A CLERK'S TALE: Barton Palmer, Clemson University
This image in the popular mind of the medievalist may be untrue (colleagues specializing in other historical periods should be consulted). Today we can at least affirm this much: that it is not true of the gentlemanly scholar we have assembled to honor. Friends, students, and colleagues will eagerly attest that Charlie Wood has made a quite successful career out of defeating this stereotype, as easily as Beowulf, resting easy one night, snapped off Grendel’s offending arm. A raconteur par excellence, it is hardly surprising that Charlie should have at an early stage in his career become fascinated with Jean Froissart, arguably the age’s most able chronicler and apologist. Even in retirement, I understand that one of his ongoing projects is a translation of selected passages from the Chroniques. Having devoted the larger part of my own academic career to editing and translating the works of one of Froissart’s contemporaries, I admire Charlie’s choice. We share an interest in Froissart, and so to honor him today, I have decided to say something about that notable and prolific writer. It is, however, Froissart the poet I intend to talk about, not a side of this servant of the rich and famous that most historians or indeed literary scholars have much addressed--at least since Huizinga’s damning and unfortunately quite influential comments about his verse. Among our colleagues, Froissart the poet has much the same kind of standing that medievalists do with the general public, if indeed it is that "good.". Yet this received view is quite unfair (in both cases, of course) and distorting to boot. Froissart’s poetry is not merely derivative, a term of opprobrium that smacks of modern, postromantic values, particularly the view that the artist should be someone who creates from what he thinks and feels and not from his culture’s ideas or forms. Froissart’s immense body of verse (more than 80 thousand lines) is no age of silver mannerist corpus that merely exemplifies the continuing popularity of three broad genres: Arthurian romance, lyric verse in the so-called "fixed forms," and love vision narrative in the double tradition of the Roman de la Rose and Guillaume de Machaut’s narrative dits. Like our honored guest, Jean Froissart has a wickedly sly sense of humor, the virtue of the polished mannerist who is thereby enabled to poke subtle fun at the very themes and structures of the literary tradition he continues yet simultaneously offers up for sophisticated critical review. Since our general topic is "history in the comic mode," I hope you will not think it an unpardonable stretch if I talk about "literature in the comic mode." The conventional view of literary historians is that Froissart would be a poor choice to illustrate "the comic mode," but I hope to show the narrow mindedness of such a judgment. Because Froissart the poet is indeed a mannerist, in the best and most praiseworthy sense of that term, I will also discuss briefly the literary context that he addresses. Confining myself to his work in the dit amoureux genre (the love vision narrative), I will say a little about Froissart’s illustrious predecessor and model, Guillaume de Machaut--also a poet of infinite jest whose humor, because of its preciosite, has gone largely unappreciated by modern readers. I start with two propositions. First, in what was after its publication in 1946 the only scholarly article of substance about Froissart’s poetry, Professor B.J. Whiting--no admirer of the poet later turned chronicler by the way--states that unlike Chaucer and Guillaume de Machaut, Froissart never fell prey to that most prevalent of late medieval clerical vices: misogyny. Whiting’s comment was not meant as praise--in an age that knew not the virtue of political correctness, he considered that the all too conventional hatred and fear of women often made for lively writing. Chaucer, he reminds us, revives the thirteenth century fabliau--an archly misogynistic genre--to good effect, while Froissart for whatever reasons were not disposed to do something similar. It turns out, we shall see, that Whiting was quite wrong about Froissart’s neglect of the medieval misogynistic tradition. My second proposition concerns a quarrel with conventional literary history. English literary medievalists have long celebrated Chaucer’s use of an an obtuse or bumbling narrator who is an obvious intratextual reflex of the poet himself. This experiencing and narrating I is the main character in the love visions, especially The Book of the Duchess and The Legend of Good Women (and also plays a notable role in The Canterbury Tales. Yet this strikingly useful comic figure is by no means Chaucer’s invention. The device is borrowed from his French contemporaries, from Jean Froissart and the master poet who was Froissart’s most important model, Guillaume de Machaut. Romanists have pointed this out to their Chaucerian colleagues for some years, but the incorrect view remains entrenched. In what follows, I will discuss how this proto-Chaucerian character becomes victimized by powerful women and hence the focus of a clerkly antifeminism played for laughs, first in Machaut’s Voir Dit or "True Poem" and then in Froissart’s homage to that masterwork, the Prison amoureuse or "Lovers’ Prison.". I begin with Machaut’s so-called "True Poem, " which turns out to be true in a way that until recently modern scholars did not believe. Long thought to be pseudo-autobiography, the Voir Dit is actually true in the way the poem’s narrator, a textual reflex of the poet, claims. In our recent edition of the work, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and I show that the letters between the poet and a young female admirer that constitute the work’s structural center are in fact genuine, if somewhat rewritten to suit the verse narrative of the couple’s literary love affair into which the letters have been carefully fitted. Machaut was apparently in his early sixties when he began a correspondence with a woman one-third his age who, she says, fell in love with him through reading his lyrics poems, texts that she also desires to emulate. Falling in love with Machaut thus provides her with not only the conventional subject matter of lyric (fin’amor) but the opportunity to study from the master how to write verse that suitably expresses that emotion. Because he had been reduced to physical and artistic impotence by age and the lack of a lady love, the young woman’s approach revives the narrator’s career as well, enabling him in fact to write/compile the record of their affair which is the Voir Dit. The work’s central premise is certainly a humorous one (perhaps even funnier because it was turns out to be true, a fact certainly known to Machaut’s first readers and listeners).. To be happy the narrator must write; to write he needs to love. And yet he should need to write only because he loves. Content should precede the urge to give it appropriate artistic form if what is produced is to be authentic. Traditionally, the lover sorrows because his lady will not reciprocate his feelings, a dissatisfaction he expresses lyrically in the hopes of better his situation. But the narrator/poet in this case seems more eager for the comforts versifying alone provides--after all, no new poems, perhaps no continuing support from aristocratic patrons. Thus the narrator needs to love if he is not to end his life as a failure. His crisis is as much professional as emotional. His concerns mirror the lady’s literary aspirations. For she can become a competent poet only if she experiences love. Technically inexpert, however, the lady cannot write even if properly inspired unless a master shows her how. Is then surprising that the poet, however aged, becomes the object of both her love and admiration? Only he can teach her how to write the lyrical verse in complex fixed forms that her true love for him prompts her to compose. But then he needs her as much as she needs him--and in neither case is their desire conventional. Text-making and lovemaking become inextricably connected as the very process of the Voir Dit’s composition becomes one of the work’s central themes (the lady eventually orders the poet/narrator to make a book to include the letters they exchange, the lyrics poems they exchange as well, and a narrative to explain the meaning and genesis of these texts). Literary mannerism depends on an artistic regime within which both the structuration and evaluation of works are expressed. Machaut’s poem offers an archly mannerist contemplation of what Marxist critic Terry Eagleton aptly terms "the literary means of production." To thematize literary production is in a sense to demystify its claims to provide a self-enclosed alternate reality. For example, the experiential pattern of fin’amor, dependent on a certain distribution of sexual desire, is here disrupted. Receiving the lady’s proposal, the narrator is displaced from his accustomed position of power and control. His desire, aroused by hers, can simply reflect it. Presented with the work of a talented amateur he is begged to criticize, the narrator’s readiness to love cannot be explained by an irresistible admiration for her literary accomplishments. Unlike the lady, then, he cannot be understood as having been seduced by poetry, but rather as prompted by his own desperation and, perhaps, overeagerness. After all, how often does a sixtysomething poet receive an offer of this kind in the mail! Preoccupied with writing, the man and woman are appropriately displaced from the drama of love in favor what each has written; texts are fetishistically substituted for bodies. Accepting her offer with almost embarrassing rapidity (for she is someone he has never laid eyes upon), the overjoyed narrator cannot consummate their compact with an embrace. The woman’s offer is as textual as the lyrics that have prompted it. Beguiled by written words, the narrator shower with affection her letter and its accompanying rondel: And I accepted it with great reverence, It would be hard to exaggerate the foolishness of this moment. The traditional courtly romance, so dependent upon the real presence of bodies, is displaced onto a written exchange fueled largely by its own inherent dynamic. As it turns out, in the remainder of the poem this exchange will only rarely be interrupted by encounters of and in the flesh. Thus the poem’s verse narrative is frequently narcissistic in the way modern metafiction is. That is, it offers for humorous effect a written meditation on the very writing that constitutes it. The Voir Dit turns out to be antifeminist in a quite traditional sense. As the love affair develops, the lady is revealed as unfaithful, a liar, and, worse yet, someone who pokes fun at the aged poet’s rapture by circulating his love letters for laughs to her friends and acquaintances. However the antifeminist strain in the work is also more subtle, less traditional, concerned not with the stereotypical fickleness of young women, but with their desire for power and control. In the Voir Dit, the poet’s lady, at first an eager pupil, becomes something like a patron--demanding that their correspondence be made into a book and offering suggestions as to how the book should be composed. The courtly lady’s traditional hauteur, her dangier, here becomes authorial and textual; the lover’s service, in turn, becomes in large measure the textual production that must suit his lady’s requirements. This theme takes on a larger significance in one of the work’s funniest episodes, one that is not only charmingly metafictional (that is, a comment on the work within the work) but connected closely to the clerkly poet who is dominated not only by his lady, but also by another, even more powerful woman, who similarly demands to be served by proper textualizing. As he travels back from a rendezvous with his lady love, fearing an attack from the Archpriest and the Bretons, one of the grand companies, the narrator is accosted and then taken prisoner by a party of beautiful ladies. Their chief turns out to be lady Esperance (Hope), an allegorical personification straight out of the Roman de la Rose. Esperance, it turns out, has been following the incremental composition of the Voir Dit with great interest, expecting that her own important role in managing the love affair will be appropriately acknowledged. The narrator quickly acknowledges his fault, asks to make amends, and is assigned a penance: he is ordered to compose a lai, a complex and lengthy lyric, in her honor. Pledging to do so when he has time, the narrator is released from his temporary bondage and completes his journey back to his dwelling in Reims, where in a short time he completes his assignment. The finished lay in praise of Esperance is set to her and to his lady love. The latter enjoins the poet to make it a part of the Voir Dit. This Pirandellian, Gidean moment ruptures the text’s pretense to tell only the truth or, at least, offer consistently credible illusion. At the same time, it offers yet another instance of the narrator’s domination or harassment by powerful women, each of whom demands the proper kind of textual tribute. The narrator is required by his lady love to keep their correspondence going; this involves not only answering her letters, but composing the lyrics she desires to read and sing. At the same time, he is put to work by her on a larger project: the writing and compilation of the Voir Dit. Pleasing his lady, he is also obligated to please Esperance, whose egotistical demand for acknowledgment and flattery cannot be ignored. The male threat of the Archpriest and the Bretons doesn’t materialize; instead the narrator is surprised by a female assault, one that finds him taken prisoner and held for a ransom he only with difficulty is later able to pay. Machaut’s poem enjoyed a huge success, prompting the much younger Froissart to emulate it. In the Voir Dit, he was evidently struck by two things: first, the connection between lovemaking and textmaking; second, the power that women characters might be shown as exerting over the male writer, a domination that refigures for humorous effect the traditional antifeminist notion that women possess more sexual power than men and can, in fact, drain men of what power they do have through sexual relations. Like the Voir Dit, the Prison amoureuse is structured around an exchange of letters between correspondents who frequently append poetry to their messages, the whole framed by a first person narrative that provides an account of the relationship between the two writers. However, Froissart’s changes in Machaut’s scheme are several and significant. Though in love with a beautiful women, the narrator is soon thrown into despair by the disrespect he believes that she shows his work. Having written a virelay in her honor, the lady chooses not to sing it, but recites another that stresses how happy she is to see her lover burdened by melancholy. Conventionally, the lover’s distress would be soothed by his lady. Froissart’s poem, however, moves in a radically different direction. A message arrives that will, if only indirectly, console him, though it is not from the lady. Instead, one of his closest male friends, who intriguingly uses the pseudonym "Rose," writes to ask for advice about how to deal with his own romantic troubles: he is reticent to tell the lady he loves her. In conventional terms, both men are stymied by dangier. Instead of confronting and overcoming the lady’s power to refuse or belittle, Rose proposes today what we would call a homosocial alternative. He suggests that the two correspond about their troubles and exchange the lyric poetry each composes for critical comment. The narrator agrees and like his fellow chooses a pseudonym more appropriate for a woman than a man. A clerkly type whose horticultural tastes are varied, he chooses a genus name, not a species, asking Rose to henceforth refer to him as Flos. Despite their best intentions (including the linguistic transvestitism of the pseudonyms), the power of women can only be deferred, not avoided. One day Flos, who carries the letters and poems of Rose in a silk bag that hangs down to his waist, hears that his lady is nearby with a company of ladies. Hoping to spend some time with her, he approaches the manor where they are enjoying themselves in the spring air. Not only is Flos welcomed; he is jokingly seized and made prisoner, while the ladies are intrigued by the bag that hangs from his belt. While one of the women diverts him, another manages to open the bag and remove its comments. Distressed at the loss, the narrator determines to have his literary property returned, but finds himself embroiled in a tussle with the damsels, and tries to hold one of them captive. This struggle leaves him: (I quote from the translation of Laurence de Looze):
..pushed and shaken Frustrated in the end, the narrator offers to exchange his prisoner for the letters, but only after his own lady says, laughingly: "Let’s let him go. Anyone can see that we have the greater strength." Looking over the texts, however, the lady sees that the letters are followed, on the same page, by lyrics. Resigned to returning the letters, she wants the poetry for her own. The lady removes a diamond ring from her finger and, using the stone as a knife, cuts the poems away from the letters. The company of ladies then amuse themselves with reciting the verse, much to the narrator’s delight and satisfaction. This episode, which offers something like both castration and a rape, is handled with the utmost delicacy and good humor. Though pleased, he says, at the outcome of this encounter, the narrator has no more encounters with women in the flesh during the poem. Instead, he occupies himself with crafting texts for Rose’s delight and criticizing or commenting upon those he receives in return. Both poems I have discussed today gently thematize the dangier that the beautiful woman uses to control the man who loves her and the danger, however playfully conceived, that women’s power can create for men, who can be taken prisoner, forced to produce, held to ransom, and symbolically violated. Read in the context of Machaut’s Voir Dit, as Froissart’s original readers undoubtedly did, the Prison amoureuse must have delighted with its radically altered sexual politics. The exchange between a man and woman who are equally eager to consummate their love becomes the mutual support and engagement of two men who, it quickly becomes obvious, are more enthusiastic about the literary game of love than its existential counterpart. Their joy lies in the power of textmaking, one that cannot be denied them despite a female attempt, soon circumvented, to seize and take over what they have written. Froissart’s aristocratic readers, I believe, would have found much delight in this clerkly fear of women and the homosocial masquerade to which it leads and celebrates.
Copyright © 1998, Barton Palmer; all rights reserved. Used
here with permission.
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Medievalists of all stripes, so the academic cliché goes, are unfunny,
dry-as-dust archaeologists of a better forgotten, grimly boring past. Preoccupied
with obscure texts written in user-unfriendly languages and hands, they reconstruct
the narratives of an era so bygone that even George Santayana on his worst day
wouldn’t expect the ignorant to be forced to relive it. Medievalists are famed
to be the worst askers of academic questions, much like the cloistered
intellectuals they study, creative types who spent their time worrying about
the residential arrangements enjoyed by angels on pinheads. On their best days,
of course, medievalists inspire eager anticipation in their students.
Unfortunately, that anticipation is usually for the salvific dawning of
the Renaissance in next semester’s course. 