Guilhem de Cabestanh's Eaten Heart, or the Dangers of Literalizing Troubadour Song

The gruesome tale of the Eaten Heart has exerted a powerful fascination over readers since at least as early as the twelfth century. This story about a cuckolded husband who takes his revenge by ripping out his rival's heart and feeding it to his wife in the guise of food has received seemingly exhaustive treatment by scholars, particularly in the last two decades. Attempts to place the various manifestations of the tale firmly in their literary, historical and cultural contexts have been accompanied by readings from religious, anthropological and psychoanalytical perspectives.¹

The medieval Occitan versions of the Eaten Heart story, all biographies of the twelfth-century troubadour Guilhem de Cabestanh, have rarely found themselves at the center of comparative studies of the legend.² And yet they rank among the earliest versions of the story to have come down to us in a fully developed form and are closely related to some of the best-known manifestations of the legend, such as the ninth tale of the Fourth Day in the Decameron. As one commentator has recently put it, the Occitan versions can be recognized as "the 'heart' of the motif's circulation, the center from which it radiated" (Fajardo-Acosta 69).

The Occitan Eaten Heart legend survives in four prose versions from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.³ Two of these are vidas, or "lives," which weave the Eaten Heart story around the formulaic descriptions of Guilhem's origins, love interests and poetic career that we would expect from a medieval biography of a troubadour. The remaining two Occitan versions are razos, or "reasons," glosses on one of Guilhem's songs, "Lo dous cossire" (PC 213,5), that seek to explain the historical circumstances of its composition. Both vidas and razos, it has long been noted, contain many historical details about the troubadours that are confirmed by other sources. In the case of Guilhem de Cabestanh, we are certain of the existence of the three protagonists of his vidas and razos, Guilhem himself, Guilhem's lord, Raimon, and Raimon's wife, Saurimonda (Cots 25-39). But the vidas and razos also contain many details that seem wildly fantastical, apparently deriving from a literal reading of troubadour song that treats the poetry as if it were historical fact. The authors of the vidas and razos are thus routinely accused of reducing the polysemous language of the troubadours to a single, falsely historicizing interpretation.⁴

My aim here is to read one particular Occitan version of the Eaten Heart legend, the razo found in troubadour songbook P, in its immediate literary context. Despite its thorough treatment of the story, the P version has tended to be overlooked, perhaps because it names the female protagonist as Margarida instead of the historically verifiable Saurimonda, perhaps because it survives in a comparatively late manuscript and is therefore of little interest in proving the antiquity of the Occitan versions in relation to the French ones. The force-feeding of Guilhem's heart to his Lady by Raimon has been read as the literalization of the frequently encountered topos of troubadour song according to which the male suitor pledges to give his heart to his Lady.⁵ But no one, as far as I am aware, has read the gruesome act in the razo as a denunciation of literalization as a hermeneutical strategy, no doubt because the P version has not been read as a razo, as a gloss on a particular song that brings to light the meta-literary gloss on glossing at work in the text.⁶ The author of the P razo not only attributes figurative meanings to the heart but understands the heart as the symbol of figuration itself. If we read the razo alongside the song that it glosses and incorporates, the force-feeding of Guilhem's heart to Margarida by her jealous husband-the reduction of a polyvalent symbol and the symbol of polyvalence to nothing but corporeality- emerges as simply the most heinous of a series of acts of misreading of troubadour song by anti-poets who seek to...