INTRODUCTION 1. the Expression “Minimizing None of Its Charm” Is

Notes INTRODUCTION 1. The expression “minimizing none of its charm” is from Nancy Mitford’s trans- lation of La Princesse de Clèves (36). 2. See especially Denis de Rougemont and René Nelli, whose books, respectively, Love in the Western World (1939) and L’Érotique des troubadours (1963) are foun- dational to the study of medieval philosophies of love. Although I take issue with many of their conclusions, especially concerning the presence of women in romantic love narratives, this study owes much to their scholarship, especially in regard to the relationship between the troubadours and Catharism. 3. In an interview with Frédéric Beigbeder published in Le Figaro littéraire (March 9, 2000), Sollers responded to the question “wouldn’t you rather be having lunch right now with a woman rather than with me,” with the following remark: “A man is a woman like the others” (Un homme est une femme comme les autres) (8). It can be said that this comment confirms the spurious meaning of “heterosexuality” for a man who writes novels whose subject is desire. 4. See Carol Siegel’s work on modern forms of homophobia and their connec- tion to cultural aesthetics, particularly a paper on Lawrence’s Lost Girl, read at the 1995 MLA, and another article in Genders (1995), “Compulsory Hetero- phobia:The Aesthetics of Seriousness and The Production of Homophobia.” In the paper on Lost Girl, Siegel makes the point that heterophobia is essential to the construction of homophobia in contemporary feminist theory, which “retains (from psychoanalytic theory) homosexuality as a repository for histor- ically forbidden desires” (3). 5. My discussions of how literature provides models for social behavior are framed by the theories of mimetic and triangular desire developed by René Girard in Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Deceit, Desire and the Novel)(1960).Two of Girard’s theoretical tenets are important to my own work: first, his argument that the desire that governs romantic passion is triangular in that its structure inevitably involves two men who desire the same object; second, his belief that 215 NOTES models of desire in literature create desire in the reader. To expand on Girard’s first premise, it is not a woman that men desire, but each other’s desire and each other’s subjectivity. Girard does not pursue the issue of the illusory nature of the woman in Western representations of desire, nor the implications of this phenomenon for women’s access to heterosexual desire. 6. In “Compulsory Heterosexuality” (1980) Adrienne Rich calls on feminists to “take the step of questioning heterosexuality as a ‘preference’ or ‘choice’ for women” (51). “The rewards will be great,” she writes, “a freeing-up of thinking, the exploring of new paths, the shattering of another great silence, new clarity in personal relations” (51). At one point in the development of a political position, Rich proposed that heterosexually identified women make the distinction—for purposes of speculation—between “lesbian existence,” by which she means “consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman,” and the “lesbian continuum.” Rich later reneged on her invitation to heterosexually- defined women to place themselves on the lesbian continuum, defined by Rich as “a range—through each woman’s life and throughout history—of woman- identified experience.” Her reason: because it offers to “women who have not yet begun to examine the privileges and solopsisms of heterosexuality ...a safe way to describe their felt connections with women, without having to share in the risks and threats of lesbian existence” (51, 73). By closing ranks to exclude heterosexually-identified women from the range of woman-identified experience, I fear that Rich replicates their exclusion from subjectivity and desire in the so-called heterosexual narrative tradition which she condemns. 7. The work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Between Men (1985) and Epistemology of the Closet (1990) moves Girard’s theories into the politics of sexual identity by stressing the homosexuality of the triangular structure. I, too, challenge the heterosexuality of desire in Western representation, but argue that desire in romantic love narratives is not homosexual either. It is rather an expression of joi, a complex poetic rendering of the erotic pleasure of writing developed by the troubadours in twelfth-century Provence. 8. Courtly love is a term coined by Gaston Paris to embrace the various philosophies of heterosexual love in the Middle Ages. Courtly love is a composite of sex roles, codes and rituals derived from Fin’Amors, a specific twelfth-century philosophy of ideal love invented by the troubadours of Occitania. The rituals of Fin’Amors, which include the asag or love test, and the exchange of hearts involving the androgynous fusion of the lovers, are inextricable from the structure of desire in romantic love narratives. For a complete history and analysis of the poetics of Fin’Amors, popularly known as courtly love since Paris’s coinage in 1883, see especially Nelli, L’Érotique des troubadours (1963). My bibliography also contains an extensive list of related works. 9. Nelli describes the homosexualization of heterosexuality in troubadour poetry throughout L’Érotique des troubadours. See especially the extensive treatment of the ritual of “the exchange of hearts”, and the conclusion (209–220, 338). For 216 NOTES the best example of Nelli’s application of Fin’Amors to contemporary eroti- cism, see “Tirésias ou les métamorphoses de la passion” (1980). Because his writings have not been translated into English, Nelli’s work is not often cited by anglophone scholars and critics. It is also important to address a misconception. While it may be true that French medieval scholars have diverging opinions about Nelli’s personal devotion to Cathar practices and for that reason some characterize him as a bit of an eccentric, there is no disagreement about either the integrity or the thoroughness of his research on the troubadours, nor about its value to scholarship in that area. 10. The term “the feminine” belongs rather to philosophy and art of the 1890’s than to the era of the troubadours. I use it here in spite of this, because I believe that the notion of the (eternal) feminine ordinarily associated with Goethe, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and writers after them to refer to male creativity,is as old as the twelfth-century philosophy of Fin’Amors. 11. In Sexual Politics (1969), Kate Millett sums up feminist objections to the commonly held idea that courtly love brought about an improvement in women’s status, “One must acknowledge that the chivalrous stance is a game the master group plays in elevating its subject to pedestal level. Historians of courtly love stress the fact that the raptures of the poets had no effect upon the legal or economic standing of women and very little upon their social status. As the sociologist Hugo Beigel has observed, both the courtly and romantic versions of love are ‘grants’ which the male concedes out of his total powers. Both have had the effect of obscuring the patriarchal character of Western culture...” (37). 12. See Harold Nicholson’s Good Behavior (1955) for a discussion of how class sys- tems are constructed by changing male behavior, especially his treatment of chivalry. 13. Le joi in troubadour poetry is a masculine noun designating the pleasure of composing. It is often also used metonymically to designate the pleasure of loving a lady with Fin’Amors. Throughout this book, I use the Provençal word, joi to designate the particular pleasure of writing which can be confused with the pleasure of loving a woman. I do this to avoid confusion with the modern French feminine noun, joie, the equivalent of the English word “joy.” In the text of the chapter on the troubadours of Occitania, I will discuss the problems with the term, including its relationship to the equally problematic word, jouis- sance (sexual bliss). Jean-Charles Huchet discusses how linguistic problems associated with confusion about the meaning of joi complicate our understanding of troubadour sexuality in L’Amour discourtois (1987) (203–211). 14. One explanation for this linguistic phenomenon (dame/don) is the influence of Hispano-Arabic poetry of the period which would have been spread by the troubadours who visited Spain, including the first troubadour, Guillaume IX. Many of the Arabic influences are frankly homosexual in content, a phenomenon that supposedly “disappears” in the western European tradition. This 217 NOTES theory originates with A.R. Nykl, Hispano-Arabic poetry and Its Relations with the Old Provençal Troubadours(1946). 15. Baudelaire writes, “La femme est naturelle, c’est-à-dire abominable” (Woman is natural, that is to say, abominable). This contemptuous statement is written in the context of the poet’s admiration for the decadent figure of the Dandy—the feminine man. 16. In Gynesis: Configurations of Women and Modernity (1985),Alice Jardine situates the trope of “the feminine” as the “space of alterity to be explored” in lan- guage within the discourse of modernity (25). She defines gynesis as “the putting into discourse of ‘woman’ as that process diagnosed in France as intrin- sic to the condition of modernity; indeed, the valorization of the feminine, woman, and her obligatory, that is, historical connotations, as somehow intrin- sic to new and necessary modes of thinking, writing, speaking. The object pro- duced by this process is neither a person nor a thing, but a horizon, that toward which the process is tending: a gynema” (25). Jardine cites Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari as male theorists who seek to escape the history of the subject under patriarchy by imagining a subject which “feminizes” itself. Jar- dine’s superb study shows clearly how the problem of “woman-as-writing” creates a double bind for “women’s relationship to the alterity of modernity” (117).

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