Sarah Kay the MONOLINGUALISM of the PARROT, OR the PROSTHESIS of ORIGINS, in LAS NOVAS DEL PAPAGAY

Sarah Kay

THE MONOLINGUALISM OF THE PARROT, OR THE PROSTHESIS OF ORIGINS, IN LAS NOVAS DEL PAPAGAY

here seems to be a return to Romance philology in Anglophone scholar- Tship. When the study of the medieval forms of modern foreign languages began in the United Kingdom about a century ago, the Romance languages taught at the University of Cambridge were French, Italian and Provençal; the same trio was honored in Oxford and London; at Manchester and other provincial universities, Provençal was less prominent than Anglo-Norman; but from about the 1970s, philological work in all these areas declined, and there was a turn in favor of literary, theoretical and cultural research. The Romanic Review has always been hospitable to medieval French and Provençal or, as I call it, Occitan studies, but its publications in these felds as far back as I can remember refect this literary or cultural emphasis; indeed, it was the leading journal of this new disciplinary turn.1 In recent years, under the infuence of postcolonial and translation theory, Anglophone critics of medieval French and Occitan have increasingly become interested in what I would see as the core concern of Romance philology: not just the development of the individual Romance languages but the relations between them and the movement of texts in these in-between zones. Thus there is an altogether new interest in Franco-Italian, in “the French of England,” and in the troubadour diaspora after the Albigensian Crusade. Renewed attention to the interactions between Anglo-Norman, French, Occitan, and Italian—medieval languages that were traditionally strong in the Anglophone academy—has also stimulated interest in Catalan as a conduit of mobility around the northern Mediterranean.2 My own recent work on the reception of troubadour poetry refects this Romance philological turn and, in a discussion directed largely to the past of the Romanic Review, I offer this essay as an indication of the kind of submis- sions it may receive in the future. In northern France and in Germany, troubadour song was imitated and assimilated by poets in their own languages,

1. See Jane Gallop’s contribution concerning the Romanic Review’s role in publishing medievalist feminist scholarship. 2. See Catherine Léglu, Multilingualism and Mother Tongue in Medieval French, Oc- citan and Catalan Narratives (University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 2010).

The Romanic Review Volume 101 Numbers 1–2 © The Trustees of Columbia University

Romanic101i01_02_BOOK.indb 23 8/31/11 3:43 PM 24 Sarah Kay

giving rise to important native traditions. But in what are now Spain and Italy, where many of the troubadours resettled after the Albigensian disaster, rather than this “nightingales’ way” of lyric re-creation, poets often composed in Occitan rather than in their own languages. And in Spain, Italy, and the Occitan homeland in between, there also developed a second form of reception in which excerpts of troubadour songs were repeated verbatim in works of an overwhelmingly scholastic or quasi-academic character—grammatical treatises, poetic biographies, and various forms of didactic text. The majority of these works are composed in the same Occitan literary koiné as the troubadours they quote, but most originate outside Occitania, are by authors whose frst language was Catalan and / or Italian, and were composed for readers or audiences who were not native Occitans either, but Catalan or Italian. Work- ing on this tradition of quotation, I fnd myself for the frst time in my life grappling with medieval Italian and Catalan, at least in their interface with Occitan. I have become a Romance philologist. Two hilarious Occitan short stories featuring a parrot as protagonist can be read as drawing attention to the issues raised by the “parroting” on which this northern Mediterranean practice of quotation relies. Las Novas del papagay or “Tale of the Parrot” and Frayre de Joy et Sor de Plazer, “Brother of Joy and Sister of Pleasure,” both present a male protagonist largely overshadowed by a parrot who serves as his factotum, especially in situations requiring diplomacy and courtship.3 By turns subordinate and managerial, merely repetitive and wildly imaginative, these parrots provide the main lines of communication in both stories, and are the essential vehicles without which their plots could not advance. Putting a parrot—as opposed to, say, a nightingale—in the driv- ing seat is both comic and unsettling.4 The parrot’s well-known capacity for mimicry turns a spotlight on quotation as a practice and raises questions about its nature. For while parrots can repeat what they have heard, it is unclear to what extent they know what they are saying. Their supposed lack of reason puts in doubt the dividing lines between speaking, quoting, repeating, and

3. Both stories are in Suzanne Méjean-Thiolier and Marie-Françoise Notz-Grob, Nou- velles courtoises: occitanes et françaises (Paris : Librairie Générale Française, 1997). Las Novas del papagay is also edited by Jean-Charles Huchet in Nouvelles occitanes du Moyen Âge (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1992), and it is this edition that I cite here. 4. “L’Avènement du perroquet au lieu du rossignol fgure emblématiquement le passage du lyrique au narratif,” in Jean-Michel Caluwé, Du chant à l’enchantement. Contri- bution à l’étude des rapports entre lyrique et narratif dans la littérature provençale du XIIIe siècle (Gent: Universiteit Gent, 1993), 178. On the broader implications of parrots, see Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Parrot Culture. Our 2,500-Year-Long Fascination with the World’s Most Talkative Bird (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004), especially chapters 1 and 2, and Paul Carter, Parrot (London: Reaktion Books, 2006).

Romanic101i01_02_BOOK.indb 24 8/31/11 3:43 PM The prosthesis of origins in LAS NOVAS DEL PAPAGAY 25

merely copying. Some medieval authors, however, saw parrots as possessing wisdom and profundity, as well as powers of imitation. (Boehrer 7 and 26–33) Rather than not knowing what they say, maybe parrots say the things we do not know we think. As exotic birds, parrots are also an apt representation of the otherness of literary Occitan to those who compose in it. Not only was Old Occitan extensively used by Catalans and Italians, it also had to some extent to be learned even by troubadours from Occitan-speaking areas, being remarkably standardized regardless of their region of origin and not entirely native to any. The parrot raises the spectre, then, that all troubadours are parrots, and not just those writers who quote from troubadour poems. This paper concentrates on the Novas del papagay, which seems to have been composed around 1250. Only one version includes an author’s name, Arnaut de Carcassès, the surname suggesting an origin either in the immedi- ate region of Carcassonne or else in a village thirty km to the south of it:5 in either case, in territories that were ruled by the Crown of Barcelona-Aragon until 1276 and that lay close to the linguistic frontier between Occitan and Catalan, probably just on the Occitan side of it. The version with Arnaut’s signature is found in the troubadour chansonnier R, which also transmits three Occitan novas by the Catalan savant Raimon Vidal de Besalú.6 Since it was Raimon Vidal who pioneered the use of quotation, and did so extensively in two of these novas,7 the R version, at least, of the Novas del papagay may appear specifcally to address this literary vogue and its Catalan associations. At this point I will summarize the novas’ plot, a task I wish were more straightforward, since the tale exhibits the kind of variance associated with the fabliaux8 and the tendency to fragmentation characteristic of Occitan narrative verse.9 Versions are found in fve manuscripts, four of which are the troubadour chansonniers R, J, G and D, and the ffth Florence Riccardiana 2756, a late thirteenth-century Italian manuscript of didactic works, at the

5. Commune of la Roque de Fa, see René Lavaud and René Nelli, Les Troubadours, vol II (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1966) 214; for more on the history of this hamlet, see René Nelli, “Arnaut de Carcassès (XIIIe s.), La nouvelle du perroquet,” Cahiers de la pensée française 2 (1941): 159–77. 6. Paris, BnF, fr. 22543, copied in the region of Toulouse in the frst quarter of the fourteenth century. 7. Raimon Vidal’s novas containing troubadour quotations are Abril issia e mai in- trava and En aquel temps c’om era jays, the latter being also found in variant forms in other manuscripts; Raimon Vidal earlier used quotations in his grammatical treatise Las Razos de trobar. 8. Alberto Limentani, L’Eccezione narrativa. La Provenza medievale et l’arte del rac- conto (Turnin: Einaudi, 1977) 61. 9. Cf. the romance of Jaufre, likewise excerpted in chansonnier manuscripts.

Romanic101i01_02_BOOK.indb 25 8/31/11 3:43 PM 26 Sarah Kay

end of which have been transcribed, as though they were prose, twenty-seven lines of Chrétien’s Cligés and around forty-two lines of the Papagay; I shall call this manuscript F.10 Chansonniers R and J contain the longest versions. Both begin in the same way: the narrator overhears a parrot in a garden wooing a lady on behalf of its master, the knight Antiphanor, son of a king.11 The lady refuses all advances on the grounds that she has a husband whom she loves, but the parrot, by means of a bravura rhetorical performance, wins her round. At the point where the lady consents to return Antiphanor’s love, the versions diverge. In J the parrot goes back with the good news to his master and hurries him off to the garden. Briefy affrming their love for one another, lover and lady kiss and “feron de lor solatz” (“took their solace,” J 167) until the parrot returns to warn them of the husband’s return. Compelled to separate, they promise to meet again, Antiphanor pronouncing a ffty-six-line oath swearing to love the lady faithfully. Such a long speech is surprising, given the husband’s threatening proximity, and feels disproportionate in a text that is, in total, only 245 lines long. In this version, then, the parrot speaks frst, set- ting up the subsequent love scene in which the human beings speak about and perform their love, represented as a form of fn’amor. In R, the narrative remains more focused on the parrot. When the lady has agreed to requite Antiphanor’s love, she entrusts it with love tokens for its master, which the parrot duly conveys. It then urges Antiphanor to seal the deal and meet the lady. A good way to distract the husband’s attention, the parrot suggests, would be to set fre to his castle; Antiphanor agrees and sends the parrot back to the lady to confrm the details of their rendezvous. The parrot then executes its cunning plan, fying to the castle carrying Greek fre in a cauldron clutched in its little toes. The castle blazes merrily, the lovers meet in

10. For R, see above, note 7; I quote the R text from Huchet (above, note 2). Chan- sonnier J (Florence, Magliaechiano 776, F 4), copied in Occitania in the fourteenth century, is quoted from the transcription by E. Stengel, “Studi sopra i canzoniere pro- venzali di Firenze e di Roma,” Rivista di Filologia romanza 1 (1872): 20–45 and 36–9. For chansonnier G (Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, R. 71 Sup.), fourteenth- century northern Italian, I quote the diplomatic transcription by G. Bertoni, Il canzoniere provenzale della Biblioteca Ambrosiana R71 in Gesellschaft für romanischen Literatur, XXVIII (Dresden: 1912), especially pp. 424 -7, 391–3. In the case of D (a composite Italian chansonnier manuscript, the core of which is mid-thirteenth century), I use Il canzoniere provenzale estense. Riprodotto per il centenario della nascita di Giulio Bertoni, introduction by D’Arco Silvio Avalle and Emanuele Casamassima (Modena: Mucchi, 1979–82) fo. 216r col.a—b. F (Florence, Riccardiana 2756) is transcribed in A.Wesselofsky, “Un nouveau texte des Novas del papagaya,” Romania VII (1878): 327–9. 11. I refer to the parrot as “it” to minimize ambiguity, but the bird is really more of a “he,” being much closer to Antiphanor than to the lady.

Romanic101i01_02_BOOK.indb 26 8/31/11 3:43 PM The prosthesis of origins in LAS NOVAS DEL PAPAGAY 27

the garden, but the fre is eventually put out and the parrot warns them they must part. The lady exhorts Antiphanor to be valiant and he departs cheerfully with the parrot. The narrator signs his name and declares he composed this tale as a warning to husbands who try to lock up their wives. As compared with the version in J, the R text reduplicates meetings between the lovers and the parrot and records almost no exchanges between the lovers themselves. More fabliau-esque and less courtly than in J, the lovers’ meeting in R is humorously paralleled by the burning castle and, when the “fre” has been put out, they seem quite content to separate with no thought of a future meeting. The way the story develops in R is more familiar to modern readers since R is the base of most editions, but the J version is better represented in medieval copies. In G, the tale ends just after the parrot’s return to Antiphanor with the expectation that the lovers will meet; the motif of the gifts is absent, aligning G with the version in J. A peculiarity of G is that Antiphanor’s long address to the lady, which forms the end of the story in J, is copied as a separate text a few folios before the beginning of the tale. As this passage is entirely in the frst person, when severed from the novas, it appears completely freestanding, like a salut. The same passage is copied in precisely this form in D, which otherwise contains none of the rest of the novas. The short extract in the only non chansonnier manuscript, F, corresponds to the frst eighty or so lines of the common beginning, but is closer to J and G than to R. Most of the scholarship on these variant versions has been absorbed with arguing which is the original version, but my interest is in the different insights they afford with regard to the status of the Occitan discourse of fn’amor in general and of its quotation in particular. All the good parrot jokes having been taken by other authors, I chose a title that makes explicit the way these questions will be pursued. Reference to Jacques Derrida’s essay Le Monolin- guisme de l’autre ou La Prothèse d’origine12 might seem misplaced given that the most recent article on the novas actually appeared in a volume entitled Le Plurilinguisme au Moyen Âge.13 In it, Suzanne Méjean demonstrates that parrots in medieval fctions often display knowledge of foreign languages, especially Occitan. But my approach, though different from Méjean’s, is not incompatible with it, since monolingualism for Derrida does not mean having only one language, even though some of the most moving (and easily

12. (Paris: Galilée, 1996). 13. Suzanne Thiolier-Méjean, “Le Langage du perroquet dans quelques textes d’oc et d’oïl,” Le Pluringuisme au Moyen Âge. De Babel à la langue une, orient-occident, éd. Suzanne Thiolier-Méjean et Claire Kappler (Paris: Harnattan, 2009) 267–99; this replaces her earlier “Le Motif du perroquet dans deux nouvelles d’oc,” Miscellanea M ediaevalia. Mélanges offerts a Philippe Ménard, éd. Jean-Claude Faucon, Alain Labbé, and Danielle Quéruel, vol. 2 (Paris: Champion, 1998) 1355–75.

Romanic101i01_02_BOOK.indb 27 8/31/11 3:43 PM 28 Sarah Kay

intelligible) parts of his book are those where he talks about the suppres- sion of every language but French from his North African upbringing.14 By the “monolingualism of the other,” Derrida means more fundamentally that any language, once one is speaking it, appears as that one which defnes the speaker and yet to which the speaker is other. Every language has, for the one who speaks it, who says je in it, who is offered the lure of identifcation by it, the impact of language as such; this is why, as Derrida keeps stressing, culture is, as such, inherently colonial. But when one identifes oneself in a language that, when one speaks it, has this blinding and traumatic impact of being the language that defnes one’s self and one’s world, this does not make those def- nitions or identifcations secure, nor does it confer any defnitive status on the language in question.15 The effect of speaking a language is always uncanny because it is both the only home one has, and yet one is never at home in it:

Il n’y avait pas de je pensable ou pensant avant cette situation étran- gement familière et proprement impropre (uncanny, unheimlich) d’une langue innombrable. (Derrida 55)

The one of monolingualism is, as this last quotation states, not an arithmeti- cal one (one language versus many languages), but the fact of alienation by the one element that seems to offer the promise of identity: the language one happens to (have to) speak.16 Language is a “prosthesis of origin” in the sense that, while it appears the source of identities of all kinds, it is also an alien appendage, a contrivance that comes from without. I propose to see the parrot in Las Novas del papagay as a comic prosthesis and a parodic monolinguist. The fact of its being a parrot rather than a nightingale draws attention to the otherness of language to the speaker, to

14. “[. . .] je n’ai qu’une langue et ce n’est pas la mienne, ma langue propre m’est une langue inassimilable. Ma langue, la seule que je m’entende parler et m’entende à parler, c’est la langue de l’autre” (Derrida 47). 15. “On se fgure toujours que celui ou celle qui écrit doit savoir dire je. En tout cas la modalité identifcatrice doit être déjà ou désormais assurée: assurée de la langue et dans sa langue” (Derrida 55). “Il se serait alors formé, ce je, dans le site d’une situation introuvable, renvoyant toujours ailleurs, à autre chose, à une autre langue, à l’autre en général. Il se serait situé dans une expérience insituable de la langue, de la langue au sens large, donc, de ce mot” (Derrida 56). 16. “Il est impossible de compter les langues, voila ce que je voulais suggérer. Il n’y a pas calculabilité dès lors que l’Un d’une langue, qui échappe à toute comptabilité arithmétique, n’est jamais déterminé. Le un de la monolangue dont je parle et celui que je parle ne sera donc pas une identité arithmétique, ni même une identité tout court” (Derrida 55).

Romanic101i01_02_BOOK.indb 28 8/31/11 3:43 PM The prosthesis of origins in LAS NOVAS DEL PAPAGAY 29

the fabrication in language of identities and desires, and to the contingency whereby the language one happens to speak—whichever it may be—has the impact of language as such, the “one” language in which the speaker appears as a “one.” A language of prestige culture, as Occitan clearly was—even if it did not have any colonial power behind it—seems especially to have imposed itself, among available languages, as the one in which one says je in order to speak of one’s desire. When writers quote the troubadours, the effect of encountering one’s desire in a borrowed form is frequently uncanny, but when the fgure recycling amorous discourse is a parrot, such uncanniness balloons into comedy. All versions of the Novas del papagay share the frst panel constituted by the parrot’s wooing of the lady, and I will look frst at this common element. Our entire knowledge of Antiphanor in this frst part of the text comes from the parrot’s representation of him as “the best knight in the world” who has, the parrot claims, already fought to demonstrate his love for the lady. Initially the parrot is represented as the mere intermediary of a message that alleg- edly originated with Antiphanor (“Messatje soy [. . .] Antiphanor [. . .] vos tramet salutz [. . .] e prega.us per mi,” “I am a messenger [. . .] Antiphanor [. . .] sends you greetings [. . .] and asks you through me,” R 8–16; JGF).17 Antiphanor is, says the parrot, sick with love that only the lady can heal (this last motif is more extensively elaborated in JGF), a message hardly striking for its originality.18 Soon, however, the parrot starts embroidering independently: “Encara.us dic may, per ma fe / per que.l devetz aver merce: / car, si.eus play, morir vol per vos / may que per autre vieure joios” (“And I tell you further, by my faith, why you should have mercy on him: for if it pleases you (or rather: thus I pledge to you, < plevir), he prefers to die for you rather than to love happily through someone else,” R 19–22; JF19). Only at this point does the lady respond, and clearly she is impressed: “Trop me paretz enrazonatz” (“You seem to me extremely / excessively good at arguing,” R 26; with less

17. This form of reference to the text provides line numbers in R (as given in Huchet’s edition) and then indicates whether the same lines are found in the other manuscripts. 18. While many have noted that the parrot has the role of bird messenger familiar from lyric (and perhaps with Oriental antecedents), the analogy with clerk-knight debates in which the value of the knight as a lover is championed by a parrot, while the clerk’s cause is upheld by a nightingale, has been overlooked. In such debates tradition, written by clerks, the nightingale wins, whereas the knight seems gawdy and shallow—a possible implication of the novas swaggering opening. That the parrot is a defating image of knighthood is an idea explored especially in the R version which foregrounds Antiphanor’s role as a knight, with the parrot as his faithful companion; in J, the protagonist appears predominantly as a courtier and suitor. 19. The equivalent lines are absent from G.

Romanic101i01_02_BOOK.indb 29 8/31/11 3:43 PM 30 Sarah Kay

reservation in JG: “Molt mi pares enrazonatz”). Now that the lady has been drawn into argument, the parrot is forced to continue improvising. To each rhetorical sally, the lady responds with humorous admiration. The parrot is so eloquent, she says, that if it were a knight, it would have no shortage of girlfriends! But she still has no intention of betraying her husband. Finally, the parrot delivers its winning speech (R 66–90; JG), a virtuoso performance that begins with reformulations of some of its previous inducements, then continues with new ones fred off in a rapid salvo: loving Antiphanor in secret need not prevent the lady loving her husband in public; she is obliged to have mercy on a love-struck suitor (both these arguments have been made before); she should take heed of the exemplary love of Blanchefeur, Iseut and Thisbe; it will do her no good if Antiphanor pines away; on the contrary, the god of love will punish her, and it, the parrot, will blacken her name as much as it can.20 The parrot here acts as a jongleur-troubadour, capable of reciting songs of courtship, but also in command of a repertoire of narrative works and a satirical tongue that it would not hesitate to use against her. In the face of this rhetorical barrage, the lady gives in, repeating her earlier admiration for the parrot’s eloquence and even repeating some of its words as she does so: “Encara.us dic que.m meravelh / car vos tan gent [sabetz] prejar” (“And I tell you further that I am amazed you know how to woo so well,” R 92–3; JG). She is explicit that the parrot’s wooing is the reason for her love: “Pels votres precx, l’amaray / et ja de luy no.m partiray” (“As a result of your entreaty I will love him and never leave him,”R 102–3; JG21). The clichés in this episode are pronounced as much by the characters as by the parrot and the whole of this opening panel confrms what Paul Carter says in his study Parrot, “We persist in thinking that parrots merely mimic us, when their mimicry is a way of telling us that we are mimics” (8). In J, where the scene of the messenger is followed by the encounter between the lovers, we might expect to have the copy embodied by the parrot in the opening scene opposed to the model of real human courtship in the second, but this expectation is disappointed. Although the parrot claimed just to be a messenger, the feelings and attitudes of both humans turn out to be heavily mediated by it. The lady opens her meeting with Antiphanor by telling him that if she has formed an excellent impression of him, it is thanks to the parrot:

Gran tems ha, non ui caualier, / tant mi plagues, si dieu mi sal, / per uostre papagai uos ual, / car hieu uos uei tan plazentier / pero, quar

20. Variants for this passage imply that the parrot’s slanders in JG will be confned to the facts, but in R only by what it is capable of inventing. 21. Huchet here re-orders the lines in conformity with JG. This passage falls after the end of the F excerpt.

Romanic101i01_02_BOOK.indb 30 8/31/11 3:43 PM The prosthesis of origins in LAS NOVAS DEL PAPAGAY 31

es tan ben parlier, / e per lo be que.m di de uos, / e quar es tan bel e tan pros / farai uostre comandamen. (J 135–43) I’ve not for a long time seen a knight / who pleased me as much, so save me God, / you have your parrot to thank for this, / that (or for?) I see you so agreeable / and so, because you are so eloquent, / and because of the good things it told me about you, / and because you are so handsome and valiant / I will do your command.

The syntax of this passage is left somewhat foating in Stengel’s punctuation, but it appears that the knight’s pleasing looks were sculpted in the lady’s mind by the parrot (“per uostre papagai uos ual / car hieu uos uei tan plazentier”) before they could be confrmed by her observation (“quar es tan bel et tan pros”), whereas the parrot’s eloquence in speaking well of his master (“per lo ben que.m di de uos”) was frst of all an attribute of Antiphanor himself (“quar es tan ben parlier”). Antiphanor declares he will love the lady loyally and offers to swear to that effect. This convinces her enough to dispense him from further oaths, because she has already decided that he is “cortes, sauis, e pros” (“courtly, wise, and valiant,” J 162), another phrase that rings as a redite, this time of her earlier recognition of his qualities as communicated by the parrot. We may know in theory that all discourse is pervaded by cita- tionality, but having its effects concentrated in a parrot that keeps alternating between the roles of ventriloquist and dummy so that one can no longer tell which is which, delivers that recognition with a shock of laughter. The oath that ends this version of the tale, but is found elsewhere as an independent text, expresses the fdelity that Antiphanor earlier offered to swear, but did not;22 postponing it allows the lovers to kiss and embrace in the little time that remains before the parrot calls a halt on the grounds of the husband’s return. However, since the husband never appears, his impending arrival may be a complete fction. The parrot is such an adept manager that its role through- out has been to create the identities that it purports to mediate between, in this case involving non-consummation on the part of the fn aman. The tale’s characters are produced within the “monolingualism of the parrot” and its discourse is a hilarious “prosthesis of origin” for the identities and desires that they profess. The development of the second half of the story in the R version retains the parrot as the primary protagonist. It begins with a delicious display of the parrot’s proverbial skill as a mimic. The lady entrusts it with traditional

22. Cf. the arguments of Jules Coulet, “Sur la nouvelle provençale Du Papagai,” Revue des Langues Romanes XLV (5e série VII) (1902): 289–330, who contends that the original form of the novas is that of J t without this fnal salut.

Romanic101i01_02_BOOK.indb 31 8/31/11 3:43 PM 32 Sarah Kay

love gifts: “E portatz li.m aquest anel / qu’el mon non cug n’aya pus bel, / ab sest cordo ab aur obrat, / que.l prenga per m’amistat” (“So take him this ring for me, that I don’t believe can be bettered anywhere in the world, together with this cord worked with gold, for him to take out of friendship for me,” R 104–7), and the parrot duly delivers them, repeating word for word, “E tramet vos aquest anel / qu’el mon non cug n’aya pus bel, / ab sest cordo ab aur obrat, / que.l prendatz per m’amistat” (R 136–9). Such a direct quotation indicates that this version at least might be guying Raimon Vidal’s novas with their scholarly, verbatim quotations from the troubadours. However, if the lady gives the parrot full instructions for it to repeat, the material Antiphanor gives his factotum to communicate back to the lady is much less polished. All he can say is, “Tornatz prymier al parlamen / a lieys parlar, si a vos platz, / doncx sestas razos li mostratz” “Go back and talk to her again and tell her these things we have spoken about” (R 153–5). Antipha- nor’s speech relies on earlier speech and in particular, his phrase “sestas razos” refers back to the parrot’s own suggestion that it could set fre to the husband’s castle so as to create an opportunity for the lady and Antiphanor to meet. Antiphanor’s commission, then, adds nothing to what the parrot has already said: the parrot has no one to quote but itself, and Antiphanor, as the name may imply, is merely the parrot’s echo, or antiphon.23 Keen to avoid any slip- up on the part of these unimaginative human beings, the parrot spells out how Antiphanor can beneft from the proposed diversion: “E can lo foc er abrassatz, / poiretz intrar per espats, / ab vostra dompna domenjar / e lieis tener et abrassar.” “And when the fre is set alight you can easily get in, pay court to your lady, and hold and kiss her” (R 148–51). It is even more explicit with the lady, giving her step-by-step instructions on how to admit Antiphanor to the garden and take “delieg” with him in a bed. In the passage just quoted (lines 148–51), the parrot not only plans to set fre the castle, it also establishes the fre as metaphor for the lover’s sexual activity by means of the pun on abrassatz, meaning frst “set alight” and then “embrace.” The resulting identifcation of fn’amor with arson is hilarious. Is it even possible that the much repeated word foc, in the succession “metre foc” (253, 259), “Al foc!” (260), “E.l foc fo totz adormatatz” (275), “que.l foc es mortz” (283), recalls the verb fotre? In any case, insistence on the sequence “set fre,” “fre!”, “the fre receded,” “the fre was dead,” with its exact paral- lel in the actions of the lovers, all too manifestly mimics the successive phases of their encounter. Whereas in the J version of the novas, the parrot shapes the words, perceptions, and emotions of the humans, in R, it also shapes their desires, leads them to perform them, and exhibits what is most intimate about

23. My thanks to Elena Russo for this suggestion.

Romanic101i01_02_BOOK.indb 32 8/31/11 3:43 PM The prosthesis of origins in LAS NOVAS DEL PAPAGAY 33

them in a farcical external display. Muscle-bound and inarticulate, Antiphanor in particular has his identity shaped by the parrot as his “prosthesis of origin” and comic double. While the novas’ content laughs at our uncanny relation to language and desire, its diverse manuscript situations discreetly evoke the troubadour diaspora and the plurilingualism of the northern Mediterranean. The monolingualism of the parrot in this context recalls Carter’s observation that parrots only talk in captivity: “It’s not all joking with parrots. They are the bad conscience of colonialism” (18). Composed in Occitan, but within Catalan territory, close to the Catalan frontier, and possibly in dialogue with a Catalan author, the tale is placed in relation with Catalan-authored works in R, a manuscript copied in the south of France. The context raises the question how much “Occitan” literature is in fact “Catalan literature” written in the Occitan koiné. J, likewise copied in Occitania, is the only other manuscript to contain a complete version of the story. The other manuscripts, all containing parts of the novas were copied in Italy, thus bringing a third language to bear, at least implicitly; here “Occitan literature” is on a path of convergence with “Italian literature” written in Occitan. In D, additionally, the salut-like extract from the novas is drawn into relation with French, since it is copied in a part of this chansonnier that also contains several French saluts and just before the part of the same codex known to trouvère scholars as French chansonnier H. The context in F is the most diverse of all, since the extract found there, copied in a space at the end of a compilation of Latin and French didactic texts, is juxtaposed with the excerpt from Cligés in such a way as to potentially draw attention to their common use of Greek protagonists.24 Indeed, the text of the F excerpt is in itself distinctly hybrid or, as we used to say, corrupt, the parrot’s frst words to the lady being full of Italianisms: “Donna, Dieu vu sal, / Messagier sum, ne vu sia mal; / Del miglior cabbaler cum fus.” Such linguistic diversity underlines that “monolingualism,” in the sense borrowed from Derrida, is not a numeri- cal unity, and that the identity it promises is a lure: when the parrot in F says “messagier sum,” its “one” identity is strikingly plurilingual. This mish-mash may seem comically appropriate coming from a parrot.25 But such passages also put in question the linguistic divisions we usually rely on. They make me wonder whether, within Romance, what look to us like hybrid or creolized forms were not in fact the norm to which more standardised literary koinés were a cultivated exception. In any case, they counsel caution as to how much

24. The parrot’s use of Greek fre may resonate with the choice of a Greek name for the protagonist, Antiphanor; like the parrot, the lover is an exotic presence in the Oc- citan text. 25. Cf. passages quoted by Méjean, “Le langage du perroquet,” 273 and 274.

Romanic101i01_02_BOOK.indb 33 8/31/11 3:43 PM 34 Sarah Kay

weight to give words like “Occitan” or “Italian” or “Catalan” or “French,” given the constant exchanges and convergences between them. Another respect in which the transmission of the novas corresponds to the “parrot factor” within it is the extent to which its copies are subject to being excerpted and / or copied in the vicinity of other excerpts. A term that my research on quotation has led me to distrust is the word “fragment,” since it puts in a single category all copies that, in the editors’ view, for whatever reason, fall short of “wholeness.” In R and J we have “whole” texts of the Novas del papagay, in D and F we have “fragments,” and in G there are two “fragments” that almost make up the “whole” in J—unless it is G that contains two whole texts and J that has sutured an originally independent salut to the novas in a process not of fragmentation but agglutination.26 It is striking, given this variation in the novas’ transmission, that three of the chansonniers that contain (parts of) it also transmit “fragments” of a different kind: anthologies of lyric coblas. One of the components that make up chansonnier D is the forilegium of Ferrari da Ferrara, a collection of mainly one- or two-stanza excerpts from courtly cansos that purports (according to the prefacing vida) to distil the essence of the songs concerned. And in both J and G, the novas is compiled adjacent to anthologies of coblas which, in this case, are closely related to each other since both contain many of the same stanzas, favor satirical over courtly pieces, and combine extracts from whole songs (or coblas triadas) alongside scurrilous isolated coblas (or coblas esparsas). The early assembling of such forilegia of single and / or excerpted stanzas is a peculiarity of the transmission of Occitan lyric.27 Diverse though they are, these anthologies are clearly related to the practice of quoting from the troubadours; indeed, in manuscript H, they are even accompanied by indications as to how they might be used.28 Thus, whereas in R the Papagay is copied alongside the two novas of Raimon Vidal that contain quotations from the troubadours, in the three other chansonnier manuscripts that transmit it, it is more or less closely associated with the raw material of potential quotation. Its manuscript contexts are thus implicated in exactly the same “problematic of the parrot” as the Papagay itself since they put in question distinctions between speaking, quoting, repeating, and copying. Even the material transmission of the story

26. The view that the salut is an independent text, frst put forward by Bartsch, is defended by Coulet, “Sur la nouvelle provençale,” 293. 27. Maria Luisa Meneghetti, “Les Florilèges dans la tradition lyrique des troubadours,” Lyrique romane médiévale: la tradition des chansonniers. Actes du colloque de Liège 1989 (Liège : Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de l’Université de Liège, 1991) 43–56. 28. Elizabeth W. Poe, Compilatio. Lyric texts and prose commentaries in troubadour manuscript H (Vat. Lat. 3207), Edward C. Armstrong monographs on medieval literature 11 (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 2000) 191–249.

Romanic101i01_02_BOOK.indb 34 8/31/11 3:43 PM The prosthesis of origins in LAS NOVAS DEL PAPAGAY 35

confrms Carter’s observation that “[parrots’] mimicry is a way of telling us that we are mimics.”29 Given that all these anthologies of coblas can be traced back to Italy, they further expose the precarious and contingent nature of the “one” of the monolanguage one happens to speak. The Novas del papagay is thus a window onto Romance philology. In speaking about it at this conference hosted by Columbia University’s Department of French and Romance Philology, I hope to have indicated how some current work is trying to live up to its name and, among our tributes to the Romanic Review, to have shown how “Romanic” languages are frmly back on the medievalist agenda.

Princeton University

29. See note 23.

Romanic101i01_02_BOOK.indb 35 8/31/11 3:43 PM Romanic101i01_02_BOOK.indb 36 8/31/11 3:43 PM