Lyric Tactics - Ingrid Nelson The Middle Ages Series

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of text composed from the forms and structures of the city. Most important, for this study, tactics, like strategies, are relationships to structures of power. But unlike strategies, they are ad hoc, improvisatory, and unregulated. These relationships are responsive and adaptive rather than proscribed and determinate, everywhere shaped by structures without being subordinate to them.

      “Lyric tactics” refer to the practices by which lyrics are composed, modified, performed, transmitted, and circulated among institutional forms of textuality. Describing these practices as “tactical” emphasizes the relationships between them and the existing structures with which they interact. These structures may be literary forms, scribal or compilational conventions, or cultural or institutional norms. Certeau’s conceptual tools and the plurality of practices and subject positions they describe are in many ways more appropriate to medieval culture than those premised on the more totalizing reach of discourses in modernity, such as Foucauldian discourse theory. Where Foucault studies practices (“procedures”) that, by their repetition, develop into a governing apparatus, Certeau seeks a complementary theory that would account for the manifold practices that are not governed by procedural relationships. The difference is subtle: while both theorists begin with practice, Certeau critiques Foucault for focusing on procedures that produce a systematic discourse and overlooking others that “have not given rise to a discursive configuration.”53 Certeau seeks to describe the outliers, the eccentricities, and the singularities that lend vibrance and spontaneity to everyday life. These practices do not necessarily oppose or resist the dominant order; rather, they operate within the structures created by them.

      As Certeau scholars have observed, The Practice of Everyday Life is in many ways an unfinished work, more a “blueprint” of the parameters of a cultural studies methodology than a “map” of a complete theory.54 His dominant metaphor of the tactical is spatial; a strategy “assumes a place,” whereas a tactic has no distinct “localization” and therefore no recognizable “borderline” that totalizes it with respect to the other.55 This metaphor seems to anticipate recent work on mobility and networks emerging from social theory. Inspired by the actor-network theory of sociologist Bruno Latour, a new model of textuality and cultural transmission sees texts as assemblages created by multiple actors working in a network. These distributed models of textual production and dissemination describe many premodern practices, especially the diverse modes of mobility affecting medieval texts, bodies, and objects. As Jacques Le Goff put it, “The mobility of men in the Middle Ages was extreme.”56 From the itineraries that offer a new perspective on medieval literary history to the decentering and recursive journeys of literary characters, nonlinear and distributed mobilities inform a variety of medieval texts and practices.57 The most trenchant application of such network theories to the medieval lyric has been put forth in some recent essays by Ardis Butterfield. Butterfield notes that English and Anglo-French lyrics tend to reuse and circulate set phrases—in fact, clichés—that may come from lyric or nonlyric contexts, such as sermons. This aspect of medieval lyric was once derided under a twentieth-century critical paradigm that privileged originality and uniqueness in its assessment of literary value. Yet as Butterfield points out, these clichés are generative and creative; they are an important component of medieval lyric form that encourages a model of reading that differs from the New Formalist paradigm of close reading. Instead, Butterfield proposes “lateral” reading, which would take into account the contexts (social and textual) in which these set phrases circulate, and the Latourian networks of lyrics that together constitute the literary object.58

      Latour’s theories are in many ways more complex and complete than Certeau’s, and Butterfield’s applications of them are helpful in understanding how medieval lyric form uses and reuses common language in creative rather than derivative ways. Yet exploring medieval lyrics with respect to tactics allows us to extend these theories in two important ways. First, it broadens our definition of the genre from one based on form to one based on practice. Framing it in this way creates a largely false dichotomy; of course, practice is integral to both Latourian network theory and Butterfield’s lyric theory. Yet because tactics apply explicitly to practices or modes of operation, considering medieval lyrics in this light shifts our focus from verbal patterning to social practice. Second, Certeau’s theory invites us to consider the relationships between lyrics and the normative textual, literary, or performative conventions in a way that refuses to set up a hierarchy or opposition between them. The lyric is a tactical text that relies on and emerges from these standards without being disciplined by them. In this model, rather than appropriating institutional textual practices to gain legitimacy (in the form of authority, for example), lyrics deploy them tactically, exploiting their potentialities, multiplicities, and ambiguities that strategic proscriptions attempt to unify, streamline, and regulate.

      Further, lyrics are tactical not only in their practices but also in their implicit theorization of their own genre. Nicolette Zeeman has suggested that lyrics offer one example of how literary genres can, if situated or flagged in a certain way, act as forms of self-theorization that emerge from literature rather than treatises.59 Throughout this book, studies of lyrics will elaborate how this implicit genre theory takes shape when poetic forms are understood within the contexts of their practices. To begin to understand how this works, I will examine how a pervasive rhetorical figure, the topos or commonplace, demonstrates and develops lyric tactics in a thirteenth-century poem, “Fowls in the Frith.” Ernst Robert Curtius, in his magisterial study, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, identifies the topos as a foundational form of medieval literature. In classical rhetoric, these conventional figures served to locate an audience in a common rhetorical place. Topoi evolved in the Middle Ages as cross-textual motifs: the “book of nature,” the locus amoenus or ideal landscape, or the world upside-down.60 For Curtius, topoi are the rhetorical matrix from which medieval literature is generated. While contemporary readers often associate the study of topoi with conservative philological methods, Michelle Warren has recently argued that it can promote ethical humanist modes of reading. In her words, topoi can be understood “not as fixed points but rather as nodes in dynamic global relations, anchored in specific landscapes while claiming vast proportions.”61 With their anonymity and mobility, lyrics perhaps best illustrate how topoi are essentially relational rather than totalizing.

      “Fowls in the Frith” not only exemplifies the lyric’s reliance on topoi but also unites rhetoric and practice to theorize lyric tactics. Surviving with musical notation in a thirteenth-century cartulary, this poem consists of five short lines.

Foweles in the frith, woods
The fisses in the flod, river
And I mon waxe wod. must; mad
Mulch sorw I walke with
For beste of bon and blod.62

      The poem’s frame of reference is ambiguous; it could be a sacred or a profane work.63 The “birds in the woods, fish in the river” formula was both a secular and a religious topos in the Middle Ages. It has an extensive tradition in Christian writing, beginning in Genesis 1:20, when both birds and fish were created on the fifth day, and continuing in medieval religious literature. The placement of the birds and fish in their natural habitats refers to the cosmic hierarchy created by God, from which man is alienated due to original sin. (Passus 11 of the B-text of Piers Plowman, to cite one example, offers an extended meditation on this topos.) Further, the language of the poem appears in other lyrics of the later Middle Ages, such as a lullaby that survives in autonomous copies and in sermons.64 In the religious or secular context, the final line of the poem is ambiguous. In one reading, the speaker feels sorrow on account of Christ, who was the “best of bone and blood,” and of the suffering of his Passion: “I walk with much sorrow that I feel for the best of bone and blood.” (If secular, “the best of bone and blood” can equally describe the beloved.) Alternately, the speaker himself or herself is the “best

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