Temporal Perspective in Augustine and the Troubadours

Abstract

TEMPORAL PERSPECTIVE IN AUGUSTINE AND THE TROUBADOURS I should begin by making it clear that the following essay is a preliminary effort, a roughing out ofan area that I intend to pursue in greaterdepth in the future. So let me start with a question: why do all the best translators of Bernart de Ventadorn insist on mistranslating the opening line ofone ofhis most famous cansos, "Lo tems vai e ven e vire" (P-C 70,30)? Literally this reads: "Time goes and comes and turns." Translators, however, invariably switch the verbs around and render it as "Time comes and turns and goes" (Goldin); "Time comes and goes and runs its round" (Press); "Time comes and goes returning through days and months and years" (GaIm and Nichols). There is a reading implied in each case: all translators adapt Bernart's line to suggest that time travels in a continuous path as it comes and goes. Time, in other words, at least in the translations, constitutes a system—a closed and integrated system—that flows in unbroken fashion before the singer. It seems to me that the chaotic nature of time suggested by Bernart's actual word order is intended and should be preserved. Ifhe had wanted to indicate that time travels an unbroken path he could have done so; each of the verbs vai, ven, and vire is easily rhymed; with only the slightest reworking Bemart could have presented the verbs in such a way as to suggest a continuous path. The order in which he chose to present them, if left as written, suggests rather a perspective on time—a relation between the seeing, singing "I" and time—that is crucial to understanding the development of the poem. The very fact that time is presented not as a unified system but rather as a chaotic, random and external force is important, not only to this poem but to an understanding of the troubadour corpus as a whole. Foritis therandom nature oftime, suggested by thisopening line, that is reinforced in the body ofthe poem in two different ways, first by its contrast with the stolid and steadfast singer whose desire is always one: Cades es us mos talans, Ades es us e no s muda." ('For my desire is always the same/ Always the same and it does not change.' 3-4). Second, and perhaps even more tellingly, by its being compared through theremainderofthe poem with the singer's lady, whose most notable characteristic is her fickleness. Her changeable nature thus offers an echo of time's varying ways, and her unpredictability is the TEMPORAL PERSPECTIVE IN THE TROUBADOURS59 equivalent of time's seemingly random progress. It is precisely the chaotic, unsystematic nature of time, seen from the stable vantage point of the singer, that is being lamented here; time, like the lady, is no longer either comprehensible or useful to the singer; he is both alienated from it and left without an entrée into its seemingly random ways. Charlotte Gross has recently suggested a parallel between the ways Bernart presents time here and the understandingsoffered by his contemporaries, the Chartrians. They too speak of an isolation from time as they attempt to masterand manipulate this external force. Yet it seems to me that therandom, unpredictablequality Bernartascribes to time speaks louder of another impulse; his observation that time, likea lady, is fickle, suggestsratherthebreakdownofakeyperceptual system. T. S. Kuhn, in his Structure ofScientificRevolutions, argues that "the perception ofanomaly—ofa phenomenon, that is, forwhich his paradigm has not readied the investigator—play[s] an essential role in preparing the way for perception ofnovelty ... the perception that something ha[s] gone wrong [is] only prelude to discovery" (57). He continues: "characteristics ofall discoveries from which new sorts of phenomena emerge include: the previous awareness of anomaly, the gradual and simultaneous emergence of both observational and conceptual recognition, and the consequent change of paradigm categories and procedures often accompanied by resistance" (63). What I wish to suggest here and through the rest of this essay is that Bernart's presentation oftimeas arandomandchaotic forceis thefirst stage in a crucial paradigm shift that occurred in the twelfth century. Curiously enough, the resistance that Kuhn marks as frequently...