Signs of the City: Medieval Poetry as Detour

Abstract

N SPEAKING of a relationship between cities and literature, one must be careful to avoid from the outset certain naive assumptions that such a topic might harbor. First, we must banish the notion that literature, if we are to grant that literature has its own mode of existence, can provide evidence of a direct sort about the reality of nonverbal phenomena occurring in time and space. Language, which is the vehicle of literature, is a system with its own structures, its own code for begetting itself, its own models for expressing or imposing order. And language that we call is all the more suspect a document of history, because the model of literary mimesis inevitably remains, for better or for worse, literature itself. Even in those periods when authors ply their every skill to the task of reproducing the world as it is, the very act of generating a text is fraught with ideologies that, tacit though they may remain, must prevail in the minds of both artist and audience if the system of communication is to remain intact. Secondly, we must remember that there is a gamut of connotations implicit in the notion of city. Already in daily speech the word holds lexical priorities that vary with the social experience of the people that use it. The French-speaking farmer of a rural village in Quebec may associate the city above all with atheism; his black counterpart in the South, with welfare. The person who attempts to use the word knowledgeably is hardly in a better position. If he sets up a synchronic model for his concept, he finds himself in the distressing situation of talking