval. Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, 83(3), pp. 639–669. Azzam, W., Collet, O., and Foehr-Janssens, Y. (2007). Cohérence et éclatement: réflexion sur les recueils littéraires du Moyen Âge. In: X. Leroux, ed., La mise en recueil des textes médiévaux. Babel 16, pp. 31–59. Benjamin, W. (1991). Sur le concept d’histoire. In: Ecrits français, Paris, Gallimard, pp. 343–344. Boogard, N.H.J. van den. (1969). Rondeaux et refrain du XIIe siècle au début du XIVe. Paris: Klincksieck. Bringhurst, R. (2008). The Polyhistorical Mind. In: The Tree of Meaning. Language, Mind and Ecology. Berkeley: Counterpoint, pp. 15–37. Busby, K. (1999). Fabliaux and the New Codicology. In: K. Karczewska and T. Conley, eds., The World and Its Rival: Essays on the Literary Imagination in Honor of Per Nykrog. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 137–160. Butterfield, A. (2002). Poetry and Music in Medieval France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carruthers, M. (2009). Varietas: A Word of Many Colors. Poetica: Zeitschrift für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, Fall, pp. 33–54. Cazelles, B. (1990). Introduction. In: B. Cazelles and C. Méla, eds., Modernité au Moyen Âge: Le défi du passé. Recherches et Rencontres, 1. Publication de la Faculté de lettres de Genève. Geneva: Droz, pp. 9–32. Chailley, J. (1984). Histoire musical du Moyen Age. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Cerquiglini, B. (1989). Eloge de la variante: histoire critique de la philologie. Paris: Seuil. Collet, O. (2005). ‘Encore pert il bien aus tés quells li pos fu’ (Le Jeu d’Adam, v. 11): Le manuscrit BNF, f. fr. 837 et le renouveau littéaire au XIIIème siècle. In: M. Mikhaïlova, ed., Mouvances et jointures: du manuscrit au texte medieval. Medievalia 55. Orléans: Paradigmes, pp. 173–192. De Lubac, H. (1961). Exégèse médiévale: Les quatre sens de l’écriture. 4 vols. Paris: Aubier.

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Dockray-Miller, M., ed. (2009). Saints Edith and Aethelthryth: Princesses, Miracle Workers, and their Late Medieval Audience. Turnhout: Brepols. Foehr-Janssens, Y. (2005). ‘Le seigneur et le prince de tous les contes’: Le Dit du Barisel et sa position initiale dans le manuscript BnF f. fr 837. In: M. Mikhaïlova, ed., Mouvances et jointures: du manuscrit au texte medieval. Medievalia 55. Orléans: Paradigmes, pp. 153–172. Fritz, J.-M. (2016). Paysages sonores et littérature médiévale: fécondité et fragilité d’une rencontre. In: L. Hablot and Vissière, L., eds., Les paysages sonores: Du Moyen Âge à la Renaissance. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, pp. 289–305. Gégou, F. (1960). Fragment de drame liturgique (?) découvert dans le manuscrit la Vallière de la Bibliothèque Nationale. Essai d’identification, d’analyse et de transcription. Revue de musicologie, 45(121), pp. 76–83. Goscelin, Wright, M. and Loncar, K., trans. (2004). The Vita of Edith. In: S. Hollis, ed., Writing the Wilton Women: Goscelin’s Legend of Edith and Liber confortatorius. Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 23–67. Heneveld, A.S. (2010). ‘Chi commence d’amour’ ou commencer pour finir: la place des arts d’aimer dans les manuscrits-recueils du XIIIème siècle”. In: Y. Foehr-Janssens and O. Collet, eds., Le recueil au Moyen Âge. Le Moyen Âge central. Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 139–156. Heneveld, A.S. (2011). The Medieval French ‘Miscellany’ and Textual Mobility: An Argument for the Medieval Book. In: C. Carreto, ed., Lors te metra en la voie…Mobilité et literature au Moyen Âge. Lisbon: Universidade Aberta, pp. 329–336. Heneveld, A.S. (2014). Concordia discors: L’harmonie de l’écriture medieval. Médiévales, 66, pp. 25–42. Hicks, A. (2017). Composing the World: Harmony in the Medieval Platonic Cosmos. New York: Oxford University Press. Holsinger, B. (2005). The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Huot, S. (1987). From Song to Book. The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Huot, S. (1997). Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet. The Sacred and the Profane in Thirteenth-Century Polyphony. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kwakkel, E, ed. (2018). Vernacular Manuscript Culture 1000–1500. “Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Book Culture”. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Lefèvre, S. (2005). Le recueil et l’œuvre unique. Mobilité et fragment. In: M. Mikhaïlova, ed., Mouvances et jointures: du manuscrit au texte medieval. Medievalia, 55. Orléans: Paradigmes, pp. 203–217. Macchiarella, I. (2011). Theorizing on multipart music making. In: I. Macchiarella, ed., Multipart Music: A Specific Mode of Musical Thinking, Expressive Behaviour and Sound. Papers from the First Meeting of the ICTM Study Group on Multipart Music (September 15–20, 2010; Cagliari – Sardinia). Udine: Nota, pp. 7–22. Marchello-Nizia, C. (1978). Ponctuation et ‘unités de lecture’ dans les manuscrits médiévaux. Langue française, 40, pp. 32–44. Mikhaïlova, M., ed. (2005). Mouvances et jointures: du manuscrit au texte medieval. Medievalia, 55. Orléans: Paradigmes.

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Textual Voices in Compilation 149 Millar, E.G. (1914–1920). Les manuscrits à peintures des bibliothèques de Londres. Bulletin de la société française de reproductions de manuscrits à peintures, 4(128–149), pp. liii-lv. Nichols, S.G. (1995). Textes mobiles, images motrices. L’instabilité textuelle dans le manuscript médiéval. Littérature, 99 (L’œuvre mobile), pp. 19–33. Nichols, S.G. and Wenzel, S. eds. (1996). The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Omont, H. (1932). Fabliaux, dits et contes en vers français du XIIIe siècle. Facsimile du manuscrit français 837 de la Bibliothèque Nationale publié sous les auspices de l ’Institut de France (Fondation Debrousse). Paris: Librairie Ernest Leroux. Pärtlas, Ž. (2016). Theoretical Approaches to Heterophony. Res Musica, 8, pp. 44–72. Renart, J. and Lecoy, F., ed. (2000). Le Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole. Paris: Honoré Champion. Reynaud, G. (1884). Bibliographie des chansonniers français des XIIIe et XIVe siècles. 2 vols. Paris: F. Vieweg. Robertson, D. (2011). Lectio Divina. The Medieval Experience of Reading. Cistercian Publications. Collegeville: Liturgical Press. Sachs, C. and Kunst, J., ed. (1977). The Wellsprings of Music. New York: Da Capo Press. Salisbury J. and Pike, J.B., trans. (1972). Frivolities of Courtiers and Footprints of Philosophers. Being a Translation of the First, Second and Third Books and Selections from the Seventh and Eighth Books of the Policraticus of John of Salisbury. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Short, I. (1987). L’avènement du texte vernaculaire: la mise en recueil. In: E. Baumgartner and C. Marchello-Nizia, eds., Théories et pratiques de l’écriture au Moyne Age. Collection Littérales, 4, pp. 11–23. Stock, B. (1990). Tradition and Modernity: Models from the Past. In: B. Cazelles and C. Méla, eds., Modernité au Moyen Âge: Le défi du passé. Recherches et Rencontres, 1. Publication de la Faculté de lettres de Genève. Geneva: Droz, pp. 33–44. Taruskin, R. (2010). The Oxford History of Western Music. I. Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taruskin, R. and Weiss, P., eds. (2008). Music in the Western World. A History in Documents. Belmont: Thomson Schirmer. Zara, V. (2011). Ad Infinitum. Polyphonic practices and theological discussions in Ars Nova’s time. In: I. Macchiarella, ed., Multipart Music: A Specific Mode of Musical Thinking, Expressive Behaviour and Sound. Papers from the First Meeting of the ICTM Study Group on Multipart Music (September 15–20, 2010; Cagliari – Sardinia). Udine: Nota, pp. 77–94. Zumthor, P. (1981). Intertextualité et mouvance. Littérature, 41(“Intertextualités médiévales”), pp. 8–16. Zumthor, P. (1963). Langue et technique poétiques à l’époque romane (XIe-XIIIe siècles). Paris: Klincksieck.

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Wolfram and the Ambiguity of the Religious Question in the Willehalm Patrick del Duca Translated by Jonathan Fruoco

The concept of polyphony, borrowed from music to designate the overlay of different voices or independent melodic parts, has been introduced in the 1960s in Western Europe after the translation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s books. Bakhtin used that notion in order to name the layering of voices, of enunciative sources in the same statement – a concept otherwise defined as dialogism. For him, this literary polyphony constitutes one of the characteristics of the modern novel, as found in the novels of Dostoevsky, namely the depiction of independent characters, thinking and acting by themselves but in dialogic interrelation: They constantly exchange ideas, they complete, oppose each other, and mingle thus provoking the evolution of their minds and consciousness in a constant exchange, and in “infinitely diverse forms of transmission and entrenchment of others’ speech” (Bakhtin, 1978, p. 167). Speech and dialogue accordingly find themselves at the heart of the modern novel. Indeed, at the end of the nineteenth century, the German writer Theodor Fontane organised his own novels around the same notions of dialogism. This novelistic polyphony is, however, far from being specific to modern literature. The evolution of the novel during the Middle Ages seems to be a first element of answer, and the transition from a French chanson de geste to a German novel is another. The polyvocality of the text that we offer to study in this chapter not only gives voices to Christians but also to Pagans, representatives of Islam as it was perceived at the beginning of the thirteenth century. The question of interreligious dialogue in the Middle Ages seems in many ways to be anachronistic. Indeed, the Western society of that time was essentially normative and opposed to any discourse that would deviate from what the Church prescribed. This society marginalised or persecuted those who were foreign or distant to such discourse, namely the Jews, the heretics, and the pagans. That is why imagining an open and fruitful dialogue with the representatives of a different religion is, most of the time, fantasy. Such is the case with Islam, a religion then often considered as heresy or paganism, as a diabolical, lustful, and violent belief. Just like in the Chanson de Roland, Western literature echoes DOI: 10.4324/9781003129837-9

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Wolfram and the Ambiguity of the Religious 151 a negative vision of Islam and of Muslims, often represented as blackskinned pagans, a colour reflecting their corrupted and evil soul. Certain texts, however, try to distance themselves from this stigmatising vision of Muslims and attempt to present them in a new way, more human and closer to the image Christians had of the civilised and courtly man. The most significative example of this change can without a doubt be found in the German romance entitled Willehalm. This poem, composed by Wolfram von Eschenbach at the beginning of the thirteenth century, is an adaptation of the anonymous chanson de geste Aliscans and was commissioned by the Landgrave of Thuringia, Hermann I whom the poet mentions in the prologue (3,8 sq).1 Just like in its French source, which belongs to William of Orange’s cycle, the poem starts with the wedding of Willehalm, one of the king of France’s vassals, with Arabel, the former wife of the Pagan king Tybalt. Arabel converts to Christianism in order to marry Willehalm and changes her name to Gyburg. Sometime after the wedding, however, a war opposing Tybalt and Terramer, Gyburg’s father, breaks out. During the first battle, Willehalm, earl of Provence, must face the huge Pagan army and is defeated, losing in that process most of his men and Vivianz. Willehalm accordingly goes to Munleun in order to ask Louis, king of Rome (“von Rome roys Lawis”, l. 103) for help. He manages, not without difficulties, to get the military support of his king, and there also discovers a young man with extraordinary strength, Rennewart, a Pagan who happens to be Gyburg’s brother. Despite the nobility of his appearance, Rennewart is forced to work in the castle’s kitchen as long as he will refuse baptism. Willehalm takes him and they both go back to his castle in Orange, which has been defended during his absence by Gyburg, and they manage to get back in the fortress. The following day marks the start of the second battle opposing the Christians and the Pagans. This time, however, Willehalm has the support of King Louis’s troops. But while parts of the French army start to flee, Rennewart comes to the help of Willehalm by killing the runaways and taking command of the Frank division. This second battle is particularly violent and bloody: Faced with incessant waves of Sarasin troops, the Christians start to show signs of weakness but eventually defeat the enemy. Terramer is transported to his ship, gravely wounded. The man who had never known defeat must escape and renounce to rule over the Roman Empire. In the morning, Willehalm laments the number of dead Christians and the disappearance of Terramer. The romance, probably unfinished, ends with the departure of the funeral procession and the continuous laments of Willehalm. We will see that the romance distinguishes itself from its source and from other chansons de geste by its representation of Pagans. Far from presenting them as the children of the devil that need to be exterminated, it rather delivers a nuanced and highly enhanced portrait. Can we nonetheless consider Wolfram as a precursor of an authentic dialogue between religions prefiguring a modern tolerance, as we tend to do when we

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question the other works of this author?2 Is this openness towards the other, towards the representatives of a non-Christian culture and religion – even Pagan – enough to speak of a true poetical expression of human brotherhood announcing Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s vision in Nathan der Weise and the famous parable of the three rings3 (Sabel, 2003, pp. 138–142)? In this parable, the German author from the eighteenth century denounces the tyranny of a unique religion, affirms that none of the three monotheist religions is superior to the others and that if concurrence is indeed needed, it should be expressed in a healthy and virtuous emulation at the service of God.4 In which way can we consider Wolfram as the precursor of the Enlightenment,5 as the advocate of the fraternity and equality of God’s creatures (Sabel, 2003, p. 163)? What does this notion of tolerance mean, and can we apply it without nuances to the Middle Ages, a time when even the most educated minds, the most brilliant authors of Humanist texts, commend God’s charity and mercy while calling for crusades and declare that “dans la mort du païen, le chrétien se glorifie, car c’est le Christ qui, par elle, est glorifié”?6 How does Wolfram manage to objectivise the other’s speech – namely the Pagan’s – so often considered as God’s enemy and the incarnation of evil? What function does he confer to dialogues in that objectivisation?

Religious Dialogue and the Notion of Tolerance in the Middle Ages During both the Antiquity and Middle Ages, the Latin verb tolerare was defined negatively and signified “to carry or bear a weight, a burden”. The toleratio thus implied the capacity to bear, and not accept, an evil, a sin, a pain, a reprehensible behaviour deemed sinful. Gregory the Great accordingly prescribed to treat the heretics, these spiritual lepers, with “a lot of gentleness”, for it is “better to tolerate evil with patience” (Cherel, 1942, p. 11). The meaning of the Middle High German verb dulden or dulten also implies the idea of bearing with pain an exterior constraint. It is necessary to note here that the verb is constructed from the same root as the substantive dult, which designates the patience and capacity to endure suffering often associated with the Passion of Christ. To bear something is to suffer. The idea of tolerance as we can conceive it during medieval times is therefore applied to the capacity to bear, not without pains, the one we disapprove of and who should be punished, to a disposition that urges us to be indulgent and patient towards what is fundamentally unacceptable. The toleratio does not mean that we are ready to accept religious pluralism and to treat the other’s religion as being equal with ours. This foreign faith is perceived as a scandal, as ungodliness, a bad belief (ungeloube). The attitude of the Church towards Pagans differs, of course, from the one adopted with heretics, that is to say towards Christians who have stepped away from the official Catholic dogma. The Catholic Church’s

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Wolfram and the Ambiguity of the Religious 153 indulgence towards Pagans having lived before the advent of Christianism is a tradition going back to Saint-Augustine, who emphasised the wisdom of the ancient philosophers that had sensed the presence of a divine providence governing all of creation. Saint-Augustine had noticed in Plato’s writing and teaching, notably in the importance given to interiority, a thought that was, according to him, close to Christian thinking (Augustine, 1983, III, p. 8). Yet we cannot really speak of tolerance here: Plato’s wisdom is only praised because it prefigures the wisdom of Christ. During the Middle Ages, the fundamental opposition between Christians and Muslims was caused, in great part, by the reciprocal ignorance that defined religiously both camps. Apart from the Christians living in Sicily and Al-Andalus, who lived with Muslims and knew the bases of Islam, the immense majority of their Western neighbours associated Muslims with Pagans worshipping idols. This ignorance is specific to almost all Europe and the French chansons de geste echo this fact by describing Pagan hordes worshipping Mohammed, Apollo, and Tervagant. Rare are the clerks who, like Peter the Venerable, try to really know and understand Islam. But here again, the intention is the very antithesis of the notion of tolerance as we perceive it today and of a constructive religious dialogue: If Peter the Venerable was, during his passage in Toledo in 1141, the first to order the translation of Islamic texts, notably of the Qur’an, it was not in order to accept the other but rather to understand the adversary’s religion so as to better refute his arguments. In his treatise entitled Contra sectam Sarracenorum, which accompanies this series of translations, Peter’s intention is clearly expressed; he wishes to fight the Saracens, not with weapons but with the words and love of God: Aggredior vos, non, ut nostri saepe faciunt, armis sed verbis, non vi sed ratione, non odio sed amore. Amore tamen tali qualis inter Christicolas et a Christo aversos esse debet, tali qualis inter apostolos nostros et illius temporis gentiles, quos ad Christi legem invitabant, exstitit, tali qualis inter ipsum creatorem et rectorem omnium deum et illos, quos, dum adhuc creaturae non creatori servirent, a cultu simulacrorum vel daemonum per suos avertit.7 (Petrus Venerabilils, 1985, pp. 62–63) This love must thus lead to a conversion of the Pagans to Christianism. The dialogue intends to refute the thesis of Islam and is nothing but an apostolate.

The Different Voices of the Willehalm The Aliscans is a chanson de geste composed in the North of France by an unknown poet at the end of the twelfth century. Despite their military processes, highlighted by the author, Pagans are from the start assimilated

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with the spawn of the devil (Aliscans l. 1054: “la gent l’aversier”); they are a criminal, villainous, and evil lot (l. 611: “la gent criminal”; l. 696: “la gent pautoniere”; l. 1318: “de mal estrait”) defined as diabolical beings (l. 2664: “li paien mescreü”; l. 6082: “[…] sont paien .XX. Maffé”). They represent demons that must be destroyed in the name of the Christian religion. Guillaume accordingly declares to one of his Pagan sons-in-law: Puis que li hom n’aime crestienté Et qu’il het Deu et despit charité, N’a droit en vie, jel di par verité. Et qui l’ocist, si destruit un maufé. Deu a vengié, si l’en set mout bon gré. Tuit estes chien par droiture apelé, Car vos n’avez ne foi ne leauté.8 (Aliscans, ll. 1274-1280) Guillaume thus denies his son-in-law any form of humanity, qualifying him as a maufé being, comparable with a dog. On the other hand, as Jean-Marc Pastré underlined in an essay on the image of the Saracen in the Willehalm (Pastré, 1982, pp. 253–265), the German adaptor has considerably enhanced the representation of the Pagan, portraying him as “plus raffiné, plus courtois et plus noble”, which humanises him. Indeed, the Pagan knights wearing fur coats fight for the love of ladies and are defined as “heiden der werden” (Willehalm, 19, l. 10), or noble Pagans. The French adjectives relative to their evil origin have been replaced by qualifying ones such as “werde”, which refers to their nobility. The “race” as it is understood in Old French, namely the value connected with their lineage, is consequently not an issue here.9 Nevertheless, Wolfram goes back to the evil trilogy specific to the chansons de geste and turns his Saracens into worshipers of Appolo, Tervagant, and Mohammed. He opposes the soldiers of God (Willehalm, 19, l. 17: “von den gotes soldieren”), the baptised (19, l. 1: “getouften”), whose sacrifice leads them straight to Heaven, to the Pagans condemned to Hell (20, ll. 10-12). Unlike the author of the chanson de geste, the German adaptor resorts to a form of dialogism that allows to actually give voices to the Pagans. Wolfram evokes twice the exchanges between Gyburg, the former Pagan who then bore the name of Arabel, with her father Terramer, the leader of the enemy forces, who remained faithful to his gods. Following the departure of Willehalm to the court of King Louis, the young woman takes over the defence of the Orange fortress, which renders possible a nocturnal dialogue between father and daughter. Terramer has decided that he will demonstrate the inferiority of Christianism and discredit Jesus by imposing to his own daughter the most infamous torments (Willehalm 108, ll. 18-22). During their exchange, he offers Gyburg the choice of three types of death: She can be drowned in the sea with stone tied around her neck, be burnt alive, or be hanged to a tree by her former husband.

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Wolfram and the Ambiguity of the Religious 155 Gyburg answers that her father has lost his mind and that rather than playing one of his games, she would rather count on the French who will not let her be defeated (Willehalm, 109, ll. 17-30; 110, ll. 1-7). After that, Gyburg does not leave any possible doubt about the fate that awaits the Saracens after death and evokes the double demise they will not escape. She thus shouts to the besieging forces: ir gunerten Sarrazine, etliche mage mine, ir welt hie beiten grozer not: iu kumt der zwivalte tot. doch ir mir bietet tode dri die zwene sint iu nahen bi: diss kurzen lebens ende, und der sele unledic gebende vor iuwerem gote Tervigant, der iuch vür toren hat erkant.10 (Willehalm, 110, ll. 21-30) Wolfram’s heroine here becomes the herald of an erroneous and stereotypical vision of Islam. That is why this particular passage does not fundamentally distinguish itself from the ancient epic tone that associated Muslims with mere idolising Pagans condemned to Hell. Wolfram similarly seems to ignore that Christ is, for Muslims, a prophet often mentioned in the Qur’an, and certainly not a magician, “der zoubrære Jesus” (Willehalm, 357, l. 23). In contrast, he puts into Terramer’s mouth certain grievances formulated by the Muslims against Christianism. Just before his first discussion with Gyburg, Terramer challenges the notions of Christ’s resurrection and of the Trinity: min geloube stüend entwerh, ob ich geloubte daz er starp und in dem tode leben erwarp und doch sin eines wæren dri.11 (Willehalm, 108, ll. 4-7) It is, however, impossible to know whether Wolfram was aware of those criticisms voiced by the Muslims or if he mentions the resurrection and the Trinity because both elements are at the very foundations of Christianism – elements that would logically be rejected by the enemies of that faith. Dialogism finds its source here not in the opposition between two social realities, as it will often be the case for the novels of the nineteenth century,12 but rather between two religious discourses, one being considered as true, the other as false. It allows the speakers to express their antagonism in another way and to avoid a fight. The ideological confrontation made possible by dialogue provokes a debate that could

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not have taken place in the reality of Western Europe at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and which is thus transposed to fiction. This polyvocality does not permit the unification of points of view but opposes them by granting to Pagans a form of humanity that was until then refused to them. They become vector of a discourse that we can now hear and eventually refute. It is during a truce that a second dialogue, longer and more debated, is made possible between Gyburg and her father (ll. 215-221). This exchange allows Gyburg to demonstrate the superiority of the Christian faith. Indeed, she affirms from the start that she has accepted baptism in the name of He who is at the origin of all creatures and of the four elements. This needs to be underlined as it is one of the most important aspects of her discourse: If God is the creator of all things then all men are creatures of God. This does not imply that religions have equal value. This God, creator of the universe, is by His wisdom superior to the idols worshipped by Terramer, which equally implies that men, made in His image, are all of divine essence and thus “les païens sont considérés ontologiquement égaux aux chrétiens”13 (Girbea, 2014, p. 535). The second reason evoked is her love for Willehalm: It is in the name of that love and for the Almighty (Willehalm, 216, l. 2: “der hœhste”; 216, l. 5: “Altissimus”) that she has accepted to lose her title of queen, a social decline she characterises as “armuot”, or poverty (216, l. 2 and l. 28). God will compensate this indigence by the salvation of her soul: Gyburg thus opposes to “des lîbes armuot” (material poverty) “der sêle richeit” (richness of the soul). The power and richness she once enjoyed as Pagan queen was therefore misleading and would have led her to damnation. Terrestrial and divine love are thus closely tied, with one form of love transcending the other and giving it a sense of legitimacy. In that respect, the adultery committed by Arabel-Gyburg cannot be condemned; it is, on the other hand, the source of her salvation and an expression of caritas. The war waged by Tybalt to reconquer his wife has no legitimacy and has in effect no justification: His claims over Gyburg have no legal basis (217, ll. 4-5: “[…] der deheine vorderunge hat / von rehte uf mich sprechen kan”).14 Gyburg relies here on divine order. The young woman’s first reply ends on the denunciation of the “tumpheit” of her father, namely his lack of judgment. Terramer’s own reply is ambiguous and contradicts the attitude he had had during the first dialogue with his daughter. His words both reveal his profound humanity as a father and the error he is religiously living in. He evokes, for instance, the gods renounced by Gyburg, along with the order that was given to him by the priests: In order to have his sins forgiven, he must kill his daughter (217, ll. 24 sq.). This religion does not only relate to idolatry, it also urges bloodshed. Terramer thus opposes to this order his paternal love, his “triuwe” – literally his loyalty in the sense of charity – that forbids him from killing his own child. Nonetheless, his

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Wolfram and the Ambiguity of the Religious 157 daughter will not be able to find bliss (217, l. 13 and l. 28: “sælde”) until she comes back to her former deities. Gyburg, reproaching once more to her father his “tumpheit”, his lack of wisdom, reaffirms the principle of the Trinity and the redeeming role played by Christ, who went to Hell to deliver the descendants of Adam and Eve, and who died on the cross to save mankind. Her discourse marks the superiority of the Christian religion over Pagan beliefs. The young woman uses arguments already present in the prologue written as a prayer. God is the creator of all things, he is a merciful father for his children and has become a man to deliver humanity from its sins while baptism turns man into a Christian and ensures his salvation: “du bist Christ, so bin ich kristen”.15 Such a dialogue between the representatives of two different religions is not specific to the Willehalm. In the Kaiserchronik – written before 1147 in Regensburg and which tells a fictitious story of the Empire through a succession of facts and reigns going from Cesar to the German king Conrad III – Pope Sylvester discusses the Christian faith with twelve Pagan and Jewish wise men (Schröder, 1964, ll. 8200-10380). He refutes the arguments advanced by his opponents by relying on the Scriptures. He thus explains that Christians do not worship three different gods, but only one bearing three names (Kaiserchronik, l. 8658: “ainen got mit den drin namen”). This dogmatic argument ends with a miracle made by Saint-Sylvester. Following this divine sign, the twelve wise men, along with 83,500 Pagans convert to Christianism. Unlike what happens in this passage from the Kaiserchronik, the discussion between Gyburg and her father leads to no conversion and never reaches such a pastoral dimension. The debate finds its continuation in a long monologue given by the heroine on the eve of the second battle: Feeling responsible for the conflict provoked by her marriage with Willehalm and the many deaths that followed,16 she prompts the Christians not to kill Pagans. In this passage, the humanism of the author comes through a vision that is both Christian and eschatological. Gyburg urges the Christian princes to spear the Pagans in case of victory, for they are “schonet des gotes hantgetat” (306, l. 28), creatures made by the hand of God.17 Here, Gyburg proceeds in a typological way and establishes a parallel between their Pagans and those from the Bible, underlining that the characters of the Ancient Law, like Noa, Elias, Enoch, Job, or even the first man and women, were also Pagans later saved by God (307, ll. 1-22). It seems that such a typological reading of this discourse enlightens us on the respect owed to the Pagans and allows us to better understand Wolfram’s thinking. In fact, one may notice here everything that separates medieval and Christian humanism from modern humanism: The moral justification always comes from God and not from man himself, who is nothing but the instrument of a Higher Will he must recognise and to which he must comply with. Gyburg declares that even Christians are, at a given moment, Pagans:

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Patrick del Duca getouft wip den heiden treit, swie daz kint der touf hab umbeleit. der juden touf hat sunder site: den begent si mit einem snite. wir waren doch alle heidnisch e. dem sældehaften tuot vil we, ob von dem vater siniu kint hin zer vlust benennet sint: er mac sich erbarmen über sie, der rehte erbarmkeit truoc ie.18 (Willehalm, 307, ll. 21-30)

Critics have long wondered if the father mentioned by Gyburg is terrestrial or celestial. In fact, Wolfram seems to use once more the image of the father applied to God19 that he had used in the prologue of the romance and where he evoked the Creator of all things whose power is both without beginning and end. He even says, “so bistu vater unt bin ich kint” (1, 8, “Thus You are the Father and I the child”) before mentioning “din kint und din künne” (1, 16, “Your child, Your lineage”).20 Wolfram deliberately plays with the various possible associations of the word father, which can refer to a biological and celestial father (see 307, l. 18). In both cases, only the one feeling true compassion can grieve the perdition of his children. Gyburg thus implicitly condemns the attitude of her own father and praises the Creator’s. She actually seems to trust the infinite mercy of this Father who can pity his children and renounce to give them up to perdition. The lexical shift argues, as René Pérennec remarked, in favour of the abolition of the difference between human creatures and the children of God, thus erasing the value of baptism (Pérennec, 2005, p. 173).21 All creatures are the children of God, whether they are Christian or not, baptised or not, and are accordingly put on equal footing (Pérennec, 2005, p. 174). The importance of the father-child relationship is invoked once more at the end of the discourse: God, mentioned both as “our Father” and with the four letters that, in Hebrew, allow to designate Him without saying His name (the tetragram, 309, l. 9: “unser vater Tetragramaton”) has given His life for sinners and has, in effect, rewarded His children for forgetting Him. Gyburg clearly states that God may forgive Pagans, even Muslims because they are creatures and children of God. The basis of this hope lies in God’s infinite mercy, of the Father who, unlike Terramer, the human father, is ready to forgive. Gyburg develops her arguments by comparing men with fallen angels and asks why man may have more hope than a fallen angel who rebelled against God (308, ll. 16 sq.). Man has been seduced by the devil while the angel, Lucifer, has condemned himself to Hell; mankind’s responsibility is, as a result, minimal. In this long monologue, Gyburg assimilates different ideas one may find in the Christian tradition, notably in the Gospels and apocryphal texts. The first of those is that Pagans having lived before the coming

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Wolfram and the Ambiguity of the Religious 159 of Christ have been delivered, if they were just, during the Harrowing of Hell (an idea present in Mt 16,18; 1 P 3,19 and in the Gospel of Nicodemus). Similarly, it is considered that the children who were born dead without having been baptised do not go to Hell but are in the limbo. What is new, however, is that this hope for salvation is not applied to the patriarchs of the Old Testament, who have not received the new Law, or to new-born babies, but to Muslims willingly living outside of Christ’s message. Another common idea that we have briefly evoked is that the fallen angels’ fault is greater than mankind’s because they had celestial knowledge and have encouraged men to be evil.22 The connection between the idea of creation and love of the father for his children is the main theme of the Willehalm’s thought. It is the only element that unites Pagans with a God they do not acknowledge. Peter the Venerable even mentions it in his Contra sectam Sarracenorum: The love Peter is ready to bear for these Pagans, in order to convert them, is similar to the love given by God to the Pagans worshiping idols. This conception is probably partly based on the Epistle to the Romans in which Saint-Paul states that God is not only the God of the Jews but also of the Pagans (Rm., 4, 29). Saint-Paul adds that, since there is only one God, the Pagans will be justified by their faith (Rm., 4, 30). Indeed, for him the Pagans deprived of the Law but naturally accomplishing its prescriptions will be justified, for they “show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts” (Rm. 2, 14-15)23. This very irenic thought was taken to its extreme in the first part of the third century by Origen who proclaimed through his conception of apocatastasis that all creatures, including the devil, will finally be reconciled in God. This hope in a final reconciliation is based, once again, on one of Paul’s epistles, in which the author evokes the submission of all things to God “so that God may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15, 28)24. Wolfram’s use of dialogues and monologues is innovative, and perhaps unique in medieval literature. While dialogue allows the opposition and discussion of theological elements (without synthesis nor real concession from one part or the other), the use of monologues, even if it relies on the expression of an exclusively Christian mind, proclaims the omnipotence of divine mercy, of love addressed to both Christians and Pagans. Gyburg’s monologue indeed allows the poet to transcend the polarity opposing true and false religions. It is, in other words, not through dialogism that the author’s humanism prevails but surprisingly through monologism and a discourse structured, articulated around the fundamental notion of God’s love for all His creatures.

The Ambivalence of Wolfram’s Romance The discourse held by the German author is quite ambivalent for, as we have seen, he does not hesitate to affirm that salvation is impossible for those Pagans who have not been baptised. This ambivalence is partly

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explained by the distribution of roles: While Willehalm embodies warlike strength and the desire to avenge Vivanz’s death, Gyburg, a former Pagan herself, preaches mercy. If one remembers that güete, goodness, was considered during the Middle Ages as an essential feminine virtue, then it is possible to understand parts of this contradiction by opposition of persons and genders.25 It seems, however, that this aporia goes deeper and marks the text in a definite way. Even the authorial voice, when it is heard, does not allow us to settle the matter. Indeed, the author-narrator denounces several times the massacres committed, qualifying them of “mort” (Willehalm, 10, l. 18), that is to say murders, thus underlining their immoral character. He even goes so far as stating that slaughtering Pagans as if they were cattle is a sin: die nie toufes künde enpfiengen, ist daz sünde, daz man die sluoc alsam ein vihe? grozer sünde ich drumbe gihe: ez ist gar gotes hantgetat, zwuo und sibenzec sprache, die er hat.26 (Willehalm, 450, ll. 15-20) He re-uses the idea expressed by Gyburg that killing a being created by God’s hand is a sin. What is new, however, is that he transposes the interdiction to draw Christian blood to a Pagan.27 Yet this Christian humanism is instantly balanced by the following lines: Wolfram evokes Terramer’s will to lead his different peoples and their mighty kings to Aix-la-Chapelle, then to continue to Rome. He praises those who gave their lives to stop this project, and whose souls do not feel suffering anymore. There is undoubtedly throughout the romance tension between the respect of human life created by God in His image, and the idea of the martyr endured to save Christianity from a Pagan invasion. Several passages evoke the saintly aspect of these Christian knights who have fallen fighting, like for example Willhelam, who is called a saint (4, l. 13: “herre sanct Willehalm”), Vivianz, escorted by an angel when he died (49, ll. 23-30), or even the stone coffins in which rest the intact bodies of the soldiers of God (357, ll. 22-30). Besides, contradictions mark the very discourses of the characters. Gyburg thus announces to the Saracens that their demise will provoke the death of the body and the soul, before evoking the possibility of redemption offered to all of God’s creatures. The same is true for her father who, in the first place, seems to have sworn the death of his daughter before changing his mind and opening his heart to caritas. To these contradictions must be added the original narrative thread and the many fights of the Aliscans – a pattern that Wolfram cannot completely ignore. Besides, it is necessary to relativise Gyburg’s words before the second battle: First, because despite the

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Wolfram and the Ambiguity of the Religious 161 emotion they provoke to the barons, they do not change the course of events and do not prevent the hecatomb; second, because it is the only part of the work in which the salvation of Pagans is evoked. In addition, we must not forget that Gyburg is a former Pagan who tries to save the members of her family. Should we take this hope expressed by Wolfram seriously or are they merely words uttered by a character who worries about her family’s fate? The importance granted to the notion of creation of God and to the image of the Father full of kindness and mercy for his children urges us to think that this hope is well-founded and that the author wishes to be its herald. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly insufficient to talk about tolerance28 or of a dialogue between religions prefiguring modern times for the only legitimate belief for the author throughout the poem remains the Christian faith. The text rather constitutes a praise of creation and of the infinite mercy of the Christian god. Yet, what remains innovative for this thirteenth-century romance is the idea that God may forgive the Pagans and unbelievers, even if this thought is profoundly evangelical and is borrowed from Saint-Paul.29 It seems that the Enlightenments, or its German equivalent, the Aufklärung, truly establishes the notion of tolerance as we conceive it today. The dialogue between religions, as perceived throughout the exchanges between Gyburg and her father, aims to demonstrate the superiority of the one’s religion, and even urge the other – in that instance, Gyburg – to come back to her former faith. In that sense, this dialogue cannot constitute the premise of our modern tolerance, as it has often been affirmed. The polyphony of the poem is always marked by tensions and the desire to defeat the other to affirm the veracity of one’s faith. Wolfram could not be the defender of a form of religious pluralism that was fundamentally foreign to medieval thinking. Pagans remain for him worshippers, but he recognises their humanity and value as creatures of God. That is why he can be listed among the medieval thinkers who, for that very reason, refused bloodshed.30 More than a dialogue between religions, Wolfram’s text is the witness of two essentially Christian virtues: charity and patience. A modern reader might be surprised but it is not so much dialogue and polyphony that constitute the reflection of Humanity’s awakening to the other, but rather the use of monologues. Thus, Gyburg’s words, which suggest salvation for all the children of the Father, are based on the message of the Scriptures: “For the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them” (Lc 9,56).31 This common Father is well and truly the Christian god and certainly not one of the three idols constituting the Pagan Trinity. The heroine’s voice seems to identify with the author’s. Wolfram’s thinking, far from prefiguring the modern notion of tolerance as it would appear during the eighteenth century, is linked with a Christian humanism based on the infinite mercy of God as described in the Scriptures, a humanism specific to several medieval intellectuals.

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Notes 1 The quotations from the German text and its French source come from the following editions: Wolfram von Eschenbach, 1989 and Aliscans, 2007. 2 Danielle Buschinger thus sees the utopia represented in Wolfram’s Parzival as “the idea of feudal and knightly tolerance towards other faiths” (2017, p. 89 – translated by the author), as the ideal of a society driven by “the mutual respect and tolerance of its members” (p. 90), or even as the reflection of an “ecumenical society” (p. 291). A similar thesis can be found, though in a more nuanced way, in Catalina Girbea’s book (2014, pp. 528–579). Nonetheless, the author underlines several times that Wolfram’s message is in many places “completely in favour of tolerance” (p. 543 – translated by the author). 3 Sabel compares the medieval work with Nathan der Weise, underlining the common points and differences between both texts. 4 “Es eifre jeder seiner unbestochnen / von Vorurteilen freien Liebe nach! / Es strebe von euch jeder um die Wette, / Die Kraft des Steins in seinem Ringʼ an Tag / Zu legen! Komme dieser Kraft mit Sanftmut, / Mit herzlicher Verträglichkeit, mit Wohltun, / Mit innigster Ergebenheit in Gott / Zu Hilfʼ!” (“Let each now rival his unbiased love / so free from every prejudice! / Vie with each other in the generous strife / to prove the virtue of the stone in the ring you wear. / Assist its might with gentleness, / hearty forbearance, benevolence, / and with inward resignation to the will of God”.) Lessing, 1987, vol. III, p. 7 (ll. 2041–2048). 5 According to Daniel Rocher, Gyburg is torn between her original family and her new Christian family. She draws from that experience “a vision of the universal kinship of races and peoples, all children of God […] that announces at the beginning of the thirteenth century the humanism of the Enlightenment” (Rocher, 1989, p. 254 – translated by the author). 6 “In the death of the Pagan, the Christian is glorified for it is Christ who is, in his turn, glorified”. See de Clairvaux 1990, pp. 60–61: “In morte pagani christianus gloriatur, quia Christus glorificatur”. 7 “I do not approach you with weapons, as our kind often do, but with speech; not with strength, but with reason; not with hatred but with love, the sort of love that should exist between Christians and the enemies of Christ; between our apostles and the Pagans of that time whom they attempted to bring into Christ’s laws; between God himself, who created and directs all things and those He diverts thanks to his members from the cult of idols and demons, while they continue to serve the creation instead of the Creator”. 8 “Once a man does not love the Christian religion, hates God, despises charity, he does not have the right to live, truly I say to you. And whoever kills him, puts to death a demon. He avenges God, who is grateful. We are right to call you all dogs, for you are faithless and lawless”. 9 Martin Aurell considers that one of the main causes of this transition to a positive vision of the Pagan is to be searched for in the new literary genre that is the novel: “It is in the novel that the opening towards the enemy reaches its climax” (2013, p. 194 – translated by the author). 10 “But you, unfortunate Saracens, some of whom are my parents, a great evil awaits you here: you will suffer a double death. While you threaten me of

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11 12

13 14 15 16

17 18

19 20

21

22 23 24 25

three different torments, this double death already looks out for you: it is the end of this short life and of the links that fetter your souls to your Tervigant God, who has deceived you”. “My faith would be troubled if I believed that he [Jesus] is dead and resurrected, and that in addition he is one while being three”. The medieval novel of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries does not objectivise social diversity or ethnic diversity through speech. That is why Rennewart, a mere kitchen porter with crude mores who knows nothing of his princely origins, does not communicate in another way, or even in another tongue than the Christian knights. The language of this German novel is only social in the sense that it is courteous and standardised (written in a Middle High German understandable for the ruling aristocratic elite). In that respect, it is the reflection of its author and audience. For more details about the social aspect of dialogism, see Todorov 1981, pp. 49–66. Wolfram’s dialogism ignores the confrontation of classes. “the Pagans are considered ontologically equal to the Christians” “who can have no legal rights over me” “You are Christ, thus am I Christian” While the exchanges between Gyburg and her father about religion and the young woman’s monologue are Wolfram’s additions, the heroin’s feeling of guilt can be traced back to French source of the text (Aliscans, ll. 2251–2262). The idea that all men are God’s creatures is repeated at the end of the novel (Willehalm, 450, l. 19). “A baptised woman carries within her a pagan even if baptism surrounds the child. The baptism of Jews is particular: they perform circumcision. We have all been pagans at the beginning. The one who reaches salvation grieves that the father might doom his children to perdition. He may have mercy on them, He who has already carried within him true mercy”. The notion of God’s universal paternity is common in the Gospel: God is the Father of all (Jn 8, 41), both good and bad (Matt, 5, 45). The expression of this evangelic notion is not isolated in the texts written at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Modern commentators like Rüdiger Schnell or Fritz Peter Knapp have shown that this father-children relationship to designate God’s link with mankind is not just one of Wolfram’s particularities. It can be found in Arnold von Lübeck’s Chronica Slavorum, in which the author makes a pagan say “Unde constat, etsi dispar sit religio, unum nos habere factorem, unum patrem” (“And it is established that, even if our religions differ from one another, we have but one Creator, one Father”). In his Sagesse (Bescheidenheit), Freidank declares that man has three types of children: Christians, Jews, and Pagans. See Bumke 2004, p. 304. A similar idea can be found in Parzival, where the tears dropped by Belakane, a pagan with whom Parzival’s father had had a son, seem to have the value of a purifying baptism. See Gierbea 2014, p. 546 sqq; Parzival, vol. 1, p. 28, ll. 14–17. See. Livre d’Enoch, chap. 7. “qui ostendunt opus legis scriptum in cordibus suis” “ut sit Deus omnia in omnibus” Ursula Liebertz-Grün opposes Willehalm’s warrior masculinity to Gyburg’s femininity, which embodies the tendency to grieve (1996, pp. 383–405).

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26 “Is it a sin to slay like cattle those who were not baptised? I say it is a great sin: they are all creatures made by the hand of God, those who belong to His seventy-two peoples”. 27 It is a principle that a Christian must not kill another Christian or spill the blood of Christ. It was stated for the first time during the Council of Narbonne in 1054 that “[w]e want and order this, in the name of God and ours: that no Christian should kill another Christian. For he who kills a Christian spills, without a doubt, the blood of Christ”. (Mansi, vol. 19: “monemus, et mandamus secundum praeceptum Dei, et nostrum, ut nullus Christianorum alium quemlibet Christianum occidat: quia qui Christianum occidit, sine dubio Christi sanguinem fundit”; 1759–1798). 28 Even the simplest acceptation retained by Catalina Girbea, who reduces tolerance to the “acceptation of the other’s religion as it is” (2014, p. 529), does not fit Wolfram’s perspective. 29 Indeed, God has mercy on whoever He wishes (see Rm 9, 18), for God has confined all men in defiance to have mercy on all (Rm 11, 32). 30 Aurell has worked on this subject and evokes the position of several clerks who condemned the use of violence to force unbelievers into the faith, preferring the force of speech instead of weapons (2013, pp. 161–187). 31 “Filius hominis non venit animas perdere sed salvare”.

Works Cited Augustine and Thimme, W., ed. and trans. (1983). De vera religione / Über die wahre Religion (Lateinisch / Deutsch). Stuttgart: Reclam. Aurell, M. (2013). Des chrétiens contre la croisade (XIIe-XIIIe siècles). Paris: Fayard. Bakhtin, M. and Olivier, D., trans. (1978). Esthétique et théorie du roman. Paris: Gallimard. Bumke, J. (2004). Wolfram von Eschenbach. Stuttgart-Weimar: Metzler. Buschinger, D. (2017). Le Graal dans les pays de langue allemande. Essais sur le Moyen Âge, 61. Paris: Honoré Champion. Cherel, A. (1942). Histoire de la tolérance. Revue d’histoire de l ’Église de France, 113, pp. 9–50. De Clairvaux, B. and Émery, P.-Y., ed. and trans. (1990). Éloge de la nouvelle chevalerie. Paris: Le Cerf. Fischer, B., Gribomont, I., Sparks, H.F.D., and Thiele, W., eds. (1994). Biblia Sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem. Stuttgart: Deutsche Buchgesellschaft. Girbea, C. (2014). Le bon Sarrasin dans le roman médiéval, 1100–1225. Paris: Classiques Garnier. Lessing, G.E. (1987). Nathan der Weise. Stuttgart: Reclam. Liebertz-Grün, U. (1996). Das trauernde Geschlecht. Kriegerische Männlichkeit und Weiblichkeit im Willehalm Wolframs von Eschenbach. Germanischromanische Monatsschrift, 46, pp. 383–405. Mansi, J. (1759–1798). Sacrorum conciliorum, nova et amplissima collectio, 53 vols. Florence-Venise. Pastré, J.-M. (1982). L’image du sarrasin dans le Willehalm de Wolfram von Eschenbach. In: Images et signes de l’Orient dans l’Occident médiéval (littérature et civilisation). Senefiance, 11. Aix-en-Provence: Presses universitaires de Provence, pp. 253–265.

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Wolfram and the Ambiguity of the Religious 165 Pérennec, R. (2005). Wolfram von Eschenbach. Paris: Belin. Régnier, C., ed., Subrenat, J. and Subrenat, A., trans. (2007). Aliscans. Paris: Champion. Rocher, D. (1989). La femme mariée entre deux familles dans la littérature allemande du Moyen Âge. In: Les relations de parenté dans le monde médiéval. Senefiance, 26. Aix-en-Provence: Presses universitaires de Provence, pp. 247–255. Sabel, B. (2003). Toleranzdenken in mittelhochdeutscher Literatur. Imagines Medii Aevi, 14. Wiesbaden: Reichert. Schröder, E., ed. (1964). Deutsche Chroniken und andere Geschichtsbücher des Mittelalters. Vol. 1: Kaiserchronik eines Regensburger Geistlichen. Berlin: Weidmann. Todorov, T. (1981). Mikhaïl Bakhtine. Le principe dialogique, suivi de: Écrits du Cercle de Bakhtine. Paris: Seuil. Venerabilis, P. and Glei, R., ed. and trans. (1985). Schriften zum Islam. Altenberge: CIS-Verlag. Von Eschenbach, W., Lachmanns, K., Nellmann, E., and Kühn, D., eds. (2006). Parzival. Text und Kommentar. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Von Eschenbach, W., Schröder, W., and Kartschoke, D., eds. (1989). Willehalm, Berlin; New York: de Gruyter.

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Part Three

From Medieval England to the Early Modern

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Chaucer’s Speech and Thought Representation in Troilus and Criseyde Encoded Subjectivities and Semantic Extension Yoshiyuki Nakao

Introduction When Criseyde is told by Pandarus that Troilus loves her, she is embarrassed and hesitant to accept it. Whether she shows an instant love for him or not will affect her honour. She sees Troilus coming back to Troy in triumph from the window of her house. The narrator describes the situation, as in (1). (1) So lik a man of armes and a knyght He was to seen, fulfilled of heigh prowesse, For bothe he hadde a body and a might To don that thing, as wel as hardynesse; And ek to seen hym in his gere hym dresse, So fressh, so yong, so weldy semed he, It was an heven upon hym for to see.1 (Tr. 2, ll. 631-637) Is this the narrator’s neutral and generic evaluation of a typical knight? Or is it filtered through Criseyde? In the latter, is it a covert thought? This speech or thought representation may be on the borderline between the two. More significantly, depending upon which representation is chosen, the words in bold are susceptible to semantic change. By this marginal case I am motivated to investigate Chaucer’s speech and thought representation (hereinafter STR). Despite scholars’ occasional references to it, it has not been systematically studied, particularly in semantic terms. This paper will focus on how and why his STR is open to differing subjectivities resulting in semantic extension.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003129837-10

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Previous Scholarship and Research Question Previous Scholarship Chaucer’s STR has undergone little systematic treatment, particularly regarding its semantics. Gordon (1970) and Pearsall (1986) are seminal in noticing that some psychological narrative parts in Troilus and Criseyde are filtered through Criseyde’s perspective. Kiser (1991) and Spearing (2005) discuss the question of “truth” in medieval narratives and clarify how its truth is textually open to epistemological complexities, but with little reference to Chaucer’s STR. In her historical analysis of STR, Fludernik (1993) deals with medieval English texts, including Chaucer. She is insightful enough to point out that Chaucer used FIS (Free Indirect Speech) as early as in the late fourteenth century. According to Fludernik (1996), Troilus and Criseyde’s primary concern is with the psychological experiences of characters; therefore, the question of how to distinguish STR is brought more into focus. However, multiple layers of its meaning are not duly discussed. Fleischman (1990) investigates the relationship between medieval orality and tense as seen in STR. However, her exemplifications are limited to medieval French texts. Moore (2015) discusses how to identify speech elements in medieval English texts, including Chaucer, the Gawain-poet, and Langland. She also investigates how reporting verbs are varied depending on their reported contents, and plastic interpretations are based on unpunctuated manuscripts. However, due to her weighted treatment of quotatives (direct speech), types of STR, particularly the narrator’s, are little distinguished. Mostly disregarded in the above studies is how a poetic structure, metrical as well as rhyming, will affect the semantics of Chaucer’s STR. Chaucer’s representation performance still leaves much to be reconsidered theoretically and semantically. My research question is to describe how and why Chaucer’s STR is likely to encode alternative and redefining subjectivities, and to bring about its semantic extension. Troilus and Criseyde is a case in point.

Method I will consider Chaucer’s STR from two standpoints: One from a hierarchy of subjectivities encoded in his STR and the other from types of his STR. A Hierarchy of Subjectivities Encoded in Chaucer’s STR From a communicative point of view, Chaucer’s narrative performance is not monolithic but is instead multidimensional, involving alternating and redefining subjectivities. These subjectivities are first divided between

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Chaucer’s Speech, Thought Representation 171 reality space (stage) and fictional space (stage). The subjectivity of reality space is structured by Chaucer the writer and his contemporary (medieval) audience and reader. Fictional space is divided into three subdivided stages. At the top stage, I set up a conceptually functional subjectivity, here called view-shifting “I” along with the view-shifting reader who is expected to interact with him. This view-shifting “I” is essentially protean in redefining and extending the subjectivity in question, moving dynamically across different subjectivities. For example, standing in between the narrator and a character with gradiences, having a higher standpoint than these two, contrasting the initiated subjectivity with different characters in different genres and stories, even with Chaucer the writer in reality space, and furthermore involving the scribes and editors who are at once writer and reader. The middle stage is the narrator and the narratee. This narrator is not only neutral in perspective but also comes close to characters. The bottom stage is an interaction between character speaker and character hearer. A character’s subjectivity is usually the most limited. Figure 9.1 shows a hierarchical structure of subjectivities and the story lines they produce. This is based on Leech and Short (1981, p. 216) but slightly revised for this research. The story lines in Figure 9.1 are apparently fixed by choosing one of the subjectivities from the bottom stage to the top, but in actual fact the above subjectivities are not necessarily fixed but are dynamically open to each other. Through these dialogical interactions among the multilayered addressers and addressees, variable story lines2 are generated. Types of Chaucer’s STR Chaucer’s STR is linguistically realised going through one or more than one subjectivity as in Figure 9.1. For this structure I will apply Fleischman (1990, p. 229) [After Short, 1982, p. 184] in Figure 9.2. Fludernik (1993, p. 311) uses PN (Pure Narrative) for NRA with a more elaborate definition: “action, background description plus evaluative commentary by the narrator”. I use PN here. Furthermore, she is sensitive to another type of STR in between PN and NRS/TA, that is NP (Narrated Perception): “description replaced by evocation of character’s perception”.3 I add NP in Figure 9.2 as one type of Chaucer’s STR, although PN and NP are likely to be marginal to each other. Establishing clear-cut categorisations of Chaucer’s STR is perhaps asking too much. It is not certain how and to what extent Chaucer is conscious of distinguishing STR in his narratives. He was not a modernist writer like Mansfield and Woolf. In this paper, however, I take Vandelanotte’s (2009, p. 338) standpoint: “However, in order to arrive at sensible interpretations in context which are consonant with linguistic facts, one needs to have well-defined categories first to serve as a filter

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Reality space

I

I (writer)

say

X

to

you You (Audience/reader)

X

Fictional space View-shifting “I”

X’

1st Person Narrator (BD, HF, PF) 3rd Person Narrator (Tr) 1st Person Narrator rd [3 Per N[Tale]] (CT)

X”

Character

X”’

View-shifting Reader

Narratee

Character

Figure 9.1 A Multidimensional Structure of Subjectivities and the Story Lines They Produce. Notes: 1. The series of X indicate the story lines to be inferred between addresser and addressee. The story lines are not made exactly in the same way between addresser and addressee. So, I choose to not use “communicated”, and rather use “inferred”. 2. The story lines X, X’, X’’, X’’’ show that there can be discrepancies between them.

Character apparently Narrator apparently in control ← ---------------------------------- → in control Speech presentation: FDS DS FIS IS NRSA NRA Thought presentation: FDT DT FIT IT NRTA NRA Examples: DS/T (direct S/T): She said/thought, “I really like it here in Berkeley”. IS/T (indirect S/T): She said/thought that she really liked it there in Berkeley. FDS/T (free direct S/T): I really like it here in Berkeley. FIS/T (free indirect S/T): She really liked it here in Berkeley. NRS/TA (narrator’s report of an S/T act): She expressed/pondered her pleasure at being in Berkeley. NRA (narrator’s report of an act): She liked Berkeley a lot. Figure 9.2 The Representation of Speech and Thought. After Short 1982, p. 184.

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Chaucer’s Speech, Thought Representation 173 through which to interpret concrete text”. Marginal as the STR examples may be, they are situated in between types of STR with gradiences. The underlying structure of subjectivities (Figure 9.1) and types of the representation (Figure 9.2 + NP) are functionally independent but semantically complementary to each other. Combined with each other, they can produce a large number of semantic extensions of Chaucer’s STR. In this paper, I will focus on some borderline examples of representations from other parts of Troilus and Criseyde which allow me to illustrate the breadth of these extensions.

Data and Discussion Troilus and Criseyde has more parts represented directly through characters than those indirectly through the narrative (See Appendix A). The characters’ speech is not necessarily closed to one particular subjectivity but extends beyond it to alternative ones. On the other hand, the narrator’s description is not necessarily neutral, but is likely to be filtered through a character’s description, as shown in (1). In what follows, I will focus on these marginal cases in which view-shifting “I” seems to be significantly working in Troilus and Criseyde. The first is Criseyde’s mentioning of the siege of Thebes in answering Pandarus’s question of what she and her friends are reading when he visits her to tell of Troilus’s love in Book II. The second is the narrator’s description of Troilus’s coming back to Troy in triumph in Book II. The third is the narrator’s description of the heavy rain by which Criseyde is forced to stay at Pandarus’s house after dinner. The fourth is the narrator’s description of Criseyde’s acceptance of Troilus in Book III. The fifth is Criseyde’s monologue in which, despite her betrayal to Troilus, she attempts to justify herself for it in Book V. The sixth is the conversation between Troilus and Pandarus upon Criseyde’s coming back to Troy in Book V. Finally, the seventh is the narrator’s description of Troilus’s dream of a boar and Criseyde holding and kissing each other. Criseyde and Pandarus: Criseyde’s Speech on the “The Siege of Thebes” In Book II, Pandarus comes to Criseyde’s house to tell of Troilus’s love for her. The narrator describes that a maid is reading to her and her friends a story of the Siege of Thebes (Tr. 2, ll. 82-84). Pandarus asks whether the story is of love. Criseyde’s answer is highlighted in her direct speech. (2) With that thei gonnen laughe, and tho she seyde, “This romaunce is of Thebes that we rede; And we han herd how that kyng Layus deyde Thorugh Edippus his sone, and al that dede; And here we stynten at thise lettres rede-

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Yoshiyuki Nakao How the bisshop, as the book kan telle, Amphiorax, fil thorugh the ground to helle”. (Tr. 2, ll. 99-105)

This direct speech is introduced with the reporting verb “seyde” with its accompanying gesture “laughe”. This mismatch between her speaking tone and the tragedy of Thebes seems to indicate that the romance would have nothing to do with the tragic story that she herself will encounter later in Book V. Pandarus’s response to it (Tr. 2, ll. 106-08) is in the same vein. Her speech is deceptively simple. The speech is not closed to her own subjectivity, but is open to alternative, possibly higher, subjectivities. One of them is the progressively functional narrator’s subjectivity, which mentioned repeatedly the siege of Troy and its destruction by the Greeks (Tr. 1, ll. 57-60; 1, ll. 71-74; 1, ll. 76-77) earlier in Book I. Another one is the retroactively functional Trojan prophet, Cassandre’s, speech. She points out later in Book V (Tr. 5, ll. 1485-1519) that Diomede, a Greek knight, is the son of Tideus, who died in the siege of Thebes. Criseyde finally yields to Diomede. What is more, Chaucer the writer can be another subjectivity. And he was in fact in the siege of his contemporary London in the Hundred Years’ War between England and France (13371453). The rhyming of “rede” (the story’s content to [read]) and “rede” (paragraph marker by the [red] letters in the manuscript) in conjunction with its paronomastic rhyme “deyde” [died] is suggestive of blood in the war. Chaucer does not say everything but leaves the gaps for the reader to fulfil. Each of the above subjectivities is likely to be true of Chaucer or the conceptual view-shifting “I”. He has set a stage which could be construed differently, depending on the reader. Various subjectivities are encoded in Criseyde’s speech, as shown in Table 9.1. Narrator and Criseyde: the Narrator’s Description of Troilus’s Triumphant Return to Troy I will re-examine (1) through the framework seen in the Method section above. Is this the narrator’s neutral description of Troilus’s triumphant return, the so-called PN, or is the description subject to Criseyde’s view, that is, FIS/T? According to which subjectivity we emphasise, we can bring about different story lines. Speech-like whispering and covered thought are too close to distinguish. Much plasticity in the text, as shown in Table 9.2 below, encourages view-shifting “I” to interact with viewshifting reader leading to a variety of semantic extensions. In terms of FIS/T the construction “so… that” is reflective of how Criseyde accumulates as much evidence as possible in order to justify her action, which might hurt her honour. We have a similar example in (6). The OED quotes this weldy as the earliest instance with the meaning of “capable of easily ‘wielding’ one’s body or limbs”. Hanna (1971, p. 44) attends its sexual implication as in (3).

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Chaucer’s Speech, Thought Representation 175 Table 9.1 Various Subjectivities Encoded in Criseyde’s Speech on the Siege of Thebes Encoded Criseyde’s Subjectivities view (DS)

the narrator’s view (PN)

Linguistic Indexes what to rede “read”

destruction of the siege of Thebes

thise lettres rede “red”

paragraph marker in the manuscript red colour

metrical features: rich rhyme to highlight the red/blood colour

another character, Cassandre’s view (DS)

Chaucer the writer’s view (reality space)

destruction of the siege of Troy

destruction of destruction of the siege the siege of of Thebes London and the siege of Troy (“This Diomede is inne, and thow art oute”. Tr. 5. l. 1519) blood in the blood in the blood in the siege of sieges of Hundred Troy Thebes and Years’ War Troy blood blood colour blood colour colour

(3) In alliterative poetry the phrase “welden a woman” has a very specific sense not recognised by OED, namely “to have sexual knowledge of a woman”. Ho was þe worþiest wight þat eny welde wolde; Here gide was glorious and gay, of a gressegrene. The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyn, ll. 365-366 Note: Ho=a lady lufsom of lote ledand a kniʒt The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyn, l. 345 The adjective weldy is susceptible to Criseyde’s perspective. (See also Nakao (2013, pp. 52–53, pp. 104–05, pp. 225–27).) According to Windeatt (1990), scribes and early editors replace it with a more generic word: worthy. (4) Tr. 2, l. 636: weldy]worþi (For the abbreviations of the Troilus manuscripts and early editions, see Appendix B.) This scribal/editorial rewriting is likely to alter FIS/T to a neutral representation PN. Root’s (1952) edition only adopts worthy. He does not seem to consider that this lexical choice affects the quality of subjectivity in STR.

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Table 9.2 The Narrator’s Description of Troilus’s Coming Back to Troy in Triumph: PN or FIS/T

Linguistic Indexes to seen body might that thing fressh weldy

semed an heven

Encoded The Narrator’s Subjectivities Neutral View (PN)

for people body trained as a knight military power referential: knightly fight young and fresh (knight) vigorous (knight)

to people a great joy (MED s.v. heven quotes this example in 1b. Fig. (b)asupremely blissful experience.

Criseyde’s View Intertextual (FIS/T?) View

Scribal View (filtering)

for Criseyde body sexually attractive sexual power deictic: sexual sexual action sexually strong (man) welden a powerful woman enough to (man) control a (Hanna III woman (1971: 44)) (man) to Criseyde a sexual ecstasy

worthy (a generic feature of a knight)

Narrator and Pandarus: The Narrator’s Description of “a Reyn from Heven” Pandarus plays a go-between of Troilus and Criseyde. He plans to help them to achieve a climax of love. He invites her to his house for dinner on the very day when he knows it will rain so heavily that she must stay there for the night (Tr. 3, ll. 559-563). Troilus is already at his house without her notice, expecting the reunion with her. (5) But O Fortune, executrice of wierdes, O influences of thise hevenes hye! Soth is, that under God ye ben oure hierdes, Though to us bestes ben the causez wrie. This mene I now: for she gan homward hye, But execut was al bisyde hire leve The goddes wil, for which she moste bleve. (Tr. 3, ll. 617-623) The narrator attributes Criseyde’s staying at Pandarus’s house to a natural phenomenon, “a reyn from heven” (Tr. 3, l. 626) that is caused by

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Chaucer’s Speech, Thought Representation 177 Table 9.3 The Narrator’s Description of “a Reyn from Heven” Encoded The Narrator’s Neutral Subjectivities View (PN)

Pandarus, the Real Creator’s View (NP)

Linguistic Indexes But O Fortune Fortune This mene I now God/the goddes wil moste a reyn from heven (Tr. 3, l. 626)

adversative discourse marker in the plot development the narrator’s speech act influential power over the heavens the narrator’s metalanguage divine will divine modality (objective) a natural phenomenon

part of Pandarus’s stream of consciousness Pandarus’s speech act Pandarus’s influential power over the event Pandarus’s metalanguage Pandarus’s will Pandarus’s modality (subjective) Pandarus’s planned event

Fortune, which is under the control of God. The narrator reinforced the point that she must stay because God’s will was executed. Apparently, her staying happens objectively without any particular subjectivity. However, the accumulated objective causes are planned to occur by Pandarus’s particular subjectivity, the real creator of this event. Perhaps Pandarus sees a heavy rainfall (NP). The narrator verbalises Pandarus’s visual perception. The reader is encouraged to be left in the objective and subjective pendulum. Narrator and Criseyde: The Narrator’s Description of How Criseyde is to Accept Troilus into Bed As mentioned above, on the very day that Pandarus knows a storm will occur, Criseyde is invited to his house for dinner. She is forced to stay there because of the storm. Troilus, waiting for her at the house, is invited to the bedroom. She at last accepts him although with much hesitation. The quotation below focuses on how her heart softens despite her great anxiety, some time after which they consummate their love. (6) This accident so pitous was to here, And ek so like a sooth at prime face, And Troilus hire knyght to hir so deere, His prive comyng, and the siker place, That though that she did hym as thanne a grace, Considered alle thynges as they stoode, No wonder is, syn she did al for goode. (Tr. 3, ll. 918-924)

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According to Gordon (1970), (6) is one of the most psychological places in Troilus and Criseyde. The word pitous (OED s.v. piteous B. †1. Full of piety; pious, godly, devout c1305-1570; 2. Full of pity c1350-) is rich in Christian implications (the deep love of Christ and the compassion of His Holy Mother Mary). This pite is also attributed to an ideal courtly love (see the dream poet goes through the tension between Pite and Daunger, and at length comes to be accepted by Pite in The Romaunt of the Rose). The prive (Cf. OED s.v. privity †1.a. A divine or heavenly mystery a1225-1470) implies divine depth or polyvalence. The grace (OED s.v. grace 11. a. The free and unmerited favour of God as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowing of blessings a1225—) concerns divine God’s favour or Mary’s. Goode describes a virtuous action derived from grace. However, the reader can anticipate what happens next. The religious and courtly terms are likely to be sceptic with subjective redefinitions. The pite under discussion leads to the acceptance of the morning Troilus into her bed. However, “prive” and “siker” the event, it remains a sin; God sees if no-one else does. The grace Criseyde gives to Troilus is a quite secular event. The place-grace rhyming may highlight the sexual implications. Smith (1992) understands syn as “sin”, and good as “God”: “sin” she did for her goodness/“God” (Cupid) in accepting Troilus. Incidentally, scribal replacement of syn for for (Gg, H2, H5, and Ph) according to Windeatt (1990) will reject its sinful reconfirmation. Is No wonder is part of Criseyde’s reaction or the narrator’s comment upon it? In intertextual terms, the event comes close to the fabliau genre, such as the “Miller’s Tale” and the “Merchant’s Tale”. The former describes the secret love between Nicholas and Alisoun, with regard to which see privetee (I (A) ll. 3454, 3493, 3558, 3603, 3623). The latter depicts May’s moralisation of accepting Damyan’s desire (pitee, grace, place IV (E) ll. 19951997) in secrecy (“So secrely that no wight of it wiste” IV (E) l. 2006). Criseyde’s Monologue: Criseyde’s Betrayal of Troilus and her Divided Subjectivities Troilus and Criseyde achieve a climax of love in Book III. However, this does not continue for long. In Book IV it is determined by the Trojan Parliament that Criseyde is to be sent to the Greek camp for a prisoner exchange. She decides to go to the Greek camp and promises Troilus to come back to Troy within ten days. In Book V she is sent to the Greek camp. In her monologue (7), she, feeling sympathetic with Troilus and keeping some distance from him, or blaming herself, or attempting self-justification, finally ascribes herself to sliding Fortune. Notes in the square brackets are mine. (7) But trewely, the storie telleth us, [The narrator’s attitude: trewely] Ther made nevere womman moore wo [No woman making greater sorrow than she]

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Table 9.4 The Narrator’s Description of How Criseyde is to Accept Troilus into Bed The Narrator’s Neutral Criseyde’s Encoded (Emotional) View Subjectivities (Reasonable) View (PN) (FIT) Linguistic Indexes pitous

grace

the favour or mercy of God

Criseyde’s sympathy (degrees of sympathy problematised) Criseyde’s sense of secrecy implies immorality (God sees if no-one else does.) Criseyde’s favour, which implies a sinful deed

syn

the narrator’s sharing of his neutral evaluation with the audience since

since

goode

good

good

Scribal View (Filtering)

fabliau: Alisoun in the “Miller’s Tale”/May in the “Merchant’s Tale” fabliau: May in the “Merchant’s Tale” fabliau: May in the “Merchant’s Tale”

rhyme: place-grace No wonder is

Intertextual View

Criseyde’s self-justification for her deed “syn she did al for goode” (sin she did for good/God (Cupid)) See Smith (1992). God (Cupid)

for: Windeatt (1990) (implication of “sin” rejected)

Chaucer’s Speech, Thought Representation 179

his prive comynge and the siker place

divine sympathy/ sympathy as an ideal courtly lady divine mysticism and secrecy in courtly love

Higher (Explicitly Critical) View

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Yoshiyuki Nakao Than she, whan that she falsed Troilus. She seyde, “Allas, for now is clene ago My name of trouthe in love, for everemo! For I have falsed oon the gentileste betraying Troilus] That evere was, and oon the worthieste!

[Criseyde’s complaint: [Loss of her honour by

“Allas, of me, unto the worldes ende, Shal neyther ben ywriten nor ysonge No good word, for thise bokes wol me shende. O, rolled shal I ben on many a tonge! Thorughout the world my belle shal be ronge! And wommen moost wol haten me of alle. [Women will hate me the most] Allas, that swich a cas me sholde falle! “Thei wol seyn, in as muche as in me is, I have hem don deshonour, weylaway! Al be I nat the first that dide amys, What helpeth that to don my blame awey? But syn I se ther is no bettre way, And that to late is now for me to rewe, To Diomede algate I wol be trewe. “But, Troilus, syn I no bettre may, And syn that thus departen ye and I, Yet prey I God, so yeve yow right good day, As for the gentileste, trewely, That evere I say, to serven feythfully, And best kan ay his lady honour kepe”. And with that word she brast anon to wepe.

[I have dishonoured women (though I was not the first)]

[Too late to regret my deed] [I will be true to Diomede]

[No other way than to depart from Troilus]

[Hoping Troilus will be true to her and keep her honour] [She burst into tears]

(→cleansing of her sin → her self-recovery→regaining her position as a courtly lady) “And certes yow ne haten shal I nevere; And frendes love, that shal ye han of me, friendship] And my good word, al sholde I lyven evere. And trewely I wolde sory be For to seen yow in adversitee; And gilteles, I woot wel, I yow leve. But al shal passe; and thus take I my leve”.

[I will not hate you] [You shall have my

I will be sorry if you are in adversity] [Without guilt… I know… I leave/think …] [Recognition that time must move on] (Tr. 5, ll. 1051-1085)

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Chaucer’s Speech, Thought Representation 181 Conflicting between her sympathy with and distance from Troilus, Criseyde is not limited to one particular subjectivity but open to dynamically varying subjectivities. These subjectivities seem to be condensed in the last two lines (Tr. 5, ll. 1084-1085), which are my focal point here. The word leve is open to three different meanings as in (8): (8) OED s.v. leave v1. 7. a. To go away from. 1225— OED s.v. leave v1. 3. d. To allow to remain in a specified condition. 1205— OED s.v. leve v2. 2. Trans. a. To believe, give credence to (a person). 971-1570. The syntax of gilteles is ambiguous in relation to the three different meanings. (9) go away from: gilteles=yow, gilteles=I, gilteles=yow and I allow: gilteles=yow believe: gilteles=yow The modality of “I woot wel” is interpreted in two ways: objectively and subjectively (modalised). The textual combination between the lexis, syntax, and modality can allow Criseyde to be variously subjectivised. Criseyde as an ideal courtly lady will encourage us to relate gilteles to yow with the meaning of leve “go away from” and to understand: “go away from you who are guiltless”. However, assuming that she achieves her self-recovery after reflecting on her sin and cleansing it by weeping, we can relate gilteles to I with the interpretation that “I who am guiltless go away from you”. It should be noticed that her betrayal is not so much attributed to her positive attitude as to being a result of external pressures due to the prisoner exchange. This self-justificatory view even allows gilteles to be related to at once yow and I with further semantic extension that “I who am innocent go away from yow who are guiltless”. The meaning “believe” is, on the other hand, more noticeable in that Criseyde is as it were answering an unasked question. We do not have to ask about Troilus’s innocence. Assuming that she has recovered herself and stands in a superior position to that of Troilus, however, we can understand how she can refer to him in that way. Another meaning of leve “To allow to remain in a specified condition” (1205—) can similarly reinforce that point: “I allow you to be guiltless”. What is more, Criseyde does not say the above propositions as selfevident, but with modal colourings “I woot wel” attached to them, subjectively “as far as I know” or objectively “I know well”. Last, but by no means least, a discoursal and metrical view deserves special attention. Her monologue here is the final speech of Criseyde except for her letter to Troilus (Tr. 5, ll. 1590-1631). The last two lines appear in the final rhyme royal stanza of her monologue. In its final stanza

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they are the final cc lines. The couplet of a rhyme royal ababbcc has here as well as elsewhere a conclusive function.4 Furthermore, the final words of the last two lines, leve (v) and leve (n) rhyme with each other with an implication of separation. The metrically repeated “finality” seems to be in accord with the “finality” of the relationship between Troilus and Criseyde. This discoursal and metrical interpretation seems to be left to the interaction of between view-shifting “I” and view-shifting reader. Her divided subjectivities are shown in Table 9.5. Troilus and Pandarus: Troilus’s and Pandarus’s Seeing One Thing but in Different Ways On the tenth, the very last day when Criseyde is expected to come back to Troy, Troilus and Pandarus, hoping against hope, wait for her return on the siege wall dividing Troy and the Greek camp. They see something coming to them. They see one and the same thing. What does it look like to Troilus? And how about Pandarus? (10) And at the laste he torned hym and seyde, … (Tr. 5, l. 1146) “We han naught elles for to don, ywis. And Pandarus, now woltow trowen me? Have here my trouthe, I se hire! Yond she is! Heve up thyn eyen, man! Maistow nat se?” Pandare answerde, “Nay, so mote I the! Al wrong, by God! What saistow, man? Where arte? That I se yond nys but a fare-carte”. (Tr. 5, ll. 1156-1162) This is exactly a DS, which faithfully reflects the speakers’ subjectivity. Troilus sees “hire/she=Criseyde”. But Pandarus instantly modifies it to “fare-carte”. Troilus applies to it a courtly idealism (unbetrayed Criseyde). Pandarus is critically detached enough to call a spade a spade. However, these contrastive story lines do not exhaust the question here. View-shifting “I” is metasubjective enough to integrate them in a higher perspective, or with a new story line “merchandise”. The new story line works, to borrow a cognitive linguistic term, as a schema.5 The “farecarte” is metonymically linked to “merchandise”, and “Criseyde” metaphorically to “merchandise” because she is bartered between Greeks and Trojans, which Brown (2007, p. 309) insightfully points out. This “merchandise” is extended to Chaucer the writer in reality space: He was involved in the Hundred Years’ War between England and France and worked as a controller at Aldgate from 1374 to 1386. The above four different story lines based on the four different subjectivities are shown in Table 9.6. The encoded subjectivities above are shown in Figure 9.3.

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Table 9.5 Criseyde’s Monologue and Her Divided Subjectivities View-1 (DS) Divided Subjectivities

View-2 (DS)

View-3 (DS)

go away from

go away from

Viewy-4 (DS)

View-5 (DS)

Linguistic Indexes go away from

syntax: gilteles

I go away from you who are guiltless

modality: I woot wel

as far as I know (subjective) I know well (objective) [“finality” of the discoursal and metrical relationship elements: Criseyde’s final between Troilus speech, final stanza of her and Criseyde] rhyme royal monologue, final cc lines, final words leve-leve (rhyme)

to allow … to believe remain in a special condition I who am guiltless I who am guiltless I allow you to I believe you are go away from go away from you remain guiltless guiltless you who are guiltless. as far as I know as far as I know as far as I know as far as I know (subjective) (subjective) (subjective) (subjective) I know well I know well I know well I know well (objective) (objective) (objective) (objective) [“finality” of the [“finality” of the [“finality” of the [“finality” of the relationship relationship relationship relationship between Troilus between Troilus between Troilus between Troilus and Criseyde] and Criseyde] and Criseyde] and Criseyde]

Note: The square bracket in the last horizontal column indicates that the text cannot easily be closed to Criseyde but is likely open to view-shifting “I”.

Chaucer’s Speech, Thought Representation 183

lexis: leve

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Table 9.6 Troilus’s and Pandarus’s Seeing One Thing but in Different Ways Encoded Troilus’s Subjectivities View (DS)

Pandarus’s View (DS)

Linguistic Indexes something coming back to Troilus and Pandarus at the Trojan wall

Reality space

Higher View Than Troilus’s and Pandarus’s (View-Shifting “I”)

Chaucer as a Controller at London Aldgate in the Hundred Years’ War (Reality Space)

hire/she= farebartered bartered Criseyde as carte=a merchandise merchandise an ideal factually between (prisoners) courtly observed Greeks and between lady, vehicle Trojans England and who (metaphorical/ France fulfils her metonymical promise extension)

London siege: The 100 Years’ War between England and France (bartered prisoners), 1337–1453 Aldgate: Controller between 1374 and 1386 (bartered commodities)

1I (Writer)

Fictional space 2 View shifting “I”: Merchandise 3 1st Person Narrator (BD, HF, PF) 3rd Person Narrator (Tr) 1st Person Narrator rd [3 Per N[Tale]] (CT) 4 Character X”’: Troilus “Criseyde” (Metaphor: Merchandise)

You (Audience/reader)

X

X’=Merchandise X’

X”

X”’

View-shifting Reader

Narratee

Character X”’: Pandarus “Fare-carte” (Metonymy: Merchandise)

Figure 9.3 The Encoded Subjectivities and the Emergence of “Merchandise”.

Narrator and Troilus: Troilus’s Dream of a Boar and Criseyde Holding and Kissing Each Other Criseyde does not come back to Troy as she promised Troilus. Sceptical of her fulfilment of her promise, he dreams that a boar and Criseyde hold and kiss each other. In (11) we find varieties of STR are juxtaposed

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Chaucer’s Speech, Thought Representation 185 without any definite boundaries. This includes a hierarchical extension from PN to IT to PN (within IT) to PN (continued) or FIT/NP like Chinese nested boxes. (11) So on a day he leyde hym doun to slepe, And [PN] so byfel that yn his slep [IT] hym thoughte That in a forest faste he welk to wepe For love of here that hym these peynes wroughte; And up and doun as he the forest soughte, [PN within IT] He mette he saugh a bor with tuskes grete, That slepte ayeyn the bryghte sonnes hete. And[PN or FIT/NP] by this bor, faste in his armes folde, Lay, kyssyng ay, his lady bryght, Criseyde. [PN] For sorwe of which, whan he it gan byholde, And for despit, out of his slep he breyde, And loude he cride on Pandarus, and seyde: [DS] “O Pandarus, now know I crop and roote. I n’am but ded; ther nys noon other bote. (Tr. 5, ll. 1233-1246) Note: Types of STR are shown in square brackets. The example is initiated by PN [byfell], a narrative tag to show the occurrence of a significant event. This is soon followed by Troilus’s IT [hym thought], followed by which comes PN [he mette] with the visualised description of a boar in his dream. The next stanza continues the last stanza by beginning with “And”. Does this show a simple continuation of “he mette”? Or more probably is the representation shifted to FIT with more deictic characteristics or perhaps more perceptively to NP with less verbalisation? Immediately after comes PN with the plot development: Troilus’s sorrow and his waking up from his dream. This PN is slipped into Troilus’s DS with Pandarus where Troilus’s consulting of his dream with Pandarus is highlighted. One type of STR and another easily alternate with one another. Let us concentrate on FIT/NP. (12) And by this bor, faste in his armes folde, Lay, kyssyng ay, his lady bryght, Criseyde. (Tr. 5, ll. 1240-1241) This may be a borderline case between PN and FIT/NP, depending on degrees of “narrator apparently in control”. The difference between FIT and NP is degrees of verbalisation: The former more verbalised and the latter less verbalised. According to which subjectivity to emphasise, the narrator or Troilus, STR types are easily variable, bringing about different story lines. Table 9.7 is a summary of this.

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Table 9.7 Troilus’s Dream of a Boar and Criseyde Holding and Kissing Each Other Troilus’s View (FIT/NP)

Intertextual View: Filostrato

Linguistic Indexes this bor word order

referential=a bor in the preceding stanza the narrator’s distanced observation

deictic=immediately in front Troilus’s mental scanning (I-mode =Interactional mode of cognition)6 deictic=Troilus’s perception of “folding”: pre-verbalised

folde

the narrator’s verbalisation of the agent of “folding”

kyssyng

the narrator’s deliberate deictic=Troilus’s deletion of the agent/ perception of “kissing”: patient of kyssyng: pre-verbalised municipal deed

aspect: kyssyng

the narrator’s description of the progressive action referential: boar

reference of his “in his lady bright, Criseyde”

deictic: =synchronised (described as Troilus sees) deictic: Troilus Cf.5.1247: Troilus’s DS: “My lady bright, Criseyde”

boar as the agent of “folding” (Filostrato 7.24.1-8)7 boar/ Criseyde as the agent of “kissing” (Filostrato 7.24.1-8) Cf. “but almost did she take pleasure …”

*Scribal View [See Below]

*Editorial View [See Below]

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The Narrator’s Near Encoded Subjectivities Neutral View (PN)

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Chaucer’s Speech, Thought Representation 187 In the case of NP, Troilus is engaged in a pre-conceptual or perceptual (visual) stage of cognition. His cognition is not fully verbalised. Instead, in the case of PN, the narrator tries to verbalise it for the sake of the audience and reader. The characteristics of NP are significantly filtered through the scribes and editors. They are encouraged to make clear the deictic characteristics there. The scribes try to specify who is the agent/ patient of folding while editors are further trying to specify the agent/ patient of kissing by their added punctuations, with regard to which Chickering’s (1990) unpunctuating Chaucer is worth special attention. (13) Tr. 5, l. 1240 manuscripts variation: his: A. Cl, H4; hir: D, Gg (hyre), H1, R (hyr), S1, S2, Th (her); omission H2, H3, Ph, Cx (Cp, Dg, H5 lack this line) Editions variation: his: Robinson, Barney (Benson), Skeat, Baugh, Warrington, Howard (Note. The image is of Criseyde held by and kissing the boar); hir/ her: Root, Donaldson, Fisher, Pollard Regarding editions, we find the difference of punctuations before and after “kissing”. (14) Tr. 5, l. 1241 punctuation of editions. a. Windeatt [his]; Donaldson/Fisher [her]) Lay kissing ay his lady bright, Criseyde b. Baugh [his] Lay, kissing ay his lady bright, Criseyde c. Robinson/Barney [his]; Root/Pollard [her]) Lay, kissing ay, his lady bright, Criseyde In the case of (14a), with no pause after Lay, and with stress on kissing and Criseyde, we are encouraged to interpret Criseyde as the agent of kissing, who is end-focused due to the S-V inversion. In the case of (14b), with pause after Lay, reading kissing ay his lady bright at a breath, we are encouraged to have an illusion that the agent of kissing is a boar and Criseyde is a patient. In the case of (14c), with a comma before and after kissing, we are encouraged to interpret that a boar and Criseyde are cooperatively engaged in the kissing with no differentiation between agent and patient. Every variant is Chaucer, and every variant is not Chaucer. The truth is in between, the final judgement of which may be ascribed to view-shifting “I” and reader.8

Conclusion I have attempted to reconsider Chaucer’s STR theoretically and semantically. I have set up a hierarchical structure of distinguishing subjectivities

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encoded in Chaucer’s narrative performance (Figure 9.1) and classified types of STR (Figure 9.2) according to Fleischman (1990), slightly supplemented by Fludernik (1993). Subjectivities are not closed but are open to one another with the increase in multi-layered subjectivities. Types of STR in Chaucer are not necessarily made clear-cut but more frequently than not marginal to each other with gradiences. Combining these two, I have described how and why varying subjectivities are likely to be encoded in Chaucer’s STR and to allow for a dynamic semantic extension. The seven examples taken up above are: Criseyde’s speech upon Pandarus (4.1: DS) and her monologue (4.5: DS), the narrator’s evaluative descriptions of Troilus (4.2: PN/FIT, 4.7: PN→IT→PN (within IT)→PN (continued) or FIT/NP), of Criseyde (4.4: PN/FIT), and of Pandarus (4.3: PN/NP), and the dialogue between Troilus and Pandarus (4.6: DS). Through these analyses I have found that Chaucer’s direct speech is not necessarily limited to a single subjectivity but is open to different subjectivities as seen in 4.1, 4.5, and 4.6; NP is interesting in that it is filtered through scribes and editors with textual variations with different subjectivities; view-shifting “I”, although textually absent, functions as a metasubjectivity to cross over and invite various subjectivities such as narrator-character alternating, intertextual, and scribal. There remain a lot of borderline and ambiguous cases in Troilus and Criseyde. These cases are quite challenging to interpret. They are not simply negative, but on the other they seem to suggest a significant plasticity in Chaucer’s STR since Chaucerian characters are not necessarily closed to one coherent range of personality, as is typically shown in modern novels. Here the question of medieval “trouthe” (truth) or “auctorite” (authority) initiated by Kiser (1991), Spearing (2005), and Moore (2015) with pioneering achievements might be relevant and worth rewarding reconsideration in clarifying how and why the plasticity of Chaucer’s STR is brought about.

Notes 1 Chaucer’s text and the abbreviations of his works are based on Benson 1987. Bolds are mine. 2 Hierarchical structure of subjectivities is hinted by mental space theory, with regard to which see Fauconnier (1994) and Fauconnier and Turner (2003). 3 NP is a character’s perception of an event. This comes close to FIS/T, but different in that the former is visional and proverbialised and the latter is likely to be verbalised. 4 Maui (1964, p. 267): [11] §125. The seven-line stanza of the rime a b a b b c c, which Chaucer employed in Troilus and Criseyde, the Parliament of Fowls, and others may pose an interesting problem in point of rime and line-structure. It has three parts, the pedes ab, ab, and the cadua bcc. Roughly speaking, the first pedes (ab, ab) may serve for the beginning of a theme and its development, and the last cadua (bcc) for the turning (or surprise) (b) and the conclusion (cc)

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5

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of the theme, thus forming a small unity within a single stanza. By so doing, stanza follows stanza with a circular and yet progressive movement of verse in accordance with the gradual and sustained development of a subject matter. And the last two lines of the stanza often give us an effect of finality just as does the heroic verse. This effect of finality or summing up may certainly be achieved in part by the last rime cc. For that matter, the structure of a sevenline stanza seems to resemble to some extent that of a Chinese zekku (quatrain), which has “beginning, development, turning and conclusion”. See Langacker (2000, p. 13)’s “Schematization and Extension”. Schema is the common core connecting “Prototype” and “Extension”. Troilus’s view and Pandarus’s view correspond to either of these two, and the view in common corresponds to “merchandise”. See Nakamura (2004, pp. 33–48) for I-mode (Interactional mode of cognition) and D-mode (Displaced mode of cognition). The I-mode shows the speaker’s experiencing of an event with such a vivid sensory perception that it is actually present in the immediate situation “I-here-now”. The D-mode, on the other hand, shows the speaker’s experiencing of an event as if others (a third party) were observing it. In Boccaccio’s Filostrato, the narrator says a boar is eager to please Cressida, and that she feels comfortable with it: “E poi appresso gli parve vedere / Sotto a’ suoi piè Criseida, alla quale / Col grifo il cor traeva, ed al parere / Di lui, Criseida di cosí gran male / Non si curava, ma quasi piacere / Prendea di ciò che facea l’animale, / Il che a lui sì forte era in dispetto, / Che questo ruppe il sonno deboletto” (Filostrato 7, 24, ll. 1-8). (And then afterward it seemed to him that he saw beneath its feet Cressida, whose heart it tore forth with its snout. And as it seemed, little cared Cressida for so great a hurt, but almost did she take pleasure in what the beast was doing. This gave him such a fit of rage that it broke off his uneasy slumber.) (The text of the Filostrato is based on Griffin and Myrick (1978)). For details of metalinguistic (scribal as well as editorial) ambiguities, see Nakao (2013, pp. 60–64) and Nakao (2018, pp. 250–255).

Works Cited Bakhtin, M., Emerson, C., and Holquist, M., eds. and trans. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination. Fours Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Benson, L.D., ed. (1987). The Riverside Chaucer: Third edition based on The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer edited by F. N. Robinson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Brown, P. (2007). Chaucer and the Making of Optical Space. Bern: Peter Lang. Chickering, H. (1990). Unpunctuating Chaucer. The Chaucer Review 25(2), pp. 97–109. Fauconnier, G. (1994). Mental Spaces: Aspects of meaning construction in natural language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fauconnier G. and Turner, M. (2003). The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Fisher, J.H., ed. (1989). The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Fleischman, S. (1990). Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval Performance to Modern Fiction. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Fludernik, M. (1993). The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction: The linguistic representation of speech and consciousness. London and New York: Routledge. Fludernik, M. (1996). Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London and New York: Routledge. Gordon, I.L. (1970). The Double Sorrow of Troilus: A Study of Ambiguities in Troilus and Criseyde. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Griffin, N.E. and Myrick A.B., eds. and trans. (1978). The Filostrato of Giovanni Boccaccio. New York: Octagon Books. Hanna, R.III., ed. (1971). Auntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyn. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kiser, L.J. (1991). Truth and Textuality in Chaucer’s Poetry. Hanover and London: University Press of New England. Kurath, H., Kuhn, S.M., and Lewis, R.E., eds. (1952-2001). Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Langacker, R.W. (2000). A Dynamic Usage-based Model. In: M. Barlow and S. Kemmer, eds., Usage Based Models of Language. Stanford: CSLI Publications, pp. 1–63. Leech, G. and Short, M. (1981). Style in Fiction. London: Longman. Masui, M. (1964). The Structure of Chaucer’s Rime Words: An Exploration into the Poetic Language of Chaucer. Tokyo: Kenkyusha. Moore, C. (2015). Quoting Speech in Early English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nakamura, Y., ed. (2004). Ninchibunporon II (Cognitive Grammar II). Tokyo: Taishukan. Nakao, Y. (2013). The Structure of Chaucer’s Ambiguity. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Nakao, Y. (2018). The Semantics of Chaucer’s Speech/Thought Presentation in Troilus and Criseyde: The Emergence of Conceptual Blending. In: H. Ohno, K. Mizuno, and O. Imahayashi, eds., The Pleasure of English Language and Literature: A Festschrift for Akiyuki Jimura. Hiroshima: Keisuuisha, pp. 241–260. Pearsall, D. (1986). Criseyde’s Choices. Studies in the Age of Chaucer: Proceedings, 2, pp. 17–29. Robinson, F.N., ed. (1957). The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. London: Oxford University Press. Root, R.K., ed. (1952). The Book of Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Short, M. (1982). Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature with an Example from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In: R. Carter, ed., Language and Literature. London: George Allen and Unwin, pp. 179–182. Smith, M. (1992). Sith and Syn in Chaucer’s Troilus. The Chaucer Review, 26 (3), pp. 266–282. Spearing, A.C. (2005). Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Romances and Lyrics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vandelanotte, L. (2009). Speech and Thought Representation in English: A Cognitive-Functional Approach. Berlin-New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Windeatt, B.A., ed. (1990). Geoffrey Chaucer Troilus & Criseyde: A New Edition of ‘The Book of Troilus’. London: Longman.

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Appendix A: The Frequency of Words According to Main Characters and Narrator Troilus Type Token

Criseyde

Pandarus

Total-character

Narrator

3718

2983

4525

11226

7119

11394

9032

14342

34768

27820

40000 35000 30000 25000 20000 15000

Type

10000

Token

5000 r to

er

ar

To

ta

l-c

N

ra ha

ra

ct

us ar nd Pa

ris C

Tr

oi

ey

lu

s

de

0

Appendix B: Manuscripts and Early Prints of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde A Cl Cp Dg D Gg H1MS H2MS H3MS H4MS H5MS J PhFormerly R S1 S2

Additional MS 12044, British Library The Campsall MS, Now Pierpont Morgan Library M 817 Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 61 MS Digby 181, Bodleian Library University of Durham, Cosin MS V. II. 13 Cambridge University Library MS Gg.4.27 Harley 2280, British Library Harley 3943, British Library Harley 1239, British Library Harley 2392, British Library Harley 4912, British Library St John’s College, Cambridge, MS L.1 Phillips 8252, Now Huntington Library HM 114 MS Rawlinson Poet.163, Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden B.24, Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden Supra 56, Bodleian Library CxCaxton’s edition of TC (c.1483) ThThynne’s edition (1532) WWynkyn de Worde’s edition (1517)

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10 Chaucer and the Streams of Parnassus Paul Strohm

Period divisions such as the imagined gulf between “Late Medieval” and “Early Modern” encourage simplifications convenient to literary history, but they gloss over actual complexities of a text’s insertion in time. Although valuable insights are to be gained by “periodising” a text in terms of attributes shared with its contemporaries, every text contains temporal contradictions and anomalies likely to escape the notice of period-based analysis. My interest here is in experimenting with some “unperiodised” thinking about Geoffrey Chaucer, opening consideration to ways in which his writing refuses confinement to its own temporal moment. My own interest in “unperiodised” thinking got a boost from a 2018 Grenoble conference organised by Jonathan Fruoco under the title “Polyphonies, Art and Territories: Medievalism and Modernity”. This capacious title offers several avenues of escape from period-exclusive thinking. One is the salutary jolt we experience upon introducing the subject of modernity into a discussion of medieval art. At least some creative artists in every age embrace a sense of themselves as new, progressive, or modern, and this gesture invites our attention to temporally unbounded moments in their texts. Our sense of a text’s timelessness may also be enhanced when we adopt a free-floating analytical standpoint; in the case of Fruoco’s conference, that of polyphony. Artistic principles and structures identifiable as “polyphonic” occur not just in the high Middle Ages but in other periods as well. A concept like polyphony – especially when understood in its broadest sense as any stylistic tendency premised on the presence within a work of simultaneous, unmerged, and unhierachised voices – can carry the analyst across divisions of place, period, or time. My plan here is to think about free-floating modernity claims, and also about polyphony as a chronologically unrestricted index of modernity, as ways of identifying artistic affinities that defy apparent norms of periodicity and temporal succession.

“Modern” Chaucer Certainly, the medieval centuries had their own discourses of modernity, and they abounded in assertions of novelty and departure. These claims DOI: 10.4324/9781003129837-11

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Chaucer and the Streams of Parnassus 193 were frequently linked with innovations in musical composition and notation. Crucial in the formation of this progressive sense was Philippe de Vitry’s Ars nova (1322), in which he set forth a new range of notational possibilities, permitting divergent melody lines to be pursued by individual voices within a coordinate whole (de Vitry and Leo Plantinga, 1961). The ensuing new practices – as realised, for example, in the musical compositions of Guillaume de Machaut – were recognised in contemporary commentary, with Ars antiqua referring to previous practice and Ars nova as a marker of innovation. Other medieval musical theorists echo Philippe in his sense of the newness of his enterprise – as in, for example, Johannes de Muris’s 1320 treatise Ars novae musicae, and by Jacobus de Liege’s references to moderni cantores (on these points of fourteenth-century usage, see Fallows, 1971). A sense of modernity accompanied by claims of innovation concurrently flourished in non-musical arts as well. As Janet Coleman demonstrated in her admirable Piers Plowman and the Moderni, Ockham and other fourteenth-century theologians and philosophers often referred to themselves as moderni, as a way of underscoring the novelty of their thoughts on matters of will and choice, ethics and reward (Coleman, 1981). Literary figures were equally ready to boost their works with assertions of novelty and new departure. A collection of French tales billed itself as “Cent nouvelles nouvelles”. Even while paying tribute to old books as his sources, Chaucer clearly considered himself a practitioner of the new, respecting the foundational role of the old but offering “new corn” and “new science” to his readers: For out of olde feldes, as men seyth, Cometh al this newe corn from yer to yere, And out of olde bokes, in good feyth, Cometh al this newe science that men lere. (Chaucer, 1987, PF, ll. 22-25) Importation of “newe science” – in the sense of scientia or learning – is only one of the senses in which Chaucer may be considered “modern”. Late medieval insistence on modernity is found in close and frequent association with what might be called “polyphonic” practices. Although the word “polyphony” was not to flourish until the nineteenth or – in common critical practice – the twentieth centuries, references to “new” music and “modern” singers were sensitive to what might be called “polyphonic” practices of associating divergent voices within a larger whole. Chaucer is, likewise, a poet of bold departure with regard to the stylistic tendencies associated with polyphony, including such features as his bold stylistic juxtapositions, his commingling of disparate voices, and his disposition to unresolved conflicts. Experimentation with a “new” musical or poetical or philosophical tendency does not in itself mean that an artist has abdicated his or

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her historical moment. An artist may always make “modern” choices among the array of opportunities presented by a particular cultural moment – without, that is, leaving his or her own time. In The Principle of Hope, published back in the 1950s, the great Marxist theorist Ernst Bloch showed that each moment in time is potentially fractured (Bloch, 1995), that people living side by side in the same country can effectively live in different centuries – some making their alliances with the past and others betting on the future – but all of them, at least technically, enclosed in the same temporal moment. To be modern in this sense is simply to be “progressive” or “up-to-date” in choosing from among already-available alternatives. Ernst Bloch’s ideas are augmented by those of Raymond Williams, who so usefully observed that every age scrambles its temporalities, mingling elements of superseded culture (“the residual”), currently popular or broadly accepted culture (“the dominant”) together with intimations of the future (“the emergent”) (Williams, 1977). And the Middle Ages are no exception. The medieval artist can claim to be a champion of emergent culture – of newness, modernity – without claiming in any sense to have escaped his or her own age, or to have transported themselves to the future. Chaucer, in these senses, may be seen as a modern, a poet of progressive tendencies within his age. And yet the Grenoble conference’s title teases us with a hint at something further, posing a more complex question: Is it possible for a work of art to be “modern”, not just in the sense of progressive or innovative in its own time, but somehow to reach beyond itself – to achieve modernity according to subsequent norms? To put the matter specifically: Can any aspect of Geoffrey Chaucer’s writing be regarded as modern – not just relatively modern within presenting medieval options, but as absolutely Modern – in any meaningful sense of the word? One way of considering this proposition is to ask whether features of Chaucer’s poetry were received as contemporaneous by writers of subsequent periods or, in this case, the literary period conventionally thought to follow his own. Certainly, Chaucer did not lack for admirers in the period we call Early Modern. But what did they admire him for? Many things are said in praise of Chaucer by Early Modern writers – as well as some things in merely ostensible praise and others in outright detraction – but to what extent was he honoured for precocious modernity, for anticipating subsequent or emergent developments or stylistically predictive tendencies? A brief canvass of Early Modern appreciations of Chaucer will suggest that, however admired, Chaucer was rarely appreciated for his continued relevance or contemporaneity. But at least one such moment of appreciation is to be found, a moment in which he is praised for what might be called “polyphonic” tendencies of mixed voices and tendencies, and with that moment I will eventually conclude.

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Shutting the Door on Chaucer The last thing on earth that most Early Modern English writers, many of them proud innovators in their own right, wanted from Chaucer was experiment, innovation, or any version of modernity. They wanted him for what they wanted him for: As a founder and guarantor of an English literary tradition. His job as an initiator was to stand at the stream’s head of this proud tradition but in no way to command or press a sense of his own continuing relevance. In this sense, most Early Modern ways of dealing with Chaucer were actually ways of not dealing with him – of sealing him in the past, not only denying him anything like contemporaneity or modernity but treating him as yesterday’s poet, over and done. In their enterprise of tradition-building, the Early Moderns paid Chaucer a certain amount of pro forma respect, but as an ancestor or progenitor rather than a continuing influence. It seems, for example, as much a matter of dutiful and second-hand report as of fresh encounter when William Webbe, in Discourse of English Poetrie (1586) says that Chaucer “was always accounted the God of English Poets” (Spurgeon, 1927). And in Strange News, Thomas Nashe rather automatically – but also rather glibly and without much investment – calls him “the Homer of England” (Nashe, 1958, p. 299). As England’s Homer, Chaucer occupies a place of unquestioned respect, but one that locates his importance in the deep past, less as a vital contemporary than a long-surpassed founder-figure. Even the most laudatory Early Modern imaginings of Chaucer tend to seal him away, to restrict him to his own time. Such a moment occurs in Thomas Dekker’s Knight’s Conjuring, in which he allows “old Chaucer” to fraternise on terms of equality and respect with sixteenth-century literary figures but restricts him to his own bower, celebrated by his medieval contemporaries, rather than allowing him to mingle freely with poets of Dekker’s own day. [...] old Chaucer, reverend for prioritie, blithe in cheare, buxome in his speeches, and benighne in his behavior, is circled a round with all the Makers or Poets of his time, their hands leaning on one another’s shoulders, and their eyes fixt seriously upon his, whilst their eares are all tied to his tongue, by the golden chaines of his Numbers […] (Dekker, 1974, p. 155) Spenser enters the company but is positioned not as Chaucer’s contemporary but as a privileged successor, as Chaucer’s son:

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The most respectful treatments of Chaucer situate him as “antient” and “old”. Leading examples include E.K.’s commentary on the Shepheardes Calendar, in which he repeatedly contrasts “olde poete” Chaucer with “new poete” Spenser, or Speght’s claim in his 1598 and 1602 editions that he has “reformed the whole Worke, whereby Chaucer for the most part is restored to his owne Antiquitie” (Speght, 1602). These are gestures of honour and respect, to be sure, but the very terms in which he is honoured suggest his supplantation, his status as a respected poet of yesteryear (Cook, 2019). This view of Chaucer may be measured by E.K.’s assumption that Chaucer’s word-choices invite glossing for contemporary audiences, and also by Speght’s considerably extended glosses to his 1598 and 1602 editions; these philological labours confirm their present admiration and respect, even as they suggest that enjoyment of Chaucer necessitates an act of recovery (Cook, 2019 and Chaghafi, 2019). Chaucer’s use of old and obscure words – often judged “rude” in Early Modern formulations – aligns with a different, but adjacent, critique, in which he is found insensitive to, or wanting in, matters of latterly accepted literary decorum. For no sooner than they had acknowledged “father Chaucer” as a senior and precedental figure, than the Early Moderns were prepared to admit that they found him a perplexing and slightly embarrassing presence. He is at once the Homer or Virgil of English letters but also an embarrassing or even corrupting influence who must be minimised, forgiven, excused, or restrained. (Rather like a venerated old patriarch whose attendance at the family wedding is mandatory, even though he cannot really be trusted among the bridesmaids or near the bar.) A case in point is Thomas Nashe, already cited for his view of Chaucer as England’s Homer. Nashe reveals another attitude in the dedicatory epistle of the same work, in which he addresses his patron, evidently an amiable good fellow and immoderate tippler whom he identifies as “Master Apis lapis”. As for his work, he expresses the hope that If your Worship (according to your wonted Chaucerisme) shall accept in good part, Ile bee your daily Orator to pray that the pure sanguine complexion of yours may neuer be famisht …, that you may tast till your last gaspe. (Nashe, 1958 p. 255) Chaucerisme, here, seems rather more Rabelasian and less Homeric or Virgilian or Spenserian than we might expect, given his place in the

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Chaucer and the Streams of Parnassus 197 pantheon of English writers, casting him more as the patron of the knowing wink and jest than the standard bearer of high art. This same undertow is elaborated in further writings of Gabriel Harvey. In his self-nominated capacity as major player and literary arbiter, Harvey went right out and bought a copy of Speght’s 1598 edition of Chaucer and loaded it with revealing marginalia. These marginalia reveal what might be considered a “Chaucer problem”: A nagging unease about his failure to meet modern norms of literary decorum. Harvey praises Chaucer and grants him laurel standing, and appreciatively notices an aspect of his accomplishment to which I will return later in these remarks – his command of a “variety” of veins and humours, his ability to write “in any kinds”. Nonetheless, his prevailing attitude toward Chaucer remains one of condescension; he imagines him a poet suited for pleasant entertainment, a “sociable” or clubbable writer, but not necessarily one of the greatest moments: Plesant interteinement of Time, with sociable intercourse of Tales, stories, discourses, and merriments of all fashions, Gallant variety of notable veines & humors in manie kinds. (Moore, 1913, pp. 226–227) In a final summation, he confesses his nagging worry. The tales are, he says, especially to be read For the varieties both of matter, & manner, that delightes with profit, & profittes with delight. Thowgh I could haue wished better choices of sum arguments, and sum subiects of more importance. (p. 229) Harvey was constantly vigilant against low scurrility, or “Tarltonising”, as he called it, after the published jests and anecdotes of that popular comic actor. He often accused Greene and Nashe of descending to this level, and, in his Four Letters, becomes so agitated on the subject that he even takes a swipe at his adored and otherwise untouchable friend Spenser, deploring Spenser’s choice of a medieval, and Chaucerian, vein for his “Mother Hubbard’s Tale”. Spenser’s tale is a satire of contemporary politics, but avails itself of a range of Chaucerian elements: It is written in decasyllabic couplets, it is part of a tale-telling situation, it confesses to a “base” style and to “mean matter”, it is an animal fable, it adopts pseudo-medieval diction, it imagines social healing in plague time (even as the pilgrimage to Becket’s shrine is imagined to cure the sick). These Chaucerian traits are, evidently, what set Harvey off, propelled him into a critique even of his dearest and most admired friend: “I must needs say, Mother Hubbard, in heat of choler, forgetting the pure sanguine of her sweete Feary Queene, willfully over-shott her malcontented selfe […]” (Harvey, 1592). Spenser’s rare mistake is to have allowed superseded and inappropriately Chaucerian elements a place among his own more decorous and

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contemporaneous productions. Harvey goes on to refer to Spenser’s tale as a “canicular tale” – a tale, that is, of the “dog days”, and his derisive word choice implies something overcooked and undesirable about Spenser’s choice to align himself with “the vaine of Chaucer”. Harvey’s tendency, which I am regarding as generally shared by his Early Modern contemporaries, is to honour Chaucer for his precedental role as a first founder of native poetical tradition, but to deny him continuing influence while expressing grave reservations about the contemporary relevance of his example. Even as he is honoured for his historical importance, he is rather decisively denied a role in contemporary poetical practice.

Sealed in Lead It often seems that even Chaucer’s most emphatic followers, given an opportunity, would have him out of the way. Even his most conspicuous devotee, Spenser, seems prepared at times to shut the door on him, betraying the same admixture of admiration and unease already glimpsed in Nashe and Harvey. This discomfort surfaces, for example, in Colin’s fervent praise of Tityrus, a.k.a Chaucer, in the Spenser’s June Eclogue (McCabe, 1999). As his name would suggest, Colin is an ostensible figure of bluff honesty and spokesperson for native tradition, though of course not nearly so forthright, or even so native, as he seems. His name is borrowed from John Skelton, who deployed Colin as a figure of rugged honesty, declaring himself in native metres and plain speech, but this Colin inhabits a world of pastoral – the Early Modern poetic world of Sannazaro and Marot, a world effectively quite estranged from that of Chaucer. Furthermore, Colin’s eulogy to Tityrus/Chaucer turns out upon inspection to be rather more tonally complex than might first seem the case. It begins becomingly and even reverently: The God of shepheards Tityrus is dead, Who taught me homely, as I can, to make, He, whilst he lived, was the soveraigne head Of shepheards all […] (McCabe, 1999, p. 90, ll. 81–84) So far so good; yet several other elements of his brief passage argue for further consideration. One might recognise a preliminary note of qualification in Spenser’s acknowledgment of Chaucer as sovereign head “whilst he lived” – that is, precisely to confine him to his own era – but perhaps I am over-reading. Where the ground does shift is in the next stanza, with “Nowe dead he is, and lyeth wrapt in leade / … And all his passing skil with him is fledde” (McCabe, 1999, p. 90, ll. 89 and 91). The Shepherds’s Calendar abounds in echoes and allusions to Chaucer’s own

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Chaucer and the Streams of Parnassus 199 writings, and here is another: In this case, a decidedly irreverent moment in the Chaucer canon. This is when Chaucer’s Clerk – speaking in propria persona, but also in some respects undoubtedly speaking for Chaucer as well, at once declares his fealty to Petrarch and (with some unconcealed satisfaction) the finality of Petrarch’s passing and the silencing of his poetic voice. Here the Clerk is somewhat chafing under Harry Bailly’s “yerde” or sway, and, agreeing to tell his tale of Griselda, acknowledges another kind of sway, that of the tale’s author Petrarch: I wol yow telle a tale which that I Lerned at Padow of a worthy clerk, As preved by his wordes and his werk. He is now deed and nayled in his cheste; I prey to God so yeve his soule reste! (Chaucer, 1987, CT, ll. 26-30) “Nayled in his cheste”: Is this a flippancy? I think so, and also that the opening of a space in which the Clerk, and Chaucer, can spin their own version of Griselda’s tale, is a welcome development. Petrarch nailed up, Chaucer encased in lead: Safely shut away, the field open for new voices and fresh literary endeavour.

Early Modern (That is, Polyphonic) Chaucer Until now I have been giving evidence of impatience and competitive unrest on the part of Chaucer’s professed sixteenth-century admirers. But what about moments of greater receptivity – moments in which Chaucer is warmly accepted as a fellow practitioner, or lauded for the contemporary character of his concerns? Moments, that is, when Chaucer seems fully up to date or “modern” to writers and readers of a subsequent period? Here is one. The most extended celebration of what might be called Chaucer’s “presentness” occurs in a seldom-cited work of Robert Greene. Greene was a writer of pastorals, a sometimes-scurrilous pamphleteer, a contemporarily celebrated playwright. He was something of a bohemian before the letter, a left-bank figure before there was a left bank, a literary polymath whose productivity and unfailing willingness to explore new literary modes and styles underwrote a career as England’s first commercially successful (or at least self-sustaining) writer. This is a writer well situated to appreciate and indeed to celebrate an aspect of Chaucer’s writing that Harvey earlier noticed but quailed away from: His tonal variety and the potentially contradictory variety of the styles in which he wrote. Greene addresses this matter in Greene’s Vision (1592), a penitential work composed and printed in 1592, the year of his death, itself cast in the characteristic medieval form of a dream vision (Greene, 1886).

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This dream vision is itself contained within a larger generic enclosure – as a penitential tract, in which Greene, near death, is overcome (in a manner reminiscent of Chaucer’s “Retraction”) with remorse at his own, previous “lascivious pamphleteering” and other errors of life, and with the relentless assaults of his own “diseased conscience”. In this “deep meditation” he falls asleep and dreams, imagining himself in a fair meadow and is approached by two “ancient men”, poets by trade, conveniently bearing the labels “Chawcer” and “Gower”. The venerability, if not outright decrepitude, of the two poets is consistent with everything I have been saying about the tendency of Early Modern writers to seal Chaucer into a superseded past. They are portrayed as two ancient men, aged, for their foreheads were the Calendars of their yeares, and the whitenesse of their haires bewrayed the number of theirdays … In diebus illis hung vpon their garments: their visages were wrinckled … and their countenace conteyned much grauitie. (Greene, 1886, pp. 208–209) Once they engage their subject, though, they do so with spirit. They have recognised signs of Greene’s distress – his self-recrimination and his worries about the possible levity of his previous writings – and they offer divergent counsel. The two fall quickly into a debate about means and ends of artistic expression, and – remembering that this is, after all, a repentance tract penned in the last months of Greene’s life – there is no question that the stringently moral Gower is going to win. But the debate itself is not nearly so one-sided as might be supposed, and, in the course of it, “Chaucer” offers the most sympathetic Early Modern rendering of his own, and Greene’s, art. Arguing on behalf of his own artistic vision, Chaucer lays out a case for a mixed style, for a tonally varied style marked by elements that invite alignment with musical polyphony. The ascent of Parnassus, and immersion in its waters, were common figures for later sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century literary accomplishment,1 and Chaucer begins with the observation that many divergent steams flow from Parnassus’s fountain: Chawcer sat downe and laught, and then rising vp and leaning his back against a Tree, he made this merry aunswer. Why Greene, quoth he, knowest thou not, that the waters that flow from Pernassus Founte, are not tyed to any particular operation? that there are nine Muses, amongst whom as there is a Clio to write graue matters so there is a Thalia to endite pleasant conceit, and that Apollo hath Baies for them both […] The braine hath many strings, and the wit many stretches: some tragical to write, like Euripides: some comicall to pen, like Terence: some deepely conceited to set out matters of great import: others sharpe witted to discouer pleasant fantasies:

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Chaucer and the Streams of Parnassus 201 what if Cato set forth seueare censures, and Ouid amorous Axiomes, were they not both counted for their faculties excellent? […] If learning were knit in one string, and could expresse himself but in one vaine, then should want of variety, bring all into an imperfect Chaos. But sundry men, sundry conceits, & wits are to be praised not for the grauity of the matter, but for the ripeness of the inuention: so that Martiall, Horace or any other, deserue to bee famoused for their Odes and Elegies, as well as Hesiode, Hortensius, or another other for their deeper precepts of doctines. (Greene, 1886, pp. 214–215) Far from the various “distancing” operations we have seen in most Early Modern engagements with Chaucer, Greene connects Chaucer’s praise of variousness to his own, that is, to Greene’s own, situation as a writer. His creation Chaucer commends Greene for having “ioyned pleasure with profite”, paraphrasing Chaucer’s own stated goal of mixing solaas and sentence, (“General Prologue”, l. 798) suggesting that this remains a pertinent objective for the sixteenth-century writer. Greene’s own literary motto, printed on the title pages of most of his books, was “Omne tulit punctum, qui miscuit utile dulci” – “he carries the day [seizes the prize] who mixes usefulness with pleasure” – a close and affirmative approximation of Chaucer’s own motto. Greene’s Chaucer points the comparison, when he says “let myselfe suffice for an instaunce, whose Canterburie tales are broad enough before, and written homely and pleasantly: yet who hath bin more canonized for his workes, than Sir Geffrey Chaucer?” (Greene, 1886, p. 215). Greene here credits Chaucer’s polyphonic style and mixed vocalities without condescension and as totally deserving of contemporary (that is, Early Modern) respect, as a very present and pertinent literary example. Gower launches a counterattack, based on the uncomfortable claim that, rather than timely and up to date, Chaucer’s works have actually gone out of style. In this claim he parrots a view that we have seen before, that Chaucer is more to be valued for his precedental importance, as the founder of a native literary tradition, than for any continuing importance. He argues to Greene that nothing new is going on here, that “men honor his [workes] more for the antiquity of the verse, the english & prose, than for any deepe loue to the matter”. He couples this assertion with a claim that Chaucer’s popularity has declined – that he is more honoured than actually read. Chaucer’s terms, he says, are “weare out of vse”. Unconvinced by his rival’s argument for many poetic mansions, he argues that a new hierarchisation of tastes and styles now prevails, that “men that write of Morall precepts, or Philosophical Aphorismes are more highly esteemd, than such as write Poems of loue, and conceits of fancie” (Greene, 1886, p. 218). The outcome is postponed. Chaucer and Gower have a contest or flyting in which each tells a tale, Chaucer a nouvelle about an amorous

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clerk who seduces a jealous wheelwright’s wife and Gower a moral, somewhat in the vein of the “Clerk’s Tale”, in which a virtuous wife proves equal to the tests her unappeasable husband devises for her. Laurels are awarded, as we would have known all along, to moral Gower – this is, after all, a repentance tract and the requirements of genre prevail.2

Chaucer’s Polyphony This idea of Parnassus’s nine streams comes back around to the topic mentioned at the beginning – the affinity between polyphony and artistic innovation – for I believe Greene’s streams of Parnassus amount to an acknowledgement of Chaucer’s polyphony and polyvocality. Over the last 25 years, and especially with the popularity of Bakhtin’s analyses of unmerged literary voices in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Bakhtin, 1984), polyphony has become an increasingly important category of literary analysis. Jonathan Fruoco is doing fascinating work about European languages as inherently polyphonic – that is, in embracing and comprising more influences (both cultural and linguistic, “pluricultural and multilingual”) than they can possibly name (Fruoco, 2017 and 2020). In view of the different linguistic impulses it contains, English cannot help but be polyphonic in spite of itself. In her contribution to the Grenoble conference, Juliette Dor spoke about Chaucer’s natural and inherent polyphony, his mixture of sources, voices, and perspectives apparent in multiple works throughout his career. I am at one with Professor Dor in viewing Chaucer’s own poetry as polyphonic through and through, marked by the constant presence of independent and unassimilated voices, a concatenation of voices, encountered simultaneously rather than serially and with their differences unresolved. Professor Dor and I both embrace the Bakhtinian definition of literary polyphony as consisting of “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 6).3 But the good news here is that we can do this with Bakhtin or (using conceptual tools which he has provided) without him. The fourteenth century can in a sense be considered polyphony’s true home; it was the point of origin of that musical style in which divergent melody lines can be pursued by individual voices within a coordinate whole. Furthermore, its most influential musical exponent was Guillaume de Machaut, poet as well as composer, whose poetical works were among Chaucer’s own strong early influences. This analogy between poetic and musical form has already been pointed out. Thomas Campbell finds common ground between Chaucer’s poetry and Machaut’s musical compositions, based on Chaucer’s simultaneous rather than sequential voices and what he identifies as the “controlled independence” of Machaut’s musical lines (Campbell, 1990). His Chaucerian illustrations are drawn from his “Miller’s Tale”, although one may also step farther back and more broadly illustrate (as Professor Dor does) this thesis with the commingled voices of Chaucer’s Canterbury

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Chaucer and the Streams of Parnassus 203 Pilgrims, that diverse company celebrated for its rendering of twentysome separate voices, vocations, class positions, and perspectives on experience. The voices of Chaucer’s quarrelsome Pilgrims are about as unmerged as they could be, their quarrels ending, like the squabbles of the Parliament of Fowls, in truce but without reconciliation. The unmerged state of voices within the Tales is conveniently figured in the state of the manuscripts of this unfinished work, replete with “floating fragments” that have no place in a coherent progress toward a single destination but remain stubbornly independent of one another, associated with different kinds of literary content and different levels of literary style.4 I regard Greene’s varied “streams of Parnassus” as an evocation of what may legitimately be called Chaucer’s polyphony, expressed in the unmerged voices of his tellers and the generic difference and stylistic antagonism of the tales they tell. I believe that, in singling out these polyphonic practices, Greene also takes a firmer step than most – or any – of his contemporaries in acknowledging Chaucer as a truly contemporaneous spirit. Polyphony is not the only way to be “Early Modern”. There’s also a stylistic and moralistic conservatism within Early Modern practice; in his Vision, the chastened and repentant Greene reserves his highest praise for the more monologic – and hence, in the terms I am currently proposing, conservative – Gower. But, in his figure of the many streams of Parnassus, Greene situates Chaucer as a persuasive exemplar of progressive late sixteenth-century poetic practice. Chaucer’s polyphony associates his verse with Thomas Nashe’s flights of extravagantly mixed prose; Shakespearean double plot and mixed style; Greene’s and Lodge’s and Sidney’s mixed-mode pastorals and their varied lyric embeddings. Polyphony and polyphonic practice provide a terminology and a conceptual bridge by which the stylistic estrangements between the periods we now label “Medieval” and “Early Modern” can be overcome. If we are looking for a “Modern” Chaucer – a Chaucer who escapes his moment and predicts the literary future – then it is with the well-travelled and endlessly renewable elements of polyphonic style that our conversation might begin.

Notes 1 As in, for example, the wildly popular Three Parnassus Plays (Leishman, 1949). 2 Thus, a further paradox: The keenest Early Modern praise of Chaucer, the one that best describes his accomplishment and assimilates it to later sixteenthcentury standards, is achieved under a sign of negation. (This is the mechanism of negation identified by Freud, in which a difficult or problematic truth may be uttered, on the condition of an accompanying nullification or disavowal (Freud, 1961).) Here, freed to speak his mind about Chaucer upon the condition of Chaucer’s negation, Greene gives us his best and most spirited tribute of all: That he answers to more than one muse, and that nine streams issue from the fountains of Parnassus.

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3 A surprising thing about Bakhtin, though, is that (in a concession to his own off-and-on Marxist framework) he believed true polyphony could be achieved only after the Industrial Revolution, taking Dostoevsky as its first major exemplar. His rationale for his position is his view of literary polyphony as a protest against the reification of human nature under Capitalism. I do not think either Professor Dor or I would agree with this conceptual limitation – which leads him to ignore the plurality of unmerged voices to be found throughout medieval literature, not least in the writings of his own beloved Rabelais. 4 Chaucer here completely departs from the more monologic practice of Boccaccio’s Decameron, which aspires to evenness both in the social rank of its personnel and in the “middle style” in which their tales – with many signs of prior generic difference erased and all now cast as “nouvelles” – are recounted.

Works Cited Bakhtin, M. and Emerson, C., ed. and trans. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bloch, E. (1995). The Principle of Hope. Cambridge: MIT Press. Chaucer, G. and Benson, L., ed. (1987). The Riverside Chaucer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Campbell, T.P. (1990). Machaut and Chaucer: ‘Ars Nova’ and the Art of Narrative. Chaucer Review, 24, pp. 275–289. Chaghafi, E. (2019). Worthy friends: Speght’s Chaucer and Speght’s Spenser. In: R. Stenner et al., eds., Rereading Chaucer and Spenser. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 168–188. Coleman, J. (1981). Piers Plowman and the Moderni. Roma: Ed. di Storiae e Letteratura. Cook, M. (2019). Cultivating Chaucerian antiquity in The Shepheardes Calendar. In: R. Stenner et al., eds., Rereading Chaucer and Spenser. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 150–167. Dekker, T. and Robbins, L., eds. (1974). A Knight’s Conjuring. The Hague: Mouton. De Vitry, P. and Leo Plantinga, L. (1961). Philippe de Vitry’s “Ars Nova”: a Translation. Journal of Music Theory, 5, pp. 204–223. Fallows, D. (1971). Ars Nova, New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. ezproxy--pvd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk:4563/10.1093/gmi/9781561592630. Freud, S. (1961). Negation. In: J. Strachey, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19. London: Hogarth, pp. 239–258. Fruoco, J. (2017). Chaucer as a Sociolinguist: Understanding the Role of Language in Chaucer’s Internationalism. In: J.M. Dean, ed., Geoffrey Chaucer. Ipswich: Salem Press, pp. 216–230. Fruoco, J. (2020). Chaucer's Polyphony. The Modern in Chaucer's Poetry. BerlinKalamazoo: De Gruyter, Medieval Institute Publications. Greene, R. and Grosart, A., eds. (1881-1886). Greenes Vision, Life and Complete Works. London, volume 12. Harvey, G. (1592). Foure Letters. EEBO ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk:2175/ openurl?ctx_ver=Z

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Chaucer and the Streams of Parnassus 205 Leishman, J.B., ed. (1949). The Three Parnassus Plays. London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson. Moore, G.C., ed. (1913). Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia. Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press. Nashe, T. and McKerrow, R.B., ed. (1958). Strange News, The Works of Thomas Nashe. vol. 1. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Speght, T., ed. (1602). The Works of Our Ancient and learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer. London: Adam Islip. Spenser, E. and McCabe, R., ed. (1999). The Shepheardes Calender, The Shorter Poems. London: Penguin Classics. Spurgeon, C. (1927). Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion; numerous editions. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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11 “‘Tis more ancient than Chaucer Himself” Keats and Romantic Polyphony Caroline Bertonèche Translated by Jonathan Fruoco

“Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?”: The question is asked by Keats in the last stanza of To Autumn. From spring to autumn, we are faced with a cycle – or end of a cycle – the four seasons (another of Keats’s poems1) of an annus mirabilis (1819) that the poet chose to end in music: Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, […] Among the river sallow, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies (ll. 28-34) In her now canonical book, The Odes of John Keats, Helen Vendler, the theoretician of Romantic dissonances, a mix of musicality, negation, and absence – which she perceptively names a “muted” polyphony in Keats’s To Autumn – writes: Keats, at the end of the poem, is the listener to his own music. It is not being used, as the nightingale’s song was, to distract him from death: he listens intently while gazing at the full spectacle of a world vegetatively bare, if still offering something to the eye; he knows the day is dying. Beauty now includes as intrinsic components “absence, darkness, death – things which are not”, as Donne called them. Keats too is re-begot of these, but finds them present in coexistence with music – a dissonant and muted polyphony, but music nonetheless. (Vendler, 1983, pp. 267–268) She then adds: DOI: 10.4324/9781003129837-12

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Keats and Romantic Polyphony 207 Keats adopts many roles in this poem: he is, by way of his goddess and his creatures, successively a creator, the things created, a harvester, a seeker, a finder, a singer and a listener to his own music. The roles permit him to exhibit the grand movements of profusion, decline, progressive expansion of view, sadness, and equanimity which coexist in the poem. Life, with its human seasons, and art, with its teeming, its gleaning, its transsubstantiation, and its music, seem coterminous, and even indistinguishable, in this richest of the odes. (Vendler, 1983, pp. 267–268) This richness, which Vendler forever sees shining from the ode, is a form of English polyphony, rather than Romantic, that Keats partly draws from Chaucer: From his name, his texts, the texts of other authors mistaken for Chaucer, in his translations, and even in his birthplace. If he preferred Chatterton to Milton, Shakespeare to Milton, Keats also preferred Chaucer to Milton. Milton and his “miltonisms” indeed poisoned Keats’s mind till the end, injecting in him a power of fragmentation that prevented him from producing a decent ending to The Fall of Hyperion. A Dream (1820). Our objective in this chapter is to try and capture in the formal and geographical proximity between Keats and Chaucer an affiliation that would define his Romanticism around a unique production at the crossroads of several languages, countries, genres: A babelisation of sorts, bringing together the English, French, and Italian traditions. Keats’s impetus with Chaucer appeared in 1817 as he celebrated his fellow countryman with those words: “I was not right in my head when I came – At Canterbury I hope the Remembrance of Chaucer will set me forward like a Billiard-Ball” (Rollins, 1958, vol. I, pp. 146–147). Then, a year later, Keats and his “weak tongue” finished writing the first book of Endymion with these stammering lines, after exploring once again Chaucer’s territory, now more than ever attentive to the notes he “used to sing”: O kindly Muse! let not my weak tongue faulter In telling of this goodly company, Of their old piety, and of their glee: But let a portion of ethereal dew Fall on my head, and presentely unmew My soul; that I may dare, in wayfaring, To stammer where old Chaucer used to sing (I, ll. 128-34) Lewis J. Moorman describes this progression in his biography as he reflects on the place of writing and maps out the Keatsian march from Canterbury to Endymion of a poet emerging from a long sleep:

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Caroline Bertonèche […] Keats wrote the first lines of Endymion in the Isle of Wight, but he soon returned to Margate, only to seek more favourable surroundings in Canterbury, where he hoped the thought of Chaucer would put him “forward like a Billiard-Ball”. Later he was sojourning in Bo Peep, where he kissed a beautiful, anonymous lady. His visit to this place with name so familiar was an interlude between the first and second books of his Endymion. No doubt the opening line “A thing of beauty is a joy forever”, was fresh in his mind, at any rate, he was nowise [not at all] “fast asleep”. (Moorman, 1940, p. 246)

Sleep and Polyphony: Waking up with Chaucer In Keats’s poems, the reference to the Ancients goes together with both the beauty of a common subject and the patronage of a great name – a theme and identity rooted in the concept of “imitation” which, in Chaucer, just like in Spencer or Shakespeare, is an essential element. It allows Keats to contemplate a rich symbiosis of renewed creativity between past and present voices within a single poem: “What follows is an imitation of the Authors in Chaucer’s time” (Rollins, 1958, vol. II, p. 204), explains Keats to George and Georgiana Keats in his long letter written on 20 September 1819. Chaucer is mentioned in the epigraph of Sleep and Poetry (1816), or rather in the “allograph” as Genette writes in Seuils, “c’est-à-dire, selon nos conventions, attribuée à un auteur qui n’est pas celui de l’œuvre”2 (Genette, 1987, p. 154). “Disons Erasme pour La Bruyère”,3 writes Genette (1987 p. 154). In this case, Chaucer, instead of an anonymous poet – or perhaps even a woman! And if we take a closer look at the subtext, one may identify the source of the narration and the story. The “allographic” illusion thus functions as an efficient discrepancy and that is why it is a quote, or even, as Antoine Compagnon explains, a “citation par excellence” (1979, p. 30) defining not only the state of mind in which Keats finds himself when the poem is being written, but also the precise substance – an apocryphal Chaucer speaking about his own sleep – that inspires Keats’s poetry: As I lay in my bed slepe full unmete Was unto me, but why that I ne might Rest I ne wist, for there n’as erthly wight [As I suppose] had more of hertis ese Than I, for I n’ad sicknesse4 nor disese (ll. 17-21)5 The ubiquity of an ever-present Chaucer, falsely crowned and who courts the place of the king (or in this case, the queen), says a lot about the importance of the author’s choice in terms of affiliation and identity; a rightful ancestor, says Keats, this author whose eminently vocal but

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Keats and Romantic Polyphony 209 fictitious presence – I quote therefore I am – overlooks the principles of authoriality and redefines the rules of copyright within the Romantic text. In his productions, the young poet (Keats was 21 when he wrote Sleep and Poetry), half asleep, therefore almost unconsciously invents authors and poems to finally read them as if they had been written for him. In his dreams, he imagines Chaucer addressing those lines to him just as he shamelessly invents his heroes, during the night or in the early morning, thus paving the way to a thousand different methods of reinventing oneself. These deforming powers of repossession are heightened by the following paradox: A mind awakened by sleepiness, inspired by a poem whose author is not the one we think. These powers must be perceived as a “Keatsian” art, to paraphrase Helen Vendler. The “structural” – some would say “spectral” – polyphony (Vendler, 1983, p. 12) of the odes is made up of several layers of a unique “preconstructed” form; or, in other words, the poem relies on the art of “deconstructing” the voices of the preceding poem/poet all the while “consolidating” them: My context for the odes is consequently all of Keats’s previous work; but I believe that the most important context for each of the odes is the totality of the other odes, that the odes enjoy a special relation to each other, and that Keats, whenever he returned to the form of the ode, recalled his previous efforts and used every new ode as a way of commenting on earlier ones. We may say that each ode both deconstructs its predecessor(s) and consolidates it (or them). Each is a disavowal of a previous “solution”; but none could achieve its own momentary stability without the support of the antecedently constructed style which we now call “Keatsian”. (Vendler, 1983, p. 6) Between the ancestral and the cavernous, one is able to unearth a poetic work overlapping another: A threshold, a liminal space of creation, an “hors d’oeuvre” or “bord d’oeuvre”,6 according to Genette. Chaucer and Keats are thus featured talking with each other even from outside the limits of the text, in the extra-poetical sphere, where each page (or leaf) hides an infinite (in-finis) amount of palimpsests: Keats’s powerful discovery, in the ode To Autumn, of a form of structural polyphony, in which several structural forms—each one autonomous, each one pregnant with meaning, each one continued for the full length of the ode—overlap in a palimpsest of effects. (Vendler, 1983, p. 6) Indeed, it is important to remember that the poet first fell asleep on Chaucer’s volumes in Leigh Hunt’s library, thereby discovering early on in his poetic career the hidden virtues of sleep in poetry:

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Caroline Bertonèche La réponse se trouve dans les ressemblances entre l’état de lecture et le sommeil. En termes d’énergie psychique, la situation du sujet qui lit s’apparente à celle du rêveur. La lecture, comme le sommeil, est fondée sur une immobilité relative, une vigilance restreinte (inexistante pour le dormeur) et une suspension du rôle d’acteur au profit de celui de récepteur. Le lecteur, ainsi placé dans une situation économique proche de celle du rêveur, laisse ses excitations psychiques s’engager dans un début de “régrédience”.7 (Metz, 1993, p. 85)

This “muted” polyphony of somnolence is rather implicit. Keats’s answer to the Chaucerian fantasy – such as the meshing of The Flour and the Leafe – is a tapestry of literary references and echoes that are left for the reader to discover with the right amount of pleasure, to quote from Barthes’s Le Plaisir du texte (1973): “si je lis avec plaisir cette phrase, cette histoire ou ce mot, c’est qu’ils ont été écrits dans le plaisir (ce plaisir n’est pas en contradiction avec les plaintes de l’écrivain)”8 (Barthes, 1973, p. 10): Wherefore I mervaile greatly of my selfe, That I so long withouten sleepe lay; And up I rose, three houres after twelfe, About the springing of the day, And on I put my geare and mine array, And to a pleasaunt grove I gan passe, Long or the bright sonne up risen was; In which were okes great, streight as a line, Under the which the grasse so fresh of hew Was newly sprong […] (ll. 18-31)

Polyphony and Englishness: At the Crossroads of European Influences (Italy, France) Chaucer’s many travels have turned him into one of the old masters of poetical translation for Keats. His literal approach to foreign texts is accompanied by an endless curiosity for the original flows of an imported work. The host poet can only be grateful for these little additions, or cultural variations, that will differentiate him from his peers, whose limits in terms of creation are often reduced to a shared citizenship. That is why Chaucer’s era, at the crossroads of the modern and the traditional, demonstrates openness by engaging with the prominent figures of an artistically prosperous Italy. If we owe to this Francophile translator poet the repatriation in his CT of a medieval art loaded with all sorts of licentious figures, let us not forget that he is, also, contemporaneous with Boccaccio – is it mere chance that Keats also became his interpreter? – and

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Keats and Romantic Polyphony 211 more importantly with Petrarch. The Romantic poet will retain from both authors, and the Tuscan model they embody, the Florentine “finesses” (Cavaliero, 1997, p. 54) that will serve his own romances. Chaucer paid tribute, before Keats, to “the face of Poesy” that is Petrarch and whose sonnets thus inspired the poet’s respect for conventions, when a love complaint is thus crowned, at the end of each line, with a powerful oxymoron: And if that I consente, I wrongfully Complaine: ywis, thus possed to and fro, Al stereless within a boot am I Amidde the see, bitwixen windes two, That in contrarye stonden everemo. Allas, what is this wonder maladye? For hoot of cold, for cold of hoot I die9 (ll. 414-420) In this case, the oxymoron is coupled with a chiasmus, which produces a form of thermal (or figural) shock, combining morbidity with peaks of warmth – which of these will suffice to chill us to the bone? It is difficult to know – that is not without reminding us of Keats and the forms of poetic speech that characterise him, in other words, this love of contrasts that persistently haunts his writings. As a tribute to the Cantus Troili, the poet sings both the union of Troilus and Criseyde, as well as the marriage of converging topographies where the quality of Chaucer’s translation takes us to the places and songs inspired by the bard of Arezzo. Chaucer teaches Keats how to appreciate certain features of this Romanticised Italy in light of the poet’s own attachment to Englishness. And while it is being shaped, full of beautiful promises and under admiring eyes, it encourages us, readers, to explore it anew. Therefore, when Keats falls asleep, lulled by the melody of this “eternal book” from whence he “may copy many a lovely saying / About the leaves, and flowers” (ll. 64-65), he also wakes up blinded by the “morning light” of Petrarch’s lines: Petrarch, outstepping from the shady green, Starts at the sight of Laura; nor can wean His eyes from her sweet face. Most happy they! For over them was seen a free display Of out-spread wings, and from between them shone The face of Poesy: from off her throne She overlook’d things that I scarce could tell. The very sense of where I was might well Keep Sleep aloof: but more than that there came Thought after thought to nourish up the flame Within my breast; so that the morning light Surprised me even from a sleepless night; And up I rose refresh’d, and glad, and gay,

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Caroline Bertonèche Resolving to begin that very day These lines; and howsoever they be done, I leave them as a father does his son. (ll. 389-404)

The “sweet” connection between Chaucer and Keats, like a father to his son, cannot be more explicit. It promises a much more familial, personal, even intimate polyphony, that retains from this song of poets and their creatures or muses (Petrarch had Laura, Chartier had the “Dame”) not only their tragedies, but also a range of much more fertile possibilities: How the indolence of Romanticism can, for example, be entirely regenerated by its hypnotic choruses.

The “Polyphonic Poem”, the Privilege of Romanticism? The polyphonic distribution in Keats, a reader and author of dreams, is also the procreative force of Romanticism defined both by the heroism and the hybridity of its models. Bakhtin, in his dialectic, would willingly speak of “antinomianism”, in other words, breaking laws and defying norms to prevent the sacrifice of one’s individual conscience in the name of the ancients. One finds this maturity in Keats’s poetry, this willingness to combine exaltation and duality, self-glorification and otherness without losing oneself along the way. This maturity is also a feature of Lord Byron’s personality, who seems more Dostoevskian than Keats (although Dostoevsky was born in 1821, the year of Keats’s death), but less so than Coleridge, mentioned by Bakhtin in his definition of the heroauthor relationship in the polyphonic novel: A character’s word about himself and his world is just as fully weighted as the author’s word usually is; it is not subordinated to the character’s objectified image as merely one of his characteristics, nor does it serve as a mouthpiece for the author’s voice. It possesses extraordinary independence in the structure of the work; it sounds, as it were, alongside the author’s word and in a special way combines both with it and with the full and equally valid voices of other characters. (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 7) The parallel between the dreamer poet, prone to morbid polyphonies, and the awakening of the dead, which almost systematically conditions the survival of the new poem and of its heroes, seems obvious: Chaucer, Chartier, Boccaccio, Petrarch, but also Dante and Keats have all read, and written about, the misadventures of Paolo and Francesca. The Italian lovers, condemned to Hell, remind the authors that they are both the figments of their imaginations as well as of their multiple readings. These stories (such as the novels of the Round Table, which told about the

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Keats and Romantic Polyphony 213 misfortunes of Lancelot and Guinevere) are eventually meant to shape the spirit of the poet who reads them. In this meta-context of figures, shared symbols, and interwoven narratives, Keats knows how to stage himself as a dreamer, just as he knows how to represent himself reading and writing in an original way. The following sonnet, although it has too often been excluded from the anthologies of Keats’s poetry is evidence enough, considering its inventiveness, its wandering melody, and the jolts of its electric rhythm: This pleasant tale is like a little copse; The honied lines do freshly interlace, To keep the reader in so sweet a place, So that he here and there full hearted stops; And oftentimes he feels the dewy drops Come cool and suddenly against his face, And by the wandering melody may trace Which way the tender-legged linnet hops. Oh! What a power has white simplicity! What mighty power has this gentle story! I, that do ever feel athirst for glory, Could at this moment be content to lie Meekly upon the grass, as those whose sobbings Were heard of none beside the mournful robbins. Keats composes this sonnet-palimpsest in the form of an “effusion”poem without changing a “single word”, on the same page as The Flour and the Leaf, that is to say in the copy of Chaucer’s poems written by his friend, Charles Cowden Clarke:10 Another example of his promptly suggestive imagination, and uncommon facility in giving it utterance, occurred one day upon his returning home and finding me asleep upon the sofa, with my volume of Chaucer open at the “Flower and the Leaf”. After expressing his admiration of the poem, which he had been reading, he gave me the fine testimony of that opinion, in pointing to the sonnet he had written at the close of it, which was an extempore effusion, and it has not the alteration of a single word. It lies before me now, signed, “J.K., Feb., 1817”. (Cowden Clarke, 1861, p. 92) The poem unveils, at the beginning, an interweaving of newly regenerated voices, after a dialogue between readers that leaves us with the impression of reducing the time gap between authors. Then comes the sweetness of a tale in which each line written by the Romantic poet mixes with the other like two drops of honey. This natural alchemy reminds us of the moment when Keats first opened Chapman’s Homer, only to

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discover the joys of the Hellenic tradition, and, with it, the translations that were to define the essence of his Romanticism. By including the story of those lines copied and tailored in that same space of pleasure inherited from Chaucer, Keats can finally open himself up to the richness of poetical accumulation – a concept theorised by Michel Butor: Auteur (auctor) en latin cela veut dire celui qui augmente quelque chose. Dans la librairie médiévale on passe son temps à recopier le texte sacré. Autour de lui, comme il y a des problèmes, on va faire des commentaires. À côté du copiste, il y a le commentateur, et un troisième personnage prend de l’importance, c’est celui qui ajoute quelque chose à l’ensemble des textes dont on disposait auparavant.11 (Butor, 1998, p. 24) Indeed, Butor reflects on accumulation by exploring its Latin etymology, this one single root (“inflare, inflatum”), which we refer to whether we speak about a translator-poet “inspired by a sort of divine breath”, or about a process of expansion (“to swell, increase, exalt”) of voices or texts. Whether we talk of polyphony or Romantic inspirations, this breath (spiritus) of poetry is a powerful notion, which seems to stand on its own. Therefore, unlike Keats, we have nothing else to add.

Notes 1 See Stillinger 1978, pp. 176–177. 2 “that is to say, according to our conventions, attributed to an author who did not produce the work”. 3 “Let’s say Erasmus for La Bruyère”. 4 The narrator seems aware of the usual cause of sleeplessness, in love-longing and love-sickness, as in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess. 5 “The epigraph is from the Flower and the Leaf (17–21) (1470), a 600-line allegorical poem that in Keats’s time was [mistakenly] attributed to Chaucer [by Hazlitt and Keats]” (Stillinger, 1978, p. 37 and p. 425n). On the influence of Chaucer’s poetry on Keats, see also Priestley 1944, pp. 439–477. 6 “out of the work” or “on the border of the work”. 7 “The answer is in the similarities between the state of reading and sleep. In terms of psychic energy, the situation of the reading subject is akin to the dreamer’s. Reading, like sleep, is based on a relative stillness, a limited vigilance (non-existent for the sleeper), and a suspension of the active role to the profit of a receptive role. The reader, thus positioned in an economic situation close to that of the dreamer, lets his psychic excitements engage in a beginning of ‘regredience’ ”. 8 “if I read with pleasure this sentence, story, or word, it is because they have been written in pleasure (a pleasure that does not contradict the writer’s complaints”. 9 See the verses taken from Petrarch’s sonnet 88, adapted by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde (Ferguson, Salter, and Stallworthy, 2004, p. 52).

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Keats and Romantic Polyphony 215 10 “[Keats composed the poem] in my Chaucer, while I lay asleep on his Sofa”. See Cowden Clarke’s letter to Milnes, 20 December 1846 (Rollins, 1965, vol. II, p. 170). 11 “Author (auctor) in Latin means increasing something. In the medieval library, we spend our time copying the sacred. Around the text, since there are issues, we will comment on them. Alongside the copyist, there is a commentator, and a third character becomes increasingly important, the one who adds something to the set of texts we previously possessed”. Italics are the author’s.

Works Cited Bakhtin, M. and Emerson, C., ed. and trans. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Barthes, R. (1973). Le Plaisir du texte. Paris: Édition du Seuil. Butor, M. (1998). L’utilité poétique. Belval: Circé. Cavaliero, R. (1997). What Elysium have ye known?. In: R. Portale, ed., Omaggio a Keats e Leopardi. Macerata: Editoriali e Poligrafici, pp. 47–55. Compagnon, A. (1979). La Seconde Main. Paris: Édition du Seuil. Cowden Clarke, C. (1861). Recollections of Keats by an Old School-Fellow. Atlantic Monthly Magazine of Literature, Art and Politics. Ferguson, M., Salter, M.J., and Stallworthy, J., ed. (2004). The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 5th edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Genette, G. (1987). Seuils, Paris: Édition du Seuil. Metz, C. (1993). Le signifiant imaginaire. Paris: Christian Bourgeois. Moorman, L.J. (1940). Tuberculosis and genius. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Priestley, F.E.L. (1944). Keats and Chaucer. Modern Language Quarterly, 5, pp. 439–477. Pearsall, D., ed. (1990). The Floure and the Leafe, The Assemblie of Ladies, and The Isle of Ladies. Kalamazoo: MIP. Rollins, H.E., ed. (1958). The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rollins, H.E., ed. (1965). The Keats Circle. Letters and Papers, 1816–1879 and More Letters and Poems, 1814–1879. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Stillinger, J. (1978). John Keats: The Complete Poems. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Vendler, H. (1983). The Odes of John Keats. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

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Part Four

Towards Modernity

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12 Evelina’s “Pollyphony” Anne Rouhette

My starting-point is a very “simple” remark: Frances Burney’s first novel contains three young girls named “Polly” with whom the heroine is associated, closely or remotely – four, in fact, if one bears in mind that the first name “Molly”, like “Polly”, derives from “Mary” or “Maria”. Maria Mirvan, called “Molly” by her father, must therefore be added to Polly Green, Polly Branghton, and Polly Moore. Since the plot of Evelina revolves in a large part around the question of identity and its relationship to naming, to patronymics, of course, but also to first names, the recurrence of this name cannot be a coincidence.1 These multiple Pollies seem to contrast with the unicity of Evelina’s character, whose simplicity is frequently emphasised in this epistolary novel. I wish here to interrogate this simplicity and unicity of Evelina and of the novel that bears her name in the light of this multiplicity by reflecting in particular on the voice or rather voices that make themselves heard in Burney’s work, whose apparent univocity or monody conceals a discreet polyphony. Borrowed from the language of music, “polyphony” etymologically means “variety of sounds or voices” that combine to form a piece made of several harmonising melodies. By analogy, in literature, the term refers to a superposition of voices that can lead, in a novel, to the confrontation of contradictory discourses, and it is especially used by Mikhail Bakhtin within the framework of his theory of dialogism. By dialogism, Bakhtin designates three sorts of interaction, between characters who express themselves in individuated and independent manners, between these characters and an instance of enunciation, or between the several discourses, which can be internal and external, of the same character, who may then be characterised by a variety of discourses. Although such a concept may seem very far from the apparent simplicity and unicity both of Evelina and of the novel which bears her name, it proves particularly operative, especially in its first and third forms, in a study of Evelina as polyphonic, which this essay will carry out by focusing on the genre of the novel and on its heroine, more particularly on her discourse. Specialists of the epistolary novel usually identify three main types, classified according to the number of letter-writers.2 In the monologue, or monologic form, one epistolary subject is the sole addresser, as in DOI: 10.4324/9781003129837-13

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Guillerargues’s Portuguese Letters (1669), in Marivaux’s posthumous Vie de Marianne (composed between 1731 and 1741), to which Burney refers to indirectly in the preface to Evelina, or in Goethe’s Werther (1774). The novels of the dialogic type, where two epistolary subjects exchange letters, are few, unlike polylogic novels, also called polyphonic (Altman, 1982, pp. 194–195), with three or more addressers. “Polyphony” is also a word used in reference to Rousseau’s Julie; Ou, La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761; Calas, 2007, pp. 36–37), which Burney evokes in her preface. This type is obviously the most complex and may take on different forms: Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) thus comprises letters penned by over twenty different characters, with two principal and two secondary addressers whose whole correspondence, letters and answers, may be given, while in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) Smollett has five epistolary subjects send letters to addressees whose answers are alluded to but never printed. In Evelina, the series of letters which constitute the novel is signed by four characters, Lady Howard, Mr Villars, Evelina, and Sir John Belmont, three of whom write several letters. To this may be added Caroline Evelyn’s posthumous letter in Volume III, which is numbered XIII, although enclosed in Villars’s letter XII, making Caroline an epistolary subject in her own right. Furthermore, a few unnumbered missives are enclosed in other letters, like Mr Macartney’s in Volume II, Letter XX. The “I”s of several narrators therefore intermingle in the novel. From this perspective, Evelina should be a polylogic novel; however, it lacks the multiplication of points of view that characterises Clarissa or Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), both polyphonic novels where the reader is led to constantly re-evaluate what he or she has just read as new information from another epistolary subject comes to light. Remarkably, only Evelina’s version of events is available to the readers, no other interpretation or vision is ever forthcoming, whether in agreement or in contradiction with hers, to which no counterpoint is provided.3 The focalisation is thus marked by its simplicity, its univocity, certainly not by its multiplicity. The ball scenes, for instance, are only depicted by Evelina, and no-one praises Mrs Selwyn for her role in the happy outcome of the story. Even the events that Evelina does not witness are related by her, as when Maria reports the conversation between Lord Orville, Sir Clement Willoughby, and Mr Lovel in Volume I, Letter XII, or when Mrs Selwyn recounts the dialogue between Orville and Willoughby in Volume III, Letter XIV: Both reporting characters soon disappear from the text and the reader is left with the dialogue in direct speech, exactly as if Evelina herself had heard it. If we bear in mind that Evelina often resembles the monologic form of a diary, or more precisely a “journal” – such is the term by which both Evelina and Villars refer to her narrative (Burney, 2008, pp. 106, 116) – and that the preface alludes to the work as “memoirs” (Burney, 2008, p. 10), the polylogic mode appears to be eclipsed by the monologic since Evelina’s voice largely dominates, which is confirmed by the number of pages devoted to Evelina’s narrative (sometimes over sixty

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in a row) and by the recurrence of the phrase “Evelina in continuation” (39 times). Evelina thus seemingly offers the single voice of a monody; when the heroine’s perspective is contradicted or nuanced, it is by a character seen and heard through the prism of her consciousness and from within her narrative, framed by it, and usually condemned for his or her bad manners and morals. This happens for instance when Sir Clement disparages the man the heroine loves and admires: “the art of Orville has prevailed; – cold, inanimate, phlegmatic as he is” (Burney, 2008, p. 358). The character’s speech is thereby discredited on a narrative level, although, as I will argue further down, it remains heard and cannot simply be ignored. The choice of presenting the reader with one uncontested version tends to erase the subjective nature of the heroine’s narrative and grants it the objective element of an authoritative discourse. The monologic character conveyed by this absence of contradiction largely explains why Evelina is considered as a conservative novel by Patricia Meyer Spacks, for instance (Spacks, 1976), since Evelina’s interpretation of the characters she encounters or of the events she experiences is nearly always sanctioned by her tutor Mr Villars, who shares his ward’s opinion on characters he has met, like Madame Duval and Mrs Selwyn, as well as on those he has not, like Sir Clement. As a figure of authority on two accounts, first as Evelina’s tutor and father-figure, and secondly as a “reverend” and therefore a spiritual guide, Villars embodies a patriarchal order the heroine endorses and never questions. The same cannot be said in my view of the novel she belongs to, if only because Villars’s presentation of her, especially of her simplicity, is revealed to be deeply flawed. Evelina’s simplicity is repeatedly brought forward, either by the author persona in the Preface, which presents the heroine as “the offspring of Nature, and of Nature in her simplest attire” (Burney, 2008, p. 10), or by characters such as Lady Howard, who describes Evelina’s character as “truly ingenuous and simple” (p. 23), and most importantly and recurrently by Mr Villars. The latter thus mentions “the artlessness of [Evelina’s] nature, and the simplicity of [her] education” (p. 117), “the artless openness, the ingenuous simplicity of her nature” (p. 127), or entreats his ward to “retain thy genuine simplicity, thy singleness of heart, thy guileless sincerity” (p. 338). In Lady Howard’s and Mr Villars’s letters, the term “simplicity” associated with Evelina sounds like an encomium, praising in particular her integrity. Confronted with the duplicity of the world that surrounds her, Evelina is “one”, sincere, incapable of lie or concealment, as shown by her failure to keep from Villars the letter she attributes to Lord Orville: “I wish I had made no concealment from the beginning, since I know not how to account for a gravity, which not all my endeavours can entirely hide or repress”, she writes Maria (p. 259), a few days before revealing everything to her tutor and concluding: “Concealment, my dear Maria, is the foe of tranquillity” (p. 268). Like an open book, her face reveals her sentiments in an immediate manner

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as her physical beauty perfectly corresponds to that of her soul. This “simplicity” and the transparency it relies upon are characteristics of the ideal woman propounded by the conduct-books which were so popular in Burney’s time: “I wish you to possess the most perfect simplicity of heart and manners”, writes John Gregory (Gregory, 1774, p. 45), while James Fordyce insists on “the grand principle of simplicity” for a woman (Fordyce, 1809, vol. I, p. 54), particularly on her “simplicity of manners” (vol. II, p. 56). This extends to her mode of expression as Fordyce advises women to speak with “that easy elegance of speech, which results from clear and lively ideas, expressed with the simplicity of nature, somewhat aided by the knowledge of books” (vol. I, p. 153), construing feminine discourse as being simple by essence. One of the problems raised by Lady Howard and Villars’s characterisation of Evelina as “simple” or the conduct books’ presentation of the ideal woman as such is that this word is far from being always positively connoted. To put it otherwise, the very definition of simplicity in Evelina is complex if not multiple, in keeping with the various sub-entries in Johnson’s dictionary for the adjective “simple”: 1/ plain, artless, unskilled, undesigning, sincere, harmless; 2/ uncompounded, unmingled, single, only one, plain, not complicated; 3/ silly, not wise, not cunning (cunning is here taken in its positive sense of “instructed” or “skilful”).4 Resolutely negative connotations are juxtaposed to more positive ones, even within the same sub-entry 1, which associates “sincere” and “unskilled”. If Mr Villars and Lady Howard seem to take the adjective in its laudatory sense, Evelina herself uses it twice to mock Mr Brown, called “simple Mr Brown” (Burney, 2008, p. 201) or “simple swain” (p. 205). This only bears out her description of the character in the same letter as a “silly young man” (p. 203), a phrase situated between the two occurrences of “simple”. She also applies the term to herself selfdeprecatingly: “how will he be provoked, thought I, when he finds what a simple rustic he has honoured with his choice!” (p. 32), or again: “I was extremely disconcerted at this grave, and but too just accusation, and I am sure I must look very simple” (p. 349), which Vivien Jones in her notes to the edition used here glosses as “foolish”. The pejorative sense of the term, which Evelina appears to favour, is actually inherent in the praises that Villars lavishes upon her. He considers her unable to understand the complexity of other people, as the suffix -less or the prefix un-, recurrent in the definitions from Johnson’s dictionary given above and in the adjective “artless” so often used to describe Evelina, clearly become the signs of a lack, which is here of an intellectual nature. “[G]uileless yourself”, explains Villars, “how could you prepare against the duplicity of another?” (p. 268). Evelina’s simplicity or here “guilelessness”, synonymous with “artlessness”, prevents her from perceiving what is duplicitous, multiple, and complex. That is at least what Villars implies, which the less than complimentary phrases he uses elsewhere to describe Evelina to Lady Howard corroborate: “You

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must not […] expect too much from my pupil. She is quite a little rustic, and knows nothing of the world […]. I shall not be surprised if you should discover in her a thousand deficiencies” (p. 21). The paternalistic tone conveyed by “pupil” and “little” corresponds to an infantilisation of women built in the demand for “child-like simplicity” which weighs upon them, in James Fordyce’s words (Fordyce, 1809, vol. II, p. 120). Lord Orville echoes Villars further down when he doubts Evelina’s ability to detect and withstand Sir Clement’s manipulations: “she is too young for suspicion, and has an artlessness of disposition that I never saw equalled” (Burney, 2008, p. 346), suggesting that she is too simple, i.e. too gullible to perceive the baronet’s bad intentions. Thus, the two men who matter the most for Evelina see her as a child or as a young innocent whose simplicity represents an intellectual limitation; the third meaning of “simple” in Johnson’s dictionary is not really distinguishable from the first in the way they perceive the heroine. Their “praise” cuts both ways. In this light, the esteem in which they hold her, due precisely to the simplicity that they attribute to her, relies on a misunderstanding of who Evelina really is. If Orville cannot ask the heroine directly what she thinks of Sir Clement, Mr Villars on the other hand has had access to the young girl’s letters, as has the reader. Villars knows, or ought to know, that she is perfectly capable of perceiving Sir Clement’s ruses as well as the double language he makes use of: “if you did not talk in one language, and think in another”, says Evelina to the baronet (p. 99). She also immediately sees through Lady Louisa’s affectation and Mr Lovel’s hypocrisy: Evelina’s simplicity does not prevent her from discerning someone else’s duplicity. More importantly perhaps, as far as Evelina’s discourse is concerned, Villars seems to disregard entirely his ward’s use of voices. Like Burney herself, who was famous in her family for her gifts as an imitator, Evelina shows a real talent for ventriloquism and quotes extensively from the speeches of other characters who express themselves in distinct, sometimes sub-standard varieties of English, and occasionally in another language: M. Du Bois’s French, Madame Duval and the Branghtons’ grammatically and syntactically incorrect English, Captain Mirvan’s nautical phrases, Lady Louisa and Mr Lovel’s speech mannerisms, etc. Burney’s novel is “many-voiced” indeed, as Vivien Jones points out in her introduction to the edition used here (Burney, 2008, p. xxxiv); as Jeffrey Hopes among others remarks, all these voices contrast sharply with the heroine’s silences, which “other voices fill out” (Hopes, 2013, p. 315) – a direction I will not pursue as I am not concerned here with the diegesis of the novel but with its use of discourse. Strikingly, Evelina’s heteroglossia is entirely owing to Evelina, not to the other epistolary subjects. Lady Howard refuses to quote directly from Madame Duval’s letter, offering instead a summary: “The chief purport of her writing I will acquaint you with; the letter itself is not worthy your notice” (Burney, 2008, p. 13), she writes on the first page of the novel. Evelina thus opens with the control exerted by one character over another one’s discourse, which is

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erased. As for Villars, he refuses to relate Madame Duval’s words to Lady Howard unless in highly doctored reported speech: “I will not trouble your Ladyship with the particulars of this disagreeable conversation” (p. 164). Madame Duval’s written and spoken words are censored by two of the novel’s main epistolary subjects, who endorse a monolingualism endowed with an ideological value analysed particularly in Davidson (2016).5 Christina Davidson argues that Burney subscribed to an “ideology of standardisation” (Davidson, 2016, p. 35),6 an ideologically conservative conception of a common language. This is strongly reminiscent of Bakhtin’s definition of a “unitary language” or “system of linguistic norms”: Unitary language constitutes the theoretical expression of the historical processes of linguistic unification and centralisation, an expression of the centripetal forces of language. A unitary language is not something given but is always in essence posited – and at every moment of its linguistic life it is opposed to the realities of heteroglossia. But at the same time it makes its presence felt as a force for overcoming this heteroglossia, imposing specific limits to it, guaranteeing a certain maximum of mutual understanding and crystalising into a real, although still relative unity – the unity of the reigning conversational (everyday) and literary language, “correct language”. A common unitary language is a system of linguistic norms. But these norms do not constitute an abstract imperative; they are rather the generative forces of linguistic life, forces that struggle to overcome the heteroglossia of language, forces that unite and centralise verbal-ideological thought, creating within a heteroglot national language the firm, stable linguistic nucleus of an officially recognised literary language, or else defending an already formed language from the pressure of growing heteroglossia. (Bakhtin, 1981, pp. 270–271) If Evelina followed in Villars and Lady Howard’s footsteps, it would be difficult to disagree with Christina Davidson’s contention that Evelina testifies to Burney’s conservative ideology, as least insofar as language is concerned. But such is not the case, precisely because of the heroine’s discourse: Simply put, Evelina’s polyphonic writing contradicts her conservative values. She does not enforce the norms she claims to abide by, does not defend a standard version of English against “the heteroglossia of language”. Whether or not Burney was a conservative in political, social, or linguistic matters, her novel certainly is not, relying as it does on a conception of language that is anything but conservative or unitary. Far from seeking to write always in a “correct” language, “guaranteeing a certain maximum of mutual understanding”, in Bakhtin’s words, Evelina reproduces words or phrases whose meaning eludes her like Captain

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Mirvan’s “sea-terms [...], which are to [her] quite unintelligible” (Burney, 2008, p. 141), but which she writes down nonetheless, just as she writes down Madame Duval’s incorrect speeches, confronting her fictitious reader, Villars, with types of language he does his best to repress. In her narrative, Evelina does not censor the “vulgar” or divergent voices, like Madame Duval’s or, on another level, those of the satirical Mrs Selwyn or even of Sir Clement when, in the passage quoted above, he expresses about Lord Orville an opinion with which Evelina disagrees but which is shared by a certain number of readers. Whether she quotes Madame Duval to criticise or mock her eventually matters little; she quotes her, often at great length, and thus introduces a disturbing voice into the novel, providing a counterpoint to the ideologically dominant discourse, especially Villars’s, the discourse of the father and of the spiritual authority he represents as a reverend. This prescriptive discourse is at times barely distinguishable from that found in conduct books: Villars’s “nothing is so delicate as the reputation of a woman; it is at once the most beautiful and most brittle of all human things” (p. 166) sounds like an echo of Fordyce’s “Remember how tender a thing a woman’s reputation is, how hard to preserve, and when lost how impossible to recover” (Fordyce, 1809, vol. I, p. 32). In Evelina’s letters, Burney gives voices to those which patriarchal society would like to silence, as Captain Mirvan silences the women around him. Both Madame Duval and Mrs Selwyn, of whom Villars and Evelina disapprove for different reasons, are thus quoted by the latter, not in the reported speech, which would mark control over their discourse, but in their “own words” (Burney, 2008, pp. 151 and 284). Those voices are clearly differentiated from Evelina’s, if only because they are most often accompanied by the usual markers of direct speech, inverted commas, or italics for shorter speeches. But the boundary between voices becomes blurred when the heroine skilfully resorts to free indirect speech, as in the following example, which occurs very early in the novel: [...] in hopes of changing the discourse, and preventing his further inquiries, I desired to know if he had seen the young lady who had been conversing with me? No; but would I honour him with my commands to see for her? ‘O by no means!’ Was there any other person with whom I wished to speak? I said no, before I knew I had answered at all. Should he have the pleasure of bringing me any refreshment? I bowed, almost involuntarily. And away he flew. (p. 33) Two voices are heard in the same utterance and mingle: Lord Orville’s, who pronounces the reported sentences, and Evelina’s, who relates them. Two discourses are superimposed, justifying the appellation of polyphony

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or polyvocality often given to free indirect speech.7 Even more remarkably, the supposedly simple Evelina proves to be a mistress of irony, a mode of expression often associated with free indirect speech;8 this is more striking since this time the two voices belong to one and the same character. Far from the simplicity and spontaneity required of woman in Evelina’s society, the ironist is a person who wears a mask, an “ironic mask” according to Vladimir Jankélévitch (Jankélévitch, 1950, p. 52, my translation), a metaphor taken up by Philippe Hamon when he refers to the ironist as a “hypocrite”, “someone who speaks from behind a mask to unmask the deceits of society” (Hamon, 1996, p. 110, my translation). Evelina thus denounces Captain Mirvan’s behaviour when she writes: “he was so civil as to immediately take possession of the vacant seat in his own coach, leaving Madame Duval and Monsieur Du Bois to take care of themselves” (Burney, 2008, p. 64), her real meaning being, of course, that he completely lacks courtesy. A type of discourse whose meaning is not that of the words actually pronounced or written, relying on the distinction between an implicit and an explicit meaning, irony is conspicuous for its lack of simplicity – this takes us rather far from the prescriptions found in conduct books quoted above, according to which women should express themselves with simplicity. The associations of irony with wit are also to be avoided by the young female readers of such books, as Fordyce explains: [...] need I tell you that men of the best sense have been usually averse to the thought of marrying a witty female? [...] we cannot be easy, where we are not safe. We are never safe in the company of a critic and almost every wit is a critic by profession. (Fordyce, 1809, vol. I, p. 147) Evelina’s image as the ideal woman takes a serious blow from her use of irony. Linguists and literary critics differ as regards voice in an ironic utterance; some hear one voice delivering a double discourse, others, like linguist Oswald Ducrot (Ducrot, 1984), describe irony as polyphonic since two voices are heard at the same time; others still distinguish between the perspectives, that of the ironist and that of his or her audience and even his or her victim. For Jankélévitch, for instance, irony is “univocal” for the ironist and “equivocal” for the person who is the butt of this irony (Jankélévitch, 1950, p. 49, my translation). Philippe Hamon, on the other hand, supports a polyphonic vision of irony, writing: “The ironical utterance is double-voiced, with a low voice and a high one” (Hamon, 1996, p. 111, my translation). This has several consequences. First, this double message raises the question of interpretation and the possibility of a misunderstanding, since irony is not always detected – is Mr Villars aware of Evelina’s irony? He never gives the slightest suggestion that he is. The “low” voice may be stifled by the “high” one, as when Mr Smith does not immediately understand that he is being mocked by Sir

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Clement at Vauxhall (Volume II, Letter XV). Secondly, Evelina’s ironical utterances emphasise that polyphony is not merely exterior to the character: It also comes from within her, as different voices make themselves heard within her discourse, whether she is aware of it or not, whether she plays with it or is played by it. For if the examples given hitherto all show Evelina’s control over those different voices, hers and those of others, a distance is sometimes created between the reader and her narrative. This introduces a blurring in the authoritative discourse, to which a discreet counterpoint is then provided. It is, for instance, perfectly acceptable to entertain about Mrs Selwyn, Mrs Mirvan, Lord Orville, or Mr Villars an opinion differing from the heroine’s, which numerous critics have done. More precisely, on a discursive level, Evelina’s irony sometimes backfires on her. When she contemptuously calls Mr Brown a “simple swain” (Burney, 2008, p. 205), using “simple” in its negative sense and making her meaning even more forceful thanks to the alliteration, she ridicules the young man by transforming him into the hero of a pastoral in quest of his lady, Polly Branghton, in Vauxhall Gardens: He has indeed been “looking for a lady”, as Mr Smith points out on the same page. By antiphrasis, the implicit meaning (the “low” voice) is that Mr Brown shares no common point with the heroes of medieval romances, which the archaic noun “swain” hints at – the term recurs several times in The Faerie Queene for instance.9 But unlike Mr Smith or Tom Branghton, the simple Mr. Brown rushes to help Polly, a damsel in very real distress in the dark and dangerous alleys of Vauxhall, which, within the context of a novel where chivalrous virtues are constantly ignored or trampled upon, as in the footrace between the two old women, likens him to Lord Orville, albeit on a very humble scale. Besides, his intentions towards his Polly are honourable, which is more than can be said for Sir Clement’s towards Evelina, and he eventually marries her. The chivalrous connotations that Evelina uses to ridicule Mr Brown thus have an adverse effect when considered in the light of the novel as a whole, and a third type of discourse, or a third voice, emerges, whose origin is difficult to locate as the reader understands or hears something that Evelina had no intention of saying but that she says nonetheless. In the same line of thought, the reader perceives very early on that Evelina is in love with Lord Orville, although she denies it. This might be expressed through her choice of words: The conversation of Lord Orville is really delightful. His manners are so elegant, so gentle, so unassuming, that they at once engage esteem, and diffuse complacence. Far from being indolently satisfied with his own accomplishments […], he is most assiduously attentive to please and to serve all who are in his company, and, though his success is invariable, he never manifests the smallest degree of consciousness.

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Anne Rouhette I could wish that you, my dearest Sir, knew Lord Orville, because I am sure you would love him; and I have felt that wish for no other person I have seen since I came to London. (p. 74, emphasis added, except for “you”)

At first sight, Evelina is describing Orville’s intellectual, social, and moral qualities, while some adjectives like “gentle” or “delightful” are ambiguous, to say the least, and may pertain to the sensuous or even erotic fields (Blanchemain-Faucon, 2010, p. 126), which is confirmed by the verb “engage” and especially by the displacement of Evelina’s own feelings onto Villars in the following paragraph, accompanied by a litotes (“I could wish” and not “I wish”). Or the young girl is betrayed by her own syntax: I hope, too, I shall see Lord Orville no more […]. As a sister I loved him; – I could have entrusted him with every thought of my heart, had he deigned to wish my confidence: so steady did I think his honour, so feminine his delicacy, and so amiable his nature! […]: but I will talk, – write, – think of him no more! (p. 262) The postposition of the negation (“see... no more”, “think of him no more”) results in a double reading: First the sentences read as “I hope I shall see Lord Orville” and “I will [...] think of him” before the negative phrase alters the meaning. The effect produced differs widely from the structures Evelina uses to speak of Captain Mirvan, for instance, when she writes: “I do not like him” (p. 40). The impression conveyed by such as passage as a whole is that Evelina’s feelings are first expressed and then qualified or negated. Her readers, fictitious like Villars or real, understand an entirely different message there: “I hope, too, I shall see Lord Orville […]. I loved him; I could have entrusted him with my heart; I will talk, – write, – think of him”. To take up the musical metaphor, the counterpoint to Evelina’s melody is provided by Evelina’s voice, suggesting that alterity comes from within the self. Something eludes the heroine, undermining her control over her discourse and questioning her monologic discourse of authority and through it, arguably, that of the entire novel. Evelina’s “simplicity”, her “unicity”, and through her, those of the feminine model promoted by the conduct books are proven to be myths that the novel interrogates. Evelina is already plural, bearing her mother and grandfather’s patronym in her first name, being the physical image of her mother, if not her reincarnation to her father: “does Caroline Evelyn still live”, Belmont exclaims when he sees her (p. 372), before conjuring her: “Oh dear resemblance of thy murdered mother […], all that remains of the most-injured of women […], thou representative of my departed wife, speak to me in her name” (p. 385). To Belmont, the daughter speaks

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with the mother’s voice. Furthermore, he indirectly underlines the mirror effect between the two women when he mentions the “dreadful […] reflections” (p. 386, emphasis mine) that his daughter awakens in him and when he repeats twice certain terms or phrases such as “representative” and “most injured of women” (pp. 384 and 385 respectively); he also resorts twice to the motif of the “dagger” (pp. 385 and 386). These doublings point out his assimilation of mother and daughter and, consequently, the daughter’s dual nature. The mirror effect is also conveyed by each of the novel’s “Pollies”, who reflect the heroine in a more or less distorted manner. Maria Mirvan, her chosen sister, is thus her “second self” (p. 123), while Polly Moore is held up to her by Madame Duval as a model to follow (p. 69) and her cousin Polly Branghton – like her, pretty and “good-natured” (p. 70) – also likes the opera and eventually marries her “swain”. More fundamentally, Polly Green functions as the heroine’s alter ego. Also described as “pretty” and “mild and good-humoured” (p. 315), the usurper occupies Evelina’s rightful place as Belmont’s daughter and makes her entrance into the world (at least, into the novel) by dancing at Bristol with Lord Orville, as Evelina did in London, before marrying Evelina’s brother and thus becoming her sister. Surprisingly, even though Evelina watches Polly Green dance, the two “Miss Belmonts” never meet nor speak, which reinforces the impression that the two girls are but two sides of the same character. This is brought out by the singular used by Mrs Selwyn when she alludes to “both the real and the fictitious daughter” (p. 377, emphasis mine), reminding us that the same signifier, “Miss Belmont”, refers to two signifieds, Evelina and Polly Green – one singular for a plural reality, a multiplicity underneath the unicity of a subject and of a novel which finally turns out to be poly/pollyphonic, and so anything but simple.

Notes 1 The questions of identity and naming in Evelina are dealt with, for instance, in Rouhette 2013, pp. 102–109. 2 See for instance Altman 1982 or Calas 2007, both indebted to Jost 1966. 3 Villars and Maria differ from the heroine as far as the interpretation of her feelings is concerned, but they never question her description of how events unfold. 4 Johnson 1755, page 1838, last modified: 6 December 2012, available online on johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/page-view/&i=1838. 5 See also, by the same author, “Conversations as Signifiers: Characters on the Margins of Morality in the First Three Novels of Frances Burney”. Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 8:2 (June 2010), pp. 277–304. 6 Davidson borrows the phrase from James Milroy and Lesley Milroy (1999. Authority in Language: Investigating Language Prescription and Standardisation, 3rd ed. London: Routledge, p. 17).

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7 There appears to be no general agreement amongst linguists regarding the status of voice in free indirect discourse. For a detailed analysis of the question, see Fludernik 1995, which sums up and prolongs the debate between Ann Banfield and Oswald Ducrot. 8 For an overview of the subject and further references, see Oltean 1993, p. 696. 9 The word may be applied to a knight, as in Book III, Canto VII, st. xxix: “[...] it chaunst a knight / To passe that way, as forth he trauelled; / It was a goodly Swaine, and of great might, / As euer man that bloudy field did fight”, which describes “the good Sir Satyrane” (st. xxx) (Spenser, 1966, p. 101).

Works Cited Altman, J.G. (1982). Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Bakhtin, M., Emerson, C., and Holquist, M., eds. and trans. (1981). Discourse in the Novel. In: The Dialogic Imagination. Fours Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Blanchemain-Faucon, L. (2010). L’Imagination féminine chez Frances Burney. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail. Burney, F., Bloom, E.A., and Jones, V., eds. (2008). Evelina; or, A Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (1778). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Calas, F. (2007). Le Roman Épistolaire. Paris: Nathan. Davidson, C. (2016). “To Speak as Others Speak”: Privileged and “Vulgar” Voices in Evelina, by Frances Burney. Women’s Writing, 23(1), pp. 33–52. Ducrot, O. (1984). Le Dire et le dit. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Fludernik, M. (1995). The Linguistic Illusion of Alterity: The Free Indirect as Paradigm of Discourse. Diacritics, 25(4), pp. 89–115. Fordyce, J. (1809). Sermons to Young Women (1766), 2 vols. London: available online on archive.org/details/bub_gb_5gjjojYJiogC/page/n3 (volume I) and on archive.org/details/bub_gb_hEfsFHa-UsQC/page/n3 (volume II) [Accessed 25 Aug 2019]. Gregory, J. (1774). A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters. London: available online on romantic-circles.org/editions/contemps/barbauld/poems1773/related_ texts/gregory [Accessed 25 Aug 2019]. Hamon, P. (1996). L’Ironie littéraire. Essai sur les formes de l’écriture oblique. Paris: Hachette. Hopes, J. (2013). “She Sat like a Cypher”: Discursive Ventriloquism in Evelina. RSÉAA XVII-XVIII, 70, pp. 309–322. Jankélévitch, V. (1950). L’Ironie ou la bonne conscience. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Johnson, S. and Besalke, B., ed. (1755). A Dictionary of the English Language. A Digital Edition of the 1755 Classic by Samuel Johnson. Available online on johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/page-view/?i=1838 [Accessed 25 Aug 2019]. Jost, F. (1966). Le Roman épistolaire et la technique narrative au XVIIIe siècle. Comparative Literature Studies, 3(4), pp. 397–427. Oltean, S. (1993). A Survey of the Pragmatic and Referential Functions of Free Indirect Discourse. Poetics Today, 14(4), pp. 691–714. Rouhette, A (2013). Correspondences: Frances Burney’s Evelina. Paris: Fahrenheit.

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Spacks, P.M. (1976). Dynamics of Fear: Fanny Burney. In: Imagining a Self, Autobiography and Novel in 18th Century England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 158–192. Spenser, E., Greenlaw, E., Osgood, C.C., and Padelford, F.M., eds. (1966). Faerie Qveene, Book Three [1590]. The Works of Edmund Spenser, A Variorum Edition. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

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13 The Whirl of the Red, Green, and Blue Christopher Anstey and the Particoloured Poem Peter Merchant

Modernism took its time to catch up with the Victorians. Until it did, hybrid art forms struggled for acceptance. “Polyphony” in literature or in the visual arts was simply a contradiction in terms or a category mistake. In 1871, Hugh Reginald Haweis failed to see how an artist in another and more static medium, even so resourceful and imaginative an artist as Turner, could ever emulate or simulate the dynamism of music: The canvas does not change to the eye – all that is, is presented simultaneously as in one complex chord, and thus the charm of velocity, which is so great a property in emotion, and which might belong to a colour-art, is denied to the painter. (Haweis, 1871, p. 32) Horizons, however, were about to expand. At the end of that same year came the second of the Alice books, Through the Looking-Glass, which confirmed the arrival on the literary scene of an author not only willing to entertain category mistakes but intent upon using them to entertain his audience: The leg of mutton that makes a bow; the willow tree which, because it has a bark, goes “Bough-wough” (Carroll, 2009, pp. 234, 139). Thinking about the arts soon took on a similar boundary-breaking boldness. In 1877, Walter Pater proclaimed their prodigious potential for convergence and cross-fertilisation: “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” (Pater, 1877, p. 528). The possibility of literary or pictorial polyphony was admitted. From here, it is common to go on and show how – thanks in large part to Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on novelistic discourse – that possibility crystallised in the middle of the twentieth century (1981). The following pages produce the line backwards rather than forwards in order to ask, on the contrary, whether it had existed in the middle of the eighteenth century. By common consent both then and now, a nearly perfect picture of what polyphony looks like is presented by William Hogarth’s 1741 print “The Enraged Musician”. Read from right to left, the print lines up caterwauling cats, a sow-gelder blowing his horn, a knife-grinder, a DOI: 10.4324/9781003129837-14

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The Whirl of the Red, Green, and Blue 233 paviour, a drummer-boy, a street musician playing his shawm, a little girl with a clacker, a ballad-singer, and a squawking parrot. The imagery exists in a visual medium but lends itself to being apprehended aurally. Simply setting eyes on the print, Henry Fielding accordingly wrote, was “enough to make a man deaf” (Fielding, 1755, p. 45). What Fielding viewed as a coming together of sights and sounds can also be analysed in terms of the familiar eighteenth-century tension between energy (the seething, surging life of the streets) and order (the patterning of the graphic artist). For Martin Meisel, Hogarth’s “Enraged Musician” carries its vision of organised chaos to the point of “polyphonic cacophony” (Meisel, 2016, p. 305). After “The Enraged Musician”, Meisel attends to the organised chaos of Tristram Shandy. Sterne’s novel delights in interrupting itself and withholding every promised climax. So it is fitting that his should be an art that apparently aspires towards polyphony, but then, as Pierre Dubois observes, consistently deflects it into problematic or paradoxical forms: Dr Slop’s delivery of “a form of excommunication of the church of Rome” (Sterne, 1983, p. 134, emphasis in original) accompanied by Uncle Toby’s “interjectional whistle” (p. 143); an abbess and a novice breaking two “sinful” words down into their constituent syllables in order that the voice which begins the first word can complete the second one, and vice versa (408–409). The text at this point “is … laid out as polyphony on a musical score”; but polyphony “is not the normal discursive mode of spoken or written language, which is linear” (Dubois, 2013, para. 16; 2015, p. 109). In choosing the seventh volume and sixth year of Tristram Shandy for a sudden attempt to put polyphony on the page, Sterne sets himself a daunting challenge. The attempt requires an abrupt abeyance of normal readerliness, as a sequential medium is manipulated to express simultaneity, and this is far less easy to effect in prose than in verse. Just a few months after the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy had appeared, the same strange stereo at which Sterne’s abbess and her novice would aim was made the centrepiece of a Gentleman’s Magazine poem by William Woty. Adopting the echo effect that had so enhanced the braying of the dunces in Book Two of Pope’s Dunciad, and moving to the teasaloon at White Conduit House what Hogarth had put on a city street, Woty proceeds to the poetic transcription of another noisy chorus in a public place: ‘Tis hurry all And ratling cups and saucers. Waiter here, And waiter there, and waiter here and there, At once is call’d — Joe — Joe — Joe — Joe —Joe— Joe on the right — and Joe upon the left, For ev’ry vocal pipe re-ecchoes Joe. (“W.W.” 1760)

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As it was at one of London’s lesser pleasure-gardens, so it also was – if small things to great may be compared – at the prime inland resort of eighteenth-century Britain. In Bath, reported a poet writing some six years after Woty, the sounds of the city make themselves heard in such confusing conglomerations as to form one single indistinguishable mass. The likes of Miss Fitchet, Miss Stote, and Lady Riggledum “come to the Pump, as before I was saying, / And talk all at once, while the Music is playing” (Anstey, 2010, p. 146). Nor is this all that assaults the ears of the unfortunate, or even “enraged”, visitor. Supplying an additional incongruous ostinato to the music as it plays, like Dr Slop’s “running bass” in Tristram Shandy (Sterne, 1983, p. 139), there may even be background noise from street cries of the kind that Hogarth had depicted: “Notes of sweet Music contend with the Cries / Of fine potted Laver, fresh Oysters, and Pies!” (Anstey, 2010, p. 104). The Bath poet was, of course, Christopher Anstey, made famous by managing – in his verse satire of 1766, The New Bath Guide – to make that city even more famous than it already was. The hallmark of Anstey’s poem, and its chief charm, was variety. A specimen summingup comes from The Imperial Magazine in 1832, hailing a new edition with illustrations by Cruikshank: “a very curious medley appears to court our attention, and excite our risible muscles” (“Review”, 1832). The poem even sums itself up in similar terms, by contriving to foreground a bandbox filled with choice and costly fabrics, as if this cabinet of fashionable curiosities – the first material object which the poem views in closeup (Anstey, 2010, pp. 97–98) – constituted a frontispiece image of the author’s own artefact. The colours in the bandbox cover the whole spectrum, since there are blonde laces, mourning crepes, “Bonnets green”, and “[f]ine Vermilion”. Anstey offers a designer version of nature’s mixing and matching as Alexander Pope had observed it: A well-accorded strife in which, though all things differ, all agree. The particoloured variety of the poem corresponds to the variousness of the city in which it is set. Anstey’s Bath is a “hot-bed of British sociability” (Cossic-Pericarpin, 2017, p. 537), and the socialising is often across class barriers. Tabby Runt the maidservant may be “the queerest Animal in Nature” (Anstey, 2010, p. 87) but can still lay claim to “the Honour of Washing / With Folk of Distinction and very high Fashion” and can still enjoy a seamless assimilation, albeit by the back door, into their networks: “So while little TABBY was washing her Rump, / The ladies kept drinking it out of a Pump” (p. 113). Bath also boasts a history which immediately defines it as multicultural and multilingual – as well as being Georgian, it is medieval, Anglo-Saxon, Roman – and the layering of voices in Anstey’s poem amusingly apes that heteroglossic heritage. One episode, “A Consultation of Physicians”, features a kind of collage of broadcast soundbites (p. 99) as the participants fire fragments of dialogue at one another.

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The Whirl of the Red, Green, and Blue 235 As in that single section, the voices of the physicians overlap and intermingle, so also – from section to section – do the voices of the main named characters in Anstey’s poem. For The New Bath Guide consists of three separate correspondences, which are polyphonically interwoven; the second begins before the first is wound up, and the third occurs before the second is concluded. The fifteen verse letters resulting all remain unanswered (at least, until the Epilogue is reached); but that Bakhtinian “multiplicity of voices” to which this threefold division of the narrative manifestly ministers is still enhanced by the fact of the letters quoting, on several occasions, the dialogue of characters other than the writers themselves. Moreover, of the five writers and readers whom the three exchanges involve four are female. Anstey’s deployment of his characters is thus designed to situate the poem inside a virtual version of that special sort of “forum for female conversation” which – according to Alison E. Hurley – the provincial watering place or resort town at this time, and pre-eminently Bath, constituted (Hurley, 2006, p. 6). The poem also comfortably inhabits, fifteen times over, what Hurley shows to be a characteristic form of the age: The spa letter, which “pursued with notable success the daunting and quintessentially eighteenth-century task of refashioning the incoherent, un-heroic, and apparently un-newsworthy matter of modern life into something artful, entertaining, and new” (p. 15). The threading together of the three letter-writers’ perspectives makes the storylines that emerge from the letters inextricably simultaneous, too. The effect created is the eighteenth-century equivalent of that “romance entrelacement”, which, when viewed in retrospect, as Marsha S. Collins notes, is bound to be sensed as “reminiscent of the entwining, competing, and complementary voices of early polyphony” (Collins, 2016, p. 66). The adventures entwined in The New Bath Guide are those of Simkin Blunderhead, his sister Prudence, their cousin Jenny, and their servant Tabitha (“Tabby”) Runt. While Simkin loses money, the women in their varying ways are losers in love. By the end there have been three wooings, no weddings, and three repentings. What befalls each member of the group in Bath is unique to him or her, but, in the words of Annick Cossic, the stories of all four “merge in the disappointment of the characters whose expectations of improvement are not met, and who therefore all share the same experience of failure” (Cossic, 2010, p. 38). This comic accumulation of competing but complementary mishaps follows the same pattern that Goldsmith imparts to The Vicar of Wakefield: The innocent falling in, to their cost, with the worldly. In Goldsmith’s novel – published in 1766, just a few weeks before The New Bath Guide – the members of the Primrose family find themselves deceived and preyed upon in ways that are alarming and amusing by turns, and a picture of imperilled innocence is built up bit by bit. That Anstey’s work has affinities with contemporary prose fiction attests to its generic diversity and shows the author to have pulled off

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a peculiar polymorphous threading together of poem and novel. As a narrative arranged in fifteen letters by various hands, however, The New Bath Guide could claim as its closest antecedent not Goldsmith’s Vicar but Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–1748). This was the novel whose range of letter-writers moved epistolary fiction away from its monologic origins in the Ovidian form of the heroic epistle and towards the polyvocality and multi-perspectivism that would go on to warrant, in modern critical discourse, the term “polyphonic”. Alex Townsend is one scholar who has applied Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony to Richardson (2003). “Epistolary polyphony” – often shading, as in Hogarth, into polyphonic cacophony – is now a widely recognised phenomenon in eighteenth-century studies. In 2014 it was addressed by Thomas Keymer, and in 2015 it was discussed more extensively by Grace Egan (Keymer, 2014, p. 170, Egan, 2015, pp. 85 et seq.). The inbuilt polyphonic potential of the epistolary mode consists partly in its capacity to tolerate switching between different types of sentence: declarative, interrogative, imperative. As the writer goes through changes of mind or mood – or, perhaps, imagines the reader doing the same – the mode is also more accommodating to shifts of style than most other kinds of writing can afford to be. Anstey’s poem effortlessly achieves epistolary polyphony both locally and overall, with sharp divisions in register and key making themselves felt within as well as between the individual letters; the consequently contrasting idioms of The New Bath Guide align it absolutely with the “internal variegation” and “interanimation of languages” prescribed by Bakhtin (passim). The stylistic volatility of the work is plainly felt when, smuggled in among some generally polite description, we find what the poem itself terms “one wicked Letter” (Anstey, 2010, p. 177), while on the local level an evident fondness for double entendre – “muff”, for instance, in three of the first four letters in Part the Second (pp. 127–128, 134, 144) – serves to fuse elegance with vulgarity. By the same token, the double perspective created by the mockheroic method allows Anstey to present what Simkin sees when he goes to the ball both as glorious and as ridiculous: Then say, O ye Nymphs that inhabit the Shades Of Pindus’ sweet Banks, Heliconian Maids, Celestial Muses, ye Powers divine, O say, for your Memory’s better than mine, What Troops of fair Virgins assembled around, What Squadrons of Heroes for Dancing renown’d Were rouz’d by the Fiddle’s harmonious Sound … (pp. 137–138) The tone of that passage suggests the balance that characterises the work as a whole. There is a side to the writing that delights in the pleasureseeking of Georgian Bath, and its “dissipated Joy” (p. 169), but also a

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The Whirl of the Red, Green, and Blue 237 side that deplores all of this. The dynamics of the poem are such that no one position is privileged, no one sentiment or attitude – whether idealism or cynicism – carries all before it, no one style enjoys definitive authorial endorsement. The anapaestic tetrameter into which Anstey has every letter, and almost every line, that Simkin writes falling was what became known as “Anstey’s measure” (Haslett, 2016, p. 138n34); but Simkin’s perspective and metre are far from being in control throughout because his cousin Jenny opens both of the poem’s parts, with letters whose sound is more chirruping and whose manner is far less circumstantial than Simkin’s. Anstey’s compositional principles preclude the promotion of any one of the poem’s voices as authoritative. Rather, as in polyphony, each voice independently makes a distinctive contribution and each one is on a par with the others. Further, as Anstey’s contemporaries insisted was necessarily the case with any well-designed garden, the way in which the discrete sections interlock is crucial. For, “if the parts are disjointed, the effect of a whole is lost”; and “the connection between the several parts … depends on the junction of each part to those about it, and on the relation of every part to the whole” (Whately, 1770, pp. 8, 9, emphasis in original). The poem’s quest for wholeness communicates itself to the poem’s leading characters. All of them are unfulfilled romantically, or have some debilitating condition, or both. Each of the women has hopes of finding her better half – which are destined to be dashed. In his final letter Simkin pronounces himself “shock’d to relate what Distresses befall / Miss JENNY, my Sister and TABBY and all” (Anstey, 2010, p. 158). Tabby and Simkin’s sister Prudence, as well as Simkin himself, are also in need of physical healing: For “Crudities” – or stomach troubles – in the last two cases (p. 87), and for “Chlorosis” in Tabby’s (pp. 91, 159). The travellers in that sense appear the counterparts, four centuries on, of Chaucer’s counterparts in The Canterbury Tales, beating a path to Becket’s tomb for reasons related (the “General Prologue” implies) to the help that he could afford the sick. Since Bath’s spa waters made it what the holy blissful martyr had made medieval Canterbury, the chief healing shrine in the country, and a place travelled to from every shire’s end, Simkin and his party have likewise undertaken a species of pilgrimage. It is a more secular pilgrimage, however, because the destination is not a centre of devotion but is devoted only to leisure. Some of Anstey’s readers certainly succeeded in making the connection with The Canterbury Tales. An endnote of Annick Cossic’s (2010, p. 184) quotes from The Gentleman’s Magazine of June 1766 a comparison between Anstey and Chaucer, who “[n]e’er told with such humour his Trumpington story: / His Simkin and Allen no more can compare / With the heroes of Bath, than the clowns at a fair”. Anstey’s Simkin is praised as a more than worthy successor to the character in “The Reeve’s Tale” who bore the same name, and the entwined storylines of The New Bath Guide are seen as rivalling the multiple narratives that unfold on the

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road to Canterbury. Of course, while Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales had a strong frame story – the pilgrimage itself – and a succession of similarly strong inset stories, The New Bath Guide is less obviously sectional in structure because its various courtship tales (Tabby and her Moravian Rabbi, Jenny and Captain Cormorant, Prudence and Roger/Nicodemus) and the varying “Distresses” that arise from them are made concurrent and coextensive. Yet Anstey is still held, by The Gentleman’s Magazine, to have out-Chaucered Chaucer. The mere fact that it was felt possible to draw such a parallel indicates that The Canterbury Tales, if not an actual influence on The New Bath Guide, might have as strong a claim to be considered an antecedent as Richardson’s Clarissa or Goldsmith’s Vicar. And if to all of Anstey’s antecedents are added the authors directly parodied in The New Bath Guide – Cossic (2010, p. 47) cites Milton, Dryden, and Gray – the polyphonic absorption into the work of voices other than the author’s own, through allusion or through mimicry, ascends into another dimension. The New Bath Guide was in turn absorbed into a number of subsequent works that respond to its example. Jane Moore sees it as “a formal antecedent” (Moore, 2007, p. 150) for Thomas Moore’s The Fudge Family in Paris (1818), which inherits and develops the generic diversity of Anstey’s poem. As well as embracing “a wide variety of verse forms”, The Fudge Family fuses “characteristics of the novel form (characterisation, verisimilitude, a unified narrative) with those of verse (rhyme, metre, imagery)” (p. 158). A.V. Seaton’s account of the achievement and afterlife of The New Bath Guide – which, as it is not focused solely on Thomas Moore, can afford to be broader – finds Anstey’s influence extending to the inauguration of a type of poem never previously recognised. By varying the metres of The New Bath Guide in accordance with his rotation of its letter-writers, Anstey laid the basis for the anapaestic tourism narrative, as Seaton terms it, and endowed it with the capacity to sustain a subtle and stimulating “permutation of voices and perspectives” (Seaton, 2016, p. 126). No less important than his development of fresh strategies for verse satire and for storytelling in verse was Anstey’s demonstration that the range of possibilities offered by Bath as a setting, whether to poet or to novelist or playwright, was now peculiarly rich. As well as permitting content of an obviously attractive kind – the bathing and the balls – the choice of Bath might indeed tend to presuppose a particular sort of artistic treatment. For, in a work whose title included (as Anstey’s did) the name of a place, the resulting sense of the writer’s surroundings did not always serve solely to determine and deliver a potential subject; it could sometimes come to colour his or her means of approaching and organising the work. Just a few years before the publication of The New Bath Guide, Charles Peters had pointed to precisely this: [t]he most celebrated lines, perhaps, in all our English poetry, are those of Sir John Denham in Coopers Hill: where he wishes for

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The Whirl of the Red, Green, and Blue 239 himself as a poet that he could flow like the river Thames; or that his strains of verse had the same good qualities with that river. O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream My great example, as it is my theme! Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull; Strong without rage; without o’erflowing full. (Peters, 1757, p. 91) There is a sense, perhaps, in which The New Bath Guide flows like the river Avon. One of the facts about the city of Bath that the Blunderhead family would have known – and might have read in The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure – was that “near two-thirds of it are surrounded by the river Avon, which, in its passage, forms a beautiful serpentine figure” (“Account”, 1758, p. 113). As it happened, Anstey would live long enough to see this very figure lovingly lifted up into the built environment. The younger John Wood gave Bath the Royal Crescent, in which Anstey bought a house (Cossic, 2010, pp. 11, 15); and after the Royal Crescent came the “intriguing serpentine form” of Lansdown Crescent, whose “sinuous curves” were “remarkably close to Hogarth’s ‘line of beauty’ ” (Pound, 1986, pp. 63, 65). More to the point, however, Anstey was all this while inducing readers of The New Bath Guide to execute strange serpentines of their own. This was because he had designed the easy extravagance of the winding Avon into the amiable amble of his poem’s narrative, as it weaves in and out of Bath’s “Fine Balls, and fine Concerts, fine Buildings, and Springs, / Fine Walks, and fine Views, and a Thousand fine Things” (Anstey, 2010, p. 115). In much the same way as the adjective “fine” loops languidly through that couplet, insinuating itself by twists and turns into the company of noun after noun, so Anstey’s self-styled “wayward Song” (p. 174) describes graceful circles around the social world that it has set itself to construct. If in 1766 Anstey allowed the lie of the land to suggest the structure of The New Bath Guide – thereby stamping it as a Bath poem through and through – Richard Brinsley Sheridan in his 1775 comedy The Rivals paid a corresponding attention, and homage, to the layout of the streets in the city’s splendid north-western corner. Sheridan had lived in Bath in the early 1770s. It was only a few years after the publication of The New Bath Guide, and the Royal Crescent had yet to be completed; but Sheridan caught the full glory of the Circus, on which work had now finished and which was home among others to Thomas Gainsborough. The Circus consists of a trio of curving terraces which together form a circle, and it works through symmetrical patterning around an emphasised centre. Sheridan’s play applies the same principles: Antithetic parallelism; the equilibrium of opposed forces; the ranging against each other of equally powerful “rivals”. The dramatic interest is divided between the trials and tribulations of two couples. The plot promises to pit A against B (Acres against Ensign Beverley) in a duel, having taken its rise from a case of

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dual identity that made B the alter ego of another A (Captain Absolute). As well as the two pairs of lovers at the centre of the play, there are further pairs of characters in parallel positions (Acres and Sir Lucius) or fulfilling similar functions (Mrs Malaprop and Sir Anthony). In the system of contrasts and correspondences that Sheridan has devised, everything seems highlighted and enhanced by its contraposed counterpart. The same would also apply to the play’s own intergeneric pairing with The New Bath Guide. These are two works imbued with locality, and on that account, each is the other’s counterpart. However, by the time Sheridan produced a play to match Anstey’s poem – likewise set in Bath, and likewise shaped by Bath – the territory had been staked out by a novelist as well. Tobias Smollett’s novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) makes an extended and memorable episode out of a month spent in Bath by Matthew Bramble and his family. The episode plainly draws upon Smollett’s own experience (in the late 1760s, after his Travels through France and Italy) as a Bath resident. He lived just below the Circus, which at that time he described as the city’s “greatest ornament”: “The whole has an air of magnificence, which cannot fail to strike the most indifferent spectator” (Smollett, 2016, p. 421). Yet the Bath sequences of Humphry Clinker blend Smollett’s recent personal observations with a number of nods to The New Bath Guide. The proximity of the two works arises not only from their respective authors having become near neighbours during the residence of both in Bath, but from the fact that mutatis mutandis – a Bramble is not the same as a Blunderhead, and a novel is necessarily different from a poem – Smollett’s comic tale about a group of characters on their travels was bound to seem a successor to Anstey’s. Anna Barbauld, commenting on Smollett’s novel in 1810, was one critic who detected dependency: “The reader is often put in mind of The [New] Bath Guide, which has suggested several of his remarks and descriptions, and which may also be traced in the humour of the characters” (1810, quoted in Miles, 1993b, p. 428). Others mistook the direction in which influence had operated and put the boot on the wrong foot. “The droll and familiar manner of the poem is original; but its leading characters are evidently borrowed from Smollett” was Thomas Campbell’s verdict on The New Bath Guide (Campbell, 1819, vol. 7, p. 439), subscribing to a chronological impossibility on which Byron very soon seized (Cochran, 2013, pp. 83–84). The main areas of intersection between Humphry Clinker and The New Bath Guide are as indicated by Anna Barbauld: Similar characters, including in each case a comic Tabby (Anstey’s Tabby Runt and Smollett’s Tabitha Bramble), embroiled in similar situations; similar ways of seeing; and, in each author’s exploration of the salient features of the Bath scene, similar choices of revelatory detail. Gill’s pastry-shop is picked out as a Bath institution by both Anstey (2010, pp. 127, 130–132) and Smollett (p. 43). The actor James Quin, who appeared as a ghost in the Epilogue to The New Bath Guide (Anstey, 2010, pp. 173–179), is resurrected

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The Whirl of the Red, Green, and Blue 241 to play a minor role in Humphry Clinker (Smollett, 1993, pp. 52–62). Anstey’s alertness to the sounds of the city appears to have helped to train Smollett’s ear too, insofar as these – rather than Bath’s sights – are once again what strike the sense in the flurry of the arrival: The trampling of porters, the creaking and crashing of trunks, the snarling of curs, the scolding of women, the squeaking and squalling of fiddles and hautboys out of tune, the bouncing of the Irish baronet overhead, and the bursting, belching and brattling of the French horns in the passage (not to mention the harmonious peal that still thunders from the Abbey steeple) succeeding one another without interruption… (Smollett, 1993, p. 34) The detail of the Irish baronet – Sir Ulic Mackilligut – at his dancing lesson, and contributing “a strange kind of thumping and bouncing” to the “diabolical” concert in which the bells and the music of the town waits have already joined, is what most insistently recalls the corresponding passage in The New Bath Guide: I hear ‘tis the Business of this Corporation To welcome in all the Great Men of the Nation, For you know there is nothing diverts or employs The Minds of Great People like making a Noise: So with Bells they contrive all as much as they can To tell the Arrival of any such Man … With Horns and with Trumpets, with Fiddles and Drums, They’ll strive to divert him as soon as he comes … “All the Devils in Hell sure at once have concurr’d To make such a Noise here as never was heard, Some blundering Blockhead, while I am in Bed, Treads as hard as a Coach-Horse just over my Head …” (Anstey, 2010, pp. 103–104) One man’s discord is another man’s harmony not understood. Although for the characters in both Anstey and Smollett there is polyphonic cacophony, with sound upon sound ringing in their ears, the design of each work promises its readers the pleasing concords of epistolary polyphony. Like The New Bath Guide, Humphry Clinker delivers its narrative in letter form. Like The New Bath Guide, it depends for its best effects on the styles and viewpoints of its letter-writers being carefully differentiated. Since Smollett is building on a bigger scale than Anstey, however, he is able to deploy a larger number of competing and entwining voices and to make the differences between them even more pronounced. Matthew, Tabitha, Jery, Lydia, and Win all write letters from Bath on two or more occasions. Two of these characters, in particular, are never on the same

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page about what they see and hear there: Matthew, the uncle, and Lydia, the niece. The circus to Lydia is sumptuous and palatial (Smollett, 1993, p. 41), but to Matthew merely “a pretty bauble” (p. 36). Lydia’s ear is “continually entertained” (p. 41) by the sounds that Matthew perceives as a merciless aural assault. “Bath is to me a new world”, she says. “All is gaiety, good-humour, and diversion” (p. 36). Yet what the niece describes as diversion is viewed by the uncle as dissipation: “this place, which Nature and Providence seem to have intended as a resource from distemper and disquiet, is become the very centre of racket and dissipation” (p. 36). Matthew’s impression of Bath is Anstey’s “dissipated Joy” (Anstey, 2010, p. 169) with the joy taken out. These discrepancies between the experience of one character and another are present in The New Bath Guide too, although the fluctuations are not quite so fierce. Simkin duly divides his final letter between the “Storms of Distress” (Anstey, 2010, p. 157), which have caused him to leave the city considerably lighter in the purse than when he came and the “Distresses” (p. 158) of Prudence, Jenny, and Tabby, caused by losses less palpable if no less painful than his. A work of the dimensions of Humphry Clinker can accommodate more extensive and emphatic instances of difference in sameness: Characters who start in the same place but diverge and come to contrasting conclusions; individuals who are exposed to the same stimuli but react in their own individual ways. Because Smollett’s novel is not confined to Bath but constitutes a tour through the whole island of Great Britain, such as Defoe had undertaken earlier in the century, he is able to use a series of strategically spaced locations as touchstones for testing the mindset and mettle of his characters. Because the cast of characters is a large one, the mix of positions, perspectives, and registers is richly heteroglossic throughout. The language is now polite, now vulgar; and, when Win is writing letters, it is semiliterate. Since Smollett’s letter-writers – like Anstey’s – frequently quote the dialogue of characters very different from themselves, Scottish and Irish dialects rub shoulders with the King’s English. For all of these reasons, Walter Scott felt that Humphry Clinker was to The New Bath Guide as something “finished and elaborate” would be to something that was, on the contrary, “but a light sketch” (1821, quoted in Anstey, 2010, p. 185). “Finished”, as opposed to sketchy, seems to mean not only more systematic but more deeply satisfying. Out of Smollett’s layered counterpointing comes the kind of harmonious fusion that puts polyphony on a firmer and friendlier footing. Competing voices and contrasting loci of devolved authority coalesce into a single coherent narrative. The multiple perspectives of this “rainbow” novel reflect the “rainbow” nation created by the 1707 Acts of Union – and so too do the intermarriages to which all of the story’s roads turn out to lead. The novel’s own local acts of union, making for mutually assured prosperity, are – as Peter Miles nicely notes (Miles, 1993a, p. xxix) – between “a young Welsh lady and a young English gentleman, a superannuated Scots

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The Whirl of the Red, Green, and Blue 243 soldier and a Welsh spinster, a Welsh maid and an English postilion”. The sinking of personal differences emblematises the erasure of national division. “Scotland and England must harmonise with each other”, writes Pierre Dubois (Dubois, 2015, p. 75); and once this is done, with Wales cast as the mediatrix, sweet music can be made. Within a generation of Humphry Clinker, epistolary polyphony was effectively played out. Although as a mainstream form the novel in letters was able to cling on for the remainder of Anstey’s life (he lived until 1805), its revivals thereafter tended to be fitful or fragmentary affairs. Lady Susan, which Jane Austen designed in or around 1794 as a polyvocal epistolary novel but concluded some ten years later in direct narrative, is read by Juliet McMaster as “a farewell … to the epistolary mode that had dominated the eighteenth-century novel and Austen’s own fictions” (McMaster, 2000, p. 184). Yet The New Bath Guide retained its popularity, and the effects to which Anstey had helped to point the way continued to be sought after in fiction. Thus, for example, the narratives of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) curl round each other like the curls of light and dark hair that Nelly twists together at the novel’s halfway point (Brontë, 1981, p. 168), and when the frame narrator catches up with the main inset narrator after an absence of several months, he witnesses a counterpointing which does as much to suggest the book’s willingness to take the rough with the smooth as the counterpointing of Dr Slop with Uncle Toby did to suggest Tristram Shandy’s: There …, at the door, sat my old friend, Nelly Dean, sewing and singing a song, which was often interrupted from within, by harsh words of scorn and intolerance, uttered in far from musical accents. “Aw’d rather, by th’ haulf, hev ‘em swearing I’ my lugs frough morn tuh neeght, nur hearken yah, hahsiver!” said the tenant of the kitchen, in answer to an unheard speech of Nelly’s. (Brontë, 1981, p. 308) Other experiments with multiple narration followed, notably those of Wilkie Collins. In Collins’s novel The Woman in White (1859–1860), the melding together of the various witness statements which carry the story forward – as well as back – produces a form of polyphony. That method of construction then returned to the verse novel with Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868–1869), which in order to tell the story of a murder case, draws on what purport to be the monologues of the major players and the speeches made in court. The qualities which persuaded Walter Scott that Humphry Clinker represented after barely five years an advance from Anstey’s probing of possibilities in The New Bath Guide to something more “finished and elaborate” are equally evident, a century on this time, in The Ring and the Book. The variety and multivocality for which Anstey’s poem yielded a template are writ very large in Browning’s distinctive decagon: A story

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in twelve books that, even after the subtraction of the sections – placed first and last – in which the poet speaks in his own voice, still has ten sides to it. The rationale for this is presented at an early stage. Browning has written as many books as there are months in the year, he says, because he does not want his readers to see the poem’s subject from one angle only. He would sooner have them see it from as many different angles as possible: Rather learn and love Each facet-flash of the revolving year! — Red, green, and blue that whirl into a white, The variance now, the eventual unity, Which make the miracle. (Browning, 1868–1869, vol. 1, p. 71) The Ring and the Book appeared at a time when animation techniques were being pioneered, which would turn a succession of images into a single composite moving picture; the kineograph or flickbook was patented by John Barnes Linnett on 18th March 1868 (Mannoni, 2000, p. 419), just eight months before the publication of the first volume of Browning’s poem. This particular passage, in the words of Britta Martens, posits through the metaphor of a colour wheel that multi-perspectivism is a means of accessing absolute truth …. The spinning movement of the wheel (that is the animating power of the poet’s imagination) combines the variety of the colour facets (the characters’ different perspectives) into the synthesis of the colour white (truth). (Martens, 2011, p. 198) Browning appears aware, as Haweis presumably was not, of the colour mixer recently pioneered by James Clerk Maxwell. If primary colours were applied to the separate sectors of a circular disc and if the disc were spun at the right speed, the colours would merge into white light. So, the polyphonic use of colour was not necessarily to be dismissed as a contradiction in terms. It was at all events possible, by bringing to a specific combination of colours the “velocity” towards which Haweis thought the visual arts would always aspire in vain, to create the contrapuntal fusions of polyphony. The whirl of colours that the colour mixer converts into pure white light, in a Platonic reduction of the Many to the One, is merely a more erudite emblem than Anstey’s bandbox of what a multivocal narrative poem is and does. A hundred years after Anstey had opened his bandbox and considered how the various hues in it might best be combined, another verse novel set in a different city – not Bath in the eighteenth century but Rome at the end of the seventeenth – contrived a similar conjuring of unity out of multitude. Certainly, some parts of what The Ring and the Book

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The Whirl of the Red, Green, and Blue 245 was able to achieve in the 1860s were anticipated by Anstey in the 1760s: The dovetailing of different perspectives; the sharing of a single experience, with suggestive variation, among several men and women. Not only was The New Bath Guide a stimulus for Smollett, therefore, but it could even have become a beacon for Browning. In that sense, Anstey’s “very early English verse novella” (Addison, 2017, p. 49) managed, thanks to its polychromatic properties and its astutely exploited epistolarity, to be a century avant la lettre.

Works Cited Anon. (1832). Review. The New Bath Guide … by Christopher Anstey, Esq. … Washbourne, London, 1832. The Imperial Magazine, Second Series, 2, p. 240. Anon. (1758). Account of Somersetshire … with a perspective view of the city of Bath. In: The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, vol. 22, pp. 113–119. Addison, C. (2017). A Genealogy of the Verse Novel. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Anstey, C. and Cossic, A., ed. (2010). The New Bath Guide. Bern: Peter Lang. Bakhtin, M., Emerson, C., and Holquist, M., eds. and trans. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination. Fours Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Brontë, E. and Jack, I., ed. (1981). Wuthering Heights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Browning, R. (1868–1869). The Ring and the Book. 4 vols. London: Smith & Elder. Campbell, T., ed. (1819). Specimens of the British Poets. 7 vols. London: John Murray. Carroll, L. and Hunt, P., ed. (2009). Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cochran, P. (2013). Don Juan and tradition or, little Juan’s potty. In: P. Cochran, ed., Aspects of Byron’s “Don Juan”. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 2–129. Collins, M.S. (2016). Imagining Arcadia in Renaissance Romance. New York: Routledge. Cossic, A. (2010). An Introduction to The New Bath Guide. In: C. Anstey and A. Cossic, ed., The New Bath Guide. Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 9–75. Cossic-Pericarpin, A. (2017). Fashionable diseases in Georgian Bath: fiction and the emergence of a British model of spa sociability. Journal for EighteenthCentury Studies, 40(4), pp. 537–553. Dubois, P. (2013) Music and modernity in Laurence Sterne: the dialectics of harmony and dissonance. XVII-XVIII [Online], viewed 7 August 2019. Dubois, P. (2015). Music in Georgian England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Egan, G. (2015). Corresponding forms: aspects of the eighteenth-century letter. Ph.D. thesis, Faculty of English, University of Oxford. Fielding, H. (1755). The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. London: A. Millar. Haslett, M. (2016). The Poet as Clubman. In: J. Lynch, ed., The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 1660–1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 127–143.

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Haweis. H.R. (1871). Music and Morals. London: Strahan. Hurley, A.E. (2006). A conversation of their own: watering-place correspondence among the Bluestockings. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 40(1), pp. 1–21. Keymer, T. (2014). Epistolary writing in the long eighteenth century. In: R. DeMaria, H. Chang and S. Zacher, eds., A Companion to British Literature. 4 vols. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, pp. 159–173. McMaster, J. (2000). The juvenilia: energy versus sympathy. In: L.C. Lambdin and R.T. Lambdin, eds., A Companion to Jane Austen Studies. Westport: Greenwood Press, pp. 173–189. Mannoni, L. and Crangle, R., ed. and trans. (2000). The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Martens, B. (2011). Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy: Challenging the Personal Voice. Ashgate: Farnham. Meisel, M. (2016). Chaos Imagined: Literature, Art, Science. New York: Columbia University Press. Miles, P. (1993a). Introduction. In: T. Smollett, P. Miles, ed., The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. London: J.M. Dent, pp. xix–xxxiii. Miles, P. (1993b). Smollett and his critics. In: T. Smollett and P. Miles, ed., The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. London: J.M. Dent, pp. 425–442. Moore, J. (2007). Radical satire, politics and genre: the case of Thomas Moore. Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, 1(1), pp. 145–159. Pater, W.H. (1877). The School of Giorgione. The Fortnightly Review, 22(130), pp. 526–538. Peters, C. (1757). A Critical Dissertation on the Book of Job. 2nd edn. London: W. Johnson, P. Davey & B. Law. Pound, C. (1986). Genius of Bath: The City and its Landscape. Bath: Millstream Books. Seaton, A.V. (2016). Getting socially on the road: the short, happy life of the anapaestic tourism narrative, 1766–1830. In: M. Henes and B.H. Murray, eds., Travel Writing, Visual Culture, and Form, 1760–1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 115–138. Smollett, T. and Miles, P., ed. (1993). The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. London: J.M. Dent. Smollett, T., Brack, O.M. Jr., Carlton, L., and Keithley, W.H., eds. (2016). The Miscellaneous Writings of Tobias Smollett. Abingdon: Routledge. Sterne, L. and Campbell Ross, I., ed. (1983). The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Townsend, A. (2003). Autonomous Voices: An Exploration of Polyphony in the Novels of Samuel Richardson. Bern: Peter Lang. Whately, T. (1770). Observations on Modern Gardening, Illustrated by Descriptions. London: Payne. W.W. [William Woty]. (1760). White Conduit House. The Gentleman’s Magazine, 30, p. 242.

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14 Towards Modernity Nova et Vetera in Paul Claudel’s Book of Christopher Colombus Jean-François Poisson-Gueffier

The Book of Christopher Columbus can be described as a perpetuum mobile. Indeed, its literary genre has changed many times, from a musical drama (1928) and a radio drama (1937–1947) to a dramatic play (1947), as a “Chr Colomb (sic) without music, but with wild animation” (Claudel, 1941). The drama is a retrospective analysis that stages a “Christopher Columbus II” “having passed the limit” of death (I, V, 40), and a “Christopher Columbus I”, embodying the “Life” and “Travel” of the one “who discovered America” (I, I, 38). Following the example of Joan of Arc, a dramatic oratorio that shares the same “powerful idiolect” (Kaës, 2011, p. 311) and the theme of Judgment, the Book includes many aspects and quotations suggesting Claudel’s expertise in medieval French literature. If Claudel’s medievalism sometimes becomes a “Middle Ages of the convention such as the poets of the Middle Ages could understand antiquity” (Claudel, 2011, p. 11), it remains based on a very precise work after medieval rhetoric and themes: The reference to the Navigatio sancti Brendani abbatis (I, XI, 49) is representative of this cultural memory. The prominent position of the medieval inspiration, in a drama at the crossing between romance and theatre, must be reassessed. Between realism and onirism, ancient sources, Japanese Nô, Catholic liturgy, and an “epicisation” following the example of Brecht, close reading can be made. Claudel’s text is then considered after its stylistic aspects and its reconfiguration of the stage area. The dream of a “total work of art” (Gesamtkunstwerk), carried by Wagner and Mallarmé, questions the polyphony of this work. The study of onomastics (“It is me, the dove carrying the Christ”, I, XIII, 55), the allusion to Saint Brendan and the allegorical squares, expand the fictional world and take part in a symbolic system. Polyphony is considered in these pages with the meaning that Bakhtin is giving to the concept. For the Russian scholar, every statement enters in dialogue with previous statements; therefore, there is no neutrality principle in literature. Every word is inhabited by other words, other voices, other meanings as well. The medieval inspiration we can notice, especially in the first part of the Book, is dually polyphonic: As a dialogue between a medieval way of thinking and telling the world, and Claudel’s representation; as a dialogue with other traditions the author combines, DOI: 10.4324/9781003129837-15

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giving his work a modern dimension. Medieval inspiration is only one aspect of this intricate conception of intertextuality, but it remains of the highest interest. It displays the link between polyphony and modernity. Polyphony is, by itself, a modern use of language and rhetoric; the medieval inspiration, which intertwines with many other components of Claudel’s theatrical world, is paradoxically an index of modernity. The purpose of this chapter is, therefore, to demonstrate how medieval writing takes a paradoxical but important part of the irreducible modernity of the scenic project. From this point of view, we will study the polyphonic insertion of the medieval matière, its symbolic system, and finally the intended purpose of medieval writing in the poetic of this modern drama. The medieval inspiration of the Book of Christopher Columbus, as tenuous as it can seem at first glance, is nevertheless highly meaningful. To give a full rendition of these references and their insertion, we must consider the “operations of integration” (Samoyault, 2001, pp. 43–44), their context and relations to other traditions, this fictional world being hybrid. Paul Claudel prefers the “integration-suggestion”, in which “the presence of the intertext is suggested, without being developed”. This category is declined into “simple reference” and “allusion”, two different ways of integration that can be read in the Book. The hagiographic mention of Saint Brendan is a “simple reference”, and clarifies the link between the delusional sailor and the Island Whale of the Irish legendary bases: “Halfchorus: What he [the old sailor] considered as islands are blowing whales. Half-chorus: What he took for islands, it is the Jasconius Fish on which holy Brendan built a cathedral” (I, 11.49). The apparent shallowness of the reference, in the text of the half-chorus (there is no “Explicateur” to comment this part of the drama), reduces to some words the “trace médiévale”, while intensifying it. The mention of Brendan sets in motion, in the spirit of the reader, a system of representations founded on the concepts of faith, allegory, and sacred, in a travel of a spiritual dimension. Claudel revives the stylistic of the medieval writing more diffusely, with no reference to a precise work. This polyphonic speech act is substantial in the scene of the four squares: These four wild idols which do not cease defending their small luggage of prerogatives and knowledge, you recognise them, Christopher Columbus! They are called Desire, Ignorance, Vanity, and worse of all, Avarice, I hear not only the avarice of the pocketbook but that of the spirit and that of the heart. (I, VI, 42) In a significant move from the sign to its significance, from the reality of the court of Spain to Allegory, Claudel carries out Christian acculturation of courteous allegories. The aulic degeneration of the Spirit is seen as an echo to the parabola of the rich man’s grounds, sentenced to death for his

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Towards Modernity 249 avarice: “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God” (Luke 12: 16–21). Following the example of Jeanne in Joan of Arc, Columbus is dedicated to dereliction. “Come to beg” the king in Valladolid (I, VI, 41), his affliction announces an antithetic structure confronting the one to the multitude, the purity to the defects, the truth to the lies. This shift from courteous figures into allegories, in a satirical purpose, can be compared to the sixth scene of Jeanne, that introduces an equivalence between royal figures and individual attribution of a defect. The herald’s answers to announce the entry of “Their Majesties” is significant at this point: “The King of France” becomes “His Majesty the Silly Person”, “the King of England”, “His Majesty the Pride”, and the “Duke of Burgundy”, “His Majesty the Avarice” (Claudel, 2011, p. 1226–1227). In fact, in Joan as in the Book, the allegory is a privileged mode of representation for “all the Authorities of the bureaucratic chessboard, which the Genius comes to disturb” (I, VI, 42). These figures of the courteous psychomachia are therefore introduced into a “théâtre de personnifications”1 (Strubel, 2009, p. 141). This medieval polyphony, through the innutrition of figures and ways of writing, occurs at key moments of the drama and takes a full part in its meaning. The scene of the “four squares” is positioned between the dissociation of Christopher Columbus I and II, soul contemplating from the proscenium, the life that another performer commemorates on the scene, and the incursion of the doves. The adventurous navigation and the quest for a “meeting of the ground” under the sign of the Cross, is consequently subordinated to the contrary Fortune, embodied in the four defects, and the Dove of the Holy Spirit. The scene of the squares belongs, to some extent, to a journey from shadows (metaphorical shade of the one who “come to beg” the King, shadow of “King of Spain”, “of all the Sovereigns” and “all the governments”, I, VI, 42) to the light (of the face in front of the mirror, the genius who “receives the light”, with the absolute light of this “second name”, which significates “all that is light”, I, VI, 43). Allegorical Squares condense the whole destiny of Christopher Columbus, they are a sort of limen (from the old Columbus’s death to the retrospect of his life) and prolepsis (announcement of the charges and successive aggressions he will suffer). Likewise, the mention of Saint Brendan can be considered as the acme of scene XI, “Christopher Columbus at the end of the ground”, and follows scene X, “the vocation of Christopher Columbus”, where the navigator reads, being a child, “in a book the history of Marco Polo” (I, X, 44). Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa, by writing the Book of Wonders, “wish, without any doubt, to present another treaty of the wonders of the world, richer, more complete than all the others; gravitational too” (Heers, 1983, p. 63). Its writing is submissive to the ambivalence of a travel narrative set in the reality of medieval East, and of an imaginary account, sedimentation of beliefs and legends.

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The video played on the screen contains a digest of these Eastern wonders: Travelers, camels, and the Palace of the Khan (I, X, 45). Brendan is only the final link of a metamorphosis of the form and purposes assigned to the travel: From Polo the “terrestrial navigator” (I, X, 45) to Columbus, the navigator “by the sea” (I, X, 45), that navigation is under the sign of “the insuperable Will of God” (I, X, 45) and goes along a mystical navigatio. The references to the John played on the screen (“At the beginning was the Verb” and “There was a man called John”, II, III, 88–90) complete the representation of a course that is abstracted from the contingencies to excite the absolute power and the sovereignty of the Spirit (“When the universe would make pretence collapse, I pass through!”, II, III, 90). The insertion of medieval imagination, much more than historicity, models in-depth the inflections of the text and accompanies the project of Columbus in its ambitions of purification, abstraction, and spiritualisation. The simultaneous integration of these traditions coming from incommensurable works and universes creates polyphony. The “Néréides” (I, XI, 48), who take “an old almost dead sailor”, seem to bring a disruption in a Christianised fictional world. This cursive allusion to Antiquity can be replaced in a broader imaginary, Claudel being “modern which by no means claims to be released from large Old” (Millet-Gérard, 2002, p. 220–221). The text contains other allusions, to “Hercules” (by metonymy to name the Pillars of Hercules) and to the “old Atlas”: “West of the world, there is gold! West of the world and beyond the tomb of the old man Atlas and Hercules there is a wine and gold country!” (I, XI, 49). The heroic or titanic figures take part, with the navigatio of Saint Brendan, on the same marvellous horizon, the “answering gold ground”, the “islands” and “gold country”. The nature and the ways of insertion of topics and medieval designs epitomise the drama. This imaginary contains and condenses a part of the significance of the Book; it brings to light its articulations and inflections, accompanies its metamorphoses. As a euphemism, each word concerning the medieval paradigm enriches the symbolic meaning of the “Book”, the “Life”, and the “Travel” (I, 1.38). The study of these cross-references to medieval imagination, and of the polyphony that results from it with other traditions (Biblical, ancient), is the poiesis side of the text (Nattiez, 1987). However, as Laurent Jenny reminds us, “each intertextual reference is the place of an alternative: either to continue the reading by seeing there only one fragment like another or to turn towards the text of origin” (Jenny, 1976, pp. 267– 281). The Book invites us to prefer the second term of the alternative, to observe the influence of these intertexts on the emergence of the meaning. To study the symbolic system of the life and travel concerns the esthesic side and takes the form of rhetoric and stylistic reading of the texts. The name of Christopher Columbus, carrying a meaning clarified by the navigator himself, and the mention of Saint Brendan, confer to

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Towards Modernity 251 the life and travel contained in the Book a symbolic dimension. This rendering of Columbus’s epic goes beyond historical drama, which produced only minor opuses, such as the Discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus, by Lope de Vega. Indeed, the conquest of referential spaces yields it to the search of a symbolic system of the beyond. The medieval parts registered in Claudel’s text contribute to give this geste maritime a higher profile. Considerations around the conformity of the name to the being, as well as its a heuristic purpose, seem to echo the medieval Problem of universals: According to the nominalists, the concepts are only words, breaths of voice (flatus vocis), while the réalistes consider that the general concept of a word is the principle of its reality. The principle of veracity, which the name is carrying (nomen omen est), introduces a dialectic relationship (Columbus is the truth, Columbus is a lie), to alter the representation of the character. The presence of an “opponent” questions each of his choices, each of its acts as well, until discovering the dual truth of its name. The predicts appear in the evocation of “the life of this predestined man whose name means Dove and Carry-Christ” (I, II, 38). This first assertion is then amplified through the stylistic device of the congeries, corresponding to “sequences of words or expressions meaning the same thing and by which the thought is reproduced in a myriad of ways” (Eco, 2013, p. 132). The Explicateur’s words are developed by Christopher Columbus II, from solemnity to lyricism and exaltation: “My name is the Ambassador of God, the carrier of Christ! My first name is the carrier of Christ! and my second name is all that is light, all that is spirit and all that has wings!” (I, VI, 43). Amplification is fortified by the epanode: The name, which associates two components of the Trinity (God and the Christ), is dissociated to introduce metaphorically the last component, the dove of the Holy Spirit, called through the circumlocution, “all that is spirit and all that has wings”. A medieval manner of thinking about the name is the source of the symbolic power of Columbus’s project. The Book does not suggest glorifying this name evenly, but to reel its symbolic potential. The querelle des universaux is represented in the one between the Defender and the Opponent, which echoes the scholastic bases of medieval disputatio. This disputatio (“your name even is a lie!”, I, VI, 43) is not based on a principle of tension-opposition, but on a search for truth beyond: The Opponent: I speak to you, Christopher Columbus, charlatan, ignoramus, hallucinated, merchant of slaves, liar, revolted, unable, slanderer! (…) The Defender: All his faults, his illusions, his suspicions, his lies, his jealousy, his selfishness, his cruelty, his contempt of what he had discovered at the cost of what it had not found yet, all that are the faults of Love. (I, VI, 42-43)

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The enumeration of the opponent and the defender, extrinsic defects as well as the intrinsic defects, and the paradox of the “faults of the love” draw a highly contrasting picture. To this symbolism of the name responds the symbolism of the “irruption of the doves”, of the “Court of Isabelle the Catholic”, and of the “Dove above the sea”, which form scenes VII to IX of the first part. Shakespearean or Hugolian contrast of sublime and trivial, of the “swirl of doves” driving out “the grotesque characters of the squares” (I, VII, 43), includes in scenic space the symbolism of the nomination but seems even more indebted to the animal political allegories. Not those of the Renart tradition, but of works such as the Fiction of Lyon by Eustache Deschamps, who uses allegory to represent political realities around the Hundred Years’ War. Charles V (the Lyon) and the queen Jeanne de Bourbon (the Lyonness) thus recovered on the bears, leopards, and other beasts the territories lost by the father of the king (Deschamps, 1878–1903, t. 7, ll. 91–96). Reading the Fiction of Lyon in such a way allows us to replace the pantomime in this medieval imagination. The analepsis of scene VIII, which represents “Isabelle child in a large garden of Castille”, holding a “childish court”, proceeds in the manner of allegorical accounts as dreamlike accounts (mainly epic): Sultan Miramolin “solemnly brings a dove in a cage to him. Isabelle accepts the dove gracefully; it puts a ring with the leg to him and freedom gives him. It flies away” (I, VIII, 44). Medieval literature, particularly the epic and Arthurian prose romances, favours, in a didactic purpose, these motifs introducing an exact correspondence between the details of the dream and those of the fictional world. Perlesvaus, in the continuity of the processes of the epic writing, thus comprises a dreamlike episode during which Lancelot is threatened by death during his sleep by thieves: In this dream, brohons are the thieves, the petit chien represents the dwarf (their associate), and the other dog figures the young girl who has just stolen the sword of the knight (Perlesvaus, 2007, p. 546). The pantomime of the doves arouses the same literal symbolism, the Dove representing Columbus, the freedom being granted to him in the name of the Kingdom of Spain, represented by the “ring with the leg”. The medieval matière conveys the san, since the dove, elected among a “swirl” conferring a quasi-seraphic range to the scene, holds prophecy and oracle. Christopher Columbus becomes the flagship of Christendom, the “ambassador of God” whose arrival is announced as soon as the own childhood of the Queen. This Christian dimension is also important in the last aspect of this symbolic system. The allusion to the medieval travel of Saint Brendan indeed inflects the search for a new world into an allegorical journey. The accumulation of the medieval features incorporated in Claudel’s writing tends to a disembodiment of the figure of the navigator, whose name and being are filled up with an accumulation of symbols and signs. The legend of Saint Brendan, immortalised in Latin (Navigatio sancti Brendani abbatis), in French (in particular those written by Benedeit and

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Towards Modernity 253 Gossuin of Metz, this last included in the Image of the world), in Italian, German, English, or Catalan, is seminal. This immram (allegorical sea journey) among the magic islands of the Atlantic leads him to the terrestrial Paradise before a final return to Ireland. In a movement from ancient mythology (the “old almost dead sailor” becomes “son of the sea” brought “by Néréides”, I, 11.48) to the medieval matière (through the mention of “the other world”), the evocation of Saint Brendan reveals the same kind of retorsio argumenti. The retorsio argumenti is Schopenhauer’s Stratagem XXVI, “To turn over an argument against the adversary”, in the Art of Being Right (Schopenhauer, 1988, p. 132). It consists of the recovery, literal or with alternatives, of a contradictory argument having to carry out, in all logic, with the same conclusion. The retorsio neutralises every dialectical relation by sapping the bases of the initial thesis. This figure turns over the unfavourable argumentation, diverts it more than it does ruin it. The enumeration of the defects assigned to Christopher Columbus, from the opponent to the defender, converts the “fault” into a “fault of the love”. The principle is the same one in the scene of the “old sailor”. The words of the half-chorus inflect from sarcastic remarks (carried on the old sailor “with half died, with half gives”, I, 11.48) to celebration (of Christopher Columbus, whose travel exceeds displacement in the margins of the sensitive world): “Half-chorus: What he [the old sailor] took for islands are blowing whales. Half-chorus: What he took for islands, it is the Jasconius Fish on which holy Brendan built a cathedral” (I, 11.49). Through the quasi-repetition of the same sentence – the mention of the “Jasconius Fish” specifying a priori that of the “blowing whales”, the speech that impresses the insanity of the “old sailor” becomes, by its intertextuality, the account of conversion. “The island Whale” of the Travel of Saint Brendan, in the version of Benedeit, is a test of spiritual value addressed to the monks, who are afraid when they see “lur isle”, which “mult tost s’en fuit”.2 In medieval imagination, there is a correspondence between res and signum inherited from Saint Augustin. Of this episode, Saint Brendan delivers a spiritual interpretation — “Ses merveilles cum plus verrez, / En lui puis mult mielz crerrez”3 (Saint-Brendan, 2006, ll. 475–476). The travel of Saint Brendan in the Book of Christopher Columbus places a legendary veil over the navigator’s adventures. It creates a polyphony, significant in the words of the Half-Chorus, between the materiality of the world (“Westward of the world there is gold!”) and the mythical immateriality of the Other World (“Westward of the world live the Blessed Ones in islands of gold”, I, XI, 49). Christopher Columbus is depicted as a sibling of Brendan. In this cleaved (song of the chorus, representation of Christopher Columbus I “greedily remained leaning on the sailor”, I, 11.49) and dialogical space (alternate song of the halfchoruses), the spectator dissociates inside the character of Columbus the man from the “ambassador of God”, exactly as the œuvre au blanc of

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the alchemists achieves the spiritualisation of the body: “Holy Brendan in the middle of the Ocean says the mass in a cathedral of glass” (I, XI, 49), Christopher Columbus joins the World together (I, II, 38). These references to the medieval imaginary take part in a true change of sphere, the spirit of conquest being placed under the Christian sign of a “meeting of the ground”. However, far from accrediting the image of Claudel as an “avid old man being hurrying toward the Holy Table” (Camus, 2008, p. 1089), the Book carries in its poetics the seeds of undeniable modernity. Moved by a love for paradox whose demonstrations were inventoried by Dominique Millet-Gérard (MilletGérard, 2005, p. 112), Claudel seems to consider these quotations in the broader intention of developing a modern drama. The insertion of a medieval matter in this polyphonic work takes an active part in the dramaturgic choices present in the first part of the drama. The Book dominates the first episode of the “Processional” (I, I, 37), and confers to the opening of the drama all of its solemnity and “pump”: “one solemnly installs the Book on the desk. The two carrystandards settle each side of the scene” (I, I, p. 37). The symbolic configuration of the carry-standards predicts the epidictic division of the speech in the figures of the “defender” and “the opponent”. The Book, whose nature remains an issue, can be replaced into a medieval point of view as an object we use for the judgment of souls, before considering its role within the dramaturgic device. Claudel, in a “Note on the production of Christopher Columbus”, assigns it a narrative function and uses it as a metaphor (p. 187). The reader is present in fabula, the way of reading evoking a widened interpretative co-operation. The “Book of Christophe Columbus” also seems to be seen as the medieval liber vitae, which reflects the life of one person in both its positive and negative dimensions, while integrating a material aspect. Indeed, the book of life follows the example of the book of accounts: The book is not anymore, the census of the universal Church, it became the register where the business of the men is registered. The word register appears besides in French in the 13th century. It is the sign of a new mentality. The actions of each man are not lost anymore in unlimited space of the transcendence, or, if one wants to speak differently, in the collective destiny of the species. From now on individualised here. The life is not brought back only anymore to one breath (animated, spiritus), with energy (virtus). It is made up of a sum of thoughts, words, actions. (Ariès, 1977, p. 37) This “amount” is significant in the narrative configuration of a drama which, such as the liber vitae, is

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Towards Modernity 255 at the same time the history of a man, its biography, and a book of accounts (or reason), with two columns, on a side the good, other the evil. The new countable spirit of the businessmen who then start to discover their world – become ours – applies to the contents of life as to the goods and the currency. (ibid.) This overprinting in the liber vitae of a Manichean vision of life and accountants is represented in scene V (“Christopher Columbus and the posterity”) and VI (“the four square”), which invite the navigator with introspection about the “judgment of men” (I, V, 40): “Look at your own life, look at your history!” (I, V, p. 41). Scene XII, “Christopher Columbus and his creditors”, carries the purely material and financial dimension of the existence of the Genovese, condemned through the sarcastic remarks of the three guitarists: “Christopher Columbus, the treasurer of all the treasures of the setting one! Christopher Columbus, streaming of gold and precious stones! Hey, you failed! hey you hammered! hey, there, you failure! Pay your debts, hey, the Genovese!” (I, XII, 51). Humiliations are like those of via crucis, through a quasi-litanic reprimand from a creditor to the other: “Pay your debts, Christopher Columbus!” (I, XII, 51). The weighing of the hearts whose scission symbolic system of the defender and the opponent can seem as a reminiscence: “– The Opponent: charlatan, ignoramus, hallucinated, merchant of slaves, liar, revolted, unable, slanderer – the Defender: all that, they are the faults of the love”, “the love of Terre de Dieu! the desire of the ground of God! the desire of the possession of Terre de Dieu!”. (I, VI, 42–43). The setting out of balance of the vices and the virtues aims to the assumption of a released truth of the illusions of the myth: “the truth is that he was the son of Tisserand of Genoa” (I, X, 44). The liber vitae thus has a heuristic function, it examines Columbus’s acts and words after his death, and governs the spatialisation of the drama. The liber vitae, an equivalent to the judgment of the hereafter, is the vector of a double symbolic configuration of the stage. The opening of the Book is subordinated to the crossing of a lethal limen and induces a division of the stage, occupied by “Christopher Columbus II”, an old man dedicated to the contemplation of his own history, and “Christopher Columbus I”, the actor of the embedded story. The crossing is dual, towards proscenium and death (“it has one step there to make to be with us! simply this narrow limit which is called death!”, I, I, 40). The “narrow limit” is at the same time material, of a place to another of the stage, and symbolic; the symbol of the moment when “what exists, made suddenly invisible as by the effect of an extraordinary screening, is damaged in a wink in the trap door of the non-being” (Jankélévitch, 2008, p. 7); the symbol of the “conquest of Invisible” (Claudel, 2011, p. 1494), of what “is ultra” (I, II, p. 38).

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The liber vitae has an influence on the configuration of the stage as on the cutting of the scenes, punctuated by this persistence of the writing in the field of the sharp word and the song: “– The explicator: The Book of the Life and the travel of Christopher Columbus who discovered America! In the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit. – Chorus, of a thundering voice: Thus, it is!” (I, I, 38). The chapters of the book being illustrated in various layers of the recollection (including scenes of the past and incursion into the “conscience from Christopher Columbus”, II, IV, 91), the “scene of this drama is the world”, in the manner of Le Soulier de Satin. The liber vitae consequently seem invested in a triple memory-based, legal, and scenographic function. Memory-based because it preserves the animated memory of the projecting episodes of an existence seeking absolute (“far which one can go, I will go! also far one cannot go, I will go too!”, I, XI, 47). Legal because it makes the distinction between the heart and the body (“simply this narrow limit which is called death!”, I, V, 40), and remains the condition of a judgment of his soul. Scenographic, finally, because the liber vitae brings to the drama its unity. This design of the Book as liber vitae is linked to the presence of books in Claudel’s other dramas (Joan of Arc, The History of Tobie and Sara…) and the idea of a Brechtian distance does not challenge more. This interpretation, which falls under precise knowledge that Claudel from the medieval centuries had, reveals notwithstanding an additional aspect of the modernity of the Book. Introducing a polyphonic principle, it gives up univocity with the profit of the medium between metamorphosis and anamorphosis. If the presence of the Middle Ages is rooted in our “sensibilité collective diffuse”4 (Zumthor, 1980, p. 36), it is here consubstantial and highly fertile in the dramatic work of Paul Claudel. Far from privileging pure historicity or tending toward the insignificance of the “reality effect”, this medieval paradigm, registered in the materiality of the text, holds a prominent place in the structure and “the indivisible unit” (Barthes, 1989, p. 141) of the Book. Being one component among others in a varied universe, the medieval imagination is conceived not like a principle of precipitation but of coalescence, bringing a physical metaphor. In this direction, the medieval references contribute to bringing mythical – and mystical – dimensions to the character and the travel, allegorical, and grafts on the model of Saint Brendan. The opening towards a fabulous “West” exceeds the field of the sensitive world, as Amériques by Edgar Varese (1921) symbolises “discoveries of new worlds on the ground, in the space or the spirit of the men”. Lastly, the production of the book of life heard as liber vitae parallel to the epicisation, which it is carrying, spares a translation of romantic with scenic and questions, in a dialogical way, the destiny of Columbus. The material value and symbolic system of the medieval loans of Paul Claudel

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Towards Modernity 257 to the writing and the civilisation thus invite us to perceive the memory persistence of a trace integrating “this past of forms and images” (Gally, 2000, p. 9).

Notes 1 2 3 4

“theatre of personifications”. “Their island moved away quickly”. “The most you see wonders, the most you will Believe [in God]”. “diffuse collective sensitivity”.

Works Cited Ariès, P. (1977). L’homme devant la mort. Paris: Seuil. Barthes, R. and Howard, R., trans. (1989). The Reality Effect. In: The Rustle of Language. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 141–148. Camus, A. (2008). Carnets, Œuvres Complètes, IV. Paris: Gallimard. Claudel, P. (1941). Lettre à Jean-Louis Barrault, 22 November 1941. Claudel, P. (2011). Théâtre, II. Paris: Gallimard [translation of The Book of Christopher Columbus by Claudel, see pp. 1318–1352]. Deschamps, E. (1878–1903). La Fiction du Lyon, Œuvres complètes, t. 7. Paris: Firmin Didot. Eco, U. (2013). Confessions d’un jeune romancier. Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle. Gally, M., ed. (2000). La trace médiévale et les écrivains d’aujourd’hui. Paris: PUF. Heers, J. (1983). Marco Polo. Paris: Beech. Jankélévitch, V. (2008). La Mort. Paris: Champs Essai. Jenny, L. (1976). Stratégie de la forme. Poétique, 27, pp. 257–281. Kaës, E. (2011). Paul Claudel et la langue. Paris: Classiques Garnier. Millet-Gérard, D. (2002). Tradition antique et poésie chrétienne: le Paradis du langage. Cahiers de la Villa Kérylos, 13(1), pp. 205–222. Millet-Gérard, D. (2005). L’impossible dialogue d’André Rouveyre et de Paul Claudel. In: La Prose transfigurée. Paris: PUPS. Nattiez, J.-J. (1987). Musicologie générale et sémiologie. Paris: Christian Bourgois. Samoyault, T. (2001). L’Intertextualité. Paris: Armand Colin. Schopenhauer, A. and Payne, E.F.J., trans. (1988). Manuscript Remains, vol. 3. Oxford: Berg Publishers Ltd. Strubel, A. (2009). Grant senefiance a. Paris: Champion. Varese, E. (1921). Amériques. Milan: Ricordi. Zumthor, P. (1980). Parler du Moyen Âge. Paris: Minuit.

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Contributors

Editor Jonathan Fruoco Jonathan Fruoco is a Research Fellow affiliated to the CEMA, Sorbonne University. His research focuses on the linguistic and cultural evolution of medieval England, with a particular interest in the work of Geoffrey Chaucer and its connection with French and Italian courtly poetry. He has recently published Les faits et gestes de Robin des Bois (UGA Editions, 2017) and Chaucer’s Polyphony: The Modern in Medieval Poetry (De Gruyter/MIP, 2020).

Contributors Uri Smilansky Uri Smilansky specialises in the francophone music of the fourteenth century, its performativity, materiality, and social function. After a postdoctoral position at the University of Exeter and teaching stints at Shakespeare’s Globe, the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, and King’s College London, he is now a researcher at the University of Oxford. He has published articles with Early Music History, Early Music, and Revue Analyse Musicale, as well as a number of book chapters and scores of recordings. Rosemarie McGerr Rosemarie McGerr is Professor of comparative literature at Indiana University. Her research lies primarily in the study of medieval European literature in its cultural context, including history, law, religious studies, the visual arts, and music. Most of her research is on texts written in medieval Latin, English, and French, but she also studies them in relationship to the other literatures of medieval Europe. Laurence Doucet Laurence Doucet is a Research Fellow at the Université Grenoble Alpes, affiliated to Litt & Arts. She is also a temporary lecturer at UGA, where she teaches French medieval literature. She specialises in magical

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Contributors 259 secret writings in the Middle Ages but is also interested in questions of narration, authoriality, and of the transmission of knowledge through writing. Dr. Doucet has studied the Matter of England (twelfth to thirteenth centuries) under the supervision of Professor Philippe Walter for her (to be published) doctoral dissertation. Laura Kendrick Laura Kendrick, Emeritus Professor at the University of Versailles/ Paris-Saclay, belongs to the research center DYPAC and is a member of the French team, headed by Jacqueline Cerquiglini Toulet, that is currently working on a critical edition of the complete works of Eustache Deschamps for publication by Champion Editions. She is the author of Chaucerian Play (1988) as well as over a dozen articles or chapters on the poetry of Eustache Deschamps. Paola M. Rodriguez Paola Maria Rodriguez is a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center in the comparative literature department. She specialises in late antique and medieval philology, particularly German, Italian, and Latin lyric poetry; in medieval reception of classical genres, such as the elegy and pastoral; and in medieval poetic and linguistic thought. She has presented on the materiality in Charles d’Orleans’s bilingual poetry at the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo and is preparing a study on the pastoral in Dante’s Purgatorio. Teodoro Patera Teodoro Patera is a Lecturer at the University of Göttingen. His research focuses on the critical paradigm of an anthropology of literature, on the relation between desire and narration in medieval poetry, and on the configuration of masculinity in medieval and Renaissance literary discourse. Amy Heneveld Amy Heneveld recently completed her dissertation at the University of Geneva on a compilation manuscript, the Cologny, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cod. Bodmer 82. Her work focuses on medieval theories of composition and their relationship to the pedagogy of love. She worked for three years at the University of Geneva on the research project Hypercodex, which sought to better understand thirteenth-century French compilation manuscripts through digital means. Patrick Del Duca Patrick del Duca is Professor at the University of Clermont Auvergne where he teaches German language and literature of the Middle Ages. His fields of research are Arthurian romance, the matter of Rome, and medieval tales, as well as the comparison between German literature and its French sources. He has also published the edition and the French translation of several German works: “Iwein” and “The poor Henry” of Hartmann von Aue, and “Reinhart Fuchs”.

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260

Contributors

Yoshiyuki Nakao Yoshiyuki Nakao is Emeritus Professor at Hiroshima University and currently occupies the position of Professor of English language education at Fukuyama University. He specialises in Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetry and is the author of The Structure of Chaucer’s Ambiguity (Peter Lang, 2013). Paul Strohm Paul Strohm is Anna S. Garbedian Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus, at Columbia University. He is Research Professor Emeritus at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, and Honorary Fellow of Queen Mary, University of London. He divides his time between Brooklyn and Oxford. He is currently writing on time and narrative in medieval literature. Caroline Bertonèche Caroline Bertonèche is Professor of English Literature at the University Grenoble Alpes, president of the SERA (Société d’Études du Romantisme Anglais) and member of the steering committee of ERA (European Romanticisms in Association). She holds a doctoral degree from the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, a post-doctoral fellowship from Harvard and Yale University, and was awarded, in 2001, the KeatsShelley Second Essay Prize Award. She has published, since then, several articles on British Romanticism and literary criticism, on the modes of influence in poetic and medical discourse, on poetry and astronomy, and on the rewriting of scientific myths in the nineteenth century. She is the author of two books on John Keats: Keats et l’Italie. L’incitation au voyage (2011) and John Keats. Le poète et le mythe (2011). She has also edited a selection of essays, dedicated to Susan Sontag, on Bacilles, phobies et contagions. Les métaphores de la pathologie (2012) and, more recently, co-edited a book on Romantic madness, “Is that Madness?”: Les organes de la folie romantique (2016). Anne Rouhette Anne Rouhette is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Literature at the University of Clermont-Auvergne, France. Her main field of interest is women’s fiction from the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries and she has published in particular on Mary Shelley, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen. She has recently co-edited (with Isabelle Hervouet) a volume on dreams and literary creation in women’s fiction (eighteenth–nineteenth centuries), to be published in 2021, and is currently working on a critical edition of an eighteenth-century translation of Evelina. Peter Merchant Peter Merchant is Principal Lecturer in English Literature at Canterbury Christ Church University, U.K., whose recent research has rotated the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ansteys: Christopher and “F.” His interest in the poetry of the earlier period has given rise to a Juvenilia Press edition (with Steven Orman) of Sarah Fyge Egerton’s The Female

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Contributors 261 Advocate and to two essays on John Gay for The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Jean-François Poisson-Gueffier Jean-François Poisson-Gueffier holds a Ph.D. in Medieval French Literature from Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle Paris 3. He has completed two monographs (on Perlesvaus and the relations of Paul Claudel with the Middle Ages) and has published twenty journal articles and reviews on rhetoric, Arthurian Romance, and Claudel. He is regularly invited for international conferences at Brown, Chicago, King’s College London, Sorbonne, Sorbonne-Nouvelle, and ENS Lyon, among others.

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Index

Abelard, Peter 3, 38, 45–51, 53–55, 57n16, 57n17, 58n19, 58n20, 58n21, 58n22, 126n24 Augustine, Saint 140, 153 Aliscans 7, 151, 153–154, 160 Alighieri, Dante 5–6, 98–106, 107–109, 212 ; Dantean 103 Angleterre, Thomas de 112 Anstey, Christopher 1, 9, 234–240, 241–245 Apocatastasis 159 Arimathea, Joseph of 69–70, 75n9 Argenteuil, Heloise of 38, 45–51, 53–55, 57n16, 58n19, 58n20 Arnaut, Bernart 42 Ars nova 76, 193 Ars novae musicae 193 Author 2–3, 7, 15, 19–20, 45, 53, 55, 65, 70–74, 76, 88, 98, 111, 119, 131, 138, 141–142, 152–154, 157, 159–161, 162n2, 163n12, 163n20, 199, 207–209, 211–213, 215n11, 221, 232, 234–235, 238, 240, 247; authorial 19, 98, 160, 237; authoriality 209; authority 2, 5, 28, 77, 82, 114, 123, 188, 221, 225, 227–228, 237, 242, 249 To Autumn 8, 206, 209 Babelisation 9, 207 Bakhtin, M.M. 2, 4, 7–9, 37–38, 55–56, 72, 76, 119, 150, 202, 204n3, 212, 219, 224, 232; 236, 247 Bakhtinian 65–66, 202, 235 Bally, Charles 71 Balade 5, 30n17, 76–83, 84–86, 88, 92n3, 92n5 Ballade 37, 39–44, 50, 57n6 Beatrice 102–106, 109

Béroul 6–7, 111–112, 114–115, 118–119, 123–124, 125n12, 126n17, 127n28 Bivocal 83–86 ; bivocality 79, 83–86 Bloch, Ernst 194 Bloch, Howard 6, 118 Boccaccio, Giovanni 210, 212 The Book of Christopher Colombus 247–248, 253–254 The Book of the True Tale, see Livre dou Voir Dit Bodel, Jean 142 Branghton, Polly 219, 223, 227, 229 Brendan, Saint 10, 247–250, 252–254, 256 Brontë, Emily 243 Browning, Robert 9, 243–245 Burney, Frances 9, 219–220, 222–225 Cacophony 1, 140, 233, 236, 241 The Canterbury Tales 5, 10, 172, 184, 201, 210, 237–238 Carnivalesque 2, 72 Castille, Blanche de 41, 57n7 Cemetery 4–5, 65–66, 69–72, 74 Champagne, Marie de 42 Champagne, Thibaut de 41–42, 54 Chanson de geste 7, 150–151, 153–154 Chanson de Roland 150 Chanson royale 5, 76–77, 86, 88, 90–91, 95n24 Chansonniers 98–99, 101–102 Chatterton, Thomas 9, 207 Chaucer, Geoffrey 1, 5, 8–9, 83, 169–171, 173–174, 175, 182, 184, 187–188, 188n1, 188n4, 191, 192–199, 200–203, 203n2, 204n4, 207–213, 214, 214n4, 214n5,

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Index 214n9, 237–238; Chaucerisme 196; Chaucerian 197, 202, 210 Le Chevalier à la charrette 4, 65, 70, 72 Claudel, Paul 1, 10, 247–248, 250–252, 254, 256 Collins, Wilkie 243 Columbus, Christopher 247–252, 253–256 Les Confessions 53–54 Consonantia 3 Contrafacture 41 Contratenor 18, 39 Criseyde 169–170, 173–177, 175–176, 178, 179, 180–185, 183–184, 184, 186, 187–188, 191, 211 Curtius, E.R. 1 Daniel, Arnaut 99, 103, 108 Debate 1, 2–3, 10, 30n10, 31n29, 41–42, 45, 50, 56, 56n5, 58n19, 77–78, 88, 96n36, 111, 143, 155–157, 200, 230n7; debate poetry 3, 15, 30n3; epistolary debate 94n20; scholastic debate 2 Deschamps, Eustache 5, 76–78, 80, 82–86, 88, 90–91, 91n1, 92n2, 92n3, 92n5, 92n6, 93n7, 94n14, 94n18, 94n21, 95n23, 95n24, 95n29, 96n32, 96n35, 96n36, 252 Dialogism 1–2, 3–4, 9, 38, 40, 42, 45, 55–56, 150, 154–155, 159, 163n12, 219; dialogic 2, 5, 8, 38, 45, 56, 79, 83, 133, 150, 220; dialogical 77, 82, 171, 253, 256; dialogichnost’ 2; dialogizatzija 2; dialogisation 2 Diomede 174, 175, 180 Direct speech 170, 173–174, 188, 220, 225 Dissonance 5, 7, 9, 18, 21, 77, 86, 135, 144–145, 206 Discourse 2, 5, 9, 37, 49–51, 53, 71, 76, 79–80, 112–113, 119, 137, 139, 150, 155–160, 192, 195, 197, 219, 223–228, 230n7, 236; adversative discourse 177; authoritative discourse 221; carnivalistic discourse 56; feminine discourse 222; interdiscursive discourse 2; interlocutive discourse 2; intralocutive discourse 2; gendered discourse 42; novelistic discourse 1, 232 Disputation 2, 251; quodlibetical disputation 3, 10n2

263

Dostoevsky, Fyodor 2, 55, 150, 204n3, 212 Early Modern 1, 8, 192, 194–195, 196, 198–201, 203, 203n2 Echecs amoureux 19 Epigraphy 71–74 Epitaph 67, 69, 73–74 Evelina 9, 219–224, 229n1 Evelina (character) 9, 219–220, 221–224, 225–229 The Fall of Hyperion. A Dream 9, 207 Farrel, Thomas 1 Fin’amors 42, 57n11 The Flour and the Leafe 210, 213 Folklore 2; folkloric 73 Foucault, Michel 4, 72 Fournival, Richard de 142 Goscelin 144 Gower, John 200–203 Grail 69–71 Gratian 3 Grave 65–67, 69–72, 74, 75n11, 142; gravestone 70 Greene, Robert 8, 197, 199–203, 203n2 Greene’s Vision 8, 199 Guinevere 66, 72, 213 Gyburg 151, 154–158, 159–161, 162n5, 163n16, 163n25 Halle, Adam de la 141–142 Heteroglossia 55, 223–224; heteroglossic 234, 242; heteroglot 224 Heterotopia 4, 72; heterotopy 72 Homer 195–196 Inferno 5, 103–106 Intelletto d’amore 6 Isolde 6, 111–118, 119–124, 124n4 Jeu-parti 41–42 Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse 38, 53–55, 220 Katabasis 66 Keats, John 8–9, 206–209, 210–214, 214n5; Keatsian 207, 209 Komarovich, V.L. 2 Lady of the Lake 69 Lancelot 4, 65–70, 71–74, 107, 213, 252

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264

Index

Langue d’oil 99 Lectio 2 Lewis, C.S. 10 Liminal 5, 102, 106–107, 109, 209; liminality 102, 106, 108 Le Livre dou Voir Dit 4, 37–40, 41–45, 47–51, 52–56, 56n4, 57n13, 57n15 La Louange des dames 76 Machaut, Guillaume de 1, 3–4, 15–18, 20, 25, 29, 37–38, 40–43, 45–46, 48, 50, 54–56, 57n13, 76, 92n3, 92n4, 193, 202 Marc (King) 6, 116 Medieval culture and art 15, 19, 37, 95n28, 136, 143, 157, 161, 188, 192, 194, 210, 215n11, 250, 256; medieval literature 1–2, 4–5, 7–8, 10, 38, 44, 51, 53–54, 56, 95n27, 111, 124, 130–132, 134, 137, 139, 146, 159, 170, 197, 199, 204n3, 227, 247–248, 251–254; medieval modernity 132, 146, 146n1, 163n12, 193, 197; medieval music 25, 27–29, 30–31n20, 92–93n6, 132, 136, 193; medieval times 2, 19, 65, 85, 95n28, 130, 144, 152, 171, 192, 195, 237, 249, 256; medieval voices and polyphony 7, 130, 133, 135, 140, 144–145, 170, 234, 249; medieval women 45 Merlin 72–73 La Messe de Nostre Dame 37 Middle Ages 4, 7, 40, 56, 130–132, 134, 136, 138, 143, 150, 152–153, 160, 192, 194, 247, 256, 259, 261 Milton, John 9, 207, 238 Modern 1, 6, 7, 8, 10, 16, 25, 29, 54, 56, 111, 131–132, 137, 146, 150–151, 157, 161, 188, 192–194, 197, 199, 210, 235–236, 248, 250, 254; modernism 232; modernity 6–8, 15, 29, 56n4, 76, 118–119, 124, 131–132, 142, 146, 192–195, 248, 254, 256 Mohammed 153–154 Monophonic 4, 21, 37, 41 Moore, Polly 219, 229 Motet 4, 17–18, 20, 28, 29, 37, 41–42, 54, 140, 142, 145 Mouvance 16, 21, 28, 137 Multilingualism 1, 98–100, 102–103, 202, 234 Multiperspectivism 236

Muris, Johannes de 193 Musica enchiriadis 3 Nashe, Thomas 195–198, 203 The New Bath Guide 9–10, 234–239, 240–243, 245 Occitan language 56n2, 94n18, 98–99, 108; langue d’oc 99; Occitan poetry 5, 41–42, 58n18, 98, 101–105, 106, 109 The Odes of John Keats 9, 206 Orange, William of 151 Paien, Thomas 40–44, 50 Pandarus 169, 173–174, 176–177, 177, 182, 184, 184, 185, 188, 189n5, 191 Paolo and Francesca 5, 106–107, 109, 212 Paradiso 107 Parnassus 8, 200, 202–203, 203n2 Paronomastic 174 Parzival 56, 162n2, 163n21 Pastourelle 77, 88, 92n3, 96n32 Paul, Saint 159, 161 Performance 3–4, 8, 16–22, 24, 26–29, 30n19, 31n20, 38–39, 42–45, 53–54, 76, 100, 113–114, 116–119, 133, 142, 170, 188 Perspectivism 119; deconstructionist perspectivism 6, 119; multiperspectivism 236, 244; novelistic perspectivism 6–7; romanesque perspectivism 119 Petrarch 199, 211–212, 214n9 Pisan, Christine de 83 Polylogic 220 Polyphony 1–4, 7–10, 15, 17–18, 20–21, 25–26, 28–29, 37–40, 44–45, 50, 55–56, 66, 76, 91, 130, 132–139, 141–146, 150, 161, 192–193, 202–203, 204n3, 207–208, 210, 212, 214, 219–220, 225, 227, 232–233, 235–237, 242–243, 247–248, 250, 253; “consensual” polyphony 92n4; contrapuntal polyphony 3, 244; “critical” polyphony 92n4; epistolary polyphony 236, 241, 243; interpretative polyphony 26; literary polyphony 3–4, 7, 15, 150, 202, 204n3, 232; liturgical polyphony 37; medieval polyphony 130, 135, 145, 249; musical

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Index polyphony 3–4, 15, 18–19, 21, 27, 43, 55–56, 200; muted polyphony 9, 206, 210; narrative polyphony 55–56; novelistic polyphony 150; pictorial polyphony 232; polyphoneous modernity 15; polyphoneous structural friction 17; polyphonic music 2–3, 15, 37, 40, 44, 55–56, 76, 132, 145; polyphonic reality 65; pollyphony 9; romantic polyphony 8; structural polyphony 209; textual polyphony 7, 17, 142, 144; temporal polyphony 17; verbal polyphony 93n6; virtual polyphony 142; vocal polyphony 130, 135 Polysemy 5–6, 137 Polytextuality 28, 37, 39, 41–42, 44 Polyvocality 5–7, 43, 56, 74, 77, 80–82, 86, 91, 98, 100, 106–108, 133, 138, 150, 156, 202, 226, 236, 243; liminal polyvocality 5 Pope, Alexander 233–234 Predicatio 2 Purgatorio 99–100, 103–104 Qur’an 153, 155 A Raw Youth 2 Resonance 16, 21–22, 24–29, 31n31, 130 Roman de la Rose 83, 94n18, 94n20, 131 Roman de Tristan 6, 111 Romanticism 1, 8–9, 15, 20, 207, 209, 211–214; romantic dissonances 206 Renart, Jean 131, 252 Representation 7–8, 10, 39, 54, 56, 87, 93n7, 95n28, 109, 111, 119, 137, 147n3, 151, 154, 169–170, 173, 175, 185, 247–251, 253; speech and thought representation (STR) 8, 169–171, 172, 173, 175, 184–185, 187–188 Rondeau 30n17, 43–45, 57n12, 76, 83, 92n5, 141–142 Rondel 39–40, 42–45, 48, 57n5, 57n13 Round Table 66, 69, 72, 212 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 38, 53–56, 220 Rutebeuf 139 Salisbury, John of 134–135, 140 Scott, Walter 242–243

265

Shakespeare, William 9, 145, 203, 207–208, 252 Subjectivism 112–113, 116, 118–119; deconstructionist subjectivism 119 Subjectivity 8, 169–171, 172, 173–174, 175–178, 181–182, 183–188, 188n2 ; metasubjectivity 182, 188 Taruskin, Richard 3, 133–134 Terramer 151, 154–156, 158 Triplum 18 Tristan 6–7, 111–118, 119–124 Troubadour 41–42, 44–45, 98–105, 109, 136 Troilus 169, 173–174, 176–178, 179, 180–182, 183–188, 189n5, 191, 211 Troilus and Criseyde 8, 170, 173, 178, 188, 188n4, 191, 214n9 Troyes, Chrétien de 65, 74 Vaqueiras, Raimbaut de 99–100 Variance 16, 21, 137 Vendler, Helen 9, 206–207, 209 Venerable, Peter the 153, 159 Ventriloquising 3, 15, 19 Vernacular 6–7, 15, 17, 82, 88, 99–100, 103, 107–108, 131, 137, 142, 144–146 Versicle 22, 24–26 Virelai 4, 16, 20–21, 31n22, 31n24, 76, 92n2, 92n5, 92n6 Virgil 104, 196 La vita nuova 5, 98, 101–106, 109n3 Vitry, Philippe de 76, 92n3, 193 Voice 3–4, 17–18, 29, 37, 39, 42, 44–45, 47, 53, 57n13, 70–71, 74, 76, 79, 81, 85–86, 90, 92n4, 92n5, 100, 104, 122, 135–136, 138–141, 161, 219–221, 225–229, 230n7, 233, 237, 244, 251, 256; authorial voice 160, 212; cantus voice 18; chivalric voice 80; commingled voices 202; contradictory voice 78; disparate voices 193; divergent voices 193, 225; goliardic voice 83; individual voices 41, 193, 202; musical voice 37, 40, 145; monological voice 2; narrative voice 16, 72–73, 102, 120; poetic voice 199; vocal modulation 76; sequential voices 202; simultaneous voices 15, 38, 202, 235; texted voice 18, 39; untexted voice 39;

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266

Index

unassimilated voices 202; unchained voice 104; unhierachised voices 192; unmerged voices 8, 55, 192, 202–203, 204n3 Von Eschenbach, Wolfram 7, 56, 151

Vox principalis 3; vox organalis 3 De Vulgari eloquenita 98, 100, 104, 107, 109 Willehalm 7, 151, 153–154, 157, 159 Wood, John 9, 239