Trobar clus: A Category of Critical Poetry

Trobar clus: A Category of Critical Poetry Carole Bowser-Nott Introduction ti\ the eleventh and tweUth centuries, in southern France, educated poets of mixed social groups invented a radical form of love poetry. This poetry was caUed 'trobar', which had a dual meaning 'to find'/'to trope' and the poets were caUed 'troubadours' meaning 'finders'/ 'tropers'. The poetry was unique and even in its day, controversial because it used the vernacular language—Occitan (sometimes called Provencal) and imagery drawn directly from everyday experiences in their courtly and often uncourtly urban environment. The poetry spoke about w o m e n in elevated terms and exalted adulterous love at a time when women's status was low and sexual relationships were regarded with austerity. The troubadours also created spirited dialogues about literary issues, money, sex and warfare. It is not surprising, therefore, that the troubadours' Uvely poetry has been, and sttil is, the subject of intense scrutiny by scholars this century, especiaUy that part of the poetry called trobar clus and trobar leu. Scholars, beginning with AUred Jeanroy eartier this century, were baffled by the trobar clus or 'closed poetry'. Trobar leu ('open poetry') never posed such difficulties. Only closed poetry, the trobar clus, has P A R E R G O N ns 15.1 (July 1997) 22 Carole Bowser-Nott resisted scholars' attempts to categorise it satisfactorily and the consensus of critical opinion to date is that the poetry should be dismissed as sheer mystification. AUred Jeanroy organised trobar into three principal stytistic categories1 : the elevated love-song (canso), the 'down-to-earth' sirventes and the dialogue poems (tenso, joe partida). H e designated th trobar leu as an easy style but the trobar clus as a deliberately obscuring stytistic device which might operate in any of the poems of the three 'schools' that he named, rendering the content difficult, if not impossible to understand. This stytistic categorisation of trobar and of the trobar clus has not been vigorously questioned by scholars to date, but dissatisfaction with Jeanroy's opinion about the trobar clus is evident in British scholar, Linda Paterson's comment: ' . . . it is seU-defeating to rely on some preconceived criterion such as obscurite systematiaue...trobar clu is by no means an obscure style; on the contrary it is fuU of meaning'. Nevertheless the stylistic designation for the trobar clus is maintained, with Paterson preferring to see it as a most dtificult aspect of the stytistic practice of eloquence as set out in the rhetorical manuals of the time. In her recent publication, The Game of Love: Troubadour Wordplay, Laura Kendrick presents the troubadours as court entertainers— clever, word-playing gamesters whose trobar clus cansos were intricate riddles for the amusement of a courtly audience. Kendrick accepts the ambiguities of the trobar clus p o e m as acceptable word-play 'a centerless consteUation held together by its very indeterminancies but admits that 'one is confronted with discouragements to playful reading'.3 Opinions such as these seem to have little in c o m m o n with the high status Dante gives to the troubadours and their vernacular 1 Alfred Jeanroy, Histoire Sommaire de la poesie Occitane: des Origines a du XVIIIe Siecle (Toulouse/Paris: Edouard Privat/Henri Didier 1945) D P 39-40. vv Linda Paterson, Troubadours and Eloquence (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1975), pp. 4-8. Laura Kendrick, The Game of Love: Troubadour Wordplay (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), p. 48. Trobar clus: A Category of Critical Poetry 23 initiative in his De vulgari eloquentia.4 In this treatise, Dante pays tribute to the troubadours as among those masters w h o developed the vernacular, instead of Latin, to create a serious work of literary art. H e certainly distinguishes his 'tilustrious doctors' from taking part in any word-punning, which he despised. Trobar clus—an alternative argument The assumption that the trobar clus and the trobar leu are two styles, one difficult and one easy, is a reductionist view of troubadour poetry which has confined it to a particularly narrow Uterary and stylistic focus and has side-lined the troubadours and then invention into an historical curiosity. It has also obscured the...