The Glorified Woman: Abstraction and Domination in Le Livre du voir dit

Abstract

Pour que je puisse dire: cette femme, il faut que d'une maniere ou d'une autre je lui retire sa realite d'os et de chair, la rende absente et l'aneantisse. Le mot me donne l'etre, mais il me donne prive d'etre. --Maurice Blanchot, La Part du feu On the surface, Guillaume de Machaut's Le Livre du voir dit (1362-65) is the transcription and description of an actual love affair supposedly occurring between Machaut anda beautiful young noblewoman whom he calls Toute Belle. Machaut's self-stated goal as author is to be as inclusive as possible in order to render a truthful account of what happened between the lovers, providing the reader with, as Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet puts it: tout: le noir et blanc, l'amour et desamour (Introduction 21). To this end, Le Livre du voir dit is a sprawling, polyphonic collection of reproduced letters and verse supposedly written between Machaut and the noblewoman in real life and then transcribed in the Voir dit, where a narrative supplied by Machaut accompanies the transcriptions. The reader follows along as the purely epistolary relationship becomes a physical one. After some tensions caused by the rarity of actual visits and by rumors of infidelity, the lovers are ultimately portrayed as having achieved an ideal courtly union. Ostensibly, then, the Voir dit (True Poem) is merely the faithful transcription of what happened between two real-life lovers. However, as Blanchot reminds us, reality cannot be transcribed into language without violence. In the case of the Voir dit, this violence is exacerbated (and highlighted) because the discourse of the text--that of medieval courtly verse--is innately infused with ah ideology (that of fin'amors) according to which Guillaume must be cast as the valiant, unwavering lover and Toute Belle--as indicated by the name--must incarnate pure beauty (along with other traits of purity). Numerous studies have demonstrated to what extent the medieval cleric, as writer, could betray a desire to create for himself, among his secular peers, an impressive persona through literature, this has been shown to be the case for Richard de Fournival, (1) Abelard, (2) and, as Kevin Brownlee and Deborah McGrady suggest, for Guillaume de Machaut himself. (3) So we should not be surprised if Guillaume's (4) lofty verse and exahed descriptions of the love affair tend to paint a rather glorious and even allegorical portrait of Machaut in the guise of giving a truthful account. However, when we consider the consequences of this glorification for the called Toute Belle, who must also have an allegorical other imposed upon her, we start to glimpse an economy of domination that underlies Guillaume's retelling of the love affair. Tapping into that economy and describing it will allow us to move beyond limitations of previous scholarship concerning the Voir dit, limitations that--while discerning ulterior motives in Machaut's depiction of the love affair (i.e., building his own image)--have ignored the violence done to the the text must sacrifice to realize those motives. In Controlling Readers, McGrady has pointed to the largely ignored role (46) of Guillaume's inscribed audience in the Voir dit--invasive in terms of its capacity to disrupt and alter the course of Guillaume's literary project. She includes Toute Belle in this audience. However, such an invasive presence is more accurately described as coming from the marginal voice of the behind the construct of Toute Belle; we must distinguish between the two, because Toute Belle is perfectly congruent and necessary to Guillaume's literary project and therefore incapable of being invasive. Guillaume would write the perfect at the expense of the authentic, imperfect we glimpse in the margins of the Voir dit. It should be emphasized here that by authentic woman I do not refer to someone having existed outside of the text (this paper does not participate in that debate). …