Lyric Tactics. Ingrid Nelson
to whom the events recorded originally occurred.”50 While Spearing’s critique of a critical tendency to see the “speaker” of a medieval poem as a literary character (an approach deriving ultimately from Wimsatt’s and Beardsley’s idea of lyric poetry as dramatic monologue) is a welcome and necessary correction to an overly simplistic reading practice, in rejecting the totalizing of the speaker, he ends up totalizing the text. Although it draws on Derrida’s critique of the voice as self-presence, Spearing’s analysis more directly recalls older New Critical reading practices that evacuate historical particularity from a text.
The French critical tradition has tended toward structuralist and poststructuralist analyses of the “I” as a purely linguistic and grammatical phenomenon (most notably in the work of Paul Zumthor). Yet in response to the influence of structuralism on French medieval lyric criticism, some scholars have argued for the centrality of subjectivity to poetic and particularly lyric texts. Michel Zink traces the affiliation of lyric with affective subjective expression as a result of a literary history in which other medieval genres—satire, drama, and prose narrative—carve out distinct formal and thematic areas that by comparison mark lyric as the genre of individual expression.51 Further, as Sarah Kay notes, social and historical circumstances inflect such signifying lyric voices: “historical factors such as gender and economic status, relationships with authors and patrons, leave perceptible traces on the subjective voice.… The ‘individual’ need not be conceived of contrastively, as differing in some essential way from others. The historical influences which combine with different discourses to construct the sense of self necessarily contribute features which are held in common with other selves.”52
Ethopoeia figures the structural, circumstantial, and public aspects of the first-person pronoun, acknowledging its own rhetorical artifice within a trope that accommodates social circumstance and difference. Some of this has to do with the historically specific conceptions of subjectivity and interiority that inhered in medieval thought. It has been amply demonstrated that a turn toward interiority, beginning in the twelfth century and elaborated, especially, in medieval religious writings, penitential discourse, and secular literature, marked the later Middle Ages. Yet scholars of the Middle Ages remain divided on whether premodern subjectivity is marked by an opposition, even an antagonism, between the inner self and the outer world or whether these are contiguous.53 Medieval uses of ethopoeia demonstrate that voice expresses a relationship between internal and external, between self and world. Ultimately, though, ethopoeia is premised on the inherent performativity of all utterances, as a figure for speech that integrates affect and circumstance in order to communicate to a public.54 Ethopoeia bears some relationship to the idea of a lyric “persona,” but it also differs in important ways from this modern concept. Chiefly, where a poetic persona is presumed to represent a complex, total subject, an ethopoetic voice is an utterance specific to both a speaker and his or her local and contingent circumstances: the words of Andromache over Hector’s corpse or of the tablecloth once discarded. My emphasis on an ethopoetic lyric voice that integrates text and performance also has some affinity with recent work on the performativity of medieval lyric reading practices.55 However, these tend to locate the lyric’s performativity in the inner experience of the reader or performer, whereas my account emphasizes the full spectrum of transmission practice of medieval lyrics, comprising interiority, performance, grammatical and rhetorical conventions, and material witnesses.
What I am proposing, in short, is that the ethopoetic voice of the medieval lyric “I” is a tactic in the practice of the genre. As we have seen, the medieval concept of voice engages both its performative and textual qualities. Ethopoeia, in some sense, makes lyrics with ad hoc improvisations on the conventions of both textual and performative voices. We have seen one instance of this in our analysis of the vocal shift in the envoy of “When the Nightingale Sings”; the next section will demonstrate how ethopoetic tactics inform the compilation and layout of lyric and nonlyric texts throughout MS Harley 2253. It is helpful at this point to refer to Michel de Certeau’s description of the interaction between orality and the written text in contemporary culture, which offers a surprisingly apt way of understanding the voices of Harley 2253. In his discussion of the modern “scriptural economy,” Certeau describes writing as an essentially strategic practice that produces a text on the regulated blank space of the page.56 Although often presented as oppositional to writing, orality is implicated in such a scriptural economy, since like writing, it is not unitary but plural and historically determined. To escape the power structures produced by the scriptural economy, Certeau concludes his discussion with an impassioned if vague call for “transformations” as a tactical alternative to writing: “Henceforth the important thing is neither what is said (a content) nor the saying itself (an act), but rather the transformation, and the invention of still unsuspected mechanisms that will allow us to multiply the transformations.”57
Certeau’s scriptural economy is a product of capitalism and as such not directly applicable to premodern textual culture. However, the blank space of the medieval manuscript page is equally as regulated as the modern printed page, and its texts are equally reliant on practices of orality and writing. What the figure of ethopoeia suggests is a rhetoric that navigates these practices tactically, drawing on the conventions of each mode to produce lyric poetry. The ethopoetic voice makes its texts from the contingent relations between composer and audience, scribe and poet and reader.
The Tactics of Voice
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