Views on Subjectivity and the Speaker in Troubadour Poetry

Abstract

The various temporal and methodological approaches to troubadour poetry from the perspective of subjectivity and the speaker come to diverse conclusions. For Zumthor, subjectivity is completely absent from the texts and the troubadour poetry is impersonal, because of specific phenomena: the register as an objectifying literary code; the circularity of poems as anonymous intertextuality and self-referentiality. Our study suggests that intertextuality may, in fact, enhance the communication of subjectivity through differentiation, and that self-referentiality may be understood in the light of an attitude towards poetic creativity and poetic (vernacular) language. This would indicate a more acute awareness of one’s own value, and this is particularly evident in the style of trobar clus. Zink’s study also points to that. Specific cases show that the lyrical persona is individualized to a certain degree and acquires the characteristics of an empirical (but not yet proto-Cartesian) subject; however, the self as portrayed in the lyrical persona is always brought back into the community. Zink implicitly locates the articulation of subjectivity outside the lyrical persona, claiming that while the lyrical persona is generalized, during the phase of its actualisation the audience will particularise it by identifying with it. Zink’s findings point to a split in the lyrical persona into the poet’s figure (as an authorial lyrical subject) and the lover's figure (as a fictional lyrical subject). Kay comes to the same conclusion when she examines the autobiographical features of the lyrical subject. Drawing on Zink’s and Pintarič’s proposals, our study suggests the possibility of introducing an instance of a melodic-musical subject, due to the specific connections of musical and lyrical discourses in the troubadour artistic configuration. During the phase of the first (collective) actualisation – keeping in mind the specificity of performance – one could introduce the notion of a collective-pathic subject. Kay points to the evident examples of a dialogical relationship between subjectivity and the lyrical persona, expressed at the rhetorical level as an agent of allegorical and ironizing practices which set up the self of the lyrical persona and destabilize it at the same time. Being the language construct that it is (although authorial at times), this persona nevertheless possesses characteristics of an empirical subject, which proves unstable in its relationship towards its (beloved and idealized) object in its lingual/rhetorical, socio-political and sexual determinativeness.