
Dedicated to Robert Paul Levine (1926–2022)
This essay is an attempt to reach out to others, knowing that one is ultimately alone. We create a fiction of otherness that maintains the adventure of the mind as a reaching toward someone. Lyric, too, maintains a fiction of embodiment and union with others; it can articulate that sense of grasping for wholeness with others and the fall of difference that comes with realizing that one is alone. “How have you been coping?” That frequent greeting captures how the pandemic, though a personal experience for everyone, has been a communal experiment in coping with loneliness. In a parallel way, lyric gives us strategies for negotiating with various categories of aloneness; it creates typologies of solitude different from other kinds that I will discuss. We find ways to construct and transform our loneliness into lyric events that confront a new mode of dwelling in the world. Dispossessed of what we have, we can look to lyric to give us models for how to transform dispossession into new ways of being. Through lyric we do not escape solitude but dwell and tarry with frustration and obstacles until, being with and observing that absence, we realize a new kind of presence, a solitary presence.
While medieval literature offers many models of solitary thinking, vernacular lyric confronts the problem of solitude in a unique mode, grappling and coping with this phenomenon that gives shape and texture to ambivalence and vexation. In courtly lyric, often the sense of being alone arrives when something is taken away from you that never really was yours: say, the inaccessible noble lady of an illicit relationship. This realization does not manifest itself as solitary consolation but as fulfillment in the flesh and voice of solitary being: what I call a solitary presence rather than solitude. This essay meditates on this event of lyric dispossession as it is transformed into a very specific musicopoetic art form across various vernacular traditions, from the Occitan works of Bernart de Ventadorn, William IX, and Arnaut Daniel to lyrics of the Iberian Peninsula, including the Mozarabic kharja (final stanzas of poems written in Arabic or Hebrew in the Romance dialect of Andalusia) and a Galician-Portuguese cantiga d’amigo (songs in which a girl laments the absence of her lover). Lyric dispossession can affirm female desire despite its dominance as a male solitary presence in the courtly tradition. In the poetic dynamics of the muwashshah, discourses of dispossession compete through the interaction of different languages and social registers. The muwashshah poetics illuminates how the female-voiced solitary presence is maintained not only in the cantiga d’amigo but in other genres such as trobairitz cansos and Old French crusade departure lyrics from the perspective of women left behind.
A comparative study among these traditions allows us to see how these lyrics can stage vulnerability or empowerment through dispossession and in different registers of seduction and even violence through fantasized or objectified female bodies. At the same time, female-voiced lyrics can stage a woman’s self-possession and own mode of empowered dispossession. How these lyrics play out on a formal level produces specific power dynamics of solitary presence that always move toward or away from fleshly embodiment, through song and its own play with movement and sounds that embody fantasies of sexual union then cruel separation, or through erotic surrogates of ornaments, clothes, and nature.
The Lyric Event of Dispossession: Solitary Presence versus Solitude
In contrast to solitude as an escape from earthly cares, solitary presence requires a process of lyric dispossession that copes with such cares without ever leaving them. For this reason, the troubadour love lyric celebrates a refined erotic love that is never spiritualized but instead translated to a disciplined embodiment of words and music. Lyric structures an absence that is always present, modified and controlled through song. Take the nature opening of Bernart de Ventadorn’s lark song:
Can vei la lauzeta mover
de joi sas alas contral rai,
que s’oblid’e-s laisse chazer
per la doussor c’al cor li vai,
ai! tan grans enveya m’en ve
de cui qu’eu veya jauzion
meravilhas ai, car desse
lo cor de dezirer no-m fon.
Ai las! tan cuidava saber
d’amor, e tan petit en sai!
car eu d’amar no-m posc tener
celeis don ja pro non aurai.
Tout m’a mo cor, et tout m’a me,
e se mezeis et tot lo mon;
e can se-m tolc, no-m laisset re
mas desirer e cor volon.
(Lazar 144–45)
When I see the lark move its wings in joy against the sun’s ray, rising up into forgetfulness, letting go, and falling because of the sweetness that invades its heart, ah, what envy takes hold of me that no matter whom I see joyful, I am in wonder that my heart, right then, does not melt from desire.
Alas, I thought I knew so much about love, and I know so little, because I cannot keep myself from loving one from whom I shall get no favor. She has taken from me my heart and my very being, and herself and the whole world, and when she took herself away from me, she left me nothing but desire and a longing heart.[1]
At first the troubadour identifies with the lark who, lying up against the sun, forgets itself as sweetness invades its heart. This sense of fullness as a forgetting, a sense of self and being joined to nature and the sweetness of love, becomes desire the moment Bernart realizes difference; he only observes the lark but does not share the same experience of love and presence. He now wants to know about something of which he knows so little, because his loved one takes herself away from him. This knowledge, the saber that he pursues, is never stable, nor does it negate the object of desire. This event of dispossession, articulated through the chiasmatic structures of “tout m’a mo cor, et tout m’a me,” leaves an active presence of nothing, a “re,” the song, presaging the emergence of an active solitary presence through song, a longing heart: “cor volon.”
This experience of dispossession differs as a lyric experience from a stoic sense of consolation and calm away from city life. As Petrarch has it, freedom and leisure arrive through escaping the life of the busy man (occupatus), a life of worry and toil brought on by an investment in earthly concerns (Petrarch, Life of Solitude 107–9). Peaceful solitude (otiosus) comes with dwelling in the recesses of the thinking self, or with a transcendent Being, or with mentors of the classical past through reading. In contrast, troubadour lyric models a process of transformation and dialogic activity with a self that wants and does not want.
While the public of the troubadours is an aristocratic audience rather than the humanist audience of Italian cities that Petrarch envisions, we can understand why troubadour lyric was operative and successful in this regard: the art transforms earthly cares and willful subjection into self-justification and artistic prowess within a feudal environment characterized by verbal negotiation of status and courtly codes among independent lords. The end is to reach not solitude but a solitary presence achieved through song that demonstrates the nobility of self-subjugation for an inaccessible love object. Such solitary negative fullness—the fall from the lark that becomes song—manifests itself as a musical-song phenomenon, a dialogic event that requires an audience, rather than a literary solitude that can be accessed anywhere and anytime (by anyone who engages in the humanist practice of reading classics, for instance). Thus for an initiated audience of the troubadour, solitary presence is contingent and performative, enacting an ethics that insinuates itself through its formal elements as performance. This solitary presence eschews the intellectual stability of Petrarch’s humanist solitude and presents a self that is dynamic and emergent through desire, transforming earthly cares and troubles into an art form that engages with other kinds of temporality—music and words. “No-m laisset re”: re is the song that articulates metrically and musically the longing heart (cor as body and heart); the rise and fall of hope and anticipation. Solitary presence achieves a discipline of that movement and temporal contingency. The stanzaic interpositions that might change the narrative of “Can vei” nevertheless maintain the song’s rise and fall within each stanza, the fifth line always realizing that sense of loss (“ai! tan grans enveya m’en ve”) (Gaunt 89–110).
Metrical structures and rhetorical figures create the temporary effect of having attained a desired love object—such as Bernart’s momentary identification with the lark—only for it to be taken away, leaving a phantom of presence (again the “re”), or as we will see in the cases of William IX and Arnaut Daniel, a move to replace the absence, and a surplus in sounds and words. The humanist thought of works such as De vita solitaria has shaped long-standing views of solitude as self-reflection and learning, a disembodied love of the intellect and God. But lyric solitary presence offers another mode of solitude as a lyric event that produces something else, an art form that transforms earthly desire into a public good, a maintenance of a worldly, self-critical, contingent self. And rather than an art that transcends earthly concerns and temporality, this art form dwells in a moment of earthly desire, without a determinant transcendence and end in God or the intellect (Petrarch, Life of Solitude 105).
For the troubadours, the historical and social context of lyric dispossession is essential for the production of solitary presence. The event aligns with the function of religious ritual and prayer. In contrast to Petrarch’s sonnets, the lyric embodies the affective states of dispossession, eschewing an affective organization around the movements of the heart that concern the absent beloved—praise, hope, despair. In the first sonnet of the Rime sparse, Petrarch already reflects on his past states of dispossession as an “experience” of his past self that he can organize through verse:
You who hear in scattered rhymes the sound of those sighs with
which I nourished my heart during my first youthful error, when
I was in part another man from what I am now;
[quand’era in parte altr’uom da quel ch’i sono]
for the varied style [del vario stile] in which I weep and speak
between vain
hopes and vain sorrow, where there is anyone who understands
love through experience [per prova], I hope to find pity, not only
pardon.
(Lyric Poems 36–37)
The reflection on experience in various modes (del vario stile) contrasts with the troubadour’s self-reflexivity that negotiates desire from one moment to the next. The troubadour is in the experience, rather than outside of it, reflecting on his past error (errore). He tarries and leaves unresolved the tensions internal to dispossession; he copes and translates those movements of the heart, but doesn’t overcome them. In other words, we experience Bernart’s realization of envy in the nature opening rather than reflecting on it and organizing it within an entire human experience of love. Rather than “an ideation of feeling,” the rise and fall of music and metrical structures embody the hope and despair of a lover who is within an affective, emotional, and psychological situation (Culler 21; Greene 222). The absent beloved has not yet been accepted as an idea one can control. It is a psychological state with which one must cope and discipline through song: “re” as a longing heart that is still being experienced rather than an experience one can name and organize in the Petrarchan mode of the Rime sparse.
The question of whether there is a “real subject” or identity behind such songs does not matter so much as how the troubadours join music and words in the courtly love song, the canso, to produce a desire that can be inhabited by various “subjects.” This comes close to what Jonathan Culler suggests as the essence of lyric poems as not character or voice but something called “voicing,” along with ritual, hyperbole, apostrophe, and personification. The performativity of troubadour song occurs in its aspect as an event, ritualized through its conventions; its aspect as musical performance, rhythm, and sound patterns; and then its functioning in the world as memorable (Culler 131). In the case of Bernart’s “Can vei,” its memorability emerges through its consistent written transmission in chansonniers despite stanzaic interposition; its metrical structure remains constant, as does the nature opening as a microcosm of the canso’s performativity as an event of dispossession. As Sarah Kay and others have suggested, how troubadours negotiate their status as desirous beings in relation to an Other through such conventions is the essential function of this lyric.
Troubadour song’s performativity occurs not as a conjuring of an absent being, nor as a lament for an absent loved one, but rather as the dramatic performance of absence—a subsuming and consuming event of dispossession. In the context of medieval love lyric, Hugo Kuhn describes the canso of the troubadours and Minnesanger as a lament of deprivation that correlates with religious lyric, which he further specifies as a “negative,” “objective” performance in which the song embodies that negative space of want. The architectural space in a church similarly embodies the negative architectural space of an unknowable yet present God, just as the mystical, apophatic writings of Meister Eckhart produce the figural presence of an unattainable and unknowable God.
Troubadours never actually want to possess their object of their desire because that would end the song. For Howard Bloch, love as dispossession in courtly lyric constitutes the “global paradox of the misogynistic articulation of woman as paradox, simultaneously ‘the Devil’s gateway’ and ‘the Bride of Christ’” (146). In the paradox of wanting and not wanting the lady in a song such as Bernart de Ventadorn’s “Can vei la lauzeta mover,” the song turns into a love song about the woman’s (domna) refusal of the lover, and then his renunciation of all women (femna). Wanting what one cannot have becomes a paradox of knowledge and ignorance, a drama of the will centered around the lady and her “cruel refusal to desire what she might obtain” (Bloch 146). Despite this misogynistic tendency that insists on the continuation of the song at whatever cost to its sources or objects, troubadour lyric still embodies a solitary presence that can expand conceptions of how solitary beings grapple with various articulations of emotional and physical desire: how we speak the problem of being alone, of being suddenly vacated of love.
William IX: The Brag as Solitary Presence
What I call the flesh of solitary presence exists in its lyric form rather than a disembodied idea of solitude. Performing dispossession requires shaping lyrical gestures that make up solitary presence; gestures such as repeated tropes, rising and falling melodies, and nonsemantic sounds or deictic particles constitute this fleshliness that is always in motion and embodied through song and performance. For instance, the chiasmatic structures in Bernart’s song maintain the negative space of “re,” the song as thing. The first attested troubadour, William IX, Duke of Aquitaine (1071–1127), invents the “song about nothing” (“Farai un vers de dreit nïen”) that presents being alone as waiting for the next lady to fill in an absence. In his boasting songs or gaps, he creates absence to boast that he can find a better one. Being alone is not about being at peace in a state of solitude but anticipating another:
Anc non la vi ez am la fort;
Anc non aic dreit ni no-m fes tort;
Quan no la vei, be m’en deport,
No-m prez un jau:
Qu’ie-n sai gensor e belazor,
E que mais vau.
I never saw her and I love her greatly;
I was never right and she did me no wrong;
When I don’t see her, I’m happy about it,
It’s not worth a rooster to me!
For I know one more gentle and beautiful,
Who is worth more.
(Bond 16–17)
This gap is known for its deliberate serial negations that don’t quite make sense. First William creates a series of nonsense negations: “I never saw her and I love her greatly,” and “I was never right and she did me no wrong.” The first negation eliminates the convention of love through the eyes, while the second eliminates the idea of a relationship based on reciprocal good acts for each other. The speaker brags that he prefers it when he doesn’t see her—a provocation that only occurs after a long process in songs such as Jaufré Rudel’s version of amor de lonh where he transforms the pain of far-away love to desire for it: “Ja mais d’amor no-m jauzirai / si no-m jau d’est’amor de lonh” (I shall have no pleasure in love / if it is not the pleasure of this love far away) (Chiarini 96; trans. Goldin 107). The negation word jau, like re in William’s song, affrms the space of absence that is quickly replaced by the sense of ambition—to find a better one, “gensor e belazor,” who is worth “more.” Jau, a nonce word for not caring (e.g., in English it would be more like “I don’t give a cock,” a nonsense negation bordering on obscene) creates the fleshly space for that prettier one, “gensor e belazor.” Jau as a specific creature (a rooster, a cock) to articulate negation is not just a negative construction but an expression that gives texture and a local sense to the song, as he’ll say in another song that something is not worth an ant (see below), or a fig. This is fleshly negation. At first the parallel grammatical constructions imply negations that make sense, but as in his other poems of nonsense and nothingness, William negates even rational negation as a provocation. We are left wondering what he wants; all we know is that he wants more.
William creates a song that foregrounds how the flesh of solitary presence, his desire, moves, as we never know the object of his desire. Though the music for this song has been lost, we can sense the deliberately crude rhythm of the octosyllabic lines (like a horse trot), a simple rhyme scheme with a repeating b rhyme, and syntactical parallel construction of his lines. Such is the flesh of his negations, of knowing nothing and letting rhythm and rhymes go without thought, like riding a horse.
Further, as Daniel Heller-Roazen has eloquently argued, the phonetic recomposition of the lexeme cor and syntagm of om n’o repeated in lines 13-18 articulates the semantic “confusion” that follows from the poet’s sleep, as well as the emphasis on the mobile tissue, the “purely phonic, material consistency of meaningful speech” (871).
No sai cora-m fui endormitz,
Ni cora-m veill, s’om no m’o ditz;
Per pauc no m’es lo cor partitz
D’un dol corau;
E no m’o pretz una fromitz,
Per Saint Marsau!
I don't know when I am asleep
Nor when I am awake, if someone doesn't tell me;
My heart almost split apart;
By a heartfelt pain;
But that is not worth an ant to me,
By St. Martial!
(Bond 14–15)
Separating sense from sound in this way, William liberates himself from determinate relations and instead creates a confused being who rejoices in “sonorous rhetoric” and “phonetic affinities” (Heller-Roazen 873, 871). He exposes the material elements of meaningful speech that form the intellectual foundations of a consolatory solitude away from earthly cares. The very expression of solitude as solitary presence—dispossession of identity, consciousness, or rational intention (composition while asleep), even the very sense of wanting and not wanting—entails an investment in figures and movement of sound. William plays within the lyric tissue of this materiality to produce a presence of confusion.
In the closing stanza he sends his subjectless “vers” to someone who will send it onward to Anjou:
Fait ai lo vers, no sai de cui;
Et trametrai lo a celui
Que lo-m trametra per autrui,
Enves Anjau,
Que-m tramezes del sieu estui
La contraclau.
I've done the song, about whom I don't know,
And I'll send it over to the one
Who will send it for me through another
Toward Anjou,
So that (she) might send me a copy of the key
To her coffer.
(Bond 16–17)
He again asserts another negation—his subjectless verse—to boast that he will have another, his addressee in Anjou. His song’s meaning is locked up like her coffer (her body?) and he wants the “contraclau” or spare key to her coffer in exchange for his song. Contraclau implies a secret key between lovers. Through the song’s movement between unnamed people, its meaning in exchange for the spare key that will open her coffer, William creates a dynamic interchange among unnamed yet specific absences (the one, someone else, toward Anjou). Through his negative deixis and deliberate foregrounding of poetic materiality throughout the gap, the phonetic and syntagmatic tissue resonate over negations that don’t make sense but nevertheless demand a contraclau. Here lyric dispossession becomes solitary lyric presence as negation, presence constitutes sounds that move, constantly negating meaningful semantics. All these elements that make up William’s gap—the boast, the bravado—somehow relate to each other but then easily don’t when put together in another way (the negations don’t make sense, etc.); such is the resilient fleshly tissue of the song. William brags about finding a better replacement or having a contraclau that locks up the song’s movement of paronomasia. Even the spare key implies a substance in reproduction, like the syntagms (s’om no m’o ditz) and lexemes (cor) that Heller-Roazen identifies in formation and deformation throughout the song. In the tornada, the semantic indeterminacy of “that one” and “another” and the “spare key” is inscribed in the recomposition of the phonemes ui and au that constitute his nothing song and its movement. Neither the semantic meaning of his vers nor the content of her coffer is what really matters; what remains as presence from lyric dispossession is the transmission and the possibility of unlocking a poetic text that negates semantic meaning, identity, and origins. Sonic matter matters in movement. The spare key suggests potential rather than stable meaning and deliberately renders confusion about the very process of hermeneutics. But presence requires William to maintain a metrical and syntagmatic framework for constant recomposition so his sonic material can speak absence through sound. Perhaps this framework also entails a sense of anxiety to keep the song going: the gap as coping mechanism, the fear of dispossession undergirds bravado.
Arnaut Daniel: Lyric Dispossession as Overloving
If Bernart creates a fullness from dispossession by constructing a longing heart in the space of absence, and William’s nonsense negations incite lyric presence through the materiality of his “vers,” we get a different configuration of lyric presence with Arnaut Daniel (fl. 1180-95). His lyric of “overloving” (sobramar), like the comparative adjectives of William, creates solitary presence as hyperbolic plenitude—a too-muchness to fill in the absence of lyric dispossession. Words cannot express the singular and extreme state of desire that he has for his lady. In terms of dispossession, Bernart creates a space of absence as song, William negates space to replace another with a better one, and Arnaut overfills that space. Thus dispossession produces a state not only of want but of overwanting, dispossession as wanting to say too much:
Sols sui que sai lo sobraffan qe-m sortz
al cor d’amor sofren per sobramar,
car mos volers es tant ferms et entiers,
c’anc non s’esduis de celliei ni s’estors,
cui encubic al prim vezer e puois,
c’ades ses lieis dic a lieis cochos motz;
pois qand la vei, non sai—
tant l’ai — que dire.
I am the only one who knows the overwoe that rises
in the heart from love in suffering through overlove,
for my will is so firm and so entire
that it never fled from her or turned aside,
the one whom I desired at the first sight and after,
for still, without her, I speak to her heated words;
then when I see her, I don't know—
so much I have—what to say.
(Wilhelm 62–65)
Without her he has so much to say: that sentiment is the productive space of solitary lyric presence that Arnaut insists is particular to his firm will only (volers, Sols sui), and that he proves through his trobar car—the emphatic use of superlative constructed verbs such as sobramar to articulate his overloving, a rich diction (trobar ric) that reinforces resonant sibilant sounds between words: “sofren per sobramar.”
Not only is Arnaut exemplary in his overloving, he is exemplary in his ability to articulate this particular state, as his signature tornadas that deploy adynaton—the expression of impossibility—affirm: “Ieu suis Arnautz qu’amas laura . . . e nadi contra suberna” (I am Arnaut who hoards the wind . . . and swims against the swelling tide) (Wilhelm 40–43). Solitary presence as poetic hyperbole translates to a singular, unique poetic prowess as a state of being dispossessed, a being that exists within new spaces of poetic invention. He has “so much to say” (“tant l’ai—que dire,” line 7). The “what to say” (“que dire,” line 7) parallels the “do I say too much?” (“Dic trop? Ieu non!,” line 41), where all that matters is that he doesn’t displease her. Arnaut indicates the idea of having too much to say within the controlled space of coblas unisonnans: a repeating rhyme scheme that manifests a presence of overing through hyperbolic diction and syntax. The performative “too much” and “whatness” registers as the flesh of sobramar—here the lyric presence of saying too much when one can’t have her “for still, without her, I speak to her heated words.” Indeed, in addition to the sobre that gives added force to the verb (overloving as sobramar), the first line’s silibants accumulate to make a heat of overloving. Hyberbolic lyric flesh in that line registers as sonic heat and a deliberate extension of semantics to just “muchness” and “overness.” Dispossession produces an active, heated suffering of sounds and words refined in the furnace of poetics. Arnaut styled himself as a craftsman (obrador) who planes and works his words. Dante respected his talent as a poet but also criticized his artistic virtuosity as a deviance from salvation, as Arnaut celebrates poetry as an end in itself. Dante places him in purgatory, letting him speak Occitan even as he refines himself in the solitary fires (Purg. 26: 139–48):
Ieu sui Arnaut, que plor e vau cantan;
consiros vei la passada folor,
e vei jausen lo joi qu’esper denan’ . . .
poi s’ascose nel foco che li affina
I am Arnaut, who weep and go singing,
with chagrin I view my past folly,
and rejoicing I see ahead the joy I hope for . . .
Then he hid himself in the fire that refines them
(Purg. 26: 142–48; Dante 444–45)
Not only does Dante honor Arnaut by allowing him to speak Occitan in purgatory, but he transforms the lyric joy (“jau”) that incites Bernart’s envy and lyric dispossession as solitary presence into a new kind of communal joy of spiritual transcendence, the narrative forward path of the Commedia.
The Woman’s Voice as Dispossession: Kharja, Cantiga d’amigo
Lyric experimentation in dispossession can enact female voicing against male monologic discourse, especially in the Iberian context of the Galician-Portuguese cantiga d’amigo and the Mozarabic kharja. In these lyric genres, new modes of language and sociolinguistic situations shape female-voiced conditions of lyric dispossession. Through the multicultural and multilingual muwashshah and the popular tradition of the Galician-Portuguese cantiga d’amigo, metrical structures are possible that change the terms of dispossession, either as a defiant or self-possessed female voice that becomes incorporated into a male-dominant structure of classical Arabic prosody (in the muwashshah, which incorporates the Romance kharja), or as a refrain and dialogue between girl and mother that enables an empowerment of dispossession in the cantiga d’amigo.
Gender Dynamics of the Kharja
“My love has been taken away from me”: how one speaks of dispossession so that it becomes solitary presence can depend on where one speaks from and in what kind of voice. Is it a voice that only your mother understands in an intimate domestic setting? Is it a girl’s voice that a primarily male audience would ventriloquize so its effects are understood within a different social protocol? The muwashshah articulates how such voices of dispossession might be in tension with one another. But to understand this competitive arena of dispossession, one needs to understand its linguistic heterogeneity and even the competitive stakes of its scholarly reception. In a sense, some scholarly traditions have felt dispossessed in that the genre has been taken away from its proper inheritance, Romance or Arabic, without seeing its essential nature as giving voice to different kinds of solitary presences in a competitive and ambitious mode.
Kharjas are the final segments of the muwashshah, a strophic form composed mainly in Arabic or Hebrew that originated in al-Andalus (Muslim Iberia) at the end of the ninth century. The genre treats themes of love, praise, and wine, and like troubadour lyric, it was a musicopoetic form that featured music and performance. The muwashshah reflects the peninsula’s mixing of cultural, ethnic, and linguistic traditions. It shows the interaction of men and women’s voices, vernacular and nonvernacular, religious and secular, and written and oral cultures. Although it was composed mainly in literary Arabic and its musical tradition, it was readily adopted by poets composing in other languages, especially in Hebrew by Andalusi Jews (Özkan). The relation between the kharja and the Western muwashshah has been of great interest to Romance scholars for two reasons: first, some kharjas have been composed (at least partially) in a Romance dialect particular to Muslim Iberia; and second, they are composed in a more popular register and at times in the voice of a woman, in contrast to the rest of the muwashshah.
The relation between the muwashshah and the kharja has led to debates about the kharja’s origins, whether it comes from a preexisting Ibero-Romance tradition or from Arabic traditions of the East. Philological debates about origins have been replaced with a focus on the “performative” aspects of this genre, in which classical Arabic and popular Romance styles seem to have influenced each other within the Andalusi environment in terms of meter (the quantitative verses of classical Arabic meters versus the syllabic, stress-based rhythms and rhymes of Romance poetry) and content (refined courtly love similar to the troubadours versus the direct, sexualized female speech in the kharjas). Scholars such as María Rosa Menocal and Tova Rosen argue well for a “fluid and diverse linguistic situation of the peninsula’s population” (Rosen 166) that reflects cross-cultural contact between the Arabic and Romance/Latin worlds, which to Vincent Barletta were “porous” despite the cultural authority of Arabic centers in the East (“Kharjas” 317).
The scholarly consensus confirms that these Ibero-Romance kharjas in the voice of a woman must be understood with the muwashshah to which they are attached. The dynamic between the body and tail (the kharja) varies. Whether the kharja is the nucleus of the muwashshah (Barletta, citing Ibn Sanāʾ al-Mulk) or an ornamental flourish added to a more elaborate Arabic tradition (Abu-Haidar), most agree that the genre must be seen as a song, in which the main Arabic body of the muwashshah could be influenced by both classical Arabic meters and more localized syllabic performative practices in the fluid, multicultural environment of Muslim Iberia, and the kharjas could be reused and circulated or original pieces taken from the “polyphony” of voices and registers available (Arabic/Hebrew/Romance, male/female, courtly/popular) (Barletta, “Kharjas” 317; Rosen 185; Abu-Haidar). Menocal argues that this juxtaposition and hybridity in the muwashshah was intentionally done and poetically productive; the different registers of the courtly Arabic and vernacular closing segment produce a “dialectic” that demonstrates contrasting poetic voices that coincide as laments of a lover (101). Citation and intertextuality were an important aspect of the muwashshah, as the poet drew from high and low genres in the composition and performance of this Andalusi poetic discourse, as premodern critics and contemporary scholars point out (Barletta, “Kharjas” 316).
We find similar historical and social conditions in eleventh-century al-Andalus and Occitania that might have proved fertile ground for the poetic experimentation of William IX and the Andalusi composers of the muwashshah who played with poetic register and language. Al-Andalus was the farthest province of the Arab empire, and the muwashshah developed when the Umayyad Caliphate was starting to be dismembered. As in Occitania, poetic experimentation developed where there was a lack of a central authority and central court. Poets could flout tradition; at the same time, the poets of muwashshah such as Ibn Māʾ al-Samāʾ (d. 1028 or 1031), like William IX, showed their deep knowledge of classical courtly tradition even as they played with new verse forms and rhymes. These poets embraced sexual bravado and provocation; this is found especially in the female-voiced kharja and in the boastful bravado of William IX. Just as William showed his competence by composing deliberately crude boasting songs as well as traditional courtly cansos, muwashshah poets developed internal rhymes and, according to J. A. Abu-Haidar, added kharjas to show technical skill, deliberately being crude or colloquial in the same mode as William (46). The muwashshah poets not only played with such new rhyme schemes but composed the kharjas in a more popular register of Arabic or mixed Arabic and Romance, and even more provocatively, gave voice to the sensual demands of a woman, perhaps even a slave girl. The kharja contrasts with the body of the muwashshah, which usually follows convention as a courtly lament for an inaccessible lover (usually male in the muwashshah) or panegyric (to a woman or man). See, for instance, this example from al-A ʿmā l-Ṭūṭilī, the earliest attested Mozarabic kharja:
He tore from a passion well proven my share
Of obedience.
Though shunned. Joy after him may choose whom it wills.
I cannot resist him on any condition;
A lord who accuses, treats harshly, delays;
Who left me in pledge to despair and disease,
Then sang with an air between boldness and love:
“Meu l-ḥabīb enfermo de meu amar.
que no ha d’estar?
Non ves a mibe que s’ha de no llegar?”
[My beloved is sick for love of me. How can he not be so? Do you not see that he is not allowed near me?]
(García Gómez 103–7; trans. Monroe 248–50)
Joseph Yahalom suggests that the direct style and concrete situations of the kharja, whether in Arabic, Hebrew, or Romance or a mix of Arabic and Romance, was placed in deliberate contrast with the courtly section that preceded it (29-36). In this example, we see the courtly convention of obedience yet despair from dispossession: “who left me in pledge to despair and disease.” The kharja introduces a challenge to that dispossession rather than a conversion and transcendence; that is to say, it talks back to the poem, challenging its courtly premises of dispossession by brutally and directly disavowing its value and refusing that beautifying gesture: “How can he not be so? / Do you see he is not allowed near me?” We switch from the perspective of the dispossessed—the lament of deprivation that becomes solitary presence—to a female voice who challenges the separation from the lover and demands a response. Yahalom argues that the kharjas serve as a kind of visceral impression, imitating a live performance:
The literal reaction quoted in the kharja in a mimetic performance transmitted a direct and immediate expression which stood in complete contrast to the heavy, conventional rhetoric of the main body of the poem. Such literal, lyrical expression had a definite advantage, especially when it followed words of praise intended for the subject of the panegyric, since the emotion in the kharja usually pours out towards a man from the mouth of a woman, and not, as is usual in the Arabic love poetry, towards a woman from a man. (32)
The kharjas, then, offer a provocative case to understand dispossession: the woman speaks out about her lover being taken away from her when we are conditioned toward the performance of the solitary presence of a man. In a “visceral performance,” she can also be more frank and take up her position as a sexualized subject in a way that we see only in vulgar or low-social-class depictions of women in troubadour poetry.[2] Such a role is inconsistent with the inaccessible noble lady of troubadour poetry and the object of Arabic panegyric love poetry. But that was obviously the point—it gave the muwashshah poetic flair. In this kharja, the woman takes the active sexual role: “I shall not go with you unless you raise my anklets up to my earrings” (García Gómez 112–13; trans. Barletta, “Kharjas” 322).
The woman is in a position of demand, but the focus on jewelry makes us wonder at her appearance of self-possession. The focus on her anklets and earrings suggests she, too, is an ornament to be possessed. In the rest of the muwashshah the poet speaks of unattainable love in the courtly manner, and only the introductory verses to the kharja shift toward the coquettish woman’s request in that he invites her to visit him in his melancholy state (Abu-Haidar 67). Already in this play with voices, the poets seem to be aware that the muwashshah allows for various conditions of faraway love: one can accept rejection in a dispirited state, or introduce a lady who explicitly rejects the courtly condition, or find a middle ground between the two. Abu-Haidar goes so far as to say this extreme shift in register and voice can be seen as an insertion of a condensed “sensational” and “pornographic” scene that was a common practice of libertine poetry in the Arab East and was now popularized in al-Andalus (70–71). Thus, while the woman with the anklets names the conditions of love, Abu-Haidar suggests that the mention of jewelry and its visual explicitness makes us think that this women is of a lower class, perhaps a slave girl.
Again the different historical and social contexts of Europe and al-Andalus provide nuance and enrich our reading of these erotic confrontations, allowing us to see where and how spaces of female self-possession are possible in the lyric traditions. The kharja economically stages the erotic game of power as wanting or not wanting to be possessed. Here we can see how dispossession can slip into dominance and violence. Even if this is staged violence, as in the troubadour pastorela tradition and its potential rape scene of lecherous knight and virtuous peasant girl, we must ask in what manner the lyric form negotiates this gendered scenario and its limits. Comparing lyric traditions illuminates the stakes of lyric dispossession.
For the sake of comparison, we turn back to troubadour poetry, because in that tradition lyric modes make both female empowerment and vulnerability possible. In trobairitz poetry, the lady might be assertive but still insists on her refinement and courtliness. When the Comtessa de Dia names the conditions of love, she remains in the courtly register but uses contractual legal language to question her lover. While her protest implies sensual intimacy, she indicates her social status—she could have her lover replace her husband:
Bels amics, avinens e bos,
cora.us tenrai en mon poder,
e que iagues ab vos un ser,
e qe.us des un bais amoros?
Sapchatz gran talan n’auria
qe.us tengues en luoc del marit
ab so que m’aguessetz plevit
de far tot so qu’eu volria.
Fair, agreeable, good friend,
when will I have you in my power,
lie beside you for an evening,
and kiss you amorously?
Be sure I'd feel a strong desire
to have you in my husband's place
provided you had promised me
to do everything I wished.
(Bruckner, Shepard, and White 10–11)
The fact that she addresses him as “Bels amics” places them on the same level as conditional lovers. She explicitly names her conditions even as she expresses her desire to lie beside him: if he fulfills his promises, then she will have him in her power and in the place of her husband. This comparison of the trobairitz with the girl of the kharja makes us consider its quotable nature. If we follow Abu-Haidar’s argument that the female-voiced kharjas, as “adjuncts or appendages,” “were meant to introduce an element of titillation” and were “entities apart from the poem in which they appear” in terms of the classical tradition, how did they form a dialectical relation, as Menocal and Yahalom claim, and how does that bear on the view of an active female-voiced lyric dispossession? (Abu-Haidar 50). The poetic objectification of this self-possessed woman schooled in the ways of love—especially when compared to the trobairitz canso—parallels depictions of the girl being physically possessed, pushing the boundaries of a supposedly playful shift in register or language on the theme of love, as in another kharja:
When I got hold of her (got possession of her) in seclusion
And drank in the water of her beautiful teeth
Tearing her garments by force,
She sang out to her mother with pride (panache):
“This impudent fellow, Mother, this impostor!”
(García Gómez 118–19; trans. Abu-Haidar 68)
If this kharja might be interpreted as playful in Abu-Haidar’s interpretation of the introductory verse, he goes on to argue that it still delivers a scene of physical, sexualized force with perhaps playful resistance (her protest as playful and affectionate). The desire to possess her and tear her garments contrasts with the courtly lament of the rest of the muwashshah: there we see the usual mode of being dispossessed of an illicit, idealized love in which physical consummation never took place, as the verse that precedes says at the end of the second stanza: “you are not a human being, but an angel (a heavenly being) / You are a chosen pearl, which is presented to a king” (Abu-Haidar 69).
Perhaps what constitutes lyric dispossession is not a space of desire embodied through formal structure, but the sense that these lyric fragments are in themselves dispossessed from communicative, social context and appropriated into a lyric context that subordinates them to the classical muwashshah and its rhetoric of courtly obedience and submissiveness. As Abu-Haidar points out, the Arabic equivalent to Occitan obediensa occurs in stanza 4, “al-khudu.” While not every kharja operates in this mode, the dialectical necessity of the kharja within the structure of the muwashshah demonstrates that female voices could be dispossessed of their agentive authority and self-possession and put in the service of the muwashshah as “psychological release and liberation” from both social taboos (women declaiming their sexual desire) and the “strict demands of classical Arabic” (Abu-Haidar 71). It is almost as if there is a revenge of dispossession in the kharja, as the woman is given a salacious and direct voice to engage in sexual activity. This assertiveness is undermined by suggestive violence and in relation to the courtly muwashshah. In my mind the violence is less to the courtly Arabic tradition, as Abu-Haidar argues (because such ornamentation and intertextual importation of different popular voices was common practice by this time), than to the local tradition from which these segments are taken. They are deliberately dispossessed of the sociolinguistic context on which they draw, and appropriated to appear as “spicy” ornaments in that they break the rules of the classical tradition. In at least these two examples, where the women are outspoken yet objectified as lower-class women (property as slave girls or women who need objects as payment), they could come from different performative oral situations in which the women are self-possessed and are now placed in a definitive subordinate position. Within the muwashshah, their voices are subordinated to the Arabic courtly male tradition of proper verse and idealized love. This experimentation then develops the misogynistic tendencies of the Occitan troubadour tradition within the Andalusi context. At least in some kharjas, there are gendered power vectors of dispossession through the poetic structure of the muwashshah.
These dispossessed female voices are disciplined in the same way Bernart disciplines his envy in the nature opening: he wants to “know” about love so he creates a “re,” a song of courtly discipline that embodies and reveals the mechanisms of desire. Here the process disciplines the unruly sexuality of a kharja, showing a provocative sexual allure by giving voice to the desirous female yet taming it all the same by showing its difference within the courtly discourse; this is why Abu-Haidar goes so far as to call such kharjas “pornographic” (68). Localized situations, such as slave women who offer themselves, seem undignified to the rest of the muwashshah, as in this kharja: “Ibrahim, oh sweet name, come to me at night or, if you do not want to, I shall come to you; tell me where I shall find you” (García Gómez 50–51, Barletta, “Kharjas” 322). While this woman appears self-possessed and compelling in her address, within the poetic hierarchy of the muwashshah such female voices are dispossessed of their performative power and made subordinate or trivial.
Thus we can see a double move of lyric dispossession occur in the muwashshah: voices of solitary presence can be then dispossessed. These poets were adapting everyday Andalusi idioms and even perhaps the positionality of slave girl’s voices and incorporating these voices into the hierarchy of dignified courtly lyric dispossession. Returning to the troubadours, we can see a similar move of objectification and exoticization: the woman as ornament. While the girl in the kharjas is given a direct voice, she appears objectified, like this lady in Bertran de Born’s poem “Ges de disnar”; the lady is exoticized and consumed, like the Oriental furniture that is part of this scene of seduction. In the sense of consumption, we can recall the voice of the slave girl in certain kharjas as indignant and assertive, yet property all the same. He tells us that he “submits to her as a slave” when she looks at him, and he celebrates her manners and conversation as worthy of the nicest imperial furnishings:
Ab doutz esgar qe·m fetz et ab clar vis
mi fetz amors son esclau.
E mos seigner m’ac pres de lieis assis
son brun feltr’emperiau,
e·il paraula fon doussa et humana
e·il dich cortes e soau.
E de solatz mi semblet Catalana
E d’acuillir de Fanjau.
By the gentle look she gave me and her bright face, love made me her slave. My lord had set her dark imperial cushion near her for me, and the conversation was gentle and friendly and the talk polite and sweet. In her hospitality she seemed a Catalan, and in her welcome a lady from Makejoy. (Paden, Sankovitch, and Stäblein 170–73)
In the stanza that follows, her crystal teeth give him a joy compared to the joy of Eastern luxury, signifying the visual consumption of her body that signifies erotic consummation:
Al gen parlar qe·m fetz et al bel ris
qan vi las denz de cristau
e·l cors graile, delgat e fresc e lis,
trop benestan en bliau—
e la colors fo fresca e rosana—
retinc mon cor dinz sa clau.
Mas aic de joi que qi·m des Corrozana
car a son grat m’en esgau.
By the charming conversation and the beautiful smile she gave me, when I saw her teeth of crystal and her body, slim, delicate, and fresh and smooth, so pretty in her tunic—and her color was fresh and rosy—she locked up my heart. I have had more joy than if someone had given me Khorassan because, at her pleasure, I rejoice in her. (Paden, Sankovitch, and Stäblein 170–73)
The Orientalist reference to Khorasan in Persia, a gateway to Baghdad for crusaders, invites us to see the lady’s body as an object of luxurious consumption, just as the mention of the imperial cushion is a marker of social status and luxury. Her teeth of crystal invite and threaten the objectifying male gaze. Bertran’s joy in her implies or anticipates sexual possession and consumption. Like this lady who enslaves Bertran only to be objectified and consumed like exotic furniture, women’s voices in the kharja are objectified in the service of male solitary presence in the muwashshah. While Bertran uses the topos of exoticism, the kharja exoticizes the self-possessed girl to reinforce the classical male dominant position of courtly desire. Bringing these two traditions into dialogue with each other, we see further how the objectified woman’s voice serves male solitary pleasure, from Bertran’s “can a son grat m’en esgau” (because, at her pleasure, I rejoice in her) to the “pearl” of the previous muwashshah whose beautiful teeth are drunk like water only for the girl to have her clothes torn away and to protest. Playful or violent? Perhaps that ambiguity is the pleasure of the poem for a male audience.
The dialectic of the muwashshah offers a poetic strategy that contrasts the inaccessible love object with a dispossessed female voice who speaks her desire. Dispossession in the muwashshah entails another voice to fill in the absence, a supplement of poetic ingenuity and bravado in the female voice of carnal desire and earthly fulfillment, often in the vernacular. In other examples, the maiden even demands sexual favors in an even more dramatic contradiction of classical Arabic love poetry, as in the example with Ibrahim. The male voice of dispossession gains poetic strength when the voice of the subaltern position is correctly subordinated as a supplement. While offering another mode of the love lament, at least in the playful-violent kharja, the self-possession of the girl is enveloped within the structure of the muwashshah and serves as a “relief valve”: therefore the kharja comes at the end of the muwashshah so as not to disturb its complex strophic structure. Notable, too, is the fact that the Arabic-Romance verses are adapted into the quantitative Arabic meter: all muwashshahat can be scanned according to quantitative meters. In sum, at least in these few examples here, the supplemental kharja produces the male presence of dispossession in the muwashshah by incorporating the dispossessed female voice. This poetic mode depends on the integrity of Arabic classical tropes and rhetoric despite the dialectic formed from the interaction between head and tail. As I have suggested, in the ambiguity between those two gendered parts, that head-tail interaction embodies a lyric pleasure of erotic commentary.
The Cantiga d’amigo and Female-Voiced Crusade Lyrics: Strategies of Female Lyric Presence
The situation of subalterity in the muwashshah becomes clearer when compared to other lyrics that use the first-person speech of women. How can the girl speak solitary presence in a dignified way in a lyric mode that maintains a self-possessed dispossession? The Iberian cantiga d’amigo offers a response to the kharja. We have already seen the contrast with the courtly trobairitz songs of the Occitan tradition and convergence with the verse of troubadours such as Bertran de Born. Closer to the assertive and social background of the female voice in the kharjas is the Galician-Portuguese cantiga d’amigo, which flourished in Iberia from the thirteenth to the mid-fourteenth centuries and is in the voice of a girl, usually a peasant, who laments the absence of a lover or “friend.” In the cantiga d’amigo, the girl defiantly asserts and questions dispossession, thereby justifying her position of solitary presence as much as critiquing it. In the refrains of this form, we see an affirmation of the girl’s point of view. Scenes of dispossession in the cantiga d’amigo involve references to seafaring, washing clothes by the river, and conversations with a protective and skeptical mother. Barletta’s analysis of the cantiga d’amigo shows how more popular sociolinguistic situations and conversational language are in tension with more traditional poetic genres and shape the cantiga d’amigo as performative pieces (“Amores”). We can then consider this tension next to the dialectic of voices in the muwashshah.
In contrast to the kharja, the cantiga d’amigo demonstrates how courtly and popular situations can produce an empowering female voice of lyric dispossession. The presence created from the artful discipline of absence develops its own idiom according to the specific female perspective within a love relationship and social context:
Digades, filha, mya filha velida,
porque tardastes na fontana fria?
Os amores ey.
Digades, filha, mya filha louçana,
porque tardastes na fria fontana?
Os amores ey.
Tardey, mya madre, na fontana fria,
cervos do monte a áugua volvian.
Os amores ey.
Tardey, mya madre, na fria fontana,
cervos do monte volvian a áugua.
Os amores ey.
Mentir, mya filha, mentir por amigo,
nunca vi cervo que volvess’o rio.
Os amores ey.
Mentir, mya filha, mentir por amado
nunca vi cervo que volvess’ o alto.
Os amores ey.
Tell me, daughter, my pretty daughter,
Why did you linger at the cold fountain?
I am in love.
Tell me daughter, my lovely daughter,
Why did you linger at the fountain so cold? I am in love.
I lingered, mother, at the cold fountain, deer of the hills were stirring up the water.
I am in love.
I lingered, mother, at the fountain so cold, deer of the hills were stirring the water up.
I am in love.
You lie, my daughter, lie for your friend,
I never saw a deer trouble the stream.
I am in love.
You lie, my daughter, lie for your lover,
I never saw a deer stirring up the pool.
I am in love.
(Azevedo Filho 102; my translation)
The refrain “I am in love” produces a cumulative effect of revolt over the mother’s objections to her illicit love: “You lie, my daughter, lie for your friend.” The personal refrain becomes a chorus that sympathizes with the girl’s love. The girl is dispossessed of her love only momentarily, as the chorus also reinforces the possibility that the secret tryst can be maintained despite the objections of the mother, who represents the law. Instead of offering consolation, the refrain—a voice that intervenes between the girl and mother, who represent illicit love versus social constraints—rhythmically reinforces the girl’s resilient hope for another reunion and breaks down the usual dichotomy that places illicit courtly love against the vulgar love associated with female-voiced women that we saw in the muwashshah, the portrayal of the faraway, cruel lady of the troubadour cansos, or the noble peasant girl of Marcabru’s pastorela. Here we see how the popular form and idiom of the cantiga transforms dispossession into a voice of self-possession: “I am in love.” In comparison to the kharja, where the female tail is subordinated to the male body of the muwashshah, the refrain structure and textured variation in diction and syntax (e.g., the cold fountain, the fountain so cold, the friend, the lover) of the cantiga allows the female voice to shape her dispossession within an intimate female sociolinguistic environment.
Further, to place this cantiga d’amigo within a larger comparative lyric context, this woman-centered text with images relating to the natural world resonates with the Song of Songs; the reference to the “cervo” especially recalls the comparison of the lover to the gazelle in Song of Songs 2.9. Both the Song of Songs and the cantiga affirm the landscape and lover through the girl’s eyes and therefore model an ethical stance—the lover as landscape, the landscape as a place of love. In these songs solitary presence entails a worldview of a different idiom that embraces nature and dialogue rather than a fall from nature, as we see in Bernart’s lark song, and its move away from all women and the world.
In female crusade lyric in the Old French tradition we see a popular female voice also galvanized by a communal refrain. This voice resists the courtly mode of dispossession that might subordinate it to the male ideology of crusade. While the girl in the cantiga d’amigo defies her mother and social constraints, her personal love supported by a communal voice of the refrain against her mother’s challenges, the lady left behind in this crusade lyric clutches her lover’s tunic as a surrogate for him, against the popular chant of a crusade song in the refrain:
De ce sui mout deceüe
Que ne fui au convoier;
Sa chemise qu’ot vestue
M’envoia por embracier:
La nuit, quant s’amor m’argüe,
La met delez moi couchier
Mout estroit a ma char nue
Por mes malz assoagier.
Dex, quant crieront Outree. . .
It disappoints me
that I did not escort him at his departure The tunic that he wore,
He sent it so that I could embrace it
At night when his love goads me
I place it next to me as I sleep
All night long against my bare skin
to soothe my suffering.
God, when they will cry “Onward!”. . .
(Bédier and Aubry 112–15, lines 49–57)
The lady laments her lover’s absence in Beauvais and the fact that she did not witness the removal of his tunic or “chemise,” the ritual that signifies his pilgrimage and vow of crusade. She holds the memento next to her body as a sensual surrogate of her lord. It makes present the memory of her lover as a material body, even as she places it “against her skin to assuage her pain” (Bédier and Aubry 116–17n51). All these elements of the song resist the idea of silent suffering—she is supposed to accept the departure of her lover who must fulfill his spiritual duty. But the sensual depiction of holding the chemise next to her skin coupled with the popular chant creates a dissonance that produces her own lyric presence of dispossession. She refuses to stay silent and holds onto the chemise not as consolation but to protest the ritual chant that encourages conversion to the cause of crusade (Galvez).
These varied medieval lyric examples demonstrate how solitary presence from dispossession depends on a particular poetics that structures dispossession as a performative event. Troubadours produce a solitary presence through gestures of contained absence, negative boasts, and hyperbole. The Iberian muwashshah and cantiga d’amigo shape solitary presence with gendered dynamics, showing how a female voice of solitary presence is maintained through the motifs of the crusade departure song: the incorporation of ritual chants as refrain and the chemise as sensual surrogate. The conditional assertiveness of the trobairitz canso as dispossession refuses to be objectified, like the girl of the departure song who holds onto the chemise of her lover as a resistance to crusade ideology, or the Mozarabic voice of the slave girl in the kharja that goes against the courtly code of the Arabic muwashshah. The female-voiced lyric genres imply a dialogue that the heterogeneity of the muwashshah ultimately denies, as the latter privileges male courtly dispossession through its poetic structure.
Nevertheless, in all these genres, solitary presence is a concretized event to be negotiated through lyric, rather than a solitude of consolation that transcends earthly cares of desire. It is in this sense that lyric dispossession defiantly refuses to find consolation in solitude; rather, it gives voice to our anxieties about aloneness and transforms them into a thing with which everyone can identify and take part: having an emotional investment in someone and having it taken away from you. Sensing and coping with that affective anxiety through lyric provides a different strategy for dealing with loneliness. It is what brought people together through this lyric that was, after all, a communal event, and still does in its contemporary versions. Today we gather online to share stories about being alone and virtually experience lyric events of coinciding themes and tropes—“I too found new joy in [cooking, gardening] during the pandemic”—and that visceral interaction about how we are coping in a new state of aloneness transforms the way we relate to other people through writing and shapes new creative endeavors. We found new virtual communities but are ever more grateful to be in live events where we experience solitary presence in performance: that shared identification with a voice that sings, “I am in love, and yet that love was taken away from me, I must sing about it because I still have a longing heart.”
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
NOTES
[1] My translation, based on Goldin 144-47.
[2] See, e.g., depictions of the virtuous peasant women in Marcabru’s pastorela, or William IX’s sexualized ladies who seduce the mute pilgrim in “Farai un vers, pos mi sonelh” (Bond 18-23).
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On Being a Medievalist and More
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The core of the Colloquy is three items from the conference, which I describe briefly here. However, we welcome contributions on how the field of medieval literature has changed over the past fifty years and how philosophy, media studies, and performance studies have catalyzed medieval studies, as well as the more circumscribed topic of medieval studies at Stanford.
In an interview that marks the centerpiece of this Colloquy, I drew Gumbrecht out on a series of questions about the influence of medieval studies in his intellectual biography and the presence of medieval studies at Stanford from the time of his arrival in 1989 to the present day. Starting our discussion with how the difficulty of the medieval period nourished new ways of approaching literary texts, we also covered foundational experiences and encounters. We spoke about the influence of Hugo Kuhn and media studies and its translation to American Humanities, the Grundriss der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters in the age of electronic media, the inspiring otherness of medieval culture and how it has productively shaped his work on presence, athletic beauty, and other phenomena—work that seeks to "conjure the past in a non-narrative way." I was fascinated by Gumbrecht’s encounters (both personally and intellectually) with Kuhn, Paul Zumthor, and certain epistemological genealogies concerning performance, media studies, and semiotics via medieval studies. He describes colloquia where he, Zumthor, Jean-François Lyotard, Niklas Luhmann and others were pursuing the "anti-hermeneutic effect," that is, "dealing with cultural artifacts or cultural phenomena that are not circumscribed to the attribution of meaning." He also describes in candid detail the convergence of an intellectual milieu at Stanford—a "technical" university in the best sense of the word, e.g. with "vibrations from computer science, engineering"—whose intersection was medieval studies. A core group of scholars cultivated a Stanford style of humanities, where "medieval studies mattered," Gumbrecht explains, because it "could never be taken for granted as with other universities." This was a time when Michel Serres, René Girard, John Freccero, Brigitte Cazelles, Jeffrey Schnapp, and Robert Harrison in the French and Italian department were publishing major works on medieval topics and authors that registered an impact in all spheres of humanities.
As Gumbrecht puts it, "performance creates its own situation. Like in our conversation." And this is true for the interview: people past and present, events local and international, colloquia, and publications came together as a story about medieval studies at Stanford and beyond in the course of the conversation. As part of this colloquy, you will also find two presentations given at the "After 1967" conference: my paper on "The Production of Medieval Life Forms in the Work of Gumbrecht" and "The Medieval Beginnings of Italian Poetry Today" by Heather Webb. These two papers describe the consequences of Gumbrecht's scholarship in our respective fields of medieval French and Italian, and touch on the motifs of his thinking such as mood, performance, and transgression.