A Story about Song: Narrative Ethics versus Lyric Isolation in Charles d’Orléans’s English Lyrics

Emmanuel Levinas’s “Reality and Its Shadow,” published in 1948, seems in many regards like a bid to outdo Plato in its suspicion of poets. Where Plato would have the poets exiled from his utopian Republic for the alluring potency of their false imitations of reality, Levinas’s concern is not for the misleading power of poetic art. He warns instead against its passivity.¹ For Levinas, poetry—and art in general—does not provide any kind of knowledge, either true or false; it, he says, “is the very event of obscuring.”² In Levinas’s conception, art withdraws its audience from active involvement in social concerns: hence, for Levinas, the problem of art. Anticipating his more elaborate exposition in 1961’s Totality and Infinity, where he marshals ethics over and against metaphysics in order to make ethics “first philosophy,” Levinas makes clear that art proves problematic in his ethically focused system: “art, essentially disengaged, constitutes, in a world of initiative and responsibility, a dimension of evasion.”³ Levinas’s critique of art’s “evasion” comes as a pointed rejoinder to the increasing parochialism of early twentieth-century critical thought, particularly in the light of the horrors of two world wars. At the same time that the American New Criticism was continuing to tweak its empiricist methodology, which privileged the ability of the poem to disclose itself qua poem, Levinas was championing socially aware literary criticism as the only way to save art from itself.

I offer these reflections as a prelude to my reading of a fifteenth-century lyric sequence because they represent an urgent and still influential articulation of the anxieties that have been caused by theories of poetic autonomy.⁴ There is, indeed, a return to critical interest in the subject of aesthetic autonomy, rearticulated in a manner that accounts for Levinas’s critique; but rather than rehearsing poststructuralist arguments to shatter once again the New Critical ideal of the well-wrought urn, I would like to take another tack and examine a premodern instance where autonomy is in fact employed as a desired aesthetic category.⁵ In this article I claim that the English mixed-form sequence by Charles d’Orléans grapples with the potential for lyric to withdraw from all social obligations, and, furthermore, that this withdrawal is figured in the terms of religious solitude as a justification for withdrawal. The poetic sequence examined here thus highlights an impasse that exists between excessive textual solipsism, exhibited by an increasingly aestheticized text, and a self-reflexive desire to provide ethical backing to a poetic project. This tension emerges particularly during a confessional exchange between the speaker and the goddess Venus, in which the speaker attempts to salvage his poetic work after losing amatory justification. His difficulty lies in the fact that, after the death of his beloved, his writings might turn out to be a purely solipsistic, and thus illegitimate, enterprise. The language of religious solitude becomes in this moment a crux that indicates the limits of literary ethics, as the speaker seeks to find some alternative basis for lyric composition—something other than the expected amatory verse.

Ars Poetica in Charles’s English Lyrics

The English sequence by Charles d’Orléans (British Library, MS Harley 682), which Mary-Jo Arn has conveniently named Fortunes Stabilnes, is a mixed-form poetic sequence, including multiple lyric forms, primarily the ballade and roundel forms, set alongside sections of narrative verse.⁶ Recent scholarship on late-medieval French lyric has delineated how, through the juxtaposition of narrative and verse, the mixed-form poetry collections of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries often implies metacommunicative efforts to interrogate the purpose and means of poetic practice.⁷ One implication of such studies is that the hybrid form of Charles’s work suggests its own embedded aesthetic theory. Maura Nolan has claimed that even if “a theory of the autonomy of art, aesthetics, does not come into being until the eighteenth century, that does not mean that medieval art did not function at moments as autonomously as the...