The tradition of troubadour quotation sheds new light on the old topic of Dante and the troubadours.1 Take the recurrent questions of how well and in what form Dante knew the troubadours. At different extremes, Marianne Shapiro quotes with approval Santangelo’s Dante e i trovatori provenzali for suggesting that Dante’s knowledge is heavily mediated by the Occitan treatises and biographical texts, whereas Maurizio Perugi thinks that Dante’s phraseology is everywhere permeated by reminiscences of Arnaut Daniel’s songs.2 The debate is framed in such a way as to make it seem demeaning to Dante to suggest that he drew on the tradition of quotation described in this book—as though such a debt could only diminish his authority in relation to the poets themselves. But what if, in addition to having familiarity with the troubadours, Dante is seen as also intervening in the (by his time) long-standing practice of excerpting and commenting on them? How might Dante’s texts be affected by the play between knowledge and subjectivity that it involves?
Of the eleven Occitan incipits quoted in De vulgari eloquentia (Of vernacular eloquence), seven are of songs featuring in a shortened form in florilegia and two of the rest (three in all) are included in razos (details are provided in Appendix 12).3 Of the two remaining incipits, one (242.17) is quoted in another grammar, the Mirall de trobar (Mirror of composition) by Berenguer d’Anoia, and only one, Arnaut Daniel’s “L’aur’amara” (29.13), is otherwise absent from both Appendix 1 and 2. This does not imply that Dante knew the others only from the sources covered by these appendices,4 or that he did not also know copies of whole versions of these songs in chansonniers, but it certainly justifies exploring De vulgari eloquentia in light of the tradition of Occitan quotation which these appendices reflect.5
Reviewing the troubadours whom Dante quotes in this treatise, rather than the actual lines he selects, further reveals that all except Aimeric de Belenoi have previously been quoted in works that grammaticalize Occitan, whether by relating it to (Latin) grammar or by explaining the troubadours on the model of the (Latin) accessus. This observation, in turn, sheds light on differences between the troubadours represented in De vulgari eloquentia and in the Divina commedia (Divine comedy). Scholars have wondered why Giraut de Bornelh is celebrated in the first, but, in the second, he is subordinated poetically to Arnaut Daniel and morally to Folquet de Marselha.6 An answer informed by the prior practice of quotation would explain that Dante’s treatise develops from the tradition of Occitan grammatico-poetic writing in which Giraut is a central if contested model, whereas his generally biographical presentation of the troubadours in the Comedy owes more to Occitan’s other grammaticalizing mode, that of the vidas and razos. In particular, the famous “Ieu sui Arnaut” of Purgatorio 26.142, though not a quotation in the sense I have defined for this study since it is under a line long, does nevertheless reprise one: that of three lines from 29.10 quoted in Arnaut Daniel’s vida, a rare example of troubadour quotation in these biographical texts and the only one to be retained in the course of their adaptation in the Comedy.
Commentators have puzzled over Folquet de Marselha’s awkwardly periphrastic account, in Paradiso 9.82–93, of his place of origin. In fully eleven lines, Provence is identified as part of a northern Mediterranean region that encompasses Catalonia and northern Italy rather than being demarcated from them. Has the clus style, purportedly abandoned by Arnaut Daniel in Purgatorio 26, been displaced onto Folquet?7 The answer, in my view, is that Folquet’s is no figurative utterance but a literal presentation of the Occitan-Catalan-Italian territory that is host to the parrots’ way: a region united by its shared use of Occitan as a language possessing vernacular grammar, and as the medium of poetry, subjectivity and vernacular authority. That Dante acknowledges the unity of this cultural space should guide us to see him as reacting—like Jean Renart (see Chapter 5)—to its practices.8 Similarly to the author of Guillaume de Dole, Dante polemicizes in favor of poetry in his native language: Occitan is to be displaced by the maternal idiom, even if, in Dante’s case, most of the mothers turn out to be fathers. But whereas Jean Renart turned troubadour lyrics into blots of song, Dante responds to the parrots’ way on its own terms, devising ways of divesting the Occitans of their ownership of poetry in the very act of seeming to acknowledge it.
I have argued throughout this book that the repetition involved in quotation is never simply repetition: it changes the meaning of that which is repeated and the subject position(s) that it implies. Since the passages Dante quotes from the troubadours preserve the original Occitan in their new linguistic environments—Latin in De vulgari and Italian in the Commedia— they are palpably transformed from native (or apparently native) utterances to fragments of an alien idiom; such linguistic divergence sharpens awareness that quotation implies relations between different subjects. This chapter analyzes troubadour quotations in the earlier and the later text to show how their play with knowledge and subjectivity is bound up in increasingly complex ways with notions of the alien and the proper, and how these notions concern Dante as a subject of poetry in the emergent language of Italian.
The term “ex-appropriation” in this chapter’s title is adopted from Le monolinguisme de l’autre, where Derrida undermines the illusion on the part of the colonizers that they are masters of their own language, that as their property it is in some sense proper to them. To this fantasy of appropriation the philosopher opposes the concept of ex-appropriation, the contradictory prefixes “ex-” and “a-” indicating that the dream of owning one’s own language is never realized, and that imagined proprietorship always leaves a trace of its failure, which Derrida here calls a “mark.”9 The term “mark,” in turn, draws its significance from Derrida’s earlier work on iteration, which underlines “the possibility of citational excerpting and grafting that characterizes the structure of every mark, spoken or written,” so that the mark inherent in language is always being re-marked.10 In the very act of quoting the troubadours, I shall argue, Dante re-marks them in such a way as both to recognize their preeminence and to eject them from it. In so doing, he exappropriates not only the troubadours themselves but also the grammaticalizing practices that, over the preceding century, constructed and cemented their seeming ownership of the language of poetry. Although in De vulgari eloquentia Dante presents himself and Italian as the beneficiaries of this process, by the Commedia he also acknowledges the extent that we are all inevitably alien to our own language; the troubadours can be ex-appropriated without his falling victim to a compensatory myth of appropriation.
All the Occitan treatises prior to or roughly contemporary with De vulgari eloquentia (1303–5) contain troubadour quotations except the Donatz proensals (Appendix 3). Texts of the Vidal tradition, which circulate freely between Catalonia and Italy, combine Occitan with Latin grammar and metaphysics and are peppered with examples from the lyric (see Chapter 1). The two short late thirteenth-century poetic treatises preserved in Ripoll also illustrate their points with incipits of troubadour songs.11 The Mirall de trobar, which takes its direction from Isidore of Seville, includes a profusion of lyric excerpts (see Appendix 13). It has not been dated more precisely than to the first decade of the fourteenth century and so may be a contemporary or immediate successor rather than a forebear of De vulgari eloquentia, but in any case the texts invite comparison. The Catalan grammarian illustrates his points copiously with extracts from songs by four of the six troubadours quoted by Dante: Giraut de Bornelh (seven songs), Aimeric de Peguilhan (four songs), Folquet de Marselha (two songs, one of them quoted on two separate occasions), and Arnaut Daniel (two songs, one unknown elsewhere). Berenguer also regularly prefaces discussion of a particular point in a song by quoting its incipit (Appendix 13, ##2–25) or uses the incipit to stand for the entire song (##26–32). The prominence he accords to Giraut de Bornelh is not merely quantitative: the Limousin troubadour dominates the Mirall’s coverage of metaplasm (poetic license) and is cited for a linguistic failing only in his use of clitic forms. Dante’s praise, in De vulgari, of Giraut’s poetic substance and construction concords with his high standing for this contemporary grammarian and may even be intended to rebut the implied reservations of Raimon and Terramagnino discussed in Chapter 1.
As we saw in that chapter, the Vidalian treatises focus on nominal inflexion in order to demonstrate Occitan’s kinship with Latin and as the means to poetic success, both in rhyming correctly and in elaborating a courtly razo. De vulgari eloquentia is of course about Italian not Occitan, and is written in Latin not the vernacular, but its approach nevertheless resembles that of its predecessors. Like Raimon, Terramagnino, and Jofre, Dante starts his treatise with reflections on the status relative to Latin of the spoken tongue, identified as a language of poetry that is coming into being, and which it is the author’s purpose to promote and refine; like them, he seeks to strip this emergent literary language of incorrect or regional forms, while admitting that variation in usage constitutes the living quality of vernacular speech; his ambitions, like theirs, are not solely descriptive but have a metaphysical dimension; and like them, he marshals poetic extracts with a view to future poetic production. Dante cannot claim flexion as grounds for rapprochement with Latin, since medieval Italian by this stage did not inflect nominal forms for case, but he is if anything keener than the Vidal grammarians for Italian to be recognized both as the rightful heir of Latin, and as replacing it (1.10.1). He resembles Jofre de Foixà in affirming the autonomy of the vernacular, surpassing his Catalan predecessor in his enthusiasm for the spoken tongue. All these similarities point to Dante’s familiarity with this grammatical tradition.
A major difference between De vulgari eloquentia and the Occitan grammars arises from the very fact of these treatises’ existence, which challenges the Italian poet to acknowledge but also displace Occitan poetry as privileged site of vernacular poetic knowledge. Given his seeming knowledge of his predecessors, Dante’s opening words, “Since I find that no one, before myself, has dealt in any way with the theory of eloquence in the vernacular . . .” (Cum neminem ante nos de vulgaris eloquentie doctrina quicquam inveniamus tractasse), appear to be intended humorously, alerting the reader to the ludic, draglike strain that runs throughout De vulgari; but their effect is also swiftly and unobtrusively to excise the entire Occitan grammatical tradition, and thereby discard the apparatus of learning with which it had surrounded the troubadours.12 More positively, Dante innovates vis-à-vis the Occitan grammarians by explicitly admitting the dimension of time into his treatment of language, a move that has major repercussions for the status of literary Occitan and the earlier scholarship invested in it.
Raimon Vidal and his successors treat the diversity of Romance idioms in purely regional terms, but Dante distinguishes between linguistic variation in space and over time. The poetic weaknesses combated by the Occitan grammarians arise from alleged faults of conjugation or construction, but for De vulgari, as for the Breviari, poetry is more profoundly framed by a hermeneutic of Fall and redemption. All human speech, Dante says, is a flawed compromise between the wordless communication of the angels and the mindless empathy of the beasts (1.2.3–5); it has fallen away from the single original vernacular in which Adam saluted God in paradise (1.4–5); it demands reflection on “the process of change by which one and the same language became many” (1.9.1). Consequently, the difference between spatial and temporal difference is spiritually freighted. When documenting linguistic divergence in space, Dante’s tone is that of farce or fabliau. On his panther hunt round Italy in quest of the true breath of the vernacular, examples of regional variation are quoted for laughs (1.9–14). The decline of language over time from its origin in paradise is presented with contrasting gravity. Of Babel, Dante writes that its “great confusion . . . brought nothing else than oblivion to whatever language has existed before” (1.9.6; confusionem illam que nil aliud fuit quam prioris oblivio). Language changes constantly and the past is made up of irrecoverable forms. Dante’s project, in hunting down the true form of the illustrious vernacular among the comic distortions that proliferate, is to create a language for the future that will offer the best hope of recovering the glorious vernacular of paradise, long since irremediably lost.13 This bid to regenerate linguistic loss follows the same theologically inspired trajectory as Matfre’s quest for lost knowledge in his Breviari d’amor (see Chapter 8); in De vulgari it is additionally intended to give voice to the future, secular institutions, which Italy does not yet possess but which it will need if it is to become Italy (1.18). (Like Occitania, Italy is not unified politically, but, unlike it, Italy still lacks a single, recognized literary idiom. Dante wants, through his treatise, to contribute to a national identity, an aim different from the Vidal grammarians’ leap into universality.)
In order to undergo linguistic regeneration, the forerunners of this future language must also be seen to be “lost.” Daniel Heller-Roazen’s comments on the passage about Babel (1.9.6), though their emphasis is different, support this interpretation: “Defined as the oblivion of its predecessor, each language, then, would repair the ‘loss’ of the one in whose wake it followed, and at the same time acknowledge its irreparable absence; each would constitute not only the reconstitution of the one before it, but also, paradoxically, its constitution.”14 The logic of regeneration is at the same time one of suppression. Occitan is peculiarly vulnerable to this logic. According to De vulgari (1.8.5–9.5), it is just one idiom of a single language of which Italian is also a form (and the langue d’oïl a third). As such it is contemporary with Italian; but such a status would risk exposing it to the vulgar triviality of spatial variation. If the language of the troubadours can be ejected from the present into the past, their poetry can be recuperated as a stepping-stone from the confusion of Babel to the true speech restored. Occitan must therefore be presented in such a way as to mark it as already sliding into the past. It is in this spirit, I believe, that Dante re-marks the troubadours.
Quotations from other poets in De vulgari are often read as inscribing a canonical lineage with Dante as its culmination. However, the notion of lineage and with it those of descent and chronology are ambiguous in this treatise. While, broadly speaking, four of the troubadours whom Dante quotes are twelfth century (Arnaut, Bertran, Folquet, and Giraut) and two had careers that fell in the thirteenth (the two Aimerics), in terms of the practice of quotation, they divide differently. Both Giraut and Folquet are quoted from the very earliest times, and Bertran de Born, too. Indeed Bertran is seldom quoted by later authors; his presence in De vulgari confirms Dante’s debt to the grammaticalizing tradition, since the troubadour is very visible in the razos and appears regularly in works by, or influenced by, Raimon Vidal. The three other troubadours share a more recent quotation history. Arnaut Daniel is not referred to by the Vidal grammarians, makes few if significant appearances in the biographies, but comes gradually into vogue in the later thirteenth century.15 Aimeric de Peguilhan has become a predictable reference point only in the decades immediately preceding De vulgari. And Aimeric de Belenoi is still somewhat marginal, since he is not quoted prior to (or beyond) the Breviari, though he is widely anthologized.
These different historicities illumine the divergent ordering of troubadours in the lists in De vulgari. The first (2.2.8), Bertran-Arnaut-Giraut, groups three poets of the golden age of Occitania; the second (2.6.6), Giraut-Folquet-Arnaut-Aimeric de Belenoi-Aimeric de Peguilhan, begins with those with the most venerable quotation history before progressing to the relative newcomers.16 Arnaut’s mobility between the two groups enables him to be both close to Dante and distant from him. His presence in the second group highlights the capacity of the practice of quotation to re-mark an older author in a new, more contemporary form. Thanks to this ambiguity, the troubadours can be thought of as both present and past; or rather, they can be just present enough to be consigned to the past.
As is well known, Dante exploits Arnaut’s “presentness” in De vulgari to position his own poetry in a closer relation to Arnaut than to any other poet in any language.17 But his distance is also useful in re-marking Occitan poetry as belonging to the past. In Dante’s treatise, Italian poets (2.2.8, 2.5.4, 2.6.6) are interposed between Dante and the troubadours; whenever he lists examples in several languages, troubadours always comes first.18 Arnaut’s ambiguous historicity belongs in tandem, then, with Dante’s efforts to recast a linguistic difference that, in reality, is spatial (hence discreditable) as one that is temporal (and thereby regenerative). Dante, in other words, has his own uniquely intellectual version of the stance adopted by authors who quote the troubadours toward the poets whom they quote. Like Matfre, he imputes knowledge to antics troubadors (the troubadours of old) to whom he is nevertheless linked as a kind of late contemporary; as with Raimon Vidal and others, this linkage takes the form of a particular bridge troubadour, here Arnaut Daniel. But De vulgari eloquentia is the only poetic treatise to elevate to a theological scheme this paradoxical coincidence of contemporaneousness with temporal separation.
The form of quotation practiced here by Dante also favors this scheme insofar as it serves as a concrete means of making a song present while at the same time causing most of it to recede into absence. De vulgari quotes only incipits, making it more laconic that any other treatise except those from Ripoll. In rare cases the repeated line is sufficient for the reader to understand the point (for example, the opening of Giraut de Bornelh 242.17 is quoted in the form “Ara ausirez encabalitz cantarz” in 2.5.4 to illustrate the syllable count of the line). Most require much more information than is provided: at least a stanza to appreciate the rhyme scheme indicated by the incipit “Se.m fos Amor de ioi donar tan larga” (29.17; 2.13.2), and an entire song to see that an incipit represents an exemplary treatment of a certain theme (2.2.8) or an illustrious composition (2.6.6). Admittedly French and Italian songs (including some by Dante himself) are accorded this same drastic abbreviation; the most brutal instance, in 2.6.6, is a salvo of eleven incipits in three languages; but the troubadours are always first on the slippery slope. Following this particular list Dante states that his readers need to be able to recall all these authorities, since with their help his concept of “supreme construction” will become clear (2.6.7). It is as if, instead of providing an anthology of earlier vernacular poems, he has archived them and provided an index to the archive. The next sentence, however, veers off unexpectedly, commending the study of “Virgil, the Ovid of the Metamorphoses, Statius and Lucan” to those who wish to become familiar with the rules of good construction. It seems there is no need to consult the vernacular archive after all, since Virgil and others will serve the purpose better. Poems that are hovering on the edge of being forgotten are here adroitly elbowed into oblivion.
When Dante begins De vulgari eloquentia by excising the earlier, Occitan treatises he occludes the very form in which he himself is writing. It is as though he wanted to compose something more like a poetic autobiography that would present him as the guardian of an archive of past poets, not as participating in an ongoing tradition of grammarians. In the case of the Occitan troubadours, quotation captures the moment of their ex-appropriation: the moment when they are just sufficiently present to be relegated to the past, so that they can form a worthy stepping-stone in the regeneration—theological and political—of poetic language. But in the case of the Occitan treatises that pioneered their appropriation, and which he surely knew, Dante’s aim is to concede them no presence whatever, but forget them absolutely, so as to be able himself to inaugurate the new poetic language of the future.
In the Commedia the commitment to oblivion is still ongoing since, as part of an even more ambitious regenerative scheme, Dante contrives almost to forget even Arnaut Daniel. But while in some respects the move to exappropriate Arnaut is more complete than it was in De vulgari, it is also nuanced by the recognition of something profoundly alien (or inhuman) in language itself, while the connection between quotation and subjectivity is thrust to the fore by the choice, of all the possible phrases he could have chosen to repeat, of the words “I am Arnaut who . . .”
Unlike in De vulgari eloquentia, the presentation of troubadours in the Comedy is broadly biographical. Dante has Bertran de Born repeat phrases from his vida in Inferno 28.136,19 and Folquet’s self-presentation in Paradiso 9.97—io8 as a reformed lover who has now embraced the perspective of providence just as clearly does not come from his songs—it replicates and amplifies his vida.20 In the case of Arnaut Daniel, however, the vida already contained some of the poet’s own words, the tornada of “En cest sonet coind’ e leri” (29.10):
Eu son Arnautz qu’amas l’aura
e chatz la lebre ab lo bou
e nadi contra suberna.
(Biographies, IX, 59)
I am Arnaut who gather up the breeze and hunt the hare with the ox and swim against the rising tide.
When the pilgrim meets the troubadour’s shade on the last ledge of purgatory where lust is purged, included in Arnaut’s eight-line speech is a declaration that similarly begins “I am Arnaut who”: “I am Arnaut who weep yet am singing” (Purgatorio 26.142; Ieu sui Arnaut que plor e vau cantan).21 The syntax “I am such and such” is by now formulaic in the Comedy since many figures have introduced themselves thus.22 But the relative pronoun “who” with which Arnaut’s self-naming continues is a departure from the pattern—only exceptionally does Dante use a similar construction in Italian.23
Prior to its quotation in the vida, the tornada of Arnaut’s song had been alluded to several times by other troubadours. Indeed, all the earliest medieval references to Arnaut’s poetry are to “En cest sonet” and almost all center on these three lines, identifying, as its most memorable core, the expression “Ieu sui Arnaut qu[e] . . . chatz la lebre ab lo bou.” It is odd, to say the least, that the passage of Arnaut Daniel’s corpus that other people most wanted to reiterate was one that identified them as someone other than who they were, only to confuse the identification further by relating it to nonhuman animals. I will argue that the tornada’s very problematization of identity makes it a potent vehicle of ex-appropriation, and that crucial to Dante’s re-marking of Arnaut’s words is his changing the qualification of this “who” from “who hunt the hare with the ox” (qu[e] . . . chatz la lebre ab lo bou) to “who weep yet am singing” (que plor e vau cantan).
In its original context in “En cest sonet,” the first test of this “who” is to find a rhyme word for each of the difficult rhymes in -aura, -ou, and -erna, which have already been filled six times in the preceding stanzas. The words Arnaut decides to include, aura (breeze), bou (ox), and suberna (tide), surely among the nouns one least expects to find in a love poem, seem choices of last resort. Hence the phrase “gathering up the breeze” takes on the meaning “finding a means to include the rhyme word aura,” “chasing with the ox” assumes the value “pursuing a line of verse such that it will end in bou,” and “swimming against the tide” refers to the difficulty of concluding with such a recalcitrant word as suberna. Each rhyme word, that is, has a double function, both integrated into the song’s syntax and detached from it as a citation form. In this respect, although they do not quote phrases from earlier in the text (as some tornadas do), the closing lines of “En cest sonet” nevertheless adopt a citational mode.24 In Derrida’s terms, the tornada re-marks the formal features of Arnaut’s own text in such a way that the self-identification “I am Arnaut who” humorously recognizes the challenge posed by the formal demands of his song, putting his mastery in question. Such re-marking may have lent the tornada to being quoted and re-marked by others.
Each line of the tornada is an example of adynaton, the trope par excellence of dislocation, and thus an apt expression of the contortions to which the rhymes give rise. As well as the difficulty of form, these adynata convey in their contradictory nature the poet’s self-deprecation in the face of unmasterable substance. While the “I am” voices the claim to be in the sense of “to be human” and “Arnaut” supplies that being with a human identity, what follows is at once a conundrum and an inhuman universe of wind, water, and beasts. Human subjectivity is framed by subjection to language, but the language of these lines exposes its potentially alien, inhuman dimension.
Arnaut’s adynata have been traced back to Ecclesiasticus 34:1–2, which compares the man who chases empty dreams to a one who “catcheth at a shadow and followeth after the wind.”25 But Leslie Topsfield finds a more plausible model in Ars amatoria,26 where Ovid recommends pretending compliance with a girlfriend’s whims:
Obsequio tranantur aquae: nec vincere possis
flumina, si contra, quam rapit unda, nates.
obsequium tigresque domat Numidasque leones;
rustica paulatim taurus aratra subit.
Ars amatoria, 2:181–84
Waters can be crossed if you go with the flow, but you’ll never be able to master rivers if you swim against the tide. Accommodating behavior will tame tigers and Numidian lions; and gradually the bull submits to the peasant’s plow.27
True, Ovid’s advice is to win one’s girl through hypocrisy, whereas Arnaut’s tornada enumerates fruitless strivings. But Ovid’s trio of wry adynata overlaps with Arnaut’s in the difficulty of swimming against the current and in the project of subduing wild animals. And while the animals are different in the two authors, Arnaut’s ox responds to the adynaton of Ovid’s bull, given that only an ox (a castrated bull) can be yoked to a plow. In replacing the improbable pairing of bull and plow with the impossible one of ox and hare, Arnaut seems to acknowledge the sexual impulse of the Ovidian passage while recasting it as inevitable failure. Both poets humorously represent human desire at cross-purposes with the nonhuman world, masterfully overcoming it in Ovid’s case, helpless before it in the canso.
Among the troubadours who allude to “En cest sonet,” Aimeric de Peguilhan in “Ses mon apleich” (10.6) is most concerned with its achievements in rhyme and is the only poet not to refer to the tornada.28 In his gallery of portraits, the Monk of Montaudon mocks Arnaut’s opacity in a stanza that retains the tornada’s introductory “Arnaut who . . .” and the two adynata closest to Ovid’s—those of the tide and the ox/bull.29 Others interpret the tornada—in particular in “I am Arnaut . . . / who hunt the hare with the ox”—as expressing erotic frustration. Arnaut himself refers, in 29.1, to his misadventures “last year, / when I hunted the hare with the ox” (Song 14, 3–4; l’autr’an / can cassava.l lebr’ ab lo bou), deciding to put failure behind him and find satisfaction with a different lady. Reworking a similar scenario, Guiraut de Salaignac colors the image with disgust for the lady he has left (249.1):
Aissi cum selh qu’a la lebre cassada
e pueys la pert e autre la rete,
tot atressi es avengut a me
d’una falsa qu’ai lonjamen amada
e servida de bon cor humilmen,
e quan cugei penre mon iauzimen,
pres sordeyor e mi mes en soan.
Aisi o fetz cum las lobas o fan.
(Song 1, 1–8)
Like the man who hunted the hare and then loses her, and another lady engages him in her service, just the same thing happened to me with a false lady whom I have long loved and served sincerely and humbly and when I imagined I could take my enjoyment she disdained me and took up with someone inferior. She acted like shewolves do.
Arnaut’s sexy little female hare, the starting point of Guiraut’s stanza, has ballooned by the end of it into the indiscriminate she-wolf of the bestiaries.
The vida combines both the stylistic and the sexual readings found in these poems. Arnaut, says the biographer, delighted in composing in caras rimas (rare and consequently precious rhymes), which make his songs hard to listen to and learn. An amorous anecdote then frames quotation of the tornada. In an effort to account for the ox, the biographer amusingly decides to read it not as a literal animal, but as the bovine husband of a lady whom Arnaut hunted—the inept and lumbering creature is no longer Arnaut himself, but his rival:
Et amet une auta dompna de Gascoigna, moiller d’En Guillem de Bouvila, mas no fo crezut que anc la dompna li fezes plazer en dreich d’amor; per que el ditz:
Eu sui Arnautz qu[e] . . . (Biographies, IX, 59)
And he loved a lady of Gascony, the wife of Sir William Oxborough [or maybe “William Ox-peasant”], but it is not believed that the lady ever gave him any gratification in respect to love; and this is why he said: “I am Arnaut who . . .”
As we know from Chapter 3, vidas containing quotations are rare and seemingly modeled specifically on accessus to Ovid. If by quoting the tornada the biographer places Arnaut among Ovid’s successors, this may reflect awareness of the parallel between it and Ars amatoria, book 2. In any event, identifying the troubadour as neo-Ovidian signals the impending ex-appropriation of Latin at the hands of Occitan, the newly grammatical vernacular. The vida was almost certainly composed in Italy for an Italian-speaking audience who would find themselves ex-appropriated from their native tongue by its assumption of Occitan as the medium of culture. The vida, in other words, performs a kind of linguistic musical chairs in which Occitan, the language with no home to go to, nevertheless commands a place, while Italian and Latin fail to find a seat.
By the time of the vida (ca. 1230), then, the core of the tornada of “En cest sonet” has been recognized as “I am Arnaut who . . . hunt the hare with the ox”; and the “who” in question has been further identified as a master of difficult and complex rhyme, a producer of opaque mumbo jumbo, the voice of frustrated desire, the discoverer of bestial urges, and a vernacular poet who challenges both Italian and the hegemony of Latin. In repeating the phrase “I am Arnaut who,” Dante may have been drawn to various of these complements of “who I am.”
Before teasing out these identifications in the Commedia, there is one quotation to note, which postdates Arnaut’s vida. Matfre includes the opening stanza of Guiraut de Salaignac’s “Aissi cum selh qu’a la lebre cassada” in his Breviari d’amor, thereby giving “En cest sonet” an indirect role in his program of spiritual regeneration. This quotation (#42;Breviari, 28745–52), figures in the second lawsuit of the perilhos tractat in which Matfre is rebutting the complaints made by troubadours against love (see Appendices 10 and 11). Matfre argues the need to distinguish, as wise poets do, between criticism of love (which he vigorously reproves) and criticism of women (which is just fine). Bernart de Ventadorn (70.23) is quoted approvingly for denouncing his treacherous lady (#41;Breviari, 28720–34). The same approval is accorded immediately afterward to Guiraut’s stanza, attributed (as it is in chansonnier C) to Aimeric de Peguilhan, the troubadour on whom Matfre most relies in this part of the perilhos tractat. Concluding the quotation, Matfre reiterates that “it is therefore right to complain of unrighteous women but not of love” (Breviari, 28753–54; Dregz es donc qu’om fassa clamor / de las deslials, non d’amor). He then quotes himself (#43) and Aimeric again (#44) to the effect that accusing love is folly, a sequence of quotations discussed in Chapter 8. By quoting Guiraut de Salignac alluding to Arnaut, Matfre adds to existing responses to the famous tornada. This part of his Breviari d’amor seeks human spiritual regeneration through quotations from love poetry, in which different troubadours define different possible ways of returning to union with God or festering in sinful separation from him, all of which gives it similarities with Dante’s masterpiece.
One of the main differences between them, however, is that Matfre quotes the troubadours meticulously, while in the Comedy, unlike in De vulgari, Dante no longer exactly quotes them—or at least, he no longer quotes them exactly. In view of the weighty tradition of quotation, Dante’s apparent insouciance about accuracy in the Comedy is another element to be accounted for in interpreting what “I am” might have to say about “who” he thinks he is.
We have seen that when Dante was working on his Comedy around 1308 to 1320, only a few decades after Matfre wrote the Breviari d’amor, there was a tradition of reflecting on the tornada of “En cest sonet” that extended back for over a century and that identified, as its most memorable core, the expression “Ieu sui Arnaut qu[e] . . . chatz la lebre ab lo bou.” Several elements of this tradition resurface in Purgatorio 26.
First, when Arnaut Daniel is pointed out by Guido Guinizelli at the beginning of the canto, the gamut of meanings that might be covered by his famous phrase “the better wordsmith in the vernacular” (miglior fabbro del parlar materno) range from Aimeric de Peguilhan’s tribute to the Monk of Montaudon’s derision, but they could well all stem from the biographer’s salute to Arnaut’s mastery of caras rimas (miglior fabbro) and his implied ex-appropriation of Ovid in favor of the vernacular (parlar materno).30
Next, the fact that the opening words spoken by Arnaut Daniel in his greeting to the Dante figure are not from his own works but may be a quotation from Folquet de Marselha is an indication that Arnaut himself is to be ex-appropriated from mastery over his own corpus.31 Dante’s seeming forgetting of the unforgettable phrase “I am Arnaut who hunt the hare with the ox” confirms this. All that remain of the striking adynata are troubadour truisms: that the singer is singing at the same time as he weeps, and sorrowful at the same time as he rejoices.32
Yet the original adynata—unnatural, bestial, and elemental—which decenter subjectivity by yoking human language to inhuman impulse, each incommensurate with the other, are not absent from the canto as a whole. Instead they are displaced to its beginning. Canto 26 opens with groups of nameless shades coursing through flames. Some energetically exclaim at “sodomy,” others rehearse the obscenity of Pasiphaë’s seduction of the bull. Their sexual chorus is exuberantly frenetic, as expressive of fascination as of remorse:33
Tosto che parton l’accoglienza amica,
prima che ’l primo passo li trascorra,
sopragridar ciascuna s’affatica:
la nova gente: “Soddoma e Gomorra!”
e l’altra: “Ne la vacca entra Pasife
perché ’l torello a sua lussuria corra.”
(26.37–42)
As soon as they break off their friendly greetings, before they take the first step to depart, each labors to outshout the other. The newcomers: “Sodom and Gomorrah!” and the others: “Into the cow goes Pasiphaë, so that the young bull will run to her lust.”
The cries continue with admissions of hermaphroditism and of bestial appetite defying human law (26.82–84, “Nostro peccato fu ermafrodito . . . non servammo umana legge, / seguendo come bestie l’appetito”). The fundamental perversity of these shades’ sexual sins finds expression in a series of dramatic adynata, in which they plunge in fire, wheel out of control, couple unnaturally, conflate male with female, and become beast.
It is noteworthy that the story of how Pasiphaë posed as a cow in order to seduce a bull, thereby giving birth to the Minotaur, is mentioned in Ars amatoria 2.23–24, not far from the line about the bull that Ovid’s wily lover implausibly yokes to his plow, and reprising a much longer exposition of the same story in Ars amatoria 1.289–326. Is there a connection between one lover’s desires yoking a bull to the plow (Ovid), those of another (Pasiphaë) securing her impregnation by a bull, and those of a third (Arnaut) hunting a hare with an ox? I wondered earlier if the ox in the tornada might be a response to Ovid’s implausible harnessing of bull to plow. Perhaps another reason for the ox in Arnaut’s tornada was Pasiphaë’s own obscene adynaton, which prompted the troubadour to invent the comically unrealizable miscegenation of ox and hare. Or perhaps it was Dante who, seeing the potential link between Arnaut and Ovid, made the connection from the troubadour’s ox to Ovid’s bulls.34 In any case, Dante has joined the tradition of seeing Arnaut’s tornada as evoking desires that veer into animality, even though he displaces those desires to the other end of the canto.
The split he thereby introduces between “I am . . . who” and the subject’s elemental passions affects the process of what, following Derrida, I am calling Dante’s ex-appropriation of the troubadours: his challenge to their ownership of, and authority over, vernacular poetry. As Derrida reminds us, such ownership and authority are illusory: we cannot own or master language. What most differentiates troubadour quotation in the Commedia from in De vulgari is that in the later text Dante clearly avoids the error of believing that, by ex-appropriating the troubadours, he can claim another language—emergent Italian—as “proper” to himself. Instead, the standoff between language and desire staged in Arnaut’s tornada, as a result of which the articulation of identity is always haunted by what is irreducibly alien to it, is transposed to the level of the entire canto.
In De vulgari the process of ex-appropriation is explored in relation to what language one speaks. In the Commedia, by comparison, it is extended to the question of human identification by or within language. The words “I am Arnaut who . . .” precisely raise this question of identification and, in so doing, realize the potential of quotation as a transferential act. The fact of repeating “I am Arnaut who . . .” while at the same time discarding the lines that once made up “Arnaut’s” identity shows that it is possible to detach one’s “I” from its previous identifications, enabling it to begin again and so to change.
As in De vulgari eloquentia, the practice of quotation is theologized in the Comedy. But in the later text, Dante is not concerned so much to cast the troubadours into the past as to regenerate their desire, a project analogous to Matfre’s in the Breviari. Where Matfre uses commentary to interpret existing troubadour songs, Dante substitutes penitential verses for Arnaut’s original adynata—but only after having recast these adynata as the wild, lustful landscape of purgatory. The moral distance between Arnaut’s new “I am” and his earlier “who” is identified by Guido Guinizelli when he detaches himself from the bands of sinners and points to Arnaut further away again. The troubadour stands on the very threshold of paradise, having literally left his impossible, animal desires behind him.
By retaining Arnaut’s original language but recasting his words, Dante has replaced the expected quotation with one he himself has composed. If the tornada imposed itself on people’s memories and forced its way into their works, Dante’s own version of “I am Arnaut who” has been just as frequently quoted and pored over. The next chapter will show how Guilhem Molinier will similarly attempt to author his own quotations in the Leys d’amors, though with conspicuously less success.