23

ARTICLE

Taming Time: Writing and Motifs of Waiting
in Twelfth- through Fourteenth-Century Occitan Albas*

To the Dawn of my life.

The troubadour repertoire includes a corpus of nineteen songs composed between the end of the twelfth century and the fourteenth century, which are traditionally classified as albas. Despite the thematic diversity–be they about separation, erotic or religious in nature–these all celebrate or mourn the arrival of the day. Most of the albas have a courtly setting: two lovers – whose secret encounter was favored by (the) night – deplore the unwelcome approach of day, which will force them to separate. The bifurcated motif of waiting and of desire infuses these lyrical pieces: time becomes the main subject of the songs. The singing ‘I’ uses the resources of rhetoric to speed up or slow down time in order to satisfy the needs of desire. The medieval Occitan lyric has a tendency to temporalize desire and to associate it with waiting or with projection. Adulterous love superimposes temporality onto forbidden desire: to the linearity of the contractual alliances of marriage, this love juxtaposes the changing laws of desire waiting to be realized, or at least spoken aloud. In the canso the expression fin’amor defines the outlines of such adulterous love, whose extratemporality Paul Zumthor has demonstrated,1 thanks to its ability to project unfulfilled desire in an uncertain future. But while the canso’s subject remains unchanged, the alba, on the contrary, falls precisely into a regulated temporality: the passage from night to day under the circumstances of consummated adultery. There 24is an essential question to be asked about the link between the genres, in which temporality regulates the affective mechanisms of amorous speech, the enunciation of love as the particular expression of desire by the poet, and the activity of courtly pastimes, in which poetry in general and the alba in particular was read, discussed and debated. Dominique Billy and Christophe Chaguignan have, both, respectively studied this generic dimension, and provided us with convincing answers.2. Is the alba, as a performance and reading in the specific context of the southern courts, a means of passing time? Certainly not. Dominique Billy especially focuses on the criteria defining the auto- reference system of the genre, while acknowledging the essential, even fundamental dimension of the parting motif.3. The modulations of waiting and of desire, and the projection of a nocturnal love in a present that keeps retaining it, offer the specular image of medieval listeners trying to occupy their entertain themselves while simultaneously seeking to make this passage of time meaningful. Being aware of time going by is to take possession of it, to draw it out or shorten it by means of emotions that follow, correspond and contradict one another. Only these very emotions make this experience more intense, endowing it with a singular dimension of play.

There is an essential playfulness in the writing of the Occitan albas which consists in reproducing the different temporalities of desire. These different temporal modalities are based on a range of emotions: waiting and frustrated desires arouse joy, sadness, anguish, anger, shame and many other emotions at the heart of the poetic and narrative construction. To fully understand this, we must first examine the different forms of time in the genre, and then, examine their effects on the writing process and, in particular, on the importance of emotions in these lyrical poems. This analysis will make it possible to draw some conclusions about the paradoxical status of time in the genre of the alba.

As a medium to enunciate the hopes of a relationship that must end at dawn, the alba bears witness to the anthropological amplitude of medieval emotions The alba, situated between day and night, while stars remain in the indecision of temporality, promotes the expression of emotions connected to the voicing of desire and of love. 25Anthropologically, this thesis is valuable because it makes the establishment of a typology possible. This presupposition is all the more true when considered in relation to the canso. The canso generally takes place around the beginning of a love relationship, and its only stakes essentially consist of one obligation, that is the lovers’ anonymity. The canso projects desire in the future of an unfulfilled love, a future that is an integral part of the poetic strategies of the genre. Conversely, in the alba, the notion of adulterous love is essential to the genre, since it portrays the moment that precedes both the sunrise and the separation of a couple who must flee the daylight. Dawn therefore represents the moment that Gouiran and Bauer have called ‘l’interrègne astral’ (the astral interregnum):4 a space that is temporal, and one in which the stars have already disappeared and the sun’s first light has just begun to brighten the horizon. This moment of the day – the indistinct space and moment of the alba – is the fundamental element of this poetry, because the moment is an inescapable fact as well as because the word alba itself holds a particular status. The term can refer to a one-word refrain concluding the last verse of each stanza or, more rarely, as a word systematically included in a fixed spot in the first verse of a stanza or in another verse. One of the characteristics of the alba is undoubtedly the disturbing ambiguity of its status, as Vincer Colomer Domingez and Trobio Fuente Cornejo have proven it5. The absence of the stars makes it a moment of instability, a moment when everything may happen. The alba does not ally itself with the promises of the day or with the protective night; it is the climax of the moment par excellence: one that cannot decide between a late night or an early day. It may variously portray the relief of those who have managed to escape the temptations of the night (in the religious alba) or the despair of those whom it separates (in the amorous alba). In either case the alba is linked to pain; its unstable equilibrium makes it an emotional no man’s land. On an emotional level, it is the uncertain moment that lovers try to connect to their domain of the night, knowing that it possesses no temporal reality, except that which is embodied in the cry of the watchman: a poignant reminder of the dangers of the day.

26

This character of fundamental uncertainty needs not be separated from spatial reality. In quite a number of albas, the natural setting which varies according to the seasons serves as a backdrop to the lovers’ tryst. The first stanza is often characterized by the illustration of a seasonal topos closely linked to the image of love, a technique which is also found in the canso. However, in the alba, this natural setting takes on a spatial reality: it is immediately sensitive to the sight, touch and hearing of the lovers: the shadow’s concealment, the foliage’s freshness, the bird’s song. But it is on the temporal plane that the distinction from the canso – the song of unrealized love – is clearer: just as the canso shows the world during a precise season but at an abstract hour, the alba shows us the world at a precise time, but during an abstract season. Gouiran and Bauer show how much the canso differs from the alba in the treatment of traditional descriptive elements, flowers and birds. While the canso includes them in its discourse, the alba limits them to a mere element of the backdrop/concedes to them a staging of the scene:

Quan lo rossinhols escria

ab sa par la nueg e·l dia,

yeu suy ab ma bel’amia

jos la flor

“When the nightingale sings

To his mate night and day,

I am with my beautiful friend

Under the flower)”6

In contrast to this alba of separation by Raimon de Las Salas:

ay auzitz,

d’auzels petitz

pels plassaditz.

“I have heard

From the little birds

In the forests)”7

27

While birds in the canso are limited to the role of topoï projected into a discourse of possibilities, the birds of the alba intervene in the dramatization of the song. The bird, modeled on the image of a watchman, echoes the watchman’s warning with its song, announcing the beginning of the new day that presides over the lovers’ separation or reminding them of the sweetness of their night of love. The canso imagines a ‘natural’ universe as a simple frame serving as a point of comparison, to supplement or counterbalance the troubadour᾿s song. By contrast, the alba places this framework at the heart of the temporal system: it exemplifies the urgency of the moment. Birds are the vanguard of the day within a night that is about to end.

Within this role of ‘efficient framework’ − to use Gouiran’s expression − the stars are also markers of an autonomous time. In the first sense, the imminence of the day is manifested both in the cosmographic plane and on the plane of proximity: in the alba, a correspondence is established between the particular situation of the lovers and the great celestial movements that regulate and measure time. To prove that this is a timeless truth, Guiraut de Bornelh’s watchman tells the happy lover about the inescapable advance of the day: ‘issetz al fenestrel / e esgardatz las ensenhas del sel’ (go to the window and look at the signs in the sky),8 confirming what the birds have already announced.

Here again, Gouiran and Bauer have studied another formal trait in order to extend their reflection on the temporal plane: the rhyme scheme.9 In three albas there is a vocalic ending often considered the prosodic signature of the genre: -ia. This ambivalent rhyme connects dia (day) and dia (the first and third persons of the present subjunctive of the verb dire [to say]). The three poems in question are ‘Us cavaliers’ by Bertran d’Alamanon (stanzas II and III); the anonymous ‘Ab la gensor’ (stanza III); and the religious alba, ‘Vers Dieus’ by Falquet de Romans. Gouiran and Bauer deduce that there is no conflict between the subjective claim of the alba and the coming of the day: this overlap in registers is a symptom of the constraints of the stars on matters of love. This convincing hypothesis deserves to be extended into the temporal conception that governs the enunciation of the genre. The serena alba – in a way the opposite of Guiraut Riquier – develops the 28hypothesis with the adjective astratz (IV, 1), which defines the destiny of the lover-poet in the song:

Mout es greus turmenz astratz

A selh qu’ab nulh valedor

no·s pot valer […].

“Grievous is the astral torment

To him who with no protector

Cannot protect himself […].)”10

Unlike in the separation alba, the lover-poet no longer fears seeing the dawning of the day which will separate him from his lady; instead, he fears that he will not be able to contain himself until their next rendezvous. The two experiences, however, come to the same thing: the pangs of passing time. Time goes by too slowly for those who are eager to meet each other and too quickly for those who fear separation. If the verb dire, in the subjunctive – the mood of subjectivity – rhymes with dia (day), the singer finds himself confronted with the paradox of having to sing in a moment that must never know an end/ at a time that must never know any ending. We can notice that this vow takes on different forms in diverse albas: ‘Plagues a Dieu ja la nueitz non falhis’ (May it please God that the night might never end) confesses the lady in the anonymous alba ‘En un vergier’ (In an orchard).11 In Guiraut de Bornelh’s alba, ‘Reis glorios’ (Glorious king), the lover cries: ‘[T]an soy en ric sojorn / qu’ieu non volgra mays fos alba ni jorn’ (I am in so rich a dalliance / that I do not want dawn or day to ever come).12 The sequence is taken up by the lover in the alba, ‘Us cavaliers’ (Once a knight) by Bertran d’Alamanon: ‘Doussa res, s’esser podia / que jamais alba ni dia / no fos’ (Sweet creature, if it could be / that it were never dawn nor day).13 This necessity of a never-ending night, as the only way to finish the albas, constitutes the paradox of the alba. It is therefore necessary for the night to be endless: regarding the two lovers, because the night witnesses the birth and fading away of their love; and also concerning the expression of desire, since love at night becomes the poetic object of the alba. In this moment of 29transition described by dawn and marking the end of their lovemaking, the alba hearkens to daybreak, at least by announcing it. Then arises the recurring motif of the poet invited to retain the night, or the motif of deploring the announcement of the rising sun by the watchman. This paradox triggers emotional frustration, but poetically, it allows for a prolongation of desire or a projection of it into the future. Its song of consummated love is inscribed in a timespan that transcends temporality.

These remarks on the expansion of time also have strong erotic implications in the albas, especially with respect to waiting. The motif of erotic waiting in the alba is built on opposing principles with respect to the canso. The nineteenth-century rediscoverers of medieval literature were largely attracted to stories of amorous – and even adulterous – adventures. The creation of the notion of ‘courtly love’ stemmed from Andreas Capellanus long before Duby’s attempt to write a history of human emotions.14

This notion of ‘courtly love’, whose substance refers to a rather restrictive amorous apparatus, brings together the domna (lady) and her suitor. The fin’amor of the troubadours is generally based on the delay and the fantasization of sexual pleasure. Desire is central to the bond of love, but it is a desire that is not necessarily satisfied, due to the unattainability of the lady and the delayed embrace, as illustrated by the famous motif of amour de lonh (love from afar), celebrated by Jaufre Rudel, (fl. 1130–70). On such ground, courtly love seems to be clearly incarnated in the canso. The canso describes an ideal of amorous harmony reached between the domna and her lover at the end of a long path of emotional progression, of the suitor (fenhador) in supplication (precador), beseeching the domna to give him hope about a forthcoming embrace. Thus, courtly love seems to be fully embodied in the canso. Like fin’amor, the canso is above all an ‘érotique de la maîtrise du désir’ (erotics of the mastery of desire).15 Dominique Billy, in his article entitled, ‘Nouvelles perspectives sur l’alba’ concluded that the alba is a tourbadour-related genre whose origins are doutlessly courtly. Studying this genre provides us with clues as to the means of expressing one’s feeling, according to a new set of criteria, both literary and social.16. The emotions that constitute the canso dramatize the waiting: pain, melancholy, languor or ecstasy, the contentment that expresses joy. The canso 30– founded on the delay and the anticipation of sexual pleasure – proposes a mixing of contrary emotions (pleasure and pain, hope and anguish, contentment and melancholy, etc.) since ‘morose delight’ is simultaneously pleasure (in anticipation of sexual release) and pain (in the concomitant lack of pleasure). There is even an accomplishment of lyrical play when the poet directly exalts the sweetness of suffering inflicted by this lack of pleasure. We recall in particular stanza IV of the canso ‘Quan lo rius de la fontana’ (When the stream of the fountain) by Jaufre Rudel:

De dezir mos cors no fina

Vas selha ren qu’ieu pus am;

E cre que volers m’enguana

Si cobezeza la·m tol;

Que pus es ponhens qu’espina

La dolors que ab joi sana;

Don ja non vuelh qu’om m’en planha.

“Of desire my heart has no end

For her whom I love the most

And I believe that wanting deceives me

Since yearning takes her from me;

For it is more painful than a thorn,

The pain healed by joy;

So I do not want anyone to pity me)”17

On the contrary, the albas portray satisfied desire, consummated in the welcoming shadow of night and offer a more complex emotional dramaturgy. This mode of composition reproduces the suffering of lack in the present, whereas the canso projects itself towards the future. There is no longer any anticipation of sexual pleasure, only the attempt to retain time by means of rhetorical games of emotion. The alba creates a poetic process of dramatization through a real distancing between the enunciative instance and the ‘I’ of the text, which then becomes a narrative that depicts the characters. Bertran of Alamanon literally presents the alba: ‘Us cavalier si jazia / ab la re que plus volia / soven baizan li dizia’ (Once a knight was lying / with the person he loved the most / kissing her often he said to her).18 Similarly, in a magnificent anonymous alba, the lady᾿s song is literally embedded in the the first stanza where the author first glimpses her:

31

En un vergier sotz fuella d’albespi

tenc la dompna son amic costa si,

tro la gayta crida que l’alba vi.

Oy Dieus, oy Dieus, de l’alba! tan tost ve!

“In an orchard under the leaves of a hawthorn

The lady held her lover by her side,

Until the watchman cried that he saw the dawn.

Oh God, oh God, the dawn! How soon it comes!”

The poet has invited us to join the intimacy of the cover of hawthorn, veritable topos of the romantic rendez-vous. His description allows us to get closer and closer to the couple. In the last cobla, the focus widens: the lady is at the center of the gazes, which gives way to a generalized point of view. In this last context, the refrain takes on an enunciative scope:

La dompna es agradans e plazen,

per sa beutat la gardon mantas gens,

e a son cor en amar leyalmens.

Oy Dieus, oy Dieus, de l’alba! tan tost ve!

“The lady is agreeable and pleasant,

Many people look at her for her beauty,

And to her heart for her loyal love.

Oh God, oh God, the dawn! How soon it comes!”19

The enunciative framework that structures the compositions thus makes it possible to draw up the contours of a complex affective game, indeed, by representing different points of view: those of the lover, the beloved, the watchman, and even a discreet narrator. In doing so, the alba allows the emotional relationship to evolve over time. This regulates the relationships between the different speakers and the characters to whom they speak. Time in the alba is a modality regulating the emotions expressed in the poems.

Time is primarily characterized by its fleeting nature and thus articulates one of the specific formal characteristics of the Occitan alba. This characteristic is the inscription of the enunciation of most secular albas, and in particular, of the separation albas, in a supposedly temporal present (the moment that precedes the sunrise) and not extra-temporal, as in the canso. Such reference to a seemingly extra-textual reality (a 32reality that due to the fiction of the narrative is not a pure effect of the song) confers transitivity to the overall meaning that contrasts strongly with the intransitivity of the words ascribed to the ‘I’ of the cansos. The temporal time of the alba (since it is inscribed in the temporality of the passage of night to day) leads to a form of transitivity: the present of the enunciation returns to the present that is unfolding, the aims of the poetic protagonists (the beauty of the lady, the regret of separating, the exchanged vows, etc.). On the contrary, the canso is more intransitive: its aims are general and detached from the contingency of objects. This relationship between transitivity and intransitivity therefore is not connected to waiting. Thus, the fate of the love declaration in the secular alba is closely linked to the threat of daybreak. This is evidenced, as we have seen, by the special status of the love declaration in its relation to what one might call the referent.

The verbalization of love is made impossible by the double constraint of waiting for dawn, which urges the lovers to separate, and at the same time subjects the enunciation of the alba to the passage of time, so that the articulation of love is made impossible. The two lovers are forced to pass time by commenting on the time that passes. From this point of view, the anonymous alba Quan lo rossinhols (When the nightingale) can be understood as the fiction of the impossible relation of the declaration of the dawn to the passage of time:

Quan lo rossinhols escria

ab sa par la nueg e·l dia,

yeu suy ab ma bell’amia

jos la flor

tro la gaita de la tor

escrida : Drute, al levar !

qu’ieu vey l’alba e·l jorn clar.

“When the nightingale sings

To his mate night and day,

I am with my beautiful friend

Under the flower

Until from the tower the watchman

Announces: Lovers, get up!

I see the dawn and the clear day.)”20

33

This alba evokes the status of the lover-poet on the one hand, and on the other, that of the nightingale, in order to oppose them (due to an adversarial relationship implicit in the initial quan). The bird’s love song – as an indissoluble union and reciprocal identification of song and love, in other words a canso – ignores the difference between day and night since this bird sings no matter the time. It is precisely to elucidate the temporal difference that the lyrical subject of this alba says that he suffers: to be in the situation of a lover who, having known pleasure with his beloved, cannot sing. Paradoxically, the watchman announces (escria) the end of the night and at the same time, the end of love. The disconnection between making love and singing is precisely what makes the alba’s declaration of love impossible. If love in the canso is a projected and unrealized desire, that of the alba appears as its opposite: an impossible love – at least impossible to sing – different from consummated desire. This disconnection between loving and singing makes the love declaration of the alba temporally ambiguous, producing a love song that is a formally negation of the song and therefore a non-love.

The time in the alba that is subject to the contrasting and contrarian influence of the stars, is a paradoxical time. By expanding and contracting itself, this paradoxical time submits the love song to the impossibility of its realization while at the same time providing the emotional palette with a wide diversity hitherto unequaled in the poetic repertoire. Emotions permit to make this malleability of the text happen within the poem by playing on its length at leisure.

This in-between, happening at twilight, is characterized by a poetics which fosters the feeling of expectation and maintains desire. That’s why, the alba, by taming time, resorts to all the resources of emotions, and thus, provides the poetry of the troubadours with a constantly renewed freshness.

Guillaume Oriol

Université Bordeaux Montaigne

École pratique des Hautes Études

34

Works Cited

Primary Sources

Les albas occitanes. Ed. Christophe Chaguinian. Musical transcription John Haines. Classiques français du Moyen Âge 156. Paris, 2008.

Alfred Pillet et Henry Carstens, Bibliographie der Troubadours, ergænzt, weitergeführt und herausgegeben, Halle, Niemeyer, 1933

Les Troubadours. Trans. René Nelli and René Lavaud. Vol 2 Paris, 1960; rpt. 2000.

Secondary Sources

Bauer, Frank, ‘Ironie de l’aube’. Revue des langues romanes 112 (2008), 321–371.

Duby, Georges. Mâle Moyen Âge. De l’amour et autres essais, Paris, 1988.

Billy, Dominique, ‘Nouvelles perspectives sur l’alba’. Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 53 (2010), 355–378.

Billy, Dominique, ‘Les mutations de l’alba dans la poésie des troubadours’. Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes 18 (2009), 181–200.

Billy, Dominique, ‘Le traitement théorique de l’alba dans la Doctrina de compondre dictats et la question de l’alborad’, Revue de Linguistique Romane 1 (2009), 195–214.

Chaguignan, Christophe, ‘Albas et Gaytas: deux définitions à problème de la Doctrina de comprondre dictats et la question de l’alborada’. Revue des langues romanes 113 (2009), 195–214.

Chaguignan, Christophe, ‘L’alba dans le système des genres troubadouresques. Réflexions sur le rapport des troubadours à la production non troubadouresque’. Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 50 (2007), 131–48.

Gouiran, Gérard and Frank Bauer, ‘L’aube et les astres: à propos de quelques particularités formelles des albas profanes’. Les Astres. Actes du colloque international de Montpellier, 23−25 mars 1995. Eds Béatrice Bakhouche, Alain Moreau and Jean-Claude Turpin. 2 vols Montpellier, 1996. II, 169–80.

Gouiran, Gérard, ‘Solitude de l’Alba’. Études sur la littérature médiévale, Montpellier, Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2016, 155–163.

Nelli, René, L’Érotique des troubadours, Toulouse, Privat, 1963, 11–12.

Poe, Elisabeth W., ‘New light of the Alba: a genre redifined’. Viator, University of California Press, 1984, 139–150.

35

Poe, Elisabeth W., ‘The lighter side of the Alba: Ab la genser que sia’. Romanistiches Jahrbuch 36 (1985), 87–103.

Régnier-Bohler, Danielle. ‘Amour courtois’, Le Goff, Jacques, Schmitt, Jean-Claude, Dictionnaire raisonné de l’Occident médiéval. Paris, 1999. 32–41.

Saville, Jonathan, The Medieval Erotic Albas: Structure as Meaning. New York, Columbia University Press, 1972.

Zumthor, Paul, ‘De la circularité du chant (à propos des trouvères des xiie et xiiie siècles)’. Poétique, 2 (1970), 129–40.

Zumthor, Paul, Essai de poétique médiévale. Paris, 1972.