Guillaume de Machaut and the Consolation of Poetry

Abstract

The Consolation of Philosophy opens with a dramatic scene. Boethius, isolated in his grief, has only the Muses for companionship and is indulging in their songs of lamentation when the music is rudely interrupted by the arrival of Philosophy.' This formidable lady sends the Muses packing and denounces them in strong terms as scenicas meretriculas [theatrical tarts] (CP, 1.Prl.29) whose blandishments serve only to prolong suffering and to alienate their victims from their true selves: dolores eius non modo nullis remediis foverent, verum dulcibus insuper alerent venenis [Not only have they no cure for his pain, but with their sweet poison they make it worse] (CP, 1.Prl.30-32). In her analysis, poetry of this type induces self-absorption and obsessive fixation on the cycle of desire and loss that characterizes human life under the dominion of Fortune. Its aestheticization of pain serves only to prolong itself and blocks any passage to a new frame of reference. Such poetry, in Philosophy's view, constructs a fiction of the self as unjustly persecuted, exiled and alienated from friends, family, and homeland. It is this willful adoption of a fictional role, this staging of the self as victim, that brings about and perpetuates Boethius's mental anguish, such that he is ultimately to blame for his own dislocation: Sed tu quam procul a patria non quidem pulsus es sed aberrasti; ac si te pulsum existimari mavis, te potius ipse pepulisti. Nam id quidem de te