Dark Forces: Music and Silence in the Fabliaux

Grace Neville

For a period like the Middle Ages that was so full of music, it is at first surprising to find so little music in the fabliaux. Whatever date one ascribes to the Middle Ages, whether it be the conservative three hundred and fifty year span 1100-1450 often invoked by scholars of medieval French literature, or the more exciting and arguably greedy millenium and a half stretching from 450 to 1850, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Industrial Revolution, the 'long moyen âge' proposed by leading Annaliste historian, Jacques Le Goff, it is undeniable that music played a dominant role in the life of the period at every level of society.' Art, iconography, stained-glass windows, sculpture, manuscripts and literary texts all bear this out. From such evidence it is clear that, whether listened to or participated in, music was essential to religious ceremonies, ritual both sacred and profane, pilgrimage, hunting, tournaments, drama and entertainment throughout the entire period. In particular, the dazzling richness and variety of the musical experience are widely attested, as is the extent to which music (particularly dancing and singing) permeated all social strata. One is struck by the bewilderingly rich array of musical instruments, along with multitudinous categories of musicians, from eminent court musicians like Guillaume de Machaut (13007-1377) to the blind beggars at the bottom of the ladder, people for whom music might bring in a few sous, a welcome bite of food. Music could even be an identity marker for characters such as St Cecilia. Even within the very languages of medieval France, the centrality of music was clearly embedded. Colloquial expressions and proverbs, along with countless images and metaphors, drew heavily on music for meaning and resonance. The fabliaux, however, appear to run counter to this pattern, to rupture this consensus. The present article will focus on the seemingly

1. Le Goff, Jacques, L'Imaginaire médiéval (Paris, Gallimard, 1985). UFrS 2 (2002) 28 NEVILLE parallel worlds of sound and silence — or, more specifically, of music and silence in the fabliaux. Not that these are the only systems of communication at work in these little stories: they take their place alongside other rich forms of expression, other non-verbal languages like body language and gestures,2 colour, flora, fauna and other signs that are never innocent, never empty, but rather fill these texts with layer upon layer of meaning.' A few words at the outset in order to situate the texts under discussion here. The fabliaux are a corpus of approximately one hundred and fifty short stories, largely anonymous, from North and North-Eastern France, dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They are short, snappy stories ('des contes à rire en vers' in the words of fabliaux pioneer, the great medievalist, Joseph Bédier4), oral literature that was recited out loud to audiences drawn from different social strata, in other words public literature. According to statistics established by Danish scholar, Per Nykrog, two thirds of the c. 150 themes encountered in the fabliaux are 'erotiques', recounting the timeless adventures of the eternal triangle of wife, husband and lover.5 They have tantalisingly strong parallels in medieval Latin genres like the exempla, as well as in world folklore, modern urban legends,"

2. See Pastoureau, Michel, Le Vêtement : histoire, archéologie et symbolique vestimentaires au Moyen Age (Paris, Léopard d'or, 1989). 3. See Schmitt, Jean-Claude, La Raison des gestes dans l'Occident médiéval (Paris. Gallimard, 1990). 4. Bédier. Joseph. Les Fabliaux (Paris, Champion, 1964, 6' édition), p. 30. This ground-breaking study, first published in 1893, is the first work of modem scholarship on the fabliaux. The standard modern edition of the fabliaux is Willem Noomen and Nico van den Boogaard, Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux, henceforth NRCF (Assen, Van Gorcum, 10 vols, 1983-). Among translations into modem French and English are the dual-language (medieval French and modem French) Fabliaux, translated by Rosanna Brusegan (Paris, Union Générale d'Editions, 10/18, 1994); Fabliaux, translated into modem French by Gilbert Rouger (Paris, Gallimard, 1978); Gallic Salt: Eighteen Fabliaux translated from the Old French, translated into English by Robert Harrison (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1974). 5. 'Le terme erotique est pris ici dans un sens très large, comme équivalent à opposant les deux sexes': Nykrog, Per, Les Fabliaux (Geneva, Droz, 1973; first published in 1957), p. 54. 6. See Neville, Grace, 'Medieval French Fabliaux and Modem Urban Legends: The Attraction of Opposites', Béaloideas: The Journal of the Folklore of Ireland Society, 57 (1989), pp. 133-49 ; Hines, John, The Fabliau in English (London. Longman, 1993). MUSIC AND SILENCE IN THE FABLIAUX 29 jokes and short stories from all ages and all cultures, and even in the commercial cinema (films such as Mad Max). They form part of the vast pool of material worked and reworked by great alchemists like Chaucer and Boccaccio. Whatever about music, the fabliaux themselves are very noisy, or rather the world they represent is full of sound, especially speech. Indeed, so central and recurrent is dialogue in this genre that many fabliaux could have been (may have been?) staged publicly as little sketches. At the very least, a skilled storyteller could have adopted the voices and gestures of the various members of his cast (wife, husband, lover) in the interests of realistic representation. We hear people talking, shouting, exclaiming, declaiming, cursing, gossiping, whispering, talking to themselves, calling out to each other, to animals and to God, laughing, shrieking, wailing and lamenting the dead, speaking in a multitude of tongues (picard, francien, faulty Latin and scraps of English), people using dialogue, prayers, psalms, proverbs, poems, people listening, overhearing, eavesdropping. Added to this din are cocks crowing, church bells ringing, spits hissing, street criers calling, people knocking on doors, the sound of a door opening gingerly as a thief tiptoes in. In the fabliaux, even dogs talk ('Estula', NRCFIV 358- 61), as do individual body parts ('Le Chevalier qui fist parler les cons', NRCF III 158-73), or so we are led to believe. To this general cacophony are added body sounds: people shouting in pain, belching, farting, snoring, hearts beating loudly, love-making in the room next door. In short, reading the fabliaux is on occasion like being condemned to live in a badly insulated apartment block or student residence! There is, of course, music within the texts themselves. Designed in all probability to be declaimed out loud in front of an audience, they exist in the first instance somewhere between speech and song. The prevalence in them of assonance and of other verbal tricks of the oral storyteller distances them from modern literature where the world shrinks to a private and, above all, silent tête-à-tête between reader and writer.7 Internal textural harmony is not, however, what concerns us here: rather is it music and its presence or absence in the world conjured up by these texts. Music usually exists here not in its own right but as part of something greater, as an element in a ceremony religious or secular.

7. On the centrality of orality in medieval literature see Zumthor, Paul, La Lettre et la voix : de la littérature médiévale (Paris, Seuil, 1987). 30 NEVILLE

Masses and funeral rites loom large here. Psalms are chanted over the dead, masses are sung. Music also forms an integral part of festivities: while people eat and drink, music rings out. It accompanies happy occasions like the master's return home after time spent away on business. The reactions elicited by this music are depicted. At funeral ceremonies, people beat their palms in rhythm to the psalms. Music thus functions as an outlet, a release for pent-up emotions, especially on the part of those most emotional of beings, women. Music can move from the background to the foreground to function as a non-verbal language. Thus, when church bells summon the faithful to Mass, the hearers dutifully obey the call. As for the musicians themselves, they are often depicted as multi- skilled entertainers for whom music represents only a part of their bag of tricks which can include, apart from singing and playing a musical instrument, acting, reciting and acrobatics: L'uns menestrez a l'autre rueve Faire son mestier tel com sot : L'un fait l'Ivre, l'autre le Sot, Li uns bale, li autre note, Et li autres dist la Riote, Et li tiers dist la Genglerie ; Cil qui vivent de jonglerie Viellent par devent le conte, Et teus i ot qui fablaius conte ; Et li autres dist l'Erberie, Ou il a mainte gaberie : Et si i a mainte risée. ('Vilain au Buffet', NRCF V 308-9, lines 148-59) (The minstrels all try to excel at doing their job: one pretends to be drunk, another plays the fool; one sings while another accompanies him; one recites a debate while another plays music; those whose profession it is play their instruments in front of the Count; and many of them tell a fabliau; another tells a story full of tricks and jokes). High and low-status musicians feature in these stories, from the ménestrels appreciated at royal courts to the humble jongleurs who scrape a living as best they can. Successful musicians can earn rich pickings, an indication of the high esteem in which they were held: Li cuens a fait crier entreus Et fait savoir as menestreus, Qui la millour trufe saroit MUSIC AND SILENCE IN THE FABLIAUX 31

Faire ne dire, qu'il aroit Sa robe d'escarlate nueve. ('Vilain au Buffet', NRCF V 308-9, lines 143-7) (The Count lets the minstrels know that whoever tells or acts out the best sketch will have his new scarlet cloak.) At the opposite end of the spectrum, jongleurs are generally despised. In Saint Pierre et le Jongleur the main character, a jongleur, is an impoverished compulsive gambler, an eternal womaniser who ends up in Hell where Lucifer heaps scorn on him as a 'filz a putain' (NRCF I 149-59). Indeed, it is significant that jongleurs should thus find themselves frequently linked to other marginalised groups like prostitutes, to be consequently derided.8 Another fabliau, Les Putains et les Lecheors, has St Paul dismiss jongleurs as 'une gent [...] forfete', errors in human form (NRCF VI 151-3). This text makes a plea for better treatment of jongleurs by the ruling classes, stating that this was part of God's plan: when he created the world, or so this story goes, God gave responsibility for the welfare of the jongleurs to the chevaliers. However, unlike the luxury in which clerics dutifully maintain prostitutes, as this tale would have it, the chevaliers are often found in dereliction of their obligations vis-à-vis the jongleurs, begrudgingly throwing poor food and clothing their way. This may be an intimation that the jongleur's normal fate was to be the eternal victim of ill-treatment of various kinds. In such hints one senses the solidarity with the jongleurs of the fabliaux storytellers, marginal characters like the clercs, young students as yet outside the loop of power. However, these relatively unproblematic questions concerning the who, when and what of music in the fabliaux do not encompass the phenomenon that is music in these texts. More interesting is the dual movement whereby music is both central and marginal to these stories. In particular, deliberate attempts to relegate music to the margins, and even to stifle it altogether, deserve further attention. It is significant that many musicians in these stories are themselves marginal characters in the society in which they find themselves. In 'Les Trois Boçus', the three hunchback musicians, being different, are consequently marginalised through physical handicap, through their nomadic lifestyle (wanderers in a land where most people rarely strayed from

8. See Rossiaud, Jacques, La Prostitution médiévale (Paris, Flammarion, 1988). 32 NEVILLE their native place"), making a living by selling not goods but entertainment, reliant on others for food, i.e. for survival in mid-winter (NRCF V 200-7). In a theocentric society like the Middle Ages in which physical handicap was frequently interpreted as a manifestation of God's anger for sins committed either by the unfortunate people themselves or by their forebears, to be thus afflicted attracted little sympathy from the wider community.'" At a practical level, people like the hunchbacks in 'Les Trois Boçus' were probably ill-suited to physical work, hence their attempts to earn a living through music (one thinks of all the blind musicians of Ireland); they stayed together in order to support each other but, more importantly, they were excluded from the company of more fortunate people as if, in some unspoken way, they were seen as harbingers of bad luck or reminders of how catastrophically everything could go wrong. As if misfortune were somehow contagious. In the particular story of the three hunchback musicians, the fact that there are not just one but three of them (three being a magic number from time immemorial) deprives them of any reality: as with identical triplets, one is not sure if there is just one of them or if there are three. One might have been credible, but three!" Added to this is the fact that the husband of the young woman in the story happens to be yet another hunchback, yet another 'non-person', and we have difficulty in suspending our sense of disbelief. They really are not like us, we cannot take them seriously, they truly are l'Autre.

9. This held true even down to the nineteenth century, strengthening Le Goff s case for a 'long moyen âge': see the fascinating Weber, Eugen, Peasants into Frenchmen: the Modernisation of Rural France, 1870-1914 (London, Chatto & Windus, 1977; first published in 1976 by Stanford University Press). 10. 'Les exclus, ce sont aussi les malades, et surtout les infirmes, les estropiés. Dans ce monde où la maladie et l'infirmité sont tenus pour les signes extérieurs du péché, ceux qui en sont frappés sont maudits par Dieu, donc par les hommes': Le Goff, Jacques, La Civilisation de l'Occident médiéval (Paris, Arthaud, 1984), p. 362; Mes aveugles, les sourds-muets, les paralytiques ; la cruauté médiévale ne les épargne pas, non plus que les bossus [...] ils offusquent la nature, dont la loi est de former des êtres sains ; ils portent la colère de Dieu, qui les a punis pour leurs péchés, ou qui a puni en eux la faute de leurs parents': Payen, Jean-Charles, Le Moyen Age : des origines à 1300 (Paris, Arthaud, 1970), p. 97; 'Les anormaux, les malades, les invalides, les infirmes sont parfois tournés en dérision': Ménard, Philippe, Le Rire et le sourire dans le roman courtois au Moyen Age (Geneva, Droz, 1969), p. 158. 11. See Aubailly, Jean-Claude, 'Le Fabliau et les sources inconscientes du rire médiéval' in Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, XXX (1987), pp. 105-17. MUSIC AND SILENCE IN THE FABLIAUX 33

Their accidental death gives no one — not the woman who caused it nor, one suspects, the original audience — any thought, no more than if they were insects. Short of stature like so many musicians depicted in medieval manuscripts, their physical shortness mirrors the meager space allocated to them in society. Their death is therefore no great loss; it pushes these non-persons back into the margins, into oblivion, their 'proper' place. At the end of the story, the woman no longer needs the ersatz happiness momentarily glimpsed through music: released from her incarceration thanks to the accidental death of her jealous husband, she can now go out and taste the real thing. Music is thereby intimately bound up with the whole question of power and control, key themes in the luxuriant undergrowth of these stories. Some of the music featured in the fabliaux emanates from the Church, and is thus controlled and regimented: it is 'safe' music. Witness how the harmonious, elegant psalm-singing of cross-dresser, Frère Denise, reflects the extent to which she is convincing in her disguise as a monk, the ease with which she fits in to a pre-existing social order ('Frère Denise', NRCF VI 15-23). It is the music that is outside Church control that interests us here, however. In this context, 'Les Trois Dames de Paris' is of particular interest. (NRCF X 106-13). It tells the story of a group of married women ostensibly going on a pilgrimage but in reality heading off on a drinking binge. In the raucous singing of one of these drunk and disorderly women who wants to dance in the street, music becomes a manifestation of abandonment, of wildness, even more arresting in the contrast between the delicateness of the love-song she drunkenly attempts to sing ('amours, au vireli m'en vois', line 164) and the coarseness of the spectacle of a befuddled, middle-aged married woman cavorting down the street for all to see. The song she sings, a love-song designed for purposes of seduction, is linked to the dancing she attempts to execute. The ambivalence of medieval churchmen towards love-songs and dancing is, of course, well known. It is significant that medieval iconography represents the torturers at the Crucifixion as dancers'% and that medieval theatre imagines dancing by the forces of Hell. The message could not be clearer: a woman who indulges in singing love-songs and in dancing is up to no good: a dramatic warning to the menfolk

12. Richard, Rastall, The Sounds of Hell', in Davidson, Clifford & Seiler, Thomas H. (eds.), The Iconography of Hell (Kalamazoo, Medieval Institute Publications at Western Michigan University, 1992), pp. 102-31 (p. 120). 34 NEVILLE listening to keep their wives under control," a caution regarding what happens when women are allowed out into the public space where drink removes them from their husband's control, where money of their own gives them a measure of power and where song and dance intimate that they are agents of dark forces. It was inevitable that their release from strict male control would end in disaster.14 Music can thus represent a force that is outside normal human control. In fact, music can confer a power that is God-like. In Saint Pierre et le Jongleur music bestows God-like powers on a jongleur who finds himself in Hell. He pathetically offers to sing for Lucifer (singing for his supper), to please / appease his host. It is all he knows how to do (NRCFI 159). His song is all he has to save him from being thrown into the boiling pot of Hell. Music, therefore, constitutes a form of power, the only power of the powerless (the jongleurs) in that most unequal of power relationships: the devil and the damned. By the end of the story, however, the jongleur's music indirectly leads to the release from Hell of a whole host of lost souls, causing an enraged Lucifer to swear that Hell is henceforth out of bounds for all jongleurs: Vassal, dit il, vuidiez l'ostel ! Vuidiez l'ostel, gel vos commant ! Ge n'ai cure de tel sergant ! Jamais jongleor ne querrai Ne lor ligniee ne tenrai ; Ge n'en vueil nul, voisent lor voie ! Mais Dieus les ait, qui aime joie. Widiez l'ostel, de vos n'ai cure. (NRCF, l, p. 159, lines 402-9) (Clear off, vassal, get out, I'm telling you now! I can do without servants like you. I'll never go looking for another jongleur again, neither them or any of their race; I don't want a single one of them, let them go their own way! God can have them, he likes merriment. Get out of here, I'm not interested in the likes of you.) Thus, through his serendipitous ability to save the damned, the jongleur is inadvertently promoted to second in power only to God, le monde à l'envers indeed. Not only that, but Lucifer's vow never to allow

13. lbid.,p. 135. 14. See Neville, Grace, 'Short Shrouds and Sharp Shrews', in Meek, Christine & Simms, Katherine (eds.), The Fragility of her Sex: Medieval Irishwomen in their European Context (Dublin, Four Courts Press, 1996), pp. 87-100. MUSIC AND SILENCE IN THE FABLIAUX 35 another jongleur into Hell means that no matter how appalling their behaviour, the jongleurs will all live on forever in Heaven. They are freed from the obligation to avoid sin and to practise good works like everyone else in order to merit Heaven. The reward and punishment formula is now rendered obsolete for they can do as they please and still be guaranteed a place in Paradise. They have thus managed to rewrite God's rules for their own purposes. One senses that the jongleur's advocate and fellow raconteur, the fabliau storyteller, is himself only too happy to promote such a self-serving message. The jongleurs are not the only 'inappropriate' group on whom music confers extraordinary powers: it also empowers women. In Les Trois Boçus, a lonely woman trapped in a loveless marriage disobeys her jealous husband's express command and invites three hunchback musicians back to the family home in his absence (NRCF V 200-7). For her, these musicians and their music afford a glimpse of something better, an all-too-fleeting consolation in her life gone hideously wrong. In a society that loved contrast, the musicians represent a brief respite, warmth in a cold climate, for even the setting of this story is significant: a bleak Northern French wintry landscape and a house overlooking a freezing river (this is Brueghel territory). This act of blatant disobedience confirms the medieval cultural stereotype of women as willful, slippery, deceptive and diametrically opposed to the good woman, Mary who personified obedience, Mary who said 'be it done unto to me according to Thy word'. The anonymous fabliau woman is Everywoman, for all women — or so the sub-text goes — are uncontrollable, even when locked up (effectively under house arrest) in a tall house on top of steps with a husband sitting guard at the front door, as is the case in this story. Thus, music functions as the gateway to transgression, it facilitates the eternal Eve who is the main character in so many of these stories to break free from her husband's control and to subvert the 'natural' social order which proclaimed the husband to be head of the wife just as Christ was head of the Church. One of the most revealing instances of music as a cipher for control passing into 'undesirable' hands is to be found here in the age- old tale (popular in medieval stories and iconography) of Aristotle who succumbs to the charms of a young woman.15 She had set out to prove that no one, not even the mighty Aristotle, could resist her charms. In

15. 'D'Aristote et d'Alixandre', in Reid, T. B. W. (éd.), Twelve Fabliaux (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1958), pp. 70-82. 36 NEVILLE other words, to prove that she, a mere woman, was all-powerful. She sings him a love-song in order to ensnare him. Most interestingly, we are told that she sang to him in a low / deep voice ('chantant basset, non mie halt', line 300). Critics seem to have overlooked the significance of this tiny detail: all details are meaningful in a genre that was literally so short of space. (While the fabliaux can range in length from a few lines to over a thousand, the average length is about 350 lines.). What we have here may be a hint that her singing was, in fact, some kind of spell. In other words, what we have here may be a rehearsal of the cultural stereotype of women as possessing other powers, magical powers which yet again cast her as a free agent, functioning beyond male reach. Thus, when music is no longer on the margins but is brought into the very heart of the story, as is the case here where it triggers off the action, chaos ensues. Le monde à l'envers, yet again.16 It is perhaps no coincidence that Aristotle, the wise man literally brought low in this story, hails from the pre-Christian era: was the inference that good Christian men would be (should be?) too well informed ever to be so misguided? The perceived dangers to the soul represented by music are rehearsed periodically throughout the Middle Ages by successive Fathers of the Church from Augustine onwards. For them, music could become 'not a gateway to understanding the Eternal but the path to carnal vice.''7 Ambivalent even towards Church music, they reserved their special scorn for less lofty genres. Little wonder that medieval churchmen in France, Ireland18 and elsewhere tried periodically to ban certain types of music, and to regulate and control those whose music might make them free agents. Time and time again, the fabliaux recall efforts to suppress such music: in Rutebeuf's 'Frère Denise', a woman castigates a monk thus: Fauz papelars, fauz ypocrite, Fauce vie meneiz et orde ! [...]

16. On the prevalence of this motif in medieval and early modem France, see Zemon Davis. Natalie, Society and Culture in Early Modem France (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1965), pp. 124-51. 17. Rastall,o/;.c(7., p. 114. 18. On the substitution by Richard Ledrede, Bishop of Ossory, 1317-60, of Latin lyrics for French ones that were, to his mind, 'base, secular, and only fit for mummers (cantilenae teatrales, turpes et secularesY among the songs popular with his congregation, see Curtis, Edmund, 'The Spoken Languages of Medieval Inland', Studies, VIII (1919), pp. 234-54 (pp. 237-8). MUSIC AND SILENCE IN THE FABLIAUX 37

Vos deffendeiz aus jones gens Et les dances et les quaroles, Violes, tabours et citoles, Et toz deduiz de menestreiz. Or me dites, sir haut reiz, Menoit sainz Fransois teile vie ? (NRCF VI 21, lines 244-5, 258-63) (False churchman, false hypocrite, what a false, dirty life you lead. You forbid the young to have anything to do with dances and balls, fiddles, drums, zithers and the pleasures of the minstrelry. So tell me this much, you there shaved on top: was this the kind of life Saint Francis led?) In other words, the whole top-down impetus is to reduce people to silence. But rather than 'silence', the term 'silences' would be more appropriate here. For silence is multiple and multi-layered in the fabliaux. We are far from the companionable silence to be found in Marie de France (that 'grande silencieuse' in the words of the much regretted scholar, Pierre Gallais'"). Silences in the fabliaux are deep, full, meaningful, heavy and occasionally menacing. Here, silences are more eloquent than words could ever be. Silence surrounds individual words such as the vocabulary of the body and of sex, two of the main preoccupations in these texts (as in the fabliau significantly entitled 'De la Damoisele qui ne pooit oir parler de foutre', NRCF IV 80-3), as if the power associated with sex and the body could be kept under control if the words designating them could be silenced. Silence equates with invisibility and even non­ existence, in theory at any rate.2" At a most obvious level, silence functions in these texts as yet another cloak (along with lies, secrets, subterfuge and hiding places of many kinds) to mask transgressive behaviour (of which there is much in the fabliaux). Lovers and aspiring lovers creep about in silence, a sure sign that something underhand is going on. A lover enjoins a girl not to speak lest she alert her father. Lovers but also thieves distinguish themselves by their quietness: they shin up trees and steal eggs from

19. Gallais, Pierre, 'Le Silence de Marie de France', in Hommage à Jean-Charles Payen .farai chansoneta novele : essais sur la liberté' créatrice au Moyen Age (Caen, Centre de publications de l'Université de Caen, 1989), pp. 187-98. 20. The fabliaux, of course, take delight in demonstrating that such occultation is ultimately impossible as actions can and do take place independently of problematic words, however problematic. 38 NEVILLE underneath a bird in her nest all unawares. It is significant that specific animals are used as points of comparison for these silent transgressors: lovers and robbers slide silently around like wolves and water rats ('Barat et Hairnet', NRCF II 62-75), the wolf being the stealthiest and deadliest of all predators in the medieval psyche.21 Silence envelops thoughts: we are often presented with someone lost in thought or more precisely lost in scheming plans, for there is little innocence to be found anywhere in the fabliaux. There is also the silence of someone for whom words represent a waste of time — paradoxical in an oral culture that placed such high value on words and on their effective deployment. Thus the priest who does not want to stop to speak in his hurry to meet his mistress. He is 'shrouded in his black cloak, without uttering a word': Enbrunchié en sa chape noire, Qui par delez lui s'an passa. Onques un mot ne li sona ('Le Povre Clerc', NRCF V 263-9, lines 58-60) Silence, like the blackness of his cape, is an enveloping disguise. Black obliterates reality. However, this is not entirely effective as a passing student sees through the double disguise of cloak and silence, to guess what the priest is plotting. But there are other silences: the silence of puzzlement and uncertainty — a man falls silent because he is astonished, convinced that magic is at work ('Les Treces', NRCF VI 209-58) or because he has been confused and defeated by his wife ('Berangier au Lone Cul', NRCF IV 247-77). There is the silence of people whose relationship is so threadbare that while they engage in rich interior monologues and even though they share a bed, they find themselves with nothing to say to each other any longer ('Le Vilain Mire', NRCF II 338-47). This absence of words mirrors the emptiness at the heart of their marriage. Then there is the sullen silence of someone who has nothing further to say, who has run out of words, having been reduced to silence by a more eloquent opponent, but who nonetheless remains stubbornly unconvinced ('Les Trois Aveugles de Compiegne', NRCF II 176-84). At the heart of many fabliaux, in fact, is an argument, a bout of verbal jousting between opponents pitted against each other, aiming to dominate and defeat their adversary verbally if not physically, by

21. See Siciliano, Italo, François Villon et les thèmes poétiques du Moyen Age (Paris, Nizet, 1971; first published in 1934), pp. 7-8. MUSIC AND SILENCE IN THE FABLIAUX 39 reducing him to silence. The contestant can be man and wife, hence at the dénouement of one of these verbal duels the husband who gloats that he has managed to reduce his wife to silence. Gender essentialism in the Middle Ages saw speech and even wordiness as a defining characteristic of women. Consequently, by depriving his wife of speech, the husband has perpetrated on her a kind of gender mutilation: he has, in fact, metaphorically castrated her. Reducing women to their 'appropriate' lowly status may bring if not happiness at least a warm glow of retribution. The stakes can be even higher, however, the rewards even more dramatic: the victor in these verbal duels can even be a low-status vilain who manages to silence his opponents, saints who are lofty in status though pitifully low in eloquence, and to win for himself, through his superior powers of persuasion, the ultimate prize, entry into Heaven ('Le Vilain qui Conquist Paradis par Plait', NRCF V 34-8). Silence is often an indication of a power imbalance in a relationship, as people who are weak or dispossessed frequently do not or cannot speak." Witness the silent, wordless weeping of 'Frere Denise' who finds herself in a disastrous personal situation, having been in effect kidnapped by her abuser. In particular, big strong people can and do reduce their opponents to silence, depriving them of la parole in a society in which most communication was verbal, in which most people were illiterate. There is the silence, therefore, of someone who has literally been rendered speechless because he has been beaten up and strangled, physical violence being a constant reality throughout these texts ('La Borgoise d'Orliens', NRCF III 366-74). Extreme measures like strangling are not usually needed in order to silence someone, however. For there is the silence of hopelessness, the silence of a girl whose father is selling her off to an unsuitable husband but who knows that speaking out would be pointless, a waste of time. Her unwillingness and inability to use words to defend herself convey her clear realisation that her father's rights over her are paramount, beyond all discussion ('Le Vilain Mire', NRCF II 338-47). For dialogue would be impossible between two such people who may be biologically close but who could not be further apart or more unequal in status. The girl's wordlessness, her reduction to silence in the face of impending disaster indicates her lowly status in her own eyes as much as in the eyes of those around her.

22. As Blaise Pascal once wrote: 'le silence est la plus grande persécution.' 40 NEVILLE

In this context, too, there is the silence of fear, fear for one's life. In Le Vilain Mire, volunteers are sought but, like terrified children, take refuge in silence for fear of being burnt to death and having their ashes fed to the sick (NRCF II 338-47). Similarly, there is the frightened silence of the wife in 'Berangier au Lone Cul' whose husband intimidates her into silence (NRCF IV 270-77). Here, silence offers a temporary haven for her: were she to speak openly and honestly, her plight would surely be worsened. At the end of this story, however, it is the husband who is reduced to silence, a sign of his final and much deserved come-uppance. In fact, one is struck in the fabliaux by the frequency with which people are ordered to be silent. The power imbalances evident in medieval society are mirrored in these texts: priests flex their authority by ordering their parishioners to stay quiet ('Le Convoiteus et l'Envieus', NRCF VI 285-7); aristocrats frighten their underlings into silence ('Le Vilain au Buffet', NRCF V 305-11); a husband orders his wife not to speak ('Trubert', NRCF X 188-262); an old woman is ordered to be silent ('Le Prestre Teint', NRCF VII 319-30); in 'Le Vilain de Bailluel', a priest orders a man to be quiet and to close his eyes while he is making love with the man's wife (NRCF V 246-9): silence is thus like a form of blindness, an absence of sight. Gendered silence, too, is at work, whereby the medieval stereotype of women as eternal chatterboxes is reversed: witness the silent but ultimately triumphant wife in 'Berangier au lone cul'. Or, in a society that loved reversing power structures (especially in safe, delimited spaces like literature, games, ritual and festival: one thinks of the medieval festival of fools, charivari, etc.), a wife who orders her husband to be silent (NRCF IV 270-77). Then there is whispering: not silence but close. Whispering that lies somewhere between sound and silence is one of the most powerful and loaded forms of communication in these texts ('Frère Denise', NRCF VI 15-23); wives whisper to their lovers in case their husband hears ('Les Perdris', NRCF IV 8-12); a woman opens a door to her lover without making any noise ('La Borgoise d'Orliens', NRCF III 366-74); a priest whispers to his bishop lest his scheme to have his beloved donkey buried in consecrated ground is overheard ('Le Testament de l'Asne', NRCF IX 246-50). Transgressive behaviour in every case. In the fabliaux, paranoia seems rampant, the enemy is everywhere. Text after text hammers out the same simple warning: MUSIC AND SILENCE IN THE FABLIAUX 41 beware. Since language can give one away, it is best not to speak, not to say out loud what one is thinking lest the listener is thereby advantaged.r> Silence surrounds actions that must be kept hidden to safeguard someone's reputation. Fabliau after fabliau warns of the dangers of speech: thus the widely rehearsed story (found in the Decameron and elsewhere) of the wife on her deathbed who recalls a rich lifetime of extra-marital affairs to her confessor who is none other than her husband in disguise ('Le Chevalier qui Fist sa Fame Confesse', NRCF IV 236-43). The wise remain silent in order to hide their thoughts, their plans for revenge For silence conceals, and a good thing too: an interesting and unexpected moral, perhaps, in a society in which so much communication was by necessity verbal ('Le Prestre qui Manja les Mures',NRCF VII 200-2). Silence is sometimes, paradoxically, the destination of the storyteller. The wordsmith is torn between loquaciousness and silence: the loquaciousness (if not wordiness) of the storyteller who announces that he has been storytelling for two whole years — one imagines his audience drowning in an unquenchable torrent of words: Tant ai dit contes et fableaus Que i'ai trouué, uiez et noueaus : Ne finai passez sont dui an ! (NRCF IV 247-77, lines 1-3) (I have told as many stories and fabliaux, old and new, as I have found: for the past two years I haven't stopped!) — and the silence desired by the storyteller who reports to us his pains to tell his story as fast as possible, to convey the maximum in the minimum number of words. Faced with the need to describe a beautiful woman or a bed scene, many a fabliaux storyteller rushes on instead, explaining that he has no time to spare for such set pieces, and that in any case, since his listeners well know what both are like, such descriptions are superfluous. As if all superfluous words were an irritant, a sign of lack of mastery in his art. Or if, more serious, knowing language as well as he does, he knows that ultimately he

23. A sixteenth-century French adage stated: 'le plus sage se tait'; a seventeenth- century French proverb deemed 'bonnes sont les dents qui retiennent la langue', while a contemporaneous author, J. Grater, similarly proclaimed: 'En bouche close n'entre mouche' (see Dictionnaire de proverbes et dictons, Paris, Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1989, p. 62). Rivarol was of similar mind: 'Le silence n'a jamais trahi personne,' he once wrote. 42 NEVILLE knows it not at all, that it is powerful beyond imagination, that naively cosying up to it can lead to disaster and that the best relationship to have with it, in the last analysis, is one of informed wariness. Perhaps in a wider context, silence or, at the very least, absence of cacophony, is something to be desired. The racket made by a chevalier in one of the fabliaux is, after all, likened to the noise made by a hundred thousand devils: si fait noise et tel martire, qui l'oïst, il pooïst bien dire ce sont cent et mile deable. (NRCFIV 247-77, lines 185-9) (he created such noise and such a rumpus that anyone hearing him might well say it's a hundred thousand devils.) The Middle Ages imagined Hell to be a noisy place. Stage directions in medieval plays about Hell called inter alia for thunder, tempests, shouting and even medieval fireworks. Added to this was the belief that devils go about farting. Hell was even occasionally visualised as a kitchen where cooks (fire persons, of course) went around banging on pots and pans. Such dissonance, such undirected, unstructured, semantically meaningless sounds are inconceivable in Heaven which is all order and structure, the home of angelic music which echoes the divine music of the spheres.24 As Richard Rastall states in an article significantly entitled 'The Sounds of Hell', 'the Devil and his agents often dislike music, for they find it annoying or distressing [...] the forces of hell dislike order and clarity of structure — and therefore they hate music'.2' The subversive genre that is the fabliaux, with its rich intertextuality, its deep familiarity with and subversion of courtly literature and of religious texts like the liturgy and exempla, represents a kind of antidote to the more conventional genres of the period. The

24. See Baschet, J., 'Images du désordre et ordre de l'image : représentations médiévales de l'enfer', Médiévales, IV (1983), pp. 15-36. 25. Rastall, op. cit., pp. 112-13, my italics. Interestingly, in Irish folk belief, Hell was sometimes imagined as a silent place. Perhaps in a society that loved and respected the art of conversation, silence could be the ultimate punishment. At all events, such accounts of an eerily silent Hell occasionally bring Beckett's plays to mind. See Neville, Grace, 'L'essentiel est invisible aux yeux : les représentations de l'au-delà dans la tradition orale en Irlande', in Carpentier, Godeleine, (dir.), L'Irlande : imaginaire et représentation (Lille, Presses de l'Université de Lille. 1997), pp. 157-71. MUSIC AND SILENCE IN THE FABLIAUX 43 world they paint is less idealised than the one usually depicted by religious or courtly writers. In their welcome for the unwelcome — noise, the body, sexuality, the messiness of everyday life — they constitute a powerful celebration of life, a feisty refusal to allow death or the forces of darkness to diminish or encroach on us. Pascal's famous dicton positioned humanity somewhere on an axis between l'ange et la bête. In the significant lack of space they afford the reminder of Heaven that is music, just as in the silence towards which they hurtle, the fabliaux locate us closer to la bête than to l'ange. Thus, underneath comical and, at times, farcical story lines, they rehearse the major questions that have troubled humanity from time immemorial. At the same time, despite the bleakness of their conclusions, they manage to be immensely comical. Such paradoxes are not the least of their many attractions.

National University of Ireland, Cork