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The Powerlessness of Writing: Guillaume de Machaut, the Gorgon, and Ordenance
ALEXANDRE LEUPIN
Translated by Peggy McCracken
Car il n'est regle qui ne faille (1)
We will here be concerned with measuring the space or the lack of connection between two seemingly incommensurable terms: the essence of power and the essence of poetic language; with tying and untying the knots of their articulations and their disjunctions.
I
Princes proliferate in the corpus of Guillaume de Machaut: friends, silent partners, employers and addressees—that is, characters of written fiction. They seem to exemplify, in the interior of the work, that which would be one or the other of its possible exteriorities: its large, attentive, garrulous and omnipresent public, or, as well, the hierarchial, socialized scene upon which the activity of the medieval poet inscribes itself.
Machaut, faced with this exteriority which is simultaneously power, describes himself as subjected to it as a secretary: he who captures in writing the voice of this power, giving it the form of a decree, a charter, a letter, or a book of records. This function makes him an intimate and servant of the prince, and a confidant to some of his secrets. It gives him the power to reveal them, more clearly than others, within the sinuosities of language; as Machaut writes of Jean de Bohème in La Prise d'Alexandrie:
Je fu ses clers, ans plus de XXX.,
Si congnu ses meurs et s'entente,
S'onneur, son bien, sa gentillesse,
Son hardement et sa largesse,
Car j'estoie ses secretaires
En trestous ses plus gros affaires.
S'en puis parler plus clerement
Que maint autre, et plus proprement. [PA, vv. 785-92]
I was his clerk for more than thirty years and thus I knew his habits and his thoughts, his honor, his worth, his kindness, his strength and his generosity, for I was his secretary in all his most important affairs. And so I can speak of them more clearly and more specifically than most others.
In another text, the Dit de l'Alerion, the relationship of the prince to his subjects is presented with such clarity that we are almost blind to the wily parabolic character of the exemplum used by Guillaume de Machaut.
A bird of prey of an inferior species dares to kill an eagle. The courtiers then praise the bird for attacking such a mighty prey ("Roy des oiseaus, noble et puissant," v. 3044 [King of the birds, noble and powerful]). The "true" king is not taken in and he cuts off the head of the regicide. It could not be more explicit that the fundamental argument which upholds the death sentence is that the bird of prey committed a crime that transgressed the laws of Nature:
Car li oiseaus se desnature,
Tant soit grans, ne tant ait de force,
Qui encontre l'aigle s'efforce. [DA, vv. 3390-92]
For a bird acts contrary to nature, no matter how big or how powerful it is, when it attacks an eagle.
At the same stroke (of the sword), the prince symbolically naturalizes power, transforming its arbitrary and artificial character into an eternal and inviolable essence. This violent operation (which in return justifies the mute and gentle obedience to its own betrayal) inscribes itself in a specific space: that of language. The bird's head is, in fact, the emblem of the subversive and destructive word which attacks not the exercise of power, but the tautology which neutralizes it as an essence and as law. The "true" word of power thus comes to detach discourse from subversion and to return it to its frivolous nothingness:
Sa teste, ce sont ses paroles,
Nom pas tant seulement frivoles,
Mais parlers de detraction
Qui met gens a destruction.
Celle teste est tost esrachie,
Par parole bien affichie
A l'onneur dou seurdit briefment. [DA, vv. 3565-71]
(The bird's) head signifies its speech, which is not only frivolous but slanderous, leading people to destruction. This head is quickly severed by the honorable speech briefly mentioned above.
But in the Dit de l'Alerion, the bird is also, in a more general sense, a metaphor for every word: not only that of the lie, of the losangiers (slanderers) in which case it is an inconstant word (cf. DA 824 ff.), but also that of desire. The bird can then symbolize not only power, but the entire space of the poem itself, to the extent that the poem is a vast adventure of desire.
Volentés qui est par dedens
Est si a Amour aërdans
Qu'elle est en un moment volée
En l'air ou sa dame est montee,
Non d'estat, mais de melodie. (2) [DA, vv. 2599-603]
The (lover's) will is so fired by Love that in an instant it flies up into the air where its Lady has climbed, not in station, but in melody.
(It is interesting to note in this context how Machaut presents a person as equal to something [à la hauteur]. It is neither a question of social stature nor of power, but of melody.)
However, this space in Machaut (which he calls argument [argument, v. 1635], comparaison [comparison, v. 2551], exemplaire [example, v. 1639]) is submitted to a systematic covering (couverture): that of the parabole (parabola or parable). Truth is then curved, and can only be half-said (DA, v. 3079: "J'en responderoie briefment / le vray un po couvertement" ["I would answer succinctly and a little covertly with the truth"]). This is the place in the very interior of the word where the supplement of the word's (de la par/ab/ole) signifier insinuates itself, this AB(C) where the oblicity and secondary place of every poetic ennunciation is initiated: "La litterature est seconde" ("Literature is second"—M. Blanchot). This obliquity could profoundly affect the word of power (its slicing, cutting power), curving it to another necessity which we will attempt to decipher.
Let us return to the eagle. In the Dit de l'Alerion it is also the metaphor for the lady, a comparison facilitated in Old French since the symbol of power was feminine (we will come back to this point):
Je di que 1'aigle de puissance,
Que j'ay a dame de vaillance
Comparé en mainte maniere . . . .[DA, vv. 3661-63]
I say that the powerful eagle, which I have in many ways compared to a noble lady ....
But it is not only the object of desire which is formulated in the request for love or for power: it refers as well to the subject of this desire—like the other birds of prey—and thus to Guillaume de Machaut, insofar as he is a hunter fascinated by the bait of his prey. (3)
The capture of the first bird of the series is enlightening in this respect: it is thanks to a living bait (another bird) that the narrator captures the sparrow-hawk, which is duly compared to the lady ("a dame comparé," v. 1197). But Machaut does not permit the sparrow-hawk to take hold of the prey—here pointing to the fundamental absence that characterizes the relationship of the bait to desire.
(It should also be noted that the bait, or the prey, is Machaut since he is a hunter who desires: the places whirl around the absent object of desire.)
In this manner, as both object and subject of the request, the birds do nothing more than mark the emptiness that is the distinctive trait of the place of the object (of the phallus: this metaphor is not limited to Boccaccio or Artaud—the ucello always takes flight in a flurry of feathers). This is why, in the Dit de l’Alerion [the Dit of the Alerion], (which certain manuscripts entitle the Dit des quatre oiseaux [the Dit of the four birds]— though there are, in a sense, five birds, since the alerion will come back to the narrator) the birds of prey endlessly replace each other, the eagle, like the others, being subject to this perpetual displacement.
If, in the beginning, the narrator has some difficulty with this dimension of loss inscribed in the object, he later follows the wise counsel of Reason; he must forget the lost object, he must replace it as soon as possible in order not to suffer merencolie [melancholy] which is the inevitable consequence of loss (v. 3802 ff.), or rather, that which he must try to efface by eternal substitution is the knowledge that the object is forever out of reach—a more profound oblivion than oblivion itself:
Quant j'ameroie
Un oisel, se je le perdoie
Et aucuns griés m'en assailloit,
Qu'autre chose ne me failloit
Que viser comment j'en raroie
Un au plus tost que je porroie,
Pour plus tost mes griés alegier
Et pour issir hors dou dangler
De merencolie la fole
Qui mains amans tue et afole. [DA, vv. 3751-60]
If I loose a bird that I love and if this causes me pain, then the only thing for me to do is to try to obtain another one as soon as possible in order to alleviate my grief more quickly and in order to avoid the danger of mad melancholy, which kills and maddens many lovers.
For the bird that flies away gives all its amplitude to the place which institutes it as a symbolic object that is not of the nature of property (l'avoir) nor even of that restitution that the poet calls the ravoir; it is
Ce que jamais ne pues ravoir
Par biau prier, ne par avoir. [DA, vv. 3805-06]
That which you can never get back with eloquent prayers nor with property.
This implies, first of all, the poetic work; as Machaut declares, at the beginning of the Remède de Fortune: "Mes oeuvres estoient volages" ["My works were flighty," v. 49]. The attribute applies not only to his so-called early works ("oeuvres de jeunesse"), but also to the flight of the pen on any white page. For what remains of the vanished ucello? A virgin space, ready to receive other birds, desires, words. A space under the absolute law of substitution, the unbendable law of a reversability within which the prince does not recognize his offspring, for the question has already been resolved, whether it concerns power or love:
Car le droit estat d'innocence
Ressamble proprement la table
Blanche, polie, qui est able
A recevoir, sans nul contraire,
Ce qu'on y vuet peindre et pourtraire;
Et est aussi comme la cire
Qui sueffre dedens li escrire,
Ou qui retient fourme ou empreinte,
Si comme on 1'a en li empreinte. [RF, vv. 26-34]
For the true state of innocence is exactly like a white smooth plank which can receive anything that one would wish to paint and represent on it, and it is also like wax in which one may write, and which conserves any form or imprint exactly as it has been pressed in.
The white backdrop (which we will see is neither as innocent nor as pure as it seems) is precisely that which makes every place absolutely reversible: that which takes away all assurance regarding the nature or the essence of power. It is that which puts everyone—princes, ladies and poets—on an equal plane where no difference and no hierarchy can reasonably expect to take hold. With one small exception: the alerion will come back to the poet, for he alone can articulate a name that has power over the bird and its flight:
Lors l'appellay je par un non,
Le quel non si bien entendi
Que son bee devers nioy tendi
En signe de recongnoissance. [DA, vv. 4588-91]
Then I called it by a name which it knew so well that it turned its beak toward me as a sign of recognition.
No text from Machaut's corpus escapes this feigned innocence of the white background. For example, let us take the Prise d'Alexandrie, a chronicle of the crusade of Pierre I of Lusignan, where we could expect to find the most refined discourse on power. And indeed, the figure of the prince here seems to border on perfection (cf. v. 7197ff.J. However, upon a closer reading, the story of the capture of Alexandria, the capture of a name whose fabulous origins are recalled ("Or parlons des fais d'Alixandre" ["Now we will speak of the feats of Alexander"], v. 7176) seems to completely contradict the panegyric: this capture amounts to a one night occupation of the city. It is nothing but a visit, quickly finished, which subsequently becomes a defeat in negotiations with the Sarasins (Saracens). The control of the name will have lasted only an instant, immediately escaping the power of the crusading prince (du prince croisé): "à la tour abolie."
In the same manner, the account of the last years of Pierre's reign show the prince slipping toward madness: his instability imperils and finally obliterates the institution of monarchy itself on which he relies and which he represents. The accusation of Florimont de Lesparre, contained in a letter which Machaut cites as if to avoid assuming responsibility for it, is highly significant:
"Or est einsi que depuis un po de temps en sa, vous avez pris meren-colie seur moy, ou par faus rapport, ou par vostre volonte, ne say lequel." [PA, 228]
Now it is true that you have been ill disposed toward me for a while, either because of a false report or by your choice, I don't know which.
In this way, the dithyrambic project is subjected, between the lines, to its own denial. There is a shrewdness that we find everywhere in Machaut's work, and which is inescapable even for the Lady, the apparently supreme figure of the power of Love (see the definitive promise of the Prologue— "Et des dames blasmer me garderay" ["And I will refrain from criticizing ladies"]—and the alternation of defamation and praise to which they are subjected in the rest of the work). This game of affirmation/denial often seems to center, in Machaut, around the famous anagrams in which he encloses his problematic "signature" and the identity of his addressee (cf. La Fontaine amoureuse, le Dit dou Lyon, le Remède de Fortune, le Dit de l'Alerion, Le Roi de Behaigne, le Voir-Dit).
What does this tell us? First of all, that the poem tends toward the sounding of one or two names, whose echos are multiplied in the textuality through the open secret of the anagram. This displaces the control of the work toward the adventure of reading, the anchoring of the name being determined by the reader rather than the writer.
Et pour ce qu'il n'apartient mie,
S'on nel demande, que je die
Que ce livre ay mis en rime .... [Dit dou Lyon, w. 2171-73]
And since it is not at all for me to say, if one should ask, that I wrote this book ....
The encoding then, is not only an open secret, it delivers the name (the identity) to the rule and to the play of the letter.
Thus in the Prise d'Alexandrie for example, the anagram signifies the simultaneous staging of the prince and the poet. In order to read the name, in order to enter into the space of its resonances, "il convient desassambler / Ses lettres, et puis rassambler" ["one must take apart its letters, then put them back together," vv. 247-48] In this respect, the prince and the poet are of the same estat (station): that of the melodious linearity of written language which couples them quite plainly, without hierarchy. It veils them as well, but it can just as well unveil them, which means that the anagrammatical crypt resides not only—or not at all—in its power of decomposition or recomposition. In the Prise d'Alexandrie, Machaut with supreme casualness accords himself the right to reveal inside information, as if to demonstrate the absence of the secret for which the anagram is the pretense:
Pierre, roy de Jherusalem
Et de Chypre, li nomma Ten
Et moy, Guillaume de Machaut,
Qui ne puis trop froit ne trop chaut,
Si que nos deux noms trouverez,
Si diligemment les querez
En ces II vers de grosse lettre. [PA, vv. 8874-80]
He was called Peter, king of Jerusalem and of Cyprus, and I, Guillaume de Machaut, who couldn't care less as you will find our two names in these two plainly written verses, if you will look for them diligently.
II
La Fontaine amoureuse is also traversed by the problematic of the power-language relationship; the poem presents a noble from the French court, Jean de Berry, whose name Machaut couples anagrammatically with his own. But here it is the prince who is a poet. At first glance, the narrator seems content with the function of voyeur and hidden transcriber who puts the lament of the Duke to paper:
Si que je pris mon escriptoire,
Qui est entaillie d'ivoire
Et tous mes outils pour escrire
La complainte qu'il voloit dire. [FA, w. 229-32]
And so I took my writing desk, which was inlaid with ivory, and all my implements in order to write down the lament that he wished to speak.
In assuming the ficticious role of secretary, Machaut seems to wish to confer his own poetic power over language upon the prince-lover, thus reversing the roles. But, if the prince can be a poet, can the poet not be a prince—of language? For we know that the secretary is not only a simple agent of transmission or of transcription, a transparent stenographer for the palinodic voice. And so, in the Voir-Dit, when the narrator appoints as secretary the bearer of Péronelle d'Armentières's first letter, he is not simply a scrupulous scribe. He is entrusted with the right (the reserve) of silence and of the secret, which plays on the name of his function:
Mais vous, serez mon secretaire,
Pour parler a point et pour taire. [VD, 12]
But you will be my secretary, to speak when appropriate and to keep silent.
There is then a reversability between the prince and the poet, between the voice and writing. The Fontaine amoureuse prolongs this parity (4) by engaging Jean de Berry and the narrator in the space of the same dream, thus affirming desire's equal sovereignty over both of them, and hiding the fact that Machaut perhaps secretly wrote the Duke's lament ("improvisée" [improvised] and yet perfectly versified, without any repetition of rhymes), and that, in any case, he subjected it to the staging of its "own" textuality.
It is in the Confort d'Ami that Machaut pushes to its very limits the paradoxical logic that structures the relationship between power and poetry. Written to console Charles de Navarre while he was a prisoner of Jean le Bon, this poem assumes all the characteristics of an occasional poem.
(But what is "occasional" in literature? That which dictates the necessity of writing? Or that which this latter appropriates by whatever means it can, thus submitting the king, the prince—the very emblem of the occasion of writing—and the writer, his biographer, to the equanimity of its endless whiteness?)
Here, as elsewhere, Machaut claims the right to join his name to that of his addressee, by dispersing them in the anagram. But this is not the only element which gives this philosophical consolation its strange appearance. In fact, the biblical exempla that Machaut chooses to console Charles de Navarre are all about fallen kings whose power is limited by divine transcendence. The paradigm is Nebuchadnezzar, who turns to the services of an inspired reader, the prophet Daniel, in order to decipher the "Mané, techel, pharès" which "sans nulle fiction" [without any deception], announces the end of his too earthly empire.
The second part of the Confort d'Ami is even more radical, for the speaking subject here claims the privilege, not of governing the prince, but even more, of inscribing in his fiction the law according to which the prince must reign:
Or te dirai que tu feras
Et comment tu gouverneras
T'ame, ton corps et ta manière. [CA, vv. 1661-63]
Now I will tell you what you will do and how you will govern your soul, your body and your comportment.
The servant thus takes the master's place. He had let this be understood as early as the prologue, treating the powerful as an equal.
Sire, et se je t'apelle amy,
N'en aies pieur cuer a my;
Car bien sçay que tu es mes sires,
Et je des mieudres ne des pires
Ne suis, mais sans riens retenir
Sui tiens, quoy qu'il dole avenir. [CA, vv. 21-26]
Sire, and if I call you friend do not hold it against me, for I know well that you are my lord, and I am neither one of the best nor one of the worst, but I am yours without reserve whatever may happen.
There should then be a third term, hidden, which would equalize the knowledge of the hierarchy and level the master-subject relationship. And, in fact, Machaut multiplies the instances in which the prince and the poet are equally subjected. We have already mentioned divine transcendence; but there is also Fortune, the petrified bronze woman with feet of clay (cf. RF, v. 1055), of whom Charles de Navarre, like everyone, is a subjés:
Et se tu vues dire que tu ne
Yès mie subjès de Fortune,
Et que ta grant attration
Affranchist ta condition . . . [CA, vv. 1871-74]
And if you mean that you are not a subject of Fortune, and that your great power exempts you ...
And also Desire, that is, at the same time the Lady and Love: (5)
Aussi m'as tu dit de Desir
Qu'i te fait durement gesir,
Avoir Ions jours et longues nuis,
Et dis qu'il te fait trop d'anuis. [CA, vv. 2209-12]
Thus you have told me that Desire makes you sleep badly, makes your days and nights seem long and you say that he gives you too many troubles.
All these figures that dominate the prince are emblems of this third secret equalizing term, which names itself only through the detours of representation: language. God is language insofar as it is related to truth and falsehood. Fortune represents its relationship to what Lacan calls tyché, the strokes of imagination which traverse the poet's language. Love, of course, sets out the relationship of language to desire.
Consequently, one can better understand the surprising equality between the prince and the poet. They are both subjected to the nature of language, to its felicities, to its desires. This nature permits power to find its names and permits poetry to make and un-make them. Language: that which subverts every appropriation of place by whatever subject, if only in order to there define itself by a fundamental usurpation. If, according to Guillaume, the founders of law—whom Rousseau calls the Legislators— were wise, it is only because of this carefully hidden usurpation:
On voit et scet tout en appert,
Que moult furent sage et appert
Cil qui les sciences trouverent,
Et aus peuples les lois donnerent.
Lamech li mauvais fu bigames,
Et si ot tout premier .II. femmes. [VD, 228]
We clearly see and know that those men who founded the sciences and gave the laws to the people were very wise and gifted. The evil Lamech was a bigamist and he was the first to have two wives.
The Confort d'Ami is thus a mirror in which the prince sees himself fall because language is the Law from which his power abusively originates. "This object in which power is inscribed is language (le langage]—or, more precisely, its inevitable expression, speech (la langue). Language is a legislature, speech is its code" (R. Barthes). But a doubt remains: this Law to which the prince, the legislator and the poet, by definition, take a second place, confused in a strict parity—the poet could be the most experienced in the tricks of the trade, having practiced them professionally. If this be the case, his position as counselor, as a governor of those who govern fa position which Machaut lays claim to in the Confort d'Ami) would not result from a more successful usurpation, but from a true claim to mastery.
III
In the Voir-Dit Guillaume de Machaut's dexterity with language codes is at its zenith. First, as a master of styles and rhetorics—letter, poem, versified narration—and in this respect the Voir-Dit is one of the most ambitious and most accomplished works of the Middle Ages. In its mastery of intertextuality—courtly literature, mythology, the Bible, the Arthurian novel—the Voir-Dit designates a practically limitless mathesis. Machaut seems to accord to writing the power to say anything and everything.
This mastery and this confidence are summed up in a single word: ordenance, the Law of discourse, the nature of fiction. A master word which at the beginning of the manuscript BN fr 1584 institutes Machaut as a master workman: "Vesci l'ordenance que G. de Machaut wet quil ait en son livre" ["Here is the ordenance that G. de Machaut wants his book to have"]. A complete catalogue of the corpus follows. To my knowledge this is the first time that the "complete works" of an author are constituted in medieval literature, because they are brought together integrally by the will, the power and the resonance of a proper name. This is the first time that this care of the "complete works" is not left to the good or ill will of a copyist.
This said, the copyist does have an influence: the corpus lacks a signature which would confirm the authenticity and the completeness of the poetic utterance and which would conclude it in the truth of a legal act. But only in appearance, because for Machaut, as for Derrida (6) or the thirteenth-century prosateurs (7), the signature, even if notarized, is irremediably drawn to the space of fiction, ready to lose there its power to designate a presence (that of an author, for example).
In the Voir-Dit, the calling into question of mastery, of will and of power passes precisely by this word which seems to have to avoid all questioning: ordenance. In fact, Machaut seems to abandon it to the Lady who replaces the prince as the text's addressee:
Ains sera tout à l'ordenance
De celle en qui gist m'esperance. (8) [VD, 17]
Thus everything will be done according to the orders of her in whom lies my hope.
Apparently Machaut radically denies the position of the master ès arts) that he assumed so well—although a little covertly ("un po couvertement")—when his address was directed to the prince. He thus refuses to accord Péronelle d'Armentières the right to use in his place the feudal metaphors of seigniory, and replaces them with the parity of the names of ami ("friend"—masculine) and amie ("friend"—feminine):
"Et, ma tres-chiere dame, je vous suppli que se jamais vous m'escrisiés aucune chose, que vous ne m'apellez pas seigneur; car qui de son serf fait son seigneur, ses ennemis mouteplie. Et, par Dieu, c'est trop biaus nons d'amy ou d'amie; car quant Seignourie saut en place, Amours s'en fuit." [42]
And, my very dear lady, I beg you that if you ever write me anything you will not call me lord, for whoever makes her serf her lord multiplies her enemies. And, by God, friend is a very beautiful name, for when Seigniory appears, Love flees.
Numerous occurences reveal that this denial of the place of power, in favor of parity, is linked to the practice of writing: Péronelle writes without fail (268); as his so-called lord, she is the mistress of poetry (153); she has the power to correct (ordener) the Voir-Dit, and to put her mark upon it in the symbolic form of a sign (enseigne) and a seal (signet).
But this mistress appointed by the fiction humbles herself in turn, in accordance with the requirement of symmetry and of absolute reversability which is that of textual space:
S'il vous plaist, vous m'apenrez a mieus faire et dire [dis et chansons]. Car je en apenroie plus de vous en un jour que je ne feroie d'un autre en .1. an. [48]
If it please you, you will teach me to compose and perform better (poems and songs). For I would learn more from you in one day than I would learn from another in one year.
Textual space seems then to come up against the impossibility of articulating the name of the father (of writing)—of anchoring power and of pinning down a master signifier. All are equal there, under the sign of a fraternity or a sorority (9), an indication of a relentless rivalry. It should be noted that sexual difference is there reduced to a mere nothing: the letter e which supplements and differentiates ami from amie. The secretary reminds Machaut of this in a reply in which paternity disappears in a dizzying succession of familial and feudal relationships:
Et que diroit vostres bons freres,
Qui vous est fils, sires et pere,
Qui si doulcement vous norrit,
Que chascuns hons de joie en rit. [VD, 286]
And what would your good brother say; he who is your son, your lord and your father, who raised you so tenderly that every man rejoiced at it.
Therefore, "souvereinneté se taist et unité parole" ["sovereignty is silenced and unity speaks" VD, 113]. More or less. For a letter from Guillaume to Péronelle in which he criticizes two of her poems seems to restore—imperceptibly, surreptitiously—all the distance which separates teacher and student, lord and serf:
Les deux choses que vous m'avez envoiées sont très bien faites à mon gré. Mais se j'estoie un jour avec vous, je vous diroie et apenroie ce que je n'apris onques a créature. Par quoi vous les feriés mieus. [21]
The two pieces that you sent me are very well done, in my opinion. But if I could spend a day with you, I would tell and teach you things that I have never taught anyone: and you could thus make better poems.
Poetic mastery is then of the nature of the secret—of a secret which the secretary (secre/taire] may know.
Which secret? That which institutes the secret of poetry, its hidden power, that which perfects the work and saves it from the fraternity's jealousy by placing it out of its reach (hors pair), is the effectiveness of fiction:
Ores vient le fort et les belles et subtives fictions dont je . . . pense à parfaire [notre (c'est à dire mon, ton) livre] par quoy vous et li autre le voiez volentiers et qu'il en soit bon memoire a tousjours mes. [262]
Now comes the end and the beautiful and subtle fictions with which I intend to finish [our (that is, my, your) book] so that you and the others will be pleased with it and so that it will be remembered forever.
The "beautiful and subtle fictions" name first of all a discourse that is true without any reference to fact, that institutes its truth through its structure as speech itself: one thinks immediately of the mythical parable, numerous in the Voir-Dit and elsewhere. But not only this: for the pact of truthful discourse, which underlies the framework of the fiction and gives its baptismal name to the entire text (10), is violently drawn toward a multiple space which contests it and of which it is here appropriate to articulate the names:
—Dissimulation (the secret):
. . . Dont j'ay mainte pensée éu
Que chascuns n'a mie scéu. [VD, 17]
Of which I have had many thoughts which no one has ever known.
—Truth as a hypothesis rather than an assertion:
Bien porroie estre voir disans . . . [VD, 9]
It could very well be true for me to say ...
—Truth as an autoassertion, as an aporia which depends only upon its utterance and not upon any exteriority:
Le Voir-dit vueil-je qu'on appelle
Ce traictié que je fais pour elle,
Pour ce que jà n'i mentiray. [VD, 17]
I want this treatise that I am writing for her to be called the True Story because I will not lie in it.
—Counterfeit, which in a deeper reading appears as an indispensable corollary of the truth, the Voir-Dit being unable to prove itself as truth unless reserving the possibility of counterfeiting:
Car cils qui vuet tel chose faire
Penser li faut au contrefaire. [VD, 18]
For he who wants to do such a thing must think of counterfeiting.
This reaches its highest point in the following passage, where truth appears as incomplete (pas-toute), impossible to speak:
Mais, ce n'est pas necessité
Que quanqu'on dit soit vérité;
N'en ce qu'on dit n'a pas le quart
De verité, se Dieus me gart. [VD, 326]
But it is not necessary that everything that one says be truth, nor does that which is said have a quarter part of truth, as God is my witness.
In this manner, the truth of literature—which is to prove its truth only in proportion to fiction, and as incomplete—this proportionality, which holds back its part of counterfeit and absence of meaning, covers not only the space of mythology or of dreams, but coincides with the very surface of the book as a whole, and in spite of all the pacts, promises, etc.
However, all things being equal, we will have recourse to mythology. At the same time, we return to a flight of birds, truth's messengers.
Let us frame the parable which itself is about framing and limits. Believing the word of some obscure slanderers (losangiers), who describe Péronelle as inconstant, the poet has locked her picture inside two coffers. But the image returns in one of Machaut's dreams, and through prosopopoeia tries to show him that he must not believe the lies of the jealous men. Two exempla are used in this aim. The Raven, who, like an innocent page, "jadis plume blanche / avoit plus que la noif sur branche" (formerly had feathers whiter than snow on a branch, 317), see Coronis, Phoebus's lover, committing adultery with a young man (11). A pure incarnation of one who speaks the truth, he wants to denounce the lovers to Phoebus, his master. On his way to Phoebus he meets the Crow and tells her the story. The Crow dissuades him from playing secretary to the truth (in citing the image of Péronelle and thus breaking the seemingly rigorous frames which separate truth-telling from mythology, the mise en abyme of the first story). For, the Crow says, "Tous voirs ne sont pas biaus à dire." [All truths are not good to tell, 319] The Crow has good reason to know: she was dismissed from Pallas's service for having surprised Erichtonios's secret. This secret is nothing more than a vast metaphor of the births of fiction: Erichtonios was born of Earth and the sperm of Vulcan, who had tried to win Pallas. The son of Onan, in a certain sense (he who did not want sons from his works) and, in addition, having two mothers, since Pallas adopted him. The figure, then, of dubious and impure genealogies of fiction, to which his monstrously equivocal nature bears witness, the top of his body being that of a man, the bottom that of a serpent. Pallas was quick to lock up (to frame) the child in a coffer, but the Crow surprised the guards as they were opening it. She quickly reported the truth of the secret and, as a fee for her services, was dismissed from her functions as secretary and replaced by the Owl. The Owl herself is not without fault:
Et si coucha avec son pere.
Et maintenant Pallas s'en pere. [VD, 323]
And so she lay with her father. And now Pallas goes around with her.
The incestuous Owl thus permits the goddess to include her in her finery, but we also hear the echo, in the mythological example and the verse, of the parade, all feathers dressed, of the father's absence, the monstrous parity which abolishes generations and makes the daughter the wife of the father.
However, the effectiveness of the parable, for the Raven, is nil: it does not stop him in the least from accomplishing what he believes to be his mission.
(It should be noted as well that at the level of the frame story, that of the relati nship Machaut-Péronelle, the parable has no effect: it does not demonstrate the invalidity of the gossip, but accomplishes exactly the opposite.)
Let us return to the second narrative coffer: Phoebus, learning of the adultery, kills Coronis and then has her eml aimed. But Coronis was pregnant: he thus delivers her of her works:
Mais il la fist ouvrir et fendre
Avant toute euvre, et 1'enfant prendre. [VD, 327]
But before the work began, he had her slashed open and the child taken out.
A fiction of birth which again designates the impure origin of fiction: as if this latter needed the death of the mother, and here, her constitution as a relic, in order to develop.
For the Raven, the white page, will find himself blackened, his feathers will lose their innocence and become as black as ink. Such is the reward for truth that he receives from the shining sun god:
"En signe de mémoire,
Sera ta blanche plume noire,
Et tuit li corbel qui 1'ont blanche
L'aront plus noire que n'est anche,
A tousjours perpétuelment." [VD, 328]
As a sign for posterity, your white feathers will be black, and all the ravens who have white feathers will have feathers blacker than ink forever.
Such is the black secret in which the writer dips his pen and which Ma-chaut describes elsewhere: "Car toudis leur fis dou blanc noir" ["For I presented white as black to them" RF, v. 3883]. A transformation of the original white into black, this white that is without a doubt a metaphor of this "white writing" ("écriture blanche") of which Dragonetti speaks (12), and of which the poet tries to fill in and cover the gaping cracks. Such is the secret which assures him a matchless superiority over other poets, as Machaut narcissistically has it written to himself by Péronelle:
Les deux balades que vous m'avez envoies sont si bonnes que on n'y saroit trouver que redire. Mais ce n'est pas comparison, car ce que vous faictes me plaist trop mieus à mon gré que ce que li autre font. [279]
The two ballads that you sent me are so good that one could not improve upon them. But this is not a comparative judgement, for your work pleases me so much more than what the others do.
IV
It remains to be seen if this mastery of the secret, this engima of power over language and its codes is not overturned if the writer is not in fact mastered by the nature of the secret. The Raven and the Crow demonstrate this reversal, for they pay the price of the secret: it relieves them, not only of their innocence—of their transparence to "communication"—but also of their place of power next to the gods. He who dips his feather in troubled waters has no place—not even that of the secretary of truth.
It could still be that the force of the secret is simply too great, whether it be hidden or discovered, whether the coffers of all histories be opened or closed: impossible, as Machaut writes of the medieval Real, that is, of God:
Par exemples te vueil prouver,
Qui sont contenu en la Bible
Et qui sont a nous impossible . . . [CA, vv. 46-48]
I want to show you by examples contained in the Bible which are impossible for us.
It remains to be seen as well, if the superiority of Machaut over Péronelle is not fleeting, transitory (a question which seems insignificant, but which is, in fact, the condensation of all the "remains—to be seen"): for the Lady is herself the guardian and the formidable figure of a secret which governs and masters writing, which comes before it and remains after the last word.
The Lady is always double:
"Et si avez double visage,
Tout ainsi comme avoit 1'image
De Fortune, dont li uns pleure,
Et li autres rit à toute heure!" [VD, 356]
And so you have a double face just like the picture of Fortune had, one of them crying and the other always laughing.
On the one hand, she revives the narrator, draws him from melancholy and death by a "Lazarus come out" which is, in the last analysis, of the nature of profanation:
En moi, où elle ouvra jadis
Trop plus que sains de paradis.
Car j'estoie du tout perdus
Mas, desconfis et esperdus;
Mais deux fois m'a resuscité. [VD, 63]
In me, where she once worked more than heaven's saints; for I was completely lost, unhappy, disheartened, and hopeless. But twice she resurrected me.
But, on the other hand, she is that which turns the writer to stone, which disables and silences him:
"Mon tres dous cuer et ma tres chiere amour, j'ay grant doubtance que vous ne tenez mains de mi, de ce que, quant je suis en vostre présence, je n'ay sens, maniere, ne advis et suis comme uns horns perdus." [130]
My very sweet heart and my dearest love, I strongly suspect that you are less attached to me, and so when I am in your presence I am senseless, mannerless, and empty-headed, and I am like a lost man.
So when the presence arrives, makes something happen (here we must stop and weigh our words, not only because we do not know what happens in the text, but also because we cannot imagine what a happening is which does not happen] when the lovers see each other, while the narrator holds himself immobile under the mortal menace of Love:
Là vi-je d'amour la maistrie:
Car j'estoie comme une souche,
Delez ma dame, en ceste couche,
Ne ne m'osoie remuer
Nient plus s'on me vosist tuer. [VD, 147]
There I saw the mastery of love, for I was rooted beside my lady in this bed, and I would not have dared to move even if threatened with death.
The text here places us before the petrifying irrepresentability of the Other, of the Law, which is also that of the phallic Mother, from which leave and to which return all the birds, all the words, and against which there is no recourse, that which need not usurp power, because it is the seat of power. (13)
This petrifying mother, the mute exterior of writing, which crosses the group of figures like that which since the beginning dispossessed them of all pretention to power and mastery, finds its parabolic form (never will a metaphor have been more necessary, since it is a question of representing the irrepresentable) in the form of the Gorgon:
Ovides le dit en ses fables,
En moralitez veritables. [VD, 227]
Ovid says it in his fables, in truthful allegories.
It is without a doubt Freud who has drawn the best lesson from the ambivalence of the Gorgon. In fact, for him the myth possesses a double truth. That of castration, certainly, but also that of the phallus's erection: the petrification is not only the sign of death and loss, but also the consolation of a lack. The tension and the effectiveness of the myth stem from the paradoxical simultaneity with which the myth represents castration and carries out the work of its mourning:
The hair upon Medusa's head is frequently represented in works of art in the form of snakes, and these once again are derived from the castration complex. It is a remarkable fact that, however frightening they may be in themselves, they nevertheless serve actually as a mitigation of the horror, for they replace the penis, the absence of which is the cause of the horror. . . .
The sight of Medusa's head makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him to stone. Observe that we have here once again the same origin from the castration complex and the same transformation of affect! For becoming stiff means an erection. Thus in the original situation it offers consolation to the spectator: he is still in possession of a penis, and the stiffening reassures him of the fact. (14)
Péronelle is thus a consoling figure of the horror, facing which the Voir-Dit is written in an alternation of avoidance (of denial) and of fascination. The unity of the writing strategy here aims to bypass the unbreakable law of castration whose powers the king, in the Dit de l'Alerion, had usurped a little too quickly.
Hence, for example, the multitude of secretaries, messangers and copyists between the Lady and the narrator: the proliferation of obstacles (bandits, disorders, epidemics, any pseudohistorical reference is valid) which make the union of the lover and the Lady difficult, if not impossible.
The Voir-Dit is, in fact, horrified by presence: there is throughout a vast strategy of delaying, destined to guarantee that the happening of presence—petrification—does not happen.
"Car vous me faites vivre en paix et en joie, loing de vous; et se je estoie en vostre presence, je porroie bien querir ce que je ne vorroie mie avoir." [19]
"For you make me live peacefully and happily far from you; and if I were in your presence, I might well seek that which I would not want to have."
For whoever would give Machaut presence in its entirety, in its truth and in its totality would rob him of everything at a single stroke: when Péronelle offers to give him her treasure (that secret to which both possess the key, about which the text remains mute, implying a sexual rapport, but we cannot wholly reduce it to this) the poet refuses, in an ambiguous "no" which avoids saying "no" definitively:
"De mon tresor que tant prisiés,
Qui ne porroit estre prisiés,
Amis, je le vous abandoing,
Prenés-le, tout je le vous doing."
Et je li respondi tantost:
"Qui tout me donne, tout me r'ost." [VD, 106]
"Friend, I yield to you my priceless treasure which you prize so highly. Take it, I give it all to you." And I then answered, "Whoever gives me all takes everything from me."
The gift of the Other, an impossible poisoned present, gains its worth only when refused: to accept it is to enter into the ruses of the imaginary, to find oneself radically deprived. It is thus necessary to indefinitely suspend its possession under the veils of a "miraculous" obscurity which Venus happily accords to the poet at the moment of union:
Si, qu'ainsi, de la nue obscure
Eusmes ciel et couverture,
Et tous .II. en fumes convert
Si qu'il n'i ot rien descouvert.
Et ce durement me séoit
Qu'adont riens goute n'i véoit. [VD, 158]
So thus from the obscure cloud we had sky and cover and both of us were covered with it so that nothing was uncovered. And it suited me very well that nothing could be seen.
It is better, in fact, to see nothing, to understand nothing. We will never know more than Machaut wishes to tell us: like Polyphemus of the legend (292)—he is also a figure of the one-eyed poet who becomes blind—we are stupefied by the writing which veils that which happens in the detours of its fiction.
The scene of the dispossession is then the very theater of writing which makes a scene: to the impossible, to the absence of the sexual rapport "qui ne s'écrit pas" ["which is not written"—Lacan]. The word of unity replacing sovereignty's silence is thus in the nature of fiction. Ma-chaut's greatness is to have related this infinite, delightful conversation which he calls the soufisance (self-sufficiency) of writing (15), with that which unveils it as a lack, making it by definition fragmentary: this hole which makes truth incomplete (pas-toute) and thus makes it true. In passing, mastery and ordenance have themselves become fiction, all the names of power are returned to their inarticulation—except to give proof of a fundamental usurpation.
Is it necessary to emphasize that in this manner the authenticity of the amorous demand and of writing is guaranteed and that, paradoxically, the title Voir-Dit is entirely justified by the very structure of the fiction?
The truth of the demand, of the word and of writing is in fact this syncope which interrupts the overly slick and overly elegant flow of the rhetoric—ready to be recovered immediately by the noise of articulation in the textual space, of the word "silence," of the word "syncope":
. . . Et qu'il li couvient recoper
Ses paroles et sincoper
Par souspirs puisiez en parfont. [RF, vv. 1762-64]
And when he must break off speaking and syncopate his words with deep sighs.
The paradox here is that writing is only syncopated when prolonged in confession of fissure. The marks of division (burned letters, 250, missing letters, 263, missing "material" ["matière"], 342) signal a continuation of the infinite conversation. On the other hand, linearity becomes the symbol of the detour by which writing masks its fragmentary essence, that by which the book must "be in pieces" ("soit par pièces," 69).
V
And the prince, in all this? It would seem that he has been somewhat lost to view. But how could he dare pretend to escape the Law of the Other, the ascendancy of the Mother and that of the Gorgon, if it is not in the trinkets which are the sign of his power?
Let us return to the Prise d'Alexandrie: what does Machaut tell us about the origin of power, of the law which founds it? Not everything that one would expect in this text which participates in a dythyrambic aim: that the monarchy would be, for example, of a divine essence and right. For Pierre de Lusignan draws the (il)legitimacy of his power from a mythological origin, which opens the text and completely effaces the terrestral ascendance (and, at the same time, the legitimation that this latter could draw from transcendence). The king of Cyprus is the son of Mars—hence his bellicose tendencies—and of Venus, the symbol of grace and courtliness.
The Christian God exists only to give life (although his primacy is affirmed), after the decision of the counsel of the ancient gods. It is hardly necessary to point out the theologically unorthodox character of this cohabitation, in an improbable Elysium, of mythology and the biblical canon—a cohabitation which, however, characterizes all of Machaut's works.
The conclusion of the Prise is itself paradigmatic. One sees the confrontation of two ideologies of power, that of an absolute monarchy represented by Pierre de Lusignan, and that of the feudal system, emblematized by the great lords who surround him.
These vassals, seeing their rights exceeded by their capricious king, decide to kill him. The assassination accomplished, they burn the kingdom's charters and replace them with an ordinance which institutes them as governors. (What is easier to break than the Tablets of the law, what is easier to replace when the Law is confused with its inscription?)
And the prince? If he had, by his death, legitimized the takeover of power by loyal supporters, his body would have been embalmed and preserved as a relic founding the natural origin of this power. But such was not the case: his burial must not make life difficult for the usurpers and their descendants.
The entombment must then become a parodic staging of the fall of Pierre: the corpse, disfigured by the wounds inflicted by the conspirators, is hidden. It is crowned with a parchment crown, and the other signs of power are equally inverted in derision:
Couronne avoit de parchemin
Painte, et tele que par chemin
N'est nul homme, s'il la trouvast,
Tant fust povres, qui la levast,
Et aussi le sestre et la pomme
Estoient aussi povre comme
La couronne et de tel peinture. [PA, vv 8780-86]
He had a crown of painted parchment and it was such that no man, no matter how poor, would pick it up should he find it by the roadside. And the scepter and the orb were just as poor as the crown and painted in the same way.
Under the cover of a "historical" relationship, Machaut here amasses all that makes the improper of the operation of writing, when it is applied to the prince. He becomes an illuminated figure, a figure disfigured by fiction, this fiction of which we have just remarked the fragility, but also the power—be it a power of avoidance. (16)
(1) Remède de Fortune, v. 2721. Other references will be indicated in the text using the following abbreviations: RF-Remède de Fortune, PA-La Prise d'Alexandrie, DA-Dil de l'Alerion, CA-Confort d'Ami, VD-Voir-Dit.
The edition of Ernest Hoepffner, Oeuvres de Guillaume de Machaut (Paris: Didot-Champion, 1908-21], is used for all citations from the following works: Le Dit dou Vergier, Le Jugement dou Roy de Navarre, Remède de Fortune, Le Dit dou Lyon, Le Dit de l'Alerion and Le Confort d'Ami. All citations from the Voir-Dit are from Paulin Paris, ed., Le Livre du Voir-Dit (Paris: Société des Bibliophiles Français, 1875). All citations from La Prise d'Alexandrie are from Louis de Mas Latrie, ed., La Prise d'Alexandrie ou Chronique du Roi Pierre de Lusignan (Geneva: Pick, 1877).
(2) See also vv. 2663-65: Mais loial Volenté d'ami/Et Desirs qui est tout emmy/Le cuer d'ami, volent après./[But the loyal Will of a friend and Desire, who is right in the middle of a friend's heart, fly after.]
(3) One will remember that at the beginning of the Jugement du Roy de Navarre, Guillaume-narrator is entirely abymé in a desiring quest: . . . J'estoie entendus/Et tous mes engins estendus/A ma queste tout seulement. (vv. 551-53) [I, along with all my instruments, was exclusively devoted to my quest.]
(4) On this subject, see the excellent chapter "Paternité et parité" in Roger Dragonetti, La Vie de la lettre an Moyen Age (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 133ff.
(5) In the Dit dou Veigier, the law of Love is said to be as strict and as inescapable as that of Death: "Je suis comparez a la mort,/Car je pren le foible et le fort/Que nuls ne m'en puet eschaper ..." (vv. 329-31] [I am comparable to death, for I take the weak and the strong and none can escape me . . . ]
(6) Cf. Marges de la philosophy (Paris: Seuil, 1972) 365ff.
(7) Cf. my chapter "Quiparle?" in Le Graal et la littérature (Lausanne: L’Age d'homme, 1982), 21-53.
(8) Also see 265: "Ma mort et ma vie, mon deduit et ma joie, ma douleur et ma santé gist en voz mains et en vostre ordenance. Et en povez ordener come de ce qui est vostre, sanz rien retenir." [My death and my life, my pleasure and my joy, my pain and my health lie in your hands and under your orders. And you can order them as if they were yours, without reserve.] and 113: "Si, met m'ame, mon cuer, ma vie et quanque j 'ay en vostre ordenance." [And so I put my soul, my heart, my life, and all that I have under your orders.)
(9) See the addresses of the letters (189 and 262): "Mon tres-dous cuer, ma chiere suer et ma tres-douce amour." [My very sweet heart, my very dear sister and my very sweet love.]
(10) "Et aussi, votre livre avera nom le Livre dou Voir dit. Si, ne vueil ne ne doy mentir." [And your book will be entitled the Book of the True Story. And thus I should not lie, nor do I want to. VD, 263]
(11) See R. Howard Bloch, Medieval French Literature and Law (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977), 56ff., and Le Graal et la littérature, 174ff. for adultery as a metaphor of truth.
(12) See "L'enjeu et l'événement" in L'Esprit créateur 23 (1983), 12.
(13) Cf. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966], 813. Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 310-11. "Let us set out from the conception of the Other as the locus of the signifier. Any statement of authority has no other guarantee than its very enunciation, and it is pointless for it to seek it in another signifier, which could not appear outside this locus in any way. Which is what I mean when I say that no metalanguage can be spoken, or, more aphoristically, that there is no Other of the Other. And when the Legislator (he who claims to lay down the Law) presents himself to fill the gap, he does so as an impostor.
But there is nothing false about the Law itself, or about him who assumes its authority.
The fact that the Father may be regarded as the original representative of this authority of the Law requires us to specify by what privileged mode of presence he is sustained beyond the subject who is actually led to occupy the place of the Other, namely, the Mother." And, although it may seem paradoxical, Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Galilée, 1974), 134: "I am the mother. The text. The mother is behind—all that I am, do, seem—the mother follows. Since she follows absolutely, she always survives, future which will have never been presentable, that which she will have engendered, witnessing, impassive, fascinating and provocative, the burial of that whose death she forsaw."
(14) Sigmund Freud, "The Medusa's Head," Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955), vol. 18, 273.
(15) Cf. the Voir-Dit, 53 and 279: "Quant je commence, je n'i say faire fin, pour la tres-grant plaisance que je pren en penser, en parler et en escrire." ["Once I begin, I don't know how to stop because of the great pleasure I find in thinking, in speaking and writing."]