Semiretired knights and Christine's manuscripts.

Between my attempts to memorize Latin grammar and translate snippets of passages and poems about Druids and purses full of cobwebs, I have been making my way through the beginning of Tirant lo Blanc. I had intended to read Llull’s Llibre de l’orde de cavalleria concurrently, but have yet to secure a paper copy that I am allowed to bring home. Here I will put down a few of the questions, some of them quite simple in formulation, I considered today as I alternated between my Spanish and Catalan editions of Tirant and a bit of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre de la prison de vie humaine. The ideas on Tirant are especially preliminary since I have scarcely made a dent in its 1200 some pages and even less of a dent in the books and articles published about it in the last 500 years.

I very much enjoyed the Earl of Warwick section, particularly the description and division of the God of Love’s rock and castle mentioned in chapters 53-55, which I will mention briefly. Reading these pages, in addition to thinking about chivalry in the Amadís, I couldn’t help recall a fellow student’s question in a seminar we had together on Arthurian romance (mostly). He asked what many probably wondered:

What are all these hermits doing here?

It is questions like these that we are often afraid to ask, especially in a seminar full of first and second year grad students desperate to impress (even more than the professor) their own peers. So here again, I returned to the question of hermits, because I thought it was a good question then and yesterday, and also because it will likely take many more pages, years maybe, to reach any conclusions on how Tirant’s chivalry is similar or dissimilar to the chivalry or chivalries present in the Amadís. Perhaps in the present case, the hermit question, drawing on the Arthurian tradition, could be formulated thusly:

How is this hermit different from Chretién’s hermits, for example?

An ex-knight that at least at this point in my assessment, is ex only in appearance, and maybe not even in appearance: he still holds the book and is eager to hear Tirant and Diafebus' (whose taking over of the telling I have yet to appreciate fully) memories about the King of England's year and a day court. Further, I wonder, can a knight be unmade? If a knight is built on and perpetuated by his deeds and lineage, if he divorces himself, albeit temporarily, from both, is he a knight no more?

Yet, he still has the book and what’s more, is putting it to use; at least in this line of thinking, he is doing nothing to disrupt the genealogy of future, soon to be, or recently invested knights. While Tirant’s exploits are certainly praised in this section, perhaps at least as much, or more, is his humility and unwillingness to be present at the retelling of his accomplishments (“Tirant callà e no volgué més parlar, sinó que ab lo cap baix e los ulls en terra estigué immoble...E Tirant llevà’s d’allí on seia, que no hi volgué més aturar, e manà descarregar totes les atzembles en mig de la praderia, e que parassen les tendes, e prop de la font posassen les taules e que adobassen de sopar.” ed. of Martín de Riquer, Barcelona: Editorial Selecta: 1947; 119)

The episode of the castle on the wooden rock was entertaining and probably quite telling. After the duke and knights and each of the estates approaching the rock is denied entry, the god of love finally appears and grants the queen and hence, the rest of the estates entry, on account of her humble request. While the estates enter together into one magnificent courtyard, once inside order and regulation is rewritten: the queen is given power to reward and punish all those who navigate in the sea of love. Even in rock-castles, order exists; here too, it is by the book and eventually, each group rests in its own place.

Thus more basic, but in my view pertinent questions: what is the role of the individual in the chivalry in Tirant? What makes a good knight, or a good queen or king, for that matter, in Tirant?
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In reading several articles these past days on Christine as publisher and about her extant manuscripts, I came across the Epistre de la prison de vie humaine, which is supposedly the last work produced in her scriptorium. The last lines, which, like the entire Epistre, survive in just one manuscript, asked many questions:

Escript à Paris par moy Cristine de Pizan, ton humble et obeissant, suppliant humblement que à mal tu n’aies ne moins gré ne m’en saches se plus tost n’as de moy eue ceste present epistre, laquelle ta benignité vueille en gré recevoir, et me soit du default de tant y avoir mis, quoyque dès pieça elle feust pour toy en ma pensée, s’il te plaist, souffisant excusacion pluseurs grans ennuis et troubles de courage, qui à cause de maints desplaisirs qui depuis le temps que je le commençay, qui fut dès pieça, ont mon povre entendement, pour sa foiblece, tenu si empeschié en tristes ymaginacions et pensées qu’il n’a esté en ma puissance de plus tost l’avoir achevé que à cestui .xx. jour de janvier l’an mil CCCCXVII. (Christine de Pizan's "Epistre de la prison de vie humaine", ed. Angus J. Kennedy. Glasgow: Glasgow Univ. French Dept., 1984) 52-3.

This letter addressed to the noblewomen of France and in particular, Mary of Berry, treats the subject of death and the mutilation of bodies, including France, the pain experienced by the country, by the soldiers upon their deaths and by the women they left behind. Reading a letter such as the Epistre de la prison de vie humaine which, unlike the Rose debate, is inextricably tied to tragic events, it becomes increasingly clear why so many so desperately want to posit hypotheses regarding Christine’s motivations for publishing and why, further, it is so tempting to read her version of the Querelle as the Querelle. It also is apparent why the Bancroft manuscript of the debate has in large part been ignored; it has not be shown to be an autograph manuscript, nor is it illuminated or decorated, save for an initial on the recto of the first folio. Yet these characteristics, and particularly the likely circumstance of its not originating with Christine, make the manuscript all the more fascinating: the only extant manuscript containing solely her version of the debate and none of her other works. Flanked by no other works, in a sense, this small court manuscript is essentially a pamphlet. In the above citation, while clearly under entirely different circumstances and most certainly in a different hand (Christine’s, if we are to put faith in her signature) the comment on the hope that her manuscript be graciously received continues to fascinate me (recalling Accipito datum placide dantis que memento). The gift of text, or a pamphlet, and the responsibilities of the new owners, and also, questions of new in the Middle Ages (which, thankfully, Tirant offers me myriad opportunities to look for provisional answers) are things I’ll continue to ponder.

Newness, convention, fin’amor, myths and truths of origin and pure verité

I return, albeit indirectly, to the question of newness that I posed in the last post. As I read Jaufre Rudel’s “Quan lo rossinhols el folhos” and “Quan lo rius de la fontana”, I tried to think about what is happening with the use of topoi in these songs. Although I have yet to come to much of an understanding on how the use of certain adjectives (vers, greu, plan, clus) paired with the words like trobar and vers function in the poems, possibly as some sort of autocommentary realized within the work as a means of self-fashioning, or as a template for the commentary of listeners, present in all of the songsI have read thus far seems to be a trick, or a series of tricks: with the apparent use of a convention, of an element that brings to mind a tradition, which, in itself, is a giant archive of authors and teachers, comes a series of conflicts. Despite the seeming repetition of words and themes, there is nothing, in what I have read so far, conventional and predictable about these songs, including, of course, fin’amor, which, by nature, if it is possible to identify a nature, cannot be conventional. Fin’amor must be adulterous, in the legal and moral sense, but it is never adulterated; it is dependent, at least in its ideal manifestation, upon its ability to be without a history: it demands and subsequently gives rise to a new event, a love like no other, able to be compared only to that which it is diametrically opposed, an imperfect love, such as love between husband and wife. I might add that readings of Rudel’s far-away lady as the Virgin seem less than plausible upon reading lines such as the opening coblas of his “Quan lo rius de la fontana”, unless Mary is to be found in the garden or underneath some curtains:

Quan lo rius de la fontana

s’esclarzis, si cum far sol,

e par la flors aiglentina,

el rossinholetz el ram

volf e refranh ez aplana

son dous chantar et afina,

dreitz es qu’ieu lo mieu refranha.

Amors de terra lonhdana,

per vos totz lo cors mi dol;

e no·n puesc trobar mezina

si non au vostre reclam

ab atraich d’amor doussana

dinz vergier o sotz cortina

ab dezirada companha.

(In Riquer, Los trovadores: historia literaria y textos. Editorial Planeta: Barcelona, 1975; I, 158, 1-2).

Perhaps it is in this where some of the newness of this poetry resides, in the indispensable newness of the love sung and created in these works. Upon the backdrop of carefully constructed and measured verses and rhymes and the employment of a topos or series of topoi, the use of a similar vocabulary, a new poetic event takes place: words are repeated only in the sense that they appear in similar form, but the meaning is pure, made anew. The opening cobla of “Quan lo rius de la fontana” begins with a familiar image of springtime, the regeneration of nature, and uses it as a springboard for the poet's own performance, his song: el rossinholetz el ram / volf e refranh ez aplana / son dous chantar et afina, / dreitz es qu’ieu lo mieu refranha.

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I sat in the Bancroft this afternoon trying to pull apart my ideas about origin, exclusion, and future with regards to the Querelle. Feeling dull and trying hard not to engage in my newest and (quite effective) method of avoiding big-question contemplation (the memorization of basic Latin grammar) I stumbled upon a translation of Derrida’s essay “Scribble: pouvoir/écrire" a text from the 1970’s that introduced a French translation of William Warburton's 1742 essay on Egyptian hieroglyphics, "Essai sur les hieroglyphes des Egyptiens." I said several times that Christine’s selection of the debate documents is a very conscious fashioning, a forceful commentary on the debate, but have yet to pull apart this power: besides careful editing, calculated inclusions and exclusions, what is this dossier's engine? What indications do we have that Christine’s version of the debate, is in dialog with a ghost, in conversation with some unrecoverable origin? Besides my own feeling that this dialog is occurring, how can I show this? I cite a little Derrida (who cites Warburton, Warburton's words appear in internal quotes below), while thinking about a question I have been reformulating these past few months: what does it mean to take a form that was transmitted orally or engaged in an aggressive and dynamic chain of sending, and to put it in a book? When selections are made as to what poems, letters, or texts will be included in the book, are those selections more of a commentary on present interests and goals, or does the selection point towards memory: what the selector wants to have remembered by future readers and listeners?

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"To summarize. It is as if a catastrophe had perverted this truth of nature: a writing made to manifest, serve, and preserve knowledge—for custody of meaning, the repository of learning, and the laying out of the archive—encrypts itself, becoming secret and reserved, diverted from common usage, esoteric. Naturally destined to serve the communication of laws and the order of the city transparently, a writing becomes the instrument of an abusive power, of a caste of ‘intellectuals’ that is thus ensuing hegemony, whether its own or that of special interests: the violence of a secretariat, a discriminating reserve, an effect of scribble and scrypt" (Derrida, “Scribble (writing-power)”, in Julian Wolfreys, ed. The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1998: 55).

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Powers are encrypted in writing. In its process of becoming, in showing what it can do, writing reveals the ‘nature’ of power. What, then, is the power of the supplement, at what point do the supplements overtake the possibility of origin? Can we ever find the origin?

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"Priests are not inventors of religion. They accumulate a sort of natural religiosity, commandeer it, divert if for their benefit, for the benefit of caste and the hegemony it represents. It was ‘natural to worship the mark, to turn ‘toward the mark’ and toward divine representation. But this natural fetishism of writing was ‘favored and fostered’ by the priests…seeking to make theological science ‘more difficult to understand,’ to reserve it for interpreters…And whenever a priest wishes to write ‘the history of the sciences’ and of human discoveries, that of his own hieroglyphic science first of all, he always invokes the intervention of the gods in an immemorial origin…

This process leads them, here again, to multiply the supplements, to ‘add new fables to the old theology of the gods’. A violent process: by dint of veil, the supplement supplants. This law of supplementary veiling and general cryptography constrains all explanations of origin, that of writing or that of the gods, that of the power of genealogical explanation which the priest appropriates only by pretending to receive it from a divine origin. And however far one goes back toward the limit of the first need, there is always a writing, a religion, already. No first text, not even a virgin surface for the inscription, and if the palimpsest requires a bare, material support for an arch-writing, no palimpsest.

No preface" (71-2).

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Does part of the power of Christine’s arrangement reside in its ability to unwrite its role as supplement, to undo its role of simply a “reading” of the debate? We cannot find the original because these debate documents, letters circulated and variously delivered, were never before written down in the sense of being recorded, fixed into an arrangement, engaged in a specific order of sending. Her arrangement, while not the preface, while not a bare support, becomes at least, a type of origin, one that is believable as a beginning. Perhaps my desire to understand and then to parse Christine’s “pure verité” is none other than a desperate want to understand her capacity to create a believable origin and chronology of the debate. The idea of origin, whether a mere ghost or not, provokes hypothesis after hypothesis, supplement, after supplement, and debate, more debate.

Men, slippery words and meaning, new, and a little Guilhem de Peitieu.

Reading and attempting to recite, or better, yet, sing Guilhem de Peitieu’s lyric poems was like unpacking hundreds of unlabeled boxes of someone else’s belongings in a one room apartment. What are these things and where do they go? Do I have a place for them, and can they be fit? Both exciting and terrifying, I go on rummaging through these lyric pieces, trying to avoid cuts from the cardboard. I have found some lines so bawdy or so beautiful, I have learned them by heart (with terrible pronunciation).

These words have many layers, they flip to a new side, that’s not only a B-side, but a new face altogether in the moment I think I have identified them. It is not so much a pinwheel of meanings, but worse, much worse, more like the hyperactive child’s peg-board project, webs and webs of tightly-wound metaphors threatening to snap. Many of concepts these works generate are not found, known, or understood with a simple sweep through the dictionary, or, and perhaps especially, with a consult of the translation.

On Israel’s suggestion, as I read, I have been writing all the words that appear over and over and their context (and / or those I am unable to decipher on first reading, these are many) in a notebook. It quickly became apparent, that any definition I wrote of the word quickly fell through the page. This falling through the page occurs on Riquer’s pages too, burning massive holes in the translation. There is something very complex in the creation of meaning here: words like amor, joi, joven, shady in meaning to begin with, are put together, spinning tightly wound webs, rays of legal discourse, rods of foudatz and sen, rings of love, court, and company, consisting of his companho, some domna, a patron, and his infinite audience, us included.

I comment here a few pieces of the poems bearing in mind a few questions I’ve considered this past year. These are big questions, along with ideas about memory, which I hope to recycle and reinvent in the coming year:

1) What does new mean in 12^th -14^th century France and Spain? [novel conte/chant/[insert genre]. What kind of theory of “new” is created in Guilhem de Peitieu? What new comes about in Chrétien? What did it mean for Froissart and Machaut? These questions lead to translatio: from where do we get the newness of these translations of old stories, topoi, genres or vocabulary? In my view, the newness is not just in reformulation and vernacularization, nor just in the event, the new present of a new telling, but rather is dependent on a trick: an author’s straightforward admission of newness, but then luring (perhaps unintentionally) the reader into thinking that it is actually the same old story only to surprise, or confuse him at the end. Maybe this is where my beloved erudite colloquialists learned their trade. But probably not.

2) What is the role of men in telling and talking about love? The calling to the attention of the listener of the passage of information from the poet to another man or to a group of men. If there could ever be a single contraclau to these poems, who would guard the key and would its handing over, its translation, unlock the treasure? These questions and statements stem partly from my interest in Froissart’s Prison Amoreuse and the dit genre. I am fascinated by the relationship and exchanges of literature and love between the poet-narrator and his companion Rose. I used to think that their literary correspondence and communications constituted a surrogate love affair, but am beginning to think of their exchanges of text, allegory, poetry, dreams and letters as a love affair proper. In a sense, they are living the fantasy of delivery and transmission with each other, instead of realizing contact (and possible consummation) with their beloveds). The texts they exchange become a source of hope and, in effect, a game, a diversion [esbatement], but an important one at that: for it is their game, the writings of their surrogate love affair that constitute the text, the book they create (and perform) called the Prison Amoreuse.

I’ll leave the first set of questions (1) and a little discussion of topoi for another entry and proceed to 2.

While it may appear that evoking his companho is simply a way to portray a dialogue situation in his works, or to heighten the performativity of his creation by staging a performance within his performance, I suspect, but have yet to determine exactly how, that his companions are essential for the transmission and realization of his lyric: its passing on and through. In “Companho, farai un vers qu’er convinen”, the companions primarily function as an inner audience. They are called upon and must be present and consulted for advice, to realize his bragging about having to choose between two excellent mounts.

[[I digress for a moment to note that stanzas like # VII of “Companho, farai un vers qu’er convinen” in which Guilhem sings about the origins of the more beautiful horse of the two, the one that does not refuse to be groomed, are major sites of confusion. Despite a decent understanding of the words employed in the stanza, I am not sure what it is doing there or what it actually means:

Qu’ie·l donei a son senhor poilli paisen,

pero si·m retinc ieu tan de convinen

que, s’il lo tenia un an, ieu lo tengues mais de cen.

(Riquer, Trovadores: historia literaria y textos. 3 vols. Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1975; Riquer 129)

[Porque yo lo entregué a su amo [cuando aún era] pollino que pacía, pero me reservé para mí suficientes derechos para que, si él lo tenía un año, yo lo tuviese más de ciento. Riquer] ]]

Returning to the companions, they are not only needed to witness and engage in Guilhem’s burlesque pieces, but also serious songs. The companions become less language, less rhetoric, and more face (perhaps signaling the artificiality of the court in comparison to life and death outside the court) in “Pos de chanter m’es pres talenz”.

Per merce prec mon conpaignon:

s’anc li fi tort, qu’il m’o perdon;

et il prec En Jezu del tron

en romans et en son lati.

…

Toz mos amics prec a la mort

qu·i vengan tut e m’onren fort;

qu’ieu ai agut joi e deport

loing e pres et e mon aizi

(VI; X in Riquer, 140-141).

The companions are clearly important and it appears, although it is far from transparent, that they belong to a category that is separate from the things which he has renounced, joy and pleasure (joi e deport), and chivalry or pride (cavalaria et orgueill), along with rich clothing. Subsequently, we might conclude, although this seems strange, that the great honor that he requests (or prays, maybe in both the vernacular and in Latin) they pay him upon his death, does not fall anywhere under any of the designations pride, chivalry, or pleasure (if one may have pleasure in or after death), all of which, we could say, belong to the courtly realm. Another possibility is that the stanza cited above that begins “Toz mos amics” is in some sense negated by the sen of the two that flank it (the preceding stanza being Tot ai guerpit cant amar sueill , / cavalaria et orgueill; / e pos Dieu platz tot o acueill; e prec li qu·m reteng’ am si.; the last the Assi guerpisc joi e depor / e vair e gris e sembeli.”

I go back to some of the more burlesque (but by no means simple) works to think briefly about some of the other men implicated in his verses. In both “Farai un vers de dreit nien” and “Farai un vers, pos mi sonelh”, as was likely quite common, the last verses refer to the specific act of sending the lyric away by a messenger or jongleur (he is named in the former, Monet). I wonder how these messengers and performers function in relation to the evocations of the companhos. Why must these instances of telling and translation be written into future performances of the lyric [also, did the tornadas change in subsequent performances?]

More again soon.