Abstract
The modern Western notion of heterosexual romantic love emerges as a literary theme in the troubadour love songs of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Occitania. In an area in the south of France, now generally called Languedoc, lyric poets revolutionized the representation of ideal love by suggesting that the love of a man for a woman might be as intensely passionate, loyal, and ennobling as male homosexual love. In antiquity, Platonic love and Aristotelian friendship provided personal relationships whose worth could not be matched by heterosexual love. In the Christian world, the medieval institution of compagnonnage (classical male friendship) intimately bonded two knights in a symbolic fusion of souls (ET, 16–17).1 In the fifteenth-century romance based on the life of the chivalric hero Jean de Beuil, Le jouvencel, we find a typical description of a knight’s love for his compagnon:
You love your comrade so in war. When you see that your quarrel is just and your blood is fighting well, tears rise to your eye. A great sweet feeling of loyalty and pity fills your heart on seeing your friend so valiantly exposing his body to execute and accomplish the command of our Creator. And then you prepare to go and die or live with him, and for love not to abandon him. And out of that there arises such a delectation, that he who has not tasted it is not fit to say what a delight it is.
Le Joi represente, en effet, l’union de la virilite et de la feminite en l’homme, dans le seul d’esir.
(In truth, joi represents the union of virility and femininity in man, in complete desire.)
—Rene Nelli, L’Erotique des troubadours
(Troubadour Eroticism)
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Notes
For further reading on male friendship in Antiquity, see Dover, Greek Popular Morality (1975), and Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (1980). For a discussion of the difficulties of distinguishing between classical male friendship and romance in twelfth-century literature, see Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love Lyric (1968).
Languedoc included the geographic regions of Limousin, Poitou, BasseAuvergne, and Aquitaine. The first courts to be poetry centers in the first half of the twelfth century were Poitiers, Ventadour, Turenne et Clermont. After 1150 at the latest, the taste for troubadour poetry spread to Le Haut et le Bas Languedoc and the counts ofToulouse were among its most ardent supporters. The area known today as Provence furnished a relatively small number of poets; it wasn’t until the time of Raimon-Beranger (1209–45) that the court of Aix became a literary center (Jeanroy, Les chansons de Guillaume IX [1913] passim).
Anthologies of troubadour poetry are often confusing in this regard. The present study, however, is not a study of troubadour poetry per se, but of a writing effect present in the poetry. For a general overview of the history of the troubadours see Henri-Irenee Marrou’s, Les troubadours (1971), a concise pedagogical text which appears in the History division of Seuil’s series Points. Rene Nelli’s L’Erotique des troubadours is an exhaustive study of troubadour eroticism that also includes an overview of the history of troubadour poetry. Several good sources in English for the history of the troubadours are Davenson, Egan, Goldin, Lindray, and Topsfield.
In a book on modern poetry published in 1998, Martine Broda makes the connection between the absence of an object of desire in early twentieth-century lyric poetry and the “equivalence entre ‘chanter’ et “aimer”’ (equivalence between `to sing’ and `to love’) in troubadour lyrics. She defines troubadour joi as the “ecstasy of unending desire.” Broda’s book, L’Amour du nom: Essai sur le lyrisme et la lyrique amoureuse (Love of the name: essay on lyricism and the love lyric, is discussed in a review of three books on poetry in Le Monde du livre of 20 March, 1998. The reviewer emphasizes the continued presence in poetry since the troubadours of a specific aspect of desire: “l’objet n’est rien, mais le desir est tout” (the object is nothing, the desire is everything).
In her review of Dominique Rabate’s volume of essays, Figures du sujet lyrique, Susan F. Crampton writes that Michel Collot’s article “Le Sujet lyrique hors de soi” (The lyric subject outside itself) presents an innovative perspective. “Collot taps examples from Rimbaud and Ponge to illustrate the notion that lyric poetry is purely immanent. Collot holds that a more positive and a more transitive mode of expression is produced once the modern lyric subject is displaced, embracing the alterity of separation” (The French Review, Vol. 73, No. 4, March 2000, 738). My work on the troubadours shows that from the first lyric poets in the twelfth century, the lyric subject exists outside itself in the figure of the lady.
As explained in the Introduction, prior to Love in the Western World, the most influential source for the culture of Occitania, was Napoleon Peyrat’s Histoire des Albigeois (1870), the first sustained study of the rise and subsequent annihilation of Catharism in southern France, which according to Krystel Maurin (1995), specialist on the presence of Cathar themes in modern literature, represented the end of a fascination on the part of several generations of Romantic writers with medieval Occitania. The fascination had begun, however, in 1803 with Fabre d’Olivet’s Le Troubadour which brought the word “troubadour” into fashion and with it the “troubadour style” in painting and architecture. We can assume that George Sand who signed her letters to Flaubert, “le vieux troubadour,” was one of the Romantics caught up in the fashion (See chapter 4). For a recent look at the “troubadour style” in Romantic art see the pages written by Josephine Le Foll, in the catalogue of an exhibit held at the Musee des Beaux Arts in Nantes, France in 1995–96 on French Romantic painting from 1815 to 1850 Les annees romantiques: La peinture en France de 1815–1850 (1995).
Gaston Paris coined the term courtly love in 1883 (see Introduction). To be accurate, the philosophy of love invented by the troubadours was called Fin’Amors, pure love, and was a rare and privileged sentiment whose rites and rituals were elaborate and strict. As Fin’Amors became popular in the courts of Occitania, it became less sincere, and often resembled a game which it was by the time Andre Chapelain wrote his treatise on love in the thirteenth century. The general term courtly love can be applied to these later versions, but should not be used to describe Fin’Amors. Rene Nelli distinguishes between Fin’Amors and later corruptions in L’Erotique des troubadours. I will define Fin’Amors, and the codes and rituals which contribute to the creation of the troubadour effect, later in this chapter.
Anne Brenon, the curator of the CRNEC, Centre Rene Nelli des Etudes Cathares, a paleontologist whose Le vrai visage du Catharisme (The True Face of Catharism) (1995) is an important revisionist study, undertakes the task of revising Rougemont’s work with a certain nostalgia, calling it “the celebrated Love in the Western World of our youth” (198). In a conversation, Brenon spoke to me of Rougemont’s influence on her as a student. This is a striking example of how the same erroneous accounts which scholars must revise attracted them to the area of research in the first place.
The idea that troubadour eroticism haunts today’s sexual relations is mentioned by a writer concerned with popular culture, Naomi Wolf, who in The Beauty Myth (1991) writes that “the catalogue of features, developed by the troubadours, first paralyzed the beloved woman into beauty’s silence” (59).
The Book of the Two Principles was discovered in Florence and published by Father Dondaine in 1939. There is a recent critical edition with notes and translation by Christine Thouzellier, published in Paris by CERT in 1973. The best known example of using Inquisition records to investigate Cathar history is Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou. At the Rene Nelli Center for Cathar Studies (CNREC), a team of scholars and archivists, headed by director Anne Brenon, author of Le vrai visage du Catharisme (The True Face of Catharism) (1995), works to revise and advance the history of Occitania. In addition to setting the record straight on the doctrines and daily life of medieval Cathars, disentangled from “mythological Catharisms” (Brenon 9), the current generation of scholars is also concerned with correcting the misrepresentation of the nature of the relationship between the Cathars and the troubadours. While it is true that the conflation of social reality and representation is a problem, it is also true that to disengage the two can itself distort that reality which we call culture. Historians working at the CRNEC are only too aware of this dilemma. The most reliable sources available at this time are books and articles by Brenon, Duvernoy, Maurin, Roquebert, Thouzellier, and Wakefield. The most extensive study is Roquebert’s multi-volume work.
This period is referred to as “The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century.” See Charles Homer Haskins. The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927). Boswell refers to Gothic architecture, biblical scholarship, the study of inedicine, law and classical literature, architecture, science, economics, and agriculture as part of the “cultural efflorescence” (265).
Although there has been no formal Cathar movement since the middle ages, Nelli calls himself a “cathar d’aujourd’hui” (a Cathar of today), the title of one of his autobiographical writings. It is difficult to classify Nelli’s writings, since their subject range is great and includes: history, for example Le musee du Catharisme (1964), Le phenomene cathare (1964), Dictionnaire des heresies meridionales (1967), La vie quotidienne des Cathares du Languedoc au XIIIe siecle (1969), Les Cathares (1972), Histoire du Languedoc (1974), Ecrivains anticonformistes du Moyen-Age occitan (1977); literary history and criticism, including his two most important books on the history and significance of Fin’Amors, L’Erotique des troubadours (1963) and Un art d’aimer occitanien du XIIIe siecle: Le roman de Flamenca (1966); a study of the surrealist poet Joe Bousquet (1975); history of spirituality, Spiritualite de l’heresie: le Catharisme (1953); psychoanalytic theory, “Tiresias ou les metamorphoses de la passion” (1980); the history of eroticism, L’Amour et les mythes du coeur (1952), Erotique et civilisations (1972); and his own bilingual poetry in French and Provencal, Arma de Vertat:Poemas de Renat Nelli (1952); and an essay on “L’Arnour courtois” in Sexualité humaine (Human Sexuality) in 1970 which merges his scholarship with his vision of the finality of intersexual eroticism.
Former Chicago Bulls player Dennis Rodman’s words at the championship rally in Chicago’s Grant Park (June 16, 1998) provide a contemporary, albeit caricatural example, of the intimate connection between compagnonnage and misogyny/heterophobia. Rodman said, “I’ve always said I’d never get married. Never have a wife. If I had to marry anybody, it’d be these twelve guys” (Chicago Tribune, June 17, 1998). Known for his off-court transvestism, particularly for appearances in an elaborate wedding gown and veil, Rodman’s sexual persona represents in a single outrageous, but socially acceptable (and cheered) image, how the heroic tradition subverts heterosexuality. Ironically, on stage at the rally were the “Loveabulls,” the team’s sexy female cheerleaders, complete with pom-poms—the compulsory (for the illusion of heterosexuality), excessive, and ridiculous female presence.
See C.S. Lewis’s Allegory of Love (1891),T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (1922),Julia Kristeva’s Histoires d’amour (1983), and George Duby’s Male Moyen Age (1988).
For the history of the myth ofTristan and Iseut, from the Celtic oral tradition, the twelfth-century fragmented versions of the troubadours Beroul and Thomas which Joseph Bedier united in a continuous narrative in 1900, to nineteenth and twentieth-century versions, adaptations, and evocations, see the 1995 Pleiade volume of Tristan et Yseut.
I use the term troubadour to refer to both troubadours and trouveres. There were women troubadours, called trobairitz, to whom I return in chapter 2. According to the Oxford Companion to French Literature (1987), the “langue d’oc” was spoken south of the line running roughly from the mouth of the Gironde eastward to the Alps. The “langue d’oui”, which prevailed and became the French language, was spoken north of this line. Present day Provencal retains, more than French, the character of Latin in respect of its vowel sounds, also to a greater degree its inflections; it is softer and more harmonious than the northern language (393).
There is an explicit reference to Fin’Amors in the fragment attributed to Beroul. After Tristan and Iseut are discovered in the forest by King Mark, the lovers decide to part forever. Iseut gives Tristan a jasper ring with a promise to go to him if ever he should send the ring back to her as a sign that he needs her. Iseut says that she makes the promise for “fine amor” (75, line 2723).
My argument here goes counter to Kevin Kopelson’s proposition that the romantic ideal of fusion is essentially heterosexual, based on the “complementarity of sexual difference” (Love’s Litany [1994] 4). Kopelson and I share, however, a point of departure. As he puts it so well, “even if conceptions of love are now passe and fragmentary, they are not necessarily inconsequential. They are active, if residual, cultural elements that have played and continue to play a crucial and underexamined role in the construction of sexuality” (2). Kopelson argues that since both love and homosexuality are literary effects, literature is an appropriate place to investigate the construction of homosexuality. I argue as strongly that heterosexuality is a literary construction—and an illusion—dating from the earliest representations of romantic love. My major difference from Kopelson is that he sees love in literature as an appropriate place to explore the construction of homosexuality, while I argue that although the heterosexuality of the literary representations of love is an illusion, it is not homosexual either.
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© 2001 Anne Callahan
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Callahan, A. (2001). Occitania: The Culture of Love. In: Writing the Voice of Pleasure. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299149_2
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