Narcissism and Selfhood in Medieval French Literature

Wounds of Desire

Nicholas Ealy

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030279158
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030279165
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Literature

This book offers analyses of texts from medieval France influenced by Ovid's myth of Narcissus including the Lay of Narcissus, Alain de Lille's Plaint of Nature, René d'Anjou's Love-Smitten Heart, Chrétien de Troyes's Story of the Grail and Guillaume de Machaut's Fountain of Love. Together, these texts form a corpus exploring human selfhood as wounded and undone by desire. Emerging in the twelfth century in Western Europe, this discourse of the wounded self has survived with ever-increasing importance, informing contemporary methods of theoretical inquiry into mourning, melancholy, trauma and testimony. Taking its cue from the moment Narcissus bruises himself upon learning he cannot receive the love he wants from his reflection, this book argues that the construct of the wounded self emphasizes fantasy over reality, and that only through the world of the imagination—of literature itself—can our narcissistic injuries seemingly be healed and desire fulfilled.

Part INarcissism and Selfhood in Context

© The Author(s) 2019

N. EalyNarcissism and Selfhood in Medieval French LiteratureThe New Middle Ageshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27916-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Narcissus and the Wounded Self

Nicholas Ealy¹

(1)

University of Hartford, West Hartford, CT, USA

Nicholas Ealy

End Abstract

In the twelfth-century Occitan composition “When I See the Lark,” Bernart de Ventadorn , one of the most influential poets during the High Middle Ages, sings of the devastating longing he feels for his lady:

Ai, las, tan cuidava saber

d’amor e tan petit en sai,

car eu d’amar no·m posc tener

celeis don ja pro non aurai.

Tout m’a mo cor e tout m’a me

e se mezeis e tot lo mon,

e can se·m tolc, no·m laisset re

mas dezirer e cor volon.

Alas! I thought I knew so much about love, but really, I know so little. For I cannot keep myself from loving her from whom I shall have no favor. She has stolen from me my heart, myself, herself and all the world. When she took herself from me, she left me nothing but desire and a longing heart.¹

Bernart here thus finds, as is the case in numerous medieval erotic songs from southern France, that his desire has profoundly changed him. For, driven by an alienating passion, he struggles to grasp the reality that, in his lady’s absence, any acknowledgment he might have expected to receive from her will never be forthcoming. Losing his self due to isolation and solitude, losing who he thought he was because his self has been stolen from him, he thereby undergoes a transformation, experiencing a shift that destabilizes his entire identity in how he sees himself and his place in the world.

With this realization, Bernart emerges as a subject enmeshed in and undone by his frustrated longing, a process that, in this move from supposed knowledge to ignorance of love, happened to him at a certain point in his desiring state. Bereft of hope, he can only now look back and, in the song, attempt to work through this disaffecting selfhood that has already occurred.² Though, what has taken place in his transformation, in this new understanding of his selfhood ? What constitutes and defines such a process? The aim of this book is to examine such questions regarding selfhood , questions that, we might say, do not simply affect Bernart but rather speak to a phenomenon that could be seen as central to the human experience. We all, for instance, move through life as a self—both introspectively and in our dealings with others and the world around us. At the same time, though, we are not born with an awareness of our selfhood , and our memories only extend back so far before there is nothing to remember about “our self.”³ How then does selfhood happen? Is it stable or, as Bernart’s song implies, something that shifts and is lost or reconfigured due to external circumstances? And, most importantly for this study, how might literary texts, like Bernart’s song, approach an understanding of selfhood from which we might gain explanations that inform our own selfhood as well?

My objective here is to attempt an answer to these questions by examining the construction of selfhood that comes to the fore in medieval literature, a construction that has contributed a dominant model for how selfhood is considered, even today, in the Western tradition. My inquiry begins in France during the twelfth century with a group of poet-singers—known as troubadours in the Occitan-speaking South (where Bernart resided) and trouvères in the French-speaking North—who begin to compose love songs where a unique understanding of the self emerges. Taking their name from the Occitan verb trobar and the French verb trouver (from the Latin tropare for composing tropes or musical verse), the ambition of these poet-singers becomes one of finding—the secondary meaning of trobar and trouver—new means of expressing the self. Such new means involve, as a first step, joining the poet-singer to the lyric I , the first-person pronoun at the center of these songs who speaks in the poet’s voice and declares his point of view. As we see with Bernart, the singer, thanks to this lyric I, can assume an identity in his own work, casting himself not simply as the composer of the lyric, but as its subject—as its self—as well.⁴ In and of itself, the creation of a singular identity from two separate entities (singer and literary persona) may not seem extraordinary, but if we examine the implications of this lyric I, we can see such a move is nonetheless quite revolutionary in how notions of selfhood come to be understood in Western European culture.

For this innovative lyric I does not arrive alone, but appears alongside a certain representation of love—referred to as “courtly love ” in English and fin’amor (“refined love”) by the troubadours and trouvères —that structures the ways in which it develops. Before exploring the relationship between love and selfhood though, we must first take a step back and seek to comprehend what constitutes this love. Scholars have long understood fin’amor, albeit an ambiguous term, to embody an ethical framework of amorous behavior situating the lyric I in relation to several distinct qualities—mezura (self-discipline), cortesia (courtesy), joven (generosity) and joi (joy)—all of which dictate how the lyric I should act and treat his beloved.⁵ In this ethical framework, which Sarah Kay calls a “matrix of desire,” the lover’s identity comes forth, not as an autonomous individual, but as a result of the interplay between his deeds and emotions—as a desiring self—and those of his lady—as his desired other. The matrix of desire, due to this exchange between poet and lady, is consequently the place where “participants [in this poetry] are located and defined,” where the lover’s lyric I—his selfhood —emerges in relation to and dependent upon the other.⁶

Bernart ’s “When I See the Lark” perhaps best illustrates this emergence of selfhood within the matrix of desire, for we can see the poet turn to his longing, manifested in the pain he endures for his lady, as a way of exploring who he is. Initially this desire, defining Bernart’s subjectivity, opens him up to a longing for fulfillment, to a fantasy that fulfillment might be possible. Simultaneously though, it makes him vulnerable to the reality this may never happen. For, Bernart’s song is not simply about how desire shapes his selfhood , but rather is a composition revealing how his sense of self comes to be under attack by his longing. At a certain point, for instance, his passion takes a turn and, as his self-as-desire emerges in this relationship with the beloved lady, he realizes the desire now defining him may also be what is destroying him:

Anc non agui de me poder

ni no fui meus de l’or’ en sai

que·m laisset en sos olhs vezer

en un miralh que mout me plai.

Miralhs, pus me mirei en te,

m’an mort li sospir de preon

c’aissi·m perdei com perdet se

lo bels Narcisus en la fon.

Never have I been in control of myself or even belonged to myself from the hour she let me gaze into her eyes: that mirror which pleases me so greatly. Mirror, since I saw myself reflected in you, deep sighs have been killing me. I have lost myself just as the beautiful Narcissus lost himself in the fountain.⁷

Attempting to find satisfaction and put a stop to his endless longing, Bernart tries to look into his beloved’s eyes. Rather than a welcoming glance from her, however, he finds her eyes have become mirrors, a discovery that pleases him at first but, in a radical turn, then alienates him from her and, most surprisingly, from his own self. For he ceases to be himself once he directs his gaze toward these eyes. The boundary one might expect to find between this desiring self and desired other has collapsed and, in the search for this lady, he instead encounters his own reflection in a mirror that he addresses in place of her. And it is this moment, as Bernart recognizes his own reflection, that leads to his destruction as deep sighs sap away his life force.

The precarious selfhood coming forth in Bernart’s song, a selfhood created in its own destruction, raises a few more questions. Why, in this quest for erotic fulfillment, does Bernart find an image (here his own), instead of the lady, as the object of his desire? Why, in this confusion of self and other, does the poet find his self through desire, only to be killed by the same desire? Answers begin to take shape at the end of the stanza where Bernart, describing his death before the mirror, compares himself to Narcissus , that young boy who suffers a similar fate when he gazes at his own reflection, falls in love with it, and dies. For Narcissus’s tale, from Book Three of Ovid ’s Latin work The Metamorphoses ( 8 C.E.), comes to serve as the narrative structuring fin’amor , not simply in Bernart’s verses, but in much of French literature during the Middle Ages, where the self emerges as narcissistic in its design.⁸ And it is this comparison Bernart and others make to Narcissus that warrants further exploration, for with this mythological figure a host of tensions stemming from the desire imposed upon the self comes to the fore, tensions, to which I now turn, that will guide my argument throughout this book.

1.1 Selfhood and the Myth of Narcissus

From its start, Ovid’s myth of Narcissus establishes itself as a narrative about the emergence of selfhood and , as we see in Bernart’s poem, about the perils of what such a selfhood might imply. It is here the tale introduces Tiresias, the blind prophet of antiquity, who informs Narcissus’s mother, when she comes seeking her son’s fortune, that he will live to see old age only “si se non noverit,” if he does not know himself.⁹ This move from not having a sense of self to cognizance of one’s selfhood takes place in two ways as the myth unfolds—acoustically through spoken language and visually through reflected imagery—and these two modes of discourse, the linguistic and the imaginary, inform the emergence of Narcissus’s selfhood. First, Ovid presents the discourse on language when Narcissus—now sixteen years old—encounters the nymph Echo , who has viewed him from afar and fallen for his beauty. Punished b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Narcissism and Selfhood in Context
• Part II. Selfhood and the Open Wound
• Part III. The Wounded Self as Witness
• Back Matter