Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature by Gilbert Jane

Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature by Gilbert Jane

Author:Gilbert, Jane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011-07-14T16:00:00+00:00


Today's prince is justified while he lives and reigns, but what will happen when he dies? The wholeness and immortality in question are secular, implying not only individual renown but the fate of dynasty and regime, ultimately of society. The masculine real-world political present and future need the feminine legendary past.

This argument is helpful in approaching the first two ballades in Villon's mini-sequence. The ‘Ballade des dames’ sustains lordship in the here and now through a contrast with a feminine otherworldliness seemingly extraneous to the political realm. Only during the ‘Ballade des seigneurs’ does the reader discover that by assenting to the terms of the first ballade, he has ceded his claim on the politically meaningful past and with it the future, thus querying the legitimacy of lordly activity in the present. Does the name of Charlemagne, which occupies the refrain of the ‘Ballade des seigneurs’, reconnect masculine lordship to the legendary domain? Of all names, that of Charlemagne – emperor of Europe, defender of the pope and conqueror of the pagan – defines the ideal self-image of French princes. In order to justify their own occupancy of the French throne, kings over the centuries turned repeatedly to a perceived continuity with this iconic figure, whence the Valois Charleses of Villon's own day.102 Some critics understand Charlemagne's name as transferring lordship's imaginary support into the legendary, communal realm, in which case a sharp discontinuity becomes apparent between the recently dead lords and the illustrious father figure. There is here no legendary seigneurial ancestry such as Deschamps created for his prince but a series of failed attempts to constitute a genealogy, expressed peremptorily in the ‘Ou est il? ou est son tayon?’ of line 379. Names such as that of Arthur duke of Brittany or Lancelot king of Bohemia fail in this environment to convey the charisma and effectiveness of their more famous legendary and historical forebears, emphasizing the gap which separates the ancestral from the recent past. The princes of the ‘Ballade des seigneurs’ seem incapable of exercising the paternal function either by begetting their own ancestors or by founding a genealogy of their own. Instead of standing as guarantor to these men, the paternal figure of Charlemagne would thus become a source of anxiety and reproach. He would represent the nom-du-père with emphasis on the nom, his disabling excess of nomination inverting the empowering anonymity of Deschamps's prince.

I am inclined, however, to include Charlemagne's name in the destitution of lordship and of the sovereign reader operating in the stanzas. Deschamps's lyric made ideological profit both from magnificent genealogy and from its final anonymous rejection. Villon's poem operates the negation of both; refusing to install the seigneurs in the second life of glorious memory, it inscribes their anonymity only as genealogy's failure and as the defacing of historical record, opening no door onto the universal. The seigneurs are merely undead, without the éclat attaching to Antigone or to Joan; though entre-deux-morts like the prince in Deschamps's envoy, they have nothing like his high-minded, high-deserving humility.



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