Assembling the Lyric Self. Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian Poetry Book.

Olivia Holmes, Assembling the Lyric Self. Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian Poetry Book

(Medieval Cultures Series, 21.) Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. ix + 50 pls. + 240 pp. $34.95. ISBN: 0-8166-3344-4.

Five chapters in this book are studies of groups of poems which either have been chosen for the purpose of illustrating the overall production of their authors (Uc de Saint Circ, Guittone d'Arezzo, Rustico Fillippi [sic], Monte Andrea and Nicolo de' Rossi) or represent the entire oeuvre of a known or unknown poet (Guiraut Riquier's, in the first instance; "De' varie romanze volgare," "La corona di casistica amorosa," in the second). Two short chapters are given to Dante's Vita nova and Petrarch's Canzoniere. What ties all the chapters together is the theory that the genres of which the Vita nova and the Canzoniere are generally thought to be the prototypes preexist them in the cycles listed above. This view is rooted in several new specific interpretations -- each one to be evaluated in its own merits elsewhere -- but all subsumed by two basic assumptions. The first is that the appearance of the author, in the nineteenth-century sense of the word, is the outcome of the shift from the predominantly oral trouba dour poetry, as Holmes takes it to have been, to the anthologies compiled from the middle of the thirteen century onward by either poet or scribe. In Holmes's study, however -- and this brings me to her second main premise -- the term "author" is conceived as the "aggregate of inferences based on the text" (4), independently of any traditionally conceived, historical author.

Holmes's implied author is signaled by such markers as lexical or metrical connectives, a sporadic use of the first person, a thematic shift, or the bare mention of the writer or of some historical event. While such connectives always suggest the presence of a macrotext, most groups are shown to lack the outside perspective that makes for an integrated authorial presence. Such presence exists in the post-conversion songs of Guittone d'Arezzo and in Guiraut Riquier's cantos. The function of the prose in the Vita nova consists, Holmes confirms, in identifying the narrating subject with the "author" and in constructing that "author" as a writer. Proceeding chronologically, Nicolo de' Rossi's sequences are seen as linking Dante's typological poetry to Petrarch's subjective poetics; and Petrarch's Canzoniere is finally set apart for the high degree of self-conscious control in the arrangement and transmission of its lyrics.

Studies of minor authors and minor collections such as this one are much worthwhile, for they are essential in determining at the very least the cultural and literary context of all authors, regardless of their degree of canonicity. It must be stated, however, that the theoretical web ingeniously spun for this book, which claims to redefine an entire tradition, falls short of its promise. For Holmes's analysis ultimately shows how great a gap there is in the construction of an authorial presence between her cycles on one side, and the Vita nova and the Canzoniere on the other. The model proposed here is too reductive -- its constitutive elements are also found in other macrotexts not mentioned in this book -- to be persuasively seen as foreshadowing the authorship suggested in the Vita nova. The tour conducted around early Provencal and Italian poetry becomes a self-fulfilling crusade, tautological in its outcome and almost declared so in Holmes's own "Conclusion."

The Vita nova conveys far more than the perception of a self-contained poetic sequence or the sense that we are in the presence of a controlling author/scribe, as Holmes intends. Here is an authorial "site intersected by a myriad suggestions" -- in the definition of Barthes's famous article on the death of the author, listed in the bibliography together with the other equally famous article by Foucault -- suggestions, in fact, deriving from the classical as well as from the new vernacualar literature. And it is above all the weight of the Latin tradition -- where the notion of authorship and the status it conferred were well established -- that is behind the performative act, unprecedented in vernacular literature, by which the "I" of the story sets itself up as the auctor as well as the scriba from the book of memory. The Vita nova being a text that posits itself as the book that is coming into being, establishes a new mode of authorship, one which, in Foucault's terminology, disperses the subject into a tri partite discursive function. It seems, therefore, that the birth of the author and the self ought not to be perceived in the passage from the orality of the Occitan literature to the written production of the Italians, but rather in the shift from literacy, no matter how compromised by oral transmission, to a high degree of self-referential literariness.