A New History of Medieval French Literature

Conclusion: The Incubation Period

129 Conclusion The Incubation Period In his beautiful book Bild und Kult (Likeness and Presence), Hans Belting speculates about writing a “history of the image before the era of art.” In this book, I have found myself in a position that, without being identical, presents certain analogies: writing a history of literature before the age of literature. My approach has been to question texts on their practice, to gather all that could be found of an implicit theory, all that could be understood of the authors, of the audiences, and of their tastes. Medieval literature presents itself as an enigma. This either triggers rejection or inspires fascination. It is enigmatic first of all for contingent reasons: the distance that separates us from the language of that time, the change of customs and of the intellectual universe. This type of obscurity arises, in fact, for the reader or the observer at every point in history. For Clément Marot in the sixteenth century, François Villon’s fifteenthcentury language had already become difficult to understand, and Villon’s allusions to facts of daily life, to current events, were no longer accessible. Moreover, in giving the title Ballade en vieux langage français (Ballade in the Old French Language) to the poem that follows the Ballades des Dames et des Seigneurs du temps jadis (Ballades of Ladies and Lords of Yesteryear) in his edition of Villon, Marot expresses the feeling that Villon was sensitive to these variations in the state of the language and of style, and to the nostalgic poetry that could come of this. The refrain of the Ballade en vieux langage français is “Gone with the wind” (Autant en emporte ly vens). This is a condition that I would gladly call the syndrome of “the Song of the Good King Henry” that Alceste, in [Molière’s] The Misanthrope, opposes to Oronte’s sonnet: “The rhyme is not rich and its style is old” 130 a new history of medieval french literature (La rime n’est pas riche et le style en est vieux). It is certainly true that a part of the difficulty and of the pleasure of reading medieval texts arises from this. Also as a result of contingency are another difficulty and another pleasure that find their source in the obscurities of an altered transmission: lost voices, gnawing rats, sleeping scribes. The pleasure is then that of the hunter who tracks the difficulty the way one tracks a hare. The [textual] crux and locus desperatus (hopelessly corrupt passage) anguish and excite the philologist. But “signs,” “tracks,” and “trail marks” are also a pleasure for any reader, the pleasure of the quest for meaning. In a way that is no longer contingent, but essential, medieval literature asks the question of clarity or of obscurity as an esthetic principle. For the troubadours, it is the debate between trobar lei (clear) and trobar clus (closed) that opposes Guiraut de Borneilh and Raimbaut d’Orange in a famous tenson. The question of intentional obscurity feeds the reflection on literature, from the prologue of Marie de France’s lays to Boccaccio’s reflections in his Life of Dante to Philippe de Mézières’ or Evrart de Conty’s remarks. Obscurity leads readers to deeper meaning and engraves texts in memory. The trobar clus of the poet brings about the reader’s happiness in making the find. The debate about love, love that, under different forms, is at the root of writing—from the love of the lady to the love of knowledge and to the love of God—marks this awareness of the literary act. The following question is posed: is it possible to sing without love and, if so, is it legitimate ? Gilles de Vieux-Maisons in his piece Chanter m’estuet, car pris m’en est corage (I Must Sing for I Desire to Do So), risks the solution that is not retained by his colleagues, Gace Brulé and Conon de Béthune in particular: “and I will sing without love, out of habit” (Si chanterai sanz amors, par usage). The question is, then, how to write when the lady does not respond to one’s love, or, in an extreme case, when she is dead. The solution of the courtly poets up to and including Guillaume de Machaut is to resort to a virtue, an allegorical power: hope. The poet is not loved but hopes to be loved, and this hope allows him to write. Yet...