Changing the Subject
At the foot of the first folio of Occitan chansonnier H someone has written: “Dreitz e raizon quieu chant em demori” (It is rightful and reasonable that I should sing and take my ease), and immediately below it the Italian translation: “Dritto e ragion chio canti e mi soggiorno.” Maria Careri has identified the hand as that of Giovanni Maria Barbieri (1519–74), a noted scholar of the medieval lyric.1 She thinks he jotted down the line as a reminder to himself to look for it in the chansonnier. His search will have been unsuccessful: the not especially distinguished song of which it is the incipit is not copied there, but only in CK. Anonymous in K, where it is transcribed in a later hand on the last folio following an anonymous song, in C it is attributed to Guillem de Saint Gregori, an ascription accepted by Pillet-Carstens and reflected in its PC number of 233.4. According to Maurizio Perugi, the song’s real author is probably Guilhem de Murs (PC 226), a late thirteenth-century poet who exchanged verses with Guiraut Riquier and belonged in the same patronage circle as Rostanh Berenguier de Marseilla (PC 427).2 However, it is likely that Barbieri thought the incipit and its song belonged to Arnaut Daniel, a view with which Carl Appel concurred.3 Barbieri probably also believed, as do scholars today, that Petrarch was convinced he was quoting Arnaut Daniel when he used this line in his canzone “Lasso me” (Canzoniere, no. 70): a song remarkable for incorporating, like the Purgatorio, a line of Arnaldian Occitan into an otherwise Italian text. Barbieri probably went looking for this song in H, a chansonnier containing an unusually large number of Arnaut’s songs, many of them with extensive Latin glosses,4 since he also believed that this manuscript was for a period in Petrarch’s hands.5 The line “Drez et rayson es qu’ieu ciant em demori” (as it appears in Rosanna Bettarini’s edition of Petrarch’s text; see Appendix 16) subtends a web of beliefs and suppositions about the authorship of the song from which it comes.6
The functioning of this web and its implications for subjectivity are the topic of this final chapter. I see line 10 of Petrarch’s “Lasso me” as marking a terminal point in the practice of quoting the troubadours. Perhaps dating from 1337–40,7 this canzone is contemporary with the Consistori’s promotion of new directions for poetry in Toulouse. But whereas the Leys d’amors were successful regionally, in Occitania and Catalonia, the way Petrarch inflects the lyric was to prove irresistible across Europe.
Unlike the Occitan verses quoted by Dante, there is no previous history of quoting “Razo e dreyt.” On the other hand, since Petrarch’s song quotes an incipit at the end of each of its five stanzas, his obvious formal model is Jofre de Foixà’s “Be m’a lonc temps menat a guiza d’aura” (Chapter 7 and Appendix 9). Jofre’s song may also enter into the web of supposition surrounding “Razo e dreyt” given that, it has been suggested, Petrarch may also have associated it with Arnaut Daniel:8 the —aura rhymes of Jofre’s first stanza (aura = breeze, daura = gilds, saura = golden-haired), rhymes dear to Petrarch, recapitulate some of those in Arnaut’s “En cest sonet” (29.10), the tornada of which I identify as the model for Dante’s famous “I am Arnaut who . . .” Petrarch’s choice of a line asserting the right to sing joyfully can be seen, thanks to this hypothetical detour, as a reversal of Dante’s Arnaut who continues to weep even as he sings. What makes the web of assumptions about Petrarch’s quotation more intricate still is that the Occitan incipit in “Lasso me,” despite its confidence in the rightness of its song, is just as palinodic as Arnaut’s words in Purgatorio 26. The difference lies in the technique of quotation: whereas Dante adjusts the Occitan text to suit his purpose, Petrarch quotes verbatim in such a way as to erode the meaning of the quoted line and transform it.
That Arnaut Daniel’s authorship should be surrounded by conjecture and supposition is not surprising. From the second third of the thirteenth century, when he becomes fashionable both for imitators and for those who quote, cases of uncertain attribution arise involving him as with all the prominent troubadours. A stanza thought to be by Uc Brunenc (450.1), “Ab plazer receup et acuoill,” is misattributed to Arnaut in the r fragment of Raimon Vidal’s So fo.9 An otherwise unknown song is attributed to Arnaut by Berenguer d’Anoia in the Mirall.10 Although the wordplay of the latter example, which presumably provides the grounds for this attribution, may not seem especially Arnaldian, the lines could conceivably be from a lost song by Arnaut.
Many troubadours are recipients of optimistic attributions that extend their existence virtually, but Arnaut was always somewhat more spectral than other classical troubadours. Placed by his vida in the same territory as Arnaut de Maruelh, Daniel seems to some extent to be in the other Arnaut’s shadow.11 The absence of concrete information about his life leads the biographer visibly to fabricate its events on the basis of the tornada of 29.10. More disturbingly, the razo to 29.2, “Anc ieu non l’aic,” frankly casts doubt on Arnaut’s authorship. It narrates how the troubadour cheated in a song competition by stealing his competitor’s composition and, when the theft was revealed, was nonetheless rewarded by being “given” the song by the judge, Richard Lionheart.12 The story is atypical in a genre that usually works to identify songs as rooted in the experience of their composers. It is also unusually clear-sighted about the way chansonniers prefer to assign a name to a song rather than leave its authorship anonymous or in doubt, even if this means generating wrong or contradictory attributions.13 Despite the authenticating, psychologizing moves of the biographies, authorship in the chansonniers is often understood as being ascribed to, not as emanating from, a named individual (as also in florilegia; see Chapter 4). Where quotation is concerned, the desire to cite a troubadour by name is similarly evident even if the name in question is the wrong one. Despite the seeming accuracy of the majority of citations, what is at stake is often less that a given opinion originated in the mind of an earlier author than that it could be ascribed to one; again, we are dealing with a direction to, not a movement from, the author in question.
The Arnaut inherited by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was a poet of whom it had been conceded in the accessus that a song could be given to him, whether or not he had composed it, and this status would surely give greater license to imitating, citing, and quoting him than was the case with other troubadours. If Guillem de Saint Gregori existed and was active in the 1220s, he may well have belonged in an early group of such imitators, since he is also credited by D with the authorship of “Ben gran avoleza intra” (233.2), a contrafactum of Arnaut’s sestina “Lo ferm voler” (29.14) that uses the same rhyme words as its model in a political sirventes of praise and blame.14 Even earlier, Raimon Vidal, father of troubadour quotation, is entangled with Arnaut Daniel since the song “Entre.l taur e.l doble signe,” attributed to him by Pillet-Carstens with the number 411.3, is accorded by others to Arnaut Daniel.15
However, if Perugi is right and the poet responsible for “Razo e dreyt” is Guillem de Murs, then its date of composition moves forward to the 1280s and is the product of another circle of Arnaut groupies, this time based in Vaucluse. The poets who make up this group may have been connected to the Consistori at Toulouse since, as Perugi points out, there are significant overlaps between the rhymes of “Razo e dreyt” and the exemplary rhyme scheme that Molinier works through as a demonstration of how to construct a song in book 5 of the first prose redaction of the Leys, and also between it and songs furnished by Molinier himself.16 The connections of “Razo e dreyt” extend to Catalonia, since a song by Cerveri de Girona has a similar meter;17 Jofre de Foixà too may have formed part of this Arnaut appreciation society; this Catalan enthusiasm for Arnaut may be responsible for the dubious ascriptions to Arnaut Daniel in the Mirall; the text of So fo in the Italian fragment r may attest the spread of enthusiasm in the other direction, in northern Italy.
While on the one hand Perugi locates “Razo e dreyt” close in both region and date to Avignon, implying this proximity as the reason for Petrarch’s encountering it, the Italian scholar also asserts that the poet “without doubt knew it as the work of Arnaut Daniel.”18 I want to explore the suppositions involved in this “knowledge.” Does “knowing [the song] as the work of Arnaut” mean believing it to have originated in the mind of the twelfth-century troubadour? Or does it merely mean ascribing it to a network of writing associated with an auctor whose fame was nourished by having songs assigned him that he may not have composed?
Although there are no citations in “Lasso me,” the question of attribution is central to the poem’s development. Of the five incipits quoted, all but “Razo e dreyt” are rather recognizable. We can hardly suppose that Petrarch did not know that he himself was the author of the final quotation, since it is the first line of one of his own songs;19 he probably supposed his readers would know it as such; the way the incipit is inserted into the text slyly underlines his connection to it. It also seems safe to infer that he would have expected readers to recognize the other three quotations from Tuscan poets: Guido Cavalcanti, Dante, and Cino da Pistoia. These are his immediate forebears, all are also quoted by Dante,20 and by adding himself to the list Petrarch is doing what almost all writers do who quote the troubadours: he identifies himself as their late contemporary.
The very first song is different. It really can be doubted if many of Petrarch’s readers would know it, or could reasonably have been expected to recognize it, whatever Petrarch may have known or not known about it. On first reading, the Occitan verse reveals itself as a foreign body in Petrarch’s text by virtue of its linguistic strangeness, which contrasts with the manifold familiarity of the other incipits. The only clue to its being a line from a song lies in the way it is introduced, the preceding dir (line 9) setting up exactly the equivocation we found in Gilles de Viés-Maisons in Chapter 7 between quoting someone else’s words and concluding a construction of one’s own. The same means of drawing attention to the presence of a quotation is found at the end of stanza II as well; only with the more recent and better known quotations in stanzas III to V is the extraneousness of the incipits dissimulated, much as it was by Jofre de Foixà, by their integration to Petrarch’s text. The inference that “Drez et rayson es qu’ieu ciant em demori” is the incipit of a song by a poet who should be known and admired is created après coup, as an aftereffect of the recognizability of the songs that are quoted later. In what follows I want to explore what happens when Petrarch’s readers are lured into this intersubjective, transferential maze.
While the focus of my analysis remains the lone troubadour quotation, the workings of the whole canzone need to be addressed for these exchanges to be appreciated. Petrarch’s song has remarkably lush versification. The a rhyme of each stanza, repeated four times, provides a frame into which are slotted three different pairs of rhyming couplets. The rhyme word of each incipit provides the second rhyme of the last of these couplets, binding each quotation eloquently into its stanza.21 It is then woven into the song as a whole by the way earlier material from the quoted line is repeated at the start of the stanza following. This structure of repetition, known in the Occitan treatises as coblas capfinidas, fixes the stanza order—thereby confirming (or implying) a chronology among the quotations—and instigates retrospective reflection on each of the quoted songs. Whereas in the earlier goliardic Latin versus cum auctoritate, or “glossed song,” the gloss (such as it was) operated proleptically in the lines preceding the quotation, now it begins in the stanza following. The resulting interplay of quotation and reaction impels the song forward via a process of self-reappraisal, in which the impulse to break with past guilt and progress toward a new future has to contend with wistfulness, reluctance, and inertia. As a consequence, whereas Jofre inserts quotations in such a way as to ensure the continuing of the troubadour canso as such, Petrarch constantly alters his perspective toward lyric composition: what starts as a love song inspired by the beauty of the beloved ends with aspirations to understand the beauty of creation. In this respect, the Arnaldian quotation in line 10 of “Lasso me” sets up Petrarch’s own version of Dante’s Arnaut when he says, “regretfully I see past folly, yet rejoicing I see ahead the joy I hope for” (Purgatorio 26.143–44; consiros vei la passada folor, /e vei jausen lo joi qu’esper denan).22 Knowledge of desire transforms that desire into the desire to desire differently, and to desire new forms of knowledge; in its small compass, “Lasso me” veers away from the erotic lyric and its scholastic deployment at the hands of those who quote it, toward unmediated communion with the cosmos.
A key element in this transformation is the Occitan phrase (“drez et rayson,” line 10), reprised in the line following as “ragion è ben.” There is a self-justificatory cast to the song quoted and to the argument drawn from it that evokes the legislative framework with which troubadour lyric has been surrounded over the preceding century and a half, and which is epitomized in such titles as Razos de trobar, Regles de trobar, and Leys d’amors. The Occitan song adheres to its duty; its rationale (razo) is its theme (razo); it clings to the inertia of a certain expression of desire in which it is right and reasonable to linger in enjoyment (demori literally means “stay, remain”).23 Through stanzas I and II of “Lasso me” the first-person subject also appears frozen in this adherence. But step by step (21), the lofty impassivity of his lady induces Petrarch to begin reasoning differently (22). The exacting rationale of love is reinterpreted as delusion (31–32). Although still indulgent toward the self he was when he composed “nel dolce tempo de la prima etade,” he is ready for change.
The change concerned is symbolic insofar as it involves reason, law, and language. The quotations play a vital role in showing how subjectivity is expressed in song. Nostalgia for a certain kind of love and renunciation of it are inseparably bound up with nostalgia for and renunciation of a certain kind of song: the spring opening in stanza I and the “I sing because I am asked to” of stanza II rehearse earlier modes of composition as well as more youthful emotions associated with spring and reciprocal desire. The Dante quotation in stanza III acts as a turning point: Petrarch’s heart, when it grows harsh (aspro) behaves like Dante’s speech” (mioparlar. . . aspro) and of course when he repeats Dante’s words, Dante’s language (mio parlar) becomes his.24 After this, there is no longer a gap between singer and song, but that is because it is Petrarch’s whole self that has to be relegated to the past; he is not yet quite free of such poetic convictions as the oppression of the look (stanza IV), or the guilt of youthful desire (stanza V). Still repeating quotations, he becomes poised to move forward to we know not what.
The poet’s future is uncertain at the end of “Lasso me,” but we can be sure that it will be one that does not quote the troubadours. To this extent, Petrarch and Molinier agree: the days of the antics troubadors are gone. Molinier’s future, however, remains within a framework of scholastic pedagogy; his own poetry and that of the Consistori displace the century-old classics on his students’ syllabus. Petrarch’s forward movement—while it may in the end be just as masterful—relies on hesitation and supposition to achieve change.
The problematic attribution of the first quotation is crucial in inaugurating this subjective transformation. The author of “Razo e dreyt” is construed retroactively on the basis of the prestige of the quotations that follow. The line is supposed to emanate from a subject supposed to know, who has to be supposed only in order to be the support of the razo concerned; conversely, knowledge of this subject is supposed only in order to postulate a point of origin for the tradition in which Petrarch stands. The point about the genealogy inscribed in “Lasso me” is not that it starts with someone celebrated whom it is time to displace but with a figure so spectral and uncertain as to provide no firm anchorage. This is what enables the song to disengage from the subject position that the Occitan line implies, and then reengage differently with the poetic order, and so progress toward a different light. With its transferential structure, the song acts by positing but then dismantling subjects of knowledge in order to be free from the inertia of their desire and in order to desire afresh. The form of the poem is the exact formal corollary of this: by using incipits as explicits, it makes an end of earlier inaugurations, so as to be able to begin again.