Medieval Academy of America

New Philology and Old French Author(s): R. Howard Bloch Source: Speculum, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Jan., 1990), pp. 38-58 Published by: Medieval Academy of America Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2864471 . Accessed: 18/03/2014 16:30
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New Philology and Old French

By R. Howard Bloch
In this paper I will argue not only that there is nothing new in the term "New Philology" (viz. Michele Barbi's Nuova filologia, Florence, 1938), but that the old philology was in fact a new philology (viz. the Neo-Grammarians) with respect to that which had preceded.' Use of the labels "new" and "old," applied to the dialectical development of a discipline, is a gesture sufficiently charged ideologically as to have little meaning in the absolute terms - before and after, bad and good - that it affixes. On the contrary, to the extent that calling oneself "new" is a value-laden gesture which implies that something else is "old" and therefore less worthy, it constitutes a rhetorical strategy of autolegitimation - with little recognition, of course, that the process itself of declaring oneself "new" is indeed very old, or at least as old, where the present case is concerned, as Vico's Nuova Scienza, which some see as the beginning of philological science.2 The qualifier "new" is by definition a relational term. Vico conceived of his science as new with respect to the philosophy of Descartes; Meyer-Liibke and the Neo-Grammarians, with respect to the Romantics; the Italian New Philologists, with respect primarily to the textual methodology of Joseph Bedier. What, then, does the "New Philology" share with the "New Science"? In the name of what does the "New Philology," which is certainly an important element of the "New Medievalism" (but which is not to be confused with the "New Historicism"), proclaim its modernity? The new "New Philology" overlaps, but is not necessarily coterminous, with the original spirit of philology in that both presuppose: (1) the privileging of language over its referent in the production of meaning, which means that some attention is paid not only to what words mean but how they mean (and, concomitantly, that those who study the Middle Ages might finally join the mainstream of twentieth-century linguistic thought); (2) the contextualizing
'Please note that I do not consider myself a "New Philologist," or a "new" anything for that matter, except perhaps a new man; and since part of being a new man implies a certain obligatory return of the subject, and since the phrase "New Philology" bothers me, I therefore place it in quotation marks. I use the term "New Philology" to refer not to the Italian "nuova filologia," but to a certain unsettling rethinking of medieval literature, especially Old French literature, that has occurred in France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, and the United States beginning in the late 1950s, since that is the newest philology. This is not to imply that such an enterprise will not itself one day be the old philology; thus we must always bear in mind Dum6zil's witty truism: "Aujourd'hui, j'ai raison; mais demain, j'aurai tort." 2 See, for example, the first chapter of Erich Auerbach's LiteraryLanguage and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquityand in the Middle Ages (New York, 1965), pp. 3-24.

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New Philology and Old French 39 of literature both with respect to historical process and with respect to other discourses of man such as philosophy, anthropology, and the social sciences; and (3) the irreductibility of the letter within the process of literary understanding, or the resistance of poetry to anything like a univocal meaning and of literary studies to the exactitude of a physical science. And (4), given the impossibility of ever exhausting the semantic richness of even the most finite element of medieval poetics (more later), the "New Philology" has as a corof poetry, its realignollary the reinscription of something like the mysterium ment - whether acknowledged or not, whether through the door of French and Swiss receptions of Lacan, German reception theory, or certain American readings of Derrida - with the domain of ontological thinking, and, yes, even with a certain occulted theological underpinning. Such an assertion does not imply what it once did - that only those whose religious conviction coincides with that of the medieval church (as if there were only one!) might study the Middle Ages, or that those who do so are motivated by some subsuming proselytizing spirit - but that a medievalist reading and writing in the final decades of our century, and who does not seek to draw his or her inspiration from the disciplinary strictures of the final decades of the last century, cannot fail to recognize the pertinence of medieval literature to any attempt to situate the literary sign with respect to Being. This means that the almost hundred years between, say, the institutionalization of the discipline of medieval studies in Germany just before the Franco-Prussian War (somewhat later in France) and, say, the appearance of Robert Guiette's D'une poesieformelle en France au moyenage (1949) or of Paul Zumthor's Langue et techniquespoetiquesa lI'poqueromane (1963) - birth certificates of the "New Medievalism" - represent an interlude between the first articulations of the philological enterprise by Vico (along with its development among the Romantics) and the revival among the "new medievalists" of the founding conception of the Nuova Scienza. Indeed, many of the enabling premises of our own modernism - and here no one is better equipped than the medievalist to sustain such an assertion - are but a return, mutatis mutandis, to the principles of what was at the threshold of the Enlightenment a radical repositing of the relation between the discourses of linguistics, philosophy, history, and poetics. Against what does the "New Philology" define itself? Against, first of all, the aspiration of the philology of the "interlude," in contrast to the original spirit of the first philologists, to the certainty of an exact science. There can be no doubt that the early stages of philological study were characterized by an appropriation of models from the natural sciences and by the effort to discover the mechanical laws of phonetic change. I am thinking in particular of the adaptation of the methodology of comparative anatomy by Friedrich von Schlegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Franz Bopp to the question of linguistic families and roots. But nothing in the early "Romantic" era can match, beginning in the 1860s, the reduction of medieval literary study to the level of a technique, the containment of philology within the limits of a method for the establishment, dating, identification, and localization of texts. To the extent that this evolution coincides

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The New Philology with a belated high moment of positivism and of literary naturalism, it can be seen as an aftereffect of the Enlightenment faith in reason.3 Then, too, the "anxiety" of the first French medievalists, which helps to explain their pretension to exactitude, stemmed from the idea that philology was essentially a German science, a perception that was in part demographic.4 Germans were not only outbreeding the French, but they were outpublishing them as well.5 Leon Gautier, whose EpopeesfranGaises had appeared in 1868, later blamed the French defeat of 1870 upon their scholarly defects: "We find before us a nation which makes war scientifically.... For the Prussian fights in the same way he criticizes a text, with the same precision and method."6 Gautier lamented that more Germans in a single town (Marburg) were working on the chanson de geste than were French scholars in all of France, that the two medieval journals of France were matched by ten beyond the Rhine, that German universities gave more courses on Old French literature, and that their students had more stamina and force. In fact, the publication of primary medieval sources had become in Germany by 1875 a matter of state, aided by the resources of empire and uniting the academies of Berlin, Munich, and Vienna. The establishment of a chair of Romance philology at Strasbourg in 1872 was merely a symptom of the proliferation after 1860 of such posts in a country where study of the Middle Ages represented, to a greater degree than in France, a catalyst of national identity. The study of ancient texts was a German field, and those who were instrumental in the founding of historical and literary studies in France were obliged to go abroad for training - Michel Breal to Berlin for Sanskrit with Bopp, Gaston Paris to Bonn for philology with Diez, Georges Monod to Berlin for paleography with Philipp Jaffe. In an essay published on the eve of World War I Henri Massis complained that "there is a clear, logical link between our system of classical studies and the capitulation of Metz, as, of course, between the methodology of German universities and the invasion of Paris...." French reaction to the losses of 1870 was largely to emulate the German model. In the four years from 1876 to 1879, 250 new chairs of literature and history, supported by university libraries, were endowed. Journals dedicated to medieval culture - the Revue des langues romanes (1870), Romania (1872), Revue de philologiefranfaise et provenfale (1887), Le Moyen Age (1888), Annales du Midi (1889) - were founded. Gradually, too, the discipline was professionalized, that is, taken out of the hands of aristocratic connoisseurs and
my "Naturalism, Nationalism, Medievalism," Romanic Review 76 (1986), 341-60. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, "Un souffle d'Allemagne ayant passe: Friedrich Diez, Gaston Paris, and the Genesis of National Philologies," RomancePhilology 40 (1986), 1-37, and my "842 - The Oaths of Strasbourg: The First Document and the Birth of Medieval Studies," A New History of French Literature(Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 6-13. 5"The German people have in erudition the same qualities as in war," wrote the eminent historian Fustel de Coulanges, "that is, numbers and discipline. Their historians form an organized army" ("De la maniere d'ecrire l'histoire en France et en Allemagne depuis cinquante ans," Revue des deux mondes 101 [1872], 245). 6 "Chronique," Revue des questionshistoriques9 (1870), 496. 7 Lesjeunes gens d'aujourd'hui(Paris, 1913), p. 107.
4 See 3 See

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41 New Philology and Old French appropriated by specialists.8 Medieval studies lost its class and at the same time moved from the private library into the "salle de classe." But most of all, those responsible for the institutionalizion of the discipline in France in particular Gaston Paris, but also Joseph Bedier - sought, in reaction to the perception that philology was a German science, to objectify philology, that is, to banish both the project of a general linguistics and the Romantic sense of poetic mystery while, at the same time, they endeavored to restrict the task of the medievalist to that of a compiler of facts, an amasser of details, which in their totality would supposedly further the progress of useful knowledge. "Les productions litteraires, tout le monde le comprend ou devrait le comprendre aujourd'hui, sont, comme tous les faits historiques, des phenomenes soumis a des conditions," writes Gaston Paris in the preface to a series of essays covering the period 1866-84. "Comprendre ces phenomenes dans leurs caracteres multiples, assigner a chacun d'eux sa date et sa signification, en demeler les rapports, en degager enfin les lois, telle est la tache du savant.... Grace a la minutieuse exactitude, a la methode severe, a la critique a la fois large et rigoureuse qu'on exige maintenant de ceux qui font de l'histoire litteraire, celle-ci pourra bientot presenter a la science dont elle depend, ... un tribut vraiment utile et pret a etre utilise."9 At this hyperfluorescent moment of the positivistic belief in progress through knowledge, scientific scholarship based upon the accumulation and classification of data was to eliminate from literature all mystery; no secrets were to remain: "D'innombrables travailleurs sont occupes dans toute l'Europe a rassembler, a expliquer, a en etablir scrupuleusement les faits et les dates, a en saisir l'esprit, a en degager les lois," Paris stated in his inaugural address at the College de France (1866). "A force d'etudes intelligentes et laborieuses, le developpement de l'art du moyen age n'a presque plus de secrets pour
nous. ..10

What the philologist seeks is, of course, some version of the nineteenthcentury notion of the natural work, born, as in Gaston Paris's account of the origin of the epic, as a natural product nourished like a plant by air, sun, and soil." Medieval literature is, for Paris, an indigenous growth emanating from French ground (even when the language is Provencal): "La chanson de geste des trouveres et la canso des troubadours sont des plantes indigenes, nees spontanement sur le sol de la patrie, et qui en reproduisent les qualites
8 Alfred Jeanroy writes of this period that the study of medieval literature "6tait trop souvent entre les mains de dilettantes sans preparation suffisante, gatees par la rhetorique ou detournee de son objet propre; il etait temps de l'y ramener et d'y faire regner de nouveau l'inflexible rigueur qui s'impose a toutes les sciences historiques" ("Les etudes sur la litterature francaise du moyen age," in La sciencefrancaise [Paris, 1933], p. 335). 9 La poesie du moyendge (Paris, 1913), l:x, xiii. 10Ibid., p. 8. " "L'epopee n'est pas une oeuvre de l'art; c'est un produit presque naturel ..." (Histoire poetiquede Charlemagne[Paris, 1865], p. 25); ". . . cetteintervalle, sterile en apparence, ne fut pas plus perdu pour la poesie que ne l'est pour la plante la periode obscure ou le germe se developpe et s'attache a ses racines a la terre nourriciere, tandis que sa tige naissante cherche l'air et le soleil. L'epopee de Charlemagne germait aussi, s'enfoncant de plus en plus dans le souvenir populaire etjetant des pousses de tout c6te" (ibid., p. 45).

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The New Philology natives et la saveur propre."'2 Such an articulation of cultural production as agricultural production can be seen, again in the context of a rivalry with Germany over the origins of France's earliest literary monuments, to reinforce nationalist claims in the period immediately following the FrancoPrussian War. Yet the deeper intent behind the organicist metaphor lies in a resistance to Romanticism - a resistance which, again, even from the perspective of scholarly method, was not without a strong element of occulted nationalism in its implicit rejection of an esthetics which was born not on French soil but beyond the Rhine.'3 The medievalists of the "interlude," which coincided with the era of literary naturalism or realism in France, sought to expunge from literature that which escaped the scientism of positivist methodology, or, to be more specific, that which was seen to be specifically poetic. This was a move with important consequences for the development of philological "science," since I think it can be shown that a significant sector of the field of medieval studies still labors under the centuryan attempt that rests old attempt to shed the yoke of the Romantic mysterium, the upon following assumptions: (1) The medieval world is somehow simpler than that of the early-modern era. A spontaneous period, a happy period, the Middle Ages participates in the fantasy of an elementary beginning, a world of innocence analogous to the lost paradise of childhood. Such a view is part and parcel of a discourse on medievalism that had been around since the eighteenth century as an essential feature of what the French call "l'esprit gaulois." Le Comte de Caylus (1753), for example, in discussing the comic tale, a genre which attracts the topos of the lost paradise like a lightening rod, speaks of "la simplicite & la naivete, qui seront toujours la base du gout vrai, & dont il semble qu'on s'ecarte un peu trop aujourd'hui"; J. B. B. de Roquefort-Flamericourt (1815), of "ce peuple, naturellement joyeux, folatre, leger, et badin."'4 Nor are they alone, for the mystification of the "happy" Middle Ages - a time of "uncomplicated sexuality" (Marie-Therese Lorcin), of "frank, simple, healthy sexuality and scatology" (Philippe Menard), of simple bodily pleasures, and personal happiness - was merely affirmed in the period of literary naturalism, which in France represents the formative era of the discipline of medieval studies. Joseph Bedier (1893) refers to "the happy epoch of the medieval period"; Per Nykrog conjectures that "Jean Bodel was, I believe, a likable man, without inner conflicts or deep hatreds; he was harmonious and happy, animated by a great and joyous love of life and of men.... Jean Bodel lived at a time when men were happy."'5 One corollary of the pristine Middle Ages is, of course, also that the millennium between the fall of Rome and the discovery of the New World was an age dominated by naive religious faith: 42
Les contes orientauxdans la litterature fran(aise du moyendge (Paris, 1875), p. 3. And this despite the resonance with Romantic notions of generative literary cycles. 14 Le Comte de Caylus, Memoires sur les fabliaux, in Memoiresde litteraturetires des registresde l'AcademieRoyale des Inscriptionset Belles-Lettres20 (1744-46), 373; J. B. B. de Roquefort-Flamericourt, De letat de la poesiefranfoise dans les XIIe et XIIIe siecles (Paris, 1815), p. 188. 15 Bedier, Lesfabliaux (Paris, 1893), p. 373; Nykrog, Lesfabliaux (Copenhagen, 1957), p. 167.
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New Philology and Old French 43 "Ce caractere poetique du moyen age," writes Gaston Paris, "eclate d'abord dans sa foi. Ce n'est pas cette religion raisonnable, si l'on peut ainsi parler, qu'inaugura le protestantisme; c'est une libre conception du monde, toute pleine d'amour et de vie. Cette foi embrasse et feconde toutes les directions de la pensee; elle forme, pour ainsi dire, le fond de toutes les ames." The Middle Ages represents, in sum, the carefree adolescence of the race: "Pareille aux souvenirs ou nous aimons a retrouver les illusions de notre jeune age, elle nous apprend a nous refaire enfants pour gouter les joies naives de l'enfance; elle nous rouvre les tresors de l'imagination de nos peres, et fait jaillir de nouveau, dans nos intelligences dessechees, les sources vives de la joyeuse et jeune poesie."16 (2) If the Middle Ages are conceived as the lost paradise of a simpler era, its literature comes to constitute, as the above quotations suggest, the trace memories of childhood, the naive and spontaneous creation of a happier time. Like a child, it is incapable of reflection, of intentionality, and thus of the deviousness of subsequent epochs: "... tout y est spontane, primesautier, imprevu: les hommes d'alors ne font pas a la reflexion la meme part que nous; ils ne s'observent pas, ils vivent naivement, comme les enfants, chez lesquels la vie reflechie que developpe la civilisation n'a pas etouffe encore la libre expansion de la vitalite naturelle."'7 The medieval text, it is widely assumed in the formative period of the positivist "interlude," is preliterary - a poetry without mystery, allegory, or style, in short, without literary elaboration or manner: "Si l'on commence par poser resolument en principe ou en fait," writes Ferdinand Brunetiere, who was certainly no friend to the Middle Ages, "que notre litterature du moyen age, nos Chansonsde geste ellesmemes, nos Fabliaux (ou Fableaux), nos Mysteres aussi n'ont aucune valeur litteraire, alors, mais seulement alors, il devient aise de s'entendre." And "if," the editor of the Revue des deux mondesrepeats, "you want to discover what is of specifically literary value in the medieval work, do not bother learning the language; read Rabelais, La Fontaine, and reread Moliere."'8 Despite an awareness of the distant origins of the vernacular tongues, medieval literature fulfills the fantasy of an aboriginal language in which the debauch of style, considered a corruption of the Renaissance, the work of women, and an importation from Italy, had not yet occurred:'9 "Le modele qui manquait au
"La poesie du moyen age," in La poesie du moyenage, pp. 8, 10. Ibid., p. 9. 18 Ferdinand Brunetiere, "Les fabliaux du moyen age et l'origine des contes," Revue des deux mondes 119 (1893), 189. 19The notion that social elegance and literary style belonged to the corrupting influence of Italy was widely held throughout the nineteenth century. J. J. Virey, for example, in a discourse which won the prize of the Societe des Sciences, Lettres et Arts de Macon in 1809, holds Italian women specifically responsible for the abuse of thought which is the equivalent of poetic style: "Catherine, et ensuite Marie de Medicis avoient appele en France, avec plusieurs vices de l'Italie, le goft de la magnificence, et cet apanage de leur famille, ce sentiment delicat dans les lettres et les arts dont elles haterent surtout le developpement. Mais elles mirent en meme temps a la mode cette manie du bel esprit et du genre grotesque, et ce ton maniere qui infectoit deja la litterature italienne. On n'etaloit. plus 1'erudition, mais on abusoit des pensees" (De l'influencedes femmes sur le gout dans la litteratureet les beaux-arts[Paris, 1810], p. 23).
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The New Philology moyen age, la Renaissance le retrouva.... C'est pourquoi, comme la prose francaise ne date que de Rabelais, de Calvin et de Montaigne, ainsi la poesie fran~aise ne date que de Ronsard et de la Pleiade."20 Literature without literature, poetry "devoid of all literary pretension" (Bedier), literature whose interest is primarily historical, literature as document - the medieval text offers the illusion of a language of beginnings, a poetic vehicle that remains to its object invisible and, therefore, innocent, pristine, unencumbered by artifice, unmannered, and unrepressed - the transcription of a "direct observation of men" in Gaston Paris's terms, a "sketch from nature" in the phrase of Edmond Faral, literature which is generally "more engaged in the social,... less gratuitous, and less playful," according to the more contemporary formula of Jean Rychner.21 (3) The carefree "honesty" of the Middle Ages supposes, finally, that medieval literature is readily - naturally - accessible, that it requires little or no interpretation. On the contrary, the medieval text is assumed to be a spontaneous creation which "speaks for itself."22 Emanating from the prehistory of literature, predating the "laws of style," avoiding both the necessity and the complications of rules, Old French poetry means clearly what it says; it is sincere, incapable of lying.23 It is true. "Elle n'est pas, comme la notre," says Gaston Paris, referring to post-Renaissance literature, "surveillee par des lois, ni retenue par les prejuges ou les convenances, ni dirigee par des exemples classiques; rien ne l'empeche de dire pleinement et entierement ce qu'elle veut dire. Aussi est-elle vraie avant tout, et c'est la son grand merite. Sans se preoccuper des regles, des theories, des questions de forme, elle exprime simplement ce qui s'agitait dans les ames...."24 The medieval text, as translucent as the Naturalists imagined language capable of being, "clear as pure water" according to Guy de Maupassant, hides nothing.25 Its very lucidity implies a consonance between the creator and his or her work, between the work and the world it represents, between form and meaning, and between literary language and its public. For there can be, in the pseudoscientific, positivist, realist aesthetics of the medievalism of the "interlude," no problem of reception: "Le public l'accepte comme le poete le donne: on ne fait pas de critique.... "26 Here we find, of course, a version of a prejudice that goes beyond medievalism, that is indeed part of the French national identity, or what one might
20 Ferdinand Brunetiere, "L'erudition contemporaine et la litterature francaise du moyen age," in Etudes critiquessur l'histoirede la litterature franfaise (Paris, 1888), p. 47. 21 Rychner, "Les fabliaux: Genres, styles, publics," in La litterature narrative d'imagination(Paris, 1961), p. 51. 22 See, for example, Philippe Menard's comment with reference to the fabliaux: "Quoique disent les ecrivains, les situations parlent d'elles-memes. Elles ne trompent pas" (Les fabliaux [Paris, 1984], p. 13). 23 "La vie et la poesie se confondent sans cesse, celle-ci etant tout impregnee de celle-la, sinceres toutes deux et sans mensonge" (Paris, "La pdesie du moyen age," p. 20).

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Ibid., p. 19.

"La langue francaise, d'ailleurs, est une eau pure que les ecrivains manieres n'ontjamais pu et ne pourrontjamais troubler" (Pierre etJean [New York, 1936], p. xlviii). 26 Paris, "La poesie du moyen age," p. 20.

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New Philology and Old French 45 think of as an aesthetics of national identity: the belief that the French language is clearer, more precise, more natural than all others. "Notre nation," writes Gustave Lanson, who was responsible for much of what the first half of the twentieth century knew about French literary history, "ce me semble, est moins sensible qu'intellectuelle: plus capable d'enthousiasme que de passion, peu reveuse, peu poetique, . logicienne, constructive et generalisatrice, peu metaphysique, ni mystique, mais positive et realiste."27 Realism, the rejection of poetry and of metaphysics, can be understood in this context as a resistance to that which is perceived to be Romantic, that is, German; and it can be understood to contain a contradiction with respect to the notion of the troubles of style as a post-Renaissance invention. Yet the fact remains that the legacy of such clarity is perceived to have been present from the beginning. The absence of style during the Middle Ages is, for example, considered to be a clearer absence in France than elsewhere. "Even if," Gaston Paris maintains, "medieval writers had not submitted to the severe rules of grammar that make the French literary language a more transparent and lucid language than others, they managed normally to construct sentences that are understandable without effort; and they did not seek obscurity as they did in the Middle Ages in so many other countries."28 This suggests that the positivist philologist's representation of a simpler world, a world of childhood, of natural spontaneous pleasures, uncomplicated sexuality, and of personal happiness not only coincided with the period of literary naturalism in France, which had a determining effect upon the discipline of medieval studies as we know it, but was predicated upon the model of a naturalist aesthetics which presupposed an elimination of the mediatory effects of poetic elaboration - a return, in essence, to the time before the Renaissance corruption of social "moeurs" through the introduction of style. The positing of a nonpoetic poetics was a function, again, of the naturalist impulse to escape the idealism and ideology associated with Romanticism. For the realistic project, as de Maupassant makes clear, was inseparable from the desire to elude theory. "En y regardant de pres," he wrote to Albert Wolff, who had accused him of wallowing in unpleasant things ("le bas-fondisme"), "la persistante reproduction des 'bas-fonds' n'est, en realite, qu'une protestation contre la theorie seculaire des choses poetiques." Or, to take another example, Zola praises Edmond Duranty in Les romanciersnaturalistes for avoiding all traces of Romanticism: "I1 n'est pas romantique, il est naturaliste, sans theorie... ."29Zola himself recognized in the medieval poet the courage "never to retreat before the word itself": "On trouve la une langue abondante, ne cachant rien a l'homme, nommant les choses par leur nom . . ."; and he conceived of Naturalism as a restoration of the masculine courage of "our fathers who lived more out in the open":
Histoire illustree de la litteraturefrancaise (Paris, 1923), 1:9. Gaston Paris, "Preface" to L. Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la langue et de la litterature francaise (Paris, 1910), p. s. 29 Cited by Jacques-Henri Bornecque and Pierre Cogny, Realisme et naturalisme(Paris, 1958), p. 67; Emile Zola, Les romanciersnaturalistes(Paris, 1890), p. 341.
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The New Philology "... pour qu'un romancier osat tacher de rendre un peu sa carrure virile a notre langue, si travaillee et si emascule aujourd'hui, il fallait attendre que le mouvement naturaliste se produisit.... "30Further, this very repression of that which was perceived to be poetic, Romantic, or simply unvirile, coupled with the notion of the immediate accessibility of the text, which is imagined to be as lucid and direct as the world it depicts, expresses a nationalist desire on the part of the French for a scientific - that is, hard - methodology that might measure up to German philological science. The medievalist of the period between the Franco-Prussian and First World Wars sought to replace the softness of theory with the rigor of method, while the naturalist sought to restore the "virile proportions" of the French tongue. And yet, if the "New Philology" has come to mean anything in the decades between World War II and the present, it is that the Old French text is as richly complex, as contrived and perverse, as self-contradictory and problematic, as deceptive and falsely seductive, as opaque, and thus as needy of interpretation, as any literary work of any age. This is a fact of life for anyone who studies medieval literature, and a situation from which not even the scientism of the positivist philology can redeem us. On the contrary, the more we take seriously the philological imperative of uncomplicated pleasures and literal meanings, the more we become convinced of the impossibility, literally, of reading France's oldest literary monuments. Some of the problems of reading medieval vernacular texts are, of course, technical and have to do with the ways in which an essentially oral language might have been graphically transcribed or with the ways in which manuscripts were copied and preserved. Thus various specialists dealing with the "Serments de Strasbourg," the first document in any Romance language, have proposed with equal conviction, that when the scribe wrote n lostanit (approximation), he really intended "non los tanit," "non lo se tanit," "non lo stanit," "non l'ostanit," "non lo frangit," "non lo suon tint," "lo suon fraint," "non lo fraint," "non l'enfraint," "de suo partem lo fraint," "de suo part in lo s[agramen]t anit," "non loftanit," "non lo s[en] tanit," "de sua part lo suon infraint."31 Further, the physical difficulty of "getting" the supposedly lucid language of the Middle Ages off the parchment page, not to mention the difficulties, even when letters and the spaces between them are decipherable, of variant versions of identical words,32 are relatively straightforward compared with the intricacies of interpretation of even the most reliable edition of the surest manuscript (which is always already an interpretation). Put in simplest terms, the closer one reads the medieval text, the less it is possible to maintain the positivist position of literary transparency, which would make the establishment of the meaning of a poetic work, or even of a particular passage, merely a question of "figuring out" what the letters on
30

46

Emile Zola, "De la moralite dans la litterature," in Documentslitteraires(Paris, 1928), pp. 290,

292. See my article cited above, n. 4. problem is brilliantly discussed in Bernard Cerquiglini's recent Eloge de la variante: Histoire critiquede la philologie (Paris, 1989).
31

32 The

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New Philology and Old French

47

the page or parchment, to invoke Gaston Paris's phrase once again, "fully and clearly say."33For there is nothing in the Old French text, as the positivist holds, that guarantees the coincidence of meaning with intention, nothing that suggests that the Old French language, with its plethora of divergent spellings for the same word and homonyms for different words, is not every bit as deceptive to the eye and to the ear as the works of Mallarme or Proust are assumed to be - nothing, in short, that leads to the conclusion that the language of medieval poets keeps its promise to mean what it says, to be true. On the contrary, the more we try to read it literally - or at the level of the letter - the more we become convinced of its very impenetrability, of the impossibility of reducing its pregnant plays of the letter to univocal meaning, or, for that matter, of the impossibility of ever exhausting the semantic resonances of certain key syllables and words. In order to demonstrate the truth of such an assertion I propose to look at several of the lays of Marie de France which not only deal directly with the question of the trustworthiness of language, and more specifically with the question of the promise, but which, as the simplest of forms (one of Andre Jolles's "simple forms"),34 establish the fact that the most basic premise of the medieval creative act is not an absence of theory, and thus the redundancy of interpretative method, but the thorough integration for medieval writers of theory and practice. One cannot emphasize this point enough, so I will repeat it: the theory of medieval texts is in the praxis, and there is no praxis without consciousness (and therefore intention) on the poet's part of the metatheoretical nature of medieval poetic practice. No syllable demonstrates the polysemic plasticity of the Old French language better than the word lai. In addition to the traditional acceptation of "melody" or "song," lai, and its variants lay, laye, laie, laiz, laes, can be used as an adjective to connote the secular realm and as a substantive to designate a lay person. By extension, it can refer to a member of the secular clergy,35 to anyone not belonging to the university community, or, as a corollary, to someone considered ignorant.36 Lai and its homophones laid, lait are used variously as a synonym for the word "staddle," for that which is ugly, or, as so often in the Miracles of Our Lady, to designate the Virgin Mary's milk. The adjectival homophones 1e, ley, lay, let, lait, leit, lae, lede specify that which is wide or large (> Latin latus). Lie, liet, lee, le summon the idea of lightness, happiness, joy (> Latin laetus), while las, lax, lais connote sadness, misery, misfortune (> Latin lassus). This tiny syllable becomes more interesting, however, when it signifies that which is left over - not only fluvial deposits
33 Witness, for example, Karl Uitti's absurd and rigidly superannuated "On Editing Chretien de Troyes: Lancelot's Two Steps and Their Context" (Speculum 63 [1988], 271-92), which demonstrates the impotence of the positivist philological method to establish a meaning. 34 Andre Jolles, Einfache Formen (Halle, 1956). 35 "Je ne sai clerc, ne lai, ne prestre, / Qui de fame ptist consirrer, / Se il ne veut trop meserrer / Envers Dieu en mainte maniere, / Par fame destorbez en iere" ("Le bien des fames," ed. Achille Jubinal, Jongleurs et trouveres[Paris, 1835], p. 84). 36"Un gros exemple em porroit metre / As genz laiz qui n'entendent lettre" (Jean de Meun, Le roman de la rose, ed. Daniel Poirion [Paris, 1974], v. 17,393).

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The New Philology and manure, but any excess, including the idea of a testamentary legs (see the Lais of Francois Villon). All of which suggests a link between the concept of a vestigial mark and the Lais as a written trace of preexisting song. Marie de France is aware that her writing not only constitutes the transcription or fixing of some more mobile, possibly oral version of legend, but that this transcription is already a rewriting of the written residues of a culture (Breton) that prefigures her own: Les contes ke jo sai verrais, Dunt li Bretun unt fait les lais, Vos conterai assez briefment. El chief de cest comencement, Sulunc la lettre e l'escriture, Vos mosterai une aventure Ki en Bretaigne la Menur Avint al tens ancienur.37 (The tales - and I know they're true - from which the Bretons made their lais I'll now recount for you briefly; and at the very beginning of this enterprise,just the way it was written down. I'll relate an adventure that took place in Brittanyin the old days.) The notion of the lais as a residue or mark connects such a legacy to the legitimation of a place or locus (OF leu) from which to speak or from which poetry becomes possible. "LA, lai, lay, adv., se dit d'un lieu qu'on designe d'une maniere precise," specifies Frederic Eugene Godefroy on page 685 of volume 4 of his dictionary. Nor, in that same vein, is it an exaggeration to associate the Lais with the principle of poetic construction or binding subsumed under the rubric of the laisse, elaborated in Old Provencal as the process of linking verses (lassar). Christine de Pisan, describing the script of the letter found at her bedside in the Dit de la rose, equates this little syllable with the wrapping or binding of a book.38 Finally, the word lai is used in its Old French forms loi, lei, ley to designate custom, usage, justice, or the law. My purpose is, in fact, to link (lassar) the notion of the lai as written residue to the question of the law and, finally, to show the extent to which the poetess and a certain medieval (and also peculiarly modern) notion of poetry are implicated in what seems in the Lais to be an obsession with linguistic transgression. And there can be no more obvious place to begin than "Lanval," where Marie articulates more explicitly than anywhere else the never simple, in fact always complicated, relation of legal to poetic justice. "Lanval" is the story of a knight of Arthur's court who, though he possesses all the qualities of the courtly lover and though he participates in the royal campaign against the Picts and the Scots, is forgotten when the time comes
37 "Guigemar," v. 19, in Les lais de Marie de France, ed. Jean Rychner (Paris, 1983). All quotations are from this edition. 38 "Le laz en fu de soye azure, / Et le seel de telle mesure / Fut d'une pierre precieuse / Resplandissant et gracieuse" (Christine de Pisan, Dit de la rose, v. 580).

48

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New Philology and Old French

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to distribute the booty of war.39 Given the economic theme, which is of a piece with that of the rivalry of Arthur's vassals for his attention ("Pur sa valur, pur sa largesce, / Pur sa beaute, pur sa pruesce, / L'envioent tuit li plusur" [v. 22]), "Lanval" seems to summon its own historico-social context: the neglected knight, who also happens to be far from home ("Fiz a rei fu, de haut parage, / Mes luin ert de sun heritage!" [v. 27]), is, in fact, about as pure an expression as can be found in Old French of the personal alienation of individual knights ("Ore est Lanval mut entrepris, / Mut est dolenz, mut est pensis!" [v. 33]), which Erich Kohler identifies with the alienation of an entire class - the twelfth-century lower nobility consisting in part of younger, unmarried sons.40 Within the general crisis of aristocracy, menaced from above by the reconstitution of monarchy and from below by the rise of an urban bourgeoisie, the "bacheliers" or "jeunes" found themselves either without land or obliged to sell their holdings and thus increasingly indebted to the caste of powerful feudal princes still possessed of the means (land, castle, and private armies) to rule. Lanval is impoverished, not only because he has been neglected, but because he has spent all he has: "Tut sun aveir ad despendu" (v. 30). Indeed, his situation can be seen to be a projection of the material condition of both a class and a generation, whose dispossession, as Georges Duby has elaborated in a series of articles and books published over the last twenty years, is also the result of a matrimonial model which worked against the interests of women and younger sons.41 The marriage practice of France's feudal aristocracy, which conceived of marriage not as a voluntary tie but as a pact between families, involved strict limitation of the number of marriages, with unendowed sons remaining for long periods without being settled (case), often, like Lanval, at the courts of others; early betrothal, sometimes at age five for girls and seven for boys; and the choice of marriage partners to be determined by either the father (the caput mansus) or the rest of the family (the seniores), or the guardian in the case of an orphan.42 According to the "lay aristocratic model of marriage," the consent of the partners counted for very little, the will of parents being the sine qua non of a legal union, once the ecclesiastical impediments had been respected. Assuming that the first son survived to the age of marriage and reproduction, the younger branches were, in effect, left to wander far from home, were, like Lanval, "neglected." Thus seen within the context of the material condition of lower nobility and within that of twelfth-century feudal marriage, Lanval's wandering off
39"Asez i duna riches duns / E as cuntes e as baruns. / A ceus de la Table Rounde - / N'ot tant de teus en tut le munde - / Femmes e teres departi, / Fors a un sul ki l'ot servi: / Ceo fu Lanval; ne l'en sovint / Ne nuls des soens bien ne li tint" ("Lanval," v. 13). 40 See especially L'aventure chevaleresque:Ideal et realite dans le roman courtois, trans. Eliane Kaufholz (Paris, 1974); and my Medieval French Literatureand Law (Berkeley, 1977), pp. 220-38. 41 See, for example, Georges Duby, Medieval Marriage (Baltimore, 1982); "Les 'jeunes' dans la societe aristocratique dans la France du nord-ouest du XIIe siecle," in Hommes et structuresdu moyenage (The Hague, 1973), pp. 213-24. 42 See of the French Middle Ages (Chicago, my Etymologiesand Genealogies:A LiteraryAnthropology 1983), pp. 70-75.

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50

The New Philology

into the countryside and his encounter with the fairy lady represent a dream of possession. The lady has all that Lanval lacks. Where he is an exile at court, she leaves her own country to find him. Where he is neglected by Arthur, she prefers him to all knights. Where Lanval is impoverished, she is so rich that "Queen Semiramis and the Emperor Octavian himself together could not buy the right panel of her tent" ("La reine Semiramis, / Quant ele ot unkes plus aveir / E plus pussaunce e plus saveir / Ne l'emperere Octavian, / N'esligasent le destre pan" [v. 82]). As the antithesis of Lanval's situation, and indeed in what could be read almost as a parody of the damsel in distress rescued by the valiant knight, the fairy lady promises eternal fidelity (in contrast to Arthur's neglect) and - more important - as much wealth as his heart desires: Ore est Lanvalen dreite veie! Un dun li ad dune apres: Ja cele rien ne vudra mes Que il nen ait a sun talent; Doinst e despende largement, Ele li troveratasez. Mut est Lanvalbien assenez: Cum plus despendra richement, E plus avra or e argent! (v. 134) (Now is Lanvalon the right track!For she gave him one final gift: never would he desire anything from this time on that he would not have as much as he wanted. No matter how much he gave or spent, she would find enough. He is sitting very pretty: the more abundantlyhe spends, the more gold and silver he will have!) The fairy lady is the literary incarnation of a fantasized solution to the material problems of the class of unmarried, unendowed, and wandering "jeunes" - an heiress whose riches are a reminder, as the French proverb still holds, that "tout mariage est un heritage." She is the source of unlimited riches, under one condition, however - that Lanval not reveal her existence: "Amis,fet ele, or vus chasti, Si vus comant et si vus pri: Ne vus descovrez a nul humme! ... A tuz jurs m'avriezperdue, Si ceste amur esteit seiie; James nem purriez veeir Ne de mun cors seisine aveir." (v. 143) she says, "how I warn you, I command and pray of you: do not reveal ("Friend," yourself to any man! You will have lost me forever, if this love becomes known; never will you be able to see me or have possession of my body.") Even this prohibition can be understood in the context of the reality of the aristocratic matrimonial model. For, as C. S. Lewis pointed out as early as the 1930s, to the extent that marriage is a matter of convenience and does

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51 New Philology and Old French not depend upon the choice of partners, there will be a gap between love and marriage, between desire and the law. Love is in this respect always against the law, a legal necessity and not an elective affinity. "Any idealization of sexual love, in a society where marriage is purely utilitarian, must begin by being an idealization of adultery."43 Which leads syllogistically to the cardinal rule of courtliness, the necessity of discretion. "Discovered love cannot last long," Andreas Capellanus discovers in a phrase not unlike that of Lanval's lady. "You should not be a revealer of love affairs," he repeatedly reveals. Here we are the witnesses to a happy marriage indeed! - the Marxian fairytale of the fairy lady as the idealized solution to the material disenfranchisement of lower nobility joined to the Cambridge Catholic's protopuritanical relegation of love to the secret dirty realm of adulterous passion. Neither, however, explains the one essential element of the rescuing woman's stipulation, which "Lanval" shares with a number of lais - that the revelation of love follows just as logically from the vow of discretion as discretion can be said to follow from love. The oath is taken to be transgressed. We know, in fact, that it will be violated the moment it is spoken.44 Like the stark world of repeatedly entwined broken promises of "La Chatelaine de Vergi," the universe of "Lanval" is one of necessity, in which characters seem drawn along by an inescapable logic of articulation according to which each narrative element entails the next as part of a causal chain that can only partially be accounted for by any extratextual or historical explanation.45 The first element is based upon the assumption, only later confirmed by events; that the reason for Arthur's original neglect is not so much a function of the rivalry between his knights as it is an expression of his own jealousy of the queen's interest in Lanval; which neglect inspires the daydream and the promise not to tell; which promise is kept only until Guenivere's interest becomes manifest and she requests Lanval's love; which request, rebuffed, produces the charge of homosexuality, the denial of which provokes the famous boast of loving someone whose humblest attendant is more beautiful than the queen; which boast leads not only to Lanval's realization that he has lost his love ("I1s'esteit bien aparcefiz / Qu'il aveit perdue s'amie: / Descovert ot la druerie!" [v. 334]) but, in yet another medieval rendering of the Potiphar's wife motif, to the denunciation before Arthur, who, like the Duke of "La Chatelaine de Vergi," puts the wronged knight in a position of either proving the truth of his boast - which, as boast, prevents its own proof - or of being punished. If "Lanval" seems to turn fatalistically around a certain logic of the promise made to be broken and of the boast which denies the possibility of substanC. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (New York, 1958), p. 13. The deepest discussion of the question of the broken promise is to be found in Shoshana Felman, The LiterarySpeech Act: Don Juan withJ. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, trans. C. Porter (Ithaca, 1983). 45For a comparison of the two "recits" see Jean Rychner, "La presence et le point de vue du narrateur dans deux recits courts: Le Lai de Lanval et la Chatelaine de Vergi," Vox Romanica 39 (1980), 86-103.
44

43

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52

The New Philology

tiation, it is because both as speech acts are so thoroughly enmeshed in the poetics of the lai as to make the transgression rendered in terms of selfcanceling vows and conceits mere thematizations of the broader paradox, which is that of fiction itself. Lanval, after all, not only uses his newfound wealth to dress jongleurs, but is the very figure of the poetess. He is depicted as the loner, a dreamer, and, again like the knight of "La Chatelaine de Vergi," is accused by the queen of being homosexual, a charge, as we know from Alain de Lille, that carried in the twelfth century an association with rhetoric.46 But most of all, Lanval's dilemma is that of the poetess who transgresses the written rule of the courtly relation subsumed in the dictum "If you say it, you lose it," who violates, in other words, what is imagined to be the integrity of an orality present to itself - and the fairy lady is just one version of such a fantasy of plenitude - every time she speaks. Put in other terms, the voice associated with the presence of the body, or even of bodies, is transgressed by the lai, which is merely its trace, by the very act of articulation, transcription being merely the limit of such a transgression. Here there is no better example of the fatalistic mutual implication of writing and betrayal than that of the lay "Laiistic," the story of two knights who are neighbors, one of whose wife loves the other, another "bacheler."47 It is unclear within the short narrative whether their love is consummated, whether, in other words, the body ever attains to a presence. Nonetheless, the lovers communicate by looking at each other from adjoining rooms. Asked by her suspicious husband why she gets up so often at night, the wife replies: "There is no joy in all the world like hearing the nightingale" ("I1 nen ad joie en cest mund / Ki n'ot le laustic chanter" ["Laiistic," v. 84]). The husband, jealous of his wife's pleasure, captures the nightingale by fashioning a laz ("N'i ot codre ne chastainier / U il ne mettent laz u glu, / Tant que pris l'unt e retenu" [v. 98]), as if, and the reference could not be more explicit, the nightingale as voice were caught in Marie's own trap, which is the lay. For the dead bird, thrown at the wife ("Sur la dame le cors geta, / Si que sun chainse ensanglanta / Un poi desur le piz devant" [v. 117]) makes a mark. The nightingale's body, the voice betrayed, is a form of writing upon the woman's body and a message to be read. Indeed, the lady sends it to her lover like a letter to inform him of betrayal. "Le laiistic li trametrai, L'aventureli manderai." En une piece de samit A or brusde et tut escrit
46 See and Genealogies, pp. 133-36; Andre Leupin, "Ecriturenaturelle et ecriture Etymologies 9 119-41; Eugene Vance,"Desir, (1976), rh6toriqueet texte,"Poetique hermaphrodite," Diagraphe to a Alan of Lille'sGrammar 42 (1980), 137-55; Jan Ziolkowski, of Sex: TheMeaningof Grammar Intellectual, Twelfth-Century Speculum AnniversaryM'onographs10 (Cambridge,Mass., 1985), pp. 40-43. 47 See and Culture my "The Dead Nightingale:Oralityin the Tomb of Old FrenchLiterature," 3 (1988), 63-78. History

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New Philology and Old French Ad l'oiselet envolupe; Un suen vaslet ad apele Sun message li ad chargie, A sun ami l'ad enveie. (v. 133)

53

("I will send the nightingale to him along with the adventure."She wrapped the bird in a piece of silk embroidered with gold and written all around. She called her servant and charged him with her message which she sent to her love). The lover, in turn, has the dead bird enshrined in a reliquary, which he carries with him as long as he lives. We find in "Laustic," as in "Lanval," the fantasy of a utopic plenitude or presence, here, however, explicitly identified with pleasurable orality.48 For the supposed communication which the proximity of houses makes possible ("Kar pres esteient lur repere" [v. 34]) is equated with pleasure: "Delit aveient al veeir, / Quant plus ne poeient aveir" ("They had the pleasure of seeing each other when they could have no more" [v. 77]). Here it is worth stopping a moment at the word delit, since it is a key to the utopic presence associated with the body. The text says delight, but, one may ask, delight at what? Certainly not presence, since Marie is categorical: "They had the delight of seeing each other when they could have no more." The imagined pleasure of the body is a substitute for presence, a supplement, which is also synonymous with delit in the sense of the flagrans delictum in which the lovers are captured. For nowhere in the lai is the presence of a voice anything but a substitute for something else. The lovers are never present to each other, and the nightingale never sings to the lovers. It is itself nothing more than the sign of a ruse or lie told to calm the jealous husband's suspicions, an invention synonymous with the lai itself. The dead bird, encased - literally, "embroidered and written" ("A or brusde et tut escrit") - is sent like a poetic envoi to the lover once consummation or the presence of bodies is no longer even imaginable. Nor was it ever, for such presence in the lai is always deferred. There is no language of presence either in "Laiistic" or anywhere else to represent the coupling of bodies, such coupling being, as Marie makes clear in "Guigemar," a surplus that never enters language: Des ore est Guigemara aise: Ensemble gisent e parolent E sovent baisent e acolent.
In the abutment of the lovers' houses we find the fantasy of presence: "Karpres esteient lur repere: / Preceines furent lur maisuns/ E lur sales e lur dunguns; / N'i aveit bare ne devise / Fors un haut mur de piere bise" (v. 34); ("Fortheir lodgings adjoined and their houses were close, and their living rooms and their dungeons. There was neither fence nor barrierexcept for a high wall of dark stone"). Because of such proximity communicationis envisaged as possible: "Des chambresu la dame jut, / Quant a la fenestre s'estut,/ Poeit parler a sun ami / De l'autrepart, e il a li" (v. 39); ("Fromthe windowof the rooms in which the lady lay she could speak to her love; and, from the other side, he could do the same").
48

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54

The New Philology Bien lur covienge del surplus De ceo que li autre unt en us! v. 530) ("Guigemar,"

(Now is Guigemar content. They lie together and kiss and embrace often. They would gladly welcome the rest of that which lovers do!) An excess that cannot be said, the presence of the body is excluded from the text. Which is not to imply that poets do not try all the time to capture the body or that such attempts do not constitute the very essence of the poetic instance. On the contrary, Marie makes this clear in the general "Prologue," an art poetique which prescribes the making of texts as a series of rewritings, which, no matter how perfect, always leave a "surplus of meaning."49 What I am suggesting is that the body (and the voice) is ultimately always deferred by the text, which supplants it, transgresses it in a sense analogous to Lanval's betrayal of the fictional fairy. For the theme of betrayal dominates not only the lais of "Lanval" and "Laiistic" but a great many other so-called courtly works as well. In the chanson de geste betrayal takes the form of broken oaths, apostasy, and treason, whereas in the courtly text it is to be found - from Beroul's Tristan and Chretien's Lancelot to the prose romances of the thirteenth century - in the theme of capture of the bodies of lovers inflagrante delicto.Betrayal is a structuring principle of the courtly lyric, whose stock of characters includes the "losengers," liars, false speakers, and flatterers, but also denouncers of adulterers. So widespread, in fact, is the theme of betrayal that the indiscretions of both Lanval and the lady of "Laiistic" seem fated. The fatalism of the boast - whether of the most beautiful woman in the world or of the greatest joy in the world - underscores the extent to which in medieval texts the poetic and erotic are embedded in each other. Even the word traire, like the word lai, is one of these polysemic markers that, in its semantic richness, transgresses the premise of a plenitude inward to verbal signs, for the ear can never hear as much, make as many distinctions, as the eye can see. At the beginning of "Guigemar," the hero who loves no one but is loved by all - and thus participates in a fantasy of plenitude or self-sufficiency, Being like unto itself - shoots a doe with antlers, a creature as sexually undefined as himself, and is in turn wounded by the arrow that is deflected back in the direction of the archer: "I1 tent sun arc, si trait a li! / En l'esclot la feri devaunt" (v. 94). ("He holds his bow, he draws it to him; he struck the doe in the front hoof").50 The shooting of the arrow that is drawn to him "trait a li" - is, in short, an inscription on the level of theme of what narrative
49"Custumefu as anciens, / Ceo testimoine Preciens, / Es livres ke jadis feseient; / Assez oscurement diseient / Pur ceus ki a venir esteient / E ki aprendre le deveient, / K'i peiissent v. 9); ("It was the custom of the gloser la lettre / E de lur sen le surplus mettre"("Prologue," ancients, as Priscianbears witness, to speak obscurelyenough in their books so that those who came after and would be obliged to learn [or teach] them might gloss the letter and add their surplus of sense"). 50 See - as a Provocationto the Disciplineof Medieval my "The MedievalText - Guigemar Review79 (1988), 63-73. Studies,"Romanic

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New Philology and Old French 55 elaboration is all about and remains indistinguishable from Marie's drawing of her own project: Ki de bone mateire traite, Mult li peise si bien n'est faite. Oez, seignurs, ke dit Marie, Ki en sun tens pas ne s'oblie. v. 1) ("Guigemar," (He who fashions [draws,treats] good materialis very pained if it is not well done. Listen, lords, to what Marie says, she who in her time does not squander her talents). If traire (MF tirer) means "to shoot," it also means "to treat," "to draw out," or, simply, "to draw," as suggested by the "traits" of the portrait of Venus painted on the wall of the lady's prison tower: La chaumbreert peinte tut entur, Venus, la deuesse d'amur, Fu tres bien mise en la peinture; Les traiz mustrout e la nature Cument hor deit amur tenir E lealment e bien servir. (v. 233) (The room was painted all around. Venus, the goddess of love, was well represented in the painting which showed her nature and her traits, how one should carry on love, and loyally serve). Then, too, traire also signifies "to translate," "to transmit," or "to transform" and is the term for that which any author does in extruding or drawing one text from another. Marie makes explicit in the "Prologue" the extent to which writing is an extrusion of prior writings: "Pur ceo comencai a penser / D'aukune bone estoire faire / E de latin en romaunz traire" ("For this reason I began to think of making a few good stories and of translating them from Latin into romance" ["Prologue," v. 28]). As translation, traire implies the transformation of the same into the other; and if it means "to shoot," "to distance," or "to introduce difference," it is because such terms of alienation are the homophone of "to deceive." Indeed, given the fact that Old French poetry, even though written, was intended for the ear (either to be recited or read aloud), there can be no difference between the words traire and trahir. "To draw or shoot" and "to betray" stand as proof of the treacherousness of a homophonic lack of difference in the sound of a word that can also mean "to differ." The deflection of meaning obvious in Guigemar's treacherous arrow is also repeated in "Laiistic" in the logic of the lady's betrayal: she betrays her love in order to protect it, as if such self-betrayal were inevitable, unavoidable. Which it is. For the poet, in writing, does exactly what the cardinal rule of courtly discretion prohibits. A transmitter of transgression through transcription, he or she reveals secret love affairs. Thus the fatality that hangs over "Lanval" and "Laiistic" from the beginning is that of the impossible equation

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The New Philology

that is poetry, and which constantly disobeys Andreas's sanction against exposure. "You must reveal what you must not reveal." Just as desire, revealed, disappears, presence, spoken, is betrayed. This is another way of saying that the lai is a liar, a deceiver, and that such deception cannot be divorced from the theme of adultery with which we began. Here there is no better proof than the story of "Eliduc," the tale with two names ("D'eles deus ad li lais a nun / Guildeluecha Guilliadun. I Elidus fu primes nomez, / Mes ore est li nuns remuez" [v. 21]) about the man with two wives, Guilliadun (the mistress) and Guildeluec (the wife). Eliduc's bigamy is synonymous with ambiguity, the ambivalence of each woman's relation to him being expressed by the partial homophony of their names: Guilliadun "Ne saveit pas que femme euist" (v. 584); and Guildeluec, unaware of Guilliadun, wonders why her husband seems withdrawn: 'Mut se cuntient sutivement. / Sa femme en ot le queor dolent, / Ne sot mie que ceo deveit; / A sei meismes se pleigneit" (v. 717). For the two women the bigamist is ambiguity; and never more so, it turns out, than when he claims to be telling the truth - "For I don't want," he claims, "to transgress my faith" ("Kar ne voil ma fei trespasser" [v. 739]). Eliduc incarnates the paradox of the liar "When I tell you I'm telling the truth, I lie; and when I tell you I lie, I am telling the truth." Which is no different, at bottom, from what the lai does when it denounces the very ambiguity it sanctions - "Kar n'est pas bien ne avenant / De deus espuses meintenir, / Ne la lei nel deit cunsentir" (v. 1128), which can be read: "the law does not permit bigamy"; "the lai does not permit bigamy"; "the law does not permit ambiguity"; "the lai does not permit ambiguity." Or, "When the lai tells you it does not permit double meaning, it means double." The law of the lai involves always, and here there can be no ambiguity, a betrayal - the betrayal of lovers, but also the betrayal of univocal meaning, a presence or plenitude in language, which, as in the paradigmatic lay of "Lanval," is transgressed by expression. Put another way, the truth which poetry can never state without transgressing its own status as fiction is that it is fiction. Which means that Lanval's trial is not only the trial of a despondent knight caught in an unconscionable dilemma, but the trial of fiction itself. That is, to the extent to which he wins his case and, in proving that his lady is best, proves that fiction is true, he loses her; and to the extent to which he fulfills the unwritten law of fiction, that it may never be revealed as such, and thereby retains the fairy lady, he loses his case. The legal case is, in essence, the case of literature, which is resolved only by Marie's own concluding ruse, which, again, is that of the poet at one remove - to so confuse the distinction between that which is to be taken as real and that which cannot be taken to be true that the reader can no longer tell whether the dream lady has come to life or if reality has become a dream. The word traire is also a synonym of trover, "to invent," in the sense of poetic inventio, and "to discover," as in the betrayal of lovers. "Ce jur furent aparceii / Descovert, trouve et veiu" ("That day they were perceived, discovered, found, and seen" ["Guigemar," v. 577]) is Marie's phrase for the capture of lovers. To write or treat (traire) is to betray (traire); or, to carry this idea further, to write immanence, whether figured as the body or the voice, is to

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New Philology and Old French

57

betray it; or, as in the case of the nightingale, to ensnare and contain it in a laz, to kill it; and, ultimately, to entomb the living voice in the dead letter of
a text, to silence it.51

This is why there are so many tombs in Marie's works. Whether the reliquary of the voice in "Laiistic," the father's tomb in "Yonec," the entombment at the end of "Chaitivel," the burial of lovers in "Deus Amanz," or the elaborate construction of the funerary chapel in "Eliduc," the lai, as a vestige or legs, is the tomb of the voice and a monument to desire. Thus, in "Eliduc" the moment of the woman's burial and the hero's withdrawal from the world to the abbey is the moment he becomes a lyric poet: "Le jur que jeo vus enfuirai, / Ordre de moigne recevrai; / Sur vostre tumbe chescun jur / Ferai refreindre ma dolur" ("The day that I will bury you I will receive the holy order, and on your tomb every day I will refrain my sadness" [v. 947]). Again, the lai as legacy is the site of mourning of a loss, more precisely, of a loss of imagined plenitude. "I don't want to lose them all by taking one!" ("Nes voil tuz perdre pur l'un prendre!" [v. 156]), laments the heroine of "Chaitivel," the feminine equal of Eliduc, the woman who would like to keep four men and whose dilemma, that of being forced to choose, is thoroughly analogous to that of the poetess who must choose a title from two alternatives. "Because I have loved you so much," the woman who refuses to "just say no" says, "I want my pain to be remembered. Thus I will compose a lai, and Quatre Dols will be its name" ("Pur ceo que tant vus ai amez, / Voil que mis doels seit remembrez; / De vus quatre ferai un lai / E QuatreDols le numerai" [v. 201]). To repeat, the poetess is the one who breaks the law by uncovering desire, the one who violates the fantasy of plenitude by choosing and who thus places
51 This explains the fact that silence is such an obsession in Old French literature: every work silences a voice. In Roland, for example, the debate about whether to sound the horn is, at bottom, a debate centering around the question of silence. In Chretien de Troyes's Erec et Enide the breaking of silence is thematized in the famous involuntary speech act - Enide's denunciation of Erec's chivalric recreantise- as later in the ordeal of silence imposed by husband upon wife. "Should I speak and risk disobeying Erec, or remain silent and risk losing the one I most love?" the troubled Enide thinks to herself, trapped in a dilemma similar to that of the lady of "Laiistic." Then, too, Chretien's Perceval turns at crucial moments around questions of silence and speech: first the mother's advice always to ask the name of one's companion, countered by the oblique father's injunction against speaking too much; then the silence at the Grail Castle, followed by his cousin's reproach: "If only you had asked the questions," she scolds, "you could have restored the king's lands and his power." "A mal eur tu [te] teiisses, / Que se tu demande l'eiisses, / Li riches rois, qui or s'esmaie, / Fust ja toz garis de sa plaie / Et si tenist sa terre en pais, / Dont il ne tendra point jamais." ("It was an evil hour when you kept quiet, since if you had asked the question, the rich king who now suffers would have been completely cured of his wound; and he would have held his land in peace, which he will now never hold"; Chretien de Troyes, Le roman de Perceval, ed. William Roach [Geneva, 1959], v. 4669). In Marie de France silence is the defining issue of the "Prologue": "Ki Deus ad dune escience / Et de parler bone eloquence / Ne s'en deit taisir ne celer, / Ainz se deit voluntiers mustrer" (v. 1). ("The one to whom God has given knowledge and the eloquence to speak should neither remain silent nor hide it but should show it gladly.") In this Marie is not alone. Whether or not to break silence is the question posed in the first strophe of almost every courtly lyric in which the topos of renascent nature and the birds' song is coterminous with the problem of how to begin. For a discussion of silence in Old French literature see Peggy McCracken, "The Poetics of Silence in the French Middle Ages," dissertation, Yale University, 1989.

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The New Philology

the presence of the voice in the tomb of writing.52 Like the liar or Lanval, she cannot write of secret love without revealing it, cannot transcribe the presence of the voice without betraying it. She always loses something in "taking one." This paradox of the poetess accounts, I think, for the fundamental masochism which lies at the core of Western eroticism. The fatalism which haunts courtly love, and indeed the tradition of romantic love as we know it, is not simply, as Georges Bataille, Denis de Rougement, Gertrude von le Fort, Rene Girard, and others have suggested, that love and death go together or are bound in some kind of theologized notion of a desire for transcendence.53 Rather, their intimacy has to do with the fact that, as long as love is imagined as a presence of bodies and as plenitude accessible to language, it will be lost in the expression. And if, as de Rougement maintains, there is no history of happy love in the West, this is not so much a function of the nature of something like a natural emotion as of the fact that one always betrays, and even kills, something whenever one sings, boasts, or even talks about it.
52 This is exactly what Marie de France does in composing the Lais: "D'un mut ancien lai bretun / Le cunte et tute la reisun / vus dirai. . ." ("Eliduc," v. 1); "Une aventure vus dirai, / Dunt li Bretun firent un lai" ("Laiistic," v. 1); see also "Guigemar," vv. 19-24. 53 See Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco, 1986); Denis de Rougement, Love in the WesternWorld, trans. Montgomery Belgion (New York, 1956); Gertrude von le Fort, The Eternal Woman, The Woman in Time, Timeless Woman, trans. Marie Cecilia Buehrle (Milwaukee, 1954); Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in LiteraryStructure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore, 1965).

Prof. R. Howard Bloch is Chair of the Department of French, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720.

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