Flying Letters and Feuilles Volantes: Symptoms of Orality in Two Troubadour Songbooks

Abstract

This essay argues that approaching troubadour lyric texts as bodies bearing symptoms of a repressed orality can deepen our understanding of how the poems relate to the manuscript songbooks in which they have been preserved. In Arnaut Daniel’s canso “Autet e bas entre’ls prims fuelhs,” the lyric persona’s contradictory desire to express the truth of his love affair while simultaneously upholding a code of sexual secrecy resonates with the perpetual negotiation of orality and textuality, voice and silence at work in the songbooks themselves. The Lacanian psychoanalytic concept of letters that “fly,” connecting the Unconscious to the Real of the body by acting as the raw material of all signification, can help account for the way in which the textual fabric of a manuscript poem and its persona’s experience of enjoyment (joi) seem to bend together under the sway of an underlying voice. A comparative reading of versions of “Autet e bas” in songbooks K and C suggests that in the performative act of copying, connections traced by rhyme left an enduring mark on the body of manuscript letters — and in the process, pushed a contradictory joi toward one or the other of its latent possibilities.