SOURCE: Klassen, Norman. “Self-Reflexiveness and the Category of the Will in Early Troubadour Poetry of Fin' Amors.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 34, no. 1 (January 1998): 29-42.

[In the following essay, Klassen examines the complex relationship between the poet's “I” and the lover's “I” in troubadour poetry.]

A number of recent studies have drawn fresh attention to the complexity of twelfth-century troubadour poetry. Linda Paterson's recent comprehensive introduction to Occitan society highlights the linguistic diversity of the region given that name;¹ she and others have also explored the subtle variations in troubadour poetry that accompany differences in poetic taste, political pressures, and local rivalries from Limoges to Aix.² In spite of this diversity, and in some ways because of it, poetic self-reflexiveness recurs insistently as a common theme. The troubadours of southern France set an important precedent in drawing attention to their own creativeness, in competing in a contest of one-upmanship, and in advertising their own interpretive genius. This quality of self-reflexiveness, developed in the immediate context of poetry usually concerned with fin' amors, leaves its impress upon the theme of love. The assertive presence of the authorial self draws attention to expressions of will, to the complex role of the category of the will in the psychology of love, and to the “I” as an ambiguous (and ambitious) construct.

Poetic self-referentiality and the theme of fin' amors interpenetrate in the category of the will, that faculty, defined in part by its relationship to rationality and to the object apprehended by sense perception, that pertains to desire and the possibility of action based on choice.³ Of importance, at least as a starting point, is the outward orientation of this internal faculty. Troubadour poetry, regardless of the degree of its frivolity or interest in hermeneutical freefall, valorises the full complexity of love by acknowledging and celebrating its outward and inward orientation, as well as the interrelationship of psychological categories. The role of the will emerges in an emphasis upon the loss of the capacity to choose and the necessity of the lover's adherence to rules of love. This twofold instantiation of the will in observable effects, where the condition of this faculty issues or fails to issue in action, finds its counterpart in the relationship between the poet and the production of songs. The objectives of rhetoric enhance this comparison in that they emphasise the choices the poet must make. The ambiguity of the “I” present in the songs as lover, as singer, as subject under construction at once indebted to and proof of the nature of love, serves as an indefinable nexus. The “I” draws attention to the proximity of the realms where lover and singer exercise their wills, if not the possibility of their contiguity or even fusion, a term which finally returns us to the prerogatives of love in this technically sophisticated poetry.

The emphasis on the will in troubadour poetry is to be found in one of its most prevalent conventions, that of the lover being reduced to a babbling fool, no longer in control of his will at all. Bernart de Ventadorn, often regarded as the most straightforward among troubadours in his celebration of love, acknowledges this condition repeatedly. In “Lo tems vai e ven e vire” the speaker tries to find solace in accepting this state of affairs:

Pero ben es qu'ela.m vensa
a tota sa voluntat […].

(36-7)⁴

And yet it is good that she subdues me to her entire will […].

At the heart of the love affair as he expresses it in this poem is the commonplace fact that his lady's will dominates. He carries on, though, however subdued, and actively acknowledges the propriety of her having power over him. Jaufré Rudel alludes to a similar condition in “Lan qand li jorn son lonc e mai”, where love itself controls the lover's will:

Vauc de talan enbroncs e clis.

(5)⁵

I go bent and bowed with desire.

Love simply takes over and leaves the lover without either initiative or the capacity almost literally to see other possibilities. Desire (talan) paradoxically usurps any faculty for choice. He carries on, but desire has reshaped him, and in his deportment he expresses submission. The loss of control over the lover's own will reveals itself to anyone who can read the signs. The evidence of the bowed head is submitted as proof of an internal condition. If the will leads to acts that reflect personal choices, the loss of control of one's will in these lyrics similarly reveals itself in the realm of actions. Early troubadour lyrics establish a strong connection between external reality, where choices become manifest, and the will. And as we shall see, the relationship between choice and action is mirrored in the “I” as self-reflexive poet, who makes his rhetorical choices and then constructs his song.

In the poetry of fin' amors, where much is loss, the accent upon the absence of choice in itself draws attention to the faculty of the will as a category as well as to the external realm of effects. The observed shift to the psychological realm in poetry of this period has occasionally led to a consideration of the medieval understanding of psychological processes and internal events. There is some justification for this stress upon activity; strictly speaking, we can refer to very fast processes and medieval commentators did express scientific interest in such effects, but beyond the poetic fascination with how quickly love can transform an individual, the poetry emphasises the instantaneous effects of love at first sight and the enduring power of love to effect the conformity of the will. The will is in this way accentuated as an irreducible component in a system. The poet of this kind of love documents necessary and predictable consequences of an eternal moment. We rightly call aspects of this documentation “conventions” and “allegory”, yet such terminology can draw attention to the literary techniques of these eminently self-reflexive writers and obscure the fact that the conventions represent the desire to isolate theoretically discrete psychological components in the conflict and a profound interest in enduring categories. Troubadour poetry reflects a preoccupation with the category of the will, not only the processes that pertain to it and issue from it.

The articulation of the immutable effects of love in the poetry of early troubadours as different as Guillaume of Aquitaine and Bernart de Ventadorn provides an indication of this interest. Bernart de Ventadorn describes the effects of love in the following way in “Can vei la lauzeta mover”:

mort m'a, e per mort li respon
e vau m'en, pus ilh no.m rete,
chaitius, en issilh, no sai on.

(54-6)

She has given me death, and I will answer her with death, and I am going away, because she does not retain me, a broken man, in exile, I know not where.

Guillaume of Aquitaine expresses a similar sentiment when he writes, in “Pus vezem de novelh florir”,

A totz jorns m'es pres enaissi
Qu'anc d'aquo qu'aimiey non jauzi,
Ni o faray ni anc no fi.
          Qu'az esciens
Fas mantas res que.l cor me di:
          “Tot es nïens.”

(13-18)⁶

This is the way it has always been with me: I never had the joy of what I loved, and I never will, as I never did. For I am aware, I do many things and my heart says, “It is all nothing”.

Both of these passages express the unchangeableness of the situation. Bernart uses the language of slavery and exile, describing a situation of powerlessness, the inability to change one's lot. He equates the effects of love with living death. Similarly, Guillaume conveys a sense of hopelessness in his love affair, a despair that yet does not issue in any meaningful change of actions. On the contrary, in his interminable state he exercises his will with repeated actions that have no effect. The will is bound to the heart, and the heart recognises that no change will ensue.

If we think of the subject of love as the troubadours' abiding theme, that context when combined with the feature of stasis supplies an interesting meaning to Guillaume's poem “Farai un vers de dreyt nien”. The poem cryptically subverts what would seem already to be conventions of troubadour poetry and draws attention to the making of a vers, yet nonetheless relies heavily upon the theme of love:

Farai un vers de dreyt nien:
Non er de mi ni d'autra gen,
Non er d'amor ni de joven,
          Ni de ren au.

(1-4)

I will make a vers of exactly nothing: there'll be nothing in it about me or anyone else, nothing about love or youth or anything else.

On one level Guillaume is true to his word; the poem is about neither love nor youthful vitality. On another, with the references to lovesickness, the notion of loving a woman from afar, concepts of comparative gentleness and beauty (gensor e bellazor [l. 35]), the poem makes a strongly rhetorical statement about love and troubadour love lyrics. In so doing it renders problematic the identity of the poetic “I”. Nothingness may produce an interpretive free-for-all and draw attention to the poet as an assertive, willing creator; it may also lead to stasis, to no reflection whatsoever, just the immutability that love causes. Love creates the conditions for epistemological anxiety. Guillaume also makes an important contribution to the poetry in terms of its ability to draw upon the motifs of fin' amors to engage the reader's sense of discernment, the necessity to choose, including ways to read the “I”. The will, exercised in arbitrary reading decisions, most appositely serves as the contraclau (l. 42) for reading this poetry, the key that unlocks it against all expectations. This activity can take place in the absence of love but finds its meaning—and the attenuation of its arbitrariness—in that context.

The convention of the lover's overridden will coexists with that of his need to exercise his will through assiduous adherence to the rules of love. Already in the earliest of troubadour lyrics the notion of love revolves around a set of rules, and the presence of rules indicates the activity of the will. In Guillaume's “Pus vezem de novelh florir”, which we have already examined briefly, the first stanza introduces in terms of sight the theme of passivity manifested as mere receptiveness to the general benevolence of nature:

Pus vezem de novelh florir
Pratz e vergiers reverdezir,
Rius e fontanas esclarzir,
          Auras e vens,
Ben deu quascus lo joy jauzir
          Don es jauzens.

(1-6)

Now when we see the meadows once again in flower and the orchards turning green, streams and fountains running clear, the breezes and the winds, it is right that each man celebrate the joy that makes him rejoice.

These lines foreshadow a passivity that registers more forcefully in the motif of love at first sight, a phenomenon largely defined by the absence of choice. Guillaume hints at a context of fin' amors by alluding to such important courtly symbols as gardens and fountains. The joy by which one is made happy also refers in one sense specifically to fulfilled love; the reference here further conjoins passive sight and love. The following stanza initially continues the resigned reflection upon the nature of love:

D'Amor non dey dire mas be.
Quar no n'ai ni petit ni re?
Quar ben leu plus no m'en cove;
          Pero leumens
Dona gran joy qui be.n mante
          Los aizimens.

(7-12)

Now I must not say anything but good of Love. Why do I get not one bit of it? Maybe I wasn't meant for more. And yet how freely it gives great joy to any man who upholds its rules.

The speaker hints at an ideal of obsequious compliance. With his not-quite-rhetorical question he puts himself on the defensive. The first meditative lines of this stanza give way to the potential for action concentrated in the notion of the obedience to rules. The singer's explanation of how to receive from love serves to set apart the role of the will, to draw attention to a concept that seems most relevant as a contrast to everything else that love comprises and everything that has to this point in the poem been implied. The disarming subtlety of the transition mirrors the paradoxical role of the will.

Rules call for obedience, the tacit agreement of the participants to play the game. Guillaume's assertion in “Pus vezem de novelh florir” that love freely gives great joy to the man who upholds its rules serves as an interpretive crux, a meeting point of many different possibilities that concern both the system or game of love itself and the player/poet as well. These possibilities emanate from the notion of aizimens. Rules depend on the operations of the will and intimate, negatively, the coercive bending of the will or, more salubriously, the directing of the will. Even in so winsome a statement as this one by Guillaume we can discover latent tensions, threats, and intimations of exhilaration that characterise fin' amors: love exercises authority; it has the power to bestow joy. While love gives great joy to some, the claim of the poetic “I” also establishes a margin, the place of those who fail in love or, possibly, those who write about love. There is here too a hint of the need for perseverance; the lover needs to maintain his adherence to the rules. Only then, at a time that remains a secret, will he receive the promised joy. The statement also suggests the attitude of a potentially “objective” poetic observer: since he has little or nothing of love, it follows that he cannot or will not obey the rules of the game. As we might expect from Guillaume, the poet hints at his own rebelliousness, his ability to thrive on the margins, his wilfulness. At the same time he accepts, even asserts, his active role as maker or performer and therefore contributor to the game of love.

Guillaume defines a very specific arena for the activity of the will: obedience to love. This consists of paying homage to love by acting agreeably to other people, behaving graciously, speaking properly. These we recognise as the courtly virtues of the lover: he exercises his will in specific ways laid down by love; he follows the rules. In this context Guillaume offers a tantalising aphorism: “A bon coratge bon poder” (23) (“When the heart is good, its power is good”).⁷ The saying in itself authenticates the value of the will and puts all the emphasis on the individual in possession of such coratge. His exposition of the need for obedience does not altogether blend with this sentence. The conventions of fin' amors similarly put constraints upon poder, a word that consistently appears in connection with notions of will and desire.⁸Poder emerges as a central and complex theme in troubadour poetry and Guillaume here contributes to a complex understanding of concepts in love dependent upon the category of the will. The upbeat aphorism also suggests his own self-confidence as a wily lover, the “I” who on another level might be the maker who will complete his meditation with reflections on the vers. Though he initially indicates that he exists on the margins of love's activity, he reveals that this is only because he wants what he cannot have: “quar vuelh so que no puesc aver” (20) (“because I want what I cannot have”). The notion of “A bon coratge bon poder” fortifies him as much as any other lover. Guillaume blurs the distinction between those marginalised by love, for reasons that might include the more detached attitude of the maker, and those who play the game faithfully. He rather accentuates the value of a firm will. Guillaume combines the activity of the will with the activity belonging to the realm of the poem itself. He speaks of the man who understands the verse well:

Del vers vos dig que mais en vau
Qui ben l'enten […].

(37-8)

Concerning this vers I tell you a man is all the more noble as he understands it […].

Obedience to love engages with the literary activities of composition and interpretation. They complement one another as activities issuing from the category of the will.

The obedience of the lover signals his integration into the game of love. At the same time the way the lover behaves graciously and speaks courteously represents a triumph of social ordering and the will of the lover effects a social blossoming. Marcabru's poem “Cortesamen vuoill comenssar” stresses the need for cortesia and mesura as qualities that become a man who wants to hear everything, to be wise but in the particular and nascently Machiavellian sense of being informed:

Assatz pot hom villanejar
Qui Cortezia vol blasmar,
Que.l plus savis e.l mieills apres
Non sap tantas dire ni far,
C'om no li posca enseignar
Petit o pro, tals hora es.
De Cortesia.is pot vanar
Qui ben sap Mesur' esgardar;
E qui tot vol auzir quant es,
Ni tot cant ve cuid' amassar,
Del tot l'es ops a mesurar,
O ja non sera trop cortes.
Mesura es de gen parlar,
E cortesia es d'amar.

(7-20)⁹

The man who wants to find fault with Courtesy is certainly capable of acting churlishly. For the most wise and informed is not able to say or do so much that he cannot be taught something, slight or significant, at some time. The person who can keep well to Moderation can boast of courtliness; and the man who wants to hear everything there is, or who is determined to gather together all that he sees, he must be moderate in everything, or he will never be very courtly. Moderation is speaking graciously, and it is Courtliness to love.

The desire of the lover provokes and enables him to integrate into the social context in ways defined as courtly. This objective gives a specific shape to the notion of the will, and lends that category actuality. The conventions of this love poetry ostensibly establish a basis for the objective analysis of the lover's internal condition in that outward actions reveal inner realities. The lover, and the phenomenon of erotic love, would appear to be subject to verifiability as they apparently function simply. One can see here the attractiveness of amour courtois as a touchstone for positivistic criticism: a supposedly self-contained cultural structure with easily identifiable features.¹⁰ Yet its simplicity is beguiling because the will plays a decisive role in linking inner and outer aspects of love. Marcabru's formulation points to a social game that extends beyond that of love itself as distinctions between “I” as lover and poet do. We recognise here Marcabru's cynicism as he refers to the quite different goal of being politically connected; yet he merely exploits the availability of the will for purposes that do not fold back into the supposedly contained game of love.¹¹

Bernart de Ventadorn pursues the issue of verifiability, highlighting the centrality of this concept yet also suggesting its elusiveness by emphasising the indeterminacy of signs in “Non es meravelha s'eu chan”:

Ai Deus! car se fosson trian
d'entrels faus li fin amador,
e.lh lauzenger e.lh trichador
portesson corns el fron denan!

(33-6)

Ah God! if only true lovers stood out from the false; if all those slanderers and frauds had horns on their heads.

The lover of “Non es meravelha s'eu chan” recognises that he has reached an impasse. As a true lover he bears all the signs of true love, yet for him this state does not distinguish him from those who feign love. That he feels love more keenly than others only exacerbates his dilemma. He has directed his will towards obeying the dictates of love, yet he cannot count on his beloved understanding his intentions because others can exercise their wills duplicitously. Sometimes Bernart is placed at the opposite end of the spectrum from Marcabru in terms of their complexity.¹² Such a construct, however, can restrict our appreciation of both poets' subtle appreciation of the nature of love.

Bernart hints at a connection between the activity of his will and the work of writing poetry:

Non es meravelha s'eu chan
melhs de nul autre chantador,
que plus me tra.l cors vas amor
e melhs sui faihz a so coman.
Cor e cors e saber e sen
e fors' e poder i ai mes.

(1-6)

Of course it's no wonder I sing better than any other troubadour: my heart draws me more toward love, and I am better made for his command. Heart body knowledge sense strength and energy—I have set all on love.

The opening lines of this poem suggest the alterity of love and the subtle self-reflexiveness of desire. Love exists independently of lover and beloved, and demands the sacrifice of all the lover's faculties. In his case, the connection between the power of the will and the process of writing poetry has theoretically the added benefit of enabling one to distinguish between true and perfidious lovers. The true lover sings better; he has more artistic ability. But Bernart's claim ultimately entails that the lover is a better artificer. The concept of the “chantador” includes that of composition. What could be the troubadour's best weapon for distinguishing between himself and untrue lovers is also potentially the most indicting evidence against him: like imposters, such composers are masters of creating fictions. This paradoxical situation in which love and an ability to sing well have an uncertain relationship to one another is mirrored in the ambiguous relationship between “I” as subject of love and “I” as self-reflexive love poet. This declaration also reveals the independence of the will. The poetic “I” establishes his own integrity: he has placed not only his heart but also his body, intelligence, mind, strength, and ability at the service of love. Yet he exists independently, as someone better made, and he eschews the fatalistic implications of this assertion in favour of the notion that he has chosen to place the members of his being at love's service. This activity is part of what has made him a better singer and it represents an enclave of the autonomy of his will.

On the one hand the lover simply follows the dictates of desire, yet on the other this situation fuels his self-righteousness as a lover and self-assurance as a singer of songs, at which point self-reflexive identification of the “I” as poet looms. Notions of conviction and of authenticity that the poetry of fin' amors embody depend upon the bi-polar and multi-level construction of the assertion and abnegation of the will. Raimbaut d'Aurenga's poem “Ar resplan la flors enversa” succinctly conveys these opposing yet mutually reinforcing tendencies. Its poetic “I” ascribes to himself a powerful role of creating fictions:

Mas mi ten vert e jauzen Joys
Er quan vey secx los dolens croys.
Quar enaissi m'o enverse
Que bel plan mi semblon tertre […].

(7-10)¹³

But Joy keeps me green and exultant, now when I see desiccated the gloomy, miserable ones. Because I invert things for myself, so that hills seem to me beautiful plains […].

At this point in the poem, the poetic “I” credits himself with the inversion of things, the fashioning of his own world. This activity gives him joy, and he hints that joy enhances his mental power, a trail of associations that for him leads to love; he carefully positions himself in this process. Eventually, he associates inversion with the typical effects of love, specifically madness:

Anat ai cum cauz'enversa
Sercan rancx e vals e tertres,
Marritz cum selh que conglapis
Cocha e mazelh'e trenca.

(33-6)

I have gone like a creature upside down, searching rocks and valleys and hills, demented like someone that the frost oppresses and destroys and cuts.

Not surprisingly the lady's gaze, striking him in the heart, has caused the lover's condition. But Raimbaut has taken a tortuous route to arrive at this statement of effect. As with other instances of the will's activity, the theme of inversion in this poem suggests both the lover's complete loss of rational control and an artificer's radical power to construct a fiction, suggesting both the intensity of love and authorial self-reflexiveness.

Raimbaut also applies the inversion motif to the other people of his poem. We have seen elsewhere in troubadour poetry that the correct social responses, graciousness and courtesy, ensure the lover's courtly standing and status as one connected and informed. But the madness brought on by love can also doom the lover to social unacceptability. In this poem the lover has encountered the rejection of others:

Mas una gen fad'enversa
(Cum s'eron noirit en tertres,)
Que.m fan pro pieigz que conglapis;
Q'us quecx ab sa lengua trenca
E.n parla bas et ab siscles.

(17-21)

But a stupid, inverted crowd of people (as if they had been nourished on the hills) whose effect on me is worse than frost! For each of them cuts with his tongue and speaks low and with whistles.

Their rejection inspires him; it fortifies his will. Employing a strategy quite different from Marcabru's, Raimbaut similarly valorises the will through his handling of motifs associated with fin' amors even as those motifs point to suppression and the loss of the freedom of the will. As elsewhere, this emphasis draws attention to the nature of the “I” and, especially by virtue of its alterity (in this case with reference to the crowd), the proximity of the “I” as lover and “I” as poet outside the song yet inspired by love. The motif of inversion, which Raimbaut makes central in this poem, aptly represents this paradoxical phenomenon in the literature of fin' amors. Crucially, love signals not merely passivity on the part of the poetic “I” as lover but the power to create fictions as well.

The art of rhetoric stands behind the interpenetration of self-reflexiveness and notions of the will and the functions of this interpenetration in troubadour poetry. From antiquity commentators acknowledged a connection between poetry and rhetoric.¹⁴ In a ground-breaking study, Douglas Kelly has shown that specific aspects of rhetoric related to the activity of the will were brought to bear upon the ancient and medieval study of poetry.¹⁵ These activities relate to the rhetorical concepts of inventio and dispositio. The poet, from the point of view of this liberal art, engages in activities that require his judgement. This understanding derives from such influential ancient theorists as Cicero and Quintilian, both of whom stress the role of judgement in the notion of devising matter. Similarly, for Martianus Capella, rhetorical invention consists of investigation and understanding, the process of making choices. In his influential Marriage of Philology and Mercury he has Rhetoric say that judgement is required in all parts of rhetoric.¹⁶ The inclusion of judgement in all aspects of rhetoric is particularly relevant for troubadour poetry, which so vitally consists of both composition and oral delivery. Robert R. Edwards has recently concluded that rhetorical inventio “occupies a leading position in poetic theory and offers a key to understanding the conceptual foundation of medieval narrative.”¹⁷ That conceptual foundation draws attention to the category of the will, the faculty for discriminating between components, their order, their suitability for the work and other such difficult choices. The category of the will, furthermore, synthesises the concepts of inner talent and rhetorical technique. Paul Zumthor has written that “[L'inventio] implique l'existence, chez l'auteur, d'un talent approprié, mais en elle-même elle est technique pure.”¹⁸ It may be pure technique, but it is a technique difficult to teach by example. The chore of choosing a plan for a poem, for example, presents infinite possibilities. In this domain the emphasis rests upon the individual and the choices, the discrete expressions of will, made by that individual: inventio and dispositio lend themselves to self-reflexiveness and furthermore give definition to self-reflexiveness in terms of choices. The nature of the poetic enterprise draws attention to the role of the will of the author.

At the same time, the convergence of poetry and rhetoric accentuates the importance of the will of the recipient. Ancient and medieval rhetoric consistently insists upon the goal of persuading the reader or auditor.¹⁹ To the extent that the writing of poetry overlaps with the art of rhetoric, it engages the category of the will in its efforts to persuade. The troubadour's poetic “I” variously wants to persuade his domna of his love, the lauzengers and trichadors of the righteousness of his cause or, on another level, to persuade the audience to admit the virtuosity of the performer and ultimately that of the composer. The overt and theatrical nature of this self-reflexive enterprise ensures that rhetorical persuasion takes on a particularly playful form, yet that does not undermine the ways in which troubadours accentuate the will.²⁰ On the contrary, the meaning of the will takes on another dimension. It grows increasingly beyond a narrowly intellectual category. The playfulness of self-reflexiveness shares common ground with other forms of persuasion, and they rhetorically mutually reinforce the pervasive relevance of the category of the will.

The relationship between troubadour self-reflexiveness and interest in the category of the will as considered under the umbrella of the theme of love indicates the early troubadours' tacit acknowledgement of the interdependency of psychological components and the nature of composition. The overriding concern with the motif of love suggests a hierarchical relationship between love and will, in which love operates on a higher plane than other categories such as the will or rationality. Yet the self-reflexive possibilities in troubadour poetry and the “I” as the site of lover and poet subvert such a construct. Praxis, in writing, subverts ideals of love both in expressions of fin' amors (the phrase itself is an attempt to stress the exclusivity of love) and in that other enigmatic ideal, spiritual love.²¹ It has been said that “to write is first of all an impossible effort to control the unconscious text”.²² Notions of the “I” constitute an important part of that which it is impossible to control.

Love nonetheless may serve as a worthy point of entry for attempts to understand the interrelationships between categories, just as writing or textuality provides the point of departure for our understanding of subversion, complicity, and false bottoms in the writing process. Sarah Kay has drawn attention to the common ground between the theme of love and self-reflexive technical concerns. She writes that the “success [of troubadour lyrics] lies in the conjunction of passion with formal refinement, commitment with convention, referentiality with irony […]. The point that holds together this poetic world of coincidentia oppositorum is the first-person subject position.”²³ That first-person subject position is a position of choice, and the context of contraries draws attention to the need to choose and the operations of the will. Kay draws attention to the importance of the relationship between what she calls the faculties and the production of a song when she writes that the “faculties [are] arranged around a gap which has no name, but from which the song appears to issue”.²⁴ For her, this gap represents the instability of the self.²⁵ In my opinion it appears as the critic or poet attempts to isolate emotion (love), intellect (self-reflexive knowledge), and will and attempts to overlook or suppress their necessary interpenetration. These components of the self are not neatly arranged in relation to one another, nor do they readily separate into discrete units. The song at once issues from the gap resulting from the fiction of their configuration at any given time and betrays a fundamental inability to recognise and parcel off discrete units. Awareness of the instability of the self issues from such necessary attempts at isolation and identification, what Kay calls the narrativisation of the faculties and which she labels as allegorical.²⁶

Love serves the troubadours well because of the complex interrelations of what are in fact component parts: love, rationality, and the will. For the importance of the relationship between the categories of love and rationality, or knowledge, one need look no further than the convention of love at first sight, in which the beloved's gaze destroys the lover's ability to reason. Bernart de Ventadorn gives us an example of this convention: the distinction between trobar clus and trobar leu arguably hinges upon the way one configures the relationship between the subject matter of love and the degree of intellectual effort and patience with riddles required. The implications of this convention in medieval love literature go well beyond the notion of opposition.²⁷ Complicating the opposition of love and knowledge points to the rationality of the author and fosters self-reflexiveness. The troubadours lay the foundation for such complex associations in the ways in which they stress a variety of terms related to knowledge in the context of love.²⁸ Yet it is their emphasis upon the role of the will with reference to an ambiguous poetic “I” that makes it especially difficult to ascribe primacy to an interest in compositional theory or ideas of self-reflexiveness and to separate these concerns from the theme of love. Rather, together they indicate a system of interacting components.²⁹

Notes

1. Linda Paterson, The World of the Troubadours. Medieval Occitan Society, c.1100 c.1300, Cambridge, 1993.

2. See, for example, Laura Kendrick, The Game of Love. Troubadour Wordplay, Berkeley, 1988: Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature, Cambridge, 1995.

3. For a fascinating discussion of the ways in which the relationship between rationality and will later comes under close scrutiny, and accompanying distinctions between decision and choice, see Bonnie Kent, Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century, Washington, D. C., 1995, esp. pp. 94-149.

4. Bernard de Ventadour, Chansons d'Amour, ed. and trans. Moshé Lazar, Paris, 1966. English translations are from Frederick Goldin, ed. and trans., Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouvères: An Anthology and a History, Garden City, 1973.

5. Jaufré Rudel, The Songs of Jaufré Rudel, ed. and trans. Rupert T. Pickens, Toronto, 1978.

6. Guillaume IX, Duc d'Aquitaine, Les Chansons de Guillaume IX, Duc d'Aquitaine, 2nd ed., ed. and trans. A. Jeanroy, Paris, 1964. English translations are from Goldin.

7. Bernard O'Donoghue catches the sense of this line nicely: “If there's a will, there's a way.” Bernard O'Donoghue, ed. and trans., The Courtly Love Tradition, Oxford, 1982.

8. Bernart de Ventadorn, for instance, writes in “Lancan vei la folha” that “Cor ai que m'en tolha / mas no.n ai ges poder” (9-10). (“I have the heart to break away, but not the strength.”)

9. Marcabru, Poésies Complètes du Troubadour Marcabru, ed. and trans. J.-M.-L. Dejeanne, Toulouse, 1909. The English translation is from O'Donoghue.

10. For a discussion of the problems surrounding the label amour courtois see Henry Kelly, “Gaston Paris's Courteous and Horsely Love”, in The Spirit of the Court, ed. G. S. Burgess and R. A. Taylor, Cambridge, 1985, pp. 217-23.

11. On the similarities between Marcabru and other troubadours regarding his attitude towards fin' amors, as well as some of the differences, see Ruth Harvey's sensitive study The Troubadour Marcabru and Love, London, 1989.

12. Linda Paterson has shown that Marcabru's vocabulary has a greater technical range in Troubadours and Eloquence, Oxford, 1975, 229. Leslie Topsfield has developed the contrast between Marcabru and Bernart in “Fin' Amors in Marcabru, Bernart de Ventadorn and the Lancelot of Chrétien de Troyes”, in Love and Marriage in the Twelfth Century, ed. Willy van Hoecke and Andries Welkenhuysen, Louvain, 1981, pp. 236-49.

13. Raimbaut d'Orange, The Life and Works of the Troubadour Raimbaut d'Orange, ed. and trans. Walter T. Pattison, Minneapolis, 1952. I have supplied the translations from O'Donoghue.

14. The extent to which the study and writing of poetry belonged to grammar or rhetoric was debated.

15. Douglas Kelly, “The Scope of the Treatment of Composition in the Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Arts of Poetry”, Speculum 41 (1966), 261-78.

16. “Iam vero partes officii mei quinque esse non dubium; nam est inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, pronuntiatio. iudicatio enim, quae a nonnullis adicitur, partibus cunctis adscribitur, idcircoque ipsa pars non poterit rite censeri, licet dicendum quid silendumve sit dispensatio iudicationis examinet. inventio est quaestionum argumentorumque sagax investigatrixque comprehensio […]. sed ex his inventionem certum est esse potissimam, cuius opus est causae quaestiones excutere et argumenta probatu idonea reperire.” Martianus Capella, ed. James Willis, Leipzig, 1983, 5.442. “There is no doubt that my duty has five parts: matter, arrangement, diction, memory, and delivery. For judgment, which some include, is required in all the parts, and therefore cannot itself properly be considered a part, although it is the province of judgment to weigh what should and should not be said. Matter, or invention, is the prudent and searching collection of issues and arguments […]. Of these the most powerful surely is invention, which has the task of discovering the issues in a case and finding suitable arguments to prove it.” All translations of Martianus are from Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts. Vol. 2, The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, trans. William Harris Stahl et al., New York and London, 1977.

17. Robert R. Edwards, Ratio and Invention: A Study of Medieval Lyric and Narrative, Nashville, 1989, p. 81.

18. Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale, Paris, 1972, p. 50.

19. Cicero stresses this goal at the outset of De inventione, and Martianus reiterates the point: “Officium vero meum est dicere apposite ad persuadendum; finis persuadere id, quod est propositum, dictione. quae quidem verba mei Ciceronis attestor” (5.439). “My duty is to speak appropriately in order to persuade; my object is through speech to persuade the hearer of the subject proposed. I invoke the words of my Cicero.”

20. Simon Gaunt discusses the relevance of play in terms rhetoric in his study of irony in early troubadour writings, Troubadours and Irony, Cambridge, 1989, esp. pp. 5-38.

21. María Rosa Menocal offers a delightful excursus into the epistemological complexities surrounding our efforts to understand poetic statements of ideal love in Shards of Love. Exile and the Origins of the Lyric, Durham and London, 1994, esp. pp. 55-183.

22. Serge Leclaire, “Le Réel dans le texte”, Littérature 3 (1971), 30-2, (p. 32). Rouben Cholakian cites Leclaire in his The Troubadour Lyric: A Psychocritical Reading, Manchester and New York, 1990, p. 6. Emphasis upon the textuality of the unconscious does not in my opinion ultimately do justice to the complexity of the interrelationships informing self-reflexiveness and fin' amors.

23. Sarah Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry, Cambridge, 1990, p. 212.

24. Kay, p. 65.

25. In a similar vein, Stephen Nichols notes that “The dialectical matrix of the lyric could readily juxtapose conflicting aspects of the subject, the didactic and the hedonistic, in a discourse which represented the complexities of a psyche that poetic language unveiled, attempted to limit and ultimately showed to be unattainable.” Stephen G. Nichols, jr., “The Promise of Performance: Discourse and Desire in Early Troubadour Lyric”, in The Dialectic of Discovery. Essays on the Teaching and Interpretation of Literature presented to Lawrence E. Harvey, ed. John D. Lyons and Nancy J. Vickers, Lexington, 1984, pp. 93-108 (p. 96).

26. Kay, p. 50. Cholakian usefully stresses the importance of context, although in defending the choice of a Freudian/Lacanian psychocritical reading he simply asserts that if a text has context, “then we must give the latter its most comprehensive interpretation” (p. 6). Unfortunately, the comprehensiveness of such a reading remains open to question.

27. For a book-length study of these issues with reference primarily to Chaucer see Norman Klassen, Chaucer on Love, Knowledge and Sight, Cambridge, 1995.

28. A. H. Schutz has shown that in troubadour poetry words such as sen and saber, sciensa and conoissensa have significance as technical terms and that “where used together or in conjunction with other abstractions (beutat, pretz, and valor) as courtly topoi lexically complement each other to a high degree.” “Some Provençal Words Indicative of Knowledge”, Speculum 33 (1958), 508-14 (p. 508). For him they reveal a philosophical dimension to the poetry of the troubadours.

29. I would like to thank Ron Martinez of the University of Minnesota for his extensive and helpful comments on a draft of this paper. The research for this article was partially completed during my tenure as a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellow. I am grateful for the SSHRC's financial assistance.