Unriddling the Devinalh

Abstract

UNRIDDLING THE DEVINALH One of the genres, or proto-genres, exploited by the earliest troubadour, Guilhem IX ofAquitaine, is the devinalh, orriddle poem. Later troubadours (including Jaufre Rudel, Raimbaut d'Aurcnga, Giraut de Borneil, and Raimbaut de Vaquieras) wrote poems more or less based on Guilhem's seminal one, or on others like it. By examining some of these texts, this article will explore the characteristics which have allowed a group of poems to be classed together as devinalhs by modern critics, despite the fact that the lyric genre never seems to have wholly congealed for the medieval poet-composer. Its lack of success may be due to the absorption of its major formal elements into the "dominant" Occitan lyric genre, the canso. In seeking to define agenre-manqué, I hope also tocastsome lighton the lyric precedents for the predilection oflater vernacular poets (such as Petrarch and his followers) for paradoxical language. The riddle is one ofthe most ancient and most widespread types offormulated thought; a case has even been made for its priority to all other forms of literature (Potter 2:938 and Tupper, passim). Most definitions identify riddles with metaphors. Aristotledefined them as such in The Rhetoric (Bk. 3, Ch. 2), where he suggested that not only do riddles furnish metaphors, but metaphors generally imply riddles. Gaston Paris defined the riddle as "a metaphor or a group of metaphors , the employment ofwhich has not passed into common use, and the explanation of which is not self-evident" (viii, quoted in Tupper xiii). Riddles are metaphors, the referent of which must be guessed (as may be the case with all original metaphors). Another formal characteristic of riddles which has frequently been included in definitions is the presence of apparently irreconcilable contradictions or incongruous elements. The folklorist Archer Tayloranalyzed the riddle into two descriptive elements, one positive and one negative, of which one is meant to be understood metaphorically and the other literally (quoted in Dundcs and Georges 111-12). Thus, in the riddle, "Something has eyes and cannot see—Irish potato" (Taylor, English Riddles 94), the positive element ("eyes") is UNRIDDLING THE DEVINALH25 meant to be taken metaphorically in reference to the answer "potato," whereas the negative element ("can't see") must be taken quite literally. Other definitions (this one is from Everyman 's Encyclopedia ) have suggested that a riddle's meaning is "hidden underastudied obscurity of expression." The literary riddle form, traceable to Sanskrit rituals more than two thousand years ago, ordinarily consists of a long series of assertions and contradictions, as opposed to the folk orpopular form, which is briefer (Taylor, Literary Riddle 3). Guilhem's riddle-poem (PC 183.7; see Appendix A) is, in fact, a string of paradoxes and antithetical statements, although they are primarily made up of negative descriptive elements, rather than one positive and one negative, as in Taylor's model. Research on thegenesis ofthe Occitan devinalh has looked for its sources in numerous philosophical and rhetorical traditions, including one of riddles in medieval Latin (for a summary, see Lawner, "Notes" 1 13-46). Sarah Spence (115-16) has proposed that while the de dreh nien of the first line is usually rendered as "about nothing," "from nothing" (or, colloquially, "out of thin air") is also a possible reading; thus de dreh nien could be seen as a translation ofthe Latin phrase exnihilo, and as a comment on the contemporary philosophical debate over God's creation of the universe exnihilo and the nature ofany secondarycreation. Butthis leads us to some of the essential controversies regarding Guilhem and the sudden appearance of his songs around 1 100: How original was he? Was he aware of the conventions of Latin poetry or the major philosophical issues of his day? More to the point: Is this poem a riddle? Erich Köhler (2: 34966 ) contends that it is not, but rather a serious probe into the metaphysical, an exploration of the ineffable which puts one's own identity and emotional world into question, in the tradition of the nescio quid of theological and philosophical disputation, ultimately stemming from St. Augustine.1 Peter Dronke (328) argues that the poem was largely ironic, parodying "a tradition of...