Applying Dante’s formulation to modern Biases via G.A. Bond.

In considering the different influences and origins of the troubadour’s activities, one must consider not only source, but the possible range of effects resultant from that source. This is particularly important when attempting to recreate the complex social setting in which the troubadours lived and composed. Oversimplification here is devastating to the attempt to reconstruct the environment and motives driving these texts. Yet this is (other than anachronistically interpreting the modes and meanings of the various compositions on a primary level) the biggest hazard and temptation for the modern reader – critically inclined or otherwise.

“A second tacit bias is introduced into the question of origins by the relative weight accorded to the compositional elements of lyric. Dante’s well-known definition of troubadour poetry as fictio rethorica musicaque poita provides a useful illustration of the implications of this problem…each of the components included in his succinct definition – fiction, ornamentation, form – has its own theory and history (including a theory of origins). All three of these theories/histories are valid: they represent different analytic structures applied to the same complex phenomenon.” (Gerald A. Bond, Origins. from: Akehurst, F., and Judith Davis. A Handbook of the Troubadours. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. pg. 239.)

It is particularly important to keep this in mind when unraveling the various strands of cultural and “textual” influences. I have in mind here the Arabic thesis – where the textual impact can be clearly demonstrated, and similarities of metaphorical expression abound (amor de lonh, raqib, duettic role) the question of possible cultural influence must be dealt with carefully. Andalusian conventions may well have infiltrated and pleased the corts de Occitania, but they certainly did not supplant the deeply-seated Latinate Christianity nor the influence which the strong heretical presences had exerted there.

Applying this mode of criticism to the Arabic thesis, we can observe that although the sophisticated and artistically prodigious court-culture of Arabic Spain had its own thriving practices of lyric performance which often celebrated the themes of both Mystical and Secular Love(Bond, 243), and that there is a definite continuity at some level between the the Hispano-Arabic love poetry and the Provencal cansos d’amor which suggests some influence which would be unavoidable, the fact remains that Andalusi culture was not Provencal culture, and that Christendom and its heresies created a ground that was vastly removed from that of Islam.

So wherein lies the difference and sameness? In both conventions the distance of the lover and the unquenchable desire created by the same is an important theme to a majority of their respective love-poetries. However, the source of desire in the Arabian love-from-afar (which coincidentally appears to have entered their poetic tradition with the founding of the monotheism of Islam and the conscious recognition of a wholly transcendent deity) is usually based on a love once possessed which has been stolen away. The object being either an ideal desert maiden of either literal or religious significance, or almost as commonly, a young boy in a “Greek”-style pederastic relationship who has surpassed the point of maturity at which such a relationship can be sustained.

“The Arab Lady is commonly described as having a waist thin as a reed, emerging from hips ample as sand dunes; her mouth contains teeth like pearls, while its saliva is intoxicating as a potent wine; her face, which is likened either to a sun or to a full moon, reveals eyes gentle as a gazelle’s, yet which ruthlessly shoot arrows that penetrate the lover’s heart, thus wounding him fatally…For his part, the lover endures his lot, taking great pride in not blaming the Lady for the pain she causes him, even when driven to the point of madness or death. For all the world like a Cheshire cat, he wastes away from passion until his body is no longer visible, so that his presence may be detected only from the moans emanating from his empty clothes. “

“A substantial portion of Arabic love poetry is pederastic. As in the Greek tradition, here too the beloved is a beardless youth, and it is conventional for the relationship between boy and older lover to come to an end as soon as the boy reaches puberty and his beard begins to sprout.” (Jayyusi, Salma, and Manuela Marín. The Legacy of Muslim Spain. Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 1992.pg. 389)

The love-poetry of the Troubadours does display a yearning for a past age(???) but this is a cultural convention which is alluded to here, not a personage of either literal or personal significance. Also, the amor de lonh is usually a future object which has never been attained but is longed for, or as in the case of Jaufre Rudel, from a lover who has never met or even seen his beloved object of desire.

“Whereas in Provencal poetry the lover has normally never met the Lady he worships, and she, in turn, is unaware of his feelings for her, and often, of his very existence, Arabic love poetry is essentially one of separation; in the past, the lovers have indeed trysted and enjoyed the fruits of love; today, because the poet has been slandered by his enemies, the love union of the past, although it is fondly recalled, is no longer possible. Nonetheless, the poet continues to hope that the Lady will one day relent and grant him her favours once again; if not in this world, then in the afterlife. ” (Jayyusi, Salma, and Manuela Marín. The Legacy of Muslim Spain. Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 1992.pg. 389)

It is this sort of consideration of the impetus behind the fictio of the canso which must be carefully considered especially as the motives behind both feminist criticism and “partisans of the Arabic Thesis” which currently hold the dominant positions in scholarship of origins may easily fall subject to their initial biases to such a point that they fail to consider the full construct of the object presented to us by the troubadour artifacts. Salma Jayyusi and Marin Manuela show this kind of discretion as they consider the nature of Hispano-Arabic Poetry and its possible collisions with Provencal lyric. It is notable that this criticism of the Arabic thesis is coming from scholars of medieval Arabic literature, which seem to have a tendency to overplay their hand when it comes to establishing strains of influence upon western culture – the mitigated claim is refreshing to say the least.

“Today we are riding the crest of another wave of enthusiasm for the Arabic thesis. Nonetheless, the literary tradition, imagery and rhetorical conventions of Arabic poetry are significantly removed from those of medieval Romance poetry in several crucial respects. Hence, the partisans of Arabic origins would find themselves on firmer ground if they could account for the discrepancies, as well as the similarities, between the two traditions….it is indeed true that Provencal and part, though by no means all, of Arabic love poetry, share certain conventions, the most striking of which is the portrayal of the beloved as a distant and unattainable Lady, often addressed in the masculine form, whom the poet must serve faithfully but hopelessly. In Arabic, this convention is hardly Pagan, that is to say, it is not pre-Islamic. Instead, it developed soon agter the rise of Islam, while its major exponents were the Bedouin poets of the ‘Udhri school…From the Quranic ideas and vocabulary employed by these poets, it does seem clear that the relationship of a faithful lover to a single Lady, whom he was fated to love eternally, was shaped by the new monotheistic religion revealed by the Prophet…Nevertheless, the stock imagery employed in these portrayals is very different from that used in Romance. ” (Jayyusi, Salma, and Manuela Marín. The Legacy of Muslim Spain. Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 1992.pg. 388)