This book is an incisive intervention into the nature of what came to be called, in the late nineteenth century, courtly love. Rather than confronting the whole shaky apparatus of that phenomenon, Rüdiger Schnell sets out to examine just one crucial aspect: does desire die after sexual contact, and is desire therefore dependent upon non-satisfaction? Beginning with Leo Spitzer’s L’Amour lointain de Jaufré Rudel et le sens de la poésie des troubadours (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), a study so foundational that it set the terms for what has been the standard reading of the troubadour canso ever since, Schnell sets out to critique the assertion that achievement of sexual satisfaction in itself annihilates desire. Such a narrow focus is both the principal virtue of the study and its ultimate limitation. With painstaking attention to every aspect of the question — including generic considerations (tensos and partimens), the nature of possession and of obstacles, and socio-economic considerations — and in setting the work out like a scientific study, Schnell undermines convincingly Spitzer’s contention that a ‘paradoxe amoureux’ is at the base of the troubadours’ (and minnesingers’) conception of love and desire. Moving from ancient and medieval philosophy to the texts of individual poets, Schnell systematically demolishes what he considers the false reading of the troubadour cansos as being static, unchanging, and single-minded in their obsession with the incompatibility of love and sex. One of the great pleasures of reading this study is the open approach the author takes to recent studies of the corpus and his inclusion of the works of scholars outside the German/French/Italian sphere. He is attentive to the consideration of time and subjective time in different genres; insistent that no one genre can be seen as the porte-parole of a supposedly unified troubadour discourse; intent on defending a second paradox ‘performatif’, one that emerges through performance and interaction; and he produces evidence that counter-examples to the ‘paradoxe amoureux’ thesis far outweigh the evidence of the relatively few songs, at least in terms of percentage, which have bolstered such an overweening theory. As Schnell says, singing of personal dramas of unrequited love before an audience represents, above all else, the ‘autoprésentation d’un groupe social se comprenant comme l’élite et non de la traduction littéraire des états psychiques individuels des troubadours’ (p. 34). Yes and no, I would respond, to this observation and to the study as a whole. Admirable in conception and execution, it succeeds in its narrower goals but fails to go far enough to stand as the definitive statement that I think Schnell might have intended. While the point is proven beyond doubt, the proof itself, dependent as it is upon the presence/non-presence of imagined ladies, the values of an elite audience, and the maintenance of a sense of community, indicates the potential of a further deconstruction of the concept of courtly love, one that would emphasize a community of poet-musicians, working within the circumscribed arena of public taste, alluding to a subtext of secrecy, self-preservation, and self-advancement, and one that might have little to do, finally, with the petty dissatisfactions of heterosexual coupling.
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Jul 9, 2023
Fahrulyan Olii + 2
