Reevaluating Narration, Negotiation, and Exchange in the Old Occitan Frayre de Joy e Sor de Plaser Rachel D. Gibson Most likely written in southern France in the late thirteenth-century, the Old Occitan-Catalan Frayre de Joy e Sor de Plaser was authored after the highpoint in the development of the troubadour lyric.1 Yet the nova rimada still echoed the courtly lyric tradition, emerging at a time when the lyric poet continued to enjoy a certain regional prestige as yet unknown to the narrative writer in the langue d’oc. Using the poetic narrative in the lyrically saturated culture of Occitania, the anonymous author of the tale opts for a medium which was most likely better known and more frequently used by those writing in the langue d’oïl, introducing a gai as the main messenger within the text.2 Among the major characters of the tale, the gai, or parrot, is by far the most active and talkative, second only to the narrator himself in its skillful ability to move the plot forward through retellings of events as they happen.3 As the reader eventually discovers, the parrot is extraordinary in both its magical abilities and its use of rhetoric, and, from its initial appearance as a gift from Virgil to Frayre de Joy, the bird sets to work to reverse the tale’s unfortunate turns of fate through magic, or appeals to piety and logic, that successfully persuade any listener it encounters. The tale opens with the death of Sor de Plaser, the daughter of the emperor of Gint-Senay, who is mourned throughout the empire and entombed in an impenetrable moated tower. With the help of magic skills learned from Virgil, the enamored young prince Frayre de Joy manages to reach her, and once inside, the youth exchanges rings with her, has sex with her body, and impregnates her. Through prayer and the help of a parrot gifted to Frayre de Joy by Virgil, the girl is magically brought back to life only to discover she has not only lost her virginity, she now has an illegitimate son. The parrot thus becomes pivotal in retroactively acquiring her consent before falling briefly into the hands of another pair of lovers, where the bird once again uses rhetoric to negotiate [End Page 48] its own release and finally facilitate the marriage between Frayre de Joy and Sor de Plaser. The choice to use the parrot as the tale’s intermediary was most likely in response to the troubadour affinity for the nightingale, the lark, and other song birds as symbols of the lyrical craft and the expression of fin’ amor. Indeed, Jean-Michel Caluwé has commented on the use of the parrot in the Old Occitan conte as a mimetic device similar to the nightingale in the lyric, yet representative of the craft of prose or poetic narrative. However, if one can read the nightingale in the troubadour lyric as a metaphor for love, or perhaps a mimetic device for the troubadour himself, what can the mimetic function of the parrot tell the reader about the evolving role of narrative in thirteenth-century Occitan culture? This study explores the parrot’s essential function in this particularly self-conscious text towards legitimizing the shift towards the narratives in the langue d’oc. It will take into consideration the author’s position in relation to the looming literary traditions of both northern and southern France, as well as how the strategic use of the parrot revalues the contribution of the narrative genre. The second half of this study draws connections between this reevaluation of narrative and a persistent discourse of exchange in the poem as demonstrated through the parrot’s essential role as negotiator in the text. While groundbreaking work has been done on the language and role of economy in troubadour lyric and razos, by comparison, Old Occitan narrative texts have received much less attention, and a more complete understanding of this dynamic has yet to be elucidated.4 This study will therefore yield a clearer picture of the narrative genre’s emerging function in medieval Occitania. Here, one finds a renegotiation of values—rooted particularly in the...