Burlesque et obscenité chez les troubadours. Pour une approche du contre-texte médiévale (review)

Pierre Bec. Burlesque et obscénité chez les troubadours. Pour une approche du contre-texte médiévale. Paris: Stock, 1984. 247 pp. 69 FF. Pierre Bec, whose fictional works, both prose and poetry, are among the best in modern Occitan, whose numerous publications on the Occitan language and its dialectical variants, and whose anthologies have contributed significantly to the increasing popularity and accessibility of Occitan literature, has compiled yet another anthology, one which will undoubtedly tumble the last pillar holding up the temple of fin amor. His "contre-texte médiéval" is none other than a collection of those poems usually left out of polite anthologies, lyrics obscene or scatological, comic, burlesque, or misogynist - in other words, those texts which gainsay the thematic unity so often cited for troubadour poets. Certainly Bee is not the first to have noted that among the poems in the troubadour canon there were some uneasy bedfellows. Victorian prejudices gave way as early as in 1897 when Carl Appel acknowledged what he considered the "rare" genre ofthe obscene parody (Bee 9). Bee also cites René Nelli's observation that "il ait existé, à toutes les époques de la lyrique occitane, des poèmes 'sauvages,' peu conformes à l'idéal courtois, et en réaction contre lui, où se donnaient libre cours, aussi crûment que dans les chants des anciens goliards, les instincts égoïstes et misogynes de ces barons paillards et batailleurs" (18). Even non-specialists would certainly have run across the apparently contradictory attitudes expressed in the works of Guillaume IX, as Bee succinctly notes: "Le premier des poètes occitans connus . . . Guilhem de Peiteus ... ne crée-t-il pas à la fois le texte celui de l'amour épuré ... et le contre-texte gaillard et truculent, subversif et iconoclaste" (7). When placed in its chronological context, this "other" literature is revealed to have origins as noble and as ancient as its better-known rival. It can easily be argued, then, that Bee's work here makes at least three major contributions to the study ofthe troubadour lyric. It unites in one volume some fifty poems which heretofore had been scattered in diverse collections and whose thematic and ideological interconnections were thus not easily identifiable. At the same time, the volume lends historical weight to the "counter-text" by establishing its legitimacy in the canon from the earliest examples to the decline ofthe troubadours. And as a bilingual edition, it allows not only for a wider public to access these texts, but also strives to resolve some ofthe more obscure semantic and syntactic elements ofthe poems. Yet it is in each of these areas that some differences of opinion will doubtless be heard. Bee divides his anthology into five sections: "La 'fin'amors' marginalisée," "Le contre-texte humoristique et burlesque," "Le contre-texte obscène et scatologique," "Le contre-texte féminin," and L'hypertrophie du trobar." While the last two chapters manifest relatively uniform traits, poems attributed to trobaritz on the one hand and verbal gymnastics which prefigure the Grands Rhétoriqueurs on the other, distinctions among the other sections are thematically based and are often blurred-a problem of which Bee is aware yet seems unable to resolve. Further complications arise from Bee's placing the "cryptogramme" of Cerveri de Girone, which might well qualify by its style as a case of "hypertrophie," in the chapter of humoristic poems. The short section on trobaritz poems raises important questions of gender and genre. In his article on the trobaritz, Bee argued against what might be called femalevoiced troubadour lyric in direct opposition to Meg Bogin's views on women troubadours. Here again, they are at loggerheads over not only the attribution of a 11 Edith J. Benkov tenso but also the sex of Bieiris de Romans. This section of the book is perhaps the most troublesome. Bee's argument on countertext relies on a truly feminine-voiced troubadour lyric, one in which the conventions are by necessity turned on their heads. Yet at the same time, he questions the attribution of many of the trobaritz poems to women. One is tempted to conclude that his argument is itself text and...