Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature: Martyrs to Love

LOVE AND DEATH IN MEDIEVAL FRENCH AND OCCITAN COURTLY LITERATURE

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Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature Martyrs to Love by

SIMON GAUNT

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Simon Gaunt 2006 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Gaunt, Simon. Love and death in medieval French and Occitan courtly literature : martyrs to love / by Simon Gaunt. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–19–927207–5 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0–19–927207–7 (alk. paper) 1. French literature–To 1500–History and criticism. 2. Provençal literature–History and criticism. 3. Courtly love in literature. 4. Death in literature. I. Title. PQ155.C74G38 2006 841⬘.1093543—dc22 2005029729 Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–927207–7

978–0–19–927207–5

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Che non si muore per amore è una gran bella verità Lucio Battisti

Acknowledgements I record specific debts in relation to individual chapters at various points throughout this book. Chapter One is based upon Gaunt (2001a); Chapter Three draws slightly on Gaunt (2004b); the middle section of Chapter Six largely reproduces Gaunt (2004a). I would like to thank Duke University Press, Peter Lang, and Palgrave Macmillan for permission to reproduce previously published material. I am also grateful to Librairie Nizet for permission to quote in full a lyric by Gaucelm Faidit in Chapter Two, and to Mucchi Editore for permission to quote in full the lyric by Guilhem IX in the Conclusion. The company, intellectual stimulation, scholarship, and friendship of some very talented medievalists in London and Cambridge have shaped this book in decisive ways, notably Bill Burgwinkle, Ardis Butterfield, Emma Campbell, Chris Cannon, Jane Gilbert, Miranda Griffin, Sylvia Huot, Sarah Kay, Clare Lees, Bob Mills, Francesca Nicholson, Karen Pratt, Ben Ramm, Marion Turner, and Julian Weiss. Similarly, the interest shown in my work by colleagues further afield such as Stefano Asperti, Carolyn Dinshaw, Aranye Fradenburg, Saverio Guida, Mario Mancini, Peggy McCracken, and Gina Psaki has been invaluable and enormously encouraging. In particular, the queer companionship of Bill and Bob has helped me retain a sense of why I do what I do as a medievalist, while Sarah’s brilliance, generosity, and drive never fail to inspire my faith in medieval French studies as the most interesting, thought-provoking, and glamorous of disciplines. In King’s College London Catherine Boyle, Patrick ffrench, Anne Green, Peter Hallward, Hector Kollias, Jo Malt, and Jim Wolfreys have been sterling colleagues in every respect: it has been a privilege indeed to work with them and their thinking—generously shared during the course of many seminars, cups of coffee, and impromptu lunches in the courtyard of Somerset House—has informed this book constantly. In particular, Patrick’s unstinting intellectual generosity has been a beacon for me— and I know for many others—in King’s. It has also been a privilege to encounter the keen intelligence, and sometimes scepticism, of King’s students such as Anna Kemp, Davina McTiernan, Paul Mertens, Alex O’Brien, Anna Papaeti, Anne-Marie Phillips, Ian Riley, Jessica Rosenfeld,

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Chloe Roskilly, and Luke Sunderland, who have kept me on my toes, frequently delighting me with their insights and questions. During much of the time I was working on this book, I carried a heavy administrative load: Rita Pannen, David Ricks, Christine Saunders, and Christine Theo, albeit in different ways, often made this load seem lighter with their thoughtful, creative, and humane approach to university administration and management. Also, without the study leave granted me by King’s College London this book would still be unfinished: I count myself fortunate indeed to work in such a supportive institution. Liz Guild has been my constant interlocutor on psychoanalysis as well as a dear friend: I cannot thank her enough for all her help. Elizabeth Edwards, Joël Gouget, Joan Haahr, Nick Harrison, and Phil Levy have likewise been stalwart friends, whose intellectual probity and compassion I can only hope to emulate. Mark Treharne read the entire manuscript and as ever offered invaluable reassurance. Finally, I would like to thank my sister Vanessa Gaunt, my step-mother Belinda Graham, and my aunt Monette Gaunt for their love and support. I should like to dedicate this book to them, and also to my nephew, the budding Egyptologist Titus Gaunt: though but a boy, he loves the past and realizes its importance. S.G. London May 2005

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Contents Illustration A Note on Quotations and Translations Introduction

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1. Love’s Martyrdom and the Ethical Subject

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2. To Die For: The Sovereign Power of the Lady in Troubadour Lyric

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3. The Deadly Secrets of the Heart: The Chastelaine de Vergy and the Castelain de Couci

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4. Between Two (or More) Deaths: Tristan, Lancelot, Cligès

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5. Talking the Talk/Walking the Walk: Gendering Death

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6. The Queer Look of Love: Narcissus, Bel Vezer, Galehaut

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Conclusion Bibliography Index

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Illustration Fig. 1. Lancelot, Guenevere, and Galehaut in the queen’s chamber. British Library Add. MS 10293, fo. 156. By permission of the British Library

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A Note on Quotations and Translations The source of all quotations can be found in the bibliography. All translations of quotations from medieval and modern texts are my own. To those who might wish to follow up quotations from modern theorists in published English translations, I apologize, but I decided not to use any published translations for a variety of reasons. Firstly, as the argument of this book depends to a large extent on the interpretation of some difficult and challenging texts (medieval and modern) which I was reading in the original language, I thought it better to be explicit about how I myself understand the extracts I quote, rather than mediate my comments through some one else’s understanding. Secondly, published translations into English are not available for all the texts I discuss and quote from, and I thought it better to be consistent. Finally, including references to translations as well as to original sources would have made an already extensive bibliography even more cumbersome. With the exception of recent translations of Agamben’s work into English, I have not consulted the translations that are available, and I must therefore take full responsibility for any translation errors. There is no scholarly consensus on the spelling of some medieval names. When this is the case, I have adopted the spelling of the edition I used, but then also tried to follow the spelling of other scholars when citing them or the titles of their works, hence some apparent inconsistencies. I adopted the strictly correct spelling Guillem de Cabestanh for this Catalan troubadour’s name, but elsewhere (for the troubadour Guilhem IX or for the character in Flamenca) retained the more usual Occitan spelling.

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Introduction

Love, Religion, Ethics In one of the most widely disseminated lyrics of the early troubadour tradition (‘Lanquan li jorn’), presumably in the mid to late 1140s, Jaufre Rudel, Prince of Blaye, sang of his celebrated amor de lonh, or distant love, in the following terms: Ben tenc lo Senhor per verai per qu’ieu veirai l’amor de lonh; mas per un ben que m’en eschai n’ai dos mals, quar tan m’es de lonh. Ai! car me fos lai pelegris, si que mos fustz e mos tapis fos pels sieus belhs huelhs remiratz! (Jaufre Rudel 1985: IV, 29–35) (I indeed consider God to be true, which is why I will see my distant love; but for every good thing that befalls me, I suffer two bad things, because of this distance. Alas! If only I could be a pilgrim there, so that my staff and my pilgrim’s mat might be gazed upon by her beautiful eyes.)

Thus, at the very beginnings of what we now call courtly literature, Jaufre evokes his faith in God as a guarantor of his being able to see his distant love. Of course, the precise referent of the amor de lonh is unclear and no doubt deliberately so. The song was probably composed at about the time of the Second Crusade and critics have wondered whether Jaufre was alluding to a woman (and if so whether she is real or fictional), or whether the amor de lonh represents social distance, the Virgin Mary, God, or indeed the Holy Land?¹ The poem is famously susceptible to different readings, but at the very least one can say that religion and worldly love inflect each other in this poetic discourse. Furthermore, Jaufre’s imbrication of love and religion is more far-reaching than a straightforward appeal to God for help with his love interests: in the second half of the stanza, Jaufre ¹ For a concise recent summary of the copious critical tradition, see Lazzerini (2001: 54–66, with a select bibliography at 240–1). As Lazzerini suggests, Jaufre’s poetry is intrinsically indeterminate (60–1).

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expresses his longing to be a pilgrim, only the implicit end-point of his pilgrimage is not a holy relic or sacred place, therefore a mediated encounter with God, but rather, the end-point is apparently his lady. The poet’s metaphor (being a ‘pilgrim’) implicitly puts his lady in the place of God, and this stanza thereby encapsulates the ambiguity that makes some of Jaufre’s songs so difficult to interpret decisively. Does the metaphor of being a ‘pilgrim’ deploy religious imagery to enhance the value of his distant love (whatever this is), or is erotic language (for example being gazed upon by ‘her beautiful eyes’) used metaphorically rather to enhance the value of a spiritual quest?² From the outset, then, courtly writers colour their language and imagery with religious overtones, but it is nonetheless highly significant that from the outset, they also seem to do so knowingly and often questioningly. For example, just a few decades after Jaufre composed ‘Lanquan li jorn’, possibly in or shortly after 1177, Chrétien de Troyes describes, in his Chevalier de la Charrette, the much anticipated but much delayed first erotic encounter between Lancelot and Guenevere as follows: Et puis vint au lit la reïne, Si l’aore et se li ancline, Car an nul cors saint ne croit tant. (Chrétien de Troyes 1992: 4651–3) (And so he came to the queen’s bed and he worships and bows down before her, for there are no holy relics in which he puts more faith.)

The religious overtones that are deployed in the portrayal of Lancelot’s love have been palpable at various points in the text before this: consider lines 410–13, which graphically evoke violent martyrdom, or lines 1460–79, which talk of worship. What is particularly telling here is the explicit nature of the narrator’s comment and the consequent implied comparison between Lancelot’s reverence for Guenevere’s body and his reverence for holy relics.³ Critics have responded at length and repeatedly ² For an extended analysis of the pilgrim metaphor in Jaufre, its origin, function and subsequent influence, see Bologna and Fassò (1991), who see Jaufre’s use of the metaphor as a response to Guilhem IX’s notorious ‘red cat’ poem (1973: V), in which he disguises himself as a pilgrim in order to receive the hospitality and sexual favours of two women. Bologna and Fassò see Jaufre’s adoption of the metaphor in response to Guilhem as a defining moment in the development of courtly literature; they also suggest (tentatively and on purely literary grounds) a much earlier date for Jaufre’s lyric output (1120s). ³ See particularly Cazelles (1991: 45–6) and Gaunt (1995: 96–7) for discussion of these lines.

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to Chrétien’s implicit invitation to reflect upon the nature of Lancelot and Guenevere’s love (among other interpretative problems in the text),⁴ and here this invitation becomes quite explicit, raising a number of important procedural and ethical questions. Do courtly lovers make love into a religion? Or, more accurately, into a risky simulacrum of religion? What is the value of the religious metaphors used to describe love in courtly texts? How do these metaphors reflect on those that use them? Do they simply enhance the value of the love? Or do they perhaps show it up to be inherently problematic, if not to say ethically flawed, because of the inappropriate deployment of religious language and imagery? As the courtly tradition advances into the thirteenth century, writers playing on the portrayal of love in religious terms increasingly abandon the gently mocking and questioning ironic tone that characterizes the work of Chrétien in favour of a far more extravagant irony that sometimes verges on camp. I shall content myself here with two agreeably flamboyant examples, from Flamenca and the Roman de la Rose. In Flamenca, an Occitan romance, probably composed shortly after 1263, the hero, Guilhem, disguises himself as a clerk in order to engineer encounters with Flamenca, the lady he has loved from afar à la Jaufre Rudel: this ruse is necessary because Flamenca’s husband, Archimbaut, has become so jealous that the only men she sees are the priests who serve her communion. But this only gives Guilhem and Flamenca the opportunity to exchange at most two words each time she goes to church, and so, in an extended episode of the romance, they chat each other up, literally at the altar, through a dialogue strung out over months (to wit: ‘Ailas!’, ‘Que plans?’; ‘Alas!’, ‘Why do you lament?’ and so on). Each prepares his or her next contribution to the exchange meticulously and, as they build the dialogue, initiated readers may gradually realize that they are mimicking and partially reconstructing a famous early troubadour lyric from the 1150s or 60s by Peire Rogier (1976: VI), which is constructed as a dialogue between the poet and Love. But Peire’s ethereal dialogue with Love is displaced in Flamenca, as the lovers’ exchange gathers pace, by their mundane concern to arrange a private meeting at the local bath-house, with predictable consequences. Throughout this hilarious episode, the narrator does not miss an opportunity to stress the lovers’ location in Church and the setting of their courtship in the context of a religious ceremony. As Helen Solterer has argued (1985a), the text derives much of its ambiguity and humour from the splicing together of ⁴ On the hermeneutic challenge of the Charrette, see in particular Bruckner (1986).

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poetic, amorous, and religious elements. Thus, Guilhem kisses a Psalter repeatedly because Flamenca has previously kissed it (Flamenca 1988: 2595–7), while she and her ladies in waiting, on the other hand, later substitute a courtly romance (Floire et Blanchefleur) for a Psalter when they re-enact Guilhem’s initial approach to Flamenca in private (4477). The lovers’ behaviour undoubtedly verges on the sacrilegious. Indeed, with clear echoes of Jaufre Rudel, Guilhem is described as ‘un estrainz pellegris’ (2042: ‘a strange pilgrim’) and the narrator comments: ‘Fraire Guillems s’apataris | e per si dons a Dieu servis’ (3817–18: ‘Brother William becomes a false friar and has served God on account of his lady’).⁵ But the text remains elegantly poised between ironic disapproval and admiring amusement. Flamenca is a marginal text: not only is it Occitan, it survives in just one fragmentary manuscript and there is no evidence that it had a broader dissemination. The same cannot be said of the Roman de la Rose, which survives in over 300 manuscripts, is translated (or recast) from French into a number of other European languages (including English and Italian), and has a discernible influence on countless subsequent texts. As Jean de Meun’s sprawling continuation (probably composed c.1270) of Guillaume de Lorris’s original 4000-line poem (composed c.1225) reaches its allegorical climax, Amant (the lover), aided by Love’s army, approaches a ‘sanctuary’ in which he at last finds his love object (a rose): again like Jaufre Rudel, he describes himself as a ‘bons pelerins’ (1966–70: 21317: ‘good pilgrim’), noting that this final stage of his pelerinage is aided by his carrying a pilgrim’s staff that is ‘roide et fort’ (21324: ‘stiff and sturdy’). As potentially obscene metaphors proliferate, the precise nature of what is being described is at one and the same time difficult to grasp, yet all too easy to imagine: Tout mon hernois tel con jou port se porter le puis jusqu’ou port, voudrai au reliques touchier, se je l’en puis tant aprouchier . . . m’agenoillai san demourer, car mout oi grant fain d’aourer le biau saintuaire honorable de queur devost et piteable . . . de l’ymage lors m’apressai ⁵ The meaning of apatarir se is disputed; the verb may connote heresy, certainly hypocrisy. See Flamenca (1988: 443 n. 41).

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que du saintuaire pres sai; mout la baisai devostement. (21553–6; 21561–4; 21571–3) (I wanted all the equipment I was carrying, if I was able to hold it up until I reached my destination, to touch the relics if I could get that close . . . I knelt without further ado, for I hungered to worship the honorable and beautiful sanctuary with a devout and piteous heart . . . and so I drew near to the statue that I knew to be near to the sanctuary and kissed it very devoutly.)

The repeated references to ‘the sanctuary’ and the use of terms such as devost/devostement, saintuaire, ymage, and reliques give the vocabulary an unmistakable religious flavour. Yet it is clear that a sexual act is being described. Indeed, the equivocation is nothing short of riotous: in a celebrated passage earlier in the poem, the allegorical figure Raison had lectured Amant on the arbitrary nature of the sign after he objected to her using the word coilles (‘balls’). She chooses as her illustrative example to set against coilles the word reliques: if the word for coilles were in fact reliques and vice versa then, she argues, everyone would be off kissing coilles in church, but shocked by the word reliques (7007–106). The spectacle at the end of the poem of touching, and kissing reliques thus in this poem disconcertingly, but hilariously, evokes the spectre of gay oral sex (the lover kissing balls) at a point of supposed heterosexual intensity. To do so through a religious metaphor only makes the inference all the more scandalous.⁶ As these examples suggest, the use in courtly literature of religious imagery and metaphors is ubiquitous, constant, and deliberate throughout the Middle Ages. Moreover, the extravagant humour and irony of my later, thirteenth-century examples should not be taken to indicate that courtly writers and their readers no longer took religious metaphors and images seriously. On the contrary, making the use of religious metaphors and images the butt of a joke in itself implies that such conventions still had currency. In any case, alongside the irony and humour that some medieval writers lavish on the use of religious language and imagery in love literature, we find an equally strong tendency to take the tradition very seriously, to see love as the source of moral and spiritual improvement, to deify implicitly the love object, to make love, in other words, into a quasi-religion. For many years, critics of medieval literature were content to read courtly texts more or less on their own terms, taking religious metaphors ⁶ On Jean’s troublesome use of allegory to underscore sexual ambivalence, see Gaunt (1998a).

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and images at face value. For example, in the nineteenth century, Gaston Paris (1883) famously offered an idealizing definition of amour courtois, a term he himself coined, on the basis of Lancelot’s worship of Guenevere. This was to set the tone of medieval scholarship for years to come. Much post-World War II scholarship, however, has been devoted to what we would now call the demystification of courtly literature. Thus, formalist and structuralist criticism showed the primacy of formal ornamentation in courtly texts; Marxist critics uncovered the social tensions underscoring much courtly literature; similarly, feminist critics analysed courtly literature’s pernicious representation of women and its construction of masculinity; practitioners of deconstruction brought out the penchant of courtly texts to foreground the play of the signifier and their inherent irony; psychoanalytic critics paid attention to the individual and collective unconscious that breaks through the symbolic order as inscribed by courtly literature; queer critics have recently unmasked the homosocial nature of courtly desire and therefore also its queer potential. All such approaches look beyond the ostensible meaning of the text, below the semantic surface, as it were, to uncover hidden or partially occluded structures and meanings. They tend, therefore, to pay scant attention to the manifest content of courtly texts—and therefore to the issues and values that preoccupied earlier criticism—or, when they do so, it is to imply that manifest content is but superstructure, a screen to mask the actual, but implicit or underlying, content or structure. The obvious and well-documented influence of Ovid on medieval love literature offers some justification for these interpretative strategies:⁷ Love and writing about love were understood as an elaborate intellectual game, in which love and writing about love were displays of masculine competitiveness and intellectual virtuosity. Indeed, historical research has suggested strongly that the phenomenon we know as ‘courtly love’ seems to have had little basis in reality and largely to have been a fictional and textual conceit.⁸ However, the manifest or literal content of a text can never be simply a transparent screen enabling the reader to see through to what matters, and modern scholarship has often been so concerned to unearth concealed meaning and underlying structure that the ostensible or literal meaning of medieval texts has frequently been occluded or pushed aside in modern readings, by scholars keen to accrue symbolic capital through feats of intellectual virtuosity that necessarily invest in hermeneutic ⁷ On which see esp. Allen (1992: 38–58).

⁸ See esp. Benton (1968).

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complexity.⁹ I have no wish to undervalue interpretation and politically motivated critical reading of medieval texts. Indeed, I hope that this book demonstrates an on-going commitment both to the hermeneutic complexity of medieval texts and also to the value of reading them in a politically informed manner. But should our ability and wish to demystify convincingly medieval discourses which, in some respects, we find antipathetic (for example because we are atheists, feminists, or gay, and the discourses in question are religious, misogynous or homophobic) prevent us from seeking a rigorous way of talking about the affects of texts that clearly had enormous power to move (as well as to amuse or stimulate thought), precisely as a means of understanding why this should be so? Are we justified in reading primarily for ironic displacements in medieval texts, or should we not also to some extent at least take discourses about ‘love’ in medieval texts at face value, as scholars of earlier generations often did? Why is love in courtly texts made analogous to a religion? Does this not imply a ‘serious’ as well as an ironic mind-set? What is the import of the use of Christian imagery in erotic contexts, and what is its affective value? What did fictional scenarios in which lovers abased themselves before their ladies and worshipped them as quasi-deities mean to medieval readers and listeners?¹⁰ One consequence of taking religious imagery and language in medieval love literature seriously is that, taken at face value, they lend ethical seriousness to love, in that they impute to those subject to love a set of principles which determines right and wrong behaviour and feelings, while offering concurrently a means of spiritual improvement and salvation.¹¹ The point of this book will be to examine what is at stake in the apparent ethical seriousness that the use of religious vocabulary and imagery lends to love in courtly texts, and it will do so, in particular, by examining one central motif, the association of love and death. ⁹ On medievalists’ stake in symbolic/ intellectual capital, see Gaunt and Kay (1997). The investment of one strand of modern scholarship in the multivalence of medieval literary texts contrasts, of course, with the more nostalgic view taken by many earlier scholars and some postwar scholars according to which medieval texts are more straightforward than modern texts since they belonged to a period of innocence and more homogeneous beliefs. ¹⁰ For further discussion of the disciplinary and institutional issues raised by medieval studies’ recent proclivity for demystification, see Gaunt (2001a: 479–81). ¹¹ This is of course a very basic definition of ethics. But by ethics I understand not simply the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, but also the means of elaborating a system for making such distinctions. My basic approach to ethics is Lacanian: see Chs. 1 and 2 for elaboration.

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My starting point and main point of focus in this will be one extremely common borrowing from religious vocabulary in the courtly lexis, martire/martiri. We will encounter many examples of this word-group in Old French and medieval Occitan courtly texts during the course of this book, but here is just one example from a late twelfth-century troubadour by way of a taster: Coras qe.m des benananssa, Amors, ni q’en fos jauzire, ara.m ten sa trencan lanssa al cor, de qe.m vol aucire— mas tant m’auci ab bel martire, q’ieu.l perdon ma mort franchamen; bella dompn’ ab gai cors plazen, per vos plaing e per vos sospire, e ren mas ma mort non aten; pero si cum vos platz m’es gen! (Gaucelm Faidit 1965: XXXIX, 1–10) (However much good he gave and however joyful he made me, Love now has his sharpest of lances—with which he wishes to kill me—against my heart. But he kills me with such sweet martyrdom that I willingly forgive him my death. Fair lady, with your gay and pleasing body, I lament and sigh on your account, and expect nothing but my death; but since this pleases you, this delights me!)

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Gaucelm Faidit submits himself completely to Love and his lady’s desire here, even if both in fact want him dead. Indeed, he claims that dying will be a pleasure if this is what his lady wants and he describes his ‘martyrdom’ as bel. Now martire and its cognates do not necessarily always denote martyrdom in the religious sense: the word can mean suffering generally. But examples in Old French and Occitan nonetheless indicate that the primary meaning is religious (von Wartburg 1925–: vi.1, 394–7), which in turn suggests, at the very least, religious overtones whenever the word is used. In this instance, these are enhanced by the implicit evocation of Longinus piercing Christ’s side with his lance, by the ‘martyr’ forgiving his tormenter (as is often the case in hagiography), and by his enthusiastic submission to the will of the one to whom he offers his sacrifice. A lover welcoming death—like a religious martyr—is a common motif in courtly love literature even when the word martire is not used. Here is an almost random example from the near-contemporary Northern

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French trouvère, the Castelain de Couci: Je ne di pas que je face folage, Nes se pour li me devoie morir, Qu’el mont ne truis si bele ne si sage Ne nule riens n’est tant a mon plesir. Mult aim mes euz qui me firent choisir: Lués que la vi, li lessai en ostage Mon cuer qui puis i a fet long estage, Ne jamés jor ne l’en quier departir. (‘La douce voiz’, 25–32, cited from Rosenberg and Tischler 1981: 210) (I do not say I am foolish, even if I were expected to die for her, for I find no other so fair nor so wise elsewhere, nor would any other thing please me more. I love my eyes, since they made me choose her: since I saw her, I have left my heart as hostage with her, and from that moment it has served a long sentence from which I never wish to remove it.) IV

Here the lover once again takes pleasure in dying, provided he is doing his lady’s will and it is ambiguous as to whether the ‘thing’ that gives him so much pleasure in line 28 is his lady (the subject of the previous line), or morir (from the line before). Courtly lyrics such as these (as well as most courtly romances) focus on desire, but they are steeped in a textual culture that stems as much from the Church as it does from the profane environment of the court, and therefore from a tradition of specifically Christian writing, in that the techniques of self-reflexive examination that characterize many courtly texts derive most obviously from clerical culture and a tradition of Christian writing inaugurated by Augustine. A good deal of recent research stresses the crucial involvement of clerical culture in the emergence of courtly culture, even locating the emergence of ‘courtliness’ in some areas of Europe in Episcopal rather than ‘secular’ courts.¹² And as Gerald Bond and others have suggested, this means that in courtly literature the category we call the ‘secular’ has, as he puts it, ‘fuzzy edges’.¹³ Thinking about love and religion in courtly literature—in this instance about martyrdom in and for love—is one way (among others) of thinking about what is at stake on these ‘fuzzy edges’ between the sacred and the ¹² See e.g. Bond (1995) and Kay (1996); on episcopal courts, see also Jaeger (1985). ¹³ See Bond (1995: 3-4); also Lazzerini (2001: 79), who argues that early troubadour lyric challenges the distinctions we take for granted ‘between sacred and profane, between spirituality and Eros’.

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secular, but understanding how and why these edges become less fuzzy and more defined as time goes by is also a matter of crucial importance to our understanding of the history of Western European culture and thought.

This Book This book will seek to explore what is at stake in the ubiquitous association of love with death in medieval courtly literature. In order to focus on a reasonably coherent body of material (chronologically and geographically), I shall confine my inquiry to twelfth- and thirteenth-century texts written in Old French and Occitan: restricting the scope of the book in this way means it considers the most influential literary traditions of the early years of courtly culture, but clearly there is room for further research in other literary traditions, in the later Middle Ages, and in the early modern period. I should also stress that my concern is not with the experience or representation of death in the real world, but rather with the evocation of death as a consequence of being in love in fictional and imaginary accounts of love, thus with the meaning and symbolic value of representations of death in texts about love.¹⁴ One consequence of courtly literature’s representation of love as a form of sacrifice or martyrdom is, I shall suggest in Chapter 1, the elaboration of an ethics of desire, an ethics, therefore, grounded in human corporeality and sexuality. Of course, spiritual love is also grounded in the body—Christ was after all made flesh—but courtly literature appropriates and incorporates models of sacrifice and desire associated with religious discourse and practices to produce an alternative ethical space in which salvation and redemption may be sought (albeit hopelessly, erroneously, or sinfully) through a passionate attachment to another human being, rather than to God. My hypothesis is that this move may be far-reaching indeed, in that through the ethics of desire, the ‘fuzzy edges’ between the ‘secular’ and the spiritual may start eventually to become more defined. This is not the first book to examine the association of love and death in medieval literature, and courtly literature’s appropriation of religious imagery. Denis de Rougement’s premise in his hugely influential L’Amour et l’Occident, first published in 1939, with a second edition in 1956, ¹⁴ On the experience and representation of dying in the Middle Ages, see Ariès (1975, esp. 32–45), and Binski (1996).

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was that the Tristan legend, which is his main focus, indicated that ‘L’amour-passion glorifié par le mythe fut réellement au douzième siècle, une RELIGION dans toute la force de ce terme’ (118: ‘In the twelfth century, the passionate love glorified by the myth was in fact a RELIGION in every sense of the term’). He was also attuned to the sacrificial nature of love in the Tristan story: ‘Nous savons, par la fin du mythe, que la passion est une ascèse. Elle s’oppose à la vie terrestre d’une manière d’autant plus efficace qu’elle prend la forme du désir, et que ce désir, à son tour, se déguise en fatalité’ (44: ‘We know, because of the end of the story, that passion is a form of ascesis. Passion is not compatible with worldly life and this is all the more effective in that passion and desire become indistinguishable, and desire, in turn, is disguised as fatality’). De Rougemont has a great deal of interest to say about the power and import of the Tristan story’s paradigmatic association of love and death. However, his sweeping account of love in the Western world has, not surprisingly, remained more influential among non-medievalists than among medievalists: not only does he offer a far more idealized, and idealizing, view of love as a source of redemption and hope in the Middle Ages than most medievalists— attuned as we are these days to the irony and humour of so many medieval texts—would now be willing to accept; he also argues, (impressionistically and without any real historical or textual justification), that the troubadours’ view of love (and through the troubadours’ influence, the view of love adopted by generations of subsequent courtly writers throughout Europe), was strongly influenced and inspired by the Cathar heretics in Occitania. The view of love that emerges from medieval literature is in fact a lot less homogeneous than a writer like de Rougemont suggests: as we have already seen, if some writers idealize love, others call such idealization into question and sometimes the same writer will do both. Furthermore, there is no firm evidence of Catharism as an established sect in Occitania until late in the twelfth century and there is nothing to suggest that early troubadours were anything other than orthodox in the religious sphere. However, I would suggest that de Rougement has retained his popularity among cultural historians and literary critics of post-medieval periods because the issues he addresses are so important: why, once the model of ‘courtly love’ has been established in the twelfth century, is love seen in ethical terms and so strongly coloured by ascesis and sacrifice? The medieval preoccupation with the association between love and death survives well beyond the Middle Ages and remains a compelling paradigm to the present day: as witness stories as disparate as Romeo and Juliet, La Princesse de Clèves, Les Liaisons dangereuses,

12

Introduction

Wuthering Heights, La Traviata, Death in Venice, West Side Story, Empire of the Senses, Titanic.¹⁵ De Rougemont wrote, of course, in a different intellectual and theoretical climate. The influence of Freud on his work is clear and acknowledged. He grapples with the inevitability of world war and the rise of Fascism, suggesting obliquely that they result from sublation of the quest for amour-passion, which he thought was the driving force for the majority of Westerners. Parallels with contemporary writers and thinkers whose work he surely knew, such as Bataille and possibly even Lacan, or equally clear reactions to others, such as Sartre, intrigue, but are never fully developed. Moreover, since de Rougement wrote L’Amour et l’Occident, other philosophical and theoretical writers have grappled— either directly or by implication—with precisely the problems which preoccupied him. My own theoretical points of references will be Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, though I will also draw substantially on commentators on their work, such as Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, as well as on other philosophers of death, such as Giorgio Agamben and Georges Bataille. There are two main reasons why I wish to filter de Rougemont’s concerns with love, death, and religion through the intellectual models offered by Lacanian psychoanalysis. Firstly, Lacan offers a theory of the subject grounded in both desire and renunciation, while using both Christian thinking and courtly love as paradigmatic examples, making connections between the two and clearly claiming the relevance of both to modern subjectivity: of all the major European thinkers of the twentieth century, Lacan was thus perhaps the one who took most account of medieval culture and accorded it most importance in modern Western civilization. Secondly, Lacan’s theory of the subject is also a theory of intersubjectivity, of how the subject is haunted by, indeed constructed through, the language of other subjects, and their desires, of how, in other ¹⁵ Jonathan Dollimore has recently charted the persistence of the association of love and death in Western culture and also stressed the importance of de Rougemont’s analysis (1998: 65–7). However, Dollimore’s account is in my view at one and the same time highly suggestive, yet also flawed. On the one hand, he argues for the centrality of the Tristan story (and therefore presumably of the Middle Ages); on the other he repeatedly places the early modern period at the heart of his own account of love and death in European culture. If, on the one hand he concedes that the ‘crisis of subjectivity’ inscribed by the association of love and death ‘was present at the inception of individualism in early Christianity’ (91), on the other, this crisis is implicitly seen as more significant in the early modern, modern and post-modern periods. Furthermore, the association of love and death, in Dollimore’s account, marks above all else ‘a pernicious mutability’ (91) and Dollimore’s account is ultimately therefore strongly inflected by rather traditional humanist values.

Introduction

13

words, we relate to each other. Literary texts, whether they be medieval, modern, or from any other period, necessarily inscribe relations between people in that they offer representations or models to readers or listeners of how people live, how people like to see themselves, how people might imagine other peoples or other worlds, and so on. Literature, in other words, may give the modern reader—still steeped in expectations derived from Romanticism whatever the impact of postmodernism—the illusion of being an intensely private experience, but it is clearly a primary means for the language of others to penetrate the literate consciousness. It is profoundly intersubjective.¹⁶ My use of Derrida, on the other hand, stems from the importance he attributes to ascesis in the elaboration of Western ethics and also from the epistemological equivocation he believes surrounds the resulting ethical discourses in Western culture: ethics, for Derrida, entail secrecy (which is also, of course, an important theme in courtly literature), so to speak of ethics, to claim an ethical position, is to undermine the very grounds on which one is hoping to stand. Throughout this book, discussion and close readings of medieval courtly texts will be interspersed with the discussion and exposition of modern theory. On the one hand, I choose to proceed through close reading because I wish to stick as closely as possible to specific examples, and because this is first and foremost a book about the way in which a particular motif and particular vocabulary operate rhetorically; in other words a book about how a particular linguistic configuration works. On the other, I offer expositions of the theoretical writers upon whom I draw, partly because I think the central paradigms on which my arguments rely may not be familiar to all readers, and partly because these are often complex, to many even baffling, and I therefore feel it is important to explain exactly how I understand them. I do not thereby intend to imply a superimposition of one discourse upon another, as if the naivety of the former is automatically clarified and explained by the latter. On the contrary, I believe that the two traditions have similar preoccupations (with love and sexuality, with ethics, with sacrifice and ascesis), and that in some instances light may be cast upon the blindspots of modern theory by the medieval texts which, in many respects, inaugurate the inscription of the history of modern subjectivity, modern sexuality, modern thinking ¹⁶ See also Jameson’s highly influential work The Political Unconscious (1981: 1–101). My use of a politically informed version of Lacanian psychoanalysis marks the strongest difference between my approach to love and death and Jonathan Dollimore’s; see the previous note.

14

Introduction

about ethics. This is because whereas I assume that both traditions are committed to thinking about the theoretical paradigms they explore, medieval culture’s predilection for questioning through humour and irony can, in some circumstances at least, make it more self-aware, or perhaps it would be better to say self-aware in different ways, and can give it more critical distance than modern theory (where humour, irony, and certainly self-irony can sometimes seem in short supply, or where play may become a form of display and mastery). The commitment, in the medieval texts I am examining, to the exploration of ideas through story-telling and fiction can also enable a critical displacement that is rarely possible in the more magisterial context of modern theoretical discourse. That courtly literature is committed to theoretical reflection seems indisputable to me: the constant use of allegory and metaphor means that courtly writers are always dealing in abstractions and their constant recourse to intertextuality and irony means that their writing is always framed interrogatively, always instantiating a metatextual and reflective—and therefore always potentially ethical—voice. The corpus of twelfth- and thirteenth-century texts I discuss may at first blush, and according to traditional literary canons, seem historically and stylistically somewhat disparate: troubadour and trouvère lyric together with various vidas and razos, a range of prose and verse romances devoted to Lancelot and Tristan, La Chastelaine de Vergy, Le Castelain de Couci, Marie de France’s Lais, texts about Narcissus. However, as D’Arco Silvio Avalle (1975: 97–121) demonstrated magisterially, this corpus of texts is bound together in a tight and intricate intertextual web of citation and imitation woven principally around the association of love with death. And as Mario Mancini has argued (2004: 84–8), this corpus was very much recognizable as such for medieval readers. This book consists of six chapters. I have tried to ensure that each may be read as a self-contained essay, but this is not a collection of essays and there is a cumulative argument. The first two chapters are devoted to different aspects of troubadour poetry, and therefore are concerned with what is generally considered to be the starting point of courtly culture. Chapter 1 will also elaborate many of the theoretical premises that will underscore the entire book, even if some will be further developed in subsequent chapters. Whereas Chapter 1 will consider how one exemplary troubadour claims the position of the martyr or victim of sacrifice for himself in order to claim ethical superiority, Chapter 2 will examine how some troubadours use this position in order to impose an ethical system of their own making on the lady whom they address. Chapter 3 moves the

Introduction

15

focus from lyric to romance, but by concentrating on two narrative texts that overtly interact with the lyric tradition, I hope to outline how courtly lyric and courtly romance may offer different perspectives on love’s martyrdom, and how romance enables some new developments. If some of the texts I will examine in the last three chapters of this book play less overtly on the religious resonance of dying for love than do those examined in the first three, they are all nonetheless underscored by the ethics of desire and love’s martyrdom established in troubadour lyric. Chapter 4 is devoted to perhaps the Middle Ages’ most celebrated martyrs to love— Tristan and Iseult—and to responses to texts about them. Chapters 5 and 6 address questions of gender and sexuality: do women die differently from men and is the motif of dying for love necessarily always one that fits a straight, heterosexual model of love? Whereas in the first three chapters, my main inspiration in Lacan’s work is his middle period (in particular Seminars 7, 8, and 11), in these last two chapters I draw increasingly on Lacan’s later work, and in particular Encore (Seminar 20). In the conclusion I will endeavour to draw the various strands of this book together, but also to look forward briefly from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to comment on how some of the textual traditions I examine impact upon subsequent European culture. In using psychoanalytic theory to analyse medieval texts, I am conscious of following in an illustrious tradition and I should therefore record a general debt to the psycho-analytically informed work of R. Howard Bloch, William Burgwinkle, Aranye L. O. Fradenburg, Miranda Griffin, Jean-Charles Huchet, Sylvia Huot, and Sarah Kay that exceeds specific citation.

1 Love’s Martyrdom and the Ethical Subject Le sacrifice signifie que, dans l’objet de nos désirs, nous essayons de trouver le témoignage de la présence du désir de cet Autre que j’appelle ici le Dieu obscur. (Lacan 1990: 306) (Sacrifice means that we try to find, in the object of our desires, proof of the presence of the desire of/for that Other which I shall call here the dark God.)

I begin with the troubadours because it is in their poetry that the phenomenon often referred to as ‘courtly love’ begins. My particular concern in this chapter will be with the image of sacrifice in the work of one key and exemplary early troubadour whose work undoubtedly shaped the subsequent tradition decisively, Bernart de Ventadorn (active c.1147–c.1170).¹ As we shall see, Bernart’s poetry derives much of its emotional appeal from the suggestion that love is a form of martyrdom. In likening suffering in love to martyrdom, Benart uses vocabulary and images from the religious sphere in order to construct his own particular representation of love. There has been a range of responses to the troubadours’ use of religious imagery and vocabulary, as there has been to that of their successors in the broader European context. On the one hand, for example, one influential critic states simply ‘The mode of fin’amor extolled by the troubadours is This chapter is based on Gaunt (2001a). The material was also the basis of papers given at the International Courtly Literature Society Conference at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, University College and Royal Holloway University of London, and the University of Bristol in 1998–9. I would like to thank audiences present on those occasions for their helpful questions. ¹ For Bernart’s seminal role in the troubadour tradition, see e.g. Topsfield (1975: ch. 4 passim, and more particularly 111): ‘The poet who was most appreciated and imitated abroad, especially in Northern France, was Bernart de Ventadorn, archetype of the courtly troubadour.’

Love’s Martyrdom

17

conceived in a purely secular framework’ (Lazar 1995: 74). Thus, for Moshé Lazar, God is invoked by twelfth-century troubadours only to enlist His help in the poet’s invariably adulterous and sensuous project: only in the thirteenth century do courtly and devotional texts begin to influence each other, but this influence works in his view in one direction only, with devotional lyrics borrowing the images and lexis of the profane tradition. But other critics have been more sensitive to the perplexing interplay of registers in courtly poetry. For example, Henri-Irénée Marrou—author of what is still one of the best general introductions to the troubadours—says ‘ce culte de la dame, élevée si haut qu’elle en devient, momentanément inaccessible, revêt facilement un aspect quasi religieux. On comprend que certains en soient venus à se demander si cet amour s’adresse à une femme réelle, s’il s’agit encore d’un amour humain’ (1971: 162: ‘this cult of the lady, exalted to such an extent that she becomes because of this, momentarily inaccessible, quickly takes on an almost religious flavour. One can well understand why some people have ended up asking themselves if this love concerns a real woman, if the love in question is still a human love’). Marrou is quite right to approach the question interrogatively: the general tone of many lyrics is indeed ‘almost’ religious and we are not told that the love of which many troubadours sing is more than a ‘human love’; the use of religious images and vocabulary leads us rather to ask ourselves if this is the case. The interplay of registers in the courtly canso is thus more complex than Lazar implies, and perhaps the real problem in his approach is his implicit belief in ‘a purely secular framework’. Is anything ‘purely secular’ in the Middle Ages? Our own grounding in secular social structures and ethics perhaps makes it difficult for us to grasp that the opposition we take for granted between secular and ecclesiastic, between sacred and profane, may simply not be operative within medieval society. To illustrate this point, I will examine briefly the so-called feudal metaphor. Frequently, a troubadour will talk of himself as his lady’s ‘man’ or ‘liege man’, he pledges her faith and in some instances evokes the homage ceremony: v

Domna, ·l genzer c’anc nasques e la melher qu’eu anc vis, mas jonchas estau aclis, a genolhos et en pes, el vostre franc senhoratge; encar me detz per prezen franchamen un cortes gatge

18

Love’s Martyrdom —mas no·us aus dire cal fo— c’adoutz me vostra preizo.

vi

Domna, vos am finamen, franchamen, de bo coratge, e per vostr’ om me razo, qui·m demanda de cui so. (Bernart de Ventadorn 1966: XXXVII, 37–49) (Lady, the fairest ever born and the best I ever saw, I bow down before you with my hands together, on my knees and on my feet, in your gracious service; give me now, generously and openly a courtly gift—but I dare not say which one— which would make the prison you keep me in sweeter. Lady, I love you truly, freely, and in good faith, and I declare myself to be your man whoever asks me to whom I belong.)

Such references, common in some troubadours, are thought to evoke the homage ceremony in which a ‘vassal’ or ‘man’ pledges faith to his lord, going down on his knees with his hands together. The uniformity, ubiquity, and value of this ‘ceremony’ as an historical practice have been challenged in recent years by historians (see Reynolds 1994), but representations of such acts of homage are common in literary texts. For one of the most influential post-war writers on medieval French and Occitan literature, Erich Köhler, the value of the so-called feudal metaphor is clear: the desire that courtly poets articulate for their ladies is as much a desire for their social status as it is for their bodies. Courtly poetry therefore mediates a desire that for Köhler is primarily social, and therefore, one may infer, ‘secular’, in that images and gestures such as those in the stanzas I have just quoted are read by him exclusively in relation to social hierarchies.² But the posture and gestures Bernart describes here are those of prayer as well as those of homage.³ My point is not that prayer rather than homage is at issue here. It is rather that homage itself cannot be viewed as an entirely secular affair since it is overdetermined by sacred discourses, practices, and postures. The word for God and the word for the figure higher up in the social hierarchy is often the same: senhor in ² Köhler’s most influential essay is perhaps ‘Observations historiques et sociologiques’ (1964). His essays on the troubadours are collected together, in Italian translation (1976). ³ It is not clear when placing one’s hands together and kneeling became the posture of prayer, rather than looking upwards with one’s hands outstretched. Other vernacular texts from the 12th cent. associate bowing, placing one’s hands together and kneeling with prayer, and it is likely that the kneeling position with hands together is adopted for prayer in imitation of feudal practices from the 11 cent. onwards.

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Occitan, seigneur in French. In both cases, an om enters his senhoratge. As is so frequently the case, registers are mixed in this poem. The talk of ‘prison’ or the ‘courtly gift’ might not be appropriate in prayer, but the repeated address to the lady certainly plays on the lexis of prayer (37 and 46). The notion of ‘a purely secular framework’ both for the practice of homage that is evoked, and for poetry such as this, is nonsensical. As already indicated in the Introduction, much recent criticism (my own included) has been devoted to the demystification of courtly lyrics such as this. Thus, for example, Sarah Kay comments on these Bernart de Ventadorn stanzas that stanza V’s representation of the act of homage is the most complete in Bernart’s corpus, but it slides off disconcertingly into the love-as-prison metaphor in the last line. This sorts oddly with the insistence on the feudal relationship as franc . . . a term which still conserves its legal value ‘free’ in other contexts. By juxtaposing two such incompatible metaphors, the text draws attention to its playful mystification. (1990: 117)

The ‘playful mystification’ in question is that behind the rhetoric lies on the one hand smutty innuendo, and on the other, a play for status. Commenting on the presence of religious imagery in the poem, Kay remarks that ‘the “religious” metaphor, like the “feudal” one, is ironic and “unreal”, an acknowledgement of a rhetorical convention’ (1990: 118). My own work in the period from which Kay’s remarks date (the late 1980s and early 90s) was devoted first to ferreting out the irony that underscores much troubadour poetry, and then to demystifying the gender politics of courtly love.⁴ The strategy behind these critical moves was deliberate and largely political. Dissatisfied with the uncritical misogynous and heterosexist garbage about love that was so often peddled in criticism of troubadour poetry, some troubadour scholars sought to demystify the rhetoric of this ostensibly sublime love poetry and show that it was not serious, that its position vis-à-vis women was questionable. Kay and I were by no means alone:⁵ we were deliberate sceptics. The citation of my own work from the late 1980s and 1990s, along with that of some close associates, does not, I hope, stem from vanity, but rather from a wish not to criticize others for holding positions I myself promoted so vigorously. But we need nonetheless to acknowledge the ⁴ See Gaunt (1989) and (1995), esp. ch. 3 on the troubadours. ⁵ See also, e.g. Cholakian (1990); Huchet (1987); Kendrick (1988). See also the survey of troubadour criticism from the period and the retrospective comments in Gaunt and Kay (1999: 5–7).

20

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extraordinary power and emotional appeal of the courtly tradition over the last 800 years. If many writers—in the Middle Ages and now—have turned an ironical gaze upon some of the apparent excesses of fin’amor (as we saw in the Introduction), others, and often these very same writers, have taken the courtly tradition seriously. Indeed, with hindsight one might say that the very act of disengagement that is signaled by the irony and play with which medievalists were so concerned in the 1970s and 1980s simultaneously enacts a commitment to that which it ostensibly undermined. Resistance to the power of courtly discourse through humour and play—whether among medieval writers or modern critics— on one level simply reaffirms its hegemony, by placing courtly discourse in a dialectic that installs courtly ideals as a hegemonic model to be contested.⁶ Thus understanding the gender politics of courtly love—its homosocial dynamic and the misogyny underlying its ostensible worship of women—is considerably less demanding than understanding why it is that anyone took fin’amor seriously in the first place, if society was as hostile to women as we believe it to have been. As Sarah Kay has suggested, the urgent literary historical questions we need to ask about troubadour poetry remain those that preoccupied earlier scholars, concerned with the origins of ‘courtly love’: ‘why is the theme of love treated with such apparent ethical seriousness in the Middle Ages’, and ‘why then?’ (1996: 208–12). In this chapter, I wish to offer two arguments, taking as my starting points firstly, the imbrication of the sacred and profane in courtly poetry, and secondly, the need to take these texts seriously (or at least to ask why they were taken seriously). The first argument is that it is less the worship of the lady (what Marrou calls le culte de la dame) that gives the courtly lyric its quasi-religious flavour, than the importance of sacrifice, or, more accurately what Louise O. Fradenberg (1997) calls sacrificial desire. My second argument is that this sacrificial desire is best understood in the light of Lacan’s insight that desire always belongs in the realm of the Other. Underscoring both arguments is a concern with ethics, in that I hope to explore the role sacrifice plays in making the courtly love lyric— in this instance the lyrics of Bernart de Ventodorn—a forum for ethical debate.

The Gift of Death in Bernart de Ventadorn’s Poetry Bernart de Ventadorn talks obsessively about death. Twenty-eight of his forty-four surviving poems have one or more specific allusions to ⁶ On the ‘dialectics of trobar’, see esp. Gruber (1983); also Meneghetti (1984).

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death;⁷ many dwell on death insistently; in many of the poems where he does not talk about death, he nonetheless sings of his pleasure in suffering and sacrifice. Thus, in one song in which he claims to have suffered more through love than Tristan (IV, 45–6) and in which he ‘jonh las mas et ador’ (58: ‘puts his hands together and worships’), Bernart concludes by talking explicitly of martyrdom: Messatgers, vai e cor, e di·m a la gensor la pena e la dolor que.n trac, e.l martire. (IV, 73–6) (Messenger, go quickly and tell the most noble one for me about the pain and torment I have because of her, and the martyrdom.)

As already noted, the word martire does not necessarily denote martyrdom in the religious sense. Whereas the nouns martyr and martre (which designate people) are almost always used in devotional contexts, the nouns martire/martiri in Old French and Occitan (which designate an act or a state) may also be used to designate suffering more generally. However, since the overwhelming majority of attestations come from religious contexts, it is clear that the primary sense is religious (von Wartburg 1925-: vi.1, 394–7). Moreover, the word is unusual enough in non-devotional contexts for its use in conjunction with images of worship (‘jonh las mas et ador’) and dying (Tristan) to be purposeful.⁸ Bernart is talking here not just about suffering in love, but about sacrificing his life for, and in, love. The only other occurrence of the word in Bernart’s corpus supports the view that he plays deliberately on its religious connotations: Anc Deus no fetz trebalha ni martire, ses mal d’amor, qu’eu no sofris en patz; mas d’aquel sui, si be.m peza, sofrire, c’Amors mi fai amar lai on li platz. (XXI, 7–10) (God never made torment or martyrdom that I could not suffer in silence, apart from the pain of love; this [the pain of love] is what I am suffering, however little I like it, for Love makes me love wherever it pleases.) ⁷ See I, III, IV, IX, X, XII, XIV, XV, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXIV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXXI, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXVIII, XXXIX, XL, XLI, XLII, XLIII, XLIV. See also (in the introduction of his edition) Lazar’s sections in his thematic index on ‘Mal d’amour et mort’ (1966: 20) and ‘Passion et souffrance amoureuse’ (22). ⁸ The Concordance de l’Occitan médiéval (Ricketts 2001) indicates that whereas martire and its cognates occur 100 times in the troubadour corpus, other words from the same semantic field are more frequent: dolor 471, pena 139, turmen 176. Sofrir/soffrir and its wide range of cognates occur more than 400 times. Of course, any word from the general semantic field of suffering may evoke martyrdom.

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I shall return to this stanza, but at this stage simply note that ‘martyrdom’ in love is said to come from God, and that it is said to be worse than any other kind. However, death is represented as something Bernart embraces willingly, provided it is what his domna or Amor wants: En son plazer sia, qu’eu sui en sa merce. Si·lh platz, que m’aucia, qu’eu no m’en clam de re. (XXXVIII, 57–60) (May it be as she wishes, since I am at her mercy. If it pleases her, may she kill me, for I complain of nothing.)

Indeed, death is something he actively desires: Garit m’agra si m’aucizes, c’adoncs n’agra faih son voler. (XLI, 22–3) (She will have cured me if she kills me, for then she will have done her will.)

Often his death is evoked as he ‘gives’ himself unconditionally to his lady: II

Gran ben e gran onor conosc que Deus me fai, qu’eu am la belazor et ilh me, qu’eu o sai. Mas eu sui sai, alhor, e no sai com l’estai! So m’auci de dolor, car ochaizo non ai de soven venir lai. .

iv

v

.

.

.

.

10

.

Amors, e que.m farai? Si garrai ja ab te? Ara cuit qu’e.n morrai del dezirer que.m ve si·lh bela lai on jai no m’aizis pres de se, qu’eu la manei e bai et estrenha vas me so cors blanc, gras e le. Ges d’amar no.m recre per mal ni per afan; e can Deus m’i fai be,

30

35

Love’s Martyrdom

23

no.l refut ni.l soan. E can bes no m’ave, sai be sofrir lo dan, c’a las oras cove c’om s’an entrelonhan per melhs salhir enan

40

45

Bona domna, merce del vostre fin aman! Mas jonchas, ab col cle, vos m’autrei e.m coman. Qu’e.us pliu per bona fe 50 c’anc re non amei tan. E si locs s’esdeve, vos me fatz bel semblan, que molt n’ai gran talan. (XVIII) (I know that God shows me great favour and does me a great honour because I love the most beautiful of women and she me. But I am here, elsewhere, and I do not know how things are with her! It kills me with pain that I do not have the opportunity to come there often. . . . Oh Love, and what should I do? Can I be cured with you? Now I think that I will die of the desire that inhabits me if the beautiful one does not welcome me there where she reclines, in such a way that I can caress and kiss her, and hold her comely, white and soft body against me. I do not renounce love, whatever the pain and suffering; and when God shows me favour, I do not refuse or disdain it. And when no favour is forthcoming, I know how to endure the torment, for sometimes one has to distance oneself in order better to leap forwards. Lady, have mercy on your pure lover! With my hands together and neck bowed, I give and commend myself to you. For I swear in good faith that I never loved anything so much. And if you have the opportunity, give me a kindly glance, for I greatly desire it.)

VI

The imbrication of erotic longing with suffering here is typical. Bernart claims to be mortally afflicted by his lady’s absence, so much so that he speaks of the place where he himself is (sai) as elsewhere (alhor) (13–14); he is alienated from himself and only a union with his beloved that is clearly sexual can possibly ‘cure’ him (stanza IV). Yet God is invoked twice in relation to his suffering (11 and 39) and, when he signals his complete submission to his lady, again adopting the posture of prayer, he offers himself as a ‘gift’ to his lady (49). As he has insistently invoked his death here (16 and 30), the implication is that his gift is not simply of his person, but also of his life, and thereby of his death.

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Love’s Martyrdom

It could be argued—and I can imagine myself doing so—that the blatant eroticism of this song means that the evocation of death should not be taken seriously, that it is a mere rhetorical ploy which may serve to give Bernart’s longing pathos, but which may also produce comedy through exaggeration. But Bernart’s evocations of death can be much more unequivocally harrowing: iv

Merces es perduda, per ver, et eu non o saubi anc mai, car cilh qui plus en degr’ aver, no.n a ges, et on la querrai? A! can mal sembla, qui la ve, qued aquest chaitiu deziron que ja ses leis non aura be, laisse morir, que no l’aon!

45

vii

Pus ab midons no.m pot valer precs ni merces ni.l dreihz qu’eu ai, 50 ni a leis no ven a plazer qu’eu l’am, ja mais no.lh o dirai. Aissi.m part de leis e.m recre; mort m’a, e per mort li respon, e vau m’en, pus ilh no.m rete, chaitius, en issilh, no sai on. (XXXI) (There is truly no mercy and I knew nothing of this, for the one who ought to be most merciful is not at all, and where then should I seek it? Ah! How bad it looks to whoever sees her, that she lets this desiring wretch, who will have nothing good without her, die without helping him. Since neither beseeching nor begging for mercy, nor any right that I have, get me anywhere and since she does not like my being in love with her, I will not tell her this any more. Thus I leave her and give up. She has killed me and I reply as a dead man, and I go away, since she will not retain me, wretched, in exile, I know not where.)

This is—deservedly no doubt—Bernart’s most famous poem (‘Can vei’), both now and in the Middle Ages. I shall return to the lady’s ostensible indifference to her suitor here and in other poems, as well as to the famous imagery with which it opens. The point of quoting these stanzas at this stage is simply to show how Bernart’s submission is total, how he gives himself up to death, and how the lyricism that he deploys in order to talk about his death through love suggests it is no joke; on the contrary— it is deadly serious. The fact that generations of medieval and modern

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listeners and readers have found this poem moving indicates that even if we do not take the scenario of Bernart giving up his life to his lady at face value, we must at least take seriously his giving us the spectacle of his death.⁹ To speak of the ‘gift of death’ is of course to evoke Jacques Derrida’s influential work on the gift. In Donner la Mort (1992), Derrida examines the centrality of sacrifice to Western European culture and ethics.¹⁰ For Derrida, the ‘gift of death’ is that which allows an individual to be truly responsible and therefore that which enables a subject’s definition as an individual. Dying is the one thing that no one else can do for you; conversely you cannot die for another. You might choose to take another’s place in the short term, but you are only postponing his or her death, not preventing it. One’s death is the only thing one truly owns, the only thing that is truly one’s own to give, and it is therefore that which confers individuality on the subject. The ‘gift of death’ is, then, ‘une bonté dont l’inaccessibilité commande au donataire; elle se l’assujettit, elle se donne à lui comme la bonté même, mais aussi comme la loi’ (1992: 45: ‘a form of goodness whose inaccessibility constitutes a command for the receiver of the gift: it subjects him, is given to him as an ultimate form of goodness, but also as the law’). As Derrida has earlier noted ‘se donner la mort, c’est aussi interpréter la mort, s’en donner une représentation, une figure, une signification, une destination’ (19: ‘to give oneself death/to take one’s own life is also to interpret death, to give oneself a representation of it, a figuration, a signification, an end point’). The representation and meaning of death enacted by the ‘gift of death’ serves to subject both giver and receiver of the gift (the donataire) to ‘the law’. In the context of the courtly lyric, it is this ‘law’ that requires the lady to take mercy on the poet, since he is giving her the ultimate gift—that of his life—albeit a gift that is completely inaccessible to her. But this does not simply explain in different terms the coercion or moral blackmail that feminist critics have seen in the dynamic of the courtly canso.¹¹ For Derrida, the ‘gift of death’ is also the very foundation of responsibility and ethical discourse in the Jewish and Christian faiths. As he succinctly puts it, ‘seul un mortel est responsable’ (45: ‘only a mortal can be responsible’), while only in the contemplation of one’s death can one fully assume one’s subjectivity. ⁹ Though this reading depends on a stanza order not found in many manuscripts: see Gaunt (1998b). ¹⁰ For a helpful exposition of Derrida’s work on the gift, religion and ethics, see Caputo (1997: 160–229). ¹¹ See Gaunt (1995: 122–79); also Burns (1985).

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For Derrida, sacrifice, in the sense of self-sacrifice, is intrinsic to public order in the Judaic-Christian tradition because it is what inculcates conscience and ethics. Thus: ‘l’inconditionnalité du respect de la loi dicte aussi le sacrifice . . . qui est toujours sacrifice de soi’ (88: ‘unconditional respect of the law requires also sacrifice . . . which is always self-sacrifice’). The relationship that Derrida posits here between public order and sacrifice has of course also been charted, though from a different perspective, by René Girard. In seeking to elaborate an anthropology of religion, Girard, like Derrida, sees sacrifice as foundational in the sacred. For Girard, religion and its rituals serve the purpose of regulating and dissipating violence (1972: 59 and 86). Whereas Derrida is as interested in what might motivate the individual to sacrifice himself as he is in the function of the spectacle of that sacrifice to society, Girard is primarily interested in the latter: for Girard, society needs the sacrificial victim as a scapegoat to whom violence can be directed and who can suffer for the exemption of others from suffering. Whereas some societies’ victims are chosen against their will, Christianity’s victims choose themselves, indeed offer themselves as victims, like Christ.¹² Furthermore, as Derrida argues, the ‘gift of death’ is not, ostensibly, part of an economics of exchange (1992: 91): for the sacrifice to be a sacrifice, nothing must be expected in return. The ‘gift of death’ is, as Derrida puts it, ostensibly un don sans économie (a gift with no economy).¹³ Of course this both is and is not the case. On the one hand, the right of God (or the gods, or the courtly Lady) not to give anything in exchange is recognized; on the other, some gift in exchange, some sign of favour, is clearly hoped for, be it eternal salvation, a good harvest, or sexual favours. But it is the gesture of giving oneself sans espoir d’échange (with no hope of exchange) that makes self-sacrifice the defining moment in responsibility and the foundation of ethics, the problem then being that true responsibility is an epistemological impossibility: no one can fully assume, that is fully know her/his responsibility, for this means giving up one’s life. The central role of sacrifice and ascesis in Christianity needs no elaboration. Sacrifice is at the heart of the Christian religious experience. This is evident in the story of Christ’s self-sacrifice and representations of ¹² I myself prefer Georges Bataille’s account of sacrifice as spectacle to Girard’s; see below Ch. 3. ¹³ This, of course, is an implicit response to Marcel Mauss’s contention (Hubert and Mauss 1964: 100) that ‘fundamentally there is perhaps no sacrifice that has not some contractual element’. Mauss is more explicitly present in Derrida’s Donner le Temps (1991), than in Donner la Mort (1992).

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it, as well as in representations of the sacrifice of countless martyrs, and in the importance of ascesis at every level of Christian life and thought. A troubadour’s claim to be a martyr to love needs to be set in this context, for it is perhaps sacrifice, rather than the apparent elevation of his Lady to the status of a divinity, that gives the impression a troubadour seeks to interweave love and religion. Or, more accurately, one could say that it is sacrifice that enables the elevation of the lady to the status of a divinity. Moreover, the insistence on sacrifice, I would suggest, enables the love lyric to elaborate an ethics of its own, to become a forum for ethical debate: vi

Si no.m aizis lai on ilh jai, si qu’eu remir son bel cors gen doncs per que m’a faih de nien? Ai las! com mor de dezire! Vol me doncs midons aucire, car l’am? O que lh’ai failhit? Ara.n fassa so que.s volha ma domna, al seu chauzit, qu’eu no m’en planh, si tot me dol. (XIX, 46–54) (If she does not welcome me there where she lies, so that I might gaze upon her fair and noble body, why then did she create me from nothing? Alas, I die of desire! Does my lady then wish to kill me because I love her? Or how have I failed her? Now, may she do with me entirely as she wishes, for I do not complain, even if I suffer.)

The disingenuous nature of the gift without economy is evident here: on the one hand, Bernart claims to want nothing in return for his death, and on the other, the implication is that his lady is wrong to let him suffer. But I am less interested in his wheedling rhetoric than in the introduction of an ethical dimension: ‘how have I failed her?’ asks Bernart. If, as Louise Fradenberg puts it, ‘ethics are significations of desire’ (1998: 265), by which I take her to mean that ethics are never innocent of desire (indeed that ethical formulations, however apparently universal are in fact structured by desire) then here and elsewhere, it is the intersection of love and death that enables Bernart to claim the high moral ground. Thus, in a poem which opens with his claiming that his song simply serves to mask his imminent death from love (XXI, 1–4, quoted below, pp. 30–1), and which is therefore underscored from start to finish by his potential sacrifice, Bernart again evokes his own ethical superiority: vi

Dins en mo cor me corrotz e.m azire, car eu sec tan las mias volontatz.

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Mas negus hom no deu aital re dire, c’om no sap ges com s’es aventuratz. Que farai doncs dels bels semblans privatz? Falhirai lor? Mais volh que.l mons me falha! (31–6) (In my heart I chastise and torment myself since I follow my own desires. But no man should have to say such a thing, for no one knows how things turn out. What will I do then with her fair intimate glances? Will I fail them? I would rather that the world fail me.)

Again he represents himself as desiring his martyrdom (‘sec tan las mias volontatz’) regardless of whether he gets any reward (34). Again he uses the verb falhir, which is charged with both ethical and material resonance, and he claims to prefer being the victim of ‘failure’ in others to his own ethical ‘failure’. As in ‘Can vei’ (XXXI, 49–56, quoted above), death—with the total submission to his lady’s will it entails—is evoked as the ultimate proof that he is right, but the logic is solipsistic: he is right because he is willing to die, and he is willing to die because he is right.

‘Le désir de l’Autre’ What then is the psychic economy of Bernart’s disingenuous sacrificial gift of himself? Troubadour poetry is, above all else, a discourse of desire. For Jacques Lacan, arguably the foremost theorist of desire in modern times, ‘le désir de l’homme, c’est le désir de l’Autre’. (1990: 261: ‘man’s desire is desire of/for the Other’). This notion of ‘le désir de l’Autre’ is, in Lacan’s thinking, profoundly bound up with sacrifice: ‘Le sacrifice signifie que, dans l’objet de nos désirs, nous essayons de trouver le témoignage de la présence du désir de cet Autre que j’appelle ici le Dieu obscur’(306: ‘Sacrifice means that we try to find, in the object of our desires, proof of the presence of the desire of/for that Other which I shall call here the dark God.’). A simpler formulation—and one which is entirely apposite in any consideration of love lyric—can provide a point of entry into his thinking here: ‘Aimer, c’est essentiellement, vouloir être aimé’ (282: ‘to love is essentially to want to be loved’). In other words, for Lacan, love is always Narcissistic in that the subject’s desire is directed towards an acknowledgement of himself in the love of the Other. As Slavoj Zizek puts it, in his analysis of Lacan’s lecture on courtly love in Seminar 7 (Lacan 1986: 167–94), ‘the long-awaited moment of highest fulfillment . . . is not the Lady’s surrender . . . but . . . the “miracle” that the Object answered’

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(1994: 104). Furthermore, in Seminar 7, Lacan implicitly, then explicitly, develops parallels between erotic and religious sacrifice.¹⁴ Le désir de l’Autre, as is well-known, can mean both [the subject’s] ‘desire for’ the Other and ‘the Other’s desire’, while the Other is best understood not as one thing, but rather as ‘la problématique de l’Autre, qui est bien cet Autre absolu, cet inconscient fermé, cette femme impénetrable, ou bien derrière celle-ci, la figure de la mort, qui est le dernier Autre absolu’ (Lacan 1994: 431: ‘the problem of the Other, which is indeed that absolute Other, the inaccessible unconscious, an inscrutable woman, or even, behind her, the figure of death, the ultimate absolute Other’). The Other then is that place in the psyche that eludes the subject’s control, in other words, the unconscious—which for Lacan is language itself—but it may also (and this is pertinent to any discussion of troubadour lyric) be identified with ‘an inscrutable woman’ and ‘the figure of death’, as well as, elsewhere, God (Lacan 1990: 306). If the subject’s concern is recognition from the Other, the burning question then, as Zizek says, is less ‘What do I want of the Other?’, but rather ‘What does the Other want of me?’, because it is only in acting in conformity with the Other’s desire that the ‘miracle’ of recognition can occur (1989: 105–28 and 1992: 55–60). When Lacan says ‘la seule chose dont on puisse être coupable, c’est d’avoir cédé sur son désir’ (1986: 370: ‘the only thing of which one can be guilty is having given way on one’s desire’), the desire to which we are thereby enjoined to be true is as much the Other’s desire as desire for the Other. And it is here—in staying true to the Other’s desire—that sacrifice comes into play. To quote Zizek again: What is then concealed by the fascinating spectacle of the sacrifice? Lacan relates the sacrifice to the desire of the Other, to the enigmatic Che vuoi? What does the Other want of me? In its most fundamental dimension, sacrifice is a ‘gift of reconciliation’ to the Other, destined to appease its desire. Sacrifice conceals the abyss of the Other’s desire, more precisely: it conceals the Other’s lack, inconsistency, ‘inexistence,’ that transpires in this desire. Sacrifice is the guarantee that ‘the Other exists’ . . . The trick of the sacrifice consists therefore in what the speech-act theorists would call its ‘pragmatic presupposition’: by the very act of sacrifice, we (presup)pose the existence of its addressee. (1992: 56) ¹⁴ He moves from his discussion of courtly love in section II, directly to talk about religion in section III. Later in the seminar (1986: 371) he explicitly associates sublimation—a notion grounded in eroticism—in section II, with the role of desire in what he calls ‘l’opération religieuse’; see below 35–8.

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The trauma that the logic of sacrifice conceals, then, is the possibility that the Other does not have the power the subject imagines to confer recognition, and the trauma that the Other itself may be lacking.¹⁵ Sacrifice denies this trauma because it presupposes that the Other does exist, and that it lacks nothing. Paradoxically, the act of self-effacement in the face of the Other’s desire that sacrifice entails is precisely what guarantees the subject the recognition s/he craves, which is why the figure of death is the ultimate, absolute Other. And as Zizek suggests elsewhere (1989: 116), another word for this process in Christian culture is love: Christianity responds willingly to the desire of the Other and sees sacrifice as an act of love. The subject is because the subject loves, and to stay true to the sacrificial love that the Other demands is to occupy the only possibly ethical position within this schema. To return to Bernart de Ventadorn, his evocations of death almost invariably go hand in hand with evocations of what Lacan calls le don suprême, and Zizek the ‘miracle’, of the Lady’s recognition of the subject. This can be seen most clearly through an examination of a motif that the Lacanian critic Jean-Charles Huchet recognizes as central to his work, the gaze: ‘Chez Bernard de Ventadorn, plus que chez tout autre troubadour . . . la Dame se donne à voir. Le regard s’y arrête, tourne autour de cet objet qui le captive avant de faire retour sur soi’ (1987: 183: ‘With Bernart de Ventadorn more than with any other troubadour . . . the Lady gives herself up to be seen. The gaze lingers on her, circles around this captivating object before turning back on itself ’). But Huchet’s analysis of the gaze in Bernart’s corpus is incomplete, for it concentrates on how the poet’s gaze is captivated by the lady; he fails to suggest how the gaze might enact a retour sur soi. In fact, as frequently as Bernart speaks of looking at his lady, if not more frequently, he fantasizes about being looked at by her: i

ii

Per meilhs cobrir lo mal pes e.l cossire chan e deport et ai joi e solatz; e fatz esfortz car sai chantar ni rire, car eu me mor e nul semblan no.n fatz; e per Amor sui si apoderatz, tot m’a vencut a forsa e a batalha. Anc Deus no fetz trebalha ni martire, ses mal d’amor, qu’eu no sofris en patz; mas d’aquel sui, si be.m peza, sofrire, c’Amors mi fai amar lai on li platz; ¹⁵ On which see Fradenburg (1997: 50).

5

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e dic vos be que s’eu no sui amatz, ges no reman en la mia nualha. Midons sui om et amics e servire, e no·lh en quer mais autras amistatz mas c’a celat los seus bels olhs me vire, 15 que gran be.m fan ades can sui iratz; e ren lor en laus e merces e gratz, qu’el mon non ai amic que tan me valha. (XXI) (In order better to conceal my painful thoughts and anxieties I sing and make merry and am joyful and comfort myself; and I try hard because I know how to sing and laugh, since I die and yet give no sign of this; and I am so controlled by Love, that it has entirely vanquished me by force and in battle. God never made torment or martyrdom that I could not suffer in silence, apart from the pain of love; this [the pain of love] is what I am suffering, however little I like it, for love makes me love wherever it pleases; and I tell you indeed that if I am not loved, this is absolutely nothing to do with my indolence. I am my lady’s man and friend and servant, and I do not ask for any other type of friendship except that she turn her beautiful eyes towards me, for they do me great good when I suffer; and I praise them, thank them, and am grateful to them, for I have no friend in the world who helps me as much.)

III

Bernart’s desire here is unequivocally the desire of the Other, as he shows himself to be completely subject to Amor (5 and 10), which stands for the discursive system, the Law, in which he seeks to register his subjectivity. His sacrifice to Amor—as already noted he uses the word martire—is willing, total and joyful (1–4): he is true to the Other’s desire, which he represents both as a force within and outside himself. But when the lady—midons—displaces Amor as the Other to which he signals his subordination (13), what does he want of her? It is not her erotic surrender, but simply that she look at him. Indeed her gaze, rather than her person, is invoked here as his source of salvation (17–18), and it is not his lady, but rather her gaze that he says he will not fail later in the poem (quoted above). This paradigm recurs frequently in Bernart’s songs: iii

Ab Amor m’er a contendre, que no m’en posc estener, qu’en tal loc me fai estendre don en nul joi non esper anceis me fari’ a pendre car anc n’aic cor ni voler; mas eu non ai ges poder que.m posca d’Amor defendre.

20

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iv

Pero Amors sap dissendre 25 lai on li ven a plazer, e sap gen guizardo rendre del maltraih e del doler. Tan no.m pot mertsar ni vendre que plus no.m poscha valer, 30 sol ma domna.m denhes vezer e mas paraulas entendre. (XXVII) (I have to contend with Love for I cannot avoid this, since he makes me die in a place where I can expect no joy, rather I should hang myself for I never had the heart nor the desire for this; but I do not have the power to defend myself against Love. But Love knows how to alight wherever it wishes, and how to give a noble reward to compensate for the bad treatment and suffering. It cannot bargain or barter with me to make it worth more [the reward?], as long as my lady deigns to see me and to listen to my words.)

The ‘gift of death’ is not without economy here. Again the subject’s desire is first and foremost le désir de l’Autre in that he is entirely subject to Love’s wishes. With typical poetic virtuosity, Bernart claims on the one hand to be fighting with love, and on the other, not to have the power to resist (17–24). Similarly, he may be saying that love has already killed him (19), while simultaneously claiming that his battle to the death with love makes him want to kill himself, only love forbids it (21– 4). He does what he believes the Other wants of him, but the second stanza quoted certainly implies an economy of exchange. And what is his guizardo (reward)? Again, his lady’s gaze, her acknowledgement and recognition (31–2). For Lacan, as for Bernart, the gaze is primarily the gaze of the Other. I shall explore further the implications of this theoretical paradigm for reading troubadour poetry in Chapter 6. What is important for my argument at this stage is that the subject’s desire instantiates an imaginary scenario in which he is construed as object, not as subject, in which his integrity and wholeness are guaranteed by the Other’s gaze, just as sacrifice guarantees the Other’s wholeness.¹⁶ The subject falls in love with his own assujettissment, and therefore paradoxically must sacrifice his subject position repeatedly in order establish and then to retain it.¹⁷ This helps to explain the phenomenon that Sarah Kay notes in the courtly canso whereby ‘the ¹⁶ On this point see most recently Zupancic (2000: 103–4): ‘the subject passes over to the side of the object. The ethical subject is not a subject who wants this object but, rather, this object itself.’ ¹⁷ See Butler (1997: 49): ‘the renunciation of the self as the origin of its own actions must be performed repeatedly and can never be finally achieved, if only because the demonstration of renunciation is itself a self-willed action. This self-willed action thus rhetorically confounds precisely what it is supposed to show.’

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man is constantly being drawn into an object role (one where he is subject to another’s desire) by the possibility of the woman assuming “feminine” agency’ (1990: 99 and more generally 96–101). It is a commonplace among medievalists that courtly literature is foundational in the ‘invention’ of the modern subject. This is precisely because courtly literature creates new configurations for subject/object relations, and one important element in this is the desire of the subject to imagine himself as the object of the Other’s desire. I shall return to this troubling of the distinction between subject and object, which in turn calls into question the nature of both at various points in this book, particularly in Chapter 6 when discussing the implications of medieval Narcissism. The most harrowing moments in Bernart’s poetry occur when he recognizes the possibility that the Other may not acknowledge him, and it is this that perhaps explains the power of his most famous images in his most famous poem: i

ii

iii

Can vei la lauzeta mover de joi sas alas contral rai, que s’oblid’ e.s laissa chazer per la doussor c’al cor li vai, ai! tan grans enveya m’en ve de cui qu’eu veya jauzion, meravilhas ai, car desse lo cor de dezirer no.m fon. Ai las! tan cuidava saber d’amor, e tan petit en sai! car eu d’amar no.m posc tener celeis don ja pro non aurai. tout m’a mo cor, et tout m’a me, e se mezeis et tot lo mon; e can se.m tolc, no.m laisset re mas dezirer e cor volon.

5

10

15

Anc non agui de me poder ni no fui meus de l’or’ en sai que.m laisset en sos olhs vezer en un miralh que mout me plai. 20 miralhs, pus me mirei en te, m’an mort li sospir de preon, c’aissi.m perdei com perdet se lo bels Narcisus en la fon. (XXXI) (When I see the lark beat its wings against the sun’s ray, and when it forgets itself and lets itself fall because of the sweetness that invades its heart, ah, such an

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intense longing takes hold of me that no matter whom I see joyful, I am amazed that my heart does not at once melt from desire. Alas, I thought I knew so much about love, and I know so little, for I cannot stop loving the woman from whom I will have no favour. She has taken from me my heart and my very being, and herself and the whole world, and when she took herself away from me, she left me nothing but desire and a longing heart. I never had any power over myself, nor was I my own from the moment she allowed me to look into her eyes, into a mirror that pleases me greatly. Mirror, since I gazed upon you deep sighs have killed me, for I lost myself just as the fair Narcissus lost himself in the pool.)

Like the lark flying up towards the sun, like Narcissus gazing at his image in the pool, the subject loves an object who cannot return his gaze; the spectacle and sheer beauty of the love-object leads to a jouissance of sorts—and I will return to this— but the indifference of the Other here is mortifying, as we see later in the song (quoted above). To gaze into the mirror, but not to have one’s gaze returned is deadly. Yet we see here particularly clearly why Zizek talks of sacrifice as a trick (1992: 56), for if, as feminist criticism has taught us, the ‘lady’ in a poem such as this is a construct of the poetic discourse, it is also worth noting how it is the sacrificial act that calls her into being: if the poet dies for her love, this lends her some reality. Paradoxically, the more Bernart protests that he renounces his desire as death takes hold of him (see stanza VII, quoted above, 24), the more he gives himself up to sacrifice, the truer he remains to his/ the Other’s desire, and thus the more he renounces his subject position, the more firmly he inscribes it. As Judith Butler puts it: ‘renunciation takes place through the very desire that is renounced: desire is never renounced, but becomes preserved and reasserted in the very structure of renunciation’ (1997: 81).¹⁸ If worked through to its conclusion, the logic of sacrifice means that death is the only moment when the subject who gives himself up to sacrificial desire can truly assume his subjectivity, just as it is the only moment when he can be truly responsible. This perhaps explains why the poet finds the spectacle of his own death so mesmerizing, despite the fear of his lady’s indifference: V

Ma razo chamja e vira; mas eu ges de lei no.m vir

¹⁸ On ‘Can vei’ see also Bloch (1991: 143–8), who argues the poem inscribes a ‘despoliation of the self ’. And for more general remarks about death invoked in the lyric as a means of inscribing the self, see Heller-Roazen (2003: 57–9); for Heller-Roazen the discursive strategy of the courtly lyricist may be summed up as follows, ‘speaking, I say that I lose myself, that I die and that, in this death, I survive myself, always different from myself ’ (59).

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mo fi cor, que la dezira aitan que tuih mei dezir son de lei per cui sospir. E car ela no sospira, sai qu’en lei ma mortz se mira, can sa gran beutat remir. Ma mort remir, que jauzir no·n posc ni no.n sui jauzire; mas eu sui tan bos sofrire c’atendre cuit per sofrire. (XXXIX, 33–44) (She undermines and derails my reason; but I keep my pure heart fixed upon her, for it desires her so much that all my desires are inspired by her for whom I sigh. And because she does not sigh, I know that I contemplate my death in her when I see her great beauty. I contemplate my death, for I can have no joy or enjoyment from her; but I know that in suffering (or waiting patiently) I can achieve something.) VI

To expect to achieve something through suffering is a gamble, but it is better than the alternative, which is nothing.

The Ethical Subject The centrality of sacrifice and ‘the gift of death’ to the economy of the courtly lyric creates a discursive space in which love is in a position to usurp religion’s hold over the subject’s desire, since sacrifice is so central to religious experience and Christian ethics. But as Louise Fradenberg has argued (1997: 48), following Derrida (1992: 18–19), sacrifice is essentially melancholic since it ‘seeks, as in mourning, to keep that which it gives up’: by incorporating death, sacrifice is thus ‘a bid for triumph, for a living beyond finitude’ (Fradenburg 1997: 51). Sacrifice is therefore a symptom of the subject’s attempt to retain that which it never had, and this returns us to the trauma that sacrifice seeks to occlude, indeed to the ‘trick’ of sacrifice.¹⁹ Sacrifice itself covers a lack, or rather (as with all desire), it deals with a relationship to lack. In other words, sacrifice supports a fantasy and is therefore, to use another Lacanian term, a decoy, or lure. This suggests another parallel between courtly lyric and religion. For Lacan, religion is both that which enables us to glimpse the jouissance ¹⁹ On the ‘trick’ of sacrifice see also Zizek (2001: 69) on ‘the superfluous and fake character of sacrifice’.

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we have given up in the symbolic, but also that which holds jouissance at bay: Sublimez tout ce que vous voudrez, il faut le payer avec quelque chose. Ce quelque chose s’appelle la jouissance. Cette opération mystique, je la paie avec une livre de chair. Voilà l’objet, le bien, que l’on paie pour la satisfaction du désir. Et voilà où je voulais vous mener pour vous donner une petite lumière sur quelque chose qui est essentiel, et qu’on ne voit pas assez. C’est là en effet que gît l’opération religieuse, toujours si intéressante pour nous à répérer. Ce qui est sacrifié de bien pour le désir—et vous observerez que cela veut dire la même chose que ce qui est perdu de désir pour le bien—, cette livre de chair, c’est justement ce que la religion se fait office et emploi de récupérer. (Lacan 1986: 371) (Sublimate as much as you like, but you will have to pay for it with something. This something is called enjoyment. I pay for this mystical act with a pound of flesh. This then is the object, the good that one gives up for the satisfaction of one’s desire. And this is where I wanted to bring you, to shed a little light on something essential that is insufficiently observed. For this is the essence of the religious act which is always interesting for us to identify. The part of goodness that is sacrificed for/to desire—and you will observe that this means the same thing as the part of desire that is lost for goodness—this pound of flesh is precisely what religion seeks and strives to recuperate.)

It is important to understand the total and destructive loss of self that the term jouissance implies for Lacan: the notion of ‘the good’ in traditional ethics is first and foremost a decoy to keep jouissance—which may be understood as pure evil—at bay (1986: 217–18).²⁰ This is why, if one accepts (which of course one may not) the premises of Lacanian thought, alternative systems of ethical thought in the West (whether classical, medieval, or modern) are unsatisfactory: they serve as regulatory devices to deflect attention from the destructive nature of human desires and drives. As Alenka Zupancic puts it: Is it possible to conceive of an ethics that is not subject to the logic of the superego in all its resonances: free, on the one hand, from the over-stressed ‘irrationality’ of its demands and, on the other, from its socializing function as the ‘internal’ ²⁰ Lacan’s notion of jouissance derives largely from Freud’s seminal essay ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ and is therefore always implicitly associated with the death drive; see Freud (1984a).

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representative of ‘external’ authorities, values and norms? We can reply affirmatively, simply by pointing out that this is exactly what Lacan is after with his concept of ethics. (2000: 160)²¹

In liberating the subject from the superego, from the desire of the Other, Lacan paves the way towards jouissance. The problem is that if there is nothing we fear more than jouissance, there is also nothing we want more. Religion may strive to recuperate jouissance, but its attempt at recuperation is doomed to failure: jouissance, by its very nature, is not recuperable because it belongs in the realm of the Real. As Zizek puts it (1997: 49–50), ‘jouissance is . . . always-already lost’, since to ‘reduce jouissance to what I hear/ understand’ is to subject it to symbolization and therefore to distort it in the Real. Like religion, the courtly lyric circles around jouissance, simultaneously gesturing towards it and holding it at bay, allowing a double perspective, which is one of the reasons why Lacan talks of courtly love as anamorphosis.²² Thus, in ‘Can vei’, the lark wants to reach the sun, Narcissus to dive into the fountain, and the jouissance this offers is potentially fatal. But as images, the lark and Narcissus offer but a simulacrum of jouissance—even an imaginary encounter with jouissance—while in fact marking its renunciation in favour of a stake in the symbolic.²³ The symbolization of the jouissance that sacrifice might have offered reduces it, subjects it to the Law, to language, to the Other. Indeed, the formal stricture and discipline of the lyric are a perfect demonstration of how language becomes, and is, the Law, the Other that holds the subject in thrall. Derrida makes a similar point, though in different terms: ‘dès qu’on parle, dès qu’on entre dans le milieu du langage, on perd la singularité’ (1992: 61: ‘As soon as one speaks, as soon as one enters the domain of language, one loses one’s singularity’). As soon as the gift is subject to representation, it partakes of an economy of exchange that undermines its purity, its absolute singularity and therefore its abstraction from relations, whether these be human or on the level of the signifier.²⁴ Knowledge and/or representation of the gift of death is, then, impossible if the gift is to retain its ethical value, and ²¹ For his position vis-à-vis conventional ethics, see also Lacan (1990: 306–7), and, for a useful synopsis, Evans (1996: 55–8). ²² His lecture on courtly love in the Ethique seminar is of course called ‘L’amour courtois en anamorphose’ (1986: 167–93). ²³ Compare Zizek ‘s comments on the Narcissistic nature of what he calls ‘imaginary suicide’ (2000: 28). ²⁴ As Caputo puts it (1997: 160): ‘The gift belongs to a thought beyond knowledge.’ See also Derrida (1991: 38): ‘le symbole engage immédiatement dans la restitution’ (‘With the symbol one is immediately implicated in restitution’).

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I will explore the implications of this further in the Chapter 3. We may aspire to give in Derrida’s absolute sense, we may indeed succeed in offering, the gift of death, but no passage through sacrifice may be represented without this entailing the destruction of the gift qua gift. And this is why in Derrida’s account, sacrifice has to be secret. In accordance with the pleasure principle, ‘Can vei’ therefore sacrifices jouissance for what Lacan sees as the main pleasure of courtly love, ‘le plaisir d’éprouver un déplaisir’ (1986: 182: ‘the pleasure of displeasure’). The lover speaks of his sacrifice, and thereby compels it to being confined to the realm of the symbolic. He therefore condemns himself to the endless reiteration of the failure of his sacrifice, to the perpetual examination of the impasse into which he has turned.²⁵ The courtly lyric therefore offers pleasure, not jouissance, and it invests in the apparently limitless aesthetic pleasures to be derived from suffering. But in gesturing towards jouissance, albeit to hold it at bay, the courtly lyric nonetheless intuits and acknowledges its fascination. For Lacan, one mechanism that enables the psyche to hold jouissance at bay is what he calls the Thing. The Thing is that which lies just beyond the reach of the symbolic in the Real; it suffers from the signifier in the Real because, although it can be glimpsed from the vantage point of the symbolic, it cannot be fully apprehended in it (1986: 142 and 150). Anamorphosis, for Lacan, is a mechanism that inevitably allows the oblique apprehension of the Thing because, in throwing starkly into relief the incommensurability of two symbolic planes, it draws attention to the Real that escapes both.²⁶ Because of its relation to jouissance, the Thing is alternately viewed as sovereign good, and as terrifying. What happens in the courtly lyric, according to Lacan, is that the lady is catapulted brutally from Other to Thing (1986: 193). She is thereby transformed from being the poet’s Narcissistic foil, to being his tyrannical and indifferent tormenter.²⁷ Perhaps the two are different sides of the same coin: it is in failing to acknowledge her suitor that the lady as Other and object of the poet’s desire (that is in both senses of le désir de l’Autre) becomes the lady ²⁵ On this point, see Lacan (1999: 120): ‘le rapport sexuel ne cesse pas de ne pas s’écrire’ (‘the sexual relation never stops not being written’). ²⁶ Thus in Holbein’s The Ambassadors, which, along with courtly love, Lacan takes as a paradigmatic example of anamorphosis, the skull at the bottom of the panel is the Thing from the sight-line that holds the ambassadors in focus, while from the sight-line that holds the skull in focus, the ambassadors themselves become the Thing. The apprehension of the other plane of signification always creates the disturbing possibility of a gap between the two. See further Ch. 6. ²⁷ For excellent expositions, see Zizek (1994: 89–112) and Kay (1999).

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as Thing. In either case, the lady’s inaccessibility and indifference are crucial to the maintenance of the fantasy of courtly love, as Zizek argues: ‘external hindrances that thwart our access to the object are there precisely to create the illusion that without them the object would be directly accessible’ (1994: 94). The lady, like God, is both the barrier that protects from jouissance and that which beckons towards it. The detours of courtly love are what holds the desiring subject in place. As Zizek puts it (1994: 96), ‘the Object of desire itself coincides with the force that prevents its attainment’, and thus we are offered the pleasurable spectacle of endless erotic longing, since the promise of fulfillment is, in fact, all the fulfillment that is wanted. As Lacan put it, when he returned to the question of courtly love in Encore (Seminar 20), thirteen years after his initial discussion in Seminar 7 (L’Ethique), ‘C’est une façon tout à fait raffinée de suppléer à l’absence de rapport sexuel, en feignant que c’est nous qui y mettons obstacle. C’est vraiment la chose la plus formidable qu’on ait jamais tentée. Mais comment en dénoncer la feinte?’ (1999: 89: ‘It is a completely refined way to supplement the lack of a sexual relation by pretending that it is we who are preventing it. It is quite the most wonderful thing ever attempted. But how is one to denounce this pretence?’). For Lacan, both religion and art engage with the abyss or void in/of the Other’s desire, that is, the Real. Art organizes itself around the abyss, religion tries to avoid it (1986: 155). The parallels between poetry and religion that I have tried to draw in this chapter need therefore to be understood as functional, rather than as the straightforward result of the influence of one sphere on the other, and it is as important to grasp the differences between the pleasures of courtly and religious sacrifice as it is to see the parallels between them.²⁸ Historically, it must surely be true that countless more people have died for their faith than have died for love. Despite its obsession with death, as art, the courtly lyric is in fact more turned towards the creative processes and detours that make up life than towards death. The fantasy and spectacle of sacrifice support the symbolic in that the subject knows he is not expected to traverse the fantasy and actually to die for love: he is enjoined rather to obey the Law ²⁸ See Lacan (1986: 178) and Fradenburg (1998: 265): ‘It makes a difference that the Virgin Mary is believed in as a virgin mother, whereas the equally imaginary courtly lady is imagined as a courtly lady. The intimacy of these forms of ascesis, “service”, devotion, needs to be deciphered, because otherwise we will not be able to understand the pathways by which power, from whatever cultural location, can refigure and be refigured by desire. But forms of ascesis should also not be conflated, because if we conflate them we cannot understand how fantasies of deferred but full accountability and jouissance operate in the workings of domination.’

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while enjoying the fantasy that he would be willing to die for love if called upon to do so, (but not now).²⁹ Religion’s relationship with the abyss is more deadly: because the abyss is not acknowledged, the subject is more willing to hurl himself into it.³⁰ On some level the courtly lover—like his public—knows the sacrificial fantasy is a fantasy; the real-life martyr does not recognize sacrifice as fantasy and is consequently more willing to traverse it. And from within the logic of religion, the martyr is right, for not to hurl oneself into the abyss would be to acknowledge its existence, which is exactly what religion would occlude. In this sense, the sacrificial love of troubadours like Bernart de Ventadorn represents a further gentrification of sacrifice in the Judaic-Christian tradition.³¹ But the usurping of the functions of religion by poetry is nonetheless significant, and if sacrifice in the courtly lyric does offer a fantasmic support to the symbolic, the fact that it thereby engenders a space for an engagement with ethics that is removed from the sphere of organized religion—a space that ultimately will be thought of as ‘secular’— should not be taken lightly. As Lacan himself suggested in Encore, the theory of the desire of the Other he had proposed earlier in his career ‘était une façon, je ne peux pas dire de laïciser, mais d’exorciser le bon vieux Dieu’ (1999: 89 ‘was a means, I cannot quite say of secularizing, but rather of ²⁹ In psychoanalytic theory, fantasy is not necessarily a private, individual and essentially interior construct associated with wish-fulfilment, but rather a collective and ideological point of identification and sublimation that belongs firmly in the realm of the symbolic. Fantasy, in other words, may be a key tool in political analysis in that it helps us to understand why subjects internalize models of subjection that are not, apparently, good for them. Thus Lacan described fantasy as ‘essentiellement un imaginaire pris dans une certaine fonction signifiante’ (1998: 410: ‘essentially an imaginary caught up in a certain signifying function). For expositions of the usefulness of fantasy in political analysis, see particularly Zizek (1997: 3–44), Rose (1996: 1–55), Stravrakakis (1999: 45–54). The Lacanian notion of fantasy as a screen, which is elaborated in different ways by Zizek and Rose, is especially suggestive: fantasy serves as a screen in that it is a surface onto which representations are projected, while also acting as a screen that screens off that which is behind it. The fantasy of dying for love offers a point of identification for aspiring lovers while screening off the jouissance from which desire deflects the subject. ³⁰ Compare Zizek’s account of the suicide’s passage à l’acte (2000: 29), which he suggests ‘is the exact opposite of the death drive’, since it is ‘the Void-Place that disappears’. ³¹ I borrow the term ‘gentrification,’ as applied to sacrifice, from Zizek (1989: 116). I understand Zizek to be talking about a shift from a model of sacrifice (like Abraham’s) that involves the renunciation of something that is precious but nonetheless external, to self-sacrifice that nonetheless involves mortification of the flesh (like Christ’s or Christian martyrs), to self-sacrifice that is essentially psychic and which projects mortification of the flesh primarily into the realm of fantasy. See also Zizek (2000: 149–50). This is not to say that fantasy cannot reinscribe the mortification of the flesh on the body, as can be witnessed in the current increase in cases of anorexia.

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exorcizing good old God’). This remark immediately precedes an overt return to the question of courtly love and also, of course, constitutes a clear indication that Lacan himself perceived a connection between courtly love and the emergence of the secular. It is here that the historical dimensions of any inquiry into courtly love and courtly ethics come sharply into focus. Increasingly, medievalists challenge the facile approach to periodization—so prevalent in modern academic discourse—according to which there is a sharp rupture in the early modern period, after which modern subjectivities and epistemologies come into being. Medievalists are more and more suggesting continuities between the medieval, early modern periods, and modern periods, though without collapsing differences between them.³² As David Aers puts it (1996: 203): ‘What if certain features of fantasy and desire not only survived the allegedly decisive sixteenth-century rupture in the history of the subject, but were actually a sine qua non for the development of capitalist social formation, and, a strange thought, even for the development of postmodern cultures?’ This is not to say that such features are ahistorical, or that they are not subject to change, and my contention is that sacrificial love is indeed one of these features, but that its drift away from the religious sphere in the Middle Ages, with concomitant shifts in emphasis, is productive of some aspects of modern and postmodern subjectivities. If psychoanalysis is still the most fruitful method we have for thinking about the relation of the social and the psychic—for instance, for thinking about what Judith Butler calls our ‘passionate attachments’ (1997: 102), in other words why we may submit with apparent willingness to hierarchies that oppress us, or, why we may have learnt to love our pain before there is anything we can hope to do about it—we need nonetheless to think about psychoanalytic paradigms historically. Lacan himself insisted upon this (1966: 401–3), and the tension that some perceive between psychoanalytic and historicist criticism is a false one. In perhaps the most ambitious attempt to date to think psychoanalytic theory historically, Teresa Brennan suggested that what she called ‘the foundational fantasy’ on which modern Western culture is predicated—the ‘fantasy in which [the subject] conceives of itself as the locus of active agency and the environment as passive’—is ancient, and that it ‘pre-dates its technocratic ³² See e.g. the remarks by David Aers (1996: 199–208). See also Gaunt (1996: 157–8); Fradenburg and Freccero (1996: xiii–xx); Kay (1996: 230–1); and Dinshaw (1999: 1–54 and 197–8).

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acting-out on the large scale’ (1993: 11 and 13).³³ The ‘foundational fantasy’ produces what Brennan calls ‘the era of the ego’, an era characterized by, among other things, the ego’s blindness to the fragility of its own construction, part of which will be bound up with a blindness to its own history (1993: 37 and 195). Some of the ahistorical (or antihistorical) gestures of structuralist or poststructuralist theory may therefore, in Brennan’s view, be seen as colluding with the ‘era of the ego’. If we are still wrestling with the problem of what comes before subjectivity, it should not prevent us from realizing that modern Western subjectivity has a history, that this history probably did not begin in the early modern period, as some have supposed, and that understanding this history remains an urgent task today, and that the task is, as yet, just beginning. To Sarah Kay’s questions ‘Why is the theme of love treated with such apparent ethical seriousness in the Middle Ages?’, and ‘Why then?’, we might now add: ‘How and why do the paradigms of courtly love still structure the formation of the modern ethical subject today?’³⁴ The answer to the first two questions, as scholarship is showing with increasing clarity, is probably to be found in the particular social configuration of twelfth-century courts, where clerics and lay people of both sexes gathered, and where cultural tastes and exchanges could flourish. The answer to the supplementary third question will depend on how persuasive analogies between thinking about love in medieval and modern times, and the resulting ethical subject, will be. For Lacan, of course, conventional ethics are a screen to what he would consider to be the only real ethical issue (staying true to one’s desire), but for those of us made of less stern stuff, courtly ethics—grounded in renunciation—will still count as ethics. I began this chapter by questioning the notion of the secular as used by some critics of medieval literature, and I would like to return now to this point: if the structural parallels between profane love and religion in courtly literature make any clear-cut distinction between the spiritual and the secular problematic and unsustainable, courtly culture’s audacious appropriation of religious models nonetheless raises the value of erotic love and desire to new levels, placing profane sacrificial desire, albeit implicitly, in competition with sacred ³³ Brennan sees this ‘technocratic acting out on a large scale’ as taking place from the 17th cent. onwards, but see Kay (1996: 230–1) or Aers (1996). ³⁴ The belief that courtly love is still relevant to modern subjectivities certainly underscores the attention Lacan pays to the troubadours, as it does my contention that love in the 12th cent. provides an essential building block for modern ideas of secular ethics.

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sacrificial desire. In Chapter 2, I want to see what happens when the discourse of sacrificial desire that emerges in the poetry of the early troubadours and then becomes so stylized in the songs of Bernart de Ventadorn becomes more markedly inflected by the lexis of contemporary social and hierarchical structures—one might say secular structures—than is the case in Bernart’s lyrics.

2 To Die for: The Sovereign Power of the Lady in Troubadour Lyric The lyrics of Bernart de Ventadorn examined in Chapter 1 were to prove enormously influential in the development of courtly literature and the conventions surrounding fin’ amor. For subsequent troubadours, Bernart seems to have been a yardstick of excellence and sincerity, both poetically and emotionally. His lyrics had a palpable influence on the development of courtly literature in England and Northern France; indeed, he may have had personal contact with a number of key figures for the dissemination of courtly ideas about love, for instance Eleanor of Aquitaine and Chrétien de Troyes.¹ Bernart was viewed in his own time—and remains today—the exemplary courtly poet, and thereby courtly lover, in the troubadour tradition. The three troubadours whose lyrics I examine in this chapter—Arnaut de Maruelh, Raimon Jordan, and Gaucelm Faidit—composed their songs in the shadow of Bernart some twenty or thirty years after his activity as a poet stopped.² All three use imagery, formal techniques, and in the case of Arnaut, senhals,³ drawn from Bernart’s work. All three cast Material that forms the basis of parts of this chapter began life as a seminar paper presented at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge in 2001. Other parts derive from a paper given at the Sexuality After Foucault Conference at the University of Manchester in 2003 and from a seminar paper for the University of Naples in 2003. I should like to thank those present for their comments; also Elizabeth Edwards, Patrick ffrench, Peter Hallward, Daniel Heller-Roazen and Ashby Kinch for comments on earlier drafts. ¹ On Bernart’s legacy and his influence on and contact with Chrétien de Troyes, see Roncaglia (1958) and Rossi (1987). Bernart’s lyrics are copiously transmitted in the troubadour chansonniers, a sure sign of enduring popularity, while his most famous lyric (‘Can vei la lauzeta mover’) seems to have been widely disseminated outside Occitania, existing as it does in French translation. Curiously, Bernart is not singled out by Dante, even though Dante uses images that may have been drawn from his lyrics. ² Their datable poetic activity is as follows: Arnaut de Maruelh 1190s; Gaucelm Faidit c.1172–c.1203; Raimon Jordan c.1178–c.1195. ³ A senhal is a code-name for a lady, patron or fellow-poet. On the shared senhals, see Ch. 6.

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themselves—like Bernart—as fawning and abject courtly lovers, and not least of the similarities between the three corpora is the insistence with which all three poets sing of the risk they run of dying as a result of their love. Furthermore, the broad dissemination of their lyrics and their presence in the Monk of Montaudon’s ‘poetic gallery’, composed in the 1190s, indicates that, like Bernart, they were key figures in the poetic culture of their time.⁴ As I argued in Chapter 1, the model of sacrificial desire that is so prevalent in Bernart de Ventadorn rhetorically associates love with a death that is likened to martyrdom. As we shall see, this motif is taken up insistently by Raimon, Arnaut, and Gaucelm, often in terms that echo Bernart. But whereas Bernart mainly seems to inhabit a private psychic space into which he allows others to intrude only occasionally—even (perhaps particularly) his non-responsive and silent lady, making his poetry highly introspective—the three later troubadours pepper their lyrics more pointedly with vocabulary relating to contemporary social structures and temporal power, implicitly setting their love thereby to a much greater degree in the context of relations with others. This is not to say that power is absent from Bernart’s poetry. Indeed, as Mario Mancini has astutely argued, following on from the seminal sociological analyses of Erich Köhler, Bernart’s poetry sublimates social tensions in order to create a private space characterized by a fidelity to joi that is immune from the power of the ric, a space in which different ethics may pertain (2000: 52–3). For Mancini, the construction in Bernart’s lyrics of a fantasmic private space—immune from court intrigue and power play—marked a milestone in the development of Western European subjectivities: in this poetic universe, interiority outweighs the public sphere. The implication of Mancini’s argument is that Bernart’s turning away from the social sphere was deliberate and significant, and that it performatively produced a sphere that could be held in opposition to the social (the private). Of course the ‘private’ was emerging in many different forms in the course of the twelfth century: consider, for example, the slow move towards private reading in religious institutions.⁵ If courtly literature (not least the lyrics of Bernart de Ventadorn) is undoubtedly important in the emergence of a distinction between the public and the private,⁶ it is ⁴ See Monk of Montaudon (1977: XVIII), stanzas III (Raimon), VI (Gaucelm), and (Arnaut). There is little secondary literature on these troubadours, but see Gaunt (1995: 131–4 and 142–4), Kay (1990: 21–3, 62–3, 72–7, 94–5, and 156–60) and Kay (1999: 212–27). ⁵ See Saenger (1997: 243–54). ⁶ In that it construes the individual as one whose desires might come into conflict with those of the group against which he defines himself. See, e.g. Hanning (1977). On the role of courtly literature in the emergence of privacy, see further Spearing (1993). X

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crucial nonetheless to realize the extent to which they inflect each other. Thus, the lack of emphasis in Bernart’s lyrics on power may—as Köhler and Mancini suggest—be as significant as its presence in the lyrics of other troubadours. I am also not claiming that imagery suggesting martyrdom is not used by the poets I shall examine in this chapter. As we shall see, this is not the case, but the emphasis is different. A simple, if crude, way of grasping this is to compare the frequency of explicit allusions to death and mercy, a notion that in the context of these lyrics is—I suggest—very much bound up with power. Of course, merce in medieval Occitan is semantically rich and multivalent: dictionaries list grâce, pitié, miséricorde, merci, mérite, sorte de redevance as its possible meanings.⁷ But in any context in which mercy is granted by or sought from an individual who is represented as powerful (whether this power be economic, political, or imaginary), such as a courtly lady, the evocation of mercy is instrumental in inscribing an implied hierarchy in that it establishes an inequitable relation. In other words, mercy is not only an abstract virtue, but rather also a means of defining a relation between two individuals who are not represented as social equals, and whose relation to power therefore differentiates them. But if the evocation of merce necessarily inscribes power relations, as Glynnis Cropp points out, merce in non-religious contexts is also always overdetermined by ‘la grâce de Dieu’ and implies therefore the expectation of God’s limitless mercy, which in itself may hint at a sense of obligation, and therefore reciprocity (1975: 177). It is significant then that when Bernart de Ventadorn’s corpus is compared to those of Raimon, Arnaut, and Gaucelm, we find a much higher incidence of merce in the work of the later poets and a concomitant much higher incidence of evocations of mercy in contexts with love and death.⁸ Similarly, poder as a noun meaning power, and its cognates ( poderos, poderatge), are significantly more frequent in Raimon, Arnaut, and Gaucelm than in Bernart.⁹ Thus, whereas Bernart deploys an image ⁷ See Levy (1973: 244–5); also Chênerie (1977), Cropp (1975: 174–7), and von Wartburg (1925–: vi. 15–18). ⁸ My electronic searching of the corpora in question, using Ricketts (2001), indicates a greater incidence of merce than Cropp’s Appendix I (1975: 453–71). Whereas Bernart uses the word merce (with senses other than ‘thanks’) 19 times in 44 surviving lyrics, Raimon uses it 9 times in 12 lyrics, Arnaut 20 times in 25 lyrics, and Gaucelm Faidit 72 times in 65 lyrics. More than half the occurrences of merce (used with senses other than ‘thanks’) in the three later troubadours are in contexts in which death is also evoked; compare this to about 32 per cent of the occurrences in Bernart. ⁹ Ricketts (2001) indicates that whereas Bernart uses the word poder and its cognates in 23 per cent of his lyrics, Gaucelm does so in 28 per cent, Arnaut in 32 per cent, and Raimon in 67 per cent.

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of himself as a martyr to and in love, frequently freezing the frame, as it were, at the moment when his sacrifice is keenly anticipated, in order that his identity is grounded in renunciation, the later poets place greater emphasis on the possibility of the lady rewarding her lover for his sacrifice and/or on her ability to do so, on the possibility that she may use her power to empower him in an anticipated future moment of fulfilment. It is perhaps useful to recall here that for Derrida, a key feature of sacrifice is that it is a don sans économie (1992: 91), even if a reward may always be implicit and performatively anticipated in acts of renunciation or abasement. The difference then between Bernart and the later troubadours is that Raimon, Arnaut, and Gaucelm articulate more clearly the economic basis of their relationship with the lady (in the sense that it is predicated upon anticipated exchange), whereas this had remained far more implicit in Bernart’s lyrics. And what this in turn suggests is a reworking of the representation of love and death as articulated in Bernart’s model of sacrificial desire into a more political—as opposed to a psychological or religious—framework. There are three sections in what follows. First, I will examine the nature of the power that is attributed to the lady by Arnaut and Raimon; secondly, I will try to draw out what is at stake in loving an individual who is deemed to have sovereign power, again using the lyrics of Arnaut and Raimon; finally, I will argue that the stress Arnaut de Maruelh, Raimon Jordan, and Gaucelm Faidit place upon mercy produces a different model of courtly ethics from the one elaborated by Bernart de Ventadorn. Given the different tone of the lyrics I will be examining in this chapter, I will be invoking more politically oriented theoretical models alongside psychoanalysis. Some of these (notably Foucauldian models) are notoriously incompatible with the psychoanalytic framework within which I worked in the last chapter, so as my argument advances, I shall explore ways of mediating between the political and psychic dynamics that underscore the imagery of love and death, drawing largely on the work of Judith Butler and the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who has significantly advanced Foucauldian thinking through his sympathetic critique.

The Sovereign Power of the Lady The framing of love with a vocabulary of power in Raimon Jordan and Arnaut de Maruelh is sometimes very marked indeed. For instance, when Raimon, in a torrent of feudal and legal terminology, likens his position as a lover to that of the vassal who is totally subject to his lord’s

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power, or when Arnaut portrays himself as engaged in a war on behalf of his overlord (Amor), a war designed to test him ethically: i

Aissi cum sel qu’em poder de senhor es remazutz per totz-temps e casatz, e non pot far mas quan sas voluntatz, e si.l fai ben o mal porta.n lauzor, sui remazutz, domn’, en vostre poder, qu’alhors non pot mos fis cors remaner mas quant ab vos, a cui guiren no.n trai mas de Merce, e non s’en met em plai. (Raimon Jordan 1990: I, 1–8) (Just like the man who has remained in his lord’s power and been his subject for ever, and who can do nothing unless he wills it, and who praises him whether he does good or evil, so have I remained, lady, in your power, for my pure heart cannot rest elsewhere, other than with you, before whom it can summon no guarantor, other than mercy, and yet it does not invoke any summons.) i Anc vas Amor no.m poc res contradire, pois ben i volc son poder demostrar; per qu’ieu non puosc sa guerra sols atendre, a sa merce mi rend totz domengiers; e ja vas lieis mos cors non er leugiers, c’anc nuills amans, pois lo primier conquis, ni aquel eis, non fo de cor plus fis. (Arnaut de Maruelh 1973: XV, 1–7) (I can contradict love in nothing since I wish indeed to demonstrate its power; because I cannot wage its war alone, I throw myself entirely on its mercy as its subordinate; and my heart will never be fickle towards it, for never did a lover, even one conquered from the outset, even one such, have such a pure heart.)

Often of course the power of the lady (or Love) is portrayed as power over life or death: vii

Bels-Deziriers, s’anc parliei follamen penedensa trob’ om ab ver perdo, e s’anc re fis qu’a vos no saupes bo eras m’en ren al vostre chauzimen; aissi me met en las vostras preizos e si me faitz jutgar segon razos, ja no.m tenretz mais en tan gran turmen, ni m’auciretz en vostre preizonatge. (Raimon: XI, 49–56) (Fair Desire, if ever I spoke foolishly one can find penitence through true forgiveness, and if I ever did anything that displeased you, now I give myself over entirely

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to your clemency; thus I place myself in your prison and if you judge me according to reason, you will indeed not subject me to such great torment, nor will you kill me while I am your captive.) La franca captenensa qu’eu non puosc oblidar, e.il doutz ris e l’esgar e.il semblan qu’ie.us vi far, mi fant, dompna valens, mieiller qu’ieu non sai dir, dinz del cor sospirar; e si per mi no.us vens Merces e Chauzimens, tem que.m n’er a morir. (Arnaut: III, 1–10) (The noble countenance that I cannot forget, the sweet laughter and glance and the expression I saw you make cause me to sigh, worthy lady, deeper than I know how to say; and if, for my sake, mercy and clemency do not vanquish you, I fear that there will be nothing for it, but for me to die.) I

One might note—in all the stanzas quoted—the prevalence alongside love and death not just of power ( poder), but also of ‘feudal’ terms such as casatz, domengiers (Raimon I, 2; Arnaut XV, 4), of technical legalistic terms such as guiren, plai (Raimon I, 7 and 8), or of terms evoking conflict and/or discipline such as guerra, conquis, preizos (Arnaut XV, 3 and 6; Raimon XI, 53). There is a consistent attempt here to associate love not just with death, but with power and external, institutional forms of discipline. The poets’ inner psychic space is therefore represented here as highly regulated and subject to discipline. These lyrics thus seem, in many respects, to represent an emotional world in which power structures which mimic those outlined by Michel Foucault in ‘Droit de mort et pouvoir sur la vie’, the last chapter of La Volonté de savoir, the first volume of his Histoire de la sexualité (1976: 175–211), are deployed metaphorically. Foucault identifies an initial form of subjection grounded in the sovereign’s power over life and death (178); for Foucault the structure that administered power and regulated the life of individuals by holding out a threat that operated on the limits of life (i.e. death) remained intact until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is a power structure bathed in the symbolism of blood, as it signifies both violent death and lineage. The paradigm shift that occurs, for Foucault, on the cusp of the early modern and modern periods is to what he calls a biopolitics, a structure that increasingly exercises control over the minutiae of life, rather

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than the limits of life. This is achieved largely through the increasingly intense regulation (socially, morally, legally, philosophically, and medically) of sexuality. As Foucault was to put it in a lecture in 1976 (1997: 218–19), but in a striking reversal of the terms with which he had characterized sovereignty in La Volonté de savoir, published in the same year, biopolitics bestow the power to ‘laisser mourir’ (‘to let die’) and ‘faire vivre’ (‘to make live’), (though to whom exactly this power is bestowed is unclear since power now pulses towards and emanates from ‘government’). Biopolitics, in other words, entails on the one hand, indifference to the value of the lives of some people, and on the other, forms of regulation that govern (or seek to govern) every aspect of the lives of others (Foucault 1994: iii, 719–20). The modern period’s preoccupation with sexuality (and psychoanalysis for Foucault would be a symptom of this) is thus repressive, not liberating. If Foucault’s position did not remain static after the publication of La Volonté de savoir in 1976,¹⁰ the import of ‘Droit de mort et pouvoir sur la vie’ should not, however, be trivialized, since it proved so influential throughout the 1980s and 90s.¹¹ And although its influence has not been particularly marked among medievalists, who have in fact tended to critique Foucauldian paradigms, it has continued implicitly to have an important impact on how scholars working in earlier and later periods have thought about the Middle Ages.¹² Foucault’s approach to periodization is at once more subtle than many of his followers and yet nonetheless equivocal. On the one hand, he is careful to insist that ‘En fait, l’analytique de la sexualité et la symbolique du sang ont beau relever en leur principe de deux régimes de pouvoir bien distincts, ils ne se sont pas succédés . . . sans chevauchements, interactions ou échos’ (1976: 196: ‘In fact, although an analytic approach to sexuality and the symbolism of blood stem from two quite distinct power structures, one did not follow on from the other . . . without overlapping, interactions and echoes’). On the other, he repeatedly uses terms such as rupture, nouvelles procédures, stating baldly: ‘concrètement, ce pouvoir sur la vie s’est dévelopé depuis le XVIIe siècle’ (1976: 182: ‘in concrete terms, this power over life has developed since the seventeenth century’). If ¹⁰ See e.g. Foucault (1994: iii, 818–25 ‘Naissance de la biopolitique’ [1979]), which marks a shift of attention towards the hegemonic potential of liberalism that potentially troubles the clear cut distinction between sovereign power and biopolitics. ¹¹ In a sense this influence is so ubiquitous that citing Foucault specifically was scarcely necessary, but see for example Greenblatt (1980: 301 note 34) and Dollimore (1991: passim, but particularly 216–17). For an overview, see Bristow (1997: 168–97). ¹² For example, Foucauldian paradigms seem to underpin the periodization of influential scholars writing about death, e.g. Ariès (1975).

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Foucault makes no explicit comment on the political structures of the Middle Ages, and if the complex portrait of antiquity that emerges from his subsequent work is not commensurate with the schematic view of history that seems implicit in La Volonté de savoir, it is nonetheless this schematic view of history that has prevailed for many of Foucault’s followers. Thus, sovereignty becomes the basis of power before the historical watershed; biopolitics, its basis afterwards.¹³ The elaboration of the notion of biopolitics represents a real intellectual breakthrough even if we question Foucault’s implied historical conclusions. But Foucault’s paradigms have been challenged on other than historical grounds. One powerful critique can come from psychoanalysis. Foucault is not—allegedly—concerned with the affective investment we might have in the structures of power that regulate our lives. He apparently offers, in other words, no intellectual framework for explaining why subjects might desire their subjection and have an erotic investment in it. Rather than simply dismissing Foucault’s findings, however, I prefer to follow Judith Butler’s example in The Psychic Life of Power by trying to put psychoanalysis together with Foucault, rather then pitting them against each other (1997: 83–105). A second important challenge to Foucault’s work has come from the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. His Homo Sacer (1995) ought, in my view, to be of particular interest to medievalists because, unlike many theorists and philosophers, he has considerable expertise in medieval culture, history, and literature and therefore is not blind to the centrality of the Middle Ages in the development of Western culture and thinking. Agamben’s argument in Homo Sacer is first that sovereign power should not be opposed to biopolitics, on the contrary it is fundamental to it; and secondly that ‘la politica occidentale è fin dall’inizio una biopolitica’ (202: ‘Western politics is from the outset a biopolitics’). This thesis is elaborated initially through the Aristotelian distinction between bios (bare life) and zoe (political life), which Agamben maps onto Foucault’s distinction between sovereign power and biopolitics. For ¹³ Death is central to the former in that power over life and death is everywhere; but death is then the obscene, dissimulated underbelly of biopolitics, which is fundamentally concerned with life and therefore makes death into ‘le point le plus secret de l’existence, le plus privé’ (1976: 182: ‘the most secret and private part of existence’). Paradoxically, the invisibility of death in modern culture is precisely what, for Foucault, enabled the increasing indifference to the sanctity of human life that has its outcome in world wars, the holocaust, our tolerance of devastating pandemics and famines. This invisibility of death is commensurate with Ariès’s notion of La Mort interdite in the 20th cent. (1975: 60–74), which is marked by ‘le grand refus de la mort’.

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Agamben, the two categories are mutually productive of each other: if it is the power of the sovereign to include bare life in political life (or to exclude it from political life) that establishes sovereign power, it is this very act of inclusion (or exclusion) that produces (or precludes) political life. Sovereign power and biopolitics are thus inseparable: ‘si può dire, anzi, che la produzione di un corpo biopolitico sia la prestazione originale del potere sovrano’ (9: ‘It can even be said that sovereign power’s primary function is the production of a biopolitical body’). Agamben so expands the meaning of the term biopolitics from Foucault’s quite specific and limited sense (which designates modes of power prevalent in Europe from the seventeenth century) to a term that subsumes all political human life that, in some respects, he is no longer talking about the same thing. But Agamben is nonetheless convinced that the trajectory of his own thought represents an extension of Foucault’s, albeit one Foucault himself neither took, nor perhaps even saw. What Agamben therefore suggests is that Western culture has produced a ubiquitous political structure in which the apparently distinct categories of bare life and the biopolitical ‘entrano in una zona di irriducibile indistinzione’ (12: ‘enter a zone of irreducible indistinction’), in which bare life is therefore the originary political category. What is at stake here is the capacity of man to represent himself ‘non più come oggetto, ma come soggetto del potere politico’ (13: ‘no longer as object but as subject of political power’). A key element in Agamben’s analysis is the figure of homo sacer (sacred man) of Roman law, who may be killed with impunity, but who may not be sacrificed. He is included in the judicial order solely by being excluded.¹⁴ One of Agamben’s prime examples of homo sacer is the werewolf in Marie de France’s Bisclavret: a figure who is relegated to the margins of the political order, whose continued existence is (on one level) a matter of indifference in that killing him has no sanction attached to it, a figure whose eventual inclusion in the political order is dependent on the sovereign (1995: 116–23).¹⁵ For Agamben, the stakes in all this could not be higher, as we see when he argues that it is the logic that lies behind the structure that he elaborates that makes Nazi death camps possible (1995: 129–211). Thus, Agamben is critical of accounts of the Holocaust that ¹⁴ Agamben (1995: 11–12 and 77–127). Also Agamben (1996: 13–19). ¹⁵ ‘Il bando e il lupo’. This short chapter is a revelatory reading of Bisclavret. In particular his comments on the importance of Bisclavret’s final transformation taking place on the bed of the sovereign suggest how the text places the regulation of sexuality at the heart of the process whereby bare life and sovereign power symbiotically produce biopolitics (120).

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give it a sacrificial spin, integrating it into a narrative of emancipation. The ‘bare lives’ that inhabit the camps exemplify, for Agamben, a ‘vita che non merita di vivere’ (1995: 150–9 ‘a life that does not deserve to live’). For Agamben, the state of exception created by the camp is not exceptional in every sense of the word; it is rather a structural possibility in all political life in the West. Agamben’s analysis of Bisclavret shows the extent to which in medieval culture the interaction of the sovereign with homo sacer produces biopolitical life, a phenomenon thought by Foucault and his followers not to have developed until after the medieval period. A key feature of sovereign power’s relation to bare life is mercy: thus, for Agamben it is significant that the ban to which the medieval incarnation of homo sacer is subject signifies being ‘at the mercy of ’ (1995: 123). It is equally key that mercy is arbitrary. A crude example of what I mean from recent popular culture is the scene in Schlindler’s List in which the camp commandant is temporarily persuaded by Schindler that mercy makes him more, rather than less, powerful. Mercy seems to have the potential to give the sovereign ethics, but at the same time mercy undermines his sovereignty. The commandant spares several Jews, but then, after hesitating, shoots one, but arbitrarily, with no apparent reason for his choice, unless of course, the point is his realization that ethics impairs his sovereignty. Ultimately, he was only interested in mercy’s effect on himself and was impervious to its ethical dimension. How might these structures be relevant to the troubadours? I wish to pursue here Agamben’s insight that biopolitics are inherent to Western European political structures and thus predate the early modern period. I want to examine how power is articulated in the troubadour love lyric in relation to evocations of sovereign power over life and death, how this produces an erotically charged biopolitical discourse, and finally, how this impacts upon ethics. Etymologically, cognates of sovereign/ty in Occitan include sobre, sobeiran, both words that abound in the corpus I am considering here. In the following quotations, I have italicized words evoking sovereignty and the power over life and death: i

Per qual forfait o per qual falhimen qu’ieu anc fezes encontra vos, Amors, mi destrenhetz e.m tenetz enveios per la bella que mos precs non enten? Trop demostratz e me vostre poder, e qui vencut vens mout fai pauc d’esfors;

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To Die For si vensiatz lieis que no.us tem ni.us blan, adoncs sai eu que.i auratz honor gran.

ii

Be.m cujava laissar ad escien que non chantes mas de vostras lauzors, ni que ja mais no.m reclames per vos, quar m’eratz tan de mal aculhimen. Mas aisso.m tol, dona, .l sen e.l saber, qu’a tota gen aug dire ad esfors que.l vostre pretz vai lo melhor sobran e lauzengiers no.us en pot tener dan.

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E quar sabetz, dona, certanamen que d’autr’ amor no.m ven gaugz ni paors, perpessatz vos si.us pot esser nuls pros si.m faitz morir ad aitan greu turmen; 20 ben conoissetz, si nonc’ o faitz parer, qui.l sieu destrui que no fai gran esfors: vostre sui hieu aissi ses tot enguan, que s’ieu ren pert vos penretz tot lo dan. (Raimon, VI) (For what misdeed or wrong that I have done you, Love, do you torment me and keep me desirous of the fair one who does not hear my pleading? You demonstrate your power too much in me, and he who vanquishes someone already vanquished exerts himself little; if you vanquish the woman who does not fear you nor revere you, then I know that you will have great honour. I indeed meant to give up singing of anything other than your praise and no longer to complain of you, for you were so unwelcoming to me. But this deprives me of my wisdom and knowledge, for I hear all people proclaim vigorously that your worth is superior to the best, and slanderers cannot harm you. And since, lady, you know certainly that neither joy nor fear can come to me from any other love, think about whether it can do you any good if you cause me to die in such great torment; you indeed know, even if this does not appear to be the case, that the one who torments his own does not exert himself greatly: I am yours without any guile, so if I lose anything, you are the one who will be harmed by this.) iv

Amors, merce, car acuoills que paratges te sopleia, qu’ieu tem que.m desesperes, mas una res m’en apaia don pren cor et ardimen, qu’enans qu’om tries paratge, t’enseignorist tant sobre.ls poderos que quant que.t plac fo pois ades razos.

25

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v

Tant es sobre .ls aussors fuelhs lo sieus pretz e seignoreia, que negun trebal en res 35 no.m tenh ni dolor qu’en aia, qu’ieu am mais, quar es plus gen, sofrir un honrat dampnatge que far guazanh, ont ieu honratz no fos, ni.l cortes digz falsar de mas chansos. 40 (Arnaut, XVIII) (Love, mercy: allow nobility to beseech you, for I fear that you drive me to despair, but one thing alone gives me comfort, which allows my heart to grow bold, namely that before nobility was conferred, it was granted that you should lord it over the most powerful so that whatever pleases you is deemed reasonable. Her worth is so high above and so lords it over the highest leaves that I have no concerns for or sorrow in anything, for—since she is the sweetest of all—I prefer to endure an honourable loss than to win something dishonourable, or to tarnish courtly words with my songs.)

Note how in the first stanza of Raimon’s lyric, the subjugation of the lover is said to require pauc d’esfors (6). Esfors then becomes a refrain word throughout the poem, emphasizing in both stanzas I and III the absolute power of the lady (14 and 22), and the total subjugation of the lover. Note also that in Arnaut’s lyric, the lady’s power is portrayed as limitless and arbitrary (31–2). In both texts, a key term is honor or its cognate honrat(z) (Raimon, 8; Arnaut, 38–9): honor in Occitan and Old French is semantically ambivalent, representing both honour (bestowed upon an individual by his sovereign) and the fief or material wealth that goes with this (Cropp 1975: 363–5). The deployment of honor in these lyrics inextricably imbricates the erotic, the ethical, and material power. Moreover, it is the lady who has the power to bestow honor. The disempowerment of the lover is total: he is nothing in the face of the lady’s sovereign power. Indeed, as in Agamben’s portrayal of homo sacer, the lover, in Arnaut and Raimon’s lyrics, is often portrayed as caught between life and death, apparently locked into a life that does not deserve to be lived; in other words, into bare life: i

D’amor no.m puesc departir ni sebrar, pero ben sai que.l partirs me demora; et ieu nom puesc senes amor estar et ai avut aital fat tota ora: qu’amoros sui et amoros serai e conosc be que per amor murrai;

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e ges per tan d’amor no.m puesc partir si be.i conosc mo viur’ e mo morir (Raimon, III, 1–8) (I can neither leave nor separate myself from love, and yet I know that leaving is my lot; and I cannot exist without love and have been thus cursed forever: for I am in love and will always be in love and I know that I will die for/through love; and yet despite this I cannot leave even if I recognize in this my life and my death.) i

Si cum li peis an en l’aiga lor vida l’ai eu en joi e totz temps la.i aurai, c’Amors m’a faich en tal dompna chausir don viu jauzens sol del desir qu’ieu n’ai, tant es valens que, quan ben m’o cossir, m’en nais orguoills e.m creis humilitatz; mais si.ls ten joins amors e jois amdos, que ren no.i pert mesura ni razos. (Arnaut, VIII, 1–8) (Just as the fish have their life in water, I have mine in joy and always will, for Love has made me choose a lady who makes me live joyfully just from the desire that I have; she is so worthy that, when I think about it, my heart swells with pride and yet I am humble; but if Love and Joy come together, neither restraint nor reason are compromised by this.)

Raimon and Arnaut do not simply portray themselves as in thrall to their sovereign lady in these lyrics: all individuals are in thrall to the sovereign, not simply homo sacer. Raimon presents himself rather as trapped in a space where his life is perpetually at risk, a space where his death is always present in his life, a notion that is developed in the following stanzas. He is unable to live fully where he is, but he is also unable to leave. Trapped in this liminal zone of living death, he is simultaneously both excluded and included in the order that amor seems here to represent. The comparison to the fish in the sea, in Arnaut’s lyric, neatly illustrates how life is portrayed as utterly dependent on the lady or love or joy. Love and joy are, as it were, the very air the lover breathes, but the sinister implications of this cliché—still prevalent in popular song—are clearer in the context of these lyrics, where it is apparent that love—or the beloved—has the power to suffocate, possibly without even noticing (given its/her indifference). Arnaut metaphorically inhabits a space in which his life is constantly under threat. For Agamben: Il sadomasochismo è appunto quella tecnica della sessualità, che consiste nel fare emergere nel partner la nuda vita. E non solo l’analogia col potere sovrano è

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consapevolmente evocata da Sade . . . ma la simmetria fra homo sacer e sovrano si ritrova qui nella complicità che lega il masochista al sadico. (1995: 149) (Sadomasochism is exactly that practice of sexuality which consists in bringing out the partner’s bare life. Not only is the analogy with sovereign power consciously evoked by Sade . . . but the symmetry between homo sacer and sovereign is recognizable in the complicity that ties the masochist to the sadist.)

While it is apparent from this that homo sacer may love the sovereign, it would be more accurate to say, since these are predetermined roles, that he may be represented or represent himself as loving the sovereign. What I am seeking to explore, therefore, is what is at stake when representations or symbolizations of sovereign power become erotically charged, as they do in troubadour lyric. It is interesting in this respect to consider the development of the Occitan word sobeiran and its Old French cognate sovrain (⬍ Latin superanus): initially it has the simple sense ‘superior’. So when masculine and applied to God or a powerful man such as a king, it simply means ‘powerful’, rather than designating any particular, absolute form of power; in the feminine it is applied to the Virgin Mary, who is obviously ‘above’ other women, but also frequently to courtly ladies. Only in the thirteenth century does the meaning ‘sovereign’ become clearly identifiable. It would seem then that sobeiran/sovrain are already strongly coloured with religious and erotic connotations before they become associated specifically with temporal power in the mid-thirteenth century (von Wartburg 1925– : xii. 434–5). Power and hierarchical structures—when described using the semantic field of sovereignty—are thus always already implicitly eroticized, and it is quite apparent in the lyrics from which I have quoted thus far in this chapter that the lover desires the subordinate position in which love places him, and that he takes pleasure in his subjection and that he loves the sovereign. What then does the lover want from this?

Loving the Sovereign The pleasure that comes from subjection is often quite explicit: vi

Dompna, s’ieu muer per vostr’amor be.m plai mas ja cug vezer mon senhor guai, lo pro marques, que fai son pretz grazir e gent honrar e totz bes far e dir. (Raimon, III, 41–4) (Lady, even if I die for your love, I like this, though I may never see again my jolly lord Marquis, who makes men grateful for his worth, behaves honourably and whose deeds and words are entirely good.)

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iii

Ges no puesc esser oblidos, qu’el mon ren tant no m’abelis; be.m malmenet e be m’aucis; quar anc la.m fes amar Amors? Si.m son li mal abaissat a plazer que totz jorns muer, pus no m’en vol mover, ans m’es sojorns lo solas e.l martires. (Arnaut, XVI, 15–21) (I can indeed not be forgetful, since nothing pleases me more in the world; for I am badly treated and killed; why did Love make me love her? My woes have indeed turned into pleasure so that I die every day and since I do not wish to leave, I like both my comfort and my martyrdom.)

What this brings sharply into focus is the contrast between the sovereign’s relation to bare life and the way in which the discourse associated with sovereignty and bare life is deployed in erotic contexts such as this. In Agamben’s schema, the sovereign will not, by definition, give a second thought—or indeed any thought at all—to what the individuals over whom he exercises his sovereign power might think, want, or feel. The sovereign is indifferent to them in the sense that he makes no distinction between them; they are all nothing to him. They, on the other hand, cannot love, since they are reduced to a pure, animal state—bare life. But while acknowledging the constant likelihood that his existence simply may not register for the lady, the lover’s plaint in the lyric is nonetheless predicated on the possibility that she may be susceptible to his plight. The lover therefore seems to be pulled in two conflicting directions: on the one hand, he seems to want to occupy the liminal zone of the homo sacer; on the other, he seems to want his lady to extract him from this space. I would suggest that he wants the former because it is the existence of this zone that makes sovereign power possible, while he simultaneously wants the latter so that he can have a share of the sovereignty which, to a certain extent at least, is created and maintained by his own discourse. I shall further suggest that it is ethics that mediates between these two desires by seducing the sovereign lady into acknowledging the lover. All of these mean that the lover both desires and yet fears indifference. These conflicting currents can be seen at work in this lyric by Arnaut (Poem II), in which love and death are present from the outset: i

Aissi cum selh que tem qu’Amors l’aucia e re no sap on s’esconda ni.s guanda, met mi meteys en guard’ et en comanda de vos, qu’ieu am ses gienh e sens bauzia,

To Die For quar mielher etz del mon, e la belaire; e si ricors mi fai vas vos atraire, si be.m foley, no cug faire folhia. ii

Qu’aissi m’ave, dona.l genser que sia, qu’us deziriers, qu’ins en mon cor s’abranda, cosselh’ e.m ditz qu’ie.us am e.us serv’ e.us blanda, e vol que.m lays d’enquerr’ autra paria per vos en cuy an tug bon ayp repaire; e pus Amors no vol que.m vir ni.m vaire, si m’aucizetz, no crei que be.us estia.

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Qu’Essenhamens e Pretz e Cortezia 15 trobon ab vos lur ops e lur vianda, e no vulhatz, s’Amors non es truanda, gitar Merce de vostra companhia; qu’ie.us clam merce tot jorn cum fis amaire, e si Merces ab vos non a que faire, 20 ma vida.m val trop meyns que si moria. (Just like the man who fears that Love will kill him and knows not how to escape or avoid this, I place myself under your protection and command, for I love without guile or dissimulation, since you are the best one in the world, and the most beautiful; and if power draws me towards you, even if this drives me mad, I do not think what I do is madness. For thus it befalls me, sweetest lady of all, that a desire, which is kindled in my heart, advises and tells me to love, serve and pay court to you, and it wishes me no longer to look for any other companion for your sake, since all good qualities reside in you; and since Love does not want me to wonder or waiver, if you kill me, I don’t think this can do you any good. For Learning and Worth and Courtesy find all they need and nourishment in you, and you do not want, unless Love is unworthy, to exclude Mercy from your retinue; which is why I continually beg mercy from you as a pure lover, and if Mercy has nothing to do with you, my life is worth less to me than if I were to die.) III

The lover seems entirely disempowered within the psychic world he portrays. Yet the poem is full of contradictions in its representation of empowerment and disempowerment. In the first stanza, the lover represents himself as under the lady’s protection and command, but implies this is the result of positive agency on his part (‘met mi meteys en guard’ e en comanda | de vos’). In stanza II, he is driven by us deziriers that advises and guides him, as if he were totally passive in the face of the Other’s desire, doing precisely what it wishes (‘e vol que.m lays’ and so on). He is both included and excluded at one and the same time, since Love apparently neither wants him to live, nor to leave (13–14). He insistently begs

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for mercy (18–20), and this leads to a stark portrayal of his life as bare life: ‘ma vida.m val trop meyns que si moria’ (21). He leads, as it were, a life that does not deserve to be lived. However, this ostensible disempowerment gives way to a consistent web of images of empowerment. In stanza IV, this is articulated through imagery of hill-top and plain (24), and rising and falling (23, 27), but at this stage, the lover’s desire is implicitly presented as unreasonable. His humility is nonetheless displaced in stanzas V and VI by a dominant implied comparison with Julius Caesar, which may in turn contain a comparison with one of the most powerful men in Western Europe in the second half of the twelfth century, Henry II of England, who was Count of Anjou, Duke of Normandy, and claimed the crown of Ireland: v

vi

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Juli Cezar conquis la senhoria per son esfors de tot lo mon a randa, non ges qu’el fos senher ni reis d’Irlanda, ni coms d’Angieus, ni ducx de Normandia, ans fo bas hom, seguon qu’ieu aug retraire, mas quar fon pros e francs e de bon aire, pujet son pretz tan quant pugar podia. Per que.m conort, enquer (s’ieu tant vivia) aia de vos tot quan mos cors demanda; pus us sols hom ses tor e ses miranda conquis lo mon ni.l tenc en sa baylia, aissi ben dei, segon lo mieu vejaire, de vostr’ amor de dreg estr’ emperaire, com el del mon ses dreg que no.i avia.

30

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Dompna doussa, corteza, de bon aire, no.us pes s’ie.us am ses gienh e ses cor vaire, car esser deu so c’Amors vol que sia. 45 (Julius Caesar conquered by force the whole world, even though he was neither king of Ireland, nor Count of Anjou, nor Duke of Normandy, rather he was of humble origin, according to what I have heard, but because he was worthy and noble and of good extraction, his worth rose as high as it could possibly rise. Which is why I take comfort that I might yet—if I live this long—have from you everything my heart asks for; since one man with neither a castle nor a watchtower conquered the whole world and held it in his power, so I think I should be rightfully emperor of your love as he was of the world when he had no right to this. Sweet, courtly and noble lady, do not worry whether or not I love you without guile or a fickle heart, for I must be what Love wants me to be.)

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The potential of the subject’s erotic longing to empower him is strongly overdetermined by these evocations of tangible political power. Indeed, the last three stanzas are bound together by a series of echoed words and ideas that resonate with power, either metaphorically or in concrete terms: pujar (23, 27, 35), bas (27, 33), conquier/conquis (28, 29, 39). This pattern of textured echoes culminates in lines 41–2 with dreg. If Julius Caesar (or indeed Henry II, who started out merely as the relatively humble Count of Anjou) illustrates neatly that it is possible to make the transition from bas om to sovereign, even when he had no right to power, this only serves to render the lover’s staged transition from homo sacer to sovereign lover de dreg (rightfully) all the more striking. But at the same time, the metaphorical empowerment of the lover contradicts his earlier total disempowerment. In light of this, we might return to the dominant idea of stanza III: Mercy personified. Here, Mercy is added to a list of other virtues which reside in the lady, and any indifference on her part is presented as an indifference not so much to the lover as to Mercy itself. To be indifferent to Mercy is to eschew all ethical value (this at least is the implication of ‘s’Amors non es truanda’ in line 17) and also, of course, to condemn the lover to bare life (21). How does this insistence on Mercy sit with what follows? If the lover’s anticipated empowerment in stanzas IV–VI is structurally connected to his disempowerment in stanzas I–III, and if the content of stanza III provides a transition between the two, then it would seem that mercy destroys sovereign power by disseminating it. Again there is a contradiction here. True mercy, absolute mercy—the sparing of one over whom one has the power of life and death—is the prerogative of the sovereign. And yet if the sovereign exercises mercy, he removes homo sacer from the liminal zone he inhabits because he establishes a relation between them that is different from the one of simultaneous inclusion/exclusion through which sovereign power and bare life are mutually productive of each other (as in Bisclavret), thereby conferring political life upon him, which in turn undermines his sovereignty. Ethics corrupts sovereign power; sovereign power is incompatible with ethics.

Mercy and the Ethical Subject As I pointed out, mercy is an important factor in Bernart de Ventadorn’s lyrics and, if there is a difference between them and those of Raimon Jordan and Arnaut de Maruelh, it is one of emphasis. Whereas the sacrificial

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flavour of Bernart’s desire construes the subject as fundamentally ethical and asks the Other to acknowledge him because of this (i.e. the subject’s virtue), in the lyrics of Raimon and Arnaut ethics are the means by which the subject seduces the Other’s sovereign power and the subject asks to be acknowledged because of the Other’s putative virtue. If we follow Agamben’s thinking, sacrifice is incompatible with sovereignty: this is because sacrifice gambles on the Other offering an ethical response to the subject’s ethical sacrifice, whereas the sovereign is by definition impervious to ethics (if by ethics one broadly means the mechanisms that regulate how we treat and interact with others, since the sovereign is responsible, ultimately, only to himself ).¹⁶ The model of sacrificial desire elaborated in Chapter 1 is solipsistic and fundamentally Narcissistic in that the subject looks to the Other for confirmation of his own ethical integrity. With the greater emphasis on power in Raimon and Arnaut, the subject becomes subject to a potentially more radical, arbitrary, and indifferent form of otherness. And because sovereign power is the object of desire in Raimon and Arnaut’s lyric, the lover’s claim to ethics would be useless. The lady/sovereign has to be made to want ethics for herself. She must be seduced into responsibility. Raimon is beguilingly honest about this strategy, though in the context of acknowledging its failure: i

ii

S’ieu fos encolpatz ves Amor de re, molt estera be qu’ieu fos malmenatz, mas on mielhs fauc sos comans pert los datz al premier lans; on plus vos soi aclis et amoros, domna, muer ses ochaizos; e mas ab vos no puesc merce trobar, no sai on la.m an cercar. Ben concosc assatz que ges no.us cove, per qu’ab bona fe vos m’era donatz, qu’anc mielhs, senes totz enjans, non amet negus amans;

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¹⁶ Of course there are other ways of thinking about ethics. One could also make a case at least for the sovereign being the incarnation of Lacanian ethics in that he would be the perfect example of a subject who never gives way on his desire.

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mas pauc mi val mos esfors contra vos, per qu’ieu n’estauc rancuros, qu’ab gen servir et ab merce clamar vos cugiei apoderar. (X) 20 (If I were culpable towards Love in anything, it would be quite right that I be badly treated, but whenever I follow its commands as well as I can, I lose at the first throw of the dice; the more I bow down and love you, lady, the more I die without good reason; and since I can find no mercy with you, I know not where I might go to seek it. I indeed know well that you do not like this, which is why I gave myself to you in good faith, for no lover ever loved so truly, without any trickery; but my efforts are worth little against you, which is why I am disgruntled, because I thought I could overpower you with my noble service and by begging for mercy.)

The ambiguous syntax of the second stanza here enhances our sense of Raimon’s disgruntlement. What exactly is it that is not acceptable to the lady? And does he give himself to his lady because he knows this will annoy her, or because he knows she is displeased by his begging (in which case the gift may also be calculated to annoy). But his final point is telling: his appeal to mercy was nothing more than an attempt to win her over (apoderar), to overpower her, that is, to usurp her power. The locus of empowerment is thus potentially ambiguous. If, in this lyric, Raimon bewails his failure to compromise his lady’s sovereign power, he nonetheless clings to the possibility of doing so as a structural potentiality of his discourse (19–20). This ambiguity is more fully realized in other lyrics, such as ‘Per solatz’ (VII), which initially at least seems to fit the sacrificial paradigm made popular by Bernart de Ventadorn: i

ii

Per solatz e per deport mi conort d’un amor que.m senh e.m destrenh, qu’eras m’adutz un talen don sai veramen que morrai, qu’i assai un fol ardimen, don ai espaven e doptansa. E mas mon cor m’a estort de greu mort, no vuelh mais que renh

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ab fals genh; 15 ans vir mon entendemen vas la plus valen qu’el mon sai, e metrai ·m al sieu chauzimen; 20 e, s’ilh m’o cossen, gen m’enansa. (Through good company and pleasure, I take comfort in a love that contains and controls me and which now awakes in me a desire from which I know truly I shall die, which is why I venture a foolishly bold gesture, which causes me to be afraid and fearful. And although it has saved my heart from a terrible death, I no longer wish to live with false dissimulation; rather my mind veers towards the most worthy that I know in the world, and I will put myself under her protection; and if she accords this to me, this will sweetly advance my cause.)

In the first stanza, desire is equated with death, and the lover puts himself under his lady’s protection in the second stanza, by implication because this is the only way he can avoid a greu mort from which the lady can perhaps protect him, but with which she simultaneously threatens him. Stanzas III and IV then elaborate on the lover’s position in a sphere that is ostensibly removed from any discourse that can prevail upon the lady. This is articulated twice, but in different ways. First, in a request to Love to intercede on his behalf in stanza III, then second in the claim that he has no right to speak either about her or to her in stanza IV; indeed, ‘mas en vuelh suffrir | greu martire’ (43–4: ‘I would rather endure great martyrdom’). The lover seems freely to embrace the position of the homo sacer, poised between life and death, dependent on an Other who is possibly at least entirely indifferent to him and who he has no chance whatsoever of touching with his language. The shift in strategy in stanza V is then all the more striking: V

Pero far li deu saber qual poder a en mi, qu’a pres e conques, qu’ie.lh serai homs et aclis, vertadiers e fis, tostemps mai; fol sen ai quar anc re li dis, qu’ans serai totz gris qu’ilh m’entenda.

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Mas per so ai bon esper, que valer me poira merces mais que res, qu’ans conquer loinhdas aclis qu’ergulhos vezis, quan s’eschai; per qu’ieu ai mon fin cor assis, qu’als no m’abellis, on m’entenda.

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Chansos, mos Guaris vuelh t’aprenda. (But I must make sure she knows what power she has in me/there is in me, whom she has captured and conquered, for I will be her man and subservient to her, true and faithful, for ever more; I am foolish for I have never said anything of this to her, indeed I will be gray before she hears me. But I have hope because mercy can help me more than anything, for a subservient man can conquer more from afar than a proud neighbour when this occurs; this is why my pure heart is fixed, for nothing else to which I might turn my attention makes me happy. Song, I want my Guaris to learn you.) VII

The syntax of lines 45–7 is ambiguous. Is the subject of the verb aver in line 47 the lady, or are we dealing rather with an impersonal construction?¹⁷ In either case, the expression poder aver e mi suggests that the location of empowerment is ambiguous: if the lady’s power is in him, does this not suggest that the power that had been so clearly located with and in the lady in the first four stanzas is being relocated with and in the lover? This ambiguity is strengthened by the repetition of the idea of conquest between lines 48 and 60. In line 48, it is the lady who has conquered the lover. On the other hand, conquer in line 60 is part of an elaborate implied simile which asserts that the passive, subordinate position of the aclis (he who is bowed down before another) can nonetheless lead to conquest. What will lead to this happy outcome? Merces, or in other words, the lady’s eventual susceptibility to ethics. As a result of this, to return to a formulation of Agamben’s, the lover no longer represents himself as the object of political power, but as its subject, a point that is neatly underlined by the repetition of entenda at the end of stanzas V and VI, which first has the lady as its grammatical subject, and then the lover. ¹⁷ For the impersonal construction see Jensen (1986: 219).

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Power pulses through this discourse, and the lover’s ploy is to ensure that it flows in his direction. The deployment of this poetic discourse to shift the subject from ostensible subordination to metaphoric empowerment is something that others have discussed brilliantly: the lover does not acquire actual social advancement through his songs (though the poet, of course, may obtain some kind of material reward if his song is pleasing), rather, he gains prestige.¹⁸ Furthermore, power in these lyrics is rarely, if ever, identical to political power in the feudal courts in which they were first performed, in that the realms over which a lord’s power in the political sphere and a lady’s putative power in the erotic sphere may be exercised can hardly be deemed coterminous. But political terminology and a discourse of temporal power is obviously used to structure the erotic, which means inevitably that the erotic must on some level also inflect the political. Power in these lyrics is thus a product of the imaginary feeding off the symbolic. Furthermore, power emanates from the discourse itself, and poets like Raimon and Arnaut merely jump on a bandwagon which they try with varying degrees of success to bring under control. What I have tried to draw out here is the role of merces and ethics, and how reading these texts with Foucault through Agamben might help us see the implications of what is going on: sovereignty and biopolitics are indeed mutually productive of each other in these lyrics. Furthermore, the sovereignty that emerges from these lyrics might even be thought of as a more absolute form of sovereignty than any encountered in the political sphere, since no sovereign may ever remain totally indifferent to his subjects and survive with his sovereignty intact. Perhaps the erotic sovereignty of the courtly lady is an important discursive precursor of the absolute monarch? In psychoanalytic terms, does it make a difference to construe the lady as sovereign as well as Lacanian Other (as I would argue Bernart de Ventadorn does)? I should like to try to answer this question through an analysis of a lyric by Gaucelm Faidit, which is quite literally structured round the idea of merce in that it uses merce as a refrain word in the fifth line of each stanza (Gaucelm Faidit 1965: XXVIII): i

Ab chantar me dei esbaudir de l’ira e del pessamen, qu’estat ai en tal marrimen

¹⁸ See most notably Kay (1990: 111–31), and the crucial distinction she makes between rank and status, which suggest an important modification to Köhler’s sociological analysis of troubadour lyric.

To Die For qu’a pauc no m’an mort li sospir; et agra·m mestier qu’ab merce pogues conquistar qualque re de que melhures ma razos e mos cors n’estes plus joyos. ii

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Mas ges no.s pot de me partir us dezirs que·m lassa e.m pren, que totz mos coratges m’enpen ves selieys que·m pogra guerir; e, s’ilh non a de me merce, pot saber que murai de se, que tant es mos mals perilhos que autres metges no m’es bos. Amiga, no·m vulhatz aucir, que, si eu anc fis falhimen, ves vos ieu m’en captenrai gen, tot aussi cum auziretz dir; qu’ades sui en vostra merce e vostres ai estat ancse; vostr’om sui en totas sazos et ades me reclam per vos. Dona, la nueg e·l jorn cossir de vostre gent cors avinen, qu’en ren als non ai mon talen, ni re mai sotz cel non dezir; qu’aissi·m tenetz pres en merce, que ges del cor non ai ab me; pus me e·l cor avetz, amdos gardatz, que·m sia quals que pros. Qu’ieu sui faitz al vostre servir et als vostre comandamen, que vos m’avetz fag de nien et ieu deg vos o mout grazir— dona, per Dieu e per merce, vos prec que·m fassatz qual que be, que tant sui de vos cobeitos que muer si no m’es faitz lo dos!

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Segner n’Agot, totas sazos estai vostre pretz fis e bos. (Through song I should rejoice in suffering and melancholy, for I have been so unhappy that sighing has nearly killed me; and it should be necessary for me to

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make a conquest with mercy, so that my argument [in my poem] might improve and my heart be more joyful. But a desire that binds and takes me captive can never leave me, for my heart pushes me entirely towards the woman who will be able to cure me; and if she has no mercy for me, she can be sure that I will die on her account, for my affliction is so dangerous that no other doctor can do me any good. Friend, do not seek to kill me, for if ever I wronged you, I will nobly make this up to you, just as you will now hear; for henceforth I am at your mercy and thus have I always been yours; I am your vassal forever and declare myself always already yours. Lady, night and day I think about your noble and comely body, for I fix my desire on nothing else, and desire nothing else under the sun; thus you may consider me imprisoned at your mercy, so that I no longer have my heart with me; since you have me and my heart, keep them both, so that some advantage might accrue to me from this. For I was created to serve you and to be at your command, since you created me ex nihilo and I should be very grateful for this—Lady, by God and for mercy’s sake, I beseech you to show me some kindness, for I desire you so intensely that not receiving the gift is the death of me! Sir Agout, your worth is always pure and good.)

The agent of mercy is the lady. Mercy is hers (21); she must have mercy on the poet (13), and she has him at her mercy (29). The mercy with which the poet seeks therefore to conquer something (6) is implicitly the lady’s. In other words, the lady’s mercy gives the poet access to power, but only on condition that he agrees to being imprisoned by, or perhaps in, it (29: pres en merce). In Foucauldian terms, the poet is included in the political order to which he aspires and is therefore empowered, but at the same time, power contains and constrains him. Furthermore, power is again clearly eroticized here, while desire is inscribed through images of hierarchy. The poet’s passionate attachment to the powerful object of desire can lead to his metaphorical empowerment (or conquest of ‘some thing’) and his subjection—whether this be as the lady’s om (or vassal) or as her prisoner—is potentially a source of erotic pleasure. The lady exercises power over the lover here, but this power functions by splitting the subject and operating both externally and internally, as in stanza IV, where the common motif of the heart as the lady’s property,—something that remains with her when the poet is elsewhere—is deployed. This both imposes and troubles a distinction between the poet’s interiority and the outside world. Indeed, the poet’s independently itinerant heart offers a good figure of the unconscious as defined by Freud, but perhaps more particularly by Lacan. The heart as

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the site of the lady-sovereign’s agency within the poet is indeed ‘in him more than him’.¹⁹ But the unconscious here regulates power as well as desire, and when the poet goes on to talk about his death in the next stanza (albeit not necessarily seriously), picking up on the earlier reference in stanza III to his lady possibly wanting to kill him, we can see that it is less his death that is at stake here than the regulation of his life by culturally bounded erotic impulses. The lady’s mercy, and indeed her sovereignty, thus establish a biopolitic in this poem, and we have therefore a perfect illustration of Agamben’s contention that sovereignty and biopolitics constitute each other. The poet’s interiority is policed and regulated by a lady who is presented in terms of temporal power, as a sovereign, with the power over life and death. Death is always present in this life that is not a life, and within the fictional frame, the troubadour (like the werewolf Bisclavret) has no hope of becoming a subject without the intervention, or mercy, of the sovereign. Nowhere is the resonance or ambivalence of this more evident in the representation of the lady as a creator ex nihilo (35): ‘vos m’a fag de nien’. Far de nien (to create from nothing) is a rare collocation in troubadour lyric: it is elsewhere used either in relation to God, or in relation to a feudal overlord who elevates a previously disempowered vassal.²⁰ The expression far de nien here thus takes us to the heart of the troubadours’ ambivalent use of religious motifs, imagery and vocabulary in relation to both desire and power. It is no coincidence—as far as my thinking here is concerned—that Lacan devoted a seminar to ‘De la Création ex nihilo’ two weeks before his seminar on ‘L’Amour courtois en anamorphe’ (1986: 139–52 and 167–84), and there is a close link between the two in the development of his arguments. Lacan gives three examples of creation: firstly, the painting whose primary function is to fill the gaping hole created by its frame; secondly, that of the pot, which for Lacan is the first and archetypal cultural object or artifact because it allows, for the first time, the conception and representation of a void (of a no-thing), which must then of course be filled; lastly is courtly love, where the no-thing that is created is implicitly the courtly lady, a product of linguistic smoke and mirrors if ever there was one. The representation of a void, of no-thing, as conceived by Lacan, is a double-edged gesture. On the one hand, the void is thereby conceived from nothing, but on the other, something is represented, implying its ¹⁹ On this formulation in relation to the heart, see below Ch. 3, 101. ²⁰ Information from Ricketts (2001). The collocation occurs six times, once in Bernart de Ventadorn (XIX, 48), quoted in Ch. 1, 27.

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prior existence. Lacan also uses the verb retrouver (to find again) here, implicitly recalling (and anticipating in his argument) the troubadour, who is etymologically, the one who ‘finds’ the poem. Creation ex nihilo— whether this be the painter, the potter or the troubadour—thus represents the void, the no-thing, but only so as to offer some kind of protection against it. Representation conjures the void into being retroactively, but thereby also denying it. As Lacan says, playing on the positive etymology of rien (‘nothing’) in French (rien ⬍ res ⫽ ‘a thing’), ‘Rien n’est fait à partir de rien’ (1986: 146: ‘No-thing is made from no-thing’). For Lacan, the signifier ‘nothing’ is a site of impossibility, but all art is organized around it. His final example (the courtly lady) implicitly eroticizes any impulse to create. The courtly lady is a creation ex nihilo, an effect of her discursive frame, the empty centre of a system of signifiers. But if we read the courtly lady in this way, what are we then to make of Gaucelm Faidit saying that his lady has created him ex nihilo, particularly when the lady in question seems as much a product of his own dreams as of the real world (stanza IV)? Gaucelm’s contention that his lady has created him ex nihilo retroactively lends material reality to the courtly lady: as a creator ex nihilo, her existence is beyond doubt. This rhetorical strategy deflects and screens the subject from the Lacanian Real, the real void, real nothingness. But as the creation of a creation, Gaucelm’s subjectivity is fragile. The sovereign who has created him, on whom he depends, is but an effect of his own discourse. Her subjectivity is thus as fragile as his, and if he is created from nothing by her, he could return to nothing. This is why he must rejoice in suffering and melancholy, as he claims at the beginning of his poem. Subjectivation, as Judith Butler argues, exploits our desire to exist (1997: 104), and as long as the poet is vulnerable to the Other and suffers because of the Other, he exists. He must cling to his suffering, indeed rejoice in it, if he is not to fade into a psychic void. Here, the lady’s extraction of the lover from nothing is also evocative of sovereignty as defined by Agamben after Foucault. The lady’s mercy extracts the poet from the liminal existence of the homo sacer, from the void or nothingness in which he has become trapped. He will die if he does not receive ‘the gift’ from his lady (40). The most obvious way of understanding this is, of course, as a reference to the sexual act. However, it is striking that the lover does not just ask for ‘a gift’, but for ‘the gift’, which may therefore be understood not simply as the object that is given, but also as the act of donation. The gift, in this sense, like mercy, establishes a relation. In Lacanian terms, this is the relation to the Other, to the

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Other’s desire, that is to say, to the symbolic order, language and the signifying chain. This effectively makes merce the signifier that grounds intersubjectivity in this poem and the gift of mercy that which enables the poet’s entry into the political order, which here, as elsewhere, is overdetermined by religious vocabulary—‘per Dieu et per merce’ says the poet as he beseeches his lady. For Foucault, psychoanalysis was an historically specific discipline, so my use of psychoanalytic paradigms for thinking about troubadour lyric can only be anachronistic from a Foucauldian perspective. Similarly, identifying biopolitical structures in premodern texts must surely be questionable from a Foucauldian perspective. But my intention is not to collapse the historical differences between the medieval, early modern and modern periods. Rather, in applying methods of analysis deriving from Foucault and psychoanalysis to the twelfth-century troubadour lyric, I am aligning myself with Agamben’s claim that early modern and modern biopolitics have a pre-modern history, and are not the result of some dramatic and violent epistemic break. This history means that early modern and modern subjects have been culturally well-prepared for an erotics grounded in discipline, a desire for subordination, and a sexual economy in which power is erotically charged. Furthermore, this is an erotics which both emanates from and directs itself towards discourse, since it is clearly discourse—in this case the discourse of the troubadour lyric—that creates power. Finally, in the case that I have examined, as in so many others, this discourse is implicitly and somewhat distastefully (because misogynistically) homosocial, even homoerotic. Unlike Bisclavret, Gaucelm does not wish to climb into a male sovereign’s bed, at least not overtly. He does, however, ambivalently gender the love object by casting their relationship in feudal (and therefore implicitly masculine) terms, and also possibly by referring to her as a (male) doctor. And in the end—as is so often the case with troubadour lyric—he addresses his love poem for an amiga he has interpellated in the second person, but nonetheless construed alternately as a monstrous and inhuman sovereign, and as a fantasmic dream-like image with the perfect body, to another man, a male patron. The sovereign Gaucelm hopes will hear his highly codified chat-up line dressed up as a cry for mercy, and whom he hopes to seduce with his rhetoric, turns out in fact to be another man. Examining how troubadours construe the lady as sovereign as well as Other may therefore help sharpen our apprehension of how courtly lyrics draw on, yet also condition the social context that produced them, enabling us thereby to see better what is at stake politically in the religious

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imagery of martyrdom that is so frequently deployed in troubadour lyric. Psychoanalysis, on the other, helps us to understand why the courtly lover loves his subjection to an imperious and sovereign courtly lady. The lyric, however, is a discourse that exists on a highly constrained temporal plain: we never do see whether the poet does actually die and/or how his lady responds. Furthermore, the lyric’s almost exclusive articulation as firstperson discourse in turn places strict generic limits on the extent to which the lyric subject interacts with the object of his desire. When courtly romance draws on the conventions of love that are first formulated in the lyric and sets them in a narrative framework, it consequently raises questions about the value of the sacrificial discourse that predominates in the lyric, about the nature of any interaction with the object of desire, and indeed about the nature of the object itself. These are the questions that will preoccupy me in subsequent chapters.

3 The Deadly Secrets of the Heart: The Chastelaine de Vergy and the Castelain de Couci Troubadour lyric is not the only influence on the development of ideas concerning love in courtly romance. Ovid is at least as important and one at least of the earliest recognizably ‘courtly’ texts in Old French—courtly in the sense of concern with a refined model of love—is directly taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Piramus et Thysbé. It is striking, however, when the Old French text is set alongside the Latin, that the lovers’ speech is shot through with references to death from the outset. This is evident, for instance, in Piramus’ lament when their parents first try to keep he and Thisbé apart: ‘Hé, las! Hé Piramus, quel la feras? En quel guise te contendras? Haÿ, pere qui m’engendras, Pour quoi N’as tu ore pitié de moi? Se tu ne prens autre conroi, Ou par enging ou par desroi Ferai Tysbé, bele, que te verrai, The material on the Chastelaine de Vergy was the basis of seminar papers given at the University of Cambridge in 1999 and King’s College London in 2001. The material on the Castelain de Couci was the basis of short papers given at the International Congress of the Association Internationale d’Etudes Occitanes in Messina in 2002 and at the French Graduate Conference in Cambridge the same year; a longer version was given at the British Branch conference of the International Courtly Literature Society in Durham in 2003. I should like to thanks those present for their questions and observations. Some sections of the material on the Castelain have been previously published in Gaunt (2004b). Patrick ffrench and Sarah Kay offered invaluable comments on various drafts.

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Ou se ce non pour toi morrai. Saches, se par amours ne t’ai, Que par force te ravirai. La mort Iert mon refuge et mon confort.’ (Piramus 2000: 151–65) (‘Alas! Oh, unhappy Piramus, what will you do? How will you react? Oh natural father, why do you not now take pity upon me? If you do not change your mind, I will make sure I see you again fair Thisbe, whether this be by devious or excessive means, or if this cannot be I will die for you. And know this: if I cannot have you through love, I will take you by force. Death will be my refuge and comfort.)

These lines are typical of the rhetoric the lovers use to analyse their feelings well before they come to their tragic end, but they have no equivalent in Ovid.¹ We might note that Piramus talks of dying for Thisbe and that the poet uses a rhyme pair—mort | confort—used frequently in Old French romance, particularly, as we will see, in Thomas’s Tristan. Indeed, since Piramus is still but a child, and not a particularly assertive one at that, rather than taking his claim that ‘par force te ravirai’ as a reference to rape or abduction, which seems unlikely in any case given his character and feelings, one might infer rather that death is taken here as a metaphorical form of ravishment that will lead to the lovers’ happy reunion, a reunion they desire and find comforting. Thus, when transposed into Old French in a text such as Piramus, the Ovidian tradition is from the outset coloured with the representation of love as sacrifice and the association of love with death that mark the troubadour lyric (see Toury 1979: 28–9). What distinguishes vernacular ‘courtly love’ from Ovidian love is in fact the association of love and death. Yet, if the influence of the troubadours on twelfth-century romance is implicit, from the early thirteenth century, writers of a range of romances mark their debt to the lyric tradition more explicitly. One way of doing this was through the use of interpolated lyrics, or integrating extant lyrics or parts of extant lyrics (mainly from the twelfth century) into a narrative either as quotation, direct speech, or as a song that a character supposedly composes to express his or her feelings. Texts that use this technique have come under increasing critical scrutiny over the last twenty years: for instance Jean Renart’s Le Roman de la Rose, Le Roman de la Violette, ¹ The closest we find to this kind of rhetoric in Ovid is ‘quique a me morte revelli | heu sola poteras, poteris nec morte revelli’ (‘Whom death alone had power to part from me, not even death shall have power to part from me’); see Ovid (1921: iv. 152–3). However, these lines, spoken by Thisbe, come when she thinks Piramus is dead.

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Le Castelain de Couci, La Chastelaine de Vergy.² The juxtaposition of lyric and narrative discourse in texts such as these implicitly invites readers to reflect on the differences between the two. Whereas love lyrics, as already noted, focus on a moment of unsatisfied desire, the narrative framework of romance has to make it clear whether love in fact turns out to be reciprocal, and if so, whether the outcome is a happy one or not. Indeed, the treatment of the love/death configuration may be transformed by narrative movement in that a shared death with the beloved may be envisaged or portrayed, becoming a union in death, not simply an imagined or anticipated solitary death. Narrative may also give the lady the opportunity to speak (even if we should not assume thereby that her voice represents that of a real woman). The value of the lyric’s discourse of sacrificial desire may therefore be examined critically in a number of different ways by romances with interpolated lyrics. This chapter has three sections. The first will elaborate in more detail the differences between lyric and romance discourse, and also on what is at stake theoretically in the juxtaposition of the two. The remaining sections will discuss two key texts which use interpolated lyrics: La Chastelaine de Vergy and Le Castelain de Couci. These texts stand in an interesting relation to each other: both play on the work of the same twelfth-century trouvère, the Castelain de Couci, though to different degrees; and in the later Middle Ages and early modern period, the two texts become confused in that the plot of the latter is rewritten under the title of the former. This confusion of the two quite distinct plots invites consideration of how the two quite distinct types of sacrifice entailed in these narratives may have been perceived as related.³ The shared lyric models deployed by both texts, and the focus they both have on the ethical value of secrecy, will supply the key to this investigation.

Lyric vs. Narrative: Self-Sacrifice vs. Spectacle The use of interpolated lyrics is not the only way in which thirteenthcentury narrative texts draw and comment on the lyric tradition. In French, the hugely influential Roman de la Rose may be read as a meditation on lyric subjectivity, and as noted in the Introduction, the delightful but ² For an overview of the technique, with sections on all these romances, see Boulton (1993). ³ For an account of post-medieval versions of the Castelain de Couci and the tendency for the heroine to become ‘Gabrielle de Vergy’, see di Maio (1996: 41–73). On the relation between the two texts in the later Middle Ages, see also Babbi (1991: 16–17).

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idiosyncratic Occitan romance Flamenca playfully exploits lyric paradigms, while dissecting a specific lyric to redeploy as part of an amorous exchange with a view to exposing the erotic and (im)moral agendas that underpin fin’ amor. And of course it is in Occitan—with the vidas and razos—that the tradition of introducing lyric texts with short prose narratives, and of glossing lyrics with prose, is inaugurated. Possibly influenced by Latin traditions such as the prosimetrum and the accessus ad auctores, the vidas and razos were probably composed at or shortly after the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to introduce Italian readers and listeners to troubadour poetry at a stage in the transmission of these texts when they had become largely unhooked from performance (at least in Italy), and firmly anchored in a written tradition. The use of interpolated lyrics is thus part of a larger textual phenomenon whereby lyric and narrative are set in a dialogic relation, and even though romances with interpolated lyrics sometimes represent lyrics in performance, their being embedded in a longer narrative suggests that they are in this context viewed primarily as written material. We are dealing therefore with a conscious literary dialectic between two related discourses that are nonetheless viewed as not entirely commensurate with each other. This incommensurability of lyric and narrative courtly discourse has two main components: firstly, the lyric is a first-person discourse, whereas courtly narrative usually entails the discernible presence of a third-person narrator who narrates and sometimes comments upon the amorous exploits of a hero and/or heroine; secondly, lyrics usually make no suggestion of sequential time, whereas narratives obviously rely on the forward movement of time. These differences lead to different treatment of some of the lyric tradition’s central metaphors or motifs. I have already noted the possibility of a shared death that is opened up in some narratives, so that sacrificial desire may appear mutual, even though, as we shall see, appearances often turn out to be deceptive. Another major difference lies in the treatment of one of the central concerns of many lyrics: celars/celer (‘concealment’ or ‘secrecy’). A troubadour may confess his love publicly in song, but his claim is that his discretion is absolute and he certainly does not name his lady, other than through a senhal (code name). Narrative, on the other hand, inevitably entails the betrayal of any secret love, and the implication of the readers or listeners in that betrayal, since the substance of the text is the narration of the secret. It is also crucial that this is done in the third person, by a narrator who analyses and comments, and who is not necessarily implicated himself in the love story. Indeed, the temporal arrangement of narrative may lead to fantasmic

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attempts to confront and resolve—or repress—some of the contradictions or paradoxes of the lyric, since in narrative, they cannot always be allowed to remain in permanent suspension, as may be the case in lyric.⁴ The vidas and razos devoted to the lyrics of the early thirteenth-century Catalan troubadour Guillem de Cabestanh, which are one of the earliest manifestations of the eaten heart story that forms the basis of Le Castelain de Couci, illustrate these points beautifully. For Sylvia Huot (1999: 274–7), this story, which is nearly always narrated with a poet as hero in the Middle Ages, is paradigmatic for the transfer of lyric motifs to narrative. Here is a stanza from the lyric glossed by these texts: En sovinensa Tenc la car’ e.l dous ris, Vostra valensa E.l belh cors blanc e lis; S’ieu per crezensa Estes vas Dieu tan fis, Vius ses falhensa Intrer’ em paradis; Qu’ayssi.m suy, ses totz cutz, De cor a vos rendutz Qu’autra joy no m’adutz: Qu’una non porta benda Qu’ieu.n prezes per esmenda Jazer ni fos sos drutz, Per las vostras salutz. (Guillem de Cabestanh 1924: V, 31–45) (I hold your face and sweet smile, your worth and your comely, smooth and white body in my memory; if, in my faith, I were as true to God, I would surely enter paradise alive and without fail; for thus have I, without hesitation, given myself to you with all my heart, for no other woman can give me joy: for there is no woman who covers her head [i.e. respectable woman] with whom I would rather sleep, or whose lover I would rather be, in exchange for a simple greeting from you.)

The prose texts that gloss this lyric are important for the dissemination of the eaten heart story in vernacular courtly culture because they were the source of the story for Boccaccio, and, almost certainly, for Dante. Guillem falls in love with the wife of his lord, Raimon de Castel Roussillon, who on ⁴ For a deservedly influential account of narrative as an imaginary ‘solution’ to problematic contradictions, see Jameson (1981: 79); this is in fact close to Lacan’s view of narrative, see Zizek (1997: 10–11).

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realizing that Guillem loves his wife becomes insanely jealous and locks her up (which is when Guillem is supposed to have composed the lyric being glossed); Raimon kills Guillem, then feeds his wife her lover’s heart; she claims never to have eaten anything so delicious, then throws herself from a window to avoid being run through by him; the lovers are then avenged by the King of Aragon, who is appalled when he hears the story.⁵ What we find in these vidas and razos is that two acts of violence on the part of Raimon de Castel Roussillon—first killing Guillem and extracting his heart, then giving it to his wife to eat—are retrospectively construed as sacrifice on the part of the lovers, offering thereby a text-book example of what Freud called Nachträglichkeit, the process whereby a trauma is realized, symbolized, and thereby possibly ‘dealt with’ only retrospectively. As if to ensure that the point is not missed (both in the diegetic and extradiegetic space constructed by the narrative), a monument to the lovers explaining the story is erected by the king of Aragon outside a church in Perpignan at the end of the narrative. In his lyric, Guillem suffers ‘greu martire’ (22: ‘grievous martyrdom); in the razo his lady dies for or on account of him (§22 ‘per el’). Both are thus treated as martyrs to love, as secular saints. Guillem’s metaphorical discourse of sacrifice in his lyric, in which he gives himself to his lady with all his heart, is thereby from the outset clearly erotic, and yet also understood as overdetermined by the religious parallel that precedes his gift of himself. But as a deliberate gloss on this lyric, the eaten heart story serves here—as it often does elsewhere—to literalize this metaphoric discourse of sacrifice so that something that is suspended in a nebulous timelessness in the lyric (‘Qu’ayssi·m suy, ses totz cutz, | De cor a vos rendutz’) is translated into a rigorous temporal and material framework. Thus, in a process that has been termed ‘demetaphorization’ by psychoanalysts interested in fantasies of incorporation, the metaphoric gift of the ‘heart’ is translated into the actual ingestion of the organ, the point being to mask the loss that has occurred (Abraham and Torok 1972: 112). Simultaneously, when a discourse of self-sacrifice is appropriated for a narrative framework, it is thereby translated by a narrator into spectacle, in this instance both for those within the narrative frame who construct and then look upon the monument ⁵ For the texts of the vidas and razos relating the eaten heart story with Guillem as hero, see Vidas (1973: 530–55). My résumé is of the version in MS H (537–41). On these texts as source for Boccaccio (Decameron, iv. 9) and Dante (Vita Nuova, iii), see Rossi (1983: 118–22). On different versions of the razo, see Burgwinkle (1997: 183–4); Poe (1984: 86–7), also (2000: 172–3). I have explored other versions of the eaten heart story in Gaunt (2004b).

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that commemorates the lovers, and then outside the narrative frame for readers of the text, who are invited thereby to contemplate the processes they witness. There are thus three levels on which others pry into the lovers’ secret:⁶ first, the lady’s husband realizes Guillem’s songs are about his wife;⁷ second, the secret is revealed to all and sundry within the text;⁸ finally, it is related to the readers. The theoretical models of sacrifice used in Chapters 1 and 2 consider sacrifice from the perspective of the first-person subject, or (in the case of Agamben and, in a different way, of Derrida) from the perspective of the being to whom sacrifice is made (even if this being—in Derrida, God, in Agamben, the sovereign—is arguably performatively constituted by being the object of a sacrificial address). However, more anthropologically oriented writers on sacrifice, such as Georges Bataille or René Girard, focus less on the subject’s experience of sacrifice than on the spectacle, ritual, and representation of sacrifice as well as on the use and role of such spectacles, rituals and representations in the formation of communities. The difference between lyric and narrative models of sacrifice in some ways corresponds to this theoretical difference. Thus, for Bataille, sacrifice is primarily a spectacle, or a representation, whereby a community figures the transgression of the law or the interdit relating to death. This primal scene underpins and is supported by an apparently teleological and evolutionary model of the passage from animality to humanity, whereby the latter emerges from the former (Bataille 1957). In sacrifice, Bataille asserts, humanity represents to itself the transgression of the interdit concerning death, this transgression offering the vicarious experience, for those who participate (that is for witnesses to the mise à mort) of a limitless fusion (1957: 92–3). Whereas in Derrida’s and Lacan’s accounts of sacrifice, the subject sacrifices or gives himself, thereby offering himself fantasmically as object of the Other’s desire, in Bataille’s account the object, though no less fabricated, is external to the agent of the sacrifice, whom for Bataille is the real subject of sacrifice. The ⁶ In ‘Lo dous cossire’, Guillem claims ‘E dezam en parvensa’ (27: ‘I cease to love for appearance’s sake’), indicating a concern to protect the lady from others’ knowledge of his love for her. ⁷ ‘E quant Raimons de Castel Rossillon auzi la canson q’En Guillems avia faita, el entendet e creset qe de sua moillier l’agues faita’ (§10: ‘And when Raimon de Castel Roussillon heard the song Sir Guillem had composed, he understood and believed that he had composed it about his wife’). ⁸ ‘Aqest mals fo saubutz per tota Cataloina e per totas las terras del rei d’Arangon, e per lo rei Anfos e per totz los baros de las encontradas’ (§17: ‘This wicked act was known about throughout Catalonia and in all the King of Aragon’s lands, and by the king and all the barons in those lands’).

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operation of sacrifice, the ‘making sacred’ of the object subordinates it to the subject, in some instances by incorporating it. What is effectively sacrificed, then, is its status as object. In this schema, the destruction of the object qua object in sacrifice troubles the boundaries of the subject, affording the experience (or illusion) of fusion, and of intimacy with the object in destruction (Bataille 1999: 58–61). Inasmuch as it is a spectacle or representation, sacrifice may be seen (although this is not explicit in Bataille) as fundamentally fantasmatic and defensive. Bataille’s account of sacrifice seems, in this respect, congruent with the Lacanian version of sacrifice as a fantasy structure through which one seeks to affirm the existence and plenitude of the Other. In so far as the spectacle of sacrifice affords (though not to the victim) a vicarious experience of the sacred, it is a ‘regulatory fiction’. Thus, ‘il s’agit d’introduire, à l’intérieur d’un monde fondé sur la discontinuité, toute la continuité dont ce monde est susceptible’ (1957: 26: ‘the point is to introduce into a world grounded in discontinuity all the continuity to which this world may be susceptible’). Yet there are clearly differences between Bataille’s account of sacrifice, and Lacan’s or Derrida’s. Bataille’s analysis is fixed on the scene of sacrifice as spectacle, maintaining a distinction between the subject of sacrifice (who instigates the sacrifice of an object or another person qua object), that is, the one to whom the ‘benefits of sacrifice . . . accrue’ (Hubert and Mauss 1964: 10), and the victim or object of sacrifice. His account of sacrifice is thus explicitly not an account of self-sacrifice. However, to the extent that sacrifice in Bataille’s account is oriented towards fusion with the Other, the position of the Bataillean subject of sacrifice is underpinned by the fantasy of being the instrument, rather than the object, of the Other’s jouissance. The subject of sacrifice therefore kills the victim, or is witness to its death, in order to be sure, in the sight of blood and viscera, of the Other’s enjoyment. For Bataille, sacrifice is a fiction or comedy, which invites exploration of the literary representation of the sacrificial fantasy. In L’Erotisme, Bataille digresses from the historical narrative of eroticism thus: ‘Le sacrifice est un roman, c’est un conte, illustré de manière sanglante. Ou plutôt, c’est, à l’état rudimentaire, une représentation théâtrale, un drame réduit à l’épisode final, où la victime animale ou humaine, joue seule, mais joue jusqu’à la mort’ (1957: 98: ‘Sacrifice is like a novel, it is a tale, illustrated in a bloody fashion. Or rather, it’s a theatrical representation of the most rudimentary sort, a drama reduced to the final act, in which the victim— whether animal or human—acts all alone, but to the death’). Narrative

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and representation thus provide a stage on which the drama of sacrifice is played out, the hero playing the role of the victim. To push this analogy further, the reader then becomes the subject of sacrifice properly speaking, the one to whom ‘the benefit accrues’. The reader, ‘à l’abri du danger’ is able to enjoy the sacrifice ‘par procuration’: ‘Il s’agit, l’endurant sans trop d’angoisse, de jouir du sentiment de perdre’ (1957: 97: ‘it is a matter of enjoying the feeling of loss, of experiencing this without too much anxiety’). Thus, despite the structural differences between Bataille’s anthropological understanding of sacrifice and Lacan’s reading of sacrifice as fantasy, they come together on the one hand in that they both believe the victim is accorded heroic status, and on the other in that they see the Other’s jouissance as the prime objective of sacrifice.

The Gift of Death and the Ethics of Secrecy: La Chastelaine de Vergy I should like to introduce my reading of the Chastelaine by elaborating briefly on the aporia Derrida associates with sacrifice and the gift of death that I explored in Chapter 1, in relation to two points arising out of his work that seem particularly pertinent to this text. First, the relationship between responsibility and betrayal; secondly, the importance of the secret, which is allied, I think, to what I call the epistemological impossibility of the gift of death, and therefore of ethical knowledge. Derrida’s principle example of sacrifice in Donner la Mort is Abraham. Derrida argues that for Abraham’s sacrifice of his son to be a sacrifice, he must truly love him. Sacrifice necessarily entails renunciation of the thing one loves most, be it another thing or person, or oneself. Thus, in order to be true to the Other (the singular, supreme, absolute Other), one must betray others. Responsibility, being answerable to the Other, is thus not compatible with responsibility to others. Derrida suggests a distinction here between duty and ethics: ‘le devoir absolu exige qu’on se conduise de façon irresponsable . . . tout en reconnaissant, confirmant, réaffirmant cela même qu’on sacrifie, à savoir l’ordre de l’éthique et de la responsabilité humaine. En un mot, l’éthique doit être sacrifiée au nom du devoir’ (1992: 67: ‘absolute duty requires one to behave irresponsibly . . . while simultaneously recognizing, confirming and reaffirming that which one sacrifices, namely ethics and human responsibility. In a word, ethics must be sacrificed in the name of duty’). But this distinction breaks down, for it is duty to the Other that guarantees responsibility to others. Without

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sacrifice there can be no ethics. But sacrifice entails betrayal at some level, which is unethical. Derrida alludes to the importance of the secret to his model of ethics throughout Donner la Mort. But the problem is portrayed not simply as stemming from public knowledge of a particular ethical or unethical act, of a particular sacrificial act, of a particular gift, but from language itself: Abraham ne parle pas, il assume cette responsabilité qui consiste à être toujours seul et retranché dans sa propre singularité au moment de sa décision. De même que personne ne peut mourir à ma place, personne ne peut prendre une décision, ce qui s’appelle une décision, à ma place. Or dès qu’on parle, dès qu’on entre dans le milieu du langage, on perd la singularité. On perd donc la possibilité ou le droit de décider. Toute décision devrait ainsi, au fond, rester à la fois solitaire, secrète et silencieuse. (1992: 61) (Abraham does not speak, he assumes the responsibility that consists in always being alone and confined in one’s own singularity at the moment of taking one’s decision. Just as no one is able to die in my place, no one can take a so-called decision for me. What is more, as soon as one speaks, as soon as one enters the realm of language, one loses one’s singularity. One loses thereby the possibility of speaking or the right to decide. Any decision should thus, in the end, remain at one and the same time solitary, secret and silent.)

Singularité designates not only a crucial element of responsibility—you are only truly responsible if you alone are answerable for what you do— but also the removal of your gesture from any economy of exchange. In the symbolic order of language everything, every gesture, every act is always already part of an economy of exchange; like a coin, it goes into circulation; it loses its singularity, and it thereby has value to others. In Donner la Mort, Derrida argues for the impossibility of the subject’s knowledge of the gift as sacrifice. In the near contemporary Donner le Temps, he pushes the argument in a different, but equally productive direction, by arguing not just that the gift is impossible, but more radically that the gift figures the impossible. Knowledge of a gift qua gift, he argues again, destroys its gift-like qualities: ‘pour qu’il y ait don, il faut que le don n’apparaisse même pas, qu’il ne soit pas perçu comme don . . . pour qu’il y ait don, il ne faut pas seulement que le donataire ou le donateur ne perçoive pas le don comme tel . . . il faut aussi qu’il l’oublie à l’instant.’ (1991: 29: ‘for there to be a gift, it is necessary for the gift itself not to be apparent or perceived as a gift . . . for there to be a gift it is not only necessary that neither the giver nor the receiver of the gift perceive the gift as such . . . it is also necessary that he forget it instantaneously’). The point again is that for a gift to be a gift, it must be freely given, it must involve

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no element of reciprocal obligation or exchange: ‘pour qu’il y ait don, il faut qu’il n’y ait pas de réciprocité, de retour, d’échange, de contre-don ni de dette’ (1991: 29: ‘for there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, no return, no exchange, counter-gift or debt’). Playing on the dual meaning of the word présent in French and in English, Derrida suggests that the true gift must exist in an eternal present; as soon as it becomes inscribed in the temporal dimension of language, it is destroyed as gift since it has entered a structure that is predicated on exchange, because, as Derrida puts it ‘le symbole engage immédiatement dans la restitution’ (1991: 38, ‘a symbol immediately engages reciprocity’). Indeed, one might infer from this that the temporal dimension of narrative entails the destruction of the potentiality of the gift: ‘la temporalité du temps . . . engage toujours le processus d’une destruction du don’ (1991: 27: ‘the temporality of time . . . always engages the process whereby the gift is destroyed’). In a specific evocation of psychoanalytic theory and practice, Derrida asserts that forgetting (l’oubli) is in fact the only condition of the gift (1991: 31). This is not to say that the true gift may never exist, but rather that like the Lacanian Real, it resists symbolization absolutely. Thus, within the symbolic order of language, the gift can only be an unrealized potentiality; it is a fiction sustained yet destroyed by its own mechanism, figured by a simulacrum: ‘même si le don n’était jamais qu’un simulacre, il faut encore rendre compte de la possibilité de ce simulacre et du désir qui pousse à ce simulacre’ (1991: 47, ‘even if the gift were never anything other than a simulacrum, it is necessary to give an account of what makes this simulacrum possible and of the desire that drives us to this simulacrum’). It is thus in the end less the impossibility of the gift that concerns Derrida, than the impossibility of its symbolization, and therefore, less the impossibility of an ethical act than the inadequacy of language as a vehicle for ethics, hence the centrality of the idea of silence, of the secret. To turn to the Chastelaine de Vergy, this brief mid-thirteenth century romance is widely disseminated, adapted and alluded to throughout the later Middle Ages and indeed the early modern period.⁹ The plot is worthy of a nineteenth-century opera in that it is simultaneously outrageously slight while having maximum potential for emotional intensity. The Chastelaine conducts her love affair with a worthy knight in secret: indeed she has imposed a vow of secrecy upon him. She uses a well-trained little dog (chiennet) to signal to her lover that the coast is clear when he comes ⁹ Precise dating is impossible. Lakits (1966: 11) concludes the text could have been written at any point between 1228 and 1288.

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calling. However, the Duchess of Burgundy falls in love with him and when he rebuffs her she is so angry that she tells her husband he has been making advances to her. The Duke then threatens the knight, his favourite, with exile. The knight protests that he cannot love the Duchess since he loves another, but the Duke will not believe him unless he reveals her identity. The knight therefore is in a dilemma: should he betray his lady by revealing her identity to the Duke (who is also her uncle), or should he stay true to his lady but lose her nonetheless through exile? He chooses to spill the beans to the Duke, little dog and all, at which point the Duke thinks it would be jolly if he came to watch one of their encounters, a suggestion to which the knight readily agrees: both men seem to enjoy this episode. Meanwhile, the Duchess is furious when the Duke fails to exile the knight, and when challenged, he extols the knight’s virtue, professing he has secure knowledge that she lied to him. She wheedles the truth out of him, and in complimenting the Chastelaine on her well-trained little dog, the Duchess thereby signals to her that she knows her secret. The Chastelaine dies of grief, wrongly assuming in a quasioperatic final soliloquy that her lover has betrayed their secret because he now loves the Duchess; the knight then kills himself; the Duke then kills the Duchess when it is revealed by a handily placed eavesdropper what has happened. An obvious point of entry into the text in the light of the theoretical models I am seeking to deploy is the coincidence of responsibility and betrayal in the knight’s behaviour. The knight is subject to competing forms of sovereignty: that of his temporal lord and that of his lady. His dilemma is unenviable: if he tells the Duke, his lord, about his love affair, he breaks his promise to his amie ; if he does not, the Duke will think he is a traitor and exile him, so he is removed from his amie anyway.¹⁰ The narrator comments of the two alternatives: ‘l’un et l’autre tient a mort’ (Chastelaine 1997: line 270, ‘one and the other lead to death’). The knight is subject here to two forms of sovereignty and to two ethical systems that turn out (unsurprisingly) to be incompatible: on the one hand, he remembers his lady and trembles with ‘ire et mautalent’ (‘anger and displeasure’); on the other, he has no wish to be thought a traïtor desloial towards his lord (177–89). The knight’s motivation is confused. On the one hand, he breaks his promise of silence in order to stay close to his lady. On the other, maybe he breaks his promise in order to stay true to his lord, in which case he needs to betray/sacrifice something/someone else in ¹⁰ The knight’s moral dilemma has been the subject of a good deal of critical writing, see particularly Cooper (1984: esp. 279–80), Guthrie (1999: 161–6), and Hunt (1993).

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order to retain his lord’s affection, to wit the person he ostensibly loves most in the world. His decision to obey his lord rather than his amie is instructive in relation to the ill-judged hierarchization of ethical systems and to gender. It reveals the extent to which the language of sovereignty deployed in the courtly lyric in relation to the lady, which I examined in Chapter 2, is highly metaphorical. However, although the knight’s decision is implicitly criticized, it is not clear things would have turned out any better had he decided to keep his promise to his amie. It is also instructive that he gives up more than he bargains for. This is precisely the kind of ‘forced choice’, ubiquitous in Lacan’s thinking, that in fact curtails freedom (see Zizek 1989: 165–9; also Kay 2003: 36–7). In making the wrong decision, the knight ends up losing precisely what he sought to retain and more. But the knight’s willing participation in the voyeuristic scene where the Duke gets ‘solace and pleasure’ (371) from eavesdropping on the knight’s night of passion and their subsequent hearty bonding around this incident suggest that the knight is more worried by the possibility of betraying his lord than betraying his amie. Significantly, the Duke makes a parallel decision in preferring to believe his friend rather than his wife. Indeed, he is paradoxically joyful when it is revealed she is a liar (425–49). Like the knight, the Duke is ethically muddled. As a result, both fail to realize what they have done until it is too late. The real sacrifice in this text is the Chastelaine’s. She dies addressing fine amour in a soliloquy in which she recalls that she gave her love to the knight, but praying God to give her lover honour and to give her death since she forgives him: ‘Ha! fine amors, est il dont droiz qu’il li a ainsi descouvert nostre conseil, dont il me pert? Que a m’amor otroier li dis, et bien a convenant li mis que a cele eure me perdroit que nostre amor descouverroit; et quant j’ai avant perdu lui, ne puis vivre aprés tel ennui; ne ma vie ne me plest point, ainz pri Dieu que la mort me doint, et que tout ausin vraiement comme j’ai amé lëaument celui qui ce m’a porchacié, ait de la moie ame pitié; et a celui qui a son tort

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m’a traïe et livree a mort, doint honor, car je li pardon. Ne ma morz n’est se douceur non, ce m’est avis quant de lui vient; que quant de s’amor me sovient, par lui morir ne m’est pas poinne.’ (813–34, my emphasis) (Alas, fine amour, is it thus right that he has revealed our secret when this is my undoing? When I granted him my love and made a pact with him, I told him I would be lost if our love were revealed; and since I have now lost him, I cannot live after such a blow; nor does my life now please me, rather I beseech God to give me death, and that, just as I have loved the one who has driven me to this point, he should have pity on my soul; and that He bestow honour upon the one who has betrayed me and delivered me to my death, for I forgive him. And I think my death is nothing but sweetness to me since it comes from him, and when I remember his love, dying on his account is no hardship for me.)

This passage insists on the ethical centrality of gift giving while leaving it intrinsically unclear what the gift actually is, love or death. Furthermore, given the invocation of God as the giver of death (823), the referent of the pronoun lui in lines 832 and 834 is ambiguous: does the Chastelaine’s death come from God or from her lover, and is it no hardship for her to die on God’s, or on her lover’s, account? The Chastelaine’s language here deliberately imbricates the religious and the erotic. She represents herself as a martyr as a result of her having given herself, but to whom exactly does she make her sacrifice, particularly in the light of her prayer for the knight’s honour? Whereas the Chastelaine’s death clearly has overtones of sacrifice, the knight kills himself out of remorse, because he wishes to administer justice to himself (897) and not as a martyr to love or his amie.¹¹ Furthermore, the Chastelaine thinks she dies alone and that the reasons for her sacrifice are therefore a secret, but her gift (of death) unwittingly goes into circulation because her speech is overheard. This extends a process of circulation in which she participates without realizing. God gives her death, she gives her life/death to her lover and fine amour, which has previously been spoken about, very insistently, throughout the text as a gift that she had given (octroier/donner) to the knight, but the Duchess wanted him to give it (love) to her (always donner with ¹¹ On this point, see Maraud (1972: 454); the knight for Maraud ‘expie sa faute’. It is of course significant that the knight kills himself by stabbing himself in the heart: see Burgess (1994: 46–7).

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the Duchess).¹² However, since from a Derridean perspective reciprocity and mutual obligation signal the destruction of the gift’s qualities as gift, the Chastelaine’s imposition of secrecy could then be read not as the capricious whim of a courtly dame, but rather as an attempt to ensure the qualities of the gift of her love qua gift.¹³ Unfortunately, she tragically misses the point: as soon as the gift is received, it is destroyed. She would have needed, to use Derrida’s formulation (1992: 60), to love not just en secret (‘in secret’), but au secret (‘secretly’). The secret of her love would have needed to be secret, certainly from the knight, but also perhaps from herself. Knowledge—of any kind—leads to circulation; symbolization of any kind—such as the chiennet—leads to circulation, which leads to loss and destruction. The text’s lesson—we are told it is an esample in the epilogue (954)— would seem to be that shared knowledge is ethically dangerous, always destructive. I have said that the knight’s motives are confused, and I have implied that the Chastelaine’s position is ethically more tenable. Gender may be an issue here. Her death seems to be spontaneously induced by the pain of her predicament, whereas the knight dies at his own hand. Does the involuntary nature of the women’s sacrifice make it ethically better? This is a question to which I will return in Chapter 5. However, it is also noteworthy that the Chastelaine’s sacrifice is grounded in misapprehension or méconnaissance: she thinks the Duchess’s knowledge indicates that the knight no longer loves her and is now courting his overlord’s wife. My point here is that circulation also leads to distortion, less in the manner of Chinese whispers, but rather in the sense that symbolization rests on an imagined consensus to which no one in fact has access, and which therefore becomes susceptible to multiple misunderstandings. In the Chastelaine, love is spoken about as a gift, but as soon as it is given and received, its integrity is destroyed. This points to a fundamental paradox of courtly literature: its raison d’être is articulating that which is only of value when unspoken and celars—discretion or secrecy—is a primary virtue in troubadour lyric, which of course by definition seeks to expose love even as it conceals its object.¹⁴ This is tracked ¹² The difference between otroier and donner may be significant here to the extent that octroier evokes legal discourse, giving a sense of mutual obligation within a clearly defined code. ¹³ Pace Hunt (1993), who argues that the Chastelaine’s pact of silence has no real moral weight. Compare Maraud (1972), whose analysis points up the different ways in which these texts respond to the ethical imperative to secrecy in courtly literature, see particularly 456–9; also Guthrie (1999: 161–6). ¹⁴ On this paradox in troubadour lyric, see Bloch (1991: 147) and Huchet (1990: 131); and in the Chastelaine, see particularly Bloch (1990: 192–3 and 1991: 114–23), and de Looze (1985: 45).

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in the Chastelaine de Vergy through the insistent use of the words celer and descouvrir, particularly, as has often been noted by critics, in the prologue and epilogue: Une maniere de gent sont qui d’estre loiaus samblant font, et de conseil si bien celer qu’i se convient en eus f [ie]r; et quant vient que on s’i decuevre, tant qu’i sevent l’amor et l’uevre, si l’espandent par le païs. (1–7) (There are some people who pretend to be loyal and to know how to keep a secret so that one feels it is safe to trust them; and when one confides in them, so that they know about one’s love and one’s deeds, they spread news of this throughout the land.) Et par cest esample doit l’an S’amor garder par si grant sen, qu’an oit touz jours en remanbrance, que ele descouvrir rien n’avance, et li celers en touz poinz vaut. (954–8) (This example encourages us to guard our love wisely, to remember always that confiding in others serves no purpose, and that keeping a secret is always worthwhile.)

As this suggests, the central ethical problem of courtly literature is secrecy and this is offered at the beginning and end as a moral grid through which to read this text.¹⁵ A worthy love should always be kept secret, and any betrayal of this secret is not only destructive, it is unethical. To give one’s love is necessarily to reveal (if only to one’s ami(e)), and to reveal is to destroy. Fine amour thus posits the possibility of an ethics that is unrealizable from the position it forces the subject to occupy, other than through death, an ethics that in any case is destroyed by our presence as readers, by the making of the ethical subject into a spectacle. The Chastelaine de Vergy seems to suggest that once knowledge of love is shared, love itself is destroyed. Thus, any transposition of the model of love elaborated in the lyric to a narrative frame, which seeks to recount the ¹⁵ Once again pace Hunt (1993), who argues that the prologue’s and epilogue’s ostensible concern with concealment is deliberately misleading and that the prologue and epilogue contrive to caution readers against simplistic moral judgements. Both Huchet (1990: 142) and Payen (1973a: 209–210) usefully highlight the tension between the prologue and epilogue on the one hand, and the narrative on the other, but see secrecy nonetheless as the key moral issue in the text.

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love in question, to make love a spectacle, is destined to be destructive. That the author of the Chastelaine had this in mind is beyond doubt, since he included in his narrative a stanza from a very well-known trouvère, the Castelain de Couci, which he introduces by explicitly inviting his readers to compare what the knight feels when he fears he will be parted from the Chastelaine, to what the Castelain feels in the lyric when he is parted from his lady: Si est en tel point autresi com li chatelains de Couchi, qui ou cuer n’avoit s’amor non; et dist en .I. ver de chançon: ‘Par Dieu, amors, fort m’est a consiurrer du samblant que m’i soloit montrer, du solaz et de la compaignie, cele qui m’ert ma dame, compaigne et amie; et quant recort sa simple compaignie, et les douz moz que seut a moi parler, comment me puet li cuers en cors durer? Quant il ne part, certes trop est mauvés.’ (291–302) (He was in such distress, just like the Castelain de Couci, who had nothing but love in his heart, and who said, in a stanza from one of his songs: ‘By God, Love, it is difficult for me to think about the expression with which she used to greet me, about the comfort and company I had with the one who was my lady, companion, and friend; and when I recall her guileless company, and the sweet words which she used to speak to me, how can my heart stay in my body? If it [my heart] does not leave at once, it is truly wicked.’)

This somewhat elliptic stanza plays on the common motif of the lover’s heart staying with the beloved when they are apart. The lover is tortured by the sweet pain of the memory of his lady’s company when distant from her. And yet, as is so often the case with courtly lyrics, the stanza is ambivalent. Recort in line 299, most obviously means ‘recall’, but it also has the sense ‘record’, as if the pain were caused as much by the trace of their union that the lover leaves in language as by their separation. It is as if the narrative—in telling the story of the secret love—is responding to something that is as yet but a potentiality in the lyric, but it responds knowingly to a potentiality that is knowingly flagged in the lyric.¹⁶ ¹⁶ On the lyric/narrative dynamic here see Huchet (1990: 127–55) and Zumthor (1975: 219–316). Zumthor writes (235): ‘l’auteur de la Chastelaine n’a pas pu maintenir la totale fermeture de l’événement que comporte le grand chant courtois. L’événement ne peut pas ne point s’entrouvrir au moins sur une histoire’ (‘the author of the Chastelaine has

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This ambivalence further underlines the extent to which articulation of love constitutes an act of betrayal. In the context of the Chastelaine de Vergy, of course, the final act of articulation within the narrative is that of the ostensibly innocent servant girl who happens to overhear the Chastelaine’s final soliloquy, but in the light of this text’s insistence on the necessity of discretion (celer) and the dangers of revelation or confidence in others (descouvrir), there is perhaps no such thing as the innocent witness. The servant girl loses her innocence as she witnesses the Chastelaine’s speech, and in this she figures both the poet (who also passes the story on) and readers, who like her, witness events with a mixture of horror and enjoyment. Without a spectator, there can be no spectacle, but it is as if proximity to the spectacle roots one to the spot, making one into a spectator. The act of witnessing constitutes the betrayal of a secret that leads to death. But we, as readers, are also witnesses and are thereby implicated here. We, as readers, are the subjects of sacrifice according to Bataille’s schema.

Ethical Incorporation: Le Castelain de Couci At eight times the length of La Chastelaine de Vergy, Le Castelain de Couci, composed by one Jakemes in the late thirteenth century, is a far more complex narrative, and it plays on lyric interpolations throughout. In this most elaborate of the medieval versions of the eaten heart story, secrecy is by no means the only important ethical component of love, but the epilogue nonetheless insistently underlines its value: Atant vos finnerai l’estore Et le conte des vrais amans En cui loiautés fu manans. Estaule furent et secré, Onni de coer, de volonté. Et tel doivent iestre et si fait Tout cil qui sont amant parfait. (Jakemes 1936: lines 8190–6) (Thus I will finish for you the story and tale of the true lovers, in whom loyalty was so abundant. They were faithful and capable of secrecy, united in heart and desire. And all those who are perfect lovers should be made and live thus.) not been able to maintain the total closure of the event of courtly song. The event cannot not lead at least to a story’). While Huchet (155–6) sees the text as ‘le lieu de confrontation et de mise à l’épreuve des différents discours supportant le système littéraire’ (‘a place in which the different discourses underpinning the literary system are confronted with each other and put to the test’).

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Mais les loiaus et les secrés K’amours a dou feu embrasés Qui art tous maus et fait haÿr Tout cou k’onnours poet amenrir, Cil ont deduit, joie et solas, Ne tantost ne recroient pas, Ains vivent en espoir joli Tant k’amours lor donne mierchi, Et sueffrent menu et souvent Maint diviers assaut aigrement, L’un de tristour, l’autre d’aaise. (8221–31) (But those who are loyal and able to keep their secret, whom love inflames with the fire that burns evil people and makes anything that is contrary to honour hateful, have pleasure, joy, and solace, nor are they recreant, rather they live hopefully and in joy, until love is merciful to them, and they often suffer many different sharp torments, sometimes from sadness, sometimes from pleasure.)

Secré(s) (used here both as an adjective and a noun, first to describe lovers capable of keeping their love a secret, then to designate such lovers themselves), is in both instances associated with loyalty, and therefore laden with ethical value. The inference is that if the lovers had not had their secret wrenched from them, their story might have had a different ending. In this instance, on one level neither lover betrays their secret; rather, it is snatched from them, then exposed for all to contemplate; on another level, however, the very articulation of love, and in the hero’s case singing songs about it, could be taken to constitute a betrayal of love. But the theme of the courtly secret in the Castelain is more complex than in the Chastelaine for other reasons too, in that what the lovers know about their own love in the Castelain—and therefore the extent to which they themselves truly ‘know’ their secret—is problematic. Like the Chastelaine and her lover, the Castelain de Couci and the Dame de Fayel are victims of méconnaissance. In the following analysis, I will explore further the issues raised by my initial presentation of the eaten heart scenario as found in razos and vidas about Guillem de Cabestanh in the first section of this chapter. I will first consider what is at stake in the retrospective construal of violence as sacrifice: as the victim of violence, the lover’s sacrifice in the Castelain was not initially intended as such, and his sacrifice was therefore a secret to himself, as much as to others. I will then examine the unconscious nature of sacrificial desire, and show how the resulting impulse to be incorporated by the Other imbricates the sacrificial and the erotic, but also again calls

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into question the extent to which the lovers themselves truly know the secret of their love. This will be followed by closer scrutiny of the nature of the heart, as gift, as object, then as signifier: it is the heart as signifier that will bring us back to the question of lyric poetry in that the heart that is eaten in the Castelain, as in most eaten heart stories, is the heart of a poet.¹⁷ I will conclude by examining the triangulated gender politics of the sacrificial scene and by returning once again to the question of sacrifice as spectacle and fantasy. If the essence of sacrifice is ascesis, or giving something up, then each of the three protagonists in the Castelain enacts a sacrifice. The Castelain gives up his life as does his lady, the Dame de Fayel; her husband gives up his wife as a consequence of his action. In each case, sacrifice involves eating, whether this be being eaten, eating the flesh of another, or orchestrating this sacrificial meal, while sacrificial eating in turn is overlayed (or perhaps underpinned) with eroticism given the protagonists’ erotic relations to each other.¹⁸ However, it is crucial to the story that the Dame de Fayel does not intend to eat the Castelain’s heart, that he in turn does not intend for her to eat his heart. But there can be no doubt that acts that were not conceived as sacrificial are retrospectively construed in sacrificial terms. Indeed, in feeding his wife the Castelain’s heart, the Lord of Fayel creates a parallel with the Eucharist, which in turn suggests retrospectively that he died for her. The religious overtones of this are further heightened by the fact that the Castelain, rather than being killed by his rival, as is usually the case in eaten heart stories, dies while on crusade, but not before arranging to have his embalmed heart sent to the Dame de Fayel, only for it to be intercepted, with disastrous results, by her husband. She laments thus: ‘Ha! com dolereus envoi a De son coer que il m’envoia! Bien me moustra qu’il estoit miens, Li miens devoit bien iestre siens! Si il est! Bien le mousterai, Car pour soie amour finnerai’. (8143–8) (‘Ah, what a painful gift is his heart, which he sent to me! He indeed showed me that it was mine, and now mine should be his! And indeed it is. I will show him for I will die for his love.’) ¹⁷ The various significations of the heart in medieval love literature are explored in Jager (2000), but inexplicably Jager does not look at the eaten heart material; see also Burgess (1994). ¹⁸ On eroticism and eating, see particularly Lacan (2001a: 237–64).

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The lady’s sacrifice here emerges as an imitation of a supposed previous sacrifice on her lover’s part. The Castelain in fact died as the result of wounds inflicted by an infidel’s poison arrow, but the lady’s declaration that she will die for (possibly because of ) his love, in imitation of him, suggests she prefers to see his death (and her own) as sacrificial.¹⁹ Indeed, this gives the lovers’ deaths overtones of martyrdom, which is precisely what is made explicit when the narrator tells us that the Dame de Fayel ‘Tant demainne anguisseus martire’ (8154, ‘undergoes such anguished martyrdom’), which in turn echoes and literalizes the Castelain’s earlier protestation that ‘Vous ferés de moi vrai martir, | Car jou come fins amans morrai’ (2165–6: ‘you will make a true martyr of me, for I will die like a pure lover’). The protagonists claim sacrifice as if they understand this makes their love more worthy—indeed more ethical—which is a point to which I will return. But the desire to make love sacrificial is all the more striking when it is considered that neither the lady nor her lover participates knowingly in the sacrificial scene.²⁰ The lady’s ostensible lack of agency here is the cue for the modern interpretation of the Castelain as being primarily about transgression: modern critics are almost unanimous that the Dame de Fayel cannot possibly wish to eat her lover’s heart, that the Castelain cannot possibly wish actually to be devoured by her, and that the husband, in feeding his wife her lover’s heart, is, as one critic puts it, force-feeding her.²¹ But to read the story as simply about transgression fails to account, as we will see, for the lady’s enjoyment of her last supper; such readings also do not consider the role that transgression plays, according to both Bataille and Lacan, in shoring up and defining the limits of the symbolic, and thereby in upholding the law. A thorough-going psychoanalytic reading will produce a different interpretation. Lacan insists that the most important feature of Oedipus’ story for Freud was not that he murdered his father and married his mother, but ¹⁹ Similarly, the lady in Boccaccio’s story presents her death as an imitation of her lover’s and casts both in sacrificial terms when she tells her husband ‘se io, non isforzandomi egli, l’avea del mio amor fatto signore e voi in questo oltraggiato, non egli ma io ne doveva la pena portare’ (Boccaccio 1992: iv. 9, § 23: ‘if, in willingly making him the master of my love, I wronged you, it is I rather than he who should have paid the penalty for this’). On Decameron, iv. 9, see particularly Mazzotta (1986: 131–58). ²⁰ This is stressed in the Occitan vidas and razos, where it is remarked that the lady eats her lover’s heart ‘a non saubuda’ (§ 12: ‘without knowing’). ²¹ For the idea of force-feeding, see Doueihi (1997: 22, 26, 32); also (1990: 55–6). For readings that focus on transgression see Vincensini (1991) and Jeay (1998). Vincensini reads the material as a synthesis of ‘la négation de trois tabous culturels fondateurs’ (454–6: adultery, gender, cannibalism) and Jeay as being concerned to normalize violence.

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rather that ‘il ne savait pas’ when he did these things (2001a: 124). Indeed, it is axiomatic to Freud’s reading and to the role the story has in his theory of the unconscious, that Oedipus unconsciously wants to kill his father, that he wishes to marry his mother, even though ostensibly he does his level best to avoid both. In other words, because desire may reside in the unconscious, we may not know what we want. Or, in certain cases, what we in fact want may be the opposite of what we think we want: thus, Oedipus seeks to escape the oracle’s predictions, but the steps he takes to prevent the predictions coming true just serve to draw him closer to his fate. What then draws him to this fate? In psychoanalytic theory, agency (if indeed this term is still meaningful in this context) must be situated here at the level of the unconscious, and the very nature of knowledge of desire becomes thereby problematic. For some psychoanalytic thinkers, fantasies of incorporation invariably spring from the unconscious (Abraham and Torok 1972: 111–13). In the eaten heart stories, the clearest indication that eating the heart is an unconscious desire is the pleasure the lady invariably takes in the meal. A common feature of these narratives is that the lady declares she has never eaten anything so delicious; as Lacan says in his discussion of the female preying mantis as a model of human sexuality, punning on the French term for the Id, ‘elle aime ça’ (2001a: 257). In some instances, she ventures this opinion only after her husband has revealed to her what she has eaten, but significantly in the Castelain, the Dame de Fayel is fulsome about the qualities of the dish before she knows what it is: La dame mout cel mes loa, Et li sambla bien c’onques mes Ne menga plus savereus mes. (8046–8) (The lady praised the dish extravagantly, indeed she thought that she had never eaten such a tasty dish.)

Indeed, her husband’s explanation of what she has eaten is a response to her request to know more about the dish which ‘boine me samble vraiement’ (8054: ‘seems really good to me’). On one level, then, her lover’s heart is apparently exactly what she wants to eat. This is surely the inference of her decision to eat nothing further: ‘Par Dieu, sire, ce poise mi; Et puis qu’il est sifaitement, Je vous affi ciertainnement K’a nul jour mes ne mangerai N’autre morsiel ne metterai

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Deseure si gentil viande. Or est ma vie trop pesande A porter, je ne voel plus vivre. Mors, de ma vie me delivre!’ Lors est a ycel mot pasmee. (8104–13) (‘By God, my lord, this pains me; and since it is so, I swear to you truly I will never eat again, nor add another morsel to such noble meat. My life is too burdensome now, I no longer wish to live. Death: deliver me from life!’ When she had said this, she fainted.)

This is a sentiment which echoes that voiced by the lady in the Occitan vidas and razos: E si.l respondet qe l’era estatz si bons e si saboros qe ja mais autres manjars ni autre beures no.il tolrian la sabor de la bocha qe.l cor G[uillem] de Capestaing li avia laisada. (§15) (And she replied to him that it had been so good and tasty that no other food or drink would take the taste from her mouth left there by the heart of Guillem de Cabestanh).²²

The stress here is placed variously on the apparently ethical qualities of what the lady has eaten (it is noble, excellent and good, its gallantry and courtesy can be tasted ), or on just how tasty it is, which may amount to the same thing. Following Derrida’s account of the ethics of the gift, one might conjecture here that the lady’s sacrificial act derives its value precisely from her lack of conscious knowledge of what she is doing. In all events, the pleasure she takes in her meal is irresistible and physical. And since she has now known total fulfilment, she no longer has any need— or desire—to eat. As Anthony Allen puts it, in his subtle and incisive reading of the Castelain, eating the heart is the ultimate realization of the gift of the self (2001: 37). One possible reading of the story, then, is that it explores the lady’s unconscious desire to devour her lover; his heart therefore indeed effects the Other’s jouissance. So what then of the lover? Is his unconscious desire to be eaten? Whereas in shorter versions of the eaten heart story, the lover is simply killed by the husband, with this and the ensuing gruesome last supper ²² Likewise, the heroine of Boccaccio’s tale declares: ‘Ma unque a Dio non piaccia che sopra a cosí nobil vivanda, come è stata quella del cuore d’un cosí valoroso e cosí cortese cavaliere come messer Guiglielmo Guardastango fu, mai altra vivanda vada’ (§ 23: ‘But God forbid that any other vile food should be added to such noble fare as the heart of so worthy and courtly a knight as sir Guiglielmo Guardastango’). See Mazzotta (1986: 154) on the significance of the lady’s comment here; also Doueihi (1997: 48).

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forming the main part of the text, in longer versions the murder and macabre meal become the culmination of a longer narrative that has carefully prepared the ground for the manner of the lover’s demise, and for what happens to his body subsequently. And indeed the most striking development of the lover’s motivation comes in the Castelain de Couci, which also differs from other versions in that here the lover, knowing he is about to die outremer, arranges to have his heart embalmed and sent to his lady. The point of this ghoulish gift, of course, is that since his heart already belongs to her, he is simply returning what she already owns. Indeed, we have been repeatedly told throughout the lengthy account of the Castelain’s affair with the Dame de Fayel that he has given her his heart, that he is willing to die for her and that his heart remains with her wherever he goes, for instance: ‘j’aim assés mieus a morrir | Que mon coer de vous departir’ (579–80: ‘I would rather die than take my heart away from you’). Repeatedly the gruesome outcome of the story is anticipated in the Castelain’s conventional rhetoric: ‘Pour riens nulle je ne feïsse Cose oultre son voel, se je peuisse, Ains me laissasse desmembrer. Ay mi! li tres dous ramembrer Que pour li souvent eü ay Ont men coer tenu liet et gai.’ (3437–42) (‘On no account would I do anything against her wishes, if it were in my power, rather I would prefer to be dismembered. Alas! The sweet memories I have often had of her keep my heart happy and gay.’)

These lines are typical of the way the dénouement is anticipated and played upon: as Helen Solterer has so cogently argued, the rhyme pair desmember/ramembrer (to dismember/to remember) underscores the association that will emerge at the end of the text between dismemberment, incorporation, and commemoration (1992: 113–15), while the heart clearly figures both the poet’s subjectivity and his love for his lady, the inseparability of which is precisely what the text sets out to establish and celebrate. Furthermore, as critics have pointed out, the association between dismemberment, incorporation and commemoration works at an intertextual level as well as through the plot (see particularly Solterer 1992; but also Calin 1981). The Castelain is unusual among romances using the interpolated lyric technique in that it only uses the lyrics of one well-known

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poet—the Castelain de Couci—seeking to weave a number of these into a pseudo-biography.²³ For example, the best known lyric of the historical Castelain, which laments his departure on crusade because this means he will not see his lady-love, is integrated into the Castelain precisely at the point when the hero of the romance leaves to go on crusade (7347–98). Thus, the corpus of the historical Castelain’s lyrics is metaphorically dismembered, incorporated into a different text, which in turn performs an act of commemoration. Furthermore, the incorporated Castelain songs often dwell on the poet’s heart, on how its vulnerability puts his life constantly at risk. For instance, in lines 7347–98, one of the Castelain’s most famous lyrics and also the one quoted in La Chastelaine de Vergy, ‘A vous, amant’, the poet refers to the/his heart no fewer than four times: ‘S’ainc nus moru per avoir coer dolant’ (7353: ‘If anyone ever died from a suffering heart’), ‘Comment me poet li coers el corps durer | Qu’il ne me part?’ (7369–70: ‘How can my heart survive in my body without leaving it?’), ‘Ne je ne puis de li mon coer oster’ (7377: ‘Nor can I take my heart away from her’), and ‘u que mes coers traie’ (7391: ‘wherever my heart may go’). The lyrics are thereby used to underline the fact that the heart is more integral to the poet’s selfhood than his body as a whole; the heart is the very essence of the self, and as such, it is gifted to the lady. Moreover, in this lyric and elsewhere, the Castelain closely associates love and death, and as Gioa Zaganelli has argued (1982: 154–5), if other trouvères claim they will die of pain if rejected by their ladies, the Castelain is clear that he will die of love alone, and that his death in itself is an ethical act. No wonder he was chosen to be hero of this romance.²⁴ The most significant plot variation in relation to other eaten heart stories in the Castelain is, as noted, that the hero arranges for his heart to be embalmed and sent to his lady in a casket. There is perhaps a dual frame of reference here. The embalming and subsequent transmission of the body parts and organs of important people for burial was not uncommon in the Middle Ages, particularly when death occurred away from home or when more than one place might be thought to have a claim on the remains (Binski 1996: 63–9 and 124–6). But if the ghoulish gesture ²³ The best analyses of the role of the lyrics in the Castelain are Huot’s (1987: 117–31) and Allen (2001), but see also Boulton (1993: 61–6) and Zink (1982: 229–32); on the Castelain as a pseudo-biography, see Calin (1981: 198–9), though Allen (2001: 28) regards the poet Jakemes less as a biographer than as a glossator. ²⁴ On the heart, see also 5957, 5976, 5988 in the lyric at 5952–91. It is interesting to note that the Castelain dwells insistently on the heart in many surviving lyrics not incorporated into the romance; on this point see Huot (1987: 124–6) and Toury (2001: 211–13).

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of the Castelain might have seemed less outlandish to a medieval reader because of contemporary burial practices, a second frame of reference is the rhetoric of love. The casket the Castelain sends his lady also contains a lock of her hair that she had given him to take on his travels and a letter addressed to her in which he states ‘Vous envoie jou mon coer ore: | C’est vos, s’est drois que vous l’aiiés’ (7668–9: ‘now I send you my heart: it is yours, so it is right that you have it’), as if to ensure that no reader misses the point that lyric topoi are being taken literally (or ‘demetaphorized’) here. The Castelain also says in his letter (which is of course subsequently purloined by his lady’s husband) that what he most desires is a total and perfect union with her, indeed, that their souls be joined in heaven ‘en parmenable vie’ (7704: ‘in eternal life’), suggesting their union is spiritual as well as corporeal. What the Castelain desires then is incorporation, since he wants to become one with his lady, to be fused utterly with her. As Anthony Allen puts it (2001: 37), the cannibalistic act is ‘un déni imaginaire à la séparation’ (‘an imaginary denial of separation’). The Castelain and his lady seem to want the same thing (since his desire is in any case the Other’s) and his desire is intensely sacrificial in that it is grounded in total renunciation of the self. His lady’s ingestion of his heart embodies their spiritual fusion and as a symbolic act works paradoxically through the body to deny the limits of the body. The act of eating the heart here is then transgressive, but not in the sense that the lovers’ are forced to act against their will. Rather, as in Bataille’s discussion of the interdit, limits are upheld through transgression, while subjects both disavow and yet invest in transgression. If the desired fusion of two subjects does indeed take place, this is only possible partially—one might even say synecdochally—and this both affirms as well as calls into question the possibility of attaining the object—of continuity with it—through purely physical means.²⁵ The process of ‘demetaphorization’ has thus produced what Abraham and Torok call ‘antimetaphor’, by which they mean not just the taking literally of a metaphor, but the calling into question of the very process of figuration on which the metaphor rested (1972: 117). As Laurence Rickels has argued in relation to Abraham and Torok’s work, if the purpose of the ²⁵ This equivocation concerning the illusory possibilities of jouissance that are afforded by the morcèlement of the other’s body haunts Lacanian psychoanalysis. See Lacan (1986: 225–81); also (2001b: 338): ‘N’y a-t-il pas une autre conception de l’analyse, qui permette de conclure qu’elle est autre chose que le remembrement d’une partialisation fondamentale imaginaire du sujet?’ (‘Is there not another conception of analysis which would allow one to conclude that it can be something other than the re-membering of a fundamentally imaginary carving up of the subject?’).

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literalization of metaphor that takes place through fantasies of incorporation is the covering up or denial of a loss, ‘antimetaphor’ draws attention to this process of denial, and to the inevitable fault lines in the fantasmic solution to unbearable loss (1988: 10). Eating the heart is then a transgressive act of consuming an object that figures an impossible, unobtainable ideal through the incorporation of a quite different object (indeed a partial object), and the concomitant dissolution of the body’s limits; this act works simultaneously through using the heart as a metaphor and as an antimetaphor, thereby recalling a pivotal element in the lyric’s system of figuration and simultaneously dismantling it. The heart, then, is both an object that is eaten and a signifier that is internalized.²⁶ It is this dual function of the heart that I should now like to explore further. In order to be offered as a gift—also to be desired by the lady and then ingested—the heart must first be transformed into an object. From a Lacanian perspective, this is on the one hand because for the lover’s desire to be fulfilled his heart must become the object of the Other’s desire; and on the other because as objet a, the heart is not simply the object of desire, but also that which figures the lack that is elicited by and elicits desire.²⁷ Thus, the lady cannot totally incorporate her lover, and the ingestion of his heart only serves to underline the lack of his real presence (or, more radically, the lack in his real presence) and the imaginary nature of the union that is achieved.²⁸ But if offering his heart to his lady clearly stages a self-sacrifice on the lover’s part, significantly by the time she comes to eat ²⁶ Harrison (1988: 26) perceptively notes in relation to the Boccaccio novella that if the husband seeks to reduce the heart to a material object to be consumed, ‘the gesture of extraction invariably falls back into the sphere of the symbolic’. ²⁷ See e.g. Lacan (1999: 81): ‘C’est pour autant que l’objet a joue quelque part—et d’un départ, d’un seul, du mâle—le rôle de ce qui vient à la place du partenaire manquant, que se constitue ce que nous avons l’usage de voir surgir aussi à la place du réel, à savoir le fantasme’ (‘It is thus that objet a plays somewhere—but with only one point of departure, that of the male—the role of that which comes to fill the place of the missing partner, and thus that what we frequently see erupting in the place of the real—namely fantasy—is constituted’). ²⁸ On ‘real presence’ see Lacan (2001a: 296–312). For Lacan la présence réelle is the presence of desire—that is the phallus—which in turn, through the signifying chain, always signifies lack. The phallus (⌽), since it purports to be the starting- and end-point of the signifying chain, becomes the signifiant exclu du signifiant (310) and as the degree zero of lack and desire, ⌽ is the only true symbol. Thus ‘real presence’ is always constituted by ‘une certaine sorte de désir, qui serait de nature à faire rentrer dans le néant d’avant toute création, tout le système signifiant’ (310: ‘a certain kind of desire, which would by its very nature return the entire signifying system to the nothingness that precedes all creation’). ‘Real presence’ thus always entails radical absence. The subject finds this nihilistic desire terrifying yet fascinating. On the phallus as ‘the signifier for which there is no signified’, see Hollywood (2002: 158–9).

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it, he is already dead. Thus, her ingestion of the heart is a supplement to her lover’s death—one might say a superfluous confirmation of its value—just as for Bataille a sacrificial meal is secondary to the mise à mort. It is also striking, then, that the heart is treated as an object in Bataille’s sense of the term in that it is subjected to culture: it is embalmed, placed in a specially made coffer, finally cooked. In other words, the heart the lady eats, though originally a mere organ from her lover’s body, has been transformed into a fabricated and symbolic object. As such it can be sacrificed—in Bataille’s sacrificial scheme—precisely because its fabricated nature marks it as an object rather than a subject. It is then the dissolution of this distinction that is effected by sacrifice. And, to move back to a Lacanian perspective, as a signifier (of the lover’s love, his subjectivity and the lack his heart embodies) the heart is also a fabricated object in that it partakes of culture rather than nature, or more accurately, the symbolic rather than the Real, or more accurately still perhaps, the treatment of the heart—both by characters within the narrative and by the narrative material itself—resolutely fails to see the Real in the heart, so transfixed is it by the symbolic, one might even say the spectacle of the symbolic, that is the symbolic texture, meaning and value of the heart, or for that matter the Castelain’s lyrics, as signifying something that exceeds their literal parameters. The narrative holds out both the Castelain’s heart and his lyrics for us to contemplate their significance. In making his heart, and therefore himself, into an object to be sacrificed, the lover’s act would seem to be ethical. From a Derridean perspective, he gives up that which is uniquely his own; from a Lacanian perspective, he stays true to his own/the Other’s desire, giving the Other what she really wants.²⁹ The heart tastes good because it represents the Good from within the sacrificial structure. The gender of the protagonists here is crucial both in the medieval cultural context and in the modern psychoanalytic framework: the feminine Other devours the male subject and, if this is construed as erotic, the menacing undertones of the monstrous feminine Other are nonetheless apparent.³⁰ There appear to be no ²⁹ For Lacan (1986: 370) ‘la seule chose dont on puisse être coupable, c’est d’avoir cédé sur son désir’ (‘the only thing of which one can be guilty is having given way on one’s desire’). See also Zizek (1994: 65–70) and Zupancic (2000: particularly 160) on Lacanian ethics and ‘not giving way on one’s desire’. ³⁰ In Le Transfert (2001a: 62), Lacan’s discussion of the praying mantis is anticipated when he asks ‘Pourquoi ne pas concevoir que . . . c’est du côté de la femme qu’est à la fois le manque . . . mais aussi, et du même coup, l’activité?’ (‘why not imagine that . . . woman not only has lack on her side . . . but also and by the same token activity’). Woman needs (in the male imaginary) to devour man to fill her own lack.

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analogous examples of men eating their female partners—whether consciously or unconsciously. So sacrifice, and the desire to be incorporated that seems to accompany it in this articulation of the sacrificial structure, is construed primarily as a masculine preserve which subordinates a man to a woman, thereby inverting usual gender relations. But the woman’s desire in this scenario is always potentially a projection of masculine fantasmic structures and it is hard not to see all the men involved in the story—including the authors/narrators—as manipulative. Indeed, as Roberta Krueger has argued, in the most significant feminist analysis of the eaten heart material, the Castelain de Couci works the gender dynamics of this sacrificial structure through to a narratological level by framing the story with a female addressee whom the poet, Jakemes, hopes to seduce with his story (1993: 182–215). Just as the Dame de Fayel will fulfil her lover’s desire by eating his heart, so the fictional female reader will fulfil Jakemes’ desire by devouring and enjoying the text: Or doinst Amours par sa bonté Que celle le recoive en gré Que mes coers aimme tant et prise Que pour li ai ceste oevre emprise!’ (51–4) (Now may Love, through its goodness, grant that the woman whom my heart loves and cherishes so should receive this work kindly, since I have undertaken it for her.)

If this fictional female reader then finds this ‘tawdry’ story (as Krueger puts it) tasty, she will by implication be guilty of a transgressive incorporation that is analogous to the Dame de Fayel’s (Krueger 1993: 215). But in both cases, the woman’s ‘reception’ of her admirer’s offering, the satisfaction of her tasteless desire, has the result of fulfilling his. The gender dynamics of the eaten heart story might seem culturally aberrant, were it not for the dominant and ubiquitous model provided by the Eucharist. And like the Eucharist, the eaten heart derives its power from being at one and the same time simply part of a man’s body and so very much more. To use a Lacanian formulation, both before and after its extraction from the body and also before and after its ingestion, the heart is ‘in you more than you’ (1990: 293–307). Indeed, as the heart starts out in the lover, while belonging to his lady, and then ends up in the lady while coming from elsewhere, the heart is the exemplary signifier in that the signifying chain in which it is a link is the very substance of intersubjectivity. If we see the heart as signifier rather than mere body part, a further parallel with the Eucharist emerges: for the lady eats not simply the heart

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of a man she has loved, but also the heart of a poet. Just as the Eucharist allows the incorporation not simply of Christ’s body, but also of the Word, so eating her lover’s heart allows the lady not simply to incorporate her lover but to incorporate the very medium of desire itself, which is poetry, language, the symbolic order. It is not surprising that she wishes to eat nothing further, for she has, as it were, eaten desire itself.³¹ Is this what the lady wanted? And if so, is not the husband’s desire to destroy the lovers’ desire crucially different from the lady’s desire to consume her own desire? The husband’s ethics are of course highly questionable: indeed, Doueihi suggestively speculates that the husband’s unconscious desire is to eat his rival’s heart (1990: 55–6). He seeks to destroy his wife’s desire to serve his own ego-ideal, and rather than being the instrument of the lover’s jouissance, he in fact becomes the instrument of his castration, which is figured through graphic dismemberment, and the transformation of the lover’s sacrifice (enacted on one level precisely to avoid the husband’s castrating authority) into spectacle. But the lover’s ethics too turn out ultimately to be ‘fake,’ as Zizek might put it (2001: 69), as he also wants to kill the lady’s desire to serve his own purposes (though for different reasons: he is saying to her ‘I am your desire. You will devour me and then nothing else!’). This lady, then, is no praying mantis. She is not allowed to become a serial heart eater, but is forced and yet chooses to eat a last supper. It is her desire that everyone wants to kill, and this is significant from a feminist perspective: her sacrifice is not fake in that her actions are less screened by the superfluous and fake aspects of sacrifice than those of the men. It is also more sacred as it is she, after all, who has eaten her lover’s body. Of the three protagonists, it is the lady who seems to pass beyond the pleasure principle to jouissance. She is engulfed by her own jouissance rather than sacrificing it for the Other’s. It is fitting, therefore, that she falls, literally one might say, into an abyss, and also that, unlike her poetlover whose words continue to echo down the centuries, she falls silent. She relinquishes her place in the symbolic. Her lover is incapable of this: he remains grounded in the symbolic, his lyrics echoing down the ages, effectively castrated as well as devoured. The specific incorporation of lyric by narrative in the texts I have examined in this chapter means their deployment of sacrificial desire operates ³¹ This is a point made overtly in another eaten heart narrative, Ignaure, see Renaud (1938: 565–75), and for a discussion Gaunt (2004b: 119–21) and Bloch (1991: 123–9); for more general readings of Ignaure, see Doueihi (1997: 19–38) and Stone (1994: 109–33).

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on a different level from that of the lyrics I examined in Chapters 1 and 2. Offering the lovers’ sacrifice as spectacle means that whereas in the lyric tradition a fiction of secrecy is maintained, in these narrative texts the betrayal of a secret by a third party—the narrator—to the reader is overtly their mainspring. In his reading of the Castelain, Anthony Allen has termed this process ‘the loss of lyric sovereignty’ (2001: 39). The ‘benefits of sacrifice’ accrue here less to the poet (though he does have the benefit of being heard down the ages) than to the reader, who rather than having to sacrifice anything himself,³² merely has to watch others doing so, or perhaps to imitate these others, but with more symbolic, attenuated forms of sacrifice. He may, for instance, feel it suffices to send his beloved poems (or flowers) rather than cut his heart out for her. The incorporation he seeks is more symbolic than real, and that which the romances ‘demetaphorize’ viscerally from the lyric tradition on which they draw is thereby reassuringly ‘remetaphorized’ through the reading process. The reader may identify with the victims of sacrifice, but does so secure in the knowledge that the risks of sacrifice are safely confined to the space of spectacle and fiction. But the reader’s sense of the value of love here depends on the death of the lovers and on the betrayal of their secret, a betrayal in which he participates. If the two texts on which I have focused in this chapter offer different models of knowledge in relation to love (one confining itself to knowledge of external manifestations of love, the other being more interested in knowledge of the unconscious), both suggest knowledge of love may lead to death.³³ It is perhaps for this reason their quite distinct plots converge in transmission.

³² I confine my remarks here to male readers. As Krueger argues (1993: 183–216), these texts may work differently for a female reader. ³³ Interestingly, for Abraham and Torok (1972: 116) the fantasy of incorporation produces what they call un secret intrapsychique.

4 Between Two (or More) Deaths: Tristan, Lancelot, Cligès The Middle Ages’ two most famous lovers were undoubtedly Tristan and Lancelot. Whatever their Celtic antecedents, in French they are initially celebrated in twelfth-century verse romances; in the thirteenth century, their stories are transposed into vast and widely disseminated prose cycles. The French texts are translated into other European languages (notably German, Italian, English), while the frequent citation of Tristan (for example, in lyric texts) or of Lancelot (for instance, in Dante) as archetypal lovers attests to their emblematic status from the twelfth century onwards. Furthermore, there is no doubt that medieval writers and readers would have had Tristan and Iseult in mind when considering tales of lovers dying for love, such as those examined in the last chapter. I chose to discuss thirteenth-century romances with interpolated lyrics first, because their interaction with the lyric tradition is so overt, but the influence of the lyric’s discourse of love, though implicit, is no less strong in romances devoted to Tristan and Lancelot.¹ Given their iconic status, a constant comparison between Tristan and Lancelot is unavoidable.² Thus, in La Mort le roi Artu (c.1225–30) when ¹ For references to Tristan and Lancelot in troubadour lyric, see Gaunt and Harvey (2006); for Dante’s reference to the Lancelot story, see Dante (1960: Inferno V, 128). See Baumgartner (1987: 25–7) and Topsfield (1981: 105–74) for lyric influence on 12-cent. verse romances about Tristan and Lancelot. On the relationship between the Chastelaine de Vergy and the Castelain de Couci and the Tristan stories, see Allen (2001: 27) and Avalle (1975: 97–121). ² On the constant implied comparison between Tristan and Lancelot, see Bruckner (1993: 94–104), Kennedy (1995a: 95–101), and Payen (1973b). In addition to the example from the Mort, compare Tristan en prose (1963–85: i, prologue), where Tristan is introduced thus: ‘Tristan, qui fu li plus soveriens chevaliers qui onques fust ou reaume de la Grant Bretagne, et devant le roi Artus et aprés, for solement li tres bons chevaliers Lancelot dou Lac’ (‘Tristan, who was the most outstanding knight who ever lived in the kingdom of Great Britain, before and since the reign of King Arthur, except from the most worthy knight Lancelot of the Lake’). Indeed, the entire Tristan en prose is structured around an

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Bohort pleads with Guenevere on Lancelot’s behalf at a point when she erroneously believes her lover to be untrue, he offers a list of male lovers who have been shamed, or who have perished as a result of love. After Solomon, Samson, Hector, and Achilles, he evokes Tristan: Et a nostre tens meïsmes, n’a pas encore cinz anz que Tristans en morut, li niés au roi Marc, qui si loiaument ama Yseut la blonde que onques en son vivant n’avoit mespris vers lui. Que en diroie ge plus? Onques nus hom ne s’i prist fermement qui n’en moreust. (Mort 1964: §59, 54–60) (And even in our time, not more than five years ago, Tristan, King Mark’s nephew, who loved Iseult the Blond so loyally, died of this [love] for she had never acted wrongly towards him in her lifetime. What more can I say? No man has ever fallen truly in love without dying as a result.)

Bohort concludes that if Guenevere persists in rejecting Lancelot, all his good qualities will perish: proesce, hardemenz, chevalerie, gentillesce (§59, 65: ‘prowess’, ‘boldness’, ‘chivalry’, and ‘nobility’). As Lancelot is the best knight in the world, this will in turn produce a political crisis: Et si poez par ce dire veraiement que vos osteroiz d’entre les estoiles le soleill, ce est a dire la fleur des chevaliers del monde d’entre les chevaliers le roi Artu: et par ce poez vos veoir, dame, apertement que vos domageroiz moult plus cest roiaume et maint autre que onques dame ne fist par le cors d’un sol chevalier. Et ce est li granz biens que nos atendons de vostre amor. (§59, 76–84) (And because of this you can truly say that you would remove the sun from among the stars, that is to say the best of all knights in the world from among King Arthur’s knights: and through this you can see, my lady, clearly that you would damage this kingdom and many others more than any lady has previously done through the body of just one knight. And this is the great good we expect from your love.)

It is noteworthy, given the evocation of Tristan and the specific reference to his death, that Bohort does not suggest that Lancelot will die if Guenevere rejects him, but rather it is his good qualities that will be destroyed. It is also significant, given the mayhem that Tristan and Iseult’s love caused in Mark’s kingdom, that Bohort presents Lancelot and Guenevere’s love as a source of social cohesion and welfare. Indeed, the two points are related: Lancelot’s love is the inspiration for his chivalric prowess, which benefits the kingdom; if Guenevere no longer loves him, ongoing and increasingly important comparison between Tristan and Lancelot, with the first half of this vast romance preparing their meeting at the almost exact mid-point of the text (see Tristan en prose 1987–97 iii), following which Tristan becomes a knight of the Round Table. See Delcorno Branca (1998: 178–99).

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Lancelot’s proesce, hardemenz, chevalerie, gentillesce—so important to the body politic—will simply wither. Indeed, although Bohort’s speech seems to imply a comparison between the list of famous lovers who have died for love, the most recent of whom is Tristan, and Lancelot, he is implicitly inviting a contrast.³ Does Guenevere want Lancelot at worst to die (like Samson, Hector, Achilles, and Tristan), or at best to be shamed (like Solomon)? And does she thereby wish to see the kingdom ‘damaged’ by his loss of prowess. In the first place, Lancelot (unlike Tristan) is not going to die (at least not as a result of his love); in the second, Bohort’s aim is to prevent this from happening by effecting a reconciliation with Guenevere. Bohort’s comparison/contrast of Tristan with Lancelot raises two crucial questions, one very familiar in criticism of medieval literature, the other rarely addressed. First, since both loves are adulterous and both involve the queen, thereby the entire body politic, why is it that Tristan and Iseult’s love is so socially and politically catastrophic, whereas Lancelot and Guenevere’s promises social and political benefits by ensuring that Lancelot’s great deeds of chivalry continue (whatever other consequences their love may have)? Secondly, why, given the exemplary nature of both loves and the idealization of fatal love in medieval lyrics and narratives, do Lancelot and Guenevere not die, particularly since, as I will show, death is very much an issue in Lancelot narratives? I shall address these questions by examining the different relation the two lovers have to what Lacan calls the Symbolic order, which is the realm of language, culture, and social order. In looking at Tristan and Lancelot’s relation to the Symbolic, I will also deploy the psychoanalytic notion of traversing the fantasy. Fantasy, in psychoanalytic thinking, should not be opposed to reality, but is rather a means of structuring the symbolic order (see Ch. 1, n. 29). ‘Traversing the fantasy’ can take a number of forms, but one model is provided by Lacan’s notion of ‘staying true to one’s desire,’ for which Antigone offers a paradigm in the work of writers such as Lacan, Zizek and Butler.⁴ In other words, with Antigone the fantasy (of staying true to one’s desire) is acted out and not (as is usually the case with fantasies) relinquished in favour of some compromise or fetish; for Lacan, this has ethical value. But Antigone turns out to be the ³ Pace Croizy-Naquet (1994: 15), who finds Bohort’s speech incoherent and confused because, despite his obsession with the effect treacherous women have, he still asks Guenevere to rejoin their ranks. For Croizy-Naquet, this stems from Bohort’s thinking being coloured by the values he had acquired on the Grail quest. ⁴ See Lacan (1986: 285–333); Zizek (1989: 213–15); Butler (2000).

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exceptional case that proves the rule, which means that the symbolic value of her story serves to underscore the value of the fantasy she represents qua fantasy. ‘Traversing the fantasy’ and ‘staying true to one’s desire’ may be the ultimate and only possible ethical act, but this turns out to be impossible to realize without some extreme form of renunciation: in other words, you may renounce everything, but the one thing you do not renounce is the fantasy itself. Furthermore, once the subject becomes committed to this extreme form of renunciation, he or she is, in Lacan’s formulation, ‘between two deaths’ (see Lacan 1986: 315–33; Zizek 1989: 131–6). Thus, from the moment Antigone decides to give her criminal brother funeral rights, she is in some sense already dead, even though still alive, in that her death is inevitable. She inhabits a space between her symbolic death, that is, her effective departure from the Symbolic order, and the actual death of her body. For Zizek (1989: 134), this is the space of the sublime. I want to suggest that Lancelot (like the audiences of courtly lyrics or the readers of courtly romances) understands, or at least is an instrument for understanding, the symbolic nature of discourses of death in courtly literature, in the sense that he understands that the purpose of the symbolic and of its discourses is to preserve life. For Lancelot, talk of dying for love is just that. He realizes it has enormous symbolic value, but does not himself make the ultimate sacrifice. Lancelot, in other words, does give up on his desire, and however frequently his possible death is evoked, it is in fact perpetually deferred. Tristan, on the other hand, does not understand the symbolic value of the association of love and death, or more accurately, he refuses to acknowledge its symbolic value, taking it to be Real. It is thus interesting—in that he lives out or traverses the fantasy of dying for love articulated in the lyric—that Tristan is frequently represented as a poet. For Tristan, the association of love and death is no metaphor; rather he has a literal, ‘anti-metaphorical’ understanding of the fatal nature of love, and so once he has fallen in love, he knows he has entered the space between two deaths. I will focus largely on Tristan and Lancelot in the first two sections of this chapter, reserving consideration of women characters until Chapter 5. A third section will examine Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligès, a romance that plays deliberately and overtly on the paradigms established by the Tristan and Lancelot material. This more comic and sceptical treatment of the rhetoric of dying for love will show how love’s martyrdom and its most important iconic figure— Tristan—become a matter of debate in medieval literature, and are never allowed to become fixed ideals.

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Tristan While it is likely that at least three full-length versions of the Tristan story in verse were composed in Old French in the period 1160–80, only two survive and these only in fragmentary form, those of Thomas and Beroul.⁵ However, the existence of three other short texts relating episodes of the longer narrative (the two Folies and Marie de France’s Chevrefoil ), and also the rapid transposition of two of the longer texts into German attest to their albeit transitory popularity: in all likelihood, the earlier verse texts were regarded as obsolete once prose versions went into circulation in the thirteenth century, and unlike Chrétien’s five contemporary canonical Arthurian romances, verse romances about Tristan seem not to have been deemed susceptible to compilation with a view to being subsumed to longer Arthurian mega-narratives (probably of course because Tristan and Iseult die, thereby giving a type of narrative closure that lends itself a lot less well to continuation).⁶ A standard critical procedure with twelfth-century verse Tristan romances has been the comparison of Beroul and Thomas (both probably composed in the 1170s). Thus, the former is often called the version commune because of the violence of some episodes, its concentration on the visceral and corporeal, and its apparent affiliation with oral and overtly partisan narration; the latter, on the other hand, is often called the version courtoise because of its more ethereal, psychologizing and literary feel (Baumgartner 1987: 101–2, 109–10). Whereas the commitment of Beroul to the lovers’ cause is unwavering, Thomas is thought by some to have been equivocal, even critical about the lovers’ ethics. Additionally, whereas Beroul’s narrator exhorts his audience to admire and support the lovers, often enlisting even God to their cause, Thomas seems to invite his audience to question the rights and wrongs of what he narrates, possibly viewing the lovers as a negative exemplum (Hunt 1981). One of the many differences between the two versions is the treatment of death. Although the comparison is in some senses difficult to calibrate because we lack the end of Beroul’s text, it nonetheless seems clear from the surviving fragments that death plays a fundamentally different role in the two texts. ⁵ The third full-length Old French verse version of the Tristan story is the one Chrétien de Troyes refers to in the prologue to Cligès, see Chrétien de Troyes (1994a: 5). ⁶ Payen, however, suggests that the virtual disappearance of Old French verse Tristan poems may have been the result of censorship because of their troublesome contents (1973b: 618). The Prose Tristan assimilates the story to broader Arthurian cyclical narratives, but the result is a major change in orientation.

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In Beroul, a number of references are made to the lovers’ commitment to dying together. For instance, when Tristan believes Iseult is about to be burnt at the stake, he declares ‘En l’art por moi, por li morrai’ (Beroul 1939: 988: ‘she is being burned for me, I will die for her’), and when shortly thereafter Mark gives her to the lepers to do with her as they will, he proclaims ‘Ahi! Yseut, bele figure, | Con deüstes por moi morir | et je redui por vos perir’ (1238–40: ‘ah! fair-faced Iseult, you should have died for me and I ought to have perished for you’). However, Tristan’s death for love is projected into a hypothetical future or posited as an alternative past. In the first instance, he has just made his death-defying leap from a chapel on a cliff onto an adjacent rock (the famous ‘Saut Tristran’ episode, see 954) with a view to rescuing Iseult from death at the stake; in the second, he is about to rescue her from the lepers. Tristan talks of death here, but is not ready to die; far from it. Neither lover wishes to die in Beroul and in the surviving fragment, neither says so. On the contrary, much of the narrative is motivated by their attempts to evade death. As Iseult says at one point ‘Je ne vuel pas encor morir | Ne moi du tot en tot perir’ (167–8: ‘I do not want to die yet, nor do I wish to destroy myself completely’). As Marie-Noëlle Lefay-Toury puts it, an ‘irrésistible force vitale’ dominates this text (Toury 1979: 150; see also Curtis 1969: 38). The lovers also seek to evade death in Thomas’s version, but the rhetoric —theirs and Thomas’s—is completely different. In Thomas, the lovers barely mention their love without also recalling that they are fated to die together. Death is evoked constantly as the solution to their troubles, particularly when they are separated, as, for example, when Tristan, disguised as a leper, is having his attempts to see Iseult thwarted by Brangwain: Suz le degré languist Tristrans, la mort desire e het sa vie, ja ne leverad mais senz aïe. Ysolt en est forment pensive, dolente se claime e cative k’issi faitement veit aler la ren qu’ele plus solt amer. Ne set qu’en face nequident, plure e suspire sovent, maldit le jur, maldit l’ure qu’el el secle tant demure. (Thomas 2003: 2026–36) (Tristan languishes under the stairs; he desires death and hates his life; he will not get up again without help. Iseult is lost deep in thought, proclaiming herself to be miserable and wretched at thus seeing the one she so loves in such a state; nor does

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she know what to do so she weeps and sighs frequently, cursing the day, cursing the hour when she must remain on this earth.)

Rather than looking for cunning solutions to their problems, here Tristan ‘sa mort desire’, while Iseult no longer wishes to remain alive. As Toril Moi puts it, their love may be imaginary and narcissistic, but it has a ‘deeper allegiance to the death drive’ (1999: 440; see also Toury 1979: 142). For Tristan and Iseult, life increasingly becomes a living death, in which, as Susan Crane suggests ‘suffering becomes an ascetic discipline’ (1986: 154). The distinction between life and death no longer seems to hold. Thus, at one point, as Tristan dreams of Iseult, she is described as ‘la bele raïne, s’amie, | en cui est sa mort e sa vie’ (1215–16: ‘the fair queen, his lover, in whom resides both his death and his life’). Life and death are conflated in and through love. Furthermore, as the fatal dénouement approaches, death is increasingly associated with desire, indeed portrayed as the object of desire, as in the following monologue from Iseult: ‘La vostre mort vei devant mei, e ben sai que tost murrir dei. Amis, jo fail a mun desir, car en voz braz quidai murrir.’ (3069–72) (‘I see your death before me and know that I must soon die. My love, I fail my desire since I expected to die in your arms’).

Iseult is desperately trying to reach Tristan before he dies in the hope that if she cannot once again cure him of a fatal wound from a poisoned weapon, as she had years before after his battle with the Morholt, at least they can die together (3255–6), the wound of course being as much a metaphor of their love as a real wound. In fact, because Tristan’s wife (Iseult as blanches mains) lies about the colour of the sail on the ship carrying her to him (white means she is on board, black means she is not), Tristan dies before she arrives, believing she has not come as he had asked. As Iseult becomes increasingly frustrated at the ship’s inability to make land—they are delayed within sight of land by a ferocious and fateful storm—we are told that she and then Tristan nearly die from desire (3150: ‘A poi ne muert de sun desir’; 3160: ‘A poi que del desir ne muert’). The distinction between desire and death dissolves here as one melts into the other, and thereby also the distinction between life and death. Death is the inevitable conclusion of this story, but it is also on some level the desired conclusion (see Toury 1979: 184). This is because

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in death the lovers can at last be together forever, untroubled and inseparable: Embrace le e si s’estent, baise li la buche e la face e molt estreit a li l’enbrace, cors a cors, buche a buche estent, sun espirit a itant rent, e murt dejuste lui issi pur la dolur de sun ami. (3264–70) (She embraces him and lays herself down, she kisses his mouth and face, holding him very close to her, lying with their bodies and mouths together; at that moment her soul leaves her and she dies thus beside him because of the sorrow she felt for her lover.)

Indeed, for Iseult, reaching Tristan is the same as dying: ‘venue sui a la mort’, she declares (3259). She desires death, and death is therefore her life. As is well-known, amur/dolur and mort/confort are among the most common rhyme pairs in Thomas’s Tristan (see Baumgartner 1987: 85 and 99; also Toury 1979: 168). However, although it is difficult to draw firm conclusions on the frequency and positioning of rhymes given the fragmentary nature of the text, it would seem that whereas the rhyme pair amur/dolur occurs with greater frequency than the pair mort/confort, the former is to be found with a degree of regularity throughout the text whereas the latter is primarily used at the end.⁷ Indeed, the use of the rhyme pair mort/confort becomes increasingly intense towards the end, so if the association of love with pain implicitly evokes death throughout, as the text reaches its climax that which is desired, gives comfort, and eases pain is explicitly death. This is apparent when Tristan summons Iseult through the intermediary of his faithful friend (and brother-in-law) Kaerdin: ‘Tristran vus mande cume druz amisté, servise e saluz cum a dame, cum a s’amie en qui maint sa mort e sa vie. ⁷ For amur/dolur see 14–15, 49–50, 69–70, 87–8, 217–18, 233–4, 249–50, 505–6, 1095–6, 1165–6, 1181–2, 1203–4, 1244–5, 1567–8, 2143–4, 2153–4, 2165–6, 2405–6, 2413–14, 2515–16, 2541–2, 2573–4, 2589–90, 2659–60, 2683–4, 2887–8, 3007–8, 3061–2, 3251–2, 3293–4. For mort/confort see 12–13, 2095–6, 2425–6, 2595–6, 2631–2, 2645–6, 2687–8, 2865–6, 3043–4, 3055–6, 3091–2, 3105–6, 3189–90, 3212–13, 3239–40, 3259–60. Amur rhymes frequently with other words, notably irrur, haür, tristur, tendrur, and particularly onur/desonur. The rhyming of mort with confort, and vice versa, is more consistent.

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Liges hum vus est e amis; a vus m’ad par busuig tramis. Mande vus, ja n’avrat confort, se n’est par vus, a ceste mort, salu de vie ne santé, si n’est par vus aporté. A mort est navré d’un espé ki de venim fud entushcé. Nus ne poüm mires trover Ki sachent sun mal meciner.’ (2859–72) (‘In his capacity as your favourite, Tristan sends you this message as a token of his friendship, service, and greetings, and he addresses you as his lady and lover, in whom reside both his death and his life. He is your liege man and your lover and he has sent me to you because he needs you. I am to tell you that he will never have any comfort, other than through you, in this death, nor can he have salvation in this life, nor health, unless you bring it. He is mortally wounded by a poisoned sword. We can find no doctors who know how to cure his illness.’)

As is often the case with Thomas, the syntax here is ambiguous. Kaerdin says Tristan will have no comfort a ceste mort (‘at this death,’ which for the sake of English idiom I have translated ‘in this death’), without Iseult. But if the confortTristan seeks is simply protection from death, one might expect the preposition de or even contre, rather than a.⁸ Salu de vie and santez seem to imply that Tristan hopes to survive, if only Iseult can reach him in time, but the collocation a ceste mort may imply that the comfort he seeks is reunion with Iseult in death, rather than her life-saving medicinal skills. Similarly, Iseult seeks comfort in her longed-for reunion with Tristan in death: ‘Se jo ne poisse vos guarir, qu’ensemble poissum dunc murrir! Quant a tens venir n’i poi e jo l’aventure ne soi, e venue sui a la mort, de meisme le bevre avrai confort. Pur mei avez perdu la vie, e jo frai cum veraie amie: pur vos voil murir ensement.’ (3255–63) (‘If I cannot cure you, at least we may die together. Since I was not able to get here in time or know what was happening, and now face death, I will take comfort in ⁸ Compare 2646, 3105, 3260. Baumgartner and Short (219) translate line 2866 ‘face à la mort’.

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the same drink [as you]. You have lost your life for me and I will now act like a true lover: I likewise wish to die for you.’)

The reciprocity and symmetry of dying pur mei and pur vos reinforces the suggested union of ensemble murrir, while significantly, as Iseult contemplates death she recalls the bevre, the love potion that was the catalyst for their fatal love in the first place, and which is the first and possibly the main thing they truly share (hence meisme le bevre). As Renée Curtis suggested, it is not coincidental that Iseult uses meisme le bevre as a metaphor for shared death (1969: 40), since as Tristan has earlier remarked El beivre fud la nostre mort, nus n’en avrum ja mais confort; a tel ure duné nus fu a nostre mort l’avum beü. (2645–8) (Our death was in that potion and we will never have any comfort from this; we drank to our death in the moment when it was given to us.)

The association between the potion and death, which may or may not have underscored the entire narrative from the outset, but which certainly does so retroactively now, shows how death has pervaded the love of Tristan and Iseult all along. Thus, from the moment the lovers drink the potion, they are between two deaths: the potion removes them from the constraints of the symbolic order, plunging them sporadically into madness, criminality, and sexual transgression, while also denying them any agency, thereby absolving them of responsibility.⁹ The space the lovers inhabit throughout the narrative is sublime. Love is an extended death, ,and since love is at once such a compelling and ecstatic experience, death is on one level at least the very pinnacle of positive experience for these lovers, one towards which they move all the time, provided it is shared. The real tragedy in Thomas is thus less that Iseult fails to save Tristan and that the lovers die, rather than that they do not die together. Indeed, ⁹ I realize my reading might seem to conflate traditional views of Beroul and Thomas’s representations of the potion here, in that the loss of agency is usually associated with Beroul’s text, whereas Thomas is thought to treat the potion more as a metaphor and therefore to make the lovers far more responsible for their acts. However, the key point about the potion is that it seals the lovers’ fate. For a concise summary of views on the potion, see Baumgartner (1987: 101–2), particularly her astute comments on p. 102: ‘le philtre, chez Thomas, ne serait plus la force magique qui, dans la version commune, provoque et provoque seule la passion des amants. Mais il resterait le signe sensible, matériel, de l’éveil et la surprise des sens’ (‘the potion in Thomas is no longer the magic force which in the version commune is the sole catalyst for the lovers’ passion, But it remains the tangible and material sign of the unexpected awakening of the senses’). See also Hunt (1981: 41), who robustly refutes any underestimation of the potion in Thomas, and likewise Curtis (1969: 36–40).

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it is for this reason perhaps that Iseult laments that she has arrived too late: the lovers had hoped for a final communion in death and do not conceive of their deaths individually, but rather as nostre mort (2645).¹⁰ The shared death that is idealized in the Middle Ages and beyond bears a striking similarity to what Lacan calls jouissance. We have already seen how Bernart de Ventadorn represents a kind of oblivion and loss of self through the metaphor of the lark in his famous lyric ‘Can vei’, or how the eaten heart stories may be read as a fantasy of total union with the lover, a fantasy of the loss of self incorporation by the Other necessarily entails. The power of the Tristan stories derives from this fantasy of total union with the love object, a fantasy in which the subject’s most meaningful and valuable experience as a subject requires the simultaneous effacement of the subject. It is thereby no accident that Thomas twice specifically invokes fantasies of incorporation in the surviving fragments: Iseult sings a lai about one Guiron, who is otherwise unknown, but this is clearly an ‘eaten heart’ story (986–96); and during her last fateful journey to try to save Tristan’s life, Iseult fantasizes about their being consumed together by a giant fish (3078), so that they might have ‘une sepulture . . . cume covent a nostre amur’ ( 3080–4: ‘a single tomb . . . as is fitting for our love’). Marie de France seems to have understood perfectly that a shared death is a form of jouissance. In her wonderful lai Chevrefoil, which may be read to some extent as a gloss on some of Thomas’s major themes (see Toury 1979: 180–1), Tristan plots to see Iseult at a point when he is exiled from the court. The lovers’ shared death is but a distant prospect at this stage of the well-known narrative, but Marie ensures we do not forget it, as she concludes her prologue saying she is going to tell a tale De Tristram e de la reïne, De lur amur que tant fu fine, Dunt il eurent meinte dolur, Puis en mururent en un jur. (Marie de France 1944: Chevrefoil, 7–10) (About Tristan and the queen, and about their love which was so pure, from which they suffered greatly, and then they died on the same day.)

The relationship between narrative past, present and future is troubled here by Marie’s narrative technique. As is often the case in medieval narratives, a short statement in the preterit (eurent, mururent) pre-empts ¹⁰ On communion in death, see particularly Crane (1986: 155–6) and Curtis (1969: 40).

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the dénouement in the prologue. An absolute past tense is therefore used to give an indication of the narrative future. Thus, even though the lovers’ shared death is here part of a relatively distant narrative future, it nonetheless haunts everything they do. In Chevrefoil, this is further underlined by the central metaphor (or simile) of the lai, that of the two entwined plants that will die if separated: . . . lunges ot ilec esté E atendu e surjurné Pur espïer e pur saver Coment il la peüst veer, Kar ne pot nent vivre sanz li; D’euls deus fu il [tut] autresi Cume del chevrefoil esteit Ki a la codre se perneit: Quant il s’i est laciez e pris E tut entur le fust s’est mis, Ensemble poënt bien durer; Mes ki puis les volt desevrer, Li codres muert hastivement E li chevrefoil ensement. ‘Bele amie, si est de nus: Ne vus sanz mei, ne mei sanz vus!’ (63–78) (. . . he had been there a long time waiting and tarrying to spy and see how he could see her, for he could not live without her. The two of them were just like the honeysuckle that clings to the hazel; once it is wrapped around it fast and grown about its trunk, they can only survive together; but if they are then separated the hazel dies at once and the honeysuckle too. ‘Fair lover, thus it is with us two: you cannot live without me, nor I without you.’)

These deservedly famous and beguilingly beautiful lines suggest that the lovers can only live when together, and that separation, denoted here through the verb desevrer, will inevitably kill them. And yet, if this were true there would be no lai, for to the extent that the point of the story is how Tristan effects a meeting with his lover, this only makes sense because they are separated, and yet obviously still alive.¹¹ Significantly, towards the end of the lai Marie uses the verb desevrer again, also at the rhyme, giving it extra emphasis (see McCash 1999: 36): ‘Mes quant ceo vient al desevrer’ (103: ‘when the moment to part comes’). When the moment to part comes, they simply separate, even though if one follows the simile with the honeysuckle and hazel, any physical separation ought to be fatal. ¹¹ Moi (1999: 441) makes the same point in relation to Thomas.

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If their union is not simply physical, and one should not therefore expect the metaphor/simile to work according to strict logic, the non sequitur at the heart of this text is nonetheless palpable and it directs the reader back to the prologue. The one moment when the lovers will be truly inseparable is death. In death, they become indistinguishable, they lose all sense of self, they become one, transcending all individuation and difference, including sexual difference.¹² As many scholars have noted, God and eternal salvation do not inform the lovers’ thinking on death in the branch of the tradition represented by Thomas or Marie de France.¹³ It is also noteworthy that the religious imagery and vocabulary that pervade the rhetoric of love in the troubadours and many courtly narratives are conspicuously absent. The lovers see their union in death as an end in itself, abstracted from any notion of life after death. Worldly love has been so elevated in its spiritual and ethical value that it no longer needs the religious imagery and vocabulary that hauled it out of the mundane in the first place. When the Tristan material is transposed into prose in the thirteenth century (c.1230–5 for the earliest version of the Tristan en prose), the intertwining of love and death remains strong, as apparently does the fatal power of the potion: Ha! Diex, quel boivre! Com il lor fu puis anious! Or ont beü; or sont entré en la riote qui jamés ne faudra tant com il aient l’ame el cors. Or sont entré en cele voie dont il lor covendra sofrir engoisse et travail tot lor aaige. Diex, quel duel! Il ont beü lor destrucion et lor mort. (Tristan en prose 1963–85: ii, § 445) (Ah! God, what a drink! How it was to harm them subsequently! Now they have drunk they have begun to face the calamitous problems that will not end as long as they live. Now they have set out on that path on which they will suffer much anguish and torment to the end of their days. God, what sorrow! They have drunk their destruction and death).

However, despite this apparent adherence to the twelfth-century verse texts’ account of Tristan and Iseult’s love, the Tristan en prose is actually ¹² The lovers’ drive to become one in Thomas is the main focus of Moi (1999: particularly 430–40); for Moi the lovers die because they cannot achieve an imaginary union that would transcend sexual difference and in which they would become each other. See also Bruckner (1993: 37–59), particularly 44, where the lovers’ desire for union is seen intelligently in relation to the text’s interest in doubles and doubling, and Maddox (2000: 42–3) on reciprocity in Chevrefoil. For more psychoanalytically informed readings of the lai as grounded in an imaginary, pre-symbolic symbiosis between the lovers, see Huchet (1981: 412–13) and Berkvam (1989). ¹³ Ruminations on this point are too numerous to list exhaustively, but see among others Hunt (1981: 43), Payen (1973b: 621), Toury (1979: 169).

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more complex: Tristan’s love for Iseult seems initially much more grounded in hostility to Mark, and then rivalry with Palamedes, another of Iseult’s admirers, while for extended Arthurian episodes the text seems more concerned with Tristan’s chivalric exploits, or with comparing his prowess to that of Lancelot, than it does with his love affair with Iseult.¹⁴ Furthermore, as we will see in Chapter 5, the lovers’ death is given a radically different treatment in the prose romance. And yet, as Sylvia Huot has recently shown (2003: 97–135 and 136–79), in the Tristan en prose we nonetheless witness a series of men falling in love with Iseult, one at least dying as a result. In Huot’s words, ‘here Iseult takes on the aspect virtually of a serial killer’ (2003: 160). And thus, as she also remarks, ‘the desire for death is in the end no different from the desire for Iseut herself ’ (2003: 116). The characters themselves recognize the fatal effects of loving Iseult. As one man in love with her (Kahedin) says to another (Palamedes, a Saracen who at one point abducts her): ‘se vous amés la u je aim, vous amés ausi con fist Narchisus, ki ama cele dont il mourut. Se vous amés la u je aim, vous amés vostre mort sans doute, et de vostre mort avés joie.’ (Tristan en prose 1987–97: i, §102, 19–22) (‘If you love the one whom I love, you love as did Narcissus, who loved the one who caused his death. If you love the one whom I love, you without doubt love your death and take joy in it.’)

But because only one lover may be truly united with Iseult, only one death can ever in fact be meaningful. Thus, to quote Huot again: Palamedes finds himself poised between two deaths but in a state of uncertainty as to what that second death will have meant once it happens. As we have seen, he perceives his very love for Iseut as a kind of death, a fall from perfection. If the second death takes the form of a sacrificial act freely offered to Iseut and carried out before her eyes, then it will retrospectively confer a sublimity on Palamedes’ entire existence: he will have been a noble martyr to love, and like that of the saintly martyr his death will open out into a glorious afterlife of love finally granted. (2003: 171) ¹⁴ See, e.g. on rivalry with Palamedes Tristan en prose (1963–85, i. §§ 329–30), or on hostility between Mark and Tristan §396. Despite a few temporary moments of reconciliation, rivalry between Palamedes and Tristan is constant throughout the romance; similarly Mark is portrayed unequivocally as an unworthy king and evil man, for instance see the Lai du Voir Disant (1987–97, iv: § 244), in which he is addressed as the ‘roi . . . plus mauvais ki soit en vie’ (‘the worst king alive’) and as ‘honnis, vergoigniés, ahonté’ (‘shamed, shameful, and disgraced’). On the equivocal treatment of love and the potion in the Tristan en prose, see Fedrick (1967), Fries (1991), Kristensen (1985), Traxler (1994) and (1996).

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In the end, a converted Palamedes dies a good Christian death at the hands of Gauvain (like many a true Arthurian knight), expiring in the arms of Lancelot no less (Tristan en prose 1987–97, ix, § 132);¹⁵ as we will see in Chapter 6 (see coda), it is his interlocutor Kahedin who in fact dies as a result of his love for Iseult. The problem, however, is that there can only be one true martyr to love for Iseult. This particular shockingly Godless afterlife of eternal joy is reserved for Tristan, and Palamedes’ putative or Kahedin’s actual gesture—however noble in spirit—inevitably leads to madness and abjection. Palamedes and Kahedin nonetheless demonstrate the extraordinary symbolic power of sacrificing one’s life for love. It is such a noble gesture that it demands to be imitated even though it is clearly inimitable. Tristan, in other words, is like Antigone the chosen one, the exceptional case that proves the rule. He fails to renounce—thereby traversing—the fantasy of dying for love. He thus subverts one of the main mechanisms of desire, but at the same time he responds the injunction—which for Lacan is ethical—not to give up on one’s desire. He acts out his romance in the space of the sublime, his excessive fidelity to the symbolic in the end in fact taking him beyond it.

Lancelot Lancelot’s imitation of the sacrificial gesture of a lover such as Tristan remains on a purely symbolic level. He is prepared to risk his life in chivalric exploits undertaken in his lady’s service, and he uses the familiar tropes that associate love and death when talking about his love, but the morbid drive towards death, indeed the desire for death that characterizes many of the Tristan stories, are largely absent from Lancelot’s love affair with Guenevere.¹⁶ This is all the more striking, given that they move through a world in which dying for love (particularly dying for love of Lancelot) is, as we will see, quite commonplace, a world in which characters often evoke the discourse of dying for love and love’s martyrdom. If both Lancelot and Guenevere die at the end of La Mort le roi Artu, they do so only when their love story is effectively over, they do not die of their passion, and no one kills them as a result of it. Furthermore, they both die repenting of their sins, as good Christians, and they die separately.¹⁷ ¹⁵ On the redemption of Palamedes, see esp. Traxler (1994: 168–9) and (1996: 385). ¹⁶ For one possible exception, see Lancelot (1993: 540), where Lancelot apparently has a fleeting vision of death as he revives from a dead faint. ¹⁷ See Mort (1964: § 202), and pp. 263–6 (for the possibly apocryphal last encounter of Lancelot and Guenevere, which also narrates her death).

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To illustrate how the treatment of the love and death motif in Lancelot narratives differs from its treatment in Tristan narratives, I shall examine an important episode of the story in two different versions: the first by Chrétien de Troyes from Le Chevalier de la Charrette, the second from the early thirteenth-century cyclic Prose Lancelot (c.1220). This involves an elaborate misunderstanding whereby each of the lovers believes the other to be dead. Following his ignominious ride in the cart of shame, Lancelot makes his way to Gorre to rescue the prisoners from the land of Logres, the most important of whom is, of course, the queen. If in Chrétien’s Charrette it is unclear whether they are already lovers, in the Prose Lancelot, their love has already been consummated. However, when they first encounter each other in Gorre, Guenevere is markedly cool. Lancelot thinks this is because he rode in the cart, but of course in Chrétien, she rebuffs him because he hesitated before climbing in, while in the prose text she rebuffs him because he left court without asking leave. As he makes his way off in some distress, he is captured and his death is falsely reported to the queen. She is so distraught at the news she refuses to eat or drink. Shortly thereafter, her death is falsely reported to Lancelot. When Guenevere first hears that Lancelot is dead in Chrétien, we are told that she almost kills herself and that she almost loses the power of speech (Chrétien de Troyes 1992: 4160 and 4165: ‘a po qu’ele ne s’est ocise’; ‘. . . a po la parole n’an perte’), which sets the tone for the whole episode: she does not in fact die, nor does she fall silent. On the contrary, she decides that though ostensibly intent on killing herself (4180), she first needs to confess her ‘sin’ to herself. Consequently, she withdraws to intone a lengthy monologue. As is so often the case in Chrétien’s romances, a moment of emotional intensity and turmoil produces a highly structured, rhetorically poised monologue, which I quote in full in order to give a sense of how Guenevere talks herself out of suicide:¹⁸ ‘Ha, lasse! De coi me sovint, Quant mes amis devant moi vint, Que je nel deignai conjoïr Ne ne le vos onques oïr? Quant mon esgart et ma parole Li veai, ne fis je que fole? Que fole? Ainz fis, si m’aïst Dex, Que felenesse et que cruex,

4200

¹⁸ This monologue has been analysed by Payen (1967: 381–5) and Toury (1979: 113–15).

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Et sel cuidai ge feire a gas, 4205 Mes ensi nel cuida il pas, Se nel m’a mie pardoné. Nus fors moi ne li a doné Le mortel cop, mien escïant. Quant il vint devant moi riant 4210 Et cuida que je li feïsse Grant joie et que je le veïsse, Et onques veoir ne le vos, Ne li fu ce donc mortex cos? Quant ma parole li veai, 4215 Tantost ce cuit le dessevrai Del cuer et de la vie ansamble. Cil dui cop l’ont mort, ce me sanble. Ne l’ont mort Breibançon Et Dex! Avrai ge rëançon 4220 De cest murtre, de cest pechié? Nenil voir, ainz seront sechié Tuit li flueve et la mers tarie. Ha, lasse! Con fusse garie Et con me fust granz reconforz 4225 Se une foiz, ainz qu’il fust morz, L’eüsse antre mes bras tenu! Comant? Certes, tot nu a nu, Por ce que plus an fusse a eise, Quant il est morz, molt sui malveise 4230 Que je ne faz tant que je muire. Don ne me doit ma vie nuire, Se je sui vive aprés sa mort, Quant je a rien ne me deport S’es max non que je trai por lui? 4235 Quant aprés sa mort m’i dedui, Certes molt fust dolz a sa vie Li max don j’ai or grant anvie. Malveise est qui mialz vialt morir Que mal por son ami sofrir, 4240 Mes certes il m’est molt pleisant Que j’aille lonc duel feisant, Mialz voel vivre et sofrir les cos Que morir et estre an repos.’ (4197–244) (‘Alas, what was I thinking when my lover came before me and I deigned neither to welcome him nor hear him out? When I turned away from him and refused to speak, was I not mad? Mad? On the contrary, so help me God, I was wicked and

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cruel. And I thought I was doing this jokingly, but he did not realize this and has not yet forgiven me. I think that I alone struck the fatal blow. When he came before me, laughing, believing that I would welcome him joyfully and be willing to receive him, I did not want to receive him and was this not a fatal blow? When I refused to speak to him, I think I at once severed his heart from his life. These two blows killed him, I am sure of it; he was killed by no mercenary. Oh God! Can I make amends for this murder, for this sin? In truth no, not unless all rivers and oceans run dry. Alas, what a relief and comfort it would be for me if once, before his death, I had held him in my arms! What? Indeed, entirely naked so that he could have been entirely at his ease. Since he is dead, I am indeed base not to seek death myself. Should my life not be burdensome if I live after he has died, when I have no pleasure other than the torments I endure for him? If I take pleasure in this after his death, would not these much desired torments not have seemed sweet to him in life. The woman who prefers to die rather than suffer torments for her lover is wicked, and indeed it is most agreeable to me that my torment last a good deal of time. I prefer to live and suffer these blows than to die and be at peace.’)

A series of rhetorical questions seem initially to express a torrent of turmoil as she examines her earlier reactions to Lancelot, lamenting her mistreatment of him. On the one hand, she uses these rhetorical questions to blame herself for Lancelot’s death, as in lines 4203–4, where she specifies she was not merely mad or foolish, but cruel and wicked; on the other, she seeks to justify herself, claiming she was joking when she rebuffed him (4205), even though there had been no hint of this at the time. She takes responsibility for his death, equating her actions to ‘fatal blows’ (4208–14), but then, at a pivotal point in the monologue, indeed exactly half way through, she wonders if there is anything she can do to make amends for Lancelot’s death, which she describes both as a ‘murder’ and a ‘sin’ (4220–1). The answer is a ‘no’ embellished with gratuitous hyperbole, but she nonetheless starts to muse on her predicament. She uses the familiar rhyme-pair mort/confort (4225–6), possibly evoking the Tristan legend, but if so, marking at the same time a contrast since she is contemplating comfort before death, not in death, and this is very obviously sex (4228). More rhetorical questions then enable her to convince herself that her continued suffering in life might offer some kind of reparation to her lover, and that death, in any case, is a cowardly way out. If Guenevere chooses eternal suffering rather than being at peace, she seems to claim this as an act of amorous heroism, but her logic is nonetheless fuzzy since she has also claimed that now Lancelot is dead, suffering is her only pleasure (deport, 4234); thus according to her own logic, she is devoting

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herself to pleasure as much as suffering (and she herself says it will be ‘molt pleisant’ to suffer thus, 4241), while in any case, any solace this might have brought Lancelot could only have done so ‘a sa vie’ (‘in his lifetime’, 4237). Her conclusion, stripped to its syntactic essentials, is clear: ‘Mialz voel vivre que morir’ (‘I would rather live than die’). It is as if the first half of the monologue works to establish the implicit proposition that she should die with Lancelot, in imitation of him, and the second half then to refute this. Thus, as Marie-Noëlle Lefay-Toury puts it (Toury 1979: 115), ‘elle n’est pas exempte d’un certain ridicule’ (‘she verges on the ridiculous’). When Lancelot learns of Guenevere’s supposed death, his response is briefer: ‘Ha Morz! Con m’as or agueitié Que tot sain me fez desheitié! Desheitiez sui, ne mal ne sant 4265 Fors del duel qu’au cuer me descent, Cist diax est max, voire mortex. Ce voel je bien que il soit tex, Et se Deu plest, je an morrai. Comant? N’autremant ne porrai 4270 Morir se Damedeu ne plest? Si ferai, mes que il me lest Cest laz antor ma gole estraindre, Einsi cuit bien la Mort destraindre Tant que malgré suen m’ocirra. 4275 Morz qui onques ne desirra Se cez non qui de li n’ont cure Ne vialt venir, mes ma ceinture La m’amanra trestote prise, Et des qu’ele iert an ma justise, 4280 Donc fera ele mon talant. Voire, mes trop vanra a lant, Tant sui desirranz que je l’aie.’ (4263–83) (‘Alas! Death, how you have sat in wait for me since though so robust I feel so weak. I am weak even though I am not ill, except for the pain that shoots through my heart, which is acute, even fatal. Yet I wish it so and if God is willing, I will die of it. What? Is there no other way to die without God’s consent? Indeed I will, if only He allows me to place this noose around my neck. Thus I think I can force Death’s hand so that it might kill me despite its reluctance. Death, who has only ever desired those who care nothing for it, does not wish to come, but my belt will bring it captive here to me. And when I have it in my power, it will do as I wish. Indeed, but it tarries and I so desire to have it.’)

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Lancelot engages here with the trope of dying for love, but seems aware that his own body’s experience of love as a fatal illness is somehow inadequate. The pain in his heart should be fatal (mortex, 4267), indeed he wishes it to be so (4268), but it isn’t actually killing him. He is not capable of dying spontaneously of grief and therefore needs to seek another means of dying. Whereas the middle of Guenevere’s monologue is marked by a rhetorical question to which the answer is ‘no’, the middle of Lancelot’s monologue is marked by a rhetorical question to which he answers ‘yes’ (4272). Yes, he will die, whatever God wants. If the repeated evocation of God’s will implies an awareness of suicide as a mortal sin, Lancelot gets round this by locking himself into a battle of wills with Death personified, but there is a contradiction in his attempt to abdicate responsibility for his own putative suicide. In order for death to do its will with him, he must first control death (destraindre, trestote prise, an ma justise 4274 and 4279–80). Whereas in many troubadour lyrics, and in most versions of the Tristan story, death would appear to be the unconscious object of desire, here death is chosen all too knowingly. When Lancelot concludes his monologue ‘Tant sui desirranz que je l’aie’, Chrétien seems to be inviting his readers to consider Lancelot’s position in the context of a literary commonplace, but discerning readers will be aware of the extent to which he differs from his literary peers by being in fact unable to die for love, however much he wishes for this. This is confirmed in the scene that immediately follows his monologue, which to my mind, verges on the comic.¹⁹ Lancelot is riding along with the knights who have taken him prisoner. He does not attempt to hang himself, but rather tightens his belt around his neck which leads to his fainting. When they pick him up, his companions quickly find the make-shift noose he has put around his neck and cut him loose. As no real pressure has been applied (because he fainted), no lasting harm has been done though he is badly bruised. The other knights then watch him closely so he cannot seek to harm himself again. This is an incompetent suicide attempt, to say the least, and the spectacle of Lancelot falling off his horse recalls other equally comic episodes in the Charrette in which Lancelot has taken or has nearly taken a fall as a result of going into ecstasies thinking about or contemplating the queen.²⁰ In his next monologue, addressed directly to Death personified, Lancelot admits defeat in the face of Death’s greater power (4318–29), claiming to find life as ¹⁹ Pace Toury (1979: 111), who takes Lancelot’s sincerity for granted. ²⁰ Compare 565–70, 753–72, 3669–91.

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deathly as Death (4330–8). As he then goes on to muse at some length on why Guenevere was so unwelcoming and ungracious when he arrived to rescue her, but without returning to the question of his death (4339–96), it would seem that he, like Guenevere, has reconciled himself to life after, and without, his beloved. Immediately after this, news arrives that Guenevere is still alive: she has after all only starved herself for two days. The news is a great comfort to Lancelot, and once again the familiar rhyme-pair is used in a manner that contrasts with its use in Thomas’ Tristan, in that the lovers take comfort in life rather than death: ‘Et antre tant noveles vienent | Que la reïne n’est pas morte. | Tantost Lanceloz se conforte’ (4400–2: ‘In the meantime the news arrives that the queen is not dead. Lancelot at once takes comfort in this’). Lancelot rushes to find the queen, who eagerly awaits him: Et molt est la reïne tart Que sa joie et ses amis veingne, N’a mes talant que ele ne teigne Atahine de nule chose. Mes novele qui ne repose, Einz cort toz jorz qu’ele ne fine, De rechief vient a la reïne Que Lanceloz ocis se fust Por li, se feire li leüst. Ele an est liee, et sel croit bien, Mes nel volsist por nule rien, Que trop li fust mesavenu. (4424–35) (The queen is so impatient for her lover and her joy to return, she no longer wishes to quarrel with him about anything. But news travels quickly and the queen quickly heard that Lancelot would have committed suicide for her sake, if he had been allowed. She is very happy about this and believes it, but would not for all the world have wished such misfortune to befall him.)

The accumulation of imperfect subjunctives to indicate what might have been underlines the extent to which Guenevere and Lancelot have their cake and eat it. The queen is happy in the knowledge that Lancelot would have committed suicide if he had been allowed (which he was not), though she would under no circumstances have wished him to suffer so (which he did not). The episode allows them to embrace death on a symbolic level, while neatly avoiding actually dying. It gestures discursively towards the sacrificial without enacting any actual sacrifice. Furthermore, the rhetorical dexterity of Guenevere’s monologue, combined with the light humour of Lancelot’s failed suicide attempt, suggests a good deal of

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ironic critical distance on Chrétien’s part, which is intensified if we are, in fact, also being invited to compare the lovers to Tristan and Iseult. What then does the prose text make of this episode? The section of the Prose Lancelot (c.1220s) that is devoted to the cart episode in some respects follows Chrétien’s text closely and arguably refers directly to Chrétien as its source.²¹ If the writer responsible for this section of the Prose Lancelot was working from Chrétien’s romance, this makes any changes of emphasis or narrative detail significant as evidence, not only of an interpretation of Chrétien, but also of an attempt to steer the narrative in a particular direction. When the section of the Prose Lancelot devoted to the cart episode is compared to Le Chevalier de la Charrette, it is apparent that the prose writer has a marked tendency to embellish and expand battle scenes, but to curtail any instances of psychological analysis, such as monologues.²² This passage is no exception, and Guenevere’s monologue— by far the more rhetorically accomplished of the two—disappears altogether. Even though there are numerous instances in the Prose Lancelot of false reports of Lancelot’s death, which sometimes lead to quests to find out the truth, in this case the whole episode is telescoped dramatically, particularly as far as Guenevere is concerned: Et quant la royne le sot, si ot teil deul ke pour .I. poi k’elle ne s’ocioit; mais elle atent encore tant ke plus le sace de voir. Et lors si s’est bien conselliee ke elle ne mangera ja mais, mais plus encore est dolente de chou ke elle li cuide bien avoir dounee la mort pour çou ke elle ne daingna parler a lui, si s’en coupe et blasme et dist ke, puis ke teus chevaliers est mors par li, dont ne doit elle pas vivre apriés lui. Teus est la complainte la royne, si en acouce au lit ne n’ose ke nus voie sa grant dolour. (Lancelot 1999: 198) (And when the queen learned of Lancelot’s death, she was so distraught she almost killed herself; but she waits a little to find out the truth. And then she starts to think to herself that she will never eat again, but she is even more distraught at the thought that she killed him by not deigning to speak to him, heaping guilt and blame upon herself, and she says that since such a knight has died through her fault, then she should not go on living after him. Such is ²¹ See Lancelot (1999: 66): ‘Kex li senescaus fu abatus et navrés pour la royne ke il conduisoit, si com li Contes de la Karete le devise’ (‘Kay the seneschal was beaten and wounded fighting for the queen whom he was escorting, just as the Tale of the Cart relates’). As Bruckner comments (2003: 95), ‘the prose Lancelot literally incorporates Le Chevelier de la Charrette. Fully digested, Chrétien’s text reappears as “Li contes de la Charete”. The reference is a tribute to the fame of Chrétien’s romance, but the loss of authorial connection corroborates the extent to which the episode has lost its separate boundaries within the interlaced space of the prose narrative.’ See also Kennedy (1995b). ²² Bruckner (2003: 98), comments on the prose author’s ‘abbreviation and amplification’ and also notes the transposition of monologues into narrative acts.

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the queen’s lament and she lies down in bed not daring to allow anyone to see her great pain.)

This brief synopsis of her lament in Chrétien cuts out the detail of her deciding it is better to live in torment than die in peace when making amends to a wronged lover, but the pragmatism of Guenevere’s approach to death as an inevitable consequence of love is already evident here, since the account of her train of thoughts is prefaced by the statement that she decides not to commit suicide yet, as she needs first to be completely sure of the truth. As in Chrétien, death is deferred, but this is effected far more summarily, while Guenevere’s ‘let’s wait and see’ approach makes her even less like Iseult than the Guenevere of the Charrette. Lancelot’s suicidal antics also get relatively short shrift: Si se pourpensse en quel maniere il s’ochira, k’il ne soit apierceus, car apriés celi qui vivre le faisoit ne kiert il ja un seul jour vivre, ains le sievra, ja en cel lieu ne sara iestre. Longement a penssé a chou. Et devant son lit gisoient toute nuit .XX. chevalier armé, k’il nel pierdissent, et aveuc çou estoit li huis de la cambre ou il gisoit mout bien fremés. Et quant vint endroit mienuit et il cuida ke tout dormissent, il se lieve, et doi chierge ardoient en la cambre, si i veoit on mout cler; et il les vaut aler estaindre, car en talent avoit k’il se piendist; mais apriés de pourpenssa ke de si vil mort ne moroit il ja, si vient a une des gaites et li cuide mout bielement oster s’espee del fuerre hors, mais cil s’apierçut, si li keurt les mains saisir, mais onkes si ne les tint ke cil ne se fust ferus de l’espee el costé seniestre si ke la pointe froia as costes; et s’un poi fust li cols tournés dedens, mors fust sans recouvrier. Li cris est levés et il sallent, si l’ont loié ne onkes puis de toute la nuit n’ot pooir de soi aidier. Au matin sont levé, si le gardent miex k’il n’avoient fait. Et quant il sont venu a .XV. lieues engleskes priés de Gorhon, s’i viennent nouvielles ke Lanselos est sains et haitiés. Et quant la royne le set, si est tant lie ke plus ne poet et est toute garie, si mangüe et boit, car assés avoit geuné. (Lancelot 1999: 200–2). (He wondered how he might kill himself without being caught, for he does not wish to live a day longer than the one on whom his life depends, rather he will follow her, wherever she may be. He thought for a long time about this. And all night long twenty armed knights were sleeping beside his bed so he could not escape, and what is more the door to the chamber where he lay was closed securely. And towards midnight, when he thought all were sleeping, he gets up and because two candles were burning in the chamber he could see quite clearly; he wants to put them out because he wishes to hang himself; but then he thinks that he does not wish to die such a vile death and he goes to one of the guards and tries to remove his sword from its sheath very stealthily, only the guard notices and quickly seizes his hands, but he does not do so quickly enough to avoid being struck in the left rib cage so that the point of the sword pierces his ribs; if the blow had penetrated just a little further it would undoubtedly have been fatal. But he

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raises the alarm and they all jump up, binding him so that he has no chance of doing anything else for the rest of the night. In the morning, they got up and guard him even more closely than they did before. And when they get to within fifteen English leagues of Gorron, the news arrives that Lancelot is safe and well. And when the queen hears this, she is as happy as can be and completely better. She eats and drinks, for she had fasted enough.)

Lancelot’s chosen method of suicide in the Charrette is specifically deemed too base here, and he fails to kill himself not so much through incompetence, but rather because he thinks of himself—of his own honour—more than he thinks of love. In the Prose Lancelot, this episode is not comic; it concentrates instead on the pragmatic nature of the responses of both protagonists, a point which is further underlined at the end when it is remarked that Guenevere has fasted enough (after just two days). In stripping out the rhetorically complex monologues and concentrating on the practical reasons for the lovers’ actions, while nonetheless acknowledging that both lovers realize they are supposed to die for love under such circumstance, the Prose Lancelot highlights its awareness of the fact that the notion of dying for love is a textual, indeed a literary, construct, an idealized model, a trope. This is all the more striking, given that in this text, characters who die for love abound: most notably, Lancelot’s companion Galehaut in the first part of the Prose Lancelot, and the Damoisele d’Escalot in La Mort le roi Artu, to whom I will return at some length in Chapters 5 and 6, but references to minor characters who die for love are also relatively commonplace.²³ In other words, Lancelot and Guenevere inhabit a world in which it is assumed that dying for love is the right thing to do, which makes it all the more striking that they do not. Indeed, as already noted, when they do die, they are separated from each other, focused on God, prayer and on repentance (Mort 1964: § 202 and pp. 263–6). Of course, it is well-known that the cyclical Prose Lancelot anticipates La Queste del Sant Graal in calling into question—with increasing opprobrium—the adulterous nature of Lancelot and Guenevere’s love (Kennedy 1986: 253–309), and it should come as no surprise therefore that their love is far from idealized. I want to suggest, however, that an important component of this is their cavalier attitude towards dying for love, in some senses their refusal to die, their refusal to be martyrs to love. This in turn points to an understanding of the value of the Tristan ²³ For instance Lancelot (1999: 458), where a damsel falls in love with Lancelot and we are told that later the conte will tell of how she dies because he refuses to reciprocate her love. See also Lancelot (2002: 176 and 356–8), where couples who have died for love are featured.

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story, of its spectacle, as purely symbolic. Lancelot and Guenevere illustrate that the sacrificial discourse of the troubadours, and the Tristan romances should be understood as a symbolic structure, to be imitated symbolically, and not literally. Though a discourse of death, it thereby becomes a means of deferring death and preserving life. Significantly, as we saw in the Introduction and in contrast to Tristan and Iseult, Lancelot and Guenevere’s love is represented using clearly marked, sometimes compromising, religious vocabulary and imagery (for instance Charrette, 4651–3). They thereby are portrayed as imperfect, but they live to tell their tale and eventually, as the symbolic disintegrates, this is not as a result of their actions, but the fault of others whose transgression is far greater: Arthur’s kingdom is destroyed by Gauvain’s relentless vendetta against Lancelot (on which see Pratt 2004: 33–7), and Arthur himself is slain by his secret son, apparently the fruit of unwitting incest, but who alarmingly, perhaps even more shockingly, wishes himself to marry Guenevere (again see Pratt 2004: 32–3). The point here is that Lancelot and Guenevere are in some respects agents of social cohesion and order: they are closely identified with the symbolic order and part of this is their status as model, but flawed, lovers. They constantly evoke the fantasy of dying for love, but do not traverse it, remaining faithful rather to the symbolic, to the mode of renunciation it requires, living subject to the law dictated by the fantasy, but without obeying it to the letter. The imperfect nature of their love ensures that the queen and the king’s favourite knight do not die and can pursue their legitimate business.

Cligès The model of fatal love provided by the Tristan story was ubiquitous and ineluctable in the Middle Ages, whether the comparison was overt or not. In this last section of this chapter I shall examine an instance where it is broadly agreed that the Tristan story is treated if not comically, certainly ironically: Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligès. This irony is the logical extension of the knowing attitude to love and death found in Lancelot narratives. Chrétien’s critical interest in the Tristan story is well-documented: at the opening of Cligès he claims to have composed a full length Tristan (1994a: line 5 ‘Dou roi Marc et d’Iseut la Blonde’), Cligès itself is widely regarded as an anti-Tristan (Polak 1982: 50–69; Gaunt 2001b: 137–45),

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and finally in one of his few surviving lyrics, ‘D’Amors, qui m’a tolu a moi’, he compares his love to that of Tristan, which is clearly viewed in negative terms: Onques du buvrage ne bui Dont Tristan fu enpoisonnez; Mes plus me fet amer que lui Fins cuers et bone volentez. Bien en doit estre miens li grez, Qu’ainz de riens efforciez n’en fui, Fors que tant que mes euz en crui, Par cui sui en la voie entrez Donc ja n’istrai n’ainc n’en recrui. (28–36; cited from Chrétien de Troyes 1994a: 461) (I never drank from the brew with which Tristan was poisoned; rather my pure heart and good will make me love more than him. I should be highly regarded for this, for I was never forced in this matter, except to the extent that I believed my eyes, which set me off on this path from which I will never deviate and have never left.)

The word enpoisonnez evokes a word often used for the love potion in Tristan stories (poison, ‘potion’, also ‘poison’), and marks Tristan and Iseult’s deadly love as inherently venomous. Chrétien seems to contrast here a positive love grounded in volentez (will) to one resulting from some coercive external factor (efforciez). This lyric seems therefore to extol a love grounded in reason and rational choice and to condemn the kind of irresistible, irrational passion to which Tristan and Iseult are subject.²⁴ Thus, for some scholars, Chrétien is a stalwart critic of everything Tristan and Iseult represent.²⁵ Cligès tells the story of two pairs of lovers: that of naïve Alixandre, heir to the Greek empire, and innocent Soredamors; then that of their far more knowing son Cligès and his equally worldly lady Fenice. The love of Alixandre and Soredamors is portrayed with ample use of the conventional ²⁴ See Zaganelli (1982: 25–62) on the topic of rational choice in Chrétien’s lyrics. Compare the scene in the Charrette where Lancelot is famously torn between Amour and Raison (365–77). If Chrétien’s overall attitude towards Lancelot is critical it is not coincidental that Amour wins. ²⁵ See particularly Frappier (1957: 114–16) and (1959a: 153). But compare Curtis (1989), Freeman (1985) and Grimbert (2001), who offer more subtle interpretations, arguing that Chrétien’s view point is harder to pin down. See also Bruckner (2003: 95), who observes that ‘Chrétien seeks to avert the tragic potential of the Tristan story: his bent is comic’.

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‘love-as-sickness’ metaphor, derived from Ovid. Consider, for instance, Alixandre’s lament: ‘Foux est qui sent enfermeté S’il ne porquiert qu’il ait santé. Et qui ne la cuide trover Por qu’en iroit conseil rover? Si s’en traivailleroit en vain. Je sent le mien mal si grevain Que ja n’en avrai garison Par mecine ne par poison Ne par herbe ne par racine. A chascun mal n’a pas mecine, Li miens est si enracinez Qu’il ne puet estre mecinez. Ne puet? Je cuit que j’ai menti. Des que primes cest mal senti, Se monstrer l’osasse ne dire, Poïsse je parler a mire Qui del tout me poïst aidier.’ (637–53) (‘The man who feels ill is foolish if he does not seek to recover. And if he thinks he cannot recover why should he not ask for help? But this would be in vain. The pain that I feel is so severe that I can never be cured either by medicine or by a potion, by herbal remedies or medicinal plants. There is no medicine for some illnesses and mine is so deeply rooted that it cannot be treated with medicine. Can’t it? I think that I may have lied. From the first moment I felt this illness, I could have asked to speak to a doctor if only I had dared to show it and to speak about it.’)

With characteristic rhetorical dexterity, Chrétien produces adnominatio here on mecine/mecinez and racine/enracinez. This passage seems primarily concerned with verbal gymnastics and a slightly tongue-in-cheek exploration of the ambiguities underpinning the Ovidian metaphors that are deployed, an exploration that gradually seems to work at Alixandre’s expense as he increasingly fails to understand their import. Thus, Soredamors is (conventionally) both the cause of Alixandre’s illness and a cure. However, he then goes on to wonder, with oafish literal-mindedness, why, if he has been struck by Cupid’s arrow in the heart, but through the eye, his eye does not appear to be punctured or otherwise wounded (700)? The Ovidian metaphors here are being treated seriously and humorously at the same time: seriously, because the characters really are in love, and this is the language they use to talk about it; humorously, because they do not quite see the import of what they are saying (see Haidu 1968: 70–2

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and Polak 1982: 42). Moreover, the idea that Alixandre’s illness might be incurable raises the spectre of his death, suggesting that love is a fatal affliction, while at the same time, if Soredamors is the ‘doctor’ who can ‘cure’ Alixandre, this implies she is the source of his salvation. The association of love and death is explored more explicitly and in more detail in the second half of the romance. When Cligès falls in love with Fenice, she is betrothed to his uncle, Alix, who had, in fact, vowed never to marry: Alix had wrongfully seized his brother Alixandre’s throne while he was away in Britain becoming a knight at Arthur’s court, but on his return, Alixandre allowed him to keep the throne provided that he never marry and also that he make Cligès his sole heir. Relations become increasingly complex as Cligès has to fight for Fenice, the woman he loves, on Alix’s behalf, so that his uncle might marry her and thereby (potentially at least) disinherit him. With the scenario of a nephew in love with his uncle’s future wife, discerning medieval readers would have no trouble recognizing a familiar plot: that of the Tristan romances, in which King Mark’s nephew Tristan is sent to Ireland to fetch his uncle’s bride-to-be, but falls in love with her himself as a result of accidentally consuming the magic potion designed to sanction matrimonial love by ensuring that Mark and Iseult fall in love with each other. In Cligès, as is well known (see e.g. Polak 1982: 50–65), the Tristan intertext is reinforced by Fenice twice explicitly declaring that she does not wish to be like Iseult, sharing her body with two men (3099–108 and 5196–9), and then by the use of two magic potions (one to give Alix the illusion that he is sleeping with his wife, whereas actually he is hallucinating; a second to make it appear that Fenice is dead, so that she can then be rescued from the grave and taken to a secret love-nest by Cligès). Fenice’s repudiation of any potential comparison to Iseult focuses less on the quality of their love—which is not even acknowledged—than on its moral and political ramifications (see McCracken 1998: 27–30). Thus, she finds Iseult reprehensible for sharing her body between two men when she addresses her nurse Thessala, beseeching her for help when she sees that her marriage to Alix is inevitable: ‘Einz vodraie estre desmembree Que de nos .II. fust remembree L’amor d’Iseut et de Tristen, Dont tantes folies dist l’en Que hontes m’est a raconter. Je ne me porroie acorder A la vie qu’Ysez mena.

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Amors en lui trop vilena, Car li cors fu a dos rentiers Et li cuers iere a un entiers. Ensi tote sa vie usa C’onques les dos ne refusa. Ceste amors ne fu pas raisnable, Mais la moie est si veritable Que de mon cors ne de mon cuer N’iert partie faite a nul fuer. Ja voir mes cors n’iert garçoniers, Ja n’i avra .II. parçoniers.’ (3099–116) (‘I would rather be dismembered than that our love be remembered as like that of Tristan and Iseult, about whom so many foolish stories are told I am ashamed to repeat them. I could never agree to the life Iseult led. Love grew too vile in her, for two men had a claim on her body when her heart belonged to one alone. She spent her whole life thus, not able to refuse either man. This love was contrary to reason, but mine is so true that my heart and my body cannot ever be parted. My body will never be prostituted, nor will it ever be shared between two men.’)

The evocation of reason recalls Chrétien’s condemnation of Tristan’s love in ‘D’Amors, qui m’a tolu’, and her language takes an unambiguous high moral tone (folies, hontes, rentiers, garçonniers). Her second main theme is Cligès’s stolen inheritance. She accuses Alix of breaking his word not to marry: ‘Ne cil ne puet fame espouser Sanz sa fiance trespasser, Einz avra, s’en ne li fet tort, Cligés l’empire aprés sa mort. Mais se vos tant saviez d’art Que ja cil n’eüst en moi part Cui je sui donee et plevie, Molt m’avriez en gré servie. Maistre, car i metez entente Que cil sa fiance ne mente Qui au pere Cligés plevi, Si come il meïsme eschevi, Que ja n’avroit fame espousee. Sa fiance sera fausee, Car adés m’esposera il, Mais je n’ai pas Cligés si vil Qu’ainz ne volsisse estre enterree Que par moi perde une denree De l’ennor qui soë doit estre.

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Ja de moi ne puisse enfes nestre Par coi il soit deseritez.’ (3127–47) (‘This man cannot marry without breaking his word, rather, unless he is wronged, Cligès will be emperor after his death. But if you know your craft well enough to ensure that the one to whom I am given and pledged should have no part in me, you would have served me well. Mistress, try to ensure that he is true to his word, which he gave to Cligès’s father, outlining the terms himself so that he might not marry. His word will be broken for now he will marry me, but my regard for Cligès means I would rather be buried than he lose through me any of the land that is rightly his. No child should be borne from me that could lead to his being disinherited.’)

If this second part of Fenice’s speech refers primarily to her own situation, in the context of her attack on Iseult it may also be read as a comment on the situation of Tristan and Iseult. As Peggy McCracken has argued, the unspoken, possibly repressed, preoccupation of medieval narratives concerning adulterous queens is the possibility that the queen may produce offspring of uncertain paternity, thereby calling into question the legitimacy of a monarch’s heir, and thereby his sovereignty. The integrity of the queen’s body thereby becomes coterminous with the integrity of the body politic and the barrenness of adulterous queens in medieval narratives, most notably Iseult and Guenevere, is largely an attempt to offset the severe anxiety their adultery provokes (McCracken 1998: 25–81). In invoking property (ennor) and inheritance (deseritez), Fenice is unusual in explicitly articulating the unspoken anxieties that underscore medieval narratives of adultery, demythologizing their idealizing and wholly unrealistic representation of adultery by focusing on the material and sordid possible consequences. Whereas the religious overtones that often colour the trope of dying for love in troubadour lyric or in eaten heart narratives rarely come to the fore in Tristan romances, in Cligès Chrétien piles on the religious imagery and terminology to such an extent that the effect verges on the parodic. Fenice’s name itself (phoenix), evokes resurrection, so the second magic potion that leads to her feigned death is thus entirely apposite in the context of the narrative. It is ironic, however, that in feigning her death she nearly dies: some doctors from Salerno fetch up just as the court is lamenting her death and recalling the story of how one of Solomon’s wives feigned death in order to escape her husband, and they decide to check whether or not she is really dead. Their tests involve beating her until blood is drawn and pouring molten lead into the palms of her hands. This torture is in many respects reminiscent of that inflicted on female martyrs in medieval

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saints’ lives.²⁶ It comes, then, as no surprise that it is twice described as martyre (5945 and 5976). Religious overtones here are intensified by the description of the elaborate tomb that Cligès has had constructed for her: Et Johan qui l’avoit ja fait[e] Dit qu’il en a apareillie Un[e] molt bel[e] et bien tallie, Mais unques n’ot entencion Qu’il i meïst se cors sainz non Quant il la comença a faire. ‘Or soit en leu de seintuare L’empereriz dedenz enclose, Qu’el est, ce croi, molt sainte chose.’ (6008–16) (And John, who had already made [the tomb) declared that he had prepared it well, that it was sumptuous and well-crafted, since he had never—since beginning the task—had any intention of putting anything other than a holy body in it. ‘Now the Empress will be enclosed as if she were in a sanctuary, for she is, I think, a very holy creature.’)

There is a telling disparity here between the way Fenice is described as a martyr and as ‘a holy creature’ fit to be placed in a ‘sanctuary’, and the situation in which she finds herself, which is the result of her desire to deceive her husband in order to live with another man. As Sarah Kay has argued (2001: 251–2), this scene is poised between the sublime and the hilarious. The situation is not of course without moral equivocation, in that Alix should never have sought to marry her in the first place. But the fact remains that in seeking to avoid being like Iseult in one respect (being shared by two men), she becomes just like her in others (she deceives her husband and becomes a past mistress at deception). Furthermore, whereas Tristan and Iseult had metaphorically inhabited a space ‘between two deaths’ once they had drunk the potion, leading to their at times becoming social outcasts, the space Fenice now inhabits is in some respects more literally ‘between two deaths’ (Kay 2001: 251–2). But the value of her symbolic death is clearly undermined through humour and intertextual play. At this point Cligès believes Fenice to be dead as a result of the doctors’ ministrations. His lament is heavily redolent of Tristan romances: ‘Ha, Morz! fait il, com iés vilainne, Quant tu esparnes et repites ²⁶ See Haidu (1968: 92–7), Kay (2001: 241–55), and Wogan-Browne (1986: 324).

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Les vils choses et les despites! 6160 Celes laiz tu durer et vivre. Morz, es tu forsenee o ivre, Qui m’amie as morte sanz moi? Ce est merveille que je voi, M’amie est morte et je sui vis. 6165 Ha! dolce amie, vostre amis Por coi vit et morte vos voit? Or porroit l’en dire par droit, Quant morte estes en mon servise, Que je vos ai morte et ocise 6170 Amie, donc sui je la mort Qui vos ai morte, n’est ce tort? Que ma vie vos ai tolue, Et s’ai la vostre retenue. Donc n’estoit moie, dolce amie, 6175 Vostre santez et vostre vie, Et dum n’estoit vostre la moie? Car nule rien fors vos n’amoie, Une chose estions andui, Or ai je fait ce que je dui! 6180 Que vostre ame gart en mon cors, Et la moie est del vostre fors, Et l’une a l’autre, ou qu’ele fust, Compainnie faire deüst, Ne riens nes deüst departir.’ (6158–85) (‘Ah, Death!’, he said. ‘How wicked you are when you spare and encourage vile and unworthy things! You allow them to live and endure. Death, are you mad or drunk to have killed my lover without me? Thus I behold a miracle. My lover is dead and I am alive. Ah, sweet lover! Why is your lover alive when he sees you dead? Now one could rightfully say, since you are dead in my service, that I am death, that I took your life. Is this not so? That I took my life from you and kept yours. Were not, sweet lover, your health and life in fact mine and were not mine yours? Since I loved nothing except you, we were one. Now I have done as I ought in keeping your soul in my body, and mine is no longer in yours. And the one or the other, wherever they may be, should be together and never parted.’)

Whereas Lancelot and Guenevere express regret at being alive when each believes the other to be dead, Cligès expresses incredulity at being alive when he believes Fenice to be dead. The idea of her dying without him is nothing short of a diabolic miracle (merveille, 6164), and one he has trouble believing (6165–7). He wonders rhetorically whether he himself is unwittingly Death incarnate, so befuddled is he in his grief. The reason

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for his incredulity is clear: as Fenice’s health and life were coterminous with his (6175–7), as they were in fact one being (‘Une chose estions andui’, 6179), one soul (6181–2), and inseparable (6184–5), how can one be dead without the other? Thus, despite Fenice’s attempts to distinguish herself and Cligès from Tristan and Iseult, it turns out that in this most fundamental respect, they are just like them. However, Fenice is not dead. She revives to console Cligès, and they then live for a while in an artfully constructed tower he has had built to house them after her false death, to which they soon add an idyllic enclosed garden so that Fenice might enjoy the benefits of fresh air. Whereas the tower itself may resemble the elaborate memorial tombs constructed in the roman antiques (see Kay 2001: 250), again possibly giving hints of martyrdom, the lovers’ sojourns in the enclosed garden are possibly reminiscent of Tristan and Iseult’s life in the forest, as portrayed by Thomas (see Polak 1982: 66). They are eventually discovered and flee to King Arthur, who is poised to help Cligès regain his father’s crown when Alix conveniently dies, leaving Cligès and Fenice to become king and queen. In an epilogue that is generally recognized as tongue-incheek, both for its brevity and its apparent lack of pertinence, given the complexity of the preceding narrative, we are told that the point of the tale is to explain why the empresses of Constantinople are kept so carefully guarded. Never again will the emperors of Constantinople trust their wives! Much conspires to make Cligès perhaps Chrétien’s most overtly comic romance: structurally, the touchingly ridiculous Alixandre and Soredamors are contrasted to the more worldly Fenice and Cligès; the results of the magic potion that make Alix believe he is having sex with Fenice as she lies chastely beside him are described in tones reminiscent of high farce; Fenice nearly being killed as she feigns death smacks of ironic reversal, as do her clearly thwarted attempts to be as unlike Tristan and Iseult as possible; finally, the light-hearted tone of the ending preempts and pokes fun in advance at any misguided attempts to give this text too moral a reading. Given the two instances in which Fenice explicitly repudiates Tristan and Iseult as model lovers, the overriding target of much of this humour is of course the Tristan story, but Chrétien’s position is complex and ambiguous, not one of straightforward condemnation, particularly since any condemnation of Tristan and Iseult is voiced through the intermediary of his characters.²⁷ Like Lancelot and Guenevere, Cligès and Fenice ²⁷ A point well made by Curtis (1989: 299–300) and Grimbert (2001: 102–3).

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use the rhetoric of love and death, but in fact seem unwilling to die. Thus, they are in some senses implicitly criticized less for not being like Tristan and Iseult than for not being like them enough. Theirs is a partial sacrifice only, a simulacrum of the sacrifice that Tristan and Iseult make, a symbolic sacrifice. And to the extent that this is acknowledged, their knowing love is treated critically, almost comically. The deployment of religious imagery and vocabulary no doubt contributes to this in Cligès, as it does in the Chevalier de la Charrette. The premise of the Tristan story is that true love is death; in both the Charrette and Cligès, Chrétien invokes and engages with this premise. That this engagement is critical is beyond question, but critical of whom and of what? Is his irony directed at Tristan and Iseult, or instead at his own characters’ failure to live the ideal love and ethical death of Tristan and Iseult? After all, in ‘D’Amors qui m’a tolu a moi’, he passes no comment on the fatality of Tristan’s love, he repudiates rather the motif of the potion, claiming himself to have embraced love (and therefore death?) willingly. The texts examined in this chapter show a sophisticated awareness of the symbolic value of dying for love, of the difference between a discourse of sacrificial desire (grounded in renunciation) and actual sacrifice (which gestures towards jouissance). Some Tristan romances embrace the fantasy by showing how the eponymous lovers traverse it, but they nonetheless hold the ideal up as difficult to attain, with the path toward jouissance barred to all but the chosen few. Other texts are more sceptical, showing through irony and comedy that the fantasy of dying for love is just that, a fantasy.

5 Talking the Talk / Walking the Walk: Gendering Death The preceding analyses have deliberately concentrated for the most part on the perspective of male characters and male writers, even if in Chapters 3 and 4, I noted in passing some differences in perspective between male and female characters. The purpose of this chapter is to ask whether dying for love in medieval literature is in fact a gendered phenomenon. When lovers die for love in medieval narratives, do men and women die differently and to different effect? If lovers’ deaths result from a desire for a totally symbiotic union, as I argued was the case in for instance the Castelain de Couci and the Tristan romances, to what extent is this realized, and is it realized differently for male and female characters? In other words, is difference—and notably sexual difference—really effaced by a shared death, as might for instance be suggested by the central simile of Chevrefoil, in which the two plants become so entwined they are indistinguishable? Finally, it is a commonplace of feminist criticism that most women characters in courtly narratives are mere foils, objects that enable men to negotiate their relation to each other, and, as I argued in Chapter 2, it often seems that courtly literature imposes an ethical system upon women, largely to the advantage of men: is the death of a woman character for love primarily of symbolic value to her lover (or to his memory), or does something of her death escape recuperation to a masculine symbolic and remain inalienably hers? The main focus of this chapter will be two iconic scenes in Old French literature, both of which involve the contemplation of the body of a woman who has died for love (or who is believed to have died for love): the arrival of the Damoisele d’Escalot’s corpse at Camelot in its funerary The portion of this Chapter on Jaufre Rudel’s vida started life as a paper delivered at the Society for French Studies 2003 conference in Sheffield. I should like to thank those present for their questions and observations.

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boat in La Mort le roi Artu, and the placing of Guilliadun’s apparently dead (but in fact undead) body on the altar of a chapel in Marie de France’s Eliduc. Before I discuss these texts, however, I should like briefly to review some of the narrative texts I have examined with a view to seeing if it is possible to establish any patterns in relation to dying for love and gender. The chapter will conclude with consideration of women who, in one way or another, do not fit in with these patterns.

Talking the Talk / Walking the Walk Any of the narrative texts I have examined in which lovers die for love could serve as a starting point for a consideration of gender, but for convenience I will begin with the Chastelaine de Vergy because the brevity of the text makes the love/death configuration so paradigmatic. Let us first compare the description of the deaths of the Chastelaine and her knight. The Chastelaine dies immediately after her long final monologue: Atant se test la chastelainne, fors que ele dit en soupirant: ‘Douz amis a Dieu vous commant!’ A ce mot de ses braz s’estraint, li cuers li faut, li vis li taint, angoisseusement s’est pasmee, e gist pale et descoulouree en mi le lit, morte sanz vie. (835–42) (On this the Chastelaine falls silent except to say with a sigh: ‘Sweet lover, I commend you to God!’ When she has said this, with her arms clasped around her, her heart fails her and her face drains of colour; she has passed out from her anguish and lies, pale and wan, in the middle of the bed, dead and lifeless.)

As we saw in Chapter 3, in her final monologue the Chastelaine construes death as a gift from God and gives herself up to death as a douceur she welcomes (831). For Jean-Charles Payen (1973a: 228), this monologue constitutes ‘la vraie signification du roman’ (‘the true significance of the romance’). While I would not share Payen’s confidence in locating ‘the true significance’ of the text, the monologue is nonetheless crucial to the text’s ethical agenda and puts the Chastelaine’s death at the heart of this. When she comes to die, this apparently involves no act of will on her part, nor on the part of another. She neither kills herself, nor is killed by another. Her death, rather, seems to be the result of a spontaneous, uncontrollable spasm of grief. It is involuntary to the extent that it seems

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to involve no physiological cause and no conscious agency on her part. Her sacrificial desire simply overwhelms her. Her lover’s death, on the other hand, is quite different. Initially, when he discovers her body, he fails to realize she is dead: Cil maintenant l’acole et bese, mes la bouche a trouvee froide, 870 et partout le cors pale et roide, et au samblant que li cors moutre, voit bien qu’ele est morte tretoute. Tantost comme esbahiz s’escrie: ‘Qui est[t] ce, Diex! est morte m’amie?’ 875 Et la pucelle sailli sus, qui au piez du lit gisoit jus, et dit: ‘Sire, ce croi de bien que ele est morte, que autre rien ne demanda puis que vint ci, 880 por le courrouz de son ami, dont ma dame la taria, et d’un chiennet la ranpona, dont li courrouz li vint mortiex.’ Et quant cil entent les mos tiex 885 que ce qu’i dist au duc l’a morte, sanz mesure se desconforte, et dit: ‘Ha las! ma douce amor, la plus cortoise, la meillor qui ainc fust, et la plus loiaus, 890 comme trichierres desloiaus vous ai morte; si fust droiture, que seur moi tournast l’aventure, si que vous n’en eüssiez mal; mes le cuer aviez si loial, 895 que seur vous l’aviez avant prise, mes je ferai de moi joustise pour traïson que j’ai feite,’ Une espee a du fuerre traite, qui ert pendue a un espuer, 900 et s’en feri parmi le cuer. Sanz plus parler et sanz plus moz, cheoir se lest lez l’autre cors, tant a sainnié que il est mors. (869–904) (He now embraces and kisses her, but her mouth was cold, her body entirely pale and rigid, and from the look of her body, he realizes she is stone dead. Astonished, he cries out: ‘God, what is this? Is my lover dead?’ And the maiden, who was lying

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at the foot of the bed, jumps up, and says: ‘Sire, I indeed think she is dead, for she longed for nothing else since coming in here, because of the sorrow she felt on account of her lover, since my lady had teased her about him and mocked her because of a little dog, all of which induced a sorrow that proved fatal.’ And when he hears this, realizing that it was what he had said to the Duke that killed her, his own misery knows no bounds, and he says: ‘Alas, my sweet love, the most courtly and best woman who ever lived, and the most loyal, I have killed you as if you were a disloyal cheat; it would have been more just if this had befallen me and you had not had to suffer; but your heart is so loyal that you took it all upon yourself, but I will administer justice to myself for my treachery.’ He draws a sword from the scabbard hanging from the wood panelling and strikes himself through the heart. Without speaking or saying another word, he lets himself fall beside the other body, and he has bled so much that he is dead.)

There is no symbiotic union through death here. On the contrary, in the first instance the knight does not even realize the Chastelaine is dead, and when he does he clearly articulates a stark contrast between her innocence and his guilt, a point which is underlined by the repeated assertion of her loyalty (890, 895), and the opposition of loiaus and desloiaus at the rhyme in lines 890–1. By implication, the Chastelaine’s loyalty is thereby contrasted to the knight’s disloyalty, her fidelity to his betrayal. As if to underline this contrast, the knight does not seem able to give himself up spontaneously to death as his lover had done. On the contrary, his death requires both agency and an overt appeal to the symbolic order of justice: ‘mes je ferai de moi justise’. Subsequently, the two lovers’ corpses are lumped together physically and linguistically, spoken about as if they had died together. They are ‘les deus amanz qui morz gisoient’ (935: ‘the two lovers who lay dead’), and they are buried together in the same sarcophagus. But their deaths are not analogous. Whereas the Chastelaine is overcome by emotions over which she has no control, a courrouz mortiex, the knight dies at his own hand. What we see here is typical. On the whole, the characters in medieval narratives who die for love without the intervention of human agency are women; men are said to die for love, and in some cases are specifically portrayed as martyrs to love, but generally, some thing or someone kills them. Thus, the Castelain de Couci is killed by a poisoned Saracen arrow, Guillem de Cabestanh in the vidas and razos is murdered by Raimon de Castel Roussillon, and Tristan, like the Castelain, dies after being wounded by a poisoned weapon. On the other hand, the Dame de Fayel, like the Chastelaine, dies from grief: Tant demainne anguisseus martire Dou duel et dou meskief qu’elle a, Que li mors si fort l’anguissa

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Et le mist a si grand maiskief Que li oel li tournent el kief; Car ja estoit de morir priés. Ne demora gaires apriés, Qu’elle pria a Dieu mierchi, Et l’ame del corps se parti. Sans vie demora li corps. Or li soit Dieus misericors! (8154–64) (She suffers such anguished martyrdom from the pain and sorrow she feels, that as a result death so beset her and tormented her that her eyes were rolling around, for she was close to death. She hardly lingered further, begging God for mercy, and her soul left her body. Her body remained lifeless. May God have mercy!)

As with the Chastelaine, the Dame de Fayel dies spontaneously from an urge that seems to emerge uncontrollably from the unconscious. Indeed, her own agency here is effaced as li mors is portrayed as a grammatical subject acting upon her. Her own actions are restricted to praying to God for mercy. The Chastelaine’s death from courrouz mortel and the Dame de Fayel’s from grief is paralleled by Iseult’s death in Thomas from dolur and tendrur: Baise li la buche e la face e molt estreit a li l’enbrace, cors a cors, buche a buche estent, sun espirit a itant rent, e murt dejuste lui issi pur la dolur de sun ami. Tristrant murut pur sun desir, Ysolt, qu’a tens n’i pout venir, Tristrant murut per sue amur, e la bele Ysolt par tendrur. (3264–74) (She kisses his mouth and face, holding him very close, lying with their bodies and mouths together; at that moment her soul leaves her and she dies thus beside him because of the sorrow she felt for her lover. Tristan died because of his desire, Iseult because she could not get there in time. Tristan died for his love, and fair Iseult from tenderness.)

On one level, it is obvious that Tristan dies on account of love. But the repeated assertion that ‘Tristrant murut pur sun desir | . . . per sue amur’ (3271 and 3273), whereas Iseult dies ‘pur la dolur’ and ‘par tendrur’, glosses over the fact that Tristan actually dies of a wound, whereas Iseult dies from no other cause than her love for Tristan.

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In each of the instances disussed here a female character dies spontaneously, whereas the man is killed. There are exceptions to this general trend in that there are some notable male figures who die for love in romance narratives, and I shall examine these in Chapter 6. There are also some women who conspicuously fail to die on cue; I shall examine some of these characters in the last section of this chapter. Before proceeding to the episode in La Mort le roi Artu in which the Damoisele d’Esclalot— possibly the best known medieval woman character after Iseult to die for love—and Guilliadun’s putative death in Eliduc, I would first like to pause for a moment to reflect upon the ethical implications of the gendered pattern I am suggesting. In Chapters 1 and 3, I invoked Jacques Derrida’s work on ethics and the gift. To recap briefly, Derrida is concerned by the ethical implications of the gift always being implicated in an economics of exchange: if the gift is in fact a transaction made in the hope of receiving something in return, then it is far from altruistic, and is rather more like an investment, made— whether knowingly or unconsciously—in the hope of some material or more abstract profit. For Derrida, the truly ethical gift, would need to be aneconomic. And as the return may be symbolic as much as material, the terms ‘economic’ and ‘aneconomic’ need to be understood broadly, as encompassing not just a material economy, but also the economy of the symbolic order. Thus, for instance, the troubadours I examined in Chapters 1 and 2, or the Castelain de Couci, may stage their deaths discursively through their lyrics, or even die within the narrative fiction in the case of the Castelain, but if the result is a stake in the symbolic order in the form of abiding poetic fame, their deaths are hardly aneconomic. The ethical gift, for Derrida, must not only be given en secret, ‘secretly’, but also au secret, which means something like ‘under an oath of secrecy’, an oath which even paradoxically extends to the sacrificial subject.¹ This is because, as noted in my discussion of the Chastelaine in Chapter 3, once knowledge of the supposed ethical act goes into circulation, it partakes of an economy of exchange, and its ethical value is thereby called into question. The female characters under discussion here all utter highly significant and poignant last words. But in addition to their dying spontaneously (one might say of an unconscious wish), it is often specifically remarked upon that they fall silent: ‘Atant se taise la chastelainne’ (Chastelaine: 835) and ‘Grant piece fu que ne parla’ (Castelain: 8150). As these women die, ¹ For the importance of sacrifice au secret, see Derrida (1992: 60).

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they fade from the symbolic order into silence, and this parallels the other women in ‘eaten heart’ stories (for instance, in the vidas and razos, and in Boccaccio) who fall out of windows, as it were, into an abyss. This contrasts in two important ways with the male characters, whose deaths nearly all result from a violent act and who neither fall silent, nor into oblivion. Even Tristan, it should be remembered, is a skilled poet and musician, whose fictional lyric compositions form an important part of his narrative, recording his love for posterity.² I am fleshing out here a suggestion I made in Chapter 3 in relation to the Chastelaine and the Dame de Fayel. According to Derrida’s model of ethics, the women’s deaths are more ethical than the men’s precisely because they die for love and nothing else, because their deaths, even when apparently chosen, result completely from involuntary responses to uncontrollable emotions, and because the gesture of dying is only implicated in the symbolic to the extent that some one else narrates it. Men may talk incessantly of dying for love in their poetry and in their speeches in narrative texts, but usually they do not actually die for love. Women do sometimes talk about dying for love (though they do so a lot less), but when the chips are down, die they do. Men talk the talk; women walk the walk.

Over Her Dead Body Elizabeth Bronfen has charted modern Western European culture’s enduring fascination—in texts and visual representations—with the figure of the beautiful dead woman, often lamented by a man whose own investment in the scene warrants scrutiny from feminist and psychoanalytic perspectives (1992). What does the aestheticized dead woman represent, and for whom? As Bronfen puts it: ‘Is it the desire for the death of the other, or for a dead other? Is the death of the beloved, or the dead beloved, a substitute for one’s death? Or/and is the stake in fact the universal truth of death as it surpasses love, gender, sexuality’ (62). But, as she goes on to argue, if the aestheticized corpse represents universal death, it is paradoxical that the enduring image is usually that of a dead woman (64) and that the mourner who is often depicted with her is often a man. It is also important to remember, even when a woman has staged and offered an interpretation of her own death, as is the case with one of the medieval examples I will examine, that the highly aestheticized corpse of a woman ² This is particularly true of texts such as Chevrefoil and the Tristan en prose.

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within certain cultural contexts (such as courtly narrative) is primarily a bearer of meaning for others, usually other men. The dead woman is, as Bronfen suggests (1992: 212), the surviving man’s symptom, a crucial marker of a lack or crisis in him. Indeed, the surviving man invariably speaks over the dead woman’s body, thereby transforming her into ‘a signifier with an incessantly receding, ungraspable signified, always pointing back self-referentially to other signifiers’ (Bronfen 1992: 54). But is the woman’s death simply a signifier in a male symbolic? Is there anything of a woman’s death, when she has died for love and become an icon to contemplate, that remains irreducibly hers? In the following analyses, I propose to look at both sides of this question, showing how a woman’s death may both bolster, yet escape, the masculine symbolic. My two examples are possibly the two most memorable instances of the contemplation of dead women in medieval literature, the scene in which Eliduc weeps over his apparently dead beloved, Guilliadun, and the scene in La Mort le roi Artu in which the Damoisele d’Escalot is borne in an otherworldly ship to Camelot to be gazed upon, then discussed by Arthur and Gauvain. I refer to these episodes as ‘scenes’ advisedly because they focus on the visual contemplation of a dead woman’s body, and it is no accident that the arrival of the Damoiselle’s funerary ship is frequently illustrated. When Guilliadun falls in love with Eliduc, he is, unbeknown to her, already married to the near homophonous Guildeluec.³ Having fallen out of favour with his lord as the result of unfair calumny, Eliduc has departed into self-imposed exile on the other side of the channel, where he enters the service of a ‘very powerful man’ (Marie de France 1944: Eliduc, 92), a king whose only heir is his daughter. Eliduc’s prowess in local wars quickly makes him invaluable to his new lord, whose daughter is initially attracted to him on the basis of what is said about him (273–4), and then falls in love with him once she has engineered a meeting (304–5).⁴ This love is soon mutual, with even the king encouraging his daughter to ‘honour’ Eliduc (495), but Eliduc is tortured by self-doubt because he has promised he will remain loyal to his wife. At this point, he is summoned home by his first lord, who has realized how wrong he had ³ On the homophony of the women’s names, the doubling effect this creates, and the possible significance of Eliduc’s own name, see esp. Mikhaïlova (1996: 243–4), but also Bloch (2003: 87–8), Dragonetti (1986: 119–20) and Huchet (1981: 423–4). As Mikhaïlova and others note, the doubling and the theme of the man with two wives recall another of Marie’s lais, Le Fresne. ⁴ On the displacement of an initial plot concerning warfare by a love plot, see in particular Prior (1998) and Sienaert (1978: 160–1).

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been to distance a loyal vassal. Eliduc resolves to tell Guilliadun the truth (615–16), but cannot bring himself to do so when he sees how miserable this will make him, falling back instead on conventional declarations, reminiscent of Tristan narratives, concerning the fatal nature of his love:⁵ ‘Pur Deu’, fet il, ‘ma duce amie, Sufrez un poi ke je vus die: Vus estes ma vie e ma mort, En vus est [tres]tut mun confort.’ (669–72) (‘My God,’ he said, ‘my sweet lover, let me speak to you just a little: You are my life and my death, my only comfort is in you.’)

He leaves, but promises to return. After a happy reunion with his original lord and virtuous wife (whose loyalty has been unimpeachable), he realizes he cannot live without Guilliadun, so without telling his wife the truth, he returns to England for what is best described as a consensual abduction, in the sense that she clearly is willing to leave with Eliduc. When their ship is caught in a mighty storm, one of the sailors accuses Eliduc of causing their bad luck by abducting Guilliadun when he already has a ‘femme leale espuse’ (835). Eliduc strikes his accuser with an oar and casts him into the sea to drown as a kind of sacrificial victim;⁶ Guilliadun, on hearing Eliduc is already married, falls into so dead a faint that all believe her to be dead. On landing safely, Eliduc has Guilliadun’s body placed on the altar of a local church: Il ad fet aporter ses dras, Un lit li funt ignelepas; La meschine desus cuchierent E cum pur morte la laissierent. Mes quant ceo vient al departir, Dunc quida il de doel murir. Les oilz li baisë e la face. ‘Bele’, fet il, ‘ja Deu ne place Que jamés puisse armes porter Ne al secle vivre ne durer! Bele amie, mar me veïstes! Duce chere, mar me siwistes! Bele, ja fuissiez vus reïne, ⁵ For Huchet, many of Marie’s lais, but particularly Eliduc, recall ‘la donnée tristanesque’ (1981: 412–13 and 423–4). ⁶ On the sacrificial connotations of the episode on board ship, see Fitz (1974), but compare Nelson (1981: 38–41) and North (1988: 126–7), who take issue with him.

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Ne fust l’amur leale e fine Dunt vus m’amastes lëaument. Mut ai pur vus mun quor dolent. Le jur que jeo vus enfuirai Ordre de moigne recevrai; Sur vostre tumbe chescun jur Ferai refreindre ma dolur.’ Atant s’en part de la pucele, Si ferme l’us de la chapele. (931–52) (He had fabrics brought and there they at once make a bed. They lay the maiden on it and left her for dead. But when the time came to leave, he thought he would die of sorrow. He kissed her eyes and face. ‘Fair one,’ he said, ‘may it please God never to allow me to bear arms again, nor last any longer nor live in this world! Fair lover, it was a sorry day that you first saw me! Sweet one, it was a sorry day when you followed me! Fair one, you would have been queen, were it not for the pure and loyal love you had for me. My heart is full of sorrow on your account. The day I bury you, I will enter holy orders; then on your tomb, every day, I will lament my sorrow.’ On this he leaves the maiden, shutting the door of the chapel.)

The paradigm that interests Bronfen could not be clearer. If we as readers know Guilliadun is not dead, this only makes it all the more striking that Eliduc arranges her body for maximum aesthetic and emotional impact on an altar. He then addresses her, using her body as a sign for his new identity as bereaved knight. Her body is the sign of his anticipated lack— he will no longer bear arms—and above all of his pain (946–50), which he promises, like a lamenting troubadour, to ‘faire refreindre’ eternally. On one level, he is out of his mind with grief; on another, her body is the catalyst for his becoming a troubadour of pure sorrow. He goes back to his wife, still withholding the truth, but returning frequently to lament and weep over Guilliadun, to contemplate her body, which miraculously (971) remains ‘blanche e vermeille’ (972: ‘white and rosy’), without losing any colour (973), only growing a little pale (974). Despite the fact that we know she is not dead and that this is again underlined by the narrator, who reminds us that she ‘en la paumeisun’ (969: ‘in a faint’), the scene clearly has religious, even hagiographic overtones, given the body’s apparently miraculous reluctance to decompose, its placement on an altar, and Eliduc’s constant return to it, as to a shrine. Let us, appropriately enough, leave Guilliadun for a moment, with Eliduc weeping over her body, and consider the Damoisele d’Escalot. The circumstances leading to the contemplation of her dead body are different. She has fallen in love with Lancelot while he has been staying at her father’s house in order to fight in a tournament at Camelot incognito.

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The Damoisele’s story is told in five relatively brief episodes, or as Jean Frappier puts it (1961: 267–73), there are five ‘acts’ in her tragedy. First, she uses the device of the don contraignant to have Lancelot wear her sleeve at the tournament (which means that everyone at court, including Guenevere, for a while believes Lancelot is in love with her);⁷ secondly, she rejects Gauvain’s advances because she is in love with Lancelot; thirdly, she nurses Lancelot when he is seriously wounded; fourthly, Lancelot rejects her because he loves Guenevere; finally, her body arrives at Camelot, borne in a sumptuous boat, with a letter in which she tells her story, declaring ‘g’en sui a ma fin venue por amer loiaument’ (Mort 1964: § 71, 23–4: ‘I have come to my end because I loved loyally’). The moment the Damoisele realizes Lancelot does not love her, indeed loves another, her death becomes a certainty: —Certes, sire, fet la damoisele, tant m’en avez dit que ge connois bien une partie de vostre corage; si m’en poise moult que il est einsi; car a ce que vos m’en avez ore dit et apris a une seule parole me feroiz vos procheinnement morir; et se vos le m’eüssiez dit un poi plus couvertement, vos m’eüssiez mis mon cuer en une langor replenie de toutes bones esperances, si que l’esperance me feïst vivre en toute joie et en toute douceur ou cuers amorex porroit demorer. (§ 38, 77–86). (‘Certainly sire’, said the damsel, ‘you have told me enough for me to know a little of what you desire; and it pains me greatly that it should be so; for you have thus told and informed me that you will soon cause me to die; and if you had told me more obliquely, you might have caused my heart to languish full of good hope, so that hope might sustain me in all the joy and sweetness in which a loving heart could reside.’)

From this point on the imminence of her death is reiterated insistently (§ 39, 3–4; § 39, 19–24). The Damoisele’s actual death is not narrated, but it is nonetheless clear that, from this moment, she is between two deaths, that her life is a kind of living death. Thus, whereas in §39, when she is nursing Lancelot, the narrator talks of her death as something that is already being actualized in the narrative present (4: ‘ele en estoit a la mort venue’) and she herself speaks of her death in the future (20: ‘si en morrai’), by contrast, when openly declaring herself to Lancelot the next time she appears, and beseeching him to love her, she talks of herself as already dead, as already in the zone between two deaths, using the immediacy of the perfect tense: ‘ge sui a la mort venue’ (§ 57, 8: ‘I have arrived at the moment of my death’), ‘g’en sui a la mort venue (§ 57, 34). ⁷ On the sleeve as the sign of the Damoisele’s desire, see Burns’ excellent reading (2002: 3–11).

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The Damoisele’s love, which is frustrated and not reciprocated, makes her sublime by placing her in this zone between two deaths. Her living death is in some respects comparable to Guilliadun’s because, like Guilliadun, she dies with no hope of a return, indeed loving a man she knows cannot love her. Whereas Guilliadun is comatose (therefore symbolically dead if still biologically alive), the Damoisele is still conscious and therefore, unlike Guilliadun, is able to plan and stage her own final resting place, exploiting her position in the sublime to maximum effect. The scene with the arrival of her funerary boat at Camelot was to inspire medieval illustrators (see the front cover), Malory to expand her story, and in the modern period Romantic and pre-Raphaelite poets and painters. Its poignancy in the Old French original remains undiminished.⁸ Gauvain at once recognizes her as the damsel who had rejected him because she loved Lancelot, and before they have even read the letter she has written to explain her death, Arthur and Gauvain, both totally transfixed by the spectacle of her dead body (‘Assez la regarderent longuement’, § 70, 44–5: ‘They looked at her for a very long time’) intuit ‘qu’ele soit mort de doel’ (§ 70, 60: ‘that she died of grief ’). Her letter clarifies this: ‘A touz les chevaliers de la Table Reonde mande saluz la damoisele d’Escalot. Je faz a vos touz ma complainte: non mie por ce que vos le me puissiez amender jamés, mes por ce que ge vos connois a la plus preude gent del monde et la plus envoisiee, vos faz ge savoir tout plainement que por loiaument amer sui ge a ma fin venue. Et se vos demandez por cui amour ge ai souferte engoisse de mort, je vos respont que ge sui morte por le plus preudome del monde et por le plus vilain: ce est Lancelos del Lac, qui est li plus vilains que ge sache, car onques ne le soi tant prier o pleurs et o lermes que il volsist de moi avoir merci; si m’en a tant esté au cuer que g’en sui a ma fin venue por amer loiaument.’ (§ 71, 8–23) (‘The Damsel of Escalot sends greeting to all the knights of the Round Table. I make my lament to you all: I tell you openly that I have died because I loved loyally, not because I think that you can ever make amends for this, but because I know you to be the most worthy and amenable people in the world. And if you ask for whose love I have suffered this anguished death, I reply that I died because of the most worthy and yet most vile man in the world: in other words Lancelot of the Lake, who is the vilest man I know, for I was not able to beg him sufficiently with my tears and weeping that he wished to take mercy on me; and this so caused my heart to suffer that I expired through loving loyally.) ⁸ See particularly Greene (2002a: 38) on the Damoisele’s ‘heroic’ end: ‘Unable to have him [Lancelot], she is trying to be him. To imitate his knightly heroism, which leads him to expose his body to suffering and death, she becomes an ascetic heroine, submitting her body to physical and moral mortification.’

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As Virginie Greene has suggested (2002a: 42), the style of her letter is reminiscent of an official document, such as a charter. Though a relatively lowly damsel, she writes as an imperious queen, presenting herself as a martyr to love, and she is celebrated as such by Arthur, who has her buried ‘a grant enneur’ (§ 71, 41–2) in Camelot’s most important church, with words inscribed on the tomb ‘qui tesmoignent la verité de sa mort, si que cil qui vendront aprés nos l’aient en remembrance’ (§ 71, 43–5: ‘which testify to the truth concerning her death, so that those that come after may always remember her on our behalf ’). It is characteristic of this text that the resulting inscription is ambiguous, potentially transmitting to ‘cil qui vendront aprés’ a misreading as much as a reading of the Damoisele’s letter: ‘ici gist la damoisele d’escalot qui por l’amor de lancelot morut’ (§ 73, 8–9: ‘here lies the damsel of escalot who died because of lancelot’s love’). The Damoisele’s letter has stated that she died because she loved loyally, but was not loved in return: Lancelot’s lack of mercy clearly signals this, as well as implying he is ethically wanting. However, the formulation in the inscription ‘por l’amor de Lancelot’ leaves it unclear whether she dies because of her love for him, or because of his love. In other words, the inscription could be taken to mean—unwittingly—that she died because of his love for the queen. More importantly, it is not made clear that their love was not reciprocal, since the formulation ‘Por l’amor de Lancelot’ recalls the kind of language that is used to describe, for instance, the death of lovers such as Tristan and Iseult who die for each other (Thomas 3273: ‘Tristant murut pur sue amur’). This ambiguity is not insignificant given Arthur’s concern that ‘the truth concerning her death’ be preserved for posterity.⁹ In both the instances of contemplation of dead women under discussion here, appearances are therefore deceptive: Guilliadun is not in fact dead and the Damoisele’s death is, potentially at least, misinterpreted for ‘cil qui vendront aprés’. So what is the truth concerning the death of these women? In each case, there is something not quite right about the scene staged over the dead woman’s body, something ‘out of joint’, and this in turn constitutes an invitation to reflect further upon the nature of the scene itself. In each case, the woman’s death, or supposed death, is due to her loving a man whom she regards as inaccessible. Of course, this turns out not quite to be the case with Eliduc, but this only serves further to underline the ⁹ On the accumulation of misreadings in and around the Damoisele d’Escalot episode, see Ingram (2003), and on the ambiguity of inscriptions in the Mort, see Solterer (1985b), esp. 560–1 on the Damoisele.

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asymmetrical nature of Guilliadun’s fatal love. Eliduc does not die of grief when he believes her to be dead, even though he thinks he is on the point of doing so (936). And it is even more striking that it is his long-suffering wife Guildeluec who revives her, not Eliduc himself. Indeed, Guildeluec seems as transfixed by the spectacle of Guilliadun’s lifeless body on the altar as Arthur and Gauvain are by that of the Damoisele d’Escalot’s: Quant en la chapele est entre[e] E vit le lit a la pucele, Que resemblot rose nuvele, Del covertur la descovri E vit le cors tant eschevi, Les braz lungs [e] blanches les meins E les deiz greilles, lungs e pleins, Or seit ele la verité, Pur quei sis sire ad duel mené. Le vadlet avant apelet E la merveille li mustrat. ‘Veiz tu’, fet ele, ‘ceste femme, Que de beuté resemble gemme? Ceo est l’amie mun seignur, Per quei il meine tel dolur. Par fei, jeo ne me merveil mie, Quant si bele femme est perie. Tant par pité, tant par amur, Jamés n’avrai joie nul jur.’ Ele comuncet a plurer E la meschine a regreter. (1010–30) (When she went into the chapel and saw the bed with the maiden, who looked like a rose bud, she uncovered her and saw her slender body, her long arms and white hands, her long, dainty and elegant fingers, she at once realizes the truth about why her husband has been so full of sorrow. She called her manservant to her and showed him the miracle. ‘Do you see’, she said, ‘this woman, whose beauty is so jewel-like? This is my lord’s beloved, the reason why he is so upset. By my faith this is no wonder when such a beautiful woman has perished. My pity and love mean that I will never be joyful again.’ She began to weep and to regret the maiden.)

This scene has elicited less specific critical attention than the dénouement more generally: immediately after it, a weasel runs across the body, is clubbed (apparently to death) by Guildeluec’s manservant, but is revived by another weasel placing a bright red flower in its mouth; Guildeluec then revives Guilliadun using the same method, and immediately offers to

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take the veil so that Eliduc may marry his sweetheart; he founds an opulent convent for her, but after some years of marriage, Guilliadun joins Guildeluec leaving Eliduc to finish his days piously in another religious establishment while his two wives pray for his soul. The dénouement is usually read in terms of the sacrifice Guildeluec apparently makes so that Eliduc might remarry, with most critics assuming hers is a selfless gesture, motivated by caritas, that we should admire,¹⁰ with only some on the contrary troubled by the mystification of Eliduc’s possibly illegal marriage and by his callous and deceptive behaviour with both his wives.¹¹ If we should remember that Eliduc’s qualities as a knight have been consistently praised throughout the text, and that his apparent inconstancy has resulted largely from his attempt to respond in an honourable way to circumstances beyond his control, it is nonetheless clear that Guildeluec’s apparent selflessness at the end of the text stretches credulity to breaking point. It is by no means unusual for a medieval narrative to end abruptly in a manner that may seem slightly implausible, possibly with a view to inviting interpretation,¹² and a definitive, unequivocal interpretation here is not possible. But I would nonetheless like to pause for a moment to consider Guildeluec’s motivation. When explaining herself to Guilliadun, Guildeluec says she went to the chapel in the first place because she wanted to understand why Eliduc was so full of sorrow: ‘Jo sui sa spuse vereiment, Mut ai pur lui mun quor dolent; Pur la dolor quë il menot Saveir voleie u il alot: Aprés lui vienc, si vus trovai.’ (1093–7) (‘I am truly his wife, and my heart is full of sorrow on his account; because of his sorrow I wanted to know where he went: I followed him and found you.’)

These lines are taken as an indication of Guildeluec’s altruism, though in fact, line 1094 is ambivalent: it could mean her heart was full of sorrow out of empathy for Eliduc’s sorrow, or it could mean her heart was full of sorrow because of his behaviour. The only thing that is clear is that she ¹⁰ See e.g. Bruckner (1993: 173–5), Burgess (1987: 149–50), Coolidge (1992: 274–5 and 284–5), Dragonetti (1986: 120), Fitz (1974: 547–8), Glasser (1983), Maddox (2000: 60–1), McCash (1994: 206), Nelson (1981), North (1988: 129–30), Potkay (1994), Robertson (1970), Sienaert (1978: 171–2). ¹¹ See e.g. Kinoshita (1998: 41–50), or more briefly Bloch (1991: 136–7). ¹² A notable example would be Yvain (Chrétien de Troyes 1994b), on which see Hunt (1986: 33–4) and Krueger (1993: 49–51), also Cligès, discussed in Ch. 4.

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wanted to know what had happened. If we return then to the scene in which she sees Guilliadun on the altar, it is striking that she responds to the corpse less out of empathy for Eliduc (i.e. out of compassion for his pain), than out of a direct and personal response on her own account to Guilliadun’s beauty, to the tragedy of her death. She gazes upon Guilliadun’s beauty just as Eliduc had done (‘E vit le lit . . .’, ‘E vit le cors . . .’); she is moved by the spectacle of the exquisite dead body just as he had been. As with the scene in which Eliduc had contemplated Guilliadun, this scene is described as a miracle (merveille, 1020) and when Guildeluec says she will have no joy now that such a beautiful woman is dead, it is her pité, her amur (implicitly for Guilliadun) that move her, not her compassion for Eliduc. She weeps and regrets the death of the maiden on her own account, not out of pity for Eliduc’s grief. I am not suggesting that Guildeluec’s interest in Guilliadun’s corpse is necessarily homo-erotic, though this should not be discounted, and at the very least, the text ‘must be read as a critique of heterosexuality as well of marriage’ (Burgwinkle 2004: 150). But in any event, there is no need to read this scene solely through the prism of an erotic triangle, and the careful, precise wording of the text suggests that Guildeluec responds to Guilliadun’s supposed death directly and on her own behalf, that the dénouement of the text may be less about a woman’s sacrifice for a man and more about a woman’s feelings for, and solidarity with, another woman. Two further elements may support this interpretation: first, the gender of the weasels; secondly, the careful, precise wording of Guildeluec’s own explanation to Guilliadun of what she is about to do once she has revived her. The gender of the weasels may seem a trivial point, but it is nonetheless noteworthy that both animals are female. The weasel is grammatically feminine in Old French (‘Une musteile vint curant’, 1032: ‘a weasel came running’), so it is not surprising that the first creature should be grammatically marked as feminine (‘esteit eissue’, ‘l’aveit ferue’, ‘aveit ocise’, see 1033, 1034, 1052). What is striking however, is that both creatures are then referred to as ‘sa cumpaine’ (1039, 1051). The clubbing of the weasel parallels the earlier clubbing of the sailor, which may suggest once again that a sacrificial victim is required to redeem a desperate situation (see Fitz 1974: 584). The relationship between the two weasels on the one hand suggests a skewed parallel to the relation between Eliduc and Guilliadun, but on the other, to the relation between the two women, indicating that Guildeluec revives Guilliadun not for Eliduc’s sake, but for her own—whichever of the women we take ‘her own’ to refer

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to.¹³ This is also consonant with Guildeluec’s explanation of what she intends to do: ‘Que vives estes grant joie en ai; Ensemble od mei vus en merrai E a vostre ami vus rendrai. Del tut le voil quite clamer, E si ferai mun chef veler.’ Tant l’ad la dame confortee Que ensemble od li l’en ad menee. (1098–1104) (‘I am very happy you are alive; I will take you with me and give you back to your lover. I wish to release him from all his obligations, and I will take the veil.’ The lady comforted her to such an extent that she was able to take her off with her.)

If it is clear that Guildeluec is motivated by a desire to subordinate her actions to another’s wishes, it is less clear who this other is. Is she returning Guilliadun to Eliduc in order to give Eliduc what he wants, or rather in order to give Guilliadun what she assumes she wants? There are other incongruities in this dénouement. For instance, whereas Guilliadun was never apparently actually dead, since it is always stressed that she is ‘en la paumeisun’, the weasel however was apparently killed by the manservant’s blow (1052). If Guilliadun was never actually dead, what are we then to make of her miraculous revival, and, again, why is she revived by another woman, rather than by Eliduc, if he has redeemed himself sufficiently to deserve her hand in marriage? We might also wonder that Eliduc and Guilliadun’s allegedly happy marriage is given such short narrative shrift (1145–8) before she too is whisked away to the religious life with the woman who had resurrected her. The prologue of this lai suggests there is some uncertainty as to what its title should be:¹⁴ D’eles deus ad li lai a nun Guildelüec ha Gualadun. Elidus fu primes nomez, Mes ore est li nuns remüez, ¹³ See Bruckner (1993: 175): ‘The drama of the two weasels appears on cue as a mise en abyme that furnishes not only a model for bringing Guilliadun back to consciousness, but also anticipates the bond we shall see uniting the two women at the end of the tale’. On the weasels, see also Coolidge (1992: 281–5), McCash (1994), Nelson (1981: 41–2). ¹⁴ On which, see esp. de Caluwé (1971: 55), Glasser (1983: 143), McCash (1994: 208–9), Prior (1998: 123–4). As Prior notes (136–7 nn. 5 and 7) the only manuscript for this lai, British Library Harley 978, records the title as ‘Eliduc’.

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Kar des dames est avenu.¹⁵ L’aventure dunt li lais fu, Si cum avient, vus cunterai, La verité vus en dirrai. (21–8) (The lai is named after these two, Guildeluec and Guilliadun. It was called Eliduc at first, but now its title has changed, for it concerns the ladies. I will tell you the adventure on which the lai is based and how it came about, and I will tell you the truth about this.)

This lai is concerned, then, with the truth, but apparently with a truth concerning women. Many critics have stressed that the conclusion of this lai—indeed the conclusion of Marie de France’s collection of Lais— focuses not on a couple living happily ever after in symbiotic unity, but by stressing that Eliduc is ‘l’aventure des ces treis’ (1181: ‘the adventure of these three’), not because they come together in a ménage à trois, but because they are united in a new-found trinitarian spiritual kinship, initiated by Guildeluec’s caritas.¹⁶ It is nonetheless striking that throughout the last few lines of Eliduc, ‘these three’ seem to be constituted by Eliduc on the one hand, and eles/lur, the two women, on the other (1171, 1173, 1174, 1175). In other words, the women have achieved a unity separate from their husband, a unity which is altogether consonant with the idea that the lai ‘concerns the ladies’. Just as there seems to be something ‘out of joint’ with the deployment of the spectacle of the aestheticized dead woman in the lai known (somewhat ironically in the light of its prologue) as Eliduc, so too the Damoisele d’Escalot’s corpse raises problems more than it puts them to rest. As I argued in Chapter 4, there is an implicit but nonetheless specific and pervasive comparison between Lancelot and Guenevere on the one hand, and Tristan and Iseult on the other, running throughout many romances. In the episode in the Chevalier de la Charrette and the parallel episode in the Prose Lancelot in which Lancelot and Guenevere believe each other to be dead, we as readers are invited to speculate on Lancelot and Guenevere’s ¹⁵ Prior (1998: 124) follows other editions and construes these lines differently, ending one sentence with line 24 and taking the subject of ‘est avenu’ to be ‘l’aventure’; however, this would normally require agreement of the past participle. She argues that the lai is displacing an interest in character with an interest in plot (aventure). ¹⁶ See Bruckner (1993: 176–7), Burgess (1987: 149–50), Coolidge (1992: 285), de Caluwé (1971: 76–7), Dragonetti (1986: 119–20), Glasser (1983: 143), Maddox (2000: 62–3), McCash (1999: 38–9), Nelson (1981: 41–2), Potkay (1994: 140–4), Robertson (1970: 175–6), Sienaert (1978: 172–3). Compare Mikhaïlova (1996: 247–53), who sees the christianization of the aventure as superficial and, using a model of the gift derived from Mauss, argues for the importance of donation and gift-giving at the end of the text.

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apparent unwillingness or inability to die for each other as Tristan and Iseult had done. When the Damoisele d’Escalot dies ‘por l’amor de lancelot’, as her epitaph puts it, this serves, in part at least, to highlight the fact that in some respects, the wrong woman has died, for surely if any woman should die for Lancelot, it should be Guenevere? And the effect of this floating corpse/signifier being, in some respects, the wrong one is quite simply cataclysmic: the Damoisele’s revelation in her letter that Lancelot did not love her in return is, by implication, also a revelation that the woman he in fact loves may indeed be Guenevere, in other words confirmation that Agravain’s accusation against the lovers (§ 4) and Morgan’s revelations (§§ 51–2) had been correct. The narrative space devoted to the Damoisele d’Escalot is slight, but her narrative impact is immense.¹⁷ Had she just gone away to die, all might have been well, but she chooses instead to leave a written account of the reasons for her death. This in itself may enhance the image she wishes to create of herself as a martyr to love, recalling as it does, for instance, Alexis’s chartre, which reveals his identity posthumously to his parents in La Vie de Saint Alexis (Alexis 1946: 371–85). But it does mean that her sacrifice is not made au secret; indeed, there is no abyss of speechlessness and silence for her. Her letter stakes her claim in the symbolic (see Solterer 1985b: 560), and the result is catastrophic. What these two scenes indicate is that the spectacle of the dead woman entails a tension. On the one hand, it represents an idealized model of sacrifice, of an admirable selflessness and altruism that is marked as feminine, but a model that is primarily a bearer of meaning for men. On the other, I would suggest these scenes are disruptive and unpalatable for men precisely because they attribute an ethical value to the woman’s act of dying that men, more often than not, seem unable to attain or imitate. Thus, Guilliadun turns out not to be really dead and is revived by another woman rather than her lover; the Damoisele simply creates havoc. In different ways, then, these two iconic corpses do indeed escape male control; they do not fit neatly into a masculine symbolic. If the lament over a beautiful female corpse is a masculine fantasy, as Bronfen (1992) suggests, it is nonetheless one that has certain troubling consequences for men, castrating them as much as it affirms their phallic authority. ¹⁷ Both Greene (2002a) and Ingram (2003) read the Damoisele as an incarnation of destiny or fate. Her death marks the beginning of the end for Arthur’s kingdom and also interestingly, as Ingram notes (130–1), the end of interlace as a narrative technique in the Lancelot-Grail cycle: whereas the five ‘acts’ in the Damoisele’s tragedy are interlaced with other narratives in classic Lancelot-Grail style, once she has died the narrative becomes more linear, drawing inexorably to its apocalyptic conclusion.

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Women Who Refuse to Die However, as we have already seen with Fenice and Guilliadun, some women do not die on cue. Both these instances indicate a degree of ironic distance in relation to the convention of a woman dying as a martyr to love, playing specifically on religious imagery, with Chrétien perhaps implying criticism of a woman’s attempt to manipulate her circumstances by staging a false death, and Marie possibly implying criticism of the expectation that a woman should die when betrayed by the man she loves. Because both instances play on the expectation that a woman will die when her love is thwarted, neither disrupts the paradigm I have sought to establish. But how are we to read instances of women not dying (when the narrative perhaps creates an expectation they should do so) without the helpful critical distance of irony? In the final section of this chapter, I shall examine two figures who exemplify this: Iseult in the Tristan en prose and Jaufre Rudel’s beloved Countess of Tripoli. My argument will concern what Zizek calls the real of sexual difference, which is the term he uses to gloss the Lacanian aphorism ‘il n’y pas de rapport sexuel’ (‘there is no sexual relation’).¹⁸ As Zizek explains, using the example of a TV commercial in which a princess kisses a frog that turns into a prince, only to be kissed by the prince to find herself transformed into a bottle of beer, the fantasies that structure masculine and feminine desire are not commensurate with each other (1997: 74). There is a lack of symmetry and reciprocity, in other words, between the masculine and the feminine; whatever culture (and here, one might think of love lyric and romance fictions in particular) might lead us on one level to believe, they are neither complementary nor compatible with each other. As Sarah Kay succinctly puts it, ‘this absence of co-ordination between “masculine” and “feminine” is what gives rise to “the real of sexual difference” ’ (2003: 75). The real here can be understood in the classic Lacanian formulation of that which resists symbolization absolutely, or alternatively, as the point at which symbolization breaks down. This notion of the real of sexual difference can help explain further why the spectacle of a woman dying for love was at one and the same time appealing and threatening. The way the Tristan en prose treats the lovers’ death differs considerably from the accounts given in Old French and Middle High German verse texts. Whereas in Thomas, Tristan is wounded in the context of his ¹⁸ See Lacan (1999: 21) and Zizek (1999: 273–9).

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fighting on behalf of Tristan le Nain, whose amie has been abducted by the dastardly Estout L’Orgueilleux, in the Tristan en prose it is Mark who administers the fatal blow in a rather banal episode in which he is annoyed to hear that his nephew is once again singing lais to Iseult. Whereas in the earlier verse versions, Mark is constantly torn between love of his wife and love of his nephew, in the Tristan en prose, his hostility to Tristan is consistent, though it often seems to stem from his perception of Tristan as a political, rather than an erotic, threat:¹⁹ Quant li rois March oï et sot que mesire Tristrans se moroit sans doute et ne pooit escaper, plus en est liés qu’il ne fu piecha mais. Ore a joie et leesce, car bien li est avis, se mesire Tristans estoit mors, il ne trouveroit jamais home en Cornuaille qui contre lui s’osast drechier. Ore a il son voloir, quant il set certainement que mesire Tristrans se muert. Il envoie cascun jour savoir conment mesire Tristrans le fait, et on li aporte noveles qui bien li plaisent, car on li dist certainnement qu’il ne puet mais longement vivre. Grant joie a li rois March, onques ne fu si liés de cose qui li avenist. (Tristan en prose 1987–97: ix, § 77, 1–11) (When King Mark heard and knew that sir Tristan was without doubt dying with no hope of recovery, he is happier about this than he has ever been before. Now he is happy and joyful, for he believes truly that if Tristan were to die, there would be no other man in Cornwall who would dare to challenge his authority. Now he has his wish since he knows that sir Tristan is certainly dying. Every day he asks how Tristan is doing, and he is brought news that pleases him greatly, for he is told that he certainly does not have long to live. King Mark is very joyful and has never been so happy about anything that has happened to him before.)

To the extent that Mark subsequently repents of what he has done, it is largely because he is worried about what other people will think (§ 77, 36–42; see Baumgartner 1990: 145–6), but on a final visit to Tristan’s deathbed, he nonetheless agrees to summon Iseult, who longs now only for death: Onques tant ne desira la mort com ele fait ore, et pour ce qu’ele set de verité que mesire Tristrans ne puet escaper et que morir le couvient, vauroit ele morir. Moult li seroit douce la mort, s’ele venoit orendroit. Ele ne prie Dieu d’autre cose ne mais que la mort viengne tost, si que elle muire avec Tristran. (§ 78, 52–7) (She never desired death so much as she does now, and because she knows truly that Sir Tristan cannot escape death and that he must die, she wishes to die. Death would be welcome, if it came now. She prays to God for nothing other than the swift arrival of death so that she might die with Tristan.) ¹⁹ On this point, see Baumgartner (1975: 190–5) and Bertolucci Pizzorusso (2000: 141–5); also Ch. 4 n. 14.

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Whereas in Thomas it is implied that had Iseult arrived earlier, Tristan might have been saved (3257, 3272), in the Tristan en prose, Tristan specifies that Iseult’s arrival cannot help him (§ 79, 5–6), and after a lengthy and eloquent farewell to chevalerie (§ 80, 48–85) he wonders what Iseult will do without him: ‘Ma dame ciere, et quant je muir, que ferés vous? Conment duerrés vous aprés moi? Conment porra ce avenir que Yseut vive sans monsigneur Tristran? Ce sera ausi grant mervelle con del poisson qui vit sans eve et conme del cors qui vit sans ame! Ma ciere dame, que ferés vous, quant je muir? Ne morrés vous avoec moi? Si iront nos ames ensamble. Ha, bele douce amie, que je ai plus amee de moi, faites ce que je vous requier, que nous muirons ensemble!’ (§ 82, 4–13) (‘My dear lady, and when I die, what will you do? How will you live without me? How could it be that Iseult lives without Sir Tristan? This would be as miraculous as a fish living out of water or as a body living without a soul! My dear lady, what will you do when I die? Will you not die with me? Our souls will depart together. Ah, sweet lover, whom I have loved more than myself, do as I ask, and let us die together!’)

It is initially unclear whether ‘Ne morrés vous avoec moi?’, though phrased as a question, has the function of a statement or a question: is Tristan asking Iseult to die with him, or suggesting interrogatively that no other solution is imaginable. Subsequent sentences indicate that this is indeed a request, which in itself marks a clear difference between the verse romances and the Tristan en prose, for in the former (though particularly in Thomas), it was clear from the outset that the lovers would die together, indeed that there was no question of one living without the other. Even in Beroul, where the lovers cling to life, there is no suggestion they will be separated in death. What is remarkable then, about this episode in the Tristan en prose, is that the matter is open to doubt, that it needs discussion, that there is any question of the lovers not dying together. Yet there is a further problem here. Iseult finds that she cannot die at will: ‘Il n’est ore nule cose en cest monde com je amaisse tant conme morir avoec vous et con faire vous compaingnie a ceste mort, ne je ne sai conment ce puisse estre. Se vous le savés, si le dites, et jel ferai erramment. Se pour dolour et angoisse peüst feme morir, je feüsse morte pluiseurs fois, puis que je ving hersoir chaiens, car je ne quit mie que nule dame fust onques tant dolante que je ne soie encor plus. Et fut ore a ma volenté, si m’aïst Diex, je moreüsse orendoit!’ (§ 82, 17–26) (‘There is nothing in this world that I would like more than to die with you and to accompany you in this death, but I do not know how to bring this about. If you know, tell me and I will do what it takes straight away. If a woman could die from

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pain and anguish, I would have died several time since I came here yesterday evening, for I do not think that any lady has ever been more sorrowful than me. And if it were a question of my will, so help me God, I would die here and now!’)

Within the context of the Tristan tradition—Thomas’s Iseult specifically dies from tendrur (3274), it will be remembered—the admission here that women do not die from pain and anguish alone is remarkable. Iseult’s articulation here of her wish to die indicates there is nothing involuntary or unconscious about her death wish. Moreover, the death wish in itself is insufficient. Iseult’s inability to die recalls the much earlier episode in which she tries to commit suicide: she was desperate to die and tried to impale herself on Tristan’s sword, but was prevented from harming herself by Mark (Tristan en prose 1963–85: III. §§ 929–31). In the Tristan en prose, Iseult seems to cling to life, and it is significant that in the end, to all intents and purposes, she is murdered by Tristan: Quant mesire Tristrans vit apertement qu’il estoit a la mort venus, il regarde entor soi et dist: ‘Signeur, je muir! Jou ne puis plus vivre. La mort me tient, qui plus ne me laisse vivre. A Dieu soiiés vous tous conmandés, qui cy estes, car a ma fin suy venu! Donc, se a Dieu plaist qu’entre les bras la roïne Yseut fine je ma vie, qui brieve est, finerai adont plus aiesé, ce m’est avis!’ Yseut s’acline sus monsigneur Tristran, quant ele entent ceste parole. Ele s’abaisse sour son pis, mesire Tristrans le prent entre ses bras. Et quant il le tint sour son pis, il dist, si haut que tout cil de laiens le porent oïr: ‘Des ore ne me caut quant je muire, puis que je ai madame Yseut ore aveuc moi!’ Lors estraint la roïne contre son pis de tant de force com il avoit, si qu’il li fist le cuer partir, et il meïsmes morut en cel point, si que bras a bras et bouce a bouce morurent li doi amant et demourerent en tel maniere embracié, tant que cil de laiens quidoient qu’il fussent em pasmisons, quant il virent apertement qu’il estoient mort andoi et que recouvrier n’i estoit; et mort sont ambedoi, et par amour, sans autre confort. (§ 83, 1–21) (When sir Tristan saw clearly that he was about to die, he looks about and says: ‘My lords, I am dying! I can live no longer. Death has me in its grasp and wishes me to live no longer. I commend all of you here to God, for this is my end. So, if it pleases God that I finish my all-too-brief life in the arms of queen Iseult, I think I will die then more comfortably!’ Iseult bends over my lord Tristan when she hears this. She lowers herself onto his chest; my lord Tristan takes her in his arms. And when he held her against his chest, he said aloud so that all those present might hear: ‘Now I care not if I die, since I have my lady Iseult with me!’ Then he clasps the queen to his chest with such strength as remained to him, so that her heart burst, and he too died at that moment, so the lovers died with their arms entwined, mouth to mouth, and they stayed there thus, in an embrace, so that those present thought they had fainted, until they realized they were both dead, and that there was no going back. And they are both dead, because of love, with no other comfort.)

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As Laurence Harf-Lancner notes (1998: 626), the pairing of mort and confort here echoes one of Thomas’s favourite rhyme pairs, but the contrast with Thomas could again hardly be greater. While it may be true that the author of the Tristan en prose has Iseult die in this way so as to avoid the stigma of suicide (see Harf-Lancner 1998: 626–7), the fact remains that in choosing to die, rather than simply expiring, and in needing Tristan’s intervention, this Iseult lacks the tragic grandeur and also the moral, indeed ethical, purity of Thomas’s Iseult. Despite the fact that we are told ‘mort sont anbedoi, et par amour’, the Tristan en prose seems equivocal about why the lovers die: En tel maniere morut li boins, le preus, pour l’amour madame Yseut, a tel dolour et a tel angoisse conme vous oés, et par le caup que li rois March li donna. Ensi morut pour la roïne, et li rois March le fist morir. Et la roïne morut pour l’amor monsigneur Tristran. Ensi morurent ambedoi. § 83, 22–7 (Thus died this good and worthy man for the love of my lady Iseult, in such pain and anguish as you hear, and because of the blow that King Mark inflicted upon him. Thus he died for the queen, and King Mark killed him. And the queen died for love of my lord Tristan. Thus did they both die.)

The repeated mention of Mark’s role in Tristan’s death is at odds with the assertion that he died ‘pour l’amour’ or ‘pour la roïne’, particularly since in the Tristan en prose Mark’s antagonism towards Tristan predates either of them falling in love with Iseult.²⁰ The lovers are subsequently buried together in a sumptuous tomb, which is surpassed only by that of Galehaut, whose death for the love of Lancelot will be examined in the next chapter: this tomb is sited in a beautiful and richly decorated church, with statues on it representing the lovers. They are, in other words, treated posthumously most emphatically as saints, as martyrs to love, but the text has nonetheless made it clear that both die as the result of somewhat tawdry crimes passionnels. Harf-Lancner reads the differences between the verse texts and the prose text as an index of the latter’s glorification of passionate love: La mort des amants, dans le roman en prose, ne sonne pas comme une défaite. Le choix que font Tristan et Iseut de mourrir ensemble et de proclamer leur amour à la face du monde sans le moindre remors, dans l’oubli complet de l’au-delà, donne à ces pages une force et une hardiesse étonnante, et tourne, bien plus que les romans en vers, à la glorification de la passion amoureuse. (1998: 628) ²⁰ See, e.g. Tristan en prose (1963–85: I, § 359), where hostility between Mark and Tristan is described in relation to their rivalry over another woman, before Iseult has entered the narrative.

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(The lovers’ deaths, in the prose romance, does not seem like a defeat. The choice Tristan and Iseult make to die together and to declare their love to the world without the slightest regret, with no regard for the hereafter, makes these pages striking and astonishingly bold, leading to a far greater extent than is the case with the verse romances, to the glorification of passionate love.)

But other scholars argue the text is more equivocal about the lovers’ deaths. For instance, as Emmanuèle Baumgartner points out (1990: 143), the fact that ‘ni Tristan ni Iseut, dans le roman en prose, ne meurent d’amour’ (‘neither Tristan nor Iseult dies of love in the prose romance’), establishes an implicit intertextual dialogue with the verse texts, with the prose text offering a ‘mort barbare, qui défie la tradition’ (‘a barbaric death, that defies the tradition’).²¹ The role of choice and volition in the lovers’ deaths in the Tristan en prose is crucial in this, has witnessed in Iseult’s admission that women do not die of grief alone. One could credit the text with realism here, but this is perhaps to miss the point. Both lovers acknowledge the fact that for their love to be truly ideal and for them to achieve a true symbiosis, they must die together. But the actual cause of Tristan’s death (love or Mark?) remains unclear, or at least equivocal in the Tristan en prose, while Iseult fails to rise to the challenge of giving her life spontaneously, au secret. Indeed, the problem lies precisely in the evocation of volition and choice: for true lovers, there is no choice, consent to death is always already given because from the moment they fall in love, they are—or should be—already between two deaths. Iseult’s failure to die as she should in the Tristan en prose marks therefore, I suggest, an anxiety about the model of love and death inscribed in the Tristan tradition, and the remodelling of the lovers’ death would therefore be wholly in tune with the remodelling of the material that goes on throughout the Tristan en prose, with its incorporation into the less challenging world of the post-Vulgate Lancelot and the Round Table.²² More importantly, however, Iseult far more than Tristan (since in the verse poems he is also killed by a wound) is denied the supreme ethical sacrifice. She is not allowed to become a true ethical heroine since she does not love Tristan enough to die for him, and she must, on the contrary, be killed. This undermines any sense of reciprocal sacrifice, and points to a profound dissonance and lack of reciprocity in their eventual union in death. ²¹ See also Bertolucci Pizzorusso (2000) and Traxler (1996: 385). ²² See Baumgartner’s excellent studies (1975) and (1990).

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Another woman who does not die on cue is the Countess of Tripoli in Jaufre Rudel’s vida, composed most probably in the early thirteenth century: Jaufres Rudels de Blaia si fo molt gentils hom, princes de Blaia. Et enamoret se de la comtessa de Tripol, ses vezer, per lo ben qu’el n’auzi dire als pelerins que venguen d’Antiocha. E fetz de leis mains vers et ab bons sons, ab paubres motz. E per voluntat de leis vezer, el se croset e mes se en mar, e pres lo malautia en la nau, e fo condug a Tripol, en un alberc, per mort. E fo fait saber a la comtessa, et ella venc ad el, al sieu leit e pres lo entre sos bratz. Et el saup qu’ella era la comtessa, si recobret l’auzir e.l flazar, e lauzet Dieu que l’avia la vida sostenguda tro qu’el l’agues vista; et enaissi el mori entre sos bratz. Et ella lo fez a gran honor sepellir en la maison del Temple; e pois, en aquel dia, ela se rendet monga, per la dolor qu’ella n’ac de la mort de lui. (Jaufre Rudel 1985: 52). (Jaufre Rudel of Blaye was a very noble man and the Prince of Blaye. And he fell in love with the Countess of Tripoli, without having seen her, because of the good things he heard about her from the pilgrims who came from Antioch. And he composed many poems about her with good tunes, but poor words. And because he wanted to see her, he took the cross and set out by sea, and he fell ill on board ship and was taken to Tripoli, to die in an inn. And the Countess was told of this and she came to him, to his bedside, and took him in her arms. And he realized that this was the Countess and he recovered his hearing and his sight, and he praised God who had kept him alive long enough to see her. And thus he died in her arms. And she had him placed with great honour in a tomb in the house of the Templars; and then, on that very same day, she became a nun because of the pain that she felt at his death.)

Jaufre Rudel, as we saw in the Introduction, is one the earliest vernacular poets to use religious imagery in love lyrics, and to deploy the association of love and death. It is therefore wholly appropriate that when his lyrics are given a narrative framework, this narrative should culminate in his death, and along with the vida and razos devoted to Guillem de Cabestanh, and the Castelain de Couci, Jaufre Rudel’s vida is one of the most famous medieval instances of the death of the troubadour. Most recent critics eschew earlier attempts to read Jaufre’s lyrics alongside the vida biographically, and interpret the vida as a reading of the lyrics, or as a fictional continuation or extension of motifs deriving from the lyrics. Thus, for Jean-Charles Huchet, the vida is ‘tissée d’une fiction héritée des cansos’ (1987: 126: ‘woven from a fiction inherited from the songs’), whereas for Maria Luisa Meneghetti, the vida represents a realization in narrative form of the lyrics, precisely because the poet dies (1980: 162–3). And Rouben Cholakian clearly has the manner of the poet’s

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death in mind when he remarks ‘Poetry and vida become one. The interest of the vida lies not its factuality but in its corroboration of a pervasive way of representing the male/ female relationship’ (1990: 83). This relationship between male and female would entail a fantasmic symbiosis, in which the lover and lady, separated in life, become one through the lover’s death. As R. Howard Bloch puts it, ‘the meeting with the lady corresponds not only to the end of song, but to the end of life itself ’ (1991: 154). I do not dissent from this view of the relation between vida and lyrics posited by most recent criticism, but would seek to offer a different account of the vida’s take on sexual difference. The vida does indeed represent the realization of the lyrics in narrative form and this works in particular through the death of the troubadour. Jaufre seems to make an exemplary and idealized sacrifice that is commensurate with the idealized and exemplary desire, grounded in abstraction, that he articulates in his lyrics. It is, entirely fitting that so much emphasis should be placed upon sight in the vida: Jaufre falls in love with the Countess ses vezer, he sets off on crusade (picking up on the religious metaphors in his lyrics, and particularly on that of pilgrimage) ‘per voluntat de leis vezer’, and he stays alive ‘tro que l’agues vista’, indicating that his moment of death and the moment he first sets his eyes on his beloved are coterminous. In lyrics such as ‘Non sap chantar’ (I), similarly, Jaufre dwells on forms of vezer (stanza II) and in ‘Lancan li jorn’ he prays to God that he might see and, above all, be seen by her (IV, 29–35). But the encounter with the beloved, the moment when the poet sees her and is seen by her, entails a rapture that leads to obliteration. The lyrical subject will thus represent this visual encounter as an eternal moment of jouissance, of loss of self, of death, for example most famously in the Narcissus stanza of Bernart de Ventadorn’s ‘Can vei’.²³ In Jaufre’s lyrics, the murderous potential of the gaze is perhaps implicit rather than explicit, but the author of the vida chooses to play Jaufre’s images through to their logical conclusion, possibly as a result also of knowing lyrics such as ‘Can vei’. It follows then that Jaufre falls in love with his lady, not despite never having seen her, but rather that his not having seen her is a condition of his being in love with her in the first place. It is nonetheless striking, if we do take the vida as a realization in narrative form of the lyrics, that in ‘Non sap chanter’ Jaufre says that he loves not only someone he has never seen, but also ‘that which will never ²³ See Chs. 1 and 6, for more on the gaze and for further comments on ‘Can vei’.

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see me’ (I, 8: ‘so que ja no.m veira’) and claims that ‘nor will she ever have joy of me’ (26: ‘ni ja de mi no.s jauzira’). The insistent futures here resonate with other Jaufre lyrics, for example, when he says that he has been cursed so that he might never be loved in ‘Lancan li jorn’ (IV), or when, in ‘Quan lo rossinhols el foillos’ (V, 8–11) he represents himself as advancing towards a lady who flees before him so that they remain the same distance apart. To say that Jaufre does not wish the gap between him and his lady to close may be to resolve an ambiguity that remains open in his lyrics, but he certainly represents the distance between them as insuperable. This is why, in ‘Non sap chantar’, he says that she will not see him, that she will not have joy of him. It may then be significant that in the vida, the gaze is explicitly not represented as reciprocal: Jaufre stays alive ‘tro qu’el l’agues vista’ (‘until he has seen her’). They may not hold each other’s gaze. Though critics do not comment upon this, it seems less remarkable that Jaufre dies in the vida than that the Countess of Tripoli does not, and this is perhaps what distinguishes Jaufre Rudel’s vida—as a gloss on lyric and no more—from romance narratives. In the vida and razos relating the eaten heart story devoted to Guillem de Cabestanh’s ‘Lo dous cossire’, and in other versions of the legend in Old French and Italian, the lady dies once she has consumed her lover’s heart and, as we have seen, this is on one level at least indicative of the perfect fusion between troubadour and lady that is the outcome of their love. In other words, the lady, as well as the poet, accedes to jouissance, or, one could even argue, the lady, rather than the poet’ accedes to jouissance, since she falls silent—sometimes she even falls into an abyss—whereas the poet’s words go on to resonate down the ages, this despite, or perhaps because of, his death. What is then striking, if one compares the two attempts to frame courtly lyric in narrative, is that the Countess is represented as apparently not loving Jaufre enough to die at the end. I would contend that the effect of this is to maintain the feinte (as Lacan calls it) of courtly love,²⁴ in other words, to maintain the illusory belief in the future possibility of an ideal sexual relation (ideal, that is, from a masculine perspective) by showing its inevitable failure in this instance. ²⁴ Lacan (1999: 89): ‘L’amour courtois. Qu’est-ce que c’est? C’est une façon tout à fait raffinée de suppléer à l’absence de rapport sexuel, en feignant que c’est nous qui y mettons obstacle. C’est vraiment la chose la plus formidable qu’on ait jamais tentée. Mais comment en dénoncer la feinte?’ (‘What is courtly love? It is a completely refined way to supplement the lack of a sexual relation by pretending that it is we who are preventing it. It is quite the most wonderful thing ever attempted. But how is one to denounce this pretence?’).

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What I am suggesting is that Jaufre Rudel’s vida, far from describing the ineffable symbiosis and fusion of lover and love object, in fact maintains the fiction of the courtly lady as the haughty and potentially indifferent Thing that fails to reciprocate the lover’s gaze and, most significantly, fails to die with him. The lady’s withdrawal into a nunnery may figure a death of sorts, but it is noteworthy that she maintains her agency (‘ella se rendet morga’) and that her continued existence maintains a barrier between lover and object. If she does symbolically die, her death is clearly less spectacular than his, and whereas his sacrifice is unequivocally focused upon her (he thanks God for keeping him alive until he gets to see her), hers may allow her to focus her desire elsewhere (for example, on God). There is no fit between the masculine and feminine here on one level, and the lover seems to sacrifice his life for a lady who does not do the same for him. The vida may therefore seek on one level to give the illusion that the distance between Jaufre and his lady has been closed by his journey to the East and his exemplary death; on another level, it may be as resolute as the lyrics in its positing of the separation of Jaufre and his amor de lonh as absolute in the past, in the present and even in the future, since death does not unite them. Jaufre’s sacrifice surely is perfect, as flawless as he claims his songs are, since his gift of death is clearly given with no hope of return. His sacrifice thus performatively reconstitutes in the narrative domain the possibility of the perfect union on which the lyrics are grounded. The failure to attain and represent its complete realization suggests that it is perhaps better never to attain union with the Other than to be confronted by its impossibility. This is why Zizek claims that [the faithful servant of the lady] ‘would even prefer the gallows to an immediate gratification of his desire’ (1994: 96). It is better to die than to be disillusioned, though it may be better still to avoid both, hence the insuperable obstacle in the lyrics. But when Jaufre finds himself faced with the object of his desire, he dies rather than testing the ability of his much anticipated joi to deliver what it had promised. The whole point of jouissance, after all, is that it is unattainable and may not be contemplated. As readers, this brings us back to the lyrics. Here, I think, is another way of approaching the self-referentiality Zumthor called ‘la circularité du chant’ (1972: 189–243). The lyric articulates an unrealizable desire that sustains itself through its very unrealizability. It is locked in an eternal present and has the function of screening off the real of sexual difference by showing the loving subject’s psychodrama, as it were, on a continuous, short-circuited loop. It is precisely the timelessness of Jaufre’s gesture that

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allows for the purity of his gift of death, since narrative progression entails knowledge and exchange.²⁵ Indeed, if the transposition of lyric motifs to narrative breaks the cycle, it is noteworthy that Jaufre’s vida has been far more successful among modern readers of medieval literature than the Guillem de Cabestanh razos and stories derived from them. And if Jaufre’s lyrics were famous in the Middle Ages, there is a case at least for seeing the eaten heart stories as equally influential: Boccaccio and Dante, for instance, both picked up the eaten heart stories in their own writing (see Ch. 3, n. 5), but neither mentions Jaufre Rudel. In my view, the lady’s death in the eaten heart stories after she has devoured her lover’s heart stages a symbiosis of subject and object that is threatening in itself, quite apart from its disturbingly visceral corporeality. This is perhaps why some modern readers have found these stories ‘tawdry’ and ‘transgressive’, but tend to consider Jaufre’s vida high tragedy. In other words, Jaufre Rudel’s story has been preferred because it avoids the threat posed by feminine jouissance. This is the sanitized version of the death of the troubadour—the version without the corpse of the troublesome, self-sacrificing women—and consequently, it remains positively cosy by comparison. Whereas Guillem de Cabestanh’s vida is a narrative dismantling of lyric metaphors, Jaufre Rudel’s vida is a reassertion of lyric subjectivity and the ethics of the lyric subject. It does, however, have limited narrative potential and appeal, since the lovers cannot actually meet without the hero falling dead.

²⁵ See Derrida (1991: 27): ‘La temporalisation du temps . . . engage toujours le processus d’une destruction du don’ (‘Time being subject to time . . . always engages a process whereby the gift is destroyed’).

6 The (Queer) Look of Love: Narcissus, Bel Vezer, and Galehaut In the last chapter, I argued that dying for love in medieval French and Occitan literature is gendered. Thus, in many narratives, women die of love with no other apparent causes, whereas men are killed by something more concrete and tangible, albeit in the context of their love. The exceptions to this general rule I examined in the last section of Chapter 5 may well be the exceptions that prove the rule in that the treatment of Iseult in the Tristan en prose overtly engages the idea that she ought to die more readily of love alone, while Jaufre Rudel, in his vida, is the very embodiment of a lyric voice as opposed to a romance character, thereby in some senses reinforcing the notion that dying for love is first and foremost a discursive phenomenon for men, a feature of the language men use about themselves in poetry, bearing little relation to the ‘reality’ portrayed in fiction. Of course, the spectacle of woman dying purely as a result of love is nonetheless a fantasy, one which elevates feminine sacrifice to the level of the sublime. This is not to say that men do not die for love in romance texts, but it is then striking that the two most prominent instances of this involve a man who dies for the love of a man, Narcissus (in the Lai de Narcisse and the Roman de la Rose) and Galehaut (in the Lancelot en prose and the Tristan en prose), the former being drawn from Ovid, the latter being, as far as we can tell, an invention of the French Arthurian tradition. This chapter will focus on these figures, but I will also consider the nature of The section on the gaze in troubadour lyric is based upon Gaunt (2004a). The material in the section on Galehaut was used—in a variety of different forms—for papers given in 2004 as part of the Queer at King’s series at King’s College London and at the Society for French Studies conference in Cambridge, then in 2005 at the International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo as well as at a conference on ‘L’omoerotismo nella letteratura medievale’ in Genoa. I should like to thank those present for their comments and observations and particularly Sylvia Huot for generous and invaluable observations.

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‘Narcissism’ in the Middle Ages, and the role it plays in the troubadour lyric more generally, as well as romance. The main question I shall address is what is the effect of Narcissus’ love for his own image, and his subsequent death, on gender? Does his being in love with an image of himself, and above all his resulting death, serve to feminize him because of the sacrifice he makes, which recalls the sacrifice of women such as Iseult, the Damoisele d’Escalot, and so on? Alternatively, does a man’s love and desire for a masculine object tend to feminize the object to which he directs his attention, since the object of medieval discourses about love is usually a woman? Or is the effect somehow more troubling still? In other words, because, as the Old French Lai de Narcisse suggests, Narcissus is both the subject and the object of desire, does this not in turn also trouble any neat apprehension of gender as working through binaries, and move the dynamics of desire into a space that might be termed queer, by which I mean one which calls into question the neatness of the binaries that culture constructs to regulate human desire: masculine/feminine, heterosexuality/homosexuality, even subject/object.¹ In the last chapter I argued that in medieval French texts, the sacrifice of women is, potentially at least, always disruptive of the symbolic order, that there is something potentially alarming about the feminine jouissance a woman’s dying for love represents, and that in some instances clearly needs to be suppressed. I wish to extend this argument here by looking at instances of love’s martyrdom that do not fit a heterosexual paradigm in order to show how these instances of sacrificial desire are also disquieting. But it is important nonetheless to realize that neither the elevation of feminine sacrifice, nor any queer dimension to sacrificial desire we might discern as modern readers, necessarily indicates a radical proto-feminist or potentially queer agenda. Indeed, if the best thing a woman or a queer who aspires to being an ethical subject can do is die—often from unrequited love—this hardly constitutes a progressive political outlook for women (whether straight or gay) or gay men. I shall argue, rather, that the gender trouble and queer desire we may locate in courtly romance by looking at instances of dying for love is redolent of an ethics and a view of gender that is consonant with Lacan’s oft-quoted, but much misunderstood, dictum in Encore: ‘il n’y pas la femme’ (1999: 14, often translated as ‘Woman does not exist’). This potentially offensive assertion needs to be understood in relation to another Lacanian aphorism, which I explored in the last chapter: ‘il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel’ (1999: 21: ‘there is no ¹ I use the term ‘queer’ in the sense outlined by Butler (1993: 223–42).

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sexual relation). Love, for Lacan, encourages the belief in a perfect and symmetrical union between a man and a woman, in a cohesive fit between the masculine and the feminine. But this perfect union is a discursive lure, a myth, fantasy (in the strictly Lacanian sense of that which structures the symbolic order), an ideal (in the Zizekian sense of fantasy understood with its political ramifications). In fact, for Lacan, desire invariably inaugurates a conflict between a desire for difference and a desire to suppress difference: ‘L’amour est impuissant, quoiqu’il soit réciproque, parce qu’il ignore qu’il n’est que le désir d’être Un, ce qui nous conduit à l’impossible d’établir la relation d’eux. La relation d’eux qui?—deux sexes’ (1999: 14: ‘Love is impotent, even when it is reciprocal, because it does not know that it is in fact nothing but a desire to be One, which leads us to the impossibility of establishing a relation between them. A relation between whom? The two sexes’).² In other words, Lacan’s insight is that love—and there is no doubt that he has courtly love in mind when he talks about love—is a psychic structure that, while seeming to entail a desire for difference and to depend upon it, in fact works to suppress difference. This suppression of difference (‘le désir d’être Un’) can be understood in two ways. On the one hand, we might consider instances of incorporation or symbiosis, such as occur in the eaten heart stories or a text such as Chevrefoil. On the other, we might think of the (feminine) object as an impossible, unattainable ideal of femininity, one whose very desirable qualities are predicated on unattainability, as we saw in the classic troubadour vision of love examined in Chapter 1, with the effect that only the masculine may viably occupy the symbolic order. Lacan’s formulation ‘la femme’ (with the italicized definite article reifying woman into an ideal, but impossible feminine, hence ‘Woman’ in English) is therefore intended to signify the gaping chasm between the feminine ideal promoted in cultural spaces such as courtly literature and the experiences, desires, and subjectivities of women, since ‘la femme’ is a necessarily phallocentric fantasy. In my view, Lacan’s insights on sexual difference in Encore help considerably to understand how many courtly texts function. Courtly literature, in other words, is a profoundly homosocial discourse, however preoccupied it may seem to be with femininity. And what a Lacanian framework may help us to understand is how courtly literature can be both profoundly ² Lacan is punning here on ‘d’eux’ (the elided preposition de, usually ‘of ’ or ‘from’, but in this neologistic collocation ‘between’, ⫹ eux, ‘them’; one would expect ‘la relation entre eux’) and ‘deux’ (two).

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homosocial and yet apparently attracted to the idea of a perfect union between a man and a woman.³ This chapter will have three sections. A first section will examine Narcissus and the nature of Narcissism in two important Old French texts, Le Lai de Narcisse and Le Roman de la Rose. The second will return to the troubadours with a view to taking this analysis of Narcissism in courtly culture further, and here the focus will be on the gaze, since medieval representations of Narcissus consistently stress the centrality of the visual to his love, and to his fate. The final section will be a reading of Lancelot’s relationship with his companion Galehaut—who dies explicitly as a martyr to his love for Lancelot in the Prose Lancelot—using the critical framework elaborated in the first two sections. While it may seem counter-intuitive to examine the troubadours after the romance texts they undoubtedly influenced, I do so because I believe the narrative texts retroactively justify the queer reading of the gaze in troubadour lyric on which I wish to elaborate.

‘Un esfant bel a desmesure’: Narcissus Throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Narcissus is cited as an exemplum of fatal, unrequited love. Consider the famous stanza from Bernart de Ventadorn’s ‘Can vei’ examined in Chapter 1, or Kahedin’s warning to Palamedes in the Tristan en prose cited in Chapter 4. The figure of Narcissus held as important a place in medieval attempts to think through the psychology of love as he does in modern, post-psychoanalytic apprehensions of human desire. It is frequently remarked, however, that ‘Narcissism’ has a different value in medieval and modern culture. Thus, it is argued that whereas modern accounts of Narcissism, particularly those inflected by Freudian psychoanalysis, use Narcissus to explore self-love, particularly libidinally invested self-love (or the extent to which love for another may in fact be underscored by love for the self so that one looks to the other primarily for a reflection of the self ), medieval accounts focus on Narcissus being in love with an image, one which by definition is unobtainable.⁴ This leads to ³ This is precisely the kind of contradiction Kay (2001) views as so central to courtly literature. ⁴ For the classical Freudian exposition, see Freud (1984b). There is an extensive bibliography on medieval Narcissism, but for the most important contributions (apart from Agamben) see: Frappier (1959b), Goldin (1967), Kay (1983), Knoespel (1985), Vinge (1967: 55–127).

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what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘la scoperta dell’irrealtà dell’amore’ (1977: 96: ‘the discovery of the unreality of love’), which, he suggests, marks an important break with the classical tradition. Thus, to follow Agamben’s analysis further, the love object by definition resides in the realm of fantasy, since the imago takes precedence over that which is actually seen: ‘è solo nella cultura medievale che il fantasma emerge in primo piano come origine e oggetto d’amore, e la situazione propria dell’eros si sposta dalla visione alla fantasia’ (1977: 97: ‘it is only in medieval culture that fantasy emerges into the foreground as the origin and object of love, and Eros ceases to be confined to the visual to inhabit the realm of fantasy’). This in turn gives Narcissus’ love a dual value, positive because he is in love with something that is ideal, and negative because his fate underscores the gap between the promise held out by the image and possible experience: ‘Narcisso, che s’innamora di un’imagine, è il paradigma esemplare della fin’amors e, insieme, con una polarità che caratterizza la sagezza psicologica del medioevo, del fol’ amour, che spezza il circolo fantasmico nel tentativo di appropriarsi dell’imagine come se fosse una creatura reale’ (1977: 139: ‘Narcissus in love with an image is paradigmatic not only of fin’amor, but also, in a reversal characteristic of the reversals operated by medieval psychological wisdom, of the fol’ amour that breaks the fantasmic circle by seeking to obtain the image as if it were a real creature’). However, the distinction between medieval and modern thinking on Narcissus is less stark than most commentators suggest: some medieval texts do present Narcissus as engaged in self-love, suffering then from the concomitant ‘split subjectivity’ this engenders, while Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage allows for a model of Narcissism that is focused precisely on the imago (see particularly Lacan 1966: 93–100). It remains nonetheless the case that, for medieval writers, Narcissus’ fate is sealed by his fascination with an image. As most modern writing about medieval representations of Narcissus has focused on the issue of whether his love should be taken as a model of self-love (following modern, post-Freudian notions of Narcissism), or rather deluded love for an image, it has tended not to stress the most obvious thing about medieval references to and accounts of his story: he dies as a result of his love. Indeed, if we return to Kahedin’s warning to Palamedes in the Tristan en prose, we see that Narcissus is cited primarily as an example of a lover who dies for his love, or indeed, as an example of one who is transfixed by his own death: ‘se vous amés la u je aim, vous amés ausi con fist Narchisus, ki ama cele dont il mourut. Se vous amés la u je aim, vous amés vostre mort sans doute, et de vostre mort avés joie’

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(Tristan en prose 1987–97: i, §102, 19–22: ‘if you love the one I love, you love as did Narcissus, who loved the one who caused his death. If you love the one I love, you undoubtedly love your death and take joy in your death’).⁵ As Jean-Charles Huchet puts it, in the Middle Ages Narcissus ‘incarne une des pathologies de l’amour parce qu’il lie l’amor à la mort’ (1990: 159: ‘is the incarnation of one of the pathological forms of love because he links amor to death’). Thus, in the twelfth-century Lai de Narcisse, if the point of the exemplum is to stress the dangers to all concerned of rejecting amorous advances, focusing thereby again (though from a different perspective) on the consequences of unrequited love, the stress is placed upon Narcissus’ eventual death:⁶ Narcisus, qui fu mors d’amer, Nous doit essample demostrer. Amors blasmoit et sa poisçance, Ki puis en prist aspre venjance. A tel amor le fist aclin Dont il reçut mort en la fin. (Narcisse 2000: 35–40) (Narcissus, who died of loving, must be an example to us. He disdained love and its power, but it then took a terrible revenge on him. It made him subject to a love that killed him in the end.)

As with other narratives adapted into Old French from Ovid, such as Piramus et Thisbé, the Lai de Narcisse effects some important changes to its source. Echo disappears completely from the Old French version to be replaced by Dané, who is accorded extensive monologues, so the tale is as much the story of her unrequited love as it is that of Narcissus. It is she who curses Narcissus so that he might know unrequited love as she has done, not one of the scorned young men who lust after him in Ovid, who are not mentioned in the French text. Also, the main characters are put in a feudal setting, Dané being the king’s daughter and Narcissus one of his vassals. Most tellingly, the end of the story is adapted to fit a familiar vernacular model, with echoes of the Tristan story. Even though Narcissus ⁵ Compare also Chrétien de Troyes (1994a: 2721–4): ‘Narcisus qui desouz l’orme | Vit en la fonteinne sa forme, | Si l’ama tant quant il la vit | Qu’il en fu morz si come en dit’ (‘Narcissus who under the elm saw his own form in the pool and loved what he saw so much that he died because of this, so they say’). Narcissus is evoked in the context of a description of Cligès’ beauty. ⁶ On this text see Goldin (1967: 22–52), Harrison (1982: 326–7 and 338–9) and Vinge (1967: 58–66)

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is so distraught he cannot but die, he manages to signal—albeit ambiguously —repentance to Dané,⁷ who then contrives to die with him: ‘Ahi! fait ele, dox amis, Come estes de la mort soupris! Biau sanlant me volés mostrer, Mais ne poés a moi parler. Lasse! si mal asanblement, Si dolereus enbracement, Si cort deport, si cort delit, Si grant angousce qui m’ocit! Lasse! ma proiiere est la mort! Or n’i a mais autre confort: Morir m’estuet de conpaignie, Car assés mix aim mort que vie.’ Li vallés muert, l’ame s’en vait. La pucele plus pres se trait, Vers soi le trait par tel aïr Du cors se fait l’ame partir. C’a fait Amour qui l’a souprise. Andui sont mort en itel guise. Or s’i gardent tuit autre amant Qu’il ne muirent en tel sanblant! (991–1010) (‘Alas’, she said, ‘sweet lover, you are so close to death! You want to be kind to me, but you cannot speak to me. Alas! What a sorry coupling this is, what a painful embrace! What brief joy, what brief pleasure, and what great anguish is killing me! Alas, my prayer is now for death!⁸ Now there is no comfort other than death: I must die with him, for I prefer to die rather than to live.’ The young man dies, his soul leaves him. The maiden comes closer and draws him to her with such force that her soul leaves her body. Love, who had taken control of her, did this. Thus did they both die. Now all other lovers should take care not to die in the same way!)

As Emmanuèle Baumgartner points out (Narcisse 2000: 153), Dané’s desire to die with her beloved here, both lovers’ death from nothing other than the pain of love, and the rhyme mort/confort, echo the Tristan legend, particularly in Thomas’s version. This retelling of the Narcissus story has ⁷ See line 983: ‘Sanblant li fait que se repent’. Faire sanblant here could mean ‘to indicate’, which is how Baumgartner renders it in her parallel translation (‘il lui montre qu’il se repent’); see also Mancini (Narcisse 1989) who translates ‘le far segno che si è pentito’. But it may also mean ‘to feign’, giving ‘he feigns repentance for her benefit’; see Tobler and Lommatzsch (1925–76: ix. 394–7). ⁸ Baumgartner (Narcissse 2000) translates ‘ma prière est la cause de sa mort’, while Mancini (Narcisse 1989) translates ‘la mia preghiera l’ha ucciso’, though his text adopts a correction, ‘Lasse, ma proiiere l’a mort !’.

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thus been sanitized in a number of ways for its Old French public: not only have the homoerotic overtones of Ovid’s version apparently been eliminated, but the end holds up the possibility—albeit a faint one—of the story having after all become a regular tale of tragic love, with Narcissus having perhaps seen the error of his ways to be reconciled in a final, reciprocal, embrace with the long-suffering Dané (on which see Goldin 1967: 40). The Old French poet may not, however, succeed altogether in eliminating the more troublesome homoerotic elements of the story. Whereas in Ovid (and indeed in the Roman de la Rose), there can be no doubt that the object of Narcissus’ love is gendered masculine,⁹ in the Lai de Narcisse he believes he is seeing a ‘fee de mer, | Qui la fontaine ait a garder’ (655–6: ‘a water fairy, who is the keeper of the pool’), which makes Narcissus’ urges, though deluded and self-destructive,¹⁰ on one level reassuringly straight. But to see this simply as a straightening out of the story is to miss the point. If Narcissus can take his reflection to be that of a girl, what does this in turn tell us about his masculinity? His beauty has been described at great length earlier in the text: Nature i mist toute s’entente Au deviser et au portraire, Et a grant painne le pot faire Tant com el en ot devisé, Car tant i mist de la biauté Q’onques ne pot rien porpenser K’iloeuques ne vausist mostrer. Primes a fait les ex rians, Sinples et vairs, clers et luisans; Mais estre tot çou qu’el i fist, Li dex d’amors du sien i mist: Il li asist un doç regart, Ki tot le mont esprent et art. Puis fist le nés et puis la face, Clere plus que cristaus ne glace. Les dens fist blances conme nois, Puis les aorne trois a trois. (64–80) (Nature put her all into making his form and took great pains until she had finished, for she put such beauty in him that she could think of nothing further ⁹ See Ovid (1921): 454, where Narcissus addresses his reflection as ‘puer unice’ (‘peerless youth’). ¹⁰ For Vinge (1967: 65) the main effect of the reflection’s ‘change of sex’ is to stress Narcissus’ error.

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she wished to express other than through him. First she made his laughing eyes, so frank, clear, shining, and bright; but the God of Love also helped by adding to her work: he gave him a sweet gaze, which enflames and sets everyone on fire. Then she made the nose and then the face, as translucent as crystal or glass. She made his teeth snow white and set them evenly.)

And so on for another twenty lines, while Dané in her monologues stresses the key role his beauty plays in her falling in love (282–91). Feminist and queer analyses of twelfth- and thirteenth-century descriptions of beauty in courtly texts have remarked that such descriptions do not appear to be gendered, that male and female beauty are described in the same terms, and that gender is marked not by the body but rather through social accoutrements such as clothes (Burns 1997; Schultz 1997). The stress on Narcissus’ clear complexion, amazingly bright eyes, and great teeth may not therefore serve to feminize him, since these are standard attributes of courtly heroes as well as heroines. But it is nonetheless striking that this text is open to the androgynous potential of Narcissus’ beauty, in that his mirror image may be taken for that of a ‘fairy’. Once Narcissus has realized his mistake (that he loves an image), he is quick to acknowledge too that he has fallen prey to self-love: ‘Or n’aim je nule rien vivant, Or ne sai je que je demant. Queus amors est ce dont me duel, Quant j’aim, si ne sa que je vuel? Le cors, le vis que je la voi, Ce puis je tot trover en moi. J’aim moi meïsme, c’est folie!’ (865–71) (‘I love no living thing, nor do I know what I want. What love is this that so torments me that when I love I know not what I want? The body, the face that I see there, I can find it all in myself. I love myself and this is madness!’)

Parts of Narcissus’ final monologue derive from Ovid, but the Lai elaborates on Narcissus’ crisis as a split subject. He is, in fact, both subject and object: ‘Je sui ce que je tant desir, Jou meïsmes me fait languir! Des que je ai çou que demant, Por quoi n’en fa ge mon talant? Ne sai, car j’aim et sou amés Et çou que j’aim me rainme assés Et n’est pas en menor esfroi,

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Si n’en poons prendre conroi. ‘Poons’? Mes ‘puis’, car je sui sox, Et ceste amor n’est pas de dox. Proier? Et que doi jou proiier? Çou que j’aim ne me sat aidier Ne conseil doner ne me peut. Or n’i a el: morir m’estuet.’ (915–28) (‘I am what I desire so much, I myself make myself languish! Since I have that which I ask for, why do I not do as I wish with it? I know not, for I love and am loved, and the one I love loves me a good deal in return and is no less frightened than me, so can we not find any solution? “We”? Do I not rather mean “I”, since I am alone, and this love does not involve two people. Beseech? And whom should I beseech? The one I love cannot help or advise me. Now there is nothing for me except to die.’)

The Old French poet shows a sophisticated awareness of Narcissus’ plight here. In falling in love, he has become one part of a couple that in theory is as inseparable as Tristan and Iseult are said to be in Chevrefoil, an indivisible ‘we’.¹¹ But in making his image the object of his desire, it is as if he has been tragically separated from his soul-mate and so is condemned to die as an ‘I’. His death is, in fact, caused by the impossibility of occupying both subject and object positions. The split is fatal and he floats between the two positions, just as he floats troublingly between genders. In the Roman de la Rose, the mass of male and female admirers with whom Ovid surrounds Narcissus are again absent, but as far as the gender of the object of his desire is concerned, Guillaume de Lorris (c.1230) follows Ovid: Sus la fontaine toz adenz se mist lors por boivre dedenz, si vit en l’eve clere et nete son vis, son nés et sa bouchete; et cil maintenant s’esbahi, car ses ombres l’avoit traï, qu’il cuida voair la figure d’un esfant bel a desmesure. (Roman de la Rose 1968: i. 1479–86) (He at once places himself above the pool in order to drink and he saw in the clear and pure water his face, his nose, and his charming mouth; and he is at once ¹¹ The play between first-person plural and singular uses verb forms rather than pronouns in Old French.

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stunned, for his reflection has betrayed him, since he believed he saw the form of an exceedingly beautiful young man.)

Although Guillaume makes it clear that Narcissus is deluded (he is ‘betrayed’ by his reflection and only ‘believes’ he saw the form of a young man), his Narcissus’ desire is nonetheless a same-sex desire. He then dies with almost indecent dispatch within less than twenty lines: ‘se en fu morz a la parclouse’ (1493: ‘he died of this in the end’) and ‘et fu morz en poi de termine’ (1501: ‘and shortly after he died’). The multiple ironies instantiated by Guillaume’s deployment of the Narcissus exemplum at this crucial point of the Rose, and by Jean de Meun’s subsequent play upon this, have been much debated by critics.¹² Astonishingly and incongruously (in that Narcissus’ fate is sealed by his spurning a woman’s advances), the essample is directed at ladies as a warning against playing hard to get with their lovers: ‘Dames, cest essample aprenez, | qui vers vos amis mesprenez’ (1505–6: ‘Ladies, take heed of this example when you disdain your lovers’). Although the pool is then labelled ‘li miroërs perilleus’ (1569: ‘the perilous mirror’), liable to deceive all those who gaze into it, and although in a perhaps ironic and retrospective extradiagetic aside the lover/narrator concedes that it also deceived him (1607), he does nonetheless gaze into it, and of course he sees the rose-bud, with which he will fall in love for the first time indirectly, reflected in it. For Jean-Charles Huchet, ‘l’originalité de Guillaume de Lorris réside essentiellement dans le statut qu’il confère à l’objet apparu dans le miroir à la place d’un visage et dans le rôle qui lui est assigné dans l’avènement du sujet’ (1990: 169: ‘Guillaume de Lorris’ originality lies essentially in the status he gives to the object that appears in the mirror rather than to an actual face, and in the role he then assigns to it in the inception of the subject’). This wonderful passage anticipates the erotic gender-bending that will underscore much of the Roman de la Rose as the lover courts not ‘the Rose’, but rather the masculine allegorical figure Bel Aceuil (Fair Welcome), which leads to some illustrations of the lover’s first kiss with his Rose as an embrace between two men (see Gaunt 1998a): here, when the lover first sees the Rose, it is not one of the garden’s ‘roses overtes’ (1644: ‘open roses’), but rather a ‘bouton’ (‘bud’). Thus, the gender of the object first seen in the fountain is grammatically masculine, ¹² See, most notably but very selectively: Allen (1992: 91–105); Gilbert (2005); Goldin (1967: 52–9); Harrison (1982: 327–9); Hill (1974: 406–14); Hult (1986: 263–300); Köhler (1963); Méla (1983); Nouvet (2000); Poirion (1970); Vinge (1967: 78–87).

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thereby realizing the homoerotic potential of Narcissus (see Poirion 1970: 155 and 1973: 74): Icil bouton mout m’enbelurent, onques si bel nu leu ne crurent. Qui em poroit un arachier, il le devroit avoir mout chier; se chapel en peüse faire, je n’amasse tant nul afaire. Entre les autres en eslui un si tres bel, envers celui nul des autres rien ne prisé puis que celui bien avisé; car une color l’enlumine qui est si vermeille et si fine con Nature le pot plus faire. (1647–59, my emphases) (These buds totally enchanted me, and I would never have believed them so fair or graceful. Anyone who managed to pluck one should indeed treasure it; I would indeed love to make a head-dress out of them. I chose one above the others and valued none of the others once I had fixed upon this one: for it was lit up by as bright a red and yet pure colour as Nature was able to make.)

Finally, as is well known, Jean de Meun explicitly displaces the exemplum of Narcissus at the end of the poem with that of Pygmalion (20787–21184), while simultaneously rejecting Narcissus’ fountain for the more powerful and less deceptive Fountain of Life, located in an idyllic park rather than Love’s garden (see 20353–448).¹³ Narcissus therefore plays a crucial and exemplary, though ambiguous, structuring role in both parts of the Rose:¹⁴ even in Jean de Meun, the apparently unequivocal repudiation of Narcissus in favour of Pygmalion is compromised by the tenuous nature of the argument (after all, Pygmalion too loved an image), and by the absurdity, if not to say the grossness of the context: Genius is on the verge of encouraging the lover to take his beloved by force as Love’s army goes into a frenzy of potentially violent lust.¹⁵ ¹³ On Pygmalion and Narcissus, see esp. Hill (1974: 406–16) and Poirion (1970). ¹⁴ Many critics assume Narcissus is a negative exemplum here; see e.g. Goldin (1967: 54), who argues that the dreamer escapes Narcissus’ fate precisely because he knows the story and can therefore avoid his mistakes. But compare Hult (1986: 282), who makes the most persuasive case against seeing Narcissus merely as a negative exemplum. ¹⁵ Indeed it is possible to read the climax as an allegory of sodomitical rape, see Gaunt (1998a: 72–3).

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The simple point I am making here is that Narcissus is a common, but deeply problematic, equivocal exemplum. He is intensely beautiful and dies for love, which is, to some extent, idealized since all lovers need by implication to be prepared to do the same: he is thus a prime example of the sacrificial lover who commits the ultimate ethical act and dies. But his love and its object are illusory. Indeed, the object itself ceases to have concrete reality, becoming, rather, an effect of representation, positioned at times in the imaginary, at time in the symbolic order. Furthermore, the gender of the object is always, to some extent, equivocal, while in some cases the distinction between subject and object is troubled. As Frederick Goldin so eloquently argues, the Narcissus story in the Middle Ages is largely about the relation between love and knowledge of the object (1967: 45).

‘Aissi·m perdei com perdet se | lo bels Narcisus en la fon’: Bel Vezer’s Fountain If both the Lai de Narcisse and the Roman de la Rose dwell on the ambiguities that are inherent in the Narcissus myth, they stress, as I have noted, the fact that he dies as a result of his encounter with an illusory object, an imago. Thus, by definition, they both also stress that what leads to his death is a visual encounter with this imago. In neither text, however, can the gaze that leads to death be regarded as straightforward. In the Lai de Narcisse, for instance, the poet remarks specifically that Narcissus’ ‘sweet gaze . . . enflames and sets everyone on fire’ (75–6), the point being that if he himself is fatally affected by gazing upon his image, gazing upon him is equally destructive. Indeed, if it is Narcissus’ regart that enflames Dané, and if he in turn is enflamed by his image’s gaze,¹⁶ then it would seem that the gaze in this text is never one of mutual contemplation, but always rather somehow involves a third sight-line that implicitly troubles any desired reciprocity. The gaze in the Lai de Narcisse is thus always implicitly triangulated, even though it in fact involves only two characters. Even more challenging, in the Rose, are the two crystals to be found at the bottom of Narcissus’ fountain, described as a merveille (1539: ‘miracle’), which ‘sanz decevoir’ (1558: ‘without deceit’) allow the one who gazes upon the ‘perilous mirror’ to see (albeit in segments and presumably refracted) the entire garden of love, down to the tiniest level of detail ¹⁶ ‘Avis li est que le regart’ (654: ‘it seems to him that she [the reflection] is looking at him’).

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(1535–68).¹⁷ Here the fountain itself (or at least the crystals) becomes an impossible all-seeing and omniscient eye, one which ironically is said not to deceive, even though the narrator shortly afterwards claims ‘Cil miroërs m’a deceü’ (1607: ‘this mirror deceived me’), but also one which serves, as in the Lai de Narcisse, to triangulate the gaze:¹⁸ it is crucial to the Rose’s programmatic theorizing of love that the lover does not, at the point when he actually falls in love, gaze upon his rosebud directly, but sees rather its reflection. The stress on the visual encounter in these texts is, then, not unproblematic. The object that is seen is often a reflection or an image as much as it is an object in the concrete, ‘real’ sense of the term, and the object may gaze out; in other words, it may be the subject or agent of the gaze as much as it is gazed upon. Furthermore, a gaze apparently involving only two people may apparently entail three sight-lines, or three agents of the gaze. With these paradoxes in mind, let us turn now to the gaze in troubadour lyric, which undoubtedly influenced both texts, whether directly or indirectly. Whereas allusions to or representation of the gaze in troubadour lyric are characteristically opaque, compacted, and lacking in narrative exposition, they may perhaps be illuminated by being read in the light of romance’s more prolix and expository responses to the tradition of medieval Narcissism the troubadours inaugurate. As I remarked in Chapter 1, the gaze is often central to troubadour lyric, with troubadours frequently evoking the sight of their lady, or the desire to see their lady. A troubadour’s lady is often, therefore, construed as the object of a masculine gaze. Needless to say, the importance of sight in the process of falling or being in love in troubadour lyric—indeed in courtly literature generally—clearly owes a good deal to the Ovidian tradition, in which love is said to enter a man’s heart through his eyes.¹⁹ However, as I suggested in Chapter 1, the gaze in troubadour lyric is often also evoked as part of a fantasy of being looked at, a fantasy that is quite literally vital in that the poet’s life seems to depend on his haughty lady’s gaze. In this fantasy, the gaze is primarily the gaze of the Other. In this section, I will endeavour to explore what is at stake in this, both for Lacan, and for a Lacanian understanding of medieval literature. ¹⁷ The deceptive inadequacy of the crystals is of course specifically explained by Jean de Meun as part of his general disparagement of Narcissus’s fountain, see 20409–34. ¹⁸ See Nouvet (2000) for a particularly suggestive account of the gaze in the Rose as ‘inhabited by an alien power’ (374). ¹⁹ Obvious examples of this convention abound in courtly romance, for instance see Chrétien de Troyes (1994a: 688–704) and (1994b: 2017–26).

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The gaze is crucial to Lacan’s explanation of subjectivity and the function therein of the Other because the subject is shored up by Other’s gaze.²⁰ In other words, the subject will sacrifice her or his desire in order to be seen by the Other, so that she or he may construe her or his self as whole, as ontologically coherent. Put simply: if I am seen by the Other (or by the others who occupy the position of the Other in my psyche), and if the Other reflects an image of me that is whole, unproblematic, and beyond question, then I must be more than a self-induced illusion, a figment of my own imagination. However, for the Other to confer wholeness on the subject in this way, the Other in itself must lack nothing: as L. O. Aranye Fradenburg puts it, ‘We imagine the Other as full, so that the Other can explain and potentially supplement our lack’ (2002: 5). However, for Lacan the supposed integrity of the Other is nothing but illusion, a projection of our needy imagination, which is why he introduces the notion of the barred Other, with which he seeks to indicate that the Other’s wholeness is in fact always illusory, always a product of our own need for coherence.²¹ And since the subject’s illusion of integrity is sustained by the illusion that the Other lacks nothing, when we realize this is not the case, we are necessarily traumatized. Despite the beguiling simplicity of some of Lacan’s formulations about the gaze, it is one of his more complex theoretical models, as is well illustrated by his attention to anamorphosis, of which his two main examples are famously courtly love and Holbein’s painting, the Ambassadors (1986: 167–84 and 1990: 92–104). In Lacan’s account, the gaze in the Ambassadors is (characteristically) triangular. The subject gazes upon the ²⁰ For Lacan’s main analysis of the gaze, see part II of Lacan (1990: 79–135): ‘Du regard comme objet petit a’. That the gaze, for Lacan, is located in the field of the Other is articulated clearly on several occasions. For example: ‘Le regard se voit . . . Ce regard que je rencontre . . . est, non point un regard vu, mais un regard par moi imaginé au champ de l’Autre’ (98: ‘The gaze may be seen . . . This gaze which I encounter . . . is not a gaze truly seen, but rather a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other’). Lacan’s account of the gaze insists (e.g. 91) on a distinction between vision and regard (vision and gaze), that is to say, on a distinction between mere sight and the fantasmic, invisible gaze of the omnivoyeur (87). ²¹ See e.g. Lacan’s ‘Subversion du sujet et dialectique du désir’ (1966: 793–827), where he remarks that the formula he uses to indicate the subject’s relation to the Other—S(A)— is the ‘signifiant d’un manque dans l’Autre’ (818: ‘the signifier of a lack in the Other’), and that the subject being deprived of enjoyment would be ‘la faute de l’Autre s’il existait: l’Autre n’existant pas, il ne me reste qu’à prendre la faute sur le Je’ (820: ‘the Other’s fault, if it existed: but since the Other does not exist, I can only lay the blame on myself ’). See also, for a pertinent account of the gaze as the gaze of the barred Other in Lacan, Copjec (1994: 36): ‘The subject instituted by the Lacanian gaze does not come into being as the realization of a possibility opened up by the law of the Other. It is rather an impossibility that is crucial to the constitution of the subject—the impossibility, precisely, of any ultimate confirmation from the Other.’

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figures in the painting, who gaze upon the subject; but from another perspective altogether the anamorphic skull that stretches across the bottom of the painting gazes out obliquely. In Lacan’s account the real emerges from the gap between the two perspectives (that of the realistic image that centres the painting, then that of the anamorphosis). The point here is that the real exists on a plane that resists symbolization absolutely, and that the anamorphic skull does not in fact resist symbolization, but rather offers an alternative plane of symbolization; the gap between the two planes of symbolization is the location of the real, because it is here that the subject may intuit that there is a sphere outside the symbolic which can never be recuperated into it.²² The skull gestures and beckons towards this sphere rather than resides in it. Furthermore, unlike the apparently meaningful gaze of the ambassadors and the empty stare of the skull, the real is characterized by a terrifying indifference to the subject. And we should note that the real by definition may not be gazed upon; It is that which we are utterly incapable of seeing. The object of the gaze and the gaze as object have the potential to reassure the subject, but also the potential to terrify, indeed to mortify, when they afford a glimpse of the real. We see this ambivalent potential in Bernart de Ventadorn, where the gaze is often evoked alongside death (see Chapter 1). But in Lacan’s account, the trauma of this is intensified by the way the Other always looks at the subject from a place where the subject cannot see it (1990: 118). We see this in the Ambassadors: if the point of Lacan’s analysis is that we are eventually—as we move around the room— apparently looked at by the empty eyes of the skull, we cannot actually realize this if we are looking at the ambassadors, the painting’s ostensible subjects, if, in other words, we continue to align ourselves with the plane of coherence, which is the symbolic plane. Thus, anamorphosis always troubles vision. As Lacan also talks about courtly love as anamorphosis, carrying this style of analysis over to the courtly lyric is an obvious analytic step (though not one that Lacan himself takes in quite this way). This theoretical exposition is not intended to foreground Lacan at the expense of the troubadours. Instead, I wish rather to draw attention ²² See Lacan (1990: 101), where the power of painting evokes ‘une dimension qui n’a rien à voir avec la vision comme telle’ (‘A dimension that has nothing whatsoever to do with vision as such’). Indeed, every painting, for Lacan, is ‘un piège à regard’ (102: ‘a trap for the gaze’), while the painter is the source of ‘quelque chose qui peut passer dans le réel’ (128: ‘the source of something that may pass into the real’). Earlier the real has been defined as that which ‘se soit présenté sous la forme de ce qu’il y a en lui d’inassimilable’ (65, original emphasis: ‘has presented itself in the form of that which is not in the least susceptible to assimilation’).

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to the congruence between Lacan’s thinking about the gaze and that of the troubadours. Of course, this theoretical congruence is unsurprising in that Lacan thought that courtly love had impacted profoundly on modern Western culture and used troubadour lyric to expound his ideas about subjectivity and love. Lacan, like many troubadours, calls into question a primarily Narcissistic view of the gaze (in the strictly Freudian sense concerning self-love) as located at the point where the subject is positioned in order to produce visual cohesion; and, like many troubadours, Lacan believes that it is not possible for either the subject or the object fully to coincide—as Joan Copjec puts it—with the gaze (1994: 36). This in turn has important implications for the relation between the gaze and gender. In much feminist theory, the gaze is represented as quintessentially masculine and as the mainstay of a repressive phallic Law: consider, for example, the influential work of Laura Mulvey (1989) and Jacqueline Rose (1986). Men look at women; the gaze is rapaciously heterosexual as well as male. Of course, both Mulvey and Rose were working in film theory, but both nonetheless suggest that film merely brings out dynamics of the gaze that are endemic to all discursive contexts. However, in a Lacanian approach to desire, as I shall suggest here, the gaze is perhaps characteristically feminine and a source of potential disruption, rather than the axis that produces a heterosexual, masculine order. My argument here has been informed by the work of writers such as Joan Copjec (1994; 15–38) and Dylan Evans (1996: 72–3), who suggest that Mulvey and Rose misconstrue the psychoanalytic notion of the gaze precisely because—like Huchet (1987: 183) and other critics of the troubadours— they fail to see the extent to which the gaze is aligned with the Other, not the subject.²³ Furthermore, as Lacan’s thinking progresses, he increasingly feminizes the Other (for example 1999: 52; and see Hollywood 2002: 144–70). But because this in itself is a traumatic notion to contemplate— something that is desired, yet feared—the gaze is, on occasion, regendered masculine, as we will see. I shall concentrate in the remainder of this section on a corpus of lyrics by Bernart de Ventadorn and Arnaut de Maruelh because both use senhals (code names) that are particularly pertinent to a consideration of the gaze in troubadour lyric: Bel Vezer (Fair Seeing/Sight), Bel/Dous Esgar (Fair Glance/Gaze).²⁴ Before returning to what we might make of ²³ In addition to Copjec and Evans, for a concise, but useful summary see Olin (1996). ²⁴ Bernart de Ventadorn uses the senhal Bel Vezer in: III, 57; VII, 50; IX, 41 and 43; XVI, 49 and 54; XVII, 64; XXIII, 60; XXIV, 49. Bernart also uses the senhal Dous-Esgar in XXX, 50. Arnaut de Maruelh uses the senhal Bel Vezer in XIX, 20 and Bel Esgar in I, 41.

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these senhals, I should first like to outline further how the gaze is represented in this corpus. For Bernart and Arnaut, the desire to be seen by the object of desire is as strong as the desire to see her. One effect is that subject/object distinctions are troubled: vii

Bela domna, .l vostra cors gens e.lh vostre belh olh m’an conquis, e.l doutz esgartz e lo clars vis, e.l vostre bels ensenhamens, que, can be m’en pren esmansa, de beutat no.us trob egansa: la genser etz c’om posch’ el mon chauzir, e no i vei clar dels olhs ab que.us remir.

viii

Bels Vezers, senes doptansa sai que vostre pretz enansa . . . . (Bernart, III, 49–58) (Fair lady, your noble body and beautiful eyes have conquered me, and your fair glance and glowing face, and your comely behaviour, to such an extent that when I take stock I can find no equal to you in beauty; you are the most noble that any man may find, and I am incapable of seeing clearly with the eyes with which I gaze upon you. Fair Seeing, without doubt I know that your worth grows . . .)

If the subject here retains his subject status by actively gazing and acting upon (by judging) the lady’s beauty, he nonetheless represents himself as the object of her gaze, as conquered by it, and he further suggests that his own vision is troubled by the spectacle of her beauty, of which a key component is her gaze (her belh olh, her doutz esgartz). The troubling of subject/object relations in the evocation of the gaze is part of the phenomenon that Lacan describes when he talks about the gaze as objet a, the cause of desire as much as its object (1990: 79–135): iv

Meravilh me com posc durar que no.lh demostre mo talan. Can eu vei midons ni l’esgar, li seu bel olh tan be l’estan: per pauc me tenh car eu vas leis no cor. Si feira eu, si no fos per paor, c’anc no vi cors melhs talhatz ni depens ad ops d’amar sia tan greus ni lens. . . . . . . . . . . .

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v

S’eu saubes la gen enchantar, mei enemic foran efan, que ja us no saubra triar ni dir re que.ns tornes a dan. Adoncs sai eu que vira la gensor e sos bels olhs e sa frescha color, e baizera.lh la bocha en totz sens si que d’un mes i paregra lo sens. (Bernart, XX, 17–24 and 33–40) (I am amazed that I am able to survive without revealing my desire to her. When I see or gaze upon my lady, her beautiful eyes suit her so well: I can hardly restrain myself from running towards her. And I would do so, were it not for fear, for I have never seen a fairer body represented in a statue or a painting through the dictates of love, however intense or urgent. . . . If I could cast a spell on people I would make my enemies into children so that they could not say or do anything to harm us. And I know that then I would see the noblest of women and her beautiful eyes and fair complexion, and I would kiss her mouth every which way so that the marks would show for a month.)

Once again, the lady’s eyes are the focus of desire: the poet looks at her primarily, it would seem, in order to see them, and therefore, by implication also to be seen. But his desire is first and foremost a desire to register desire, to leave a trace, whether this be in the implicit comparison between the account of his lady’s beauty and statues or paintings of other women, or in sadistic kissing that will leave visible bruises. Desire here is the precondition to subjectivity; the poet only makes his mark in the symbolic through desire as his lady’s body becomes the screen on which he writes, the medium through which he makes his mark; his lady is thus less the object of his desire than its cause. Of course, the lady’s body is a discursive fabrication that needs, to some extent at least, to be disassociated from the material bodies of the women in the courts for which troubadour lyrics were composed. As such, the lady’s body as object of the subject’s gaze is primarily an image in the poet’s mind’s eye: vi

Dompna, si no.us vezon mei olh, be sapchatz que mos cors vos ve; e no.us dolhatz plus qu’eu me dolh, qu’eu sai c’om vos destrenh per me. Mas si.l gelos vos bat’ de for, gardatz qu’el no vos bat’ al cor. Si.us fai enoi, e vos lui atretal, e ja ab vos no gazanh be per mal!

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Mo Bel-Vezer gart Deus d’ir’ et de mal, s’eu sui de lonh, e de pres atretal!

viii

Sol Deus midons e mo Bel-Vezer sal, tot ai can volh, qu’eu no deman ren al. (Bernart, XXIV, 41–52) (Lady, if my eyes do not see you, know that my heart does; and do not be more pained by this than me, for I know how tormented you are on my account. But, if the jealous man beats your body, do not let him touch your heart. He hurts you, and you hurt him, and do not let him obtain from you kindness in exchange for a harsh act. May God protect my Fair Seeing from anger and evil, when I am distant and then when I am near by also. As long as my lady and my Fair Seeing are safe, I have all I want and ask for nothing more.)

VII

Domna, Amors m’a dat tant d’ardimen, quar sap qu’ieu fis vos sui e no.m destuelh, qu’el cor m’a fag miralh ab que.us remir.

VIII

Domna, de Pretz sui en l’aussor capduelh, mas per semblan mon cor no vos aus dir.

Domn’, el semblan podetz mon cor chauzir. (Arnaut, IV, 43–8) (Lady, love has made me so bold, since it knows that I am true to you and never waver in this, that it has made a mirror in my heart in which I can gaze upon you. Lady, I am at the highest peak of worth, but I do not dare to reveal my heart to you through my expression. Lady, in my expression you can read my heart.) IX

In both lyrics, the subject evokes moments when he physically does not see his lady, but ‘sees’ her nonetheless in his heart. Bernart’s lyric specifically theorizes the internal and external worlds as separate domains, both for himself and his lady, implying on both counts that the physical and the external are subordinate to the psychic and internal. The use of the language of vision in relation to the poet’s internal world enacts precisely the distinction that Lacan makes when he distinguishes between vision or the eye and the gaze (1990: 91). The subject’s eye does not see the object, but the object is nonetheless in his field of vision. Bel Vezer, the gaze, is evoked, but is tellingly a separate entity from the subject. Furthermore, the lady (midons) and Bel Vezer initially seem to be one and the same, but then distinct. There are thus apparently three elements in this love story: the poetic subject, his lady, and the gaze, personified by Bel Vezer. The

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lady’s physical presence is not essential for her to be seen. We see this clearly in Arnaut’s lyric, where the lady is absent and the image of her that the poet carries in his heart is in fact more important. If the poet in his heart gazes upon the mirror love has provided him, a mirror of course always returns the gaze of the onlooker, and Arnaut thus seems more concerned with his own internal world than with the lady, who is shut out of his heart here by the opacity of his poetic expression (see Gaunt 1995: 131–2). The internalization of vision in these lyrics resonates strongly with Jaufre Rudel’s amor de lonh. Jaufre’s most famous lyric can be read as a prayer that he might see his distant lady, and that he might be seen by her (IV, 29–35). In the vida (examined in Chapter 5), he falls in love with the Countess of Tripoli ses vezer, and her gaze is clearly the object of desire: to see her—and therefore to be seen by her—is Jaufre’s sole aim. And yet when he does see and is seen by her, this kills him. The mortifying properties of the Other’s gaze also emerge in Bernart’s lyrics: viii

Can vei vostras faissos e.ls bels olhs amoros, be.m meravilh de vos com etz de mal respos. E sembla.m trassios, can om par francs e bos e pois es orgolhos lai on es poderos.

ix

Bel Vezer, si no fos mos enans totz en vos, laissat agra chansos per mal dels enoyos. (Bernart, XVII, 56–67) (When I see your face and your beautiful, amorous eyes, I am amazed that your response is so hostile. And it seems to me like treachery when one seems generous and good to be then proud when one is powerful. Bel Vezer, if my well-being did not depend entirely on you, I would have given up singing entirely because of the kill-joys.) vi

Li seu belh olh traïdor, que m’esgardavon tan gen, s’atressi gardon alhor, mout i fan gran falhimen;

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mas d’aitan m’an mout onrat que, s’eron mil ajostat, plus gardon lai on eu so, c’a totz aicels d’eviro. (Bernart, XXV, 41–8) (Her treacherous eyes, which gazed upon me so sweetly, would commit a great outrage if they were to look elsewhere in this way; but they have honoured me greatly to such an extent that if a thousand men were assembled here, they would look more towards me than all those around.) iii

Anc non agui de me poder ni no fui meus de l’or’ en sai que.m laisset en sos olhs vezer en un miralh que mout me plai. miralhs, pus me mirei en te, m’an mort li sospir de preon, c’aissi.m perdei com perdet se lo bels Narcisus en la fon. (Bernart, XXXI, 17–24) (I never had power over myself, nor was I my own from the moment she allowed me to look into her eyes, into a mirror that pleases me greatly. Mirror, since I gazed upon you deep sighs have killed me, for I lost myself just as the fair Narcissus lost himself in the pool.)

In the first two quotations, the treacherous potential of the lady’s gaze is brought to the fore, and even if in the second quotation, the subject insists that she only has eyes for him, this is asserted in the context of the possibility of her instead having a roving eye, or, even more traumatically, of her gaze in fact being indifferent to him, of it being unable to distinguish him from other men.²⁵ The first quotation also evokes the gaze in relation to power, which is an issue as well in Bernart’s most famous lyric, ‘Can vei’, from which the final stanza quoted is taken. Here, the lady’s gaze exercizes power over the lover and leads him to lose power over himself. That the gaze is then crucial to self-definition is underlined by the mirror motif and by the evocation of Narcissus: the lover is locked into a reciprocal, but fatal, gaze with the image he sees in the perilous mirror. In Lacanian terms, the imaginary, the symbolic and the real interact poignantly in this stanza: the surface of the mirror—the symbolic—structures the imaginary—the beguiling image the lover perceives—but fails to conceal completely, the mortifying properties of ²⁵ Fradenburg (2002: 30) talks of the barred Other’s ‘roving gaze’.

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the real. What this in turn suggests is that the gaze (like the lady) is also what Lacan calls the Thing (1986: 27–102). The Thing, which Lacan defines obscurely as that which suffers from the signified in the real (1986: 142 and 150) is the terrifying spectacle just perceptible from the symbolic that enables the subject to glimpse the real that is concealed by and in the symbolic and the imaginary. As we saw in Chapter 1, the lady in the courtly lyric is, for Lacan, a good example of the Thing: the poetic subject looks to her so that she might turn her gaze upon him, but he receives no acknowledgement in return, and it is this dual perspective on and of the lady that explains why Lacan talks of courtly love as anamorphosis. The implicit conflation of the gaze and the Thing as Lacan moves through his seminars serves to suggest the horror that the subject feels on realizing that the Other’s gaze is in fact the barred Other’s gaze, in other words, on realizing, that the Other does not have the power to confer wholeness and completeness on the subject, that the Other, like the subject, is lacking. To put this in less stridently Lacanian terms, the gaze as object of desire becomes the Thing when a troubadour realizes that there is nothing out there to gaze back at him, that the lady/Other is a figment of his imagination, and that all he contemplates in his lady’s eyes is an abyss (on which see Zizek 1994: 89–113). What are we then to make of the senhals Bel Vezer or Bel Esgart? We have seen that the gaze is indeed the object of desire in Bernart’s and Arnaut’s lyrics, and also that this troubles subject/object distinctions in that it is not always clear whose gaze is at stake. In part, the senhals reinforce the troubling power of this imagery. If it is not always clear that the senhals designate the poet’s lady—in at least one instance in Bernart’s corpus, Bel Vezer explicitly designates a male friend (XXIII, 60), and in others the referent is unclear—this very ambivalence highlights the ambiguity of the gaze in these lyrics, suggesting that the senhals function in a manner not dissimilar from anamorphoses such as the skull in Holbein’s the Ambassadors, in that they call into question the fixity and solidity of the symbolic order. It is interesting, in this respect, that these senhals are masculine, and senhals often are. Yet at same time, in the context of Lacanian theory, it is striking, though unsurprising, that the feminine Other is not identical with any embodied woman, and that frequently she is masculinized. It is thus indeed true, in these texts, that ‘il n’y a pas la femme’. We may take Bernart’s and Arnaut’s use of masculine senhals as a further indication that the troubadour love lyric is a homosocial discourse that marginalizes women.²⁶ But the dynamic of the gaze means that ²⁶ See among others Cholakian (1990); also Gaunt (1995: 135–47).

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something more than homosocial desire is at stake in the senhal Bel Vezer. If woman is man’s Other here, and woman the subject of the gaze, then it follows that man’s subjectivity derives from his wish to construe himself as the object of the Other’s gaze. The troubadour lyric is then a discourse in which only women can truly be the subject of the gaze, but in which they may also see only one thing (a man), and then only as he wishes to be seen. But when—as he inevitably will, regardless of whether he contemplates the domna in his lyric or a ‘real’ lady—a troubadour fails to see what he looks for in a lady’s eyes—which is a gaze directed at himself, focused on recognition—and sees instead an abyss of non-recognition and indifference, this is truly mortifying. The gaze must then—urgently and desperately— be located elsewhere, which is to say, nowhere, in a space that escapes and confounds gender by subsuming the feminine and the masculine. The senhals Bel Vezer and Bel Esgart perhaps therefore encapsulate perfectly the gaze’s troubling power. As Lacan put it ‘dans l’amour . . . Jamais tu ne me regardes là où je te vois’ (1990: 118: ‘in love . . . you never look at me from a place where I can see you’). In other words, in every love affair there is a concealed third point of reference to queer the pitch.

‘Issi fu Galehoz morz por Lancelot’: The Ultimate Sacrifice? The death of Lancelot’s devoted companion Galehaut ‘por Lancelot’ is controversial among scholars of the Prose Lancelot. Initially an enemy of Arthur, he is so taken by Lancelot when he first sees him that he abandons the war he is waging on Arthur’s kingdom to be Lancelot’s friend. This is unquestionably ‘love at first sight’ (Dover 1999: 129). It is Galehaut who brings Lancelot and Guenevere together, and the non- or pre-cyclic version of the Lancelot (c.1210) concludes with his death, which clearly gives it immense structural value.²⁷ Although, he was largely ignored by critics, for a long time in recent years Galehaut has been seen by some as a queer hero, whose homoerotic love for medieval literature’s ultimate matinee idol leads him inexorably ²⁷ On the relation between non- or pre-cyclic version, see Kennedy (1986), and for a briefer account Kennedy (2003). The two versions diverge only towards the end of the part of the narrative that concerns me here. I cite the text from the recent Lettres Gothiques editions, largely on grounds of accessibility. The first two volumes (1991 and 1993) make up the non-cyclic version and use Kennedy’s text (1980). Volumes iii–v (1998, 1999 and 2002) represent about two-thirds of the remaining cyclic text (c.1220). On the structural importance of Galehaut in the Lancelot, see particularly Markale (1985: 80–1), who stresses the political importance of Galehaut’s ‘relation amoureuse’ with Lancelot, since it leads to Galehaut making peace with Arthur.

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towards the ultimate sacrifice. But then, with equal vigour, his (and by implication Lancelot’s) reputation has been passionately defended: their relationship, it is suggested, needs to be read in the context of medieval codes of friendship, and to impose homoerotic impulses on either knight would be anachronistic.²⁸ While it may well be anachronistic to use terms like ‘gay’, ‘queer’, even ‘homoerotic’, to describe Galehaut and Lancelot’s relationship, in some senses subjecting either character to such an inquisition is to miss the point. In my view, it is crucial to bear three closely connected points in mind: first, Galehaut dies as a result of his love for Lancelot, which means, given its romance context, that his love needs to be read in the light of other instances of dying for love in romance;²⁹ secondly, that the same word in Old French can designate both love and friendship should not occlude the fact that in the Lancelot there is deliberate ambiguity in relation to Galehaut’s feelings for Lancelot;³⁰ thirdly, ²⁸ On Galehaut, see esp. Cohen (1999: 178–83); Delcorno Branca (1998: 225–38); Dover (1999); Frappier (1964); Godard (2003: 82–3); Griffin (2005: 131–6); Hyatte (1991), (1994: 102–21), and (1999); Johnson (2003: 48–61); Marchello-Nizia (1981: 973–9); Markale (1985: 76–82); Méla (1984: 326–8 and 352–3); Ménard (1995); Mieszkowksi (1995: 28–45); Rosenberg (2003); Roubaud (1986: 69–95). MarchelloNizia and Markale, whose studies predate gay or queer studies, read Galehaut and Lancelot’s liaison as indicative of homosexuality. Cohen, Godard, and Mieszkowksi read Galehaut as a gay or queer hero; Cohen’s account is particularly persuasive. Roubaud talks of his passionate and melancholic love for Lancelot and Ménard of his passionate friendship, but without commenting on sexuality. Hyatte and Dover both caution against anachronism, though Dover stresses that Galehaut and Lancelot do not love each other in the same way and finds the text ambiguous; Hyatte, on the other hand, concedes that their relation ‘borders on the homoerotic’ while nonetheless asserting unequivocally that their ‘nonsexual amistié/amor lacks the very essence of its erotic models’ (102). Hyatte (1999) repudiates any queer interpretation of Galehaut far more unequivocally than Hyatte (1994). Frappier’s earlier meticulous character study curiously feels the need to repudiate a charge of homosexuality against Galehaut (or as he puts it ‘une ombre d’impureté’), though none had at this stage been leveled. Rosenberg and Delcorno Branca offer more general surveys of Galehaut’s appearance in French and Italian texts. Johnson, Griffin, and Méla, like myself, implicitly read the text as deliberately ambiguous. ²⁹ See esp. Mieszkowksi (1995: 37): ‘no ordinary causes of death . . . divert attention from the meaning of his dying.’ Also Johnson (2003: 61): ‘After all, in a context where women such as Aude and Iseut did the dying for their lost loves, and where Guenevere does not die for the sake of Lancelot, what greater proof of Galehaut’s love is there, when, believing Lancelot dead, Galehaut dies of despair? Who loved Lancelot more?’ And Cohen (1999: 181): ‘Galehaut out-Lancelots Lancelot, whose every attempt to achieve immortality by dying for love is ingloriously botched.’ ³⁰ Compare Mosès (Lancelot 1991: 853): ‘Afin de prévenir toute interprétation stupide, précisons que le même mot désigne au XIIIe siècle l’amour et l’amitié’ (‘In order to head off any stupid interpretation, we should explain that the same word designates love and friendship in the thirteenth century’). But see Johnson (2003: 61), who takes Mosès to task for not seeing the deliberate ambiguity in this, and also Rosenberg (2003: 247) for some pertinent remarks on this point.

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Galehaut’s passionate love for Lancelot is by its nature unrequited, so the text is seeking less to impugn the hero’s sexuality than to set his love for Guenevere within the broader context of a general reflection on sexuality. In what follows, I wish first to give a general overview of Galehaut’s character and his interactions with Lancelot, but with a view to then considering how Galehaut’s love for the hero calls subject/object and gender relations into question, and how his presence and crucial agency at key moments in Lancelot and Guenevere’s love story (as well as Guenevere’s presence in Galehaut’s one-sided love affair with Lancelot) means that love is, as André Green might put it, always marked by la tiercité, by the necessity to every relation of a third term which is the agent of the relation (2002: 260–308). Indeed, I will suggest that it is the necessary but troublesome nature of this tiercité that makes Galehaut’s suppression from the narrative so necessary, but further, that it is no accident that at the end of the vast prose cycle, it is with Galehaut that Lancelot is buried, and not Guenevere (Mort 1964: §203), as if this suppression never entirely succeeds. Thus, I hope the structural parallels with the medieval Narcissism I have outlined in the first two sections of this chapter, and its potential for gender trouble, will be evident. When Galehaut first meets Lancelot, Galehaut is waging war on Arthur’s kingdom. He has been mentioned before as a remarkable knight: ‘Galehoz li proz, li preuzdom, li sires des Estranges Illes, li filz a la Bele Jaiande’ (Lancelot 1991: 192: ‘Galehaut the worthy, the noble man, the lord of the Strange Isles, the son of the fair Giantess’). When he does appear as a protagonist, he has already conquered thirty kingdoms and is threatening similarly to subjugate Arthur’s. Though not a giant, he is six inches taller than any other knight, a hunky model of chivalry, feared but revered by all.³¹ He first catches sight of Lancelot on the battle field. Not yet Guenevere’s lover (though already in love with her), Lancelot is fighting incognito—as he so often does—for Arthur in the battle against Galehaut’s invading forces. His prowess instantly transfixes Galehaut, and it is noteworthy that in this instance, Lancelot’s reputation has not preceded him. Galehaut’s first encounter with Lancelot is visual and it is, ³¹ For Cohen (1999: 178–83), Galehaut’s being the son of a giantess is an essential element of his queerness. However, his hybrid parentage has no real narrative weight in the Prose Lancelot, and is stressed far more in the Tristan en prose. His character in the Tristan clearly warrants further exploration.

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as already noted, love at first sight: Qant Galehoz vit ces mervoilles que il faisoit, si se merveilla coment li cors d’un chevalier pooit ce faire, et dit a soi meïsmes que il ne voudroit mie avoir conquises totes les terres cui sont desouz lo trone, par covant que uns si preudons fust morz par ses corpes. (Lancelot 1991: 826) (When Galehaut saw his wonderful deeds, he was amazed the body of one knight could achieve so much, and he said to himself that he would not want to have conquered all the lands in the world if it meant that such a worthy man as this should die through his fault.)

Galehaut orders his men not to harm the mystery knight, and from this point hostilities effectively cease, in that Galehaut’s main aim is to convince Lancelot to be his friend. There follows a remarkably touching scene. Galehaut has four beds made up in his bedchamber, the highest and most luxurious for Lancelot, a slightly lower one (by implication) for himself, and two lower still for the knights assigned to serve Lancelot. Having told Lancelot that he will sleep elsewhere so as not to disturb him, Galehaut leaves. Exhausted from battle, Lancelot quickly falls asleep, at which point: quant Galehoz sot que il estoit andormiz, si se coucha delez lui au plus coiement que il pot, et deus de ses chevaliers as autres deus; ne laianz n’ot plus de totes genz. La nuit dormi li chevaliers mout durement et tote nuit se plaignoit an son dormant. Et Galehoz l’ooit bien, car il ne dormoit gaires, ainz pensa tote nuit a retenir lo chevalier. Au matin se leva li chevaliers et oï messe. Et ja estoit Galehoz levez coiement, car il ne voloit que li chevaliers s’aparceüst. (Lancelot 1991: 840) (when Galehaut knew he was asleep, he lay down beside him as quietly as he could, with two of his knights in the other two [beds]; and there were no other people there. The knight [Lancelot] slept very heavily and all night lamented in his sleep. And Galehaut could hear this very clearly as he hardly slept at all, rather he wondered all night how he could keep the knight with him. In the morning, the knight got up and heard mass. And Galehaut had already quietly got up, as he did not want the knight to know.)

This passage has elicited scholarly controversy.³² Does delez lui (‘beside him’) indicate that Galehaut gets into the same bed as Lancelot, or is he rather ensuring a chaste distance between them by climbing into the fourth bed? Clearly speculation is pointless. What seems more significant is that a text that is usually so precise on such details (brevity is not its ³² See e.g. Dover (1999: 130); Markale (1985: 80–1); Hyatte (1994: 103–5); Johnson (2003: 57); Marchello-Nizia (1981: 975); Mieszkowksi (1995: 30–1).

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main virtue), should in fact be ambiguous here. It is then also striking that the structure of Lancelot’s relation with Galehaut should be so clearly delineated. Lancelot, oblivious to Galehaut’s presence, weeps all night because of his unrequited love for Guenevere; Galehaut seeks just to be close to him. There are no reciprocal gazes here. And there is an (absent) third party in their emotional communion. As Galehaut subsequently sues for peace at his new friend’s instigation, he enjoys chatting with his new acquaintances at Arthur’s court about Lancelot’s qualities, since all had admired his prowess on the battlefield, and Galehaut promises to bring him triumphantly to court. What, he asks Arthur, would he give to have this knight (who is still anonymous) as his companion? Arthur replies, with a degree of obtuse inverse prophesy, that he would share anything with him, except of course the Queen (Lancelot 1991: 862). However, Arthur is quickly overtrumped by Gauvain, known in the Middle Ages as a gallant womanizer. To the same question, he replies: ‘Se Dex . . . me doint la santé que ge desir, ge voudroie orendroit estre la plus bele damoisele do mont saine et haitiee, par covant que il m’amast sor tote rien, ausin bien com ge l’ameroie’ (Lancelot 1991: 862: ‘If God were to give me all the health I desire, I would want to be the fairest damsel in the world, in robust good health, as long as he loved me above all others, just as I would love him’). Guenevere then makes everyone laugh by pointing out that Gauvain has offered more to the anonymous knight than any lady, but Galehaut soberly remarks when the question is turned on him ‘j’an vodroie avoir tornee ma grant honor a honte, par si que ge fusse a tozjorz ausi seürs de lui comme ge voudroie que il fust de moi’ (862: ‘I would have all my considerable honour turned into shame, as long as I could be as sure of him forever as I would wish him to be of me’). As if the ambivalence of the bed-scene were not sufficient, Gauvain’s transgendered identification gives the proceedings an unmistakable erotic charge,³³ with Lancelot as the universal object of desire. Lancelot, of course, is already in love with the queen and she is as transfixed by his prowess as the others. Galehaut is now intuiting the reasons for his new friend’s continual weeping and starts to scheme to bring Lancelot and Guenevere together. When he tells Guenevere of his ³³ See Burns (1997: 119), who reads this scene as an instance of the ‘unmarked transvestism’ of knights in the Lancelot; and Méla (1984: 352), who finds ‘ces équivoques’ indicative of Lancelot’s ability to exceed worldly structures. Other scholars find the scene troubling, for example Hyatte (1994: 105 n. 18): ‘This odd declaration made in the context of courtly badinage surely does not reflect Gauvain’s desire.’

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plans, she expresses surprise that he is not happier at the prospect of seeing Lancelot at court: ‘Dame, fait il, si m’aïst Dex, ge nel verroie mies mains volentiers de vos.’ ‘C’est la chose, fait ele, par coi ge dot que vos ne faisiez greignor chiere. Et si est totjorz la costume que la dessirree chose est totjorz la plus veé, et si i a de tex genz qui a autrui font a enviz aaise de la chose que il plus aimment. Et neporqant n’aiez mies paor, que ja par moi ne perdroiz rien que vos i aiez aüe.’ (Lancelot 1991: 870) (‘Lady’, he says, ‘may God help me, I will be no less happy to see him than you.’ ‘But this is why’, she says’, ‘I am surprised that you are not happier. For it is customary that the desired object is also the most forbidden, and there are some people who allow others to enjoy the thing they most love only most reluctantly. But fear not, for you will not lose anything through me that you may have actually had.’)

The analytic precision of Guenevere’s words here is striking. First, she concedes that Galehaut’s desire is analogous to her own: she thus speaks to him as to a rival lover, but nonetheless as to one whom she perceives to be willing to sacrifice his love for his beloved’s happiness. Secondly, she is a Lacanian avant la lettre in seeing a link between desire and the inaccessibility of the object: indeed she construes Lancelot as Galehaut’s objet a, the lack that causes his desire. Thirdly, her final sentence suggests that in her view, the inaccessibility of the object to Galehaut is due to what we would call sexual orientation: she knows that Galehaut will not lose anything that he ever actually may have had or had a chance of having through her because she knows that his love for Lancelot will never be reciprocated, since he in fact loves her—a woman—and therefore in her view, by implication, could never love Galehaut. Throughout this portion of the text, Galehaut is increasingly a tormented figure. He wants to give Lancelot what he wants, but realizes that this can only have the effect of taking his beloved away from him. In an episode that is subsequently referred to in the cycle as l’accointement Galehaut (Galehaut’s ‘act of friendliness’), Galehaut brings the lovers together, orchestrating, indeed participating in their first kiss. The physical presence of Galehaut as a third party here is palpable both in the text, where it is stressed that the kiss takes place ‘devant Galehot’ (894), and in illustrations, in which Galehaut is either shown standing to one side of the couple, but taking hold of Lancelot to direct him towards Guenevere, or even more strikingly, when Galehaut has the lovers kiss across his lap.³⁴ ³⁴ For an example of the former see London British Library Additional 10293, fo. 78, for the latter the famous illustration in New York Pierpont Morgan 805, fo. 67. On these images, see Camille (1991: 162–5) and Stones (1995: 125–39).

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I shall return to the question of the presence of a third party in the heterosexual union, but to resume the narrative for the moment, Guenevere then reveals Lancelot’s name to Galehaut, but not before first gifting him to Galehaut, in a bizarre inversion of the accointement, but with overtones of a marriage ceremony, though with clear limitations: ‘Galehot, ge vos doign cest chevalier a tozjorz, sauf ce que j’ai aü avant’ (Lancelot 1991: 896: ‘Galehaut, I give you this knight forever, except for what I had first’). During the courtly interludes that follow, Galehaut acquires a lady friend, the Dame de Malehaut. But this is not a straightforwardly heterosexual relation, for she too was initially keen on Lancelot. She observes the first kiss and is quick to persuade Guenevere that the set-up will look less suspicious to the rest of the court if there are four rather than three of them. Not to put too fine a point on it, the Dame de Malehaut is a beard, allowing Guenevere to see Lancelot at will and Galehaut to spend his days with Lancelot.³⁵ Meanwhile, Lancelot and Galehaut take to sleeping in the same bed so Lancelot can spend the night emptying his heart to Galehaut, who says to Guenevere ‘Dame . . . si lo solacerai’ (Lancelot 1991: 898: ‘Lady, I will comfort him’). Unfortunately, this idyll is not destined to last. Lancelot and Galehaut leave Camelot to travel to Sorelois, one of Galehaut’s lands. Here Galehaut is tormented by dreams foretelling his death. His dreams are not difficult to interpret: he himself appears as a lion, Lancelot as a leopard (Lancelot 1993: 602–6). The dreams are interpreted more extensively in the cyclic version than in the non-cyclic version: here the leopard will ‘steal his heart’, as a result of which he will die, unless a serpent who is ‘roine des dames’ intervenes, which, we are told, is unlikely (Lancelot 1998: 128–30, also 144). Galehaut’s love-sickness is described at length by one of the clerks he has asked to interpret his dreams in terms heavily redolent of passionate, sexual love. He uses an abundance of Ovidian commonplaces: love is a prison, an illness that is painful yet sweet; it enters the heart through the eyes, which are described as a mirror; finally, love is likened to a hunt, though the distinction between the hunter and the hunted is uncertain (Lancelot: 1998: 120). As a conventional medieval description of sexual infatuation, this could not be clearer, right ³⁵ Some scholars take the presence of the Dame de Malehaut as evidence of Galehaut’s heterosexuality. See for instance Frappier (1964: 545): ‘Faut-il ajouter que sa liaison avec la Dame de Malehaut pourrait rassurer les plus soupçonneux?’ (‘Is it necessary to add that his liaison with the Lady of Malehaut should reassure even the most suspicious minds?’). But see Markale (1985: 82) on the ambiguity of the situation.

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down to the medical nature of the diagnosis of melancholia (see Méla 1984: 351 and Roubaud 1986: 82–6). But the context of Galehaut’s anxious dreams is his love for Lancelot, not his love for a woman. Love is the last of three possible explanations the clerk offers for the mortal pain Galehaut feels in his heart (Lancelot: 1998: 116), the other possibilities being sorrow and anger as a result of shame. There is a very lengthy discussion of what the figures in Galehaut’s dream represent (122–58), but even if the correct interpretation is not explicitly determined, there is no doubt that Galehaut’s love for Lancelot will be the death of him, in part at least because of Lancelot’s love for Guenevere. The cyclic version in fact arrives in a rather prolix manner at the same conclusion the pre-cyclic version reached more pithily: ‘Car vos amez, fait il, Lancelot plus que nul home, et vos en verroiz tel chose avenir dont vos avroiz si grant duel qu’il se covandra que vos en perdroiz la vie. Et lors morroiz par lui, que garantiz n’an poez estre.’ (Lancelot 1993: 606–8) (‘For you love Lancelot’, he said [the clerk interpreting the dream], ‘more than any other man and such things will happen to you because of this which will cause you great pain and on account of which you will lose your life. And thus you will die on his account, and nothing can protect you from this.’)

Lancelot, who is listening, is horrified, but Galehaut cannot escape his destiny. He is clearly ‘between two deaths’, sublime, and here he fittingly comforts Lancelot. Thus, this is not merely intense medieval male friendship, compagnonage, which is the term used for example to describe the relations of famous pairs of friends and companions in arms such as Roland and Oliver or Lancelot and Gauvain, but love—and a love that is marked, for Galehaut at least, as passionate and subliminally erotic. As many scholars have noted (though drawing different conclusions), the language and codes of fin’ amor are used to describe Galehaut’s love,³⁶ and its nature gets clearer and clearer as his death approaches. Thus, his desire for Lancelot is implicitly but repeatedly likened to Guenevere’s, as like her he faints when he thinks Lancelot is wounded or dead and, as if to ensure that readers do not miss the point, this even happens once in Guenevere’s presence, though significantly Galehaut faints before Guenevere (Lancelot 1998: 192). Furthermore, not only is his love repeatedly spoken about as being ³⁶ See Frappier (1964: 545); Hyatte (1991), (1994: 102–121), and (1999); Markale (1985: 80); Méla (1984: 351); Mieszkowksi (1995: 28).

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of the body as well as of the heart,³⁷ but most importantly Galehaut dies of grief when he believes Lancelot to be dead: ‘issi fu Galehoz morz por Lancelot’ are almost the last words of the non-cyclic version (Lancelot 1993: 682). Galehaut’s love for Lancelot is thus sacrificial. As Samuel N. Rosenberg puts it (2003: 246), his is ‘a tale of love and self-denial’. He gives up everything for him—something on which the text, and Galehaut himself, reflect repeatedly through speculation on all the conquests Galehaut might have made, had he not chanced to see Lancelot that day on the battlefield. This absolute renunciation clearly marks Galehaut as an ethical hero, whereas Lancelot and Guenevere of course conspicuously fail to die for each other. Galehaut’s love for Lancelot—to use Judith Butler’s terminology— pushes at the limits of intelligibility and legibility in relation to normative ideas of male friendship (Butler 1990: 16–17). And precisely because the symptoms of erotic love are so intelligible and legible here, this suggests the presence of a more transgressive and troublesome desire. A corollary of this—again following a Butlerian line of analysis—is that normative gendered identities are also troubled. Most obviously, as object of Galehaut’s desire, Lancelot is feminized. But Galehaut’s complete submission to what he perceives to be Lancelot’s desire, as well as his attraction to another man, are equally troublesome. Both knights are feminized by Galehaut’s passionate love for and total identification with Lancelot. Conversely, as E. Jane Burns (1996) has persuasively argued, Guenevere is masculinized throughout much of this part of the text, for instance, gifting Lancelot to Galehaut as in a marriage, and it is striking then that this homoerotic plot is interlaced with that of the so-called ‘false Guenevere’ episode, which also serves to trouble gendered identities, though not, of course, in the same way. In the ‘false Guenevere’ episode a woman who is in fact the queen’s half sister (in one version at least) fetches up at court and claims she is the true Guenevere, but was treacherously displaced by an impostor after her wedding night.³⁸ The ‘false Guenevere’ then succeeds in replacing the ‘true’ Guenevere at court for some years as Arthur becomes infatuated with her. This is why once Lancelot and Galehaut have left court to go to Sorelois, ³⁷ For just one example, see Lancelot (1993: 574), where Galehaut asks Lancelot, ‘Que ferai ge qui tot ai mis an vos et cuer et cors?’ Frappier (1964: 545) and Dover (1999) both stress the importance of the heart in the representation of Galehaut, as if this rendered his feelings more spiritual than corporeal, but the heart is usually mentioned alongside the body. ³⁸ For stimulating readings of the False Guenevere episode, see Burns (1996); Griffin (2005: 125–31); and Rockwell (1991).

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they have to stay away. The whole episode plays upon the medieval commonplace that is deployed so strikingly at the end of Marie de France’s Guigemar, when the hero fails to recognize his long-lost love: ‘Femmes se resemblent asez’ (1944: 779 ‘all woman look alike’). If the true and false Gueneveres do look uncannily alike as a result of their being half-sisters (in the cyclic version at least), Arthur’s inability to tell them apart nonetheless suggests that in the face of his worldly authority, women are interchangeable. Furthermore, the text seems ultimately to suggest that the ‘true’ Guenevere’s authenticity is proven above all by and in Lancelot’s love (since Lancelot is instrumental in her return to court and in the proof of her identity), so to some extent one could say that the ‘truth’ of her identity resides precisely in her own ‘falseness’. But this authentication in itself turns out to be troublesome, not only because of the questionable ethics of Lancelot’s love for Guenevere, but also because Lancelot and Guenevere are only able to escape Arthur’s wrath because Galehaut is willing to fund their life-style, and to offer them protection in Sorelois. Indeed, Galehaut, while on the one hand being one of the ‘true’ queen’s most outspoken defenders, enjoys the period of her disgrace, as it means he gets to spend more time with Lancelot. Ironically, la fausse roïne, as she is repeatedly called, turns out to be more loyal to Arthur than the ‘true’ queen, who is patently disloyal and whose fate is determined as much by the support of the man who loves the man she loves, as it is by the man she loves. The outcome is that Lancelot goes to court to attend upon the ‘true’ queen (who is of course false), returned to her rightful position. Galehaut dies, when it is falsely reported to him that Lancelot is dead. And in the pre-cyclic Lancelot, this is the end of the story. As Charles Méla has observed (1984: 351), Galehaut’s desire is Narcissistic. But the opaque Other (who may in fact be more similar than Other) to whom this subject looks does not reciprocate his gaze directly. This can be construed in two ways. First—and most obviously—if Galehaut’s passionate love is not reciprocated, it is equally important that Lancelot and Guenevere need Galehaut’s presence in order to kiss and effect their union, that he is, to use Méla’s formulation, the conjointure between them. Secondly, it follows from this that there is no clear ‘natural’ symmetry in the desire of Lancelot and Guenevere, or as Lacan would put it, ‘there is no sexual relation’; or to put this slightly differently again, to the extent that a (heterosexual) sexual relation is possible (and there is no doubt in my mind that this was what Lacan meant by a sexual relation) it depends here on the presence of a supplementary third that effectively queers desire, and tellingly in some of the most densely illustrated

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Figure 1 Lancelot, Guenevere, and Galehaut in the queen’s chamber. British Library Add. MS 10293, fo. 156. By permission of the British Library.

manuscripts of the Prose Lancelot, Lancelot and Guenevere are often shown in the company of Galehaut, sometimes in erotically charged locations, such as the queen’s chambre (see Figure 1). The presence of this supplementary third also resonates with Lacan’s account of love and Narcissism as central to the psychoanalytic notion of transference (2001b: 29–202). As Moustafa Safouan succinctly explains, whereas traditionally love is defined ‘comme un rapport dual qui a pour fin la saisie de l’essence du beau. Ici nous avons affaire à une triplicité inhérente à la relation du sujet parlant au symbolique en tant qu’il est essentiellement distinct de l’imaginaire et de sa capture’ (2001: 160: ‘as a two-way relation the aim of which is the capture of the beautiful. Here

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we are dealing with an inherent tripling of the relation of the speaking subject to the symbolic in that it is essentially distinct from the imaginary and from its capture’). If analysis and love (for Lacan) are both about knowledge of the Other (and of the Other’s desire) and of the object, the obfuscating play of the imaginary and the symbolic in our universal Narcissism that necessarily divides l’objet du manque from l’objet de satisfaction, as André Green puts it (1983: 31–79), decentres the subject and forces him or her to look to a third party—le sujet supposé savoir (‘the subject supposed to know’) in Lacanese—for confirmation of the knowledge that eludes him. Galehaut’s sacrifice means he is willing to be le sujet supposé savoir for Lancelot, the one who knows his desire. Guenevere also knows, but is not willing to make the same sacrifice (for Galehaut). Ending the story with Galehaut’s death (as is the case with the pre-cyclic version) subverts the impasse (or impossibility) of the sexual relation by disposing of the troublesome supplementary third and suggesting that the sexual relation—the perfect union of two lovers—is possible after all. As Charles Méla puts it, ‘La tragédie de Galehaut libère . . . le roman d’une hypothèque narcissique’ (1984: 353: ‘Galehaut’s tragedy liberates the romance from being mortgaged to Narcissism’). But the death of Galehaut nonetheless potentially at least queers the narrative by creating an implicit comparison between Guenevere and Galehaut, the latter being willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, while the former—weak woman that she is—merely gets to sleep with Lancelot (see Johnson 2003: 61). And even if—in the cyclic text—we are then treated to several thousand more pages of Lancelot and Guenevere’s sexual relation, the impasse sexuelle never quite goes away, for Galehaut’s memory haunts the text,³⁹ and ultimately Lancelot is buried with Galehaut (see Mort 1964: § 203), who thus gets the better of Guenevere in the end, morally and physically, in that he gets to lie with Lancelot for eternity.⁴⁰ ³⁹ For instance, when Lancelot first learns of Galehaut’s death from Guenevere as they are in the throes of passion during their night together in the Charrette episode: ‘Et la li dist elle la mort de Gallehout, car encore n’en savoit il rien, si en eust fait assés grant deul, mais li lieus n’i estoit pas’ (Lancelot 1999: 206: ‘And there she told him about Galehaut’s death, for he knew as yet nothing of this, and he would have been very upset, only this was not the place’). One possible interpretation of this episode is that Guenevere is testing Lancelot, to see how he will react to Galehaut’s demise; the pluperfect subjunctive used in lieu of the perfect conditional suggests that he, on the other hand, simply fails to take the news in. From Lancelot’s perspective, the sexual relation that is in progress does not seem able to admit of Galehaut’s absence. ⁴⁰ See Greene (2002b: 386–9), who talks about the ‘homosexualité latente’ of the dénouement and argues it marks sublimation of sexual drives.

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The sexual politics of this are frankly dubious. The true Guenevere— we might infer—does not have the bottle to do what a good medieval heroine should do and die for her love; she merely betrays her husband. The false Guenevere, on the other hand, falls ill with a ghastly rotting disease and seems therefore to have the true Guenevere’s immorality written out on her body. This is a text that seems to have scant interest in the ethics of women’s desire, even if the practicalities receive considerable attention (as we saw in Guenevere’s exchanges with Galehaut). On the other hand, if Lancelot and Galehaut are, as I have suggested, feminized here, masculinity and the dynamics of masculine desire are scarcely untroubled. The very presence of the third party effectively queers the sexual relation, which is no longer symmetrical or reciprocal, while the gender and indeed the nature of the object—its concrete reality—is, to say the least, ambiguous. In Chapter 5, I argued that in many texts only women seem capable of committing the truly ethical act, but this is then viewed as potentially dangerous. Possibly this is not only because women therefore die heroically, but also because man thereby implicitly becomes the object, or more accurately, the object is either masculine or a feminized man. True martyrs to love, those who die purely because of their love always seem to make gender trouble. The result, in the Lancelot, is that the hero, the most emblematic of medieval lovers, ends up lying for eternity not beside his lady, but rather beside the man who had taken him for his own Narcissistic image.

Coda: Kahedin One man who does apparently die for love for a woman in romance is Kahedin in the Tristan en prose.⁴¹ His life becomes so blighted by the knowledge that Iseult will never love him in return that he gives up eating and drinking, growing thinner day by day (1987–97: i, §159). There is no medicine for what ails him (§160) so he decides to compose one last poem for Iseult to send to her after his death. His covering letter is interestingly pointed: ‘Diex voelle que ma dame Yseut vive encore tant qu’ele sace por soi meïsmes en com grant dolour chil fine sa vie ki fine en destrece d’amours’ (§ 161: ‘May God grant that my lady Iseult live long enough to know for herself in what great pain one ends one’s life when it ⁴¹ For general character studies, see Baumgartner (1970), (1975: 243–5), and (1990: 158–9); also Toury (1990). Baumgartner (1970: 78) notes that he is the only character in the Tristan en prose to die for love and comments on the virulence of his final curse of Iseult; subsequently, she describes his death as that of the exemplary lyric poet (1990: 159).

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ends in distress because of love’). The poem he sends Iseult suggests he construes both love and death as a gift: D’Amours truis je trop dur le don! Et puis que a lui m’abandon Pour bien aimer, mal guerredon Me rent. N’i truis autre pardon. (§ 161, 93–6) (I find Love too cruel a gift! And since I abandon myself to it, it gives me a wicked reward for loving well. I find no other pardon.) Chest brief ki ma mort vous presente Vous mante. Je n’ai mais nule entente Fors a mort. Ja Diex ne consente Que vostre gens cors tel mal sente. (§ 161, 137–40) (I send you this letter which presents my death to you. My only intention now is to die. May God not allow your noble body to feel such pain.)

It could not be clearer that, for Kahedin, the gift of love and the gift of death are part of an economy of exchange. This is particularly apparent in his use of the terms guerredon, pardon and presente. Furthermore, in the light of the final words of his covering letter, where he hopes that Iseult will one day know from personal experience what he has felt, the final words of his lai could almost be ironic. This is not an ethical gift, but a bid for revenge.

Conclusion Let me begin this conclusion by returning to the beginnings of the troubadour tradition: i

ii

iii

iv

Molt jauzens, mi prenc en amar un joi don plus mi vueill aizir; e pos en joi vueill revertir, ben dei, si puesc, al meils anar, qu’als meils or n’an, estiers cujar, c’om puesca vezer ni auzir. Eu, so sabetz, no.m dei gabar ni de grans laus no.m sai formir; mas si anc negus jois poc florir, aquest deu sobre totz granar e part los autres esmerar, si cum sol brus jorns eslcarzir. Anc mais no poc hom faissonar cors, en voler ni en dezir ni en pensar ni en consir; aitals jois non pot par trobar, e qui be.l volria lauzar d’un an no.i poiri’ avenir. Totz jois li deu humeliar e tot’ autr’ amors obezir, midons, per son bel acuillir e per son douset esgar: e deu hom mai cent tans durar qui.l joi de s’amor pot sazir.

v

Per son joi pot malaus sanar, e per sa ira sas morir, e savis hom enfolezir, e belhs hom sa beutat mudar, e.l plus cortes vilaneiar, e.l totz vilas encortezir.

vi

Pus hom gensor no.n pot trobar, ni huelhs vezer, ni boca dir,

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Conclusion a mos obs la vueill retenir, per lo cor dedins refrescar e per la carn renovelar, que no puesca envellezir.

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Si.m vol midons s’amor donar, pres soi del penr’ e del grazir e del celar e del blandir e de sos plazers dir e far e de son pretz tener en car e de son laus enavantir.

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Ren per autrui non l’aus mandar, tal paor ai c’ades s’azir; ni ieu mezeis, tan tem faillir, 45 non l’aus m’amor fort asemblar. Mas ela.m deu mon meils triar, pos sap c’ab lieis ai a guerir. (Guilhem IX 1973: IX) (Very joyfully, I take a joy in love from which I wish to take further comfort; and since I wish to return to joy, I must, if I can, go towards the good, for now I do go towards the best, without delusion, that can be seen or heard. I, mark my words, should not boast, nor can I lavish extravagant praise on myself; but if ever any joy was to flourish, this one should bear fruit and refine itself before all others, just as a dull day may grow bright. No man has ever fashioned such a being, in his wishes, desires, thoughts or imagination; such a joy is peerless, and if you wanted to praise it sufficiently, you could not do so in a year. All joy should submit to my lady, and all other love should obey her, because of her fair welcome and sweet gaze: and the man who can obtain the joy from her love should last a hundred times longer. Through her joy a sick man may be cured, and through her ire a healthy man may die, and a wise man sent mad, and a handsome man made ugly, and the most courtly man may be made into a peasant and the most vile courtly. Since a more noble lady cannot be found, or seen, or spoken of, I wish to retain her for myself to rejuvenate my heart inside and refresh my flesh so that it might never grow old. If my lady wishes to give me her love, I am ready to take it and be grateful and conceal this, and yet speak of it graciously, and say and do whatever she pleases and cherish her reputation and sing her praises. I do not dare send anything to her through another, so fearful am I that this displease her; nor do I dare declare openly my love to her myself, so much do I fear failing in this. But she should see the best in me, since I know that in her lies my salvation.)

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This lyric by the first troubadour, Guilhem IX (1071–1126), cannot be precisely dated, but it was probably composed during the first few decades of the twelfth century, a little before Jaufre Rudel composed ‘Lanquan li jorn’ and sang of his amor de lonh. Historical sources and several of Guilhem’s own lyrics suggest he was an educated, yet tempestuous man, a larger-than-life figure with a ribald sense of humour, not to mention a strong appetite for wine, women, and song.¹ Guilhem was thus a typical early twelfth-century ruler, if somewhat more powerful than many others, and he was not averse to confrontation as a means of imposing his authority on those around him—his subjects, women, the Church, even his notional overlord, the King of France. This makes the language of subjection and sacrifice he uses in some of his lyrics all the more startling. Guilhem does not talk explicitly of dying for love (as many subsequent troubadours do), but he does couch his love songs in the language of subjection and self-sacrifice. As we see in stanza IV, his lady commands humility and obedience. Her desire is paramount, and the poetic subject becomes the object of his lady’s desire, as much as she is the object of his. It is this process of subjection that Guilhem calls love (20 and 24), in which spiritual improvement is to be found. The word meils, used three times at the beginning and end of this poem (4, 5, and 47), almost as a kind of framing device, is difficult to translate, but one possible rendering is certainly ‘the Good’. Love, then, is the source of ‘the Good’. It has transformative power (stanza V) and it is the source of salvation (47). The healing powers attributed to love (25, 48), like the metaphors used to designate the flourishing, improvement and enlightenment it can produce, suggest strong parallels with sacred writing about the power of prayer, about the refinement of the human soul, and about the salvation that only God can provide.² The first two elements of the antitheses that constitute the description of love’s transformative power in stanza V suggest that an important element in the poetic subject’s subjection to his lady is his willingness to give up his life to/for her. He loves her—literally—with his life and thus with his death. In giving himself to his lady, he also receives something in return: her love, which is described as a gift in stanza VII. ¹ For a brief account of Guilhem’s life and reputation, see most recently Lazzerini (2001: 43–6). On Guilhem’s education and cultural milieu see Bond (1995: 105–111). ² Numerous examples could be cited, of course, but see Clemence of Barking (1964: lines 1162–96), which are an oration by Catherine in which, like Guilhem, she uses antithesis extensively, talks of salvation using verbs cognate to those used by Guilhem, and deploys metaphors of flourishing.

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Giving transforms itself into taking here. The lover gives himself, but he takes his lady’s love in return. What the lady takes from him is his sovereignty, but in return, her love confirms his status as a subject, which is thereby grounded in renunciation and ascesis, the cornerstones of ethics in Christian tradition. Love, then, however altruistic it might seem, turns out to be Narcissistic, in that its function seems to be to produce, to ensure and to confirm the self ’s integrity, not simply to reach out towards the other. This, in turn, is ethically questionable, but the gesture of giving oneself nonetheless enables the subject to claim (albeit implicitly) his position as ethical. The song too is a kind of gift, in that Guilhem speaks of sending it to his lady (42), even if he does not dare do so, and even if it comprises a risk of failure (45), which may be understood both in pragmatic and ethical terms. But the song’s discourse is inherently self-reflexive as we see if we consider line 31 and the force of the verb trobar, which can mean ‘to find’, but also ‘to compose’: the poet is saying that no one could find another woman like his lady, but also that no other poet could ‘compose’ one like her. Guilhem thus seems aware of the paradox inherent in much courtly discourse: he is not so much talking about an encounter with a real woman as his engagement with a textual construct of his own fabrication. As if to underline this, the power of speech figures in the very next line. The ethical problems here are twofold. First, love and sexual desire become the site of an ethical code of conduct involving ascesis, renunciation and sacrifice, postures which would normally be associated with religion. Secondly, what seems to be a desire to encounter difference/otherness is, in fact, when the surface is scratched, a means of contemplating the self. If lyrics such as this anchor ethical discourse in something other than God, the nature of the engagement with the Other as constituted by the lady remains open to question, and Guilhem’s adoption of religious imagery is a knowing and self-conscious strategy used simultaneously to elevate love to a spiritual level while also inviting debate about the probity of doing so, since the powers he attributes to his lady are the powers usually attributed to God. The logical outcome of the model of sacrificial desire seen here in embryonic form is displayed most clearly in the Tristan tradition, where (in some versions at least) the lovers embrace a Godless death with thoughts only for each other and for their eternal union in death, or in eaten heart stories, where the lovers’ union is figured in eucharistic terms, and where acts that are incontrovertibly sinful within a Christian framework are viewed as redemptive and positively valued, leading to a form of profane

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sanctity. Of course, when lovers overtly make love into a religion, they are mocked and implicitly criticized for this, as we saw with Flamenca and, more obliquely, with Cligès: nowhere in medieval literature is there evidence for a mentality that approaches the atheist, or the ‘secular’ as an absolute and polar opposite of the sacred, nor should we expect to find it. But numerous texts represent lovers who are willing to die martyrs to love and accord this redemptive value. This establishes a discursive space in which subjects may become ethical subjects without recourse to God, using an ethical system that parallels and mimics religion, incorporating religious elements, but remaining nonetheless sharply distinct, in other words a secular ethics of desire. I would like to draw a number of conclusions at this stage. First, the model of sacrificial desire I have examined in this book is developed in an identifiable corpus of texts that was to prove crucial for the evolution of Western European thinking about love. As I noted in my Introduction, the texts I discuss in this book are bound together in an intricate web of citation and imitation. These texts were clearly associated with each other for medieval writers, readers and transmitters, and a large part of their ideological common ground derives from their interest in and association of love and death. The success and trajectory of this corpus of texts thus indicates a conscious engagement on the part of medieval culture with sacrificial desire. Secondly, it needs to be remembered that although this sacrificial scheme gestures towards the Real, it is nonetheless very much anchored in the Symbolic, indeed, it is mediated through the very stuff of the Symbolic, that is, language, and in particular, poetic language: the stake that some sacrificial subjects claim in poetry thus points clearly to the broad conclusion that the model of sacrificial desire that was to prove so successful in literature is, in fact, not sacrificial at all, but rather what Lacan called a lure. A representation of sacrifice is deployed in order to engender a subjectivity grounded in displays of renunciation and ascesis that appear to give up everything, while in fact holding on to an identity grounded in ethical sacrifice, to a fantasy of sacrifice that serves as a screen for the subject’s sovereignty. In other words, the courtly lover speaks of death in order to live, and as we saw in Chapter 2, the lyric subject in particular is potentially empowered by his ostensible abasement before a sovereign lady. As in Lacan and Bataille’s thinking, fiction thus grounds identity in medieval texts. But whereas modern theory often (problematically in my view) stands outside or above the sacrificial subject, offering a diagnosis of his or her self-delusion, medieval literature frequently

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represents subjects (whether these be characters or implied readers) as having a more knowing or critical view of the processes of sacrificial desire, which may be treated with ironic distance, or troubled in other ways. Medieval literature often has a strong intellectual, indeed theoretical, impulse that is in some ways analogous to that of the theoretical writing that has informed this book; it certainly shares an interest in some of the same paradigms. But it also has a far more marked sense of humour about itself, which, arguably perhaps, makes it more reflective. It certainly seems well aware of what Slavoj Zizek has called the gentrification of sacrifice in Western European culture (1989: 116), which is the tendency to internalize models of sacrifice that are originally not only religious, but also visceral, and to imitate them in non-religious, non-visceral ways. The potential self-deception this entails (despite the humour and irony with which sacrificial models may be treated) means that what Teresa Brennan called ‘the era of the ego’ (see Chapter 1) dates back further than the early modern period, to the Middle Ages. Thirdly, if the serious impulse of love’s martyrdom may be troubled through irony and intertextual play, women and queers may sometimes represent a more radical challenge to the normative power of sacrificial desire. On one level, as we saw in Chapter 2, women have an ethical system imposed upon them in troubadour lyric, one which, in romance, requires them to make the supreme sacrifice for love, while men often merely talk about it. Queer desires, on the other hand, rarely seem to register in many courtly texts. But, in dying in inappropriate or troublesome ways, some women and queers may uncover the insidious lure of a symbolic order in which men bleat endlessly about their willingness to die for love while walking all over women. Like Antigone, some women and queers become ethically heroic by staying true to their desire, traversing the fantasy, triumphantly challenging the symbolic order by refusing to give up on their desire, however inappropriate this may seem. They may ostensibly be marginalized from the narrative for this (as, for example, is the case with the Damoisele d’Escalot or Galehaut), but the impact they have is nonetheless immense. The sacrificial desires of the Narcissistic men I discussed in Chapter 6, in particular, trouble overtly some of the apparently straightforward distinctions that structure subjectivity: masculine/feminine, heterosexuality/homosexuality, subject/object. An index of the influence of the models of sacrificial desire and love’s martyrdom that I have examined in this book, but also of its persistently troublesome nature, is their legacy after the High Middle Ages. Throughout the later Middle Agess, readers appear to have an undiminished appetite for

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texts about Tristan and Iseult, the Chastelaine de Vergy, or the eaten heart, and for lyrics using the discourse of sacrificial desire. New texts about love and death are also produced, such as Alain Chartier’s La Belle Dame sans Merci (1424). Beyond the Middle Ages, the legacy of the Tristan story is of course well known, particularly in the nineteenth century, but the branch of the medieval love-death tradition represented by the Chastelaine de Vergy and the eaten heart stories is if anything more important in the centuries before 1900. Numerous short stories, operas and plays continually reenact variations on the stories of the Chastelaine de Vergy and the Castelain de Couci, sometimes conflating the two plots, and these stories resurface continually in contexts that can only be described as mainstream.³ Thus in the early modern period, Nouvelle 70 of Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron (completed before 1549) is a reworking of the Chastelaine de Vergy, while one of Jean-Pierre Camus’s Spectacles d’horreur (1630) is called simply ‘Le Cœur mangé’. If some changes to the inherited plots seem to clarify elements that are ambiguous or obscure in the medieval poems, the most striking changes serve to Christianize the stories. Thus, if secrecy remains at the core of the plot in Nouvelle 70, ‘Madame du Vergy’ is rendered more respectable by virtue of her being a widow for some seven years, while her virtue and chastity are constantly stressed. At the end of the story, the Duke founds an abbey in which he has not only his wife, but also his niece and the knight buried, these last two in a sumptuous shared tomb reminiscent of Tristan and Iseult’s. More importantly, he returns from a successful bout of Crusading to pass his duchy onto his son ‘et se alla rendre religieux en l’abbaye où estoit enterrée sa femme et les deux amans. Et là passa sa vieillesse heureusement avecques Dieu’ (Marguerite de Navarre 1999: 497: ‘and then entered the religious life in the abbey where his wife was buried, and the two lovers. There he spent his old age happily with God’). In ‘Le Cœur mangé’, the lovers’ relations are similarly represented as chaste. Using a scenario subsequently made familiar by Molière’s L’Ecole des femmes, Camus has his youthful, innocent and devout heroine, Crisèle, married by her parents to a rich old man, Rogat, despite her being in love with the similarly youthful Memnon. When mortally wounded while at war in the Low Countries, where he has gone to try virtuously to forget his frustrated love, Memnon ‘désira en mourant que son cœur fût ³ For details, see di Maio (1996), who also reproduces the libretti of several operas, and Doueihi (1997), though his survey is less exhaustive.

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porté au tombeau de ses ancêtres, suppliant Crisèsle par une lettre qu’il dicta, de faire prier Dieu pour lui, et d’aimer encore après sa mort ce pauvre cœur, qui durant sa vie n’avait aimé qu’elle’ (Camus 1995: 85–86: ‘desired while dying that his heart should be borne to the tomb of his ancestors, begging Crisèle in a letter that he dictated to have prayers said for him, and to love his poor heart after his death, given it had loved only her in life’). The gift of the heart thus becomes as much a sign of Memnon’s fidelity to dynastic allegiance as it does of his love for Crisèle, who has the heart placed in a silver casket, then placed in a black marble tomb in church. Rogat, however, becomes jealous since Crisèle ‘fort souvent . . . faisait offrir à Dieu des sacrifices pour son repos, où elle assistait avec beaucoup de dévotion, arrosant ce tombeau d’un flux continuel de larmes’ (86: ‘often made sacrifices to God for his eternal rest, attending [these services] most devoutly, wetting the tomb with a constant flood of tears’). Rogat therefore has the heart stolen, then fed to his unsuspecting wife, telling her shortly thereafter that she need no longer visit the tomb so frequently since ‘elle portait ce tombeau par tout son propre estomac’ (87: ‘she carried this tomb every where in her own stomach’). A relation of Memnon challenges Rogat to a duel, and released from the clutches of this dastardly old man, ‘elle se jeta dans un cloître où elle acheva sa vie en pleurant ses fautes et nourissant toujours en son âme le souvenir de la cruauté de ses parents et de l’amitié de Memnon’ (87: ‘she entered a convent where she ended her days weeping for her sins and cultivating in her soul the memory of her parents’ cruelty and of Memnon’s friendship’). Thus, whereas in the Chastelaine de Vergy it is stipulated that the Duke ‘ala sanz retorner’ (945: ‘went without returning’) to the Holy Land, indeed becoming a Templar (946), his return to an abbey of his own foundation in Nouvelle 70 of the Heptaméron gives the entire narrative a far more penitential flavour. Similarly, in ‘Le Cœur mangé’, not only are the lovers made less culpable by virtue of their chastity and allegiance to values other than love, but also Crisèle’s taking the veil reworks the heroine of medieval eaten heart stories as a devout Christian woman rather than as a martyr to love. The changes these early modern writers make to medieval texts they undoubtedly knew (whether in their thirteenth-century versions or in later medieval adaptations) can obviously be attributed to the heady religious climate of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.⁴ But at the same time, the inscription of these stories into an overtly Christian ideological framework (which nonetheless perhaps never ⁴ Modern editors of both texts assume direct knowledge of medieval sources, see Marguerite de Navarre (1999: 784) and Camus (1995: 81).

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entirely recuperates them) is implicit recognition of the scurrilous and risky nature of the way love usurps the redemptive power of religion in the medieval narratives. Subsequent writers recognize the power of these stories more overtly. The Marquis de Sade, for instance, incorporates a version of the eaten heart story into La Nouvelle Justine (written 1797). This occurs in the story within a story that is ‘L’histoire de Jérôme’ (Sade 1995: 703–97), told in the first person as a parodic confession in the Romantic mode. During the long catalogue of his violent sexual misdemeanours, and while on the run in Italy, Jérôme encounters a young woman called Héloïse (747–8), whose name at once gives the episode a distinctly medieval flavour. Having raped Héloïse in a variety of ways as she is draped over the corpse of her lover, whom he has just murdered (750–2), Jérôme performs analingus on the corpse, then sodomy (752). Still not satisfied, he torments Héloïse with thorny sticks so that her blood runs into that of her dead lover’s, before staging what seems to represent the pinnacle of sexual attainment: Rassassié de cette barbarie, j’en invente de nouvelles: je la force à sucer les plaies d’Alberoni. La voyant m’obéir avec une sorte de délicatesse, j’arrache des épines, et l’en frotte sur les parties les plus délicates; j’en introduis dans son vagin, je lui en déchire les tétons. J’incise enfin le cadavre du jeune homme; j’en extirpe le cœur, pour en barbouiller le visage de ma victime; je la contrains à en mordre quelques parcelles. Je n’en pouvais plus; et le fier Jérôme, qui venait de faire la loi à deux individus, la recevait en ce moment de son vit: on ne banda jamais de cette violence-là. Pressé du besoin de perdre mon foutre, j’oblige ma victime à prendre dans la bouche le vit de son amant, et je l’encule en cet état. J’avais un poignard à la main; je lui réservais la mort à l’instant de ma décharge . . . elle approche: je fais devancer mes coups: ce n’est qu’avec lenteur que je veux lui faire recevoir le dernier. Je caresse en attendant, avec délices, la voluptueuse idée de mêler aux divins élans de ma décharge les derniers soupirs de celle que je fous. ‘Elle va sentir’, pensé-je en la limant à tour de reins, ‘elle va éprouver les plus cruels moments de l’homme, lorque j’en goûterai les plus doux.’ Le délire s’empare de mes sens; je la saisis par les cheveux, d’une main, et de l’autre je lui plonge, à quinze reprises différentes, un poignard dans le sein, dans le bas-ventre, et dans le cœur. Elle expire, et mon foutre n’est pas encore répandu. Ce fut alors, mes amis, que j’éprouvai bien de quel merveilleux effet est d’égorger l’objet qu’on fout. L’anus de ma victime se resserrait, se comprimait, en raison de la violence des coups que je lui appuyais; et lorsque je perçais le cœur, la compression fut si vive, que mon vit en fut déchiré. Ô délicieuse jouissance! (752–3) (Having had my fill with this barbaric act, I invent some new ones: I force her to suck Alberoni’s wounds. Seeing her obey me with a kind of delicacy, I tear off some thorns and rub them on the most delicate parts of her body; I insert some

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into her vagina, rip her nipples to shreds with them. Finally, I cut open the young man’s body and extract the heart, smearing her face with it and forcing her to eat some bits. I couldn’t hold back any longer: bold Jérôme, who had just laid down the law to two individuals, was now entirely subject to the law dictated by his own cock: this was the most violently stiff hard-on ever. Completely in thrall to my need to come, I make my victim take her lover’s cock in her mouth, then I fuck her arse. I had a dagger in one hand: I was holding her death back for the moment I came . . . I am almost there so I slow down a little: I want her to receive the last blow only slowly. As I tarry, I caress rapturously the voluptuous idea of mingling the divine outbursts of my ejaculation with the last gasps of the woman I am fucking. ‘She is going to feel’, I thought while drilling her with my thrusting hips, ‘she is going to feel man’s most intense cruelty, while I feel man’s most intense pleasure’. My senses are seized by delirium; I grab her hair with one hand, and with the other, I plunge a dagger, with fifteen different blows, into her breast, her stomach and her heart. She is expiring, and still I have not come. It was at that moment, my friends, that I realized the full effect of slitting the throat of the object one is fucking. My victim’s anus was contracting, tightening as a result of the blows I was inflicting upon her; and, just as I punctured her heart, the contraction was so intense, that my cock was ripped to shreds. Oh wondrous enjoyment!)

After a few moments rest, Jérôme still has the energy to sodomize Héloïse’s corpse, but this perfunctory act is only performed out of a desire to treat her equitably: he had, after all, sodomized her lover’s corpse too. The high point of jouissance in Jérôme’s story, possibly in the whole of La Nouvelle Justine (in which instances of jouissance are hardly lacking), is the violent orgasm achieved—note his own cock is déchiré—as he sodomizes, but also pierces the heart of, the woman whom he has just forced to eat her lover’s heart, the lover he murdered and whose corpse he has just sodomized. This is a startlingly original take on the eaten heart story, with Jérôme playing the role of the husband, and focusing on his violent sexual urges, directed as much at the hero as well as the heroine, while completely disregarding the perspectives of the lovers. The demetaphorization of the heart is taken a stage further than in medieval texts as Héloïse is forced to eat her lover’s heart directly from his body, and as if to underline that the heart is no longer a partial object, she does not get even to ingest it all, but rather only quelques parcelles. Tellingly, the moment when Jérôme forces the heroine to eat bits of her lover’s heart produces the most ‘violent’ erection ever achieved. The act, which unlike the parallel moment in medieval eaten heart stories really is an instance of force-feeding, thus represents an unbearably intense, irresistible desire on his part. His erection both results from his laying down the law to the lovers, yet also becomes the law in and of itself, the law as such. Obeying the law with

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obsessive and tenacious fidelity, interestingly piercing the heroine’s heart as well as forcing her to consume her lover’s, leads to the most intense jouissance imaginable, which explicitly conflates intense evil (les plus cruels moments), with love (les plus doux). It is easy to see why Lacan found Sade compelling. Furthermore, the fantasmic jouissance Jérôme attains here is not necessarily just his (however offensive this makes his narrative), since the contraction of Héloïse’s anus is described as vive, and her spasms consume him, on some level, as much as his blows annihilate her. Indeed, his fantasy is of an orgasm so intense that it would at one and the same time be totally vital, yet totally destructive, leading to the annihilation of the object and the consumption of the subject. Sade has stripped the eaten heart story of any veneer of Christianity, paring it down to visceral animal urges. It is not clear whether he knew medieval versions of the story.⁵ Stendhal, on the other hand, clearly did know medieval versions, since he included in De l’Amour (1822) an accurate and good translation of one version of the Guillem de Cabestanh razo that narrates the eaten heart story (1965: 191–6). But by far the more interesting use of the story comes in Le Rouge et le Noir (1830), when Madame de Rênal is torturing herself over her adulterous relations with Julien: Elle revenait du village. Elle était allée entendre la messe dans l’église de Vergy. Une tradition fort incertaine aux yeux du froid philosophe, mais à laquelle elle ajoutait foi, prétend que la petite église dont on se sert aujourd’hui était la chapelle du château du sire de Vergy. Cette idée obséda madame de Rênal tout le temps qu’elle comptait passer à prier dans cette église. Elle se figurait sans cesse son mari tuant Julien à la chasse, comme par accident, et ensuite le soir lui faisant manger son cœur. (Stendhal 1958: 133) (She returned from the village. She had been to mass in the church at Vergy. According to a tradition which may be considered of dubious authenticity by the more dispassionate thinker, but which she believed entirely, the little church one uses today was once the Chapel of the Lord of Vergy. This idea obsessed Madame de Rênal the entire time she spent ostensibly praying in this church. She constantly imagined her husband killing Julien while hunting, as if by accident, then the same evening having her eat his heart.)

Stendhal alludes here to the conflation of the plots of the Chastelaine de Vergy and the Castelain de Couci that was well known in the later medieval, early modern and modern periods, and we seem to return to the reading of the scenario I was arguing for in Chapter 3, with the ⁵ See the note in Sade (1995: 1249–50).

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husband’s apparent brutality representing an acting out of the heroine’s subliminal desire: madame de Rênal is obsessed by the parallels she sees between her own situation and that of the heroine of the eaten heart stories, and her imagination dwells on the spectacle of her consuming her lover’s heart, which seems to represent for her the pinnacle of passionate romantic love. Compared to Sade, religious imagery has been restored to the story by Stendhal (madame de Rênal’s fantasies are triggered in church), but not with a view to reproducing the overt Christianization of the story we saw in the early modern period, but rather to restoring the dangerous ambivalence of the medieval texts. Indeed, Stendhal obviously responds to the medieval association of love and death: it will be remembered that the novel concludes with Mathilde, Julien’s second lover, bearing his head away with her after his execution to enact an extravagantly staged tragic burial. On the other hand ‘Madame de Rênal fut fidèle à sa promesse. Elle ne chercha en aucune manière à attenter à sa vie; mais trois jours après la mort de Julien, elle mourut en embrassant ses enfants’ (512: ‘Madame de Rênal was true to her word. She did not in any way seek to take her own life; but three days after Julien’s death, she died while kissing her children’). Her spontaneous death from grief mimics that of medieval heroines, her predecessors. Le Rouge et le Noir is a supremely ironic novel, but in giving the last word, as it were, to Madame de Rênal, perhaps it recognizes her as the one truly ethical character. Julien himself is executed, but fidèle à sa promesse, Mme de Rênal is the one character true enough to her desire to die for it alone. In the modern, as well as the medieval period, this is what good heroes and heroines do. In this book I have tried to explain why.

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Index Agamben, Giorgio 12, 47, 51–3, 56–7, 62, 65–6, 69, 70–1, 79, 172 Alexis, Vie de Saint 156 Anamorphosis 37–8, 182–3, 190 Antigone 106–7, 118, 210 Arnaut de Maruelh 44–9, 54–5, 56, 58–61, 184, 187–8, 190–1 II 58–61 III 49 IV 187–8 VIII 56 XV 48–9 XVI 58 XVIII 54–5 Bataille, Georges 12, 79–81, 90, 93, 98, 209 Bernart de Ventadorn 16–43, 44–7, 61–2, 114, 164, 171, 183, 184–91 III 185 IV 21 XVII 188–9 XVIII 22–3 XIX 27, 69 n. 20 XX 185–6 XXI 21, 27–8, 30–1 XXIII 190 XXIV 186–7 XXV 188–9 XXVII 31–2 XXXI 24–5, 33–4, 37–8, 114, 164, 171, 189–90 XXXVII 17–19 XXXVIII 22 XXXIX 34–5 XLI 22 Beroul, Tristan 108–9, 159 Boccaccio, Giovanni 77, 78 n. 5, 93 n. 19, 95 n. 22, 99 n. 26, 167 Brennan, Teresa 41–2, 210 Butler, Judith 12, 32 n. 17, 34, 41, 47, 51, 70, 106, 169 n. 1, 199 Camus, Jean-Pierre 211–12 Castelain de Couci 9, 75, 89, 97 Castelain de Couci, by Jakemes 14, 75, 90–103, 141–2, 143–4, 163, 211, 215

Catherine, Vie de Sainte 207 n. 2 Chastelaine de Vergy 14, 75, 83–90, 97, 139–41, 143–4, 211, 212, 215 Chrétien de Troyes 2, 44, 108 n. 1, 119–25, 128–37, 181 n. 19 Chevalier de la Charrette 2, 119–25, 129 n. 24, 155–6 Cligès 128–37, 157, 173 n. 5, 209 ‘D’Amors qui m’a tolu’ 129, 132, 137 Damoisele d’Escalot 127, 145, 147–50, 155–6, 169 Dante 77, 78 n. 5, 104, 167 de Rougement, Denis 10–12 Derrida, Jacques 12–13, 25–6, 35, 37–8, 47, 79, 81–3, 95, 100, 143–4 desire of the Other 20, 28–35, 38–9, 59, 62, 70, 79, 98, 99–100, 154, 202 eaten heart 77–9, 90–103, 114, 165, 167, 170, 208, 211–16 ethics 3, 7, 10, 25–8, 36–7, 42, 47, 53, 58, 61, 65–6, 81–3, 84–5, 87–8, 90–1, 97, 100, 102, 106–7, 118, 143–4, 156, 161–2, 169, 199, 203, 204, 208–10, 216 fantasy 35, 39–40, 41–2, 80–1, 106–7, 114, 118, 128, 137, 170, 181, 209–10, 215 Flamenca 3–4, 76, 209 Foucault, Michel 49–51, 66, 70–1 Freud, Sigmund 36 n. 20, 68, 78, 93–4, 171–2 Galehaut 127, 161, 168, 191–203 Gauvain 118, 128, 148, 149, 195 Gaze 30–2, 34, 164–5, 180–91, 200 Gender 15, 19–20, 101–2, 138–67, 169–70, 176, 178–9, 180, 184, 191, 193, 199, 203, 210 Gaucelm Faidit 8, 44–7, 66–71 XXVIII 66–71 XXXIX 8

234 gift, the 22–3, 25–8, 32, 37–8, 47, 70–1, 78, 81–3, 85–7, 92, 95–6, 97–8, 143, 166–7, 204, 207–8 Girard, René 26, 79 Green, André 193, 202 Guenevere 105–6, 118–28, 148, 155–6, 193, 195–203 Guilhem IX 205–8 Guillaume de Lorris, see Roman de la Rose Guillem de Cabestanh 77–9, 141, 144, 163, 165, 167, 215 Vidas and razos 77–9, 95, 141, 144, 163, 165, 167, 215 V 77–9, 165 Ignaure, Le Lai d’ 102 n. 31 imaginary, the 66, 99, 116 n. 12, 180, 189–90, 201–2 incorporation 80, 91–2, 94, 96–7, 98–9, 102–3, 114, 170 irony 5–7, 19–20, 124–5, 128, 136–7, 210 Iseult 105–6, 109–18, 131–2, 134, 136–7, 142, 155–6, 158–62, 169, 203–4 Jaufre Rudel 1, 4, 163–7, 188 Vida 163–7, 188 I 164–5 IV 1, 164–5, 188 V 165 Jean de Meun, see Roman de la Rose Jouissance 34, 35–9, 80–1, 95, 102, 114, 137, 164, 165, 166–7, 169, 214–15 Kahedin 117–18, 172–3, 203–4 Lacan, Jacques 12–13, 28–30, 35–42, 68–71, 80–1, 85, 93–4, 98 n. 25, 99–100, 101, 106–7, 114, 157, 165, 169–71, 172, 181–4, 187, 189–91, 200–2, 209, 215 Seminar VII 15, 28–9, 36, 38, 69–71, 107, 182–3, 190 Seminar VIII 15, 94, 99 n. 28, 201 Seminar XI 15, 16, 28–9, 101, 182 n. 20, 187, 191 Seminar XX 15, 39, 40–1, 157, 165 n. 24, 169–71, 184 Lancelot 14, 104–7, 117, 118–28, 147–50, 155–6, 191–203

Index Lancelot en prose/ Prose Lancelot 119, 125–8, 155–6, 191–203 Marguerite de Navarre 211–12 Marie de France 14, 52–3, 114–16, 145–7, 150–5, 157, 170, 200 Bisclavret 52–3 Chevrefoil 114–16, 170 Eliduc 145–7, 150–5, 157 Martire 8, 21–2, 31, 58, 64, 78, 93, 134, 141–2 Metaphor/ antimetaphor 78, 98–9, 103, 107, 214 Mercy 25, 46–7, 53, 60–1, 65–6, 68–9, 70–1, 142, 149–50 Monk of Montaudon 45 Mort le roi Artu, La 104–6, 118, 127, 145, 147–50, 155–6, 193 Narcisse, Le Lai de 168–9, 173–7, 180–1 Narcissism 28, 33, 38, 62, 164, 168–9, 171–81, 184, 193, 200, 202, 203, 208, 210 objet a 99–100, 185–6, 196 Ovid 6, 73–4, 130, 168, 173, 175, 176, 177, 181, 197 Peire Roger 3 Piramus et Thisbé 73–4 Queerness 153–4, 169, 191–203, 210 Raimon Jordan 44–9, 53–5, 55–6, 57–8, 61–6 I 48–9 III 55–6, 57–8 VI 53–5 VII 63–6 X 62–3 XI 48–9 Razos, see Vidas and Razos real, the 37, 38–9, 70, 83, 99–100, 107, 157, 183, 189–90, 209 Rose, Roman de la 4–5, 75, 177–81 Sacrificial desire 20, 26–7, 29–30, 34–5, 40, 45, 62, 76, 78–9, 86, 91–2, 100–3, 118, 124, 137, 140, 162, 166, 168, 208–9 Sade, Marquis de 56–7, 213–15

235

Index secrecy 13, 76, 79, 81–3, 86–90, 90–1, 103, 143, 156, 162, 211 sexuality 15, 50, 71, 169, 175, 184, 191–203 sovereignty 47, 49–61, 62, 63, 66, 69, 70–1, 84–5, 103, 133, 208, 209 Stendhal 215–16 sublime, the 107, 113, 118, 134, 149, 168, 198 suicide 123–4, 126–7, 140–1, 160–1 symbolic, the 38, 66, 71, 83, 93, 99–100, 102, 106–7, 113, 118, 124, 128, 137, 138, 141, 143–4, 145, 156, 170, 180, 183, 186, 189–90, 201–2, 209–10

Thing, the 38–9, 166, 190 Thomas, Tristan 108–14, 136, 142, 157–8, 159–61, 174 Tristan 11, 14, 21, 103–18, 128–9, 131, 134, 136–7, 141–2, 144, 155–6, 157–62, 208, 211 Tristan, Roman de, see Beroul and Thomas Tristan en prose 104–5 n. 2, 116–18, 157–62, 171, 172–3, 193 n. 31, 203–4 Vidas and razos 76–9, 141, 163–7 Zizek, Slavoj 12, 28–30, 34, 39, 85, 102, 106–7, 157, 166, 170, 190, 210