“Pseudo-autobiography” and the Body of Poetry in Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune

Abstract

“Pseudo-autobiography” and the Body of Poetry in Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune Laurence de Looze I N HIS SEMINAL CONSIDERATION of genre and (medieval) lit­ erary history, Hans Robert Jauss took the important step of situating the conventions of genres in the reader’s reception as much as, or more than, in the pages the reader reads.1One does not simply read, Jauss maintained, because one is always reading as: what a work is is not separable from what it is received as being. This results in a reader sens­ ing genre—i.e., reading according to certain generic conventions—most keenly precisely when he also senses that the bounds of a genre are being transgressed by a particular work: when, that is, the reader is unable to read comfortably according to his usual generic expectations. Somewhat paradoxically, then, the most exemplary texts of a par­ ticular genre are inevitably those which are perceived as going beyond the established conventions of the genre and provoking the reader’s horizon of expectation. Jauss contrasts these “ chefs-d’oeuvre” to “ stereotyped” works which are entirely conventional, which do not transgress, pro­ voke, resist, in which he finds the proof of generic atrophy. It follows that great examples of a genre will almost always be generically mixed (for the features which transgress the conventions of a genre will them­ selves have to be read “ as something” —namely, as something else) and that “ pure” examples of a single genre are fossilized, stereotyped con­ structions. The greatest examples of a genre will inevitably be, in certain respects, “ other to themselves.” Now, generic identity is never stable, even if one must occasionally freeze its motion in order to carry out analysis. Genre is as shifting as human perception itself, and as varied as the perceptions of different readers and different historical periods. One could chart the mix, even the evolution of perceived genre, in a particular work in terms of its mediation of a dominant genre by an “interprétant” genre, as Kathryn Gravdal proposes in this issue.2One would need to post a caveat, how­ ever, to the effect that the roles of dominant and subjugant may meta­ morphose from reader to reader, place to place, or period to period. In other cases, no one set of generic expectations arises, leading to a tussle between generic expectations. VOL. XXXIII, NO. 4 73 L ’E sprit C réateur As an example of the insoluble contestation of two genres, I will take up that of what has been designated, albeit somewhat loosely, as the medieval “ pseudo-autobiography.” Critics generally agree that it reaches its apogee in the fourteenth century, and that its practitioners include, among others, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and Christine de Pizan in France, Juan Ruiz in Spain, and Geoffrey Chaucer in England. This consensus is extraordinary given that critics have not been able to define what the pseudo-autobiography actually is. Here I will set forth briefly a theory of the pseudo-autobiography,3 and then examine a particular example, Guillaume de Machaut’s Le Remede de Fortune.4 One of the few attempts to formulate a definition of the medieval pseudo-autobiography has been that of Gabriel Gybbon-Monypenny: This genre [which] I would call the “ erotic pseudo-autobiography” . . . is an account by a poet, usually in verse, of an episode or episodes of his supposed love life, into which are interpolated a number of his own lyric compositions. The songs are said to have been com­ posed in connection with the love affair described, and the narrative serves, among other things, to explain their genesis.5 Though the various works subsequently cited are in general excellent examples of the pseudo-autobiography, the definition is problematic, for the taxonomy “ erotic pseudo-autobiography” presupposes an undefined notion of “ pseudo-autobiography.” If the erotic pseudo-autobiography is defined somewhat redundantly as nothing more than a pseudo-auto­ biography in which the protagonist’s erotic life figures prominently, the question remains: what is a pseudo-autobiography? Now, since the pseudo-autobiography is dependent on a notion of autobiography, which is itself dependent on an implicit recognition of biography, the pseudo-autobiography...