Abstract
This chapter treats narcissism and selfhood, through the lens of testimony, in Guillaume de Machaut’s Fountain of Love (c. 1360). As a testimony to love, the text relates the encounter between a forlorn lover and a clerk who composes the lover’s lament for his beloved lady. Both learn that unreciprocated vision and speech, due to language’s polyvocal nature, work against their testimonial appeal. The story of Narcissus, at the center of the text, complicates testimony as well, for this is a tale that, having no witnesses who can speak of Narcissus’s demise, resists its own telling. The sole recourse the lover has, I posit, is to resort to the fantastical world of literature and dreams, where his wounds seemingly are healed and desire fulfilled.
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Notes
- 1.
Guillaume de Machaut, Le Livre de la fontaine amoureuse, ed. Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet (Paris: Editions Stock, 1993), v. 132; 40. Quotations in Middle French, with verse and page numbers cited, are taken from this edition. English translations are my own.
- 2.
Giraut de Borneil, “Razon e leuc” in The “Cansos” and “Sirventes” of the Troubadour Giraut de Borneil : A Critical Edition, ed. and trans. Ruth Verity Sharman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), vv. 35–40 and 52, 131, 133, translation modified.
- 3.
R. Howard Bloch, The Anonymous Marie de France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 36–38.
- 4.
This is evident in the Story of the Grail, “l’estoire ensi le tesmoigne,”—as the story testifies or makes known. See: Chrétien de Troyes, Le Roman de Perceval ou le conte du Graal, ed. William Roach (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1959), v. 2807, 82.
- 5.
Shoshana Felman, “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, 1992), 5.
- 6.
Scholars have arrived at different spellings of these names in this anagram (all derivations of “Guillaume de Machaut” and “Jean de Berry et Auvergne”), but none form exact spellings of either name. Laurence de Looze argues the genius of Machaut’s anagram lies precisely in its problematic solvability. See: “‘Mon nom trouveras’: A New Look at the Anagrams of Guillaume de Machaut—The Enigmas, Responses, and Solutions” in Romanic Review 79.4 (1988), 537–57. For a discussion of how Machaut constructs his authorial persona in his works, see: Elizabeth Eva Leach, Guillaume de Machaut: Secretary, Poet, Musician (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 82-131.
- 7.
Guillaume, Fontaine, vv. 45–47 and 49–51, 36.
- 8.
Ibid., vv. 229–39, 46, 48.
- 9.
Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, “Un engin si soutil”: Guillaume de Machaut et l’écriture au XIV e siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001), 113.
- 10.
Guillaume, Fontaine, vv. 131–35, 40.
- 11.
Felman, “Education,” 5.
- 12.
Ibid.
- 13.
Guillaume, Fontaine, vv. 347–56, 54.
- 14.
Ibid., vv. 456–68, 60.
- 15.
Ibid., vv. 523–35, 66.
- 16.
Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 29–30.
- 17.
Ovid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Books 1–5 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), v. 3.380, 97; Ovid, The Metamorphoses of Ovid (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), 92.
- 18.
Ibid.; Ibid.
- 19.
Ibid., vv. 3.386–87, 97; Ibid.
- 20.
Nouvet , Enfances narcisse (Paris: Galilé, 2009), 38. My translation of: “‘Coeamus’ entremêle une demande de rencontre à une demande de copulation, c’est-à-dire d’‘entrelacement’ […]. Il illustre et définit l’entremêlement linguistique qu’est un écho. Les divers sens d’un mot ne se contentent pas de le faire éclater et de le disperser: ils s’entremêlement, s’accouplent, et couplent les uns avec les autres, couple linguistique aussi troublante, serpentine, et confuse que la copulation sexuelle.” For more on the use of Echo in Medieval French literature, see: Miranda Griffin, Transforming Tales: Rewriting Metamorphosis in French Medieval Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 68-101.
- 21.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, v. 3.385, 97.
- 22.
Simon Gaunt, Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature: Martyrs to Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 30.
- 23.
Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992), 64.
- 24.
Gaunt, Love, 35.
- 25.
Guillaume, Fontaine, vv. 708–13, 78.
- 26.
Garth Tissol, The Face of Nature: Wit, Narrative, and Cosmic Origins in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 78. For a reading of this rewriting of the myth of Morpheus in the Fountain, see the conclusion to Griffin's Tales, 211-35.
- 27.
Ibid., 83.
- 28.
Guillaume, Fontaine, vv. 756–62, 80, 82.
- 29.
Žižek, Enjoy, 66.
- 30.
Guillaume, Fontaine, vv. 782–94, 82, 84.
- 31.
Ibid., vv. 1003–18, 96, 98.
- 32.
Ibid., vv. 801–02, 84.
- 33.
Ibid., vv. 1311–12, 114.
- 34.
Nouvet , Enfances, 150. My translation of: “Les circonstances spécifiques de la mort de Narcisse signalent l’impossibilité de connaître et de narrer l’histoire de Narcisse. Elles coupent l’histoire de toute voix narratrice, de toute source subjective. Cette coupure inscrit de fait l’histoire de Narcisse dans la parenthèse qu’est l’événement traumatique. Elle est suspendue, hors mémoire, radicalement étrangère à toute histoire qu’un ‘je’ pourrait vouloir se raconter.”
- 35.
Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 240.
- 36.
Ibid., 159. I do not agree with those who claim Machaut does not include Narcissus’s story because it is already so well known during the fourteenth century. Machaut includes his own version of the myth elsewhere, most famously in his Motet VII, and obviously understands that it explores themes related to desire, language, and human subjectivity. See: Guillaume de Machaut, Poésies lyriques, Vol. II, ed. V. Chichmaref (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1909), 495–96.
- 37.
Guillaume, Fontaine, vv. 1421–22, 120.
- 38.
Ibid., vv. 1372–73, 118.
- 39.
Alexandre Leupin, “The Powerlessness of Writing: Guillaume de Machaut, the Goron, and Ordenance” in Yale French Studies 70 (1986), 137.
- 40.
Ibid., 136.
- 41.
Felman, “Education,” 3.
- 42.
Consider seven of the eight times mot appears here: “Et qu’elle dogne a chascun mot sa glose” [and may she give to each word its proper meaning], v. 760, 82; “je nul mot ne sonne” [I speak not a word], v. 979, 96; “Que mot ne dist” [saying not a word], v. 1036, 100; “Onques n’i fist arrest ne doute/Qu’escripte ne fust mot a mot” [He did not stop and did not doubt that it was written word for word], vv. 1522–23, 126; “Mais ci l’ay mot a mot escript,/Si com veü l’ay en escript” [But I wrote it word for word just as I saw it written], vv. 1993–94, 152. The eighth use juxtaposes mot with the tortures of love: “Mais qui scet bon mot, se le die./Si vous dirai la maladie/Qui me perse le cuer de l’ame” [But he who knows a good word, let him say it. I will tell you about the malady piercing my heart and soul], vv. 1443–45, 122. The plural form, mos, appears twice in the phrase “briés mos” or “in few words.” See: v. 710, 78; v. 2109, 158.
- 43.
Guillaume, Fontaine, v. 397, 58.
- 44.
Ibid., vv. 1565–66, 128.
- 45.
Ibid., v. 2152, 160.
- 46.
Ibid., vv. 1622–24, 132.
- 47.
Ibid., vv. 2207–22, 164.
- 48.
Ibid., vv. 2229–31, 164.
- 49.
Ibid., vv. 2225–26, 164. In Middle French, the verb retollir implies that nothing is removed or lacking in this relationship.
- 50.
Ibid., vv. 963–68, 94.
- 51.
Ibid., vv. 2335–45, 172.
- 52.
Ibid., vv. 2257–60, 166.
- 53.
Ibid., vv. 2241–43, 166.
- 54.
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 118.
- 55.
Ibid.
- 56.
Pierre Hadot, “Le mythe de Narcisse et son interprétation par Plotin” in Narcisses, ed. Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 84.
- 57.
On the connection between ivory and dreams, see: Frederick Ahl, Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 261–64. The rhyme of ivoire and voire in the Fountain occurs in vv. 1395–96: “Et Venus le marbre et l’ivoire/Fist entaillier, c’est chose voire” [And Venus had the marble and ivory sculpted, this is true]. See: Guillaume, Fontaine, 118.
- 58.
Guillaume, Fontaine, vv. 2616–20, 188.
- 59.
Guillaume, in his Book of the True Poem (Livre du Voir Dit), twice references this second title: “Je vous fais escrire l’un de mes livres que j’ai fait derrainement, que on appelle Morpheus” [I am going to have copied for you one of my books I recently wrote, it is called Morpheus] and “Je vous envoie mon livre de Morpheus, que on appelle La Fontaine Amoureuse” [I am sending you my book Morpheus, called The Fountain of Love]. See: Guillaume de Machaut, Le Livre du Voir Dit, ed. Paul Imbs (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1999), 124, 126, and 186, my translations.
- 60.
Guillaume, Fontaine, vv. 229–30, 100.
- 61.
Aristotle, On the Soul in The Basic Works of Aristotle, trans. Richard McKeon (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 573.
- 62.
Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press), 76–77.
- 63.
This tale is known as the Book of Sybil. See: Josiane Haffen, Contribution à l’étude de la sibylle médiévale (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1984).
- 64.
Cerquiglini-Toulet , Engin, 210. My translation of: “L’art est en rapport avec la nigromance. Magie est l’anagramme de l’image. L’art est métamorphose. Il donne vie et voix à l’inanimé.”
- 65.
Ibid., 226. My translation of: “Pour écrire, [Machaut] se forge avec ses outils, la plume, le papier ou le parchemin, un objet digne d’être aimé, même si cet objet est une ‘image,’ un être de mots que l’écriture fixe. Les lois de l’amour sont bien des règles de grammaire.”
- 66.
Guillaume, vv. 2825–30, 200.
- 67.
Agamben, Stanzas, 128.
- 68.
Nouvet , Enfances, 70. My translation of: “Il faut accueillir l’autre qui est déjà à l’œuvre dans la voix soi-disant propre afin d’apprendre à le mettre à l’œuvre et à en faire quelque chose d’autre. Le poète s’occupe certes la place de Narcisse, mais afin d’accomplir ce dont Narcisse est incapable: reconnaître, aimer, embrasser l’autre à même la voix. Au lieu de le fuir comme Narcisse […], je dois donc—telle est la loi ovidienne qui est également la loi lyrique—m’avancer vers lui, m’accoupler à lui qui s’est déjà accouplé à moi.”
- 69.
Guillaume, Fontaine, vv. 2842–43, 200.
- 70.
Ibid., v. 2848, 200. For how this concluding line speaks to the problematic nature of interpretation in the Fountain, see: Daisy Delogu, “‘Laisser le mal, le bien eslire’: History, Allegory, and Ethnical Reading in the Works of Guillaume de Machaut” in A Companion to Guillaume de Machaut, ed. Jennifer Bain and Deborah McGrady (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 269.
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Ealy, N. (2019). Narcissus and Testimony: Guillaume de Machaut’s Fountain of Love . In: Narcissism and Selfhood in Medieval French Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27916-5_6
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