Rolando Pérez ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 Towards a Genealogy of the Gay Science: From Toulouse and Barcelona to Nietzsche and Beyond Rolando Pérez Hunter College-CUNY 1. Introduction Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made. (Immanuel Kant) The term gay science (gaya sciensa) or gay saber refers to a post-troubadour ars poetica of the fourteenth and fifteenth century. Known to philologists as a poetics of recuperation, it is mostly associated these days with the title of Nietzsche's 1887 book, Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, variously translated into English as The Joyful Wisdom (1914) by Thomas Common, and The Gay Science (1974) by Walter Kaufmann and subsequent translators. It has been translated into Spanish as La gaya ciencia and El gay saber. How much Nietzsche actually knew about the poetry of the gay science is hard to know; most likely it came from his knowledge of the minnesingers (love singers) –the medieval German troubadour poets (Kippenberg, 721-730)– via Richard Wagner.1 In any case, Nietzsche, the ex-philologist, incorporated the term into his philosophy, mixing it with elements from the Greek, Stoic, and dithyrambic tradition. Because today we know the term mostly through him is that we have began in some ways backwards. But Nietzsche was certainly not the first to have incorporated it into a holistic worldview.2 The middle period, as it were, of an interest in the gay science, took place during the fifteenth century, and found expression in the poetics of the Marqués de Santillana, Enrique de Villena, and in the Cancionero de Baena (1454). The troubadour-inspired poetics of gaya sciensa found its fullest articulation in the Las leys d'amors of Guilhem Molinier in 1356. Though certainly not the first,3 Molinier's Leys d'amors is the most comprehensive study of Provençal poetics, combining theory and examples from the best of troubadour poetry. It gave rise to two schools of gaya sciensa, one in Toulouse ("Consistoire du Gai Savoir" in 1323) and the other in Barcelona ("Consistori de Barcelona" in 1338). More on this later; but for now 1 Wagner's opera Tannhäuser takes the title from the name of a minnesinger of the thirteenth century. He was supposed to have participated in one of Frederick II's crusade in the Holy Land (Kippenberg & Welker, 78-79). Another German composer who dedicated an opera to the minnesang (e.g., Guntram) was Richard Strauss, composer of the beautiful symphonic poem, Also Sprach Zarathustra, after Nietzsche's book. For a comparative study of the French-German troubadour poetry see "La poésie Franćaise en Allemagne" in Jeanroy, pp. 274-307. 2 An unjustly ignored work applying the theory of the gay science to contemporary literature is the two volume study of E.S. Dallas, The Gay Science, published in London in 1866 by Chapman and Hall, twelve years before Nietzsche's famous book of the same title. It was reprinted in 1969, under the editorship of René Wellek by the Johnson Reprint Corporation (NY/London). 3 Raimon Vidal de Besuldu's Razos de trobar was written between 1190-1200; the Donatz proensal of Uc Faidit was written in Italy, sometime around 1240; the Doctrina d'Acort was written between 1282 and 1296 by Terramagnino da Pisa" in Sardinia; the Regles de trobar authored by Jofre de Foixà at the request of Sicilian king, Jacme II, was written sometime between 1286 and 1291 (Marshall, lxxii). And finally, the Doctirna de compondre dictats, which immediately follows the Razos de trobar in the manuscript (H), was most likely written at around the same as the Razos and the Regles .J.H. Marshall conjectures that it was written by the Catalan, Jofre de Foixà, as the conclusion of Regles de trobar (Ibid., lxxviii). Rolando Pérez 547 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 what is most important –if we are to fully understand the meaning of gay science– is to follow the thread out of a complex labyrinth. To this end, we will begin our study by returning to the historical moment that gave rise to the poetics of gaya sciensa –the culture of Provençal troubadour poetry. It is only through such a return that we can best understand the gay science of Toulouse, Barcelona, the Spanish poets of the 15th century, and finally, that of our latest and most distinguished inheritor, Friedrich Nietzsche. 2. Provençal economics, culture, and poetry Much has been written on Dante's famous treatise, De vulgari eloquentia, as one of the first attempts to articulate a romance language poetics. In some ways, though speculative in nature, it is also a philosophical treatise following traditional lines of rhetorical argumentation. De vulgari eloquentia argues for a consideration of the Italian language as a poetic language. And his Divina Commedia incontestably remains the greatest literary work of the middle ages, written in such a vulgare illustre. Yet, what is often forgotten, is that the south of France had already, by the time Dante had written his famous treatise, developed a poetry of its own, not in Latin but, in Provençal, Occitan, or lange d'oc.4 According to Martín de Riquer, what we know as troubadour poetry is made up of 2542 compositions from three hundred and fifty known poets, or trobadors (the plural of trobaire), some anonymous, who commonly wrote in Provençal (1975, I: 10). This amazing output of work written first in the south of France and then in the north of Spain, can only be understood against the socio-economic, ethical, political, and religious soil which made its flourishing possible. Although today we think of Provençe as a region of France, the fact is that until the thirteenth century Provençe was an autonomous territory with its own language and culture. "France," was in all actuality the north of the country with its Frankish influence, and its center of power in Paris. In effect, France and Provençe were two separate and distinct countries which merely shared a greater geographical area. The language spoken in southern cities and towns such as Toulouse, Narbonne, and Montségur was Occitan or Provençal, a language closer to Latin than that spoken in the Frankish or Germanic north.5 The historical influence upon the south was in the main, even if indirectly, Roman. "The survival of Roman law,6 the prominent role of women, and the refinement of a society not organized for war, marked it off from the more disciplined north...Its prosperity was shaped by the trade routes of the Mediterranean. 4 The Marqués de Santillana was one of the first to note Dante's debt to Provençal poetics in his "Prohemio e carta" (445). And in his edition of De vulgari eloquentia (1983), Sergio Cecchin points out that though it is doubtful that Dante had read Raimon Vidal's Razos de trobar (1972), some of his formulations bear resemblance (2). This is clearly Cecchin's response to Salvatore Santangelo's 1959 study, Dante e i trovatori provenzali , wherein Santangelo claimed that Dante had read an early, more complete version of Vidal's Razos de trobar (79-97) –a much disputed claim, which Marshall has masterfully responded to in Appendix II of The Razos (1972, 161-166). More recently Gregory B. Stone has outlined the points of agreement between Dante and Vidal regarding the more general assessment of the "derivative or secondary status of prose narrative" with respect to the lyric (8). See also pages 9, 1415 in The Death of the Troubadour. 5 "After the French conquest of the thirteenth century a large section of the country was called Languedoc because in the southern language 'oc' was used instead of 'oui' to mean 'yes.' But Languedoc never included all of the South and eventually it was applied only to the districts of Tolouse, CarcassonneBéziers, and Beaucaire-Nîmes. Moreover, it was not a name that the men of the South would have given themselves, though they accepted it in the end" (Strayer, 10). As such, we will always refer for simplicity and all-inclusiveness's sake to the language of the south as 'Provençal.' 6 See also Strayer (4). Rolando Pérez 548 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 Its cities developed on Italian, not on northern lines" (Sumption, 17). More urbanized than the north, the merchant economy of the south had given rise to an advanced and powerful middle class. Landowners and not the aristocracy held most of the power in the Provençal cities. "By 1200 the greatest lord in the South, the count of Toulouse, had yielded almost all power in his own capital city to the counsel, the leaders of the bourgeoisie. In many ways, the southern towns resembled the rising city-states of Italy7...At Nîmes the governing body of the town was composed of four knights and four members of the bourgeoisie" (Strayer, 7).8 The trade and merchant economy of the south, doubtlessly led to the rise of a tolerant and permissive cosmopolitan culture. Jews had little or no problems being accepted by Provençal society, and were even allowed to own land. Other so-called heretics, as for instance, the Cathars "were not only tolerated, they were often completely absorbed into the society" (Strayer, 8). No wonder, then, the south with its cultural and economic laissez faire, would eventually come under the attack of the papacy in Paris. Provençe did pretty much what Provençe wanted, and it was seen by the north as a disorderly, heretical society that had to be brought in line with northern papal and aristocratic power. "The northerners thought the southerners were undisciplined, spoiled by luxury, a little soft, too much interested in social graces, too much influenced by contemptible people such as businessmen, lawyers, and Jews" (Strayer, 10).9 And the southerners viewed the northerners as being crude, arrogant, and aggressive.10 Notwithstanding the criticism of the north with respect to the south's lack of political unity, it was the south's political disunity that made it tolerant and gave it its cultural diversity. Such diversity, in turn, was a product of the new bourgeois economic order. Anachronistically as it may be to speak of capitalism, Provençal economics was beginning to move in a direction which resembled pre-capitalistic economic formations.11 Its adoption of a trade economy, and its move away from the rigidity of a feudal, landed economy, was one of the earliest instances of what Deleuze and Guattari would call, a "deterritotialization" of wealth –the final, most advanced stage of capitalism. It is not surprising, then, that this represented a grave danger for the landed nobility and for the Church, whose status was now in question. If money could be made by anyone then it would be a matter of time before the bourgeois merchants would 7 "It is true that the merchant class developed very rapidly in the Southern cities, and particularly in Toulouse. Unlike the old patricians of these cities, unlike the nobles, the merchants were not rich in land. They were contractors and managers of money, and their revenues were essentially in movables. They came into head-on conflict with a Church that forbade loan with interest. Thus the game so familiar to the urban Republics of Italy was played out at Toulouse –with the prince and the nobility supporting the old patriciate against the new rich..." (Madaule, 12). And Jonathan Sumption writes: "The frontier of the Holy Roman Empire lay not at the Alps but at the Rhone; Provence was an imperial territory; Lyon and Avignon were frontier towns" (17). 8 It is interesting to note that it was perhaps on this kind of structure that the Consistori of the gay science was based, with its seven representative judges. Not to mention the competitive aspect of the poetry "games" and prizes. 9 For more on the southern tolerance of the Jews and their successes in the south see also The Albigensian Crusade: An Historical Essay by Jacques Madaule (5) and Massacre at Montségur: A History of the Albigensian Crusade by Zoe Oldenbourg (24-25). The secularism of Provençe impacted Jewish life as well, as many Jewish intellectuals turned to the study of Aristotelian metaphysics and particularly, to the work of Maimonides (Abrahams, 369, 371). 10Their disparate world views, no doubt impacted the kind of literature that each of these regions produced, for while the preferred genre of the north was the epic, that of the south was the lyric. 11 "A society based on cash rather than services was inevitably more fluidly organized than the overwhelmingly agricultural society of the north" (Sumption, 15). Rolando Pérez 549 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 overtake the nobility in wealth and power.12 As wealth became moveable so did the society, including the once stationary nobility. The castles were no longer isolated fortresses each on its own rocky perch, but had genuine social contact with each other. People paid each other visits; there were gatherings at which the woman's place was supreme. Then it was the habit of many of the nobles in the South of France to leave their castles and establish themselves in town houses for part of the year. Here they met not only their peers but also the rich bourgeoisie, including the new rich, whose refinements in manners drew them closer to the nobility" (Madaule, 13). Eventually the wits necessary (to make money), to rise above one's station, came to possess the same social value as the courtly valors of the feudal knight. "Wits are rarely inherited, and a lowly-born man could rise to great heights by his own merits. This was true of some of the most illustrious troubadours. They were the first men of letters, honoured by their protectors and living in familiarity with the great" (Madaule, 14). In fact, though a great number of troubadours came from the upper classes, a number of them did not.13 Marcabrun and Bernard de Ventadour (or Ventadorn"), two of the greatest of the troubadours, came from humble origins.14 As Madaule says above, what brought the troubadours together one with the nobility, and two to each other, regardless of their class differences, was their art. "The important thing is that, contrary to one's expectation regarding the rigid compartmentalization of social classes in the Middle Ages, differences of social standing were not observed when it came to the multiple interactions of troubadours with each other" (Riquer 1975, 21, my translation). Troubadours of humble origins enjoyed literary contacts with members of the high nobility, while nobles carried on poetic dialogues with court jesters. It is even believed, says Riquer, that Raimbaut de Vaqueiras (author of the beautiful Kalendas maia), son of a poor knight, might have began his career as a court jester reciting other people's poetry, and worked his way up to become a troubadour (Ibid., 21). If in the medieval scholastic tradition, the intellectual belonged exclusively to the "professional," ecclesiastical class, the troubadours were one of the first intellectuals to break with such a tradition, giving rise to both a professional and a non-professional class of poets. Professional troubadours like Marcabrun, Bernard de Ventadour, and Peire Vidal were among those who made their living primarily from their poetry (Ibid., 23), while non- 12 "The increasing development of trade...had made its impact on the working classes. Even humble artisans were gradually being transformed into a powerful class, with full realization of their rights...[T]he burgher's social position was beginning to eclipse that of the nobility" (Oldenbourg, 23) 13 The point may be made that because the troubadours wrote in the vulgate and not in Latin that a troubadour without formal scholastic education could write at all, and be read and understood by a much larger audience than if he or she had written in Latin. The use of Provençal over and above Latin must have had a "democratizing" effect on high culture and the economy. The impressive number of troubadours alone is a testament to this. 14 "A tradition, according to which his parents were humble domestics in the castle of Ventadour, stems from little more than a too literal reading of a remark made in a satirical poem of the late twelfth century. It is, however, most probable tat he in fact spent his early years (some time in the 1130s and 1140s) at the court of Ventadour and that he there received, under the guidance of the viscount Eblo his training in the art of lyric poetry" (Anthology, 64). A lot of what we know of the more famous troubadours comes from razos or vidas that were written about them by others who may have gathered the information either directly from the things the troubadours said about themselves in their poetry or what other troubadours said about them. Inaccurate as some of these razos or vidas may be, they are all we have about them, and on the whole they at least provide us with a general, albeit inexact idea, of their lives. For the difference between razos and vidas see Riquer (1975, 26-27) and Stone (8-9). Rolando Pérez 550 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 professional troubadours were usually noble men and womenlike Comtessa de Dia (countess), 15 Guilhem de Peitieu (duke of Aquitaine), and Jaufré Rudel (prince), who made their living from things other than poetry. Starting at the beginning of the twelfth century, under the influence of Latin theories of rhetoric, the troubadours came to articulate a theory of style which they applied to their poetry. Since their poetry was usually either read or sung to an audience, they became aware of the impact of different poetic styles on audience reception. In the end two camps were formed based on poetic styles, which went by the nominatives, trobar leu and trobar clus. Trobar leu was poetry written in a simple, clear, and light style, free of stylistic complications, and double entendres. Bernard de Ventadour's poetry is an example of trobar leu. Trobar clus, on the other hand, was poetry written in a closed or hermetic style: difficult, subtle, and elusive. Marcabrun's work is exemplary of this more difficult style. In between these two competing styles –and troubadours often attacked each other for writing in one style or the other– there were such variations as trobar ric, trobar escur, trobar sotil, etc. Significant in all this is that a substantial group of poets, as the world has not known since, argued, dialogued, challenged, and competed against one another at the most refined of artistic levels. That they shared a common culture with a certain political economy that made such artistic work possible cannot be denied. For directly or indirectly, the Albigensian Crusade launched against the "rampant" individualism of Provençe, marked the beginning of the end of the age of the troubadours. It is no wonder that Nietzsche in the nineteenth century, at the dawn of the industrial revolution, would look back upon this moment in history as a golden age of joyous, artistic creation and self-expression. 3. The poetics of the gay science in Provençe & and Catalonia The golden age of the troubadours began circa 1100 with Guilhem de Peitieu and ended some time around 1300 with the poetry of Guiraut Riquier, and a poetic interchange in 1298 between Frederick II of Sicily and Ponç Hug IV of Ampurias (Riquer 1975, 11). Thus by 1333, the year the city of Toulouse commissioned Guilhem Molinier to edit Las leys d'amors,16 the actual poetical practice of the troubadours had become a thing of the past. Though the troubadours had not been a central target of the Albigensian Crusade, they were perhaps seen as part of the secular immorality of the Midi, making their poetry one of the first casualties of the northern crusade against the tolerant and permissive south. And as such, Molinier's d'amors, can be seen 1) as a project of recuperation and 2) as way of saving a part of (secular) Provençal culture by injecting it with a religiosity that it did not originally possess. The Consistori, as we will see later, was founded precisely to make troubadour poetry morally "safe" through the 15 "A fief was thought of as the possession of a family not of an individual. For this reason women could, and commonly did, inherit in their own right, a notable symptom of the unmilitary quality of southern fiefs" (Sumption, 20). And Meg Bogin writes: "There are countless examples of women who governed in their husband's name or were made regent, depending on the status of the husband...Phillipa, the wife of Guilhem de Poitou, the first troubadour, governed Aquitaine while he was in the East from 1101 to 1102" (35). This economic openness to ownership by women –most likely the result a reduction in the male population, due to the number of men who died fighting in the crusades– doubtlessly contributed to the emergence of a poetry composed by women troubadours, or trobairitz. 16 "There are three versions of Las leys d'amors. The first, in prose, was composed between 1328 and 1337; the second, in verse, between 1337 and 1343; and the third, in prose, is dated 1355" (Riquer 1975, 35, my translation). This last one, edited by Joseph Anglade (1919), and the one we will cite herein, is presently available in facsimile through Nabu Press/Amazon (2011). Or the reader may access it online in various electronic formats at https://archive.org/details/lasleysdamorsman01angluoft. See also the Appendix. Rolando Pérez 551 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 sanction of the "Santa Gleyza" (holy church): a word repeated many times throughout Las leys d'amors. However, before we turn to Las leys d'amors it is essential that we dedicate a few brief words to the essence of the poetry that came before it, for without it we have no way by which to make the necessary comparison that will shed some light on the gay science at its inception, and its impact on a number of fourteenth and fifteenth century Spanish authors, and on Nietzsche. The word "troubadour" or "trobador" has its origin in the Provençal/Catalan verb, "trobar"; in French "trovaire", in Italian "trovare". Trobar, related to the Latin "inveniere," means to find. Riquer reminds us that inveniere can also mean to imagine or to invent, but to invent in the sense of "literally creating" something, as exemplified in the title of Cicero's essay on rhetoric, De inventione. "The troubadour Guiraut Riquier puts in the mouth of Alfonso X, the wise king of Castilla, this affirmation: 'segon proprietat/de lati, qui l'enten.../son inventores/ dug dig il trobador'" (Riquer 1975, 20).Or: "according to proper Latin/to him who understands/all troubadours/are called inventors" (my translation). In a marriage of traditions, the terms of classical Latin rhetoric were united with the poetical praxis of the troubadour and trobairitz who searched for the right word, rhyme, meter, etc, to compose his/her poetry; it was in this sense that he/she was conceived of as an "inventore". The art of the troubadour was of one finding the right word(s) with which to express primarily, though no exclusively, his love (fin'amors) for the beloved domina, or woman. Bernard de Ventadour is an excellent example of a troubadour through whom we can readily see all the concerns of the art-form displayed in the very words he employs. We cite him here, followed by Press' translation: Chantar no pot gaire valer Si din's dal cor no mou lo chans, Ni chans no dal cor mover Si no.i es fin'amors coraus Per so es mos chantars cabaus, Qu'en joi d'amor ai et enten La boch'e.ls olhs e.l cor e.l sen. "Singing cannot much avail, if from within the heart comes not the song; nor can the song come from the heart, unless there be noble love, heartfelt. Hence is my singing supreme, for in love's joy I hold and direct my mouth, my eyes, my heart, my understanding" (67, Press' translation). The references to a beloved, to a fine and noble love (fin'amors), to the joy of loving (joi d'amor), to the different parts of the body through which the lover expresses his love (la boch'e.ls olhs e.l cor), the mouth, the eyes, the heart, and finally through the understanding (e.l sen), are all part of a Provençal poetic compendium. Sen is sense, as it is sensorial or physical, but it is also cognitive understanding. Sens and saber often appear together, used interchangeably to mean the same thing –either knowledge in a formalistic "sense" of the word or understanding. "Amor blasmen per no-saber," writes de Ventadour. "Love is blasphemed by those who do not understand." "With saber is often associated the noun cor. Literally, this means 'heart.' In the mediaeval scheme, the heart was the seat of intelligence. One learned 'by heart...Wisdom, which is close to knowledge, is the resultant of love seated in the heart.'" (Schutz 508). Love, as conceived by the troubadours could only be the mutual love of two lovers: "En agradar et en voler/Es l'amors de dos fins amans," writes de Vetnadour. "In agreement and in desire/is the love of two noble lovers." What the lover fears most, says de Ventadour, is that his beloved will one day cease to look at him, to love him –this, he says, fills him Rolando Pérez 552 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 with fear (temer). What is joy? Answer: The happiness that comes from the lover's love for his mistress, for the woods, for the plains –out of Nature's womb. It is found, as the American poet, Walt Whitman, also found it, as much in a leaf of grass as in the body of the beloved. Can l'erba fresch'e.lh folha par, E la flors boton'el verja, E.l rorrinhols autet e clar Leva sa votz e mou so chan, Joi ai de lui, e joi ai de la flor, E jois de me e de midons major; Daus totas partz sui de joi claus e sens, Mas sel es jois que totz autres jois vens. "When the fresh grass and the leaf appears, and the flower blossoms on the bough, and the nightingale raises high and clear its voice and pours out its song, joy I have for it, and joy for the flower, and joy for myself and for my lady yet more: on all sides I am bound and circled by joy, but that is joy which all other joys overwhelms" (79, Press' translation). These few stanzas we have quoted here are from a poet many consider the greatest of all the troubadour poets. Yet, nowhere in Las leys d'amors does Molinier cite a stanza or a even single line of Bernard de Ventadour; nowhere in Las leys d'amors, does one find comparable expressions of carnal joy and love. But that should not surprise us, for as we said earlier, Las leys d'amors, were written, edited, and compiled, as an opposition to the kind of bucolic, "pagan," heretical love songs of the original troubadours of the 12th and 13th centuries. "Like Montanhagol, Guiraut Rirquier and their contemporaries, Molinier belonged to a society where morality and religion had become the dominant concerns of the day. After the Albigensian Crusade, after the establishment of the Inquisition, the society of the Midi –the society of the intellectual capital of Languedoc– had changed. A reflection of this change can be seen in the concept of love." (Anglade, 45, my translation). Not only is Anglade correct in his assessment of Molinier, but one could very well read Las leys d'amors as a historical document –a mirror– of post Alibengsian society, where the immoral amors of troubadour poetry had been totally re-conceptualized to fit the conservative, religious values of the new society. From the very first page of Book I to the very end of Las leys, God is source and inspiration of "el Gay Saber." If, as Aristotle said, "all men desire to know [sciensa]" and from such knowledge wisdom is born ("naysh sabers"), and from wisdom is born understanding ("conoyshensa"), and from understanding, sense ("sen") and from sense, good works ("be far"), and from good works courage, praise, honor, worth, and pleasure; then from pleasure at last, comes joy and happiness (gaug et alegriers). This is the basic syllogism presented by Molinier at the outset of Las leys, and yet as it is, it remains incomplete; for it seems to leave the question open as to whose happiness (alegrier) is being referred to here. Is it happiness of the philosophers, the happiness of poets? Or is it happiness in general? The answer, for Molinier, may have been all of the above and none of the above at the same time. Our five senses have been given to us (8) so that through them we may worship and praise God. To God, "nostre sobira maestre," writes Molinier, "senhor e creator, platz qu'om fassa lo sieu servezi am gaug et am alegrier de cor..." (8) In other words, our supreme master, Lord and Creator is pleased when man serves him with the kind of joy and happiness that comes from the heart (cor). What then is the object of poetry? The answer: to sing to God. The Psalm says, according to Molinier: "Cantatz et alegratz vos en Dieu" (8, my Rolando Pérez 553 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 italics). Most likely taken from verse I and II of Psalm IX (dedicated to the chief Musician...A Psalm of David), it reads: "1. I will praise thee, Oh Lord, with my whole heart...2. I will be glad to rejoice in thee: I will sing praise to thy name, O though most High" (Holy Bible, 467, my italics). The "trobar" of the troubadours is sanctified through the Consistori (a pseudo-church with seven instead of twelve apostles) that will insure that the virtuous, God-given knowledge and wisdom "meravilhoza e vertuoza dona Sciensa" be employed in praising (lauzors) God (Dieu), the virgin Mary (glorioza Mayre, 8), and all the saints in Paradise ("totz los Sans de Paradis"). The enemies of the gay science ("enemigas del Gay Saber," 8) are those who fail to employ their art of trobar to praise God in their songs. The pre-Crusade vocabulary of pretz (worth) valors (courage) sciensa (knowledge), sabers (wisdom), honors (honor), plazers (pleasure), cor (heart), dezirer (desire) fin'amors (noble love), domina (woman), midons (my lady) which once reflected the values of troubadour culture –as expressed by the poets to their beloveds– are either turned into Christian values, or eradicated outright, as with the concept of fin'amors, which disappears completely in Las leys d'amors. Nowhere in Molinier's hundreds of pages that makes up his compendium is there any mention of woman, except, of course, the virgin Mary, "mayre de Dieu". Where the troubadours placed women at the center of their poetry –the object of love– "el Gay Saber," in all its hatred of women, disappears them. Woman is not to be trusted. Firstly, she lacks wisdom, and therefore, can be of very little assistance to men. "'.I. home de mil he atrobat savi, mas de totas las femmas no trobada una savia,'" (Molinier I: 158), pronounces the author in a citation, supposedly from the Psalms. "I have come across thousands of wise men, but of all the women that I have met I have never met one who was wise" (my translation). Women are deceptive; they have deceived such great men as David, Salomon, and Samson with their words (Ibid., 158). The counsel of women is worth little: "Cosselh de femma petit val" (159). A woman is like a beast ("femma es...bestia" 159), confuser of men ("confuzios d'ome" 159), and a home wrecker ("domiciles de riota" 159). All that women can do, as creatures of Satan (Sathan), is to bring chaos and disorder into the lives of men. "'Femma fort qui la trobara?'" (160) "A strong woman, where is she to be found?" "I don't mean physically strong ("de fortsa corporal" (160), says Molinier, but morally strong. Such a woman would be one that would oppose vices (vicis), sin (peccatz) and the evil temptations (malas temptacios) of the flesh (carnals). However, such a woman does not exist, for "totas femmas son...malas..." (160) "All women are evil" and will lead the good, careless man into evil ways –a warming that men should keep this in mind when dealing with women. (161). So where, then, has all the love of the troubadours, gone? Clearly, Molinier took very little from troubadour culture. The more carefully one reads Las leys d'amors, the more astonished one becomes concerning the long-standing association of "el Gay Saber" with the Provençal poetics that preceded it. Far from Molinier's mind was the troubadour idea of love. A greater influence upon his poetics of love was Albertano da Brescia's De amore et dilectione Dei et proximi et aliarum rerum et de forma viate, especially Chapter III of Book I, "De doctrina amoris et dilectione Dei." 17 Here God, through his love (amore),18 inspires (Dei inspiratione) men to sing him praise. And 17 In 1328 Albertano of Brescia was imprisoned in Carmona by Frederick II .From prison he authored several treatises, among them, Liber de amore (Sedgwick, 222). Coincidentally, Frederick II, friend to the troubadours, and an admirer of Epicurean philosophy, was one of Nietzsche's "European" heroes (Beyond Good and Evil, #200: 112). Dante placed Frederick II in Canto X of the Inferno (line 119) along with Epicurus and his followers (line 14). 18 There is an indirect relationship between Albertano's conception of amore and the fin'amors of the troubadours (most often mistakenly referred to as "amour courteois" or "courtly love," after Gaston Rolando Pérez 554 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 through God's love and man's reciprocal love of God happiness is realized.19 Las Leys shares basically the same sources (Aristotle, Isidore of Seville, Saint Bernard, Saint Gregory, St. Jerome, Seneca, Cato, the Psalms, Ecclesiastics, etc.,) with Albertano's work.20 Molinier also consulted Albertano's Liber consolationis and Ars loquendi et tacendi; the former for its ideas concerning women and their capacity to give counsel, and the latter for its theories of rhetoric (Anglade, 60-61). All of which brings us to the part of Las leys d'amors which has to do with rhetoric and composition, and to the earlier and later treatises on the art of trobar. Although Raimon Vidal's Razos de trobar (1972) preceded Molinier's compendium we shall continue with Las leys for now, if only because the more theoretical Leys serves as a bridge into Vidal's Razos and the other treatises. Rhetoric begins with philosophy. Like the water that flows into many rivers, it branches out and expands into the different arts and sciences. "Isidore [of Seville] says that philosophy is understanding ["conoyshensa"] of causes human and devine" (Molinier, I: 72, my translation). Philosophy, reminds us Molinier, has its roots in the Greek word, philos, which means love (amors). Of the seven sciences which make up philosophy, two of them are grammar ("gramatica" 73) and rhetoric ("rhetorica" 73).21 Grammar teaches us to speak and to write well, it being the art of good orthography. Rhetoric, which comes from rethos, is the science of giving order and structure to words (81). According to Isidore this science was founded by Greek philosophers like Gorgias and Aristotle, and translated ("traslatada") into Latin by Cicero (81). "Aristotle says and Cicero agrees with him that the subject matter of this science [rhetoric] is divided into three parts: demonstration, advice, and judgment" (87, my translation). From this point on Molinier continues to quote Isidore, and occasionally his favorite "troubadour" and spiritual ally, the conservative poet, N'Ath de Mons.22 Pronunciation, declares Molinier, should always be dignified; words must be uttered in a beautiful, measured manner. They must express humility ("humilitat" 115), simplicity ("simpleza" 115), authority ("auctoritat" 115), and great piety ("gran pietat" Paris). Albertano read and extensively quoted Andreas Capellanus in De amore; he did so not so much in agreement with but rather as a critique of Capellanus' view of human love. "The major twelfth-century sources that shaped the thought of Albertanus were of French origin or were particularly popular in France. French influence is evident in all of Albertanus's works, including De amore. His classicism owed much to that of the French schools. The same was true of his readings of his contemporaries. Albertanus was certainly familiar with the literature of courtly love, at least through the writings of Andreas Capellanus...Albertanus...used Andreas chiefly to provide discussion of particular kinds of human relationships, and most often disapproved of his views" (Powell, 46). It is interesting to note the similarities between Albertano and Molinier; for though the latter's compendium is a post-troubadour ars poetica ,the fin'amors of the troubadours is nowhere to be founds in its nearly eight hundred pages. 19 Both Albertano and Molinier quote Seneca extensively. For many writers of the age Seneca represented a bridge from Epicureanism to Christianity. Through Seneca writers like Albertano and Molinier were able to arrive at a kind of Christian Epicureanism, as evidenced in the Gay Saber of Las Leys that would not have been possible otherwise. Such an attempt to "Christianize" Epicurus was revisited in the fifteenth century with the work of Italian humanist, Lorenzo Valla, and his treatise, De voluptate. For more on Valla's conception of joy and love (voluptate-caritas) see the bilingual edition of Valla's On Pleasure/De voluptate (1977). 20 For a brilliant exposition of Molinier's borrowing of sources and imitation of Albertano (and Brunetto Latini) see Joseph Anglade (58-63). 21The other sciences are logic (logica), geometry (geometria), arithmetic (arismetica), music (muzica), and astronomy (astronomia), 73. 22 N'Ath de Mons "was conservative in a certain sense, but he was also 'modern' for his age" writes Anglade (87). Rolando Pérez 555 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 115). As such, then, one must use good, honest, simple, and clear ("claras" 119) words (as the troubadours of the past once did in their trorbar leu).23 In Book III, Molinier leaves aside some of his philosophizing to turn once again to rhetoric; this time to explicate the kinds of rhetoric there are. One genre of rhetoric, says Molinier, is prose (proza), and this kind corresponds to the way "common people speak" (Molinier, II: 13), the other is rhyme (rima), and this genre corresponds to a certain calculated, sense of moderation (mezura 13) in writing. If razos (reason) is the capacity to judge good from bad (Ibid., I: 135), trobar is the subtle science (sciensa) of versifying with temperance. Molinier then provides us with numerous examples of verses (bordos) which employ lines of four to twelve syllables (63-72); of the use of pauses (pauzas suspensivas) in the different bordos (95); of the different ways of rhyming (98-120); of the different coblas and their metric and rhyming patterns (120175); and lastly, of the definitions of tornada (176), chanso (177), dansa (179), sirventes (181), tenso (182), partimen (183), and planch (183-184). Book III, the last book of the Las leys, is essentially a treatise on grammar: on verb conjugations, on the use of nouns, parts of speech, etc. What distinguishes Las leys d'amors from all the other treatises of its kind is the philosophical breadth of the compendium; it grounds its science of composition, "sciensa de trobar," entirely upon a religious moral foundation. Such was not the case with the Italian and Catalan theorists of trobar. Vidal's Razos de trobar (1972) begins with the author's assertion that he, Raimon Vidal24 ("ieu Raimonz Vidals" 2) has known very few men who truly know the right way to compose ("la dreicha maniera de trobar" 2). He has written the book, says Vidal, to teach with examples from the best of the troubadours, how to compose correctly. Absent from Vidal's Razos are any references to God, gay saber, or any sort of ethics. His sources are not the writers of the Greek and Latin antiquity (e.g., Gorgias and Cicero), nor the church fathers (e.g., St. Bernard and St. Jerome), but the troubadours themselves (e.g., G. de Borneill and B. de Ventadour). What we have before us is a secular treatise on grammar and poetics. In a sentence reminiscent of Aristotle's "all men by nature desire" to know, Vidal instead writes: "Everyone , Christians, Jews, Moslems, emperors, princes, kings, dukes, counts, viscounts, nobles, vassals, clerks, middle class workers, peasants, small and great, turn their attention every day to composing and singing (chantar)" (2, my translation). Thus, the science of composing (trobar) is one which concerns everyone from the king to the peasant. That being so, one must know the right way to compose; for there is a right and a wrong way, and the delineation of the two is the object of Vidal's Razos (1972). Fortunately, there is no language more appropriate for the art of composing poetry than the Limousin language, says Vidal. "French is best for writing romances and pastorellas, but the Limousin language is better for composing chansons and serventes. And there is no language, anywhere that possesses greater authority when it comes to singing than Limousin..." (6, my translation). However, before one can sing (chantar) or compose poetry (trobar) it is necessary that one know the rules of grammar. Vidal accuses many troubadours of ignoring the rules of grammar, in the false believe that rhyming is everything. They sacrifice grammatical correctness to rhyme. The troubadour, then, who has inherited the noble Limousin language, "should be careful not to introduce a rhyming word when it is not appropriate" (22). Instead, he should see to it that such things as gender and parts of speech, are respected. When Giorgio Agamben writes that the gay science of Las leys 23 Neither the trobar leu, the trobars clus, nor any of the other troubadour styles, figure in any way in Las leys d'amors. 24 Molinier cites Vidal once in Las leys d'amors (III: 23). Rolando Pérez 556 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 d'amors is "essentially a grammar of the Provençal language" ("La parola" 156), the summation applies with much more precision to Vidal's Razos de trobar than it does to Molinier's work. He is on target, however, when he points to the Saussurean difference between langue and parole (156-159) that was already operating in the ars poetica of theorists like Vidal. The importance of the Razos de trobar was to establish a distinction between langue (the correct way of composing, trobar) and parole (the spoken language; the phonetics that often determined rhyme for the troubadours). "Since the troubadour's language lacked a codified grammatical structure, rhyme was the supplement for this lack and was transformed into an increasingly complex 'pseudogrammar'" (Stone, 16). In this respect the Vidal's Razos is exemplary of a formalistic post-troubadour grammar and ars poetica. The moral Puritanism of Molinier becomes a formal, linguistic Purinatism in Vidal, which ends in the imperative: "You will write grammatically correct sentences."25 The Razos de trobar was later turned to verse by Terramagnino da Pisa (1972). Known as the Doctrina d'Acort (1972, 27-54) it leaves out the more personal references of the Razos, the geographical references, and any reference to the spoken language of Provençe. Marshall believes that it was probably written for a small number of Italian intellectuals interested in Provençal verse. Other treatises followed between the Razos and Enrique de Villena's Arte de trovar (356370), among them, two anonymous treatises in MS. Ripoll 129 (Marshall, 99-106), Jofre de Foixà's Regles de trobar and the continuation of the Regles, the Doctrina de compondre dictats (Marshall, 93-98). The Regles was written some time between 1286 and 1291, at the request, says Foixà, of King Jacme, of Sicily (The Razos, 56). He wrote the Regles, declares Foixà, for those who could not understand the Latin grammar of Vidal's Razos, but who nevertheless had an interest in the subject of composition. For them he writes a clear (clar) romance grammar that will provide them with the kind of knowledge (saber) that has to do with nouns, rhyme, case, articles, etc. The last two pages include a concise list of the different kinds of compositions beginning with the vers and ending with the tenso (97-98). What Marshall calls the "Vidal tradition" includes Mirrall de trobar and Donatz Proensals, and though Marshall does not include Villena therein, Anglade certainly does. Enrique de Villena's Arte de trovar (1994), written around the year 1413, is obviously a late comer to the scene. The Arte de trovar, as we have it today is but a fragment of what seems to have been until the time of Zurita and Quevedo, a much longer work. It is possible, says Pedro Cátedra in the introduction to the Obras Completas (Complete Works), that Villena's essay may have been one of the literary casualties of the Escorial fire of 1672 (1994, xxvi). In any case, given what has remained to us, Villena's Arte is unique with respect to the other treatises, which may explain why Marshall does not refer to it in The Razos. Its uniqueness is due to the fact that it is the only treatise on the art of composing poetry which turns most of it attention to phonetics. Rather than rules of grammar or rhyme, Villena concerns himself with diction and comparative phonetics. He traces the changes in the Romance alphabet from its Latin origins to his day, and the impact of those changes on phonetics (1994 361363). His study begins with an enumeration of the lungs (pulmón) and the organs or instruments (instrumentos) responsible for producing sound: the trachea or bronchial 25 "...[T]he grammarian's desire to formulate a clear-cut rule has led him to misinterpret the ordinary literary practice of the language. Vidal was deluded in thinking that, for any given element of the language, there must necessarily be a rule clearly separating a 'correct' from and 'incorrect' form. This left no room for the concept of alternative forms, free variants of equal currency in written usage...Vidal's norm, therefore, was in a number of respects much narrower than that of the best troubadours of the twelfth century" (Marshall, lxxxv). Rolando Pérez 557 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 tubes (tracharchedía), the palate (paladar), tongue (lengua), teeth (dientes), and lips (beços 359). Differences in pronunciation vary from place to place according to the way sound is made, and linguistic changes occur primarily with variations in sound (360). What a good "trobador," or poet must keep in mind is that the choice of one letter over another will determine the quality of his composition. The good poets, says Villena, were those who knew which letters produced pleasing sounds ("euphonía") and which letters to avoid, because they sounded unpleasant ("desplazible" 366). Good diction (dición) was based on this knowledge. The decision, for instance, to substitute the hard sound of the g in the word linagge with a t to soften the sound, as in linatge, is an example of the kind of choice that a good poet will make. "This," writes Villena, "is done in the Limousin language" (1994 366, my translation). Other examples of substitutions are the ph for f as in philosophía (366), or the second n in año with the y to create anyo which, according to Villena, sweetened the sound ("adulça el son" 367). In the end, for Villena the art of composition was linguistically based on usage and phonetics. The Arte de trovar, dedicated to the Marqués de Santillana (355), had an impact on the Spanish poets of the time, insofar as it was the first formal treatise to lay the foundations for a Castilian poetics based on the troubadour art of composition. For if Baena does not mention Villena by name, the term "gaya çiençia" is likely to have come 1) from Villena's Arte and 2) from Las leys d'amors, which Villena mentions in his treatise (356). Anglade believes that Baena may have had access to one of the versions of La leys d'amors (114); and there is something to be said for such a conjecture. Firstly, Baena's conception of "gaya çiençia" as an art infused by God's divine grace (López Estrada, 37) seems to be derived from much of what is in the first book of Molinier's Las leys, and not from Villena's Arte, in which literary-theological concerns are entirely absent. Secondly, though the Arte may have pointed Baena in the right direction, Villena's essay deals, as we said earlier, primarily with phonetics. And yet Baena alludes in his "Prologus Baenenssis" ("Baenean Prologue") to a whole range of compositional topics that are not covered in the Arte, but are in Las leys: the subtle and right manner of determining meter, according to pauses, consonants, syllables, accents, etc., (37). The case of the Marqués de Santillana is a bit more complicated. Anglade does not believe that Santillana had read either Villena's essay, or Las leys. His reason for thinking so is Santillana's assertion in the Proemio that many of the (troubadour) poetic terms had come from Portugal and Galicia (López Estrada, 59). But Anglade's conjecture seems to be much more driven by his own cultural prejudices, than Santillana who viewed troubadour poetry as a "'historical tradition to which many nations contributed'" (Lapesa, 253, my translation).26 What is clear, despite all the obfuscation, is that the well-read Santillana had a clear sense of Provençal poetry ("los lemosís françeses" 56); the consequent poetics of the Catalan troubadours ("aun catalanes" 56); and finally, the importance of troubadour poetics for Dante and the art of composing in romance (56, 58): "that in our vulgate we call gay science ("gaya sçiençia llamamos" 52). In the end, Molinier's articulation of a neo-troubadour poetics led to the institution of a Consistory, a society, as it were, of the gay science –the first one established in Toulouse, and the second chartered in Barcelona. 26 Rafael Lapesa attributes this quote to Werner Krauss (254). And Patterson writes: "Few movements are more significant from the standpoint of comparative literature. The early poetic schools of Catalonia, Spain, Portugal, North France, Norman England, Sicily, Italy, and Germany show how pervasive was the Provençal influence" (37). Rolando Pérez 558 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 4. The Consistori of Toulouse and Barcelona Dating the first Consistori of Tolouse has been somewhat problematic. R. Gubern following the work of Alfred Jeanroy, sets it at 1324; and while Anglade is clear with respect to its subsequent meetings, he, on other hand, shies away from establishing a foundation date. In 1324 Raimon de Cornet de Saint Antoine wrote his Doctrinal de trobar as a guide to the contestants of the Consistori competitions (Anglade 101; Patterson 36). From the very beginning, claims Anglade, Catalan poets were among the first to be awarded the prestigious golden violet (violette) award (105). The Consistori consisted of seven judges or mantenedors (maintainers) of the "gai savoir." And in 1358, Molinier, who was put in charge of the Toulouse Consistori, imbued the language of its charter, with a religious spirit. The seven maintainers of the Gay Saber were to honor God, our Lord ("Dieu, nostre senhor") in the name of good (virtuous) love or "bon'amor" (Molinier, I: 19, 21). According to most historians of literature the Consistori of the Gay Saber was imported to Catalonia at the request of Joan I el Caçador, King of Aragon (1387-1396), who wanted to establish a school of the gay science in Barcelona, modeled after the one in Toulouse. And though the dates of the Barcelona Consistori vary from 1388 to 1393, we know that the first floral games (jocs florals) took place in the Catalonian city of Lleida, on May 31, 1338, in celebration of the Pentecost (Gubern, 96).27 From the Catalonian Consistori of 1393, 1395, 1396, and 1398 (Riquer 1964, 565-567, 569) we can readily see that the school of Gay Science was under the direct economic control of the crown. While the Toulouse Consistori (or Consistoire) was instituted as a celebration of troubadour poetry as sanctioned by the church, the more secular Catalonian Consistori was sanctioned by the crown. If the Consistori in Barcelona, was more successful than its twin in Toulouse, it is probably due to the fact that Toulouse was a conquered city which instituted the Consistori in order to preserve a piece of its rich past, while the Barcelona Consistori, outside of the troubadours' native soil, could more easily retain some of the secular features of the troubadour poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth century. The domina and midons of the troubadours had been transformed into the Virgin Mary. One no longer sang to a flesh and blood lover, but rather to the Virgin. The albas, once the "dawn" poems of the troubadours lamenting the approaching sunrise when they would have to leave the company of their married lovers, became the poetry sung by post-Albigensian "troubadours" in honor of the Virgin. The poetic competitions of troubadours such as Bernard de Ventadour, de Bertran de Born, Arnaut Daniel, Peire Vidal, and others, became the institutionalized, controlled, regular floral games of the fourteenth and fifteenth century. The troubadour poets competed against each other, but they did so individually, and outside of any academic, regulated system. Now with the Consistori the competitions could continue, and a "dangerous," secular tradition could be made safe for everyone. The marginal power of the church in twelfth and thirteenth century Provençe had now taken centerstage with a vengeance. By the time Villena wrote Arte de trovar, the Consistori had become a "living" museum of troubadour poetry. Moreover, Villena erroneously attributed the establishment of the first Consistori to Raimon Vidal, (355), and mistook the title of Jofré de Foxa's work to be "Continuacion del trobar" (355), when in fact, it was Regles de trobar. But Villena provides us with a detailed idea of how the Consistori was constituted. Not seven (as in Toulouse) but four judges made up the committee that decided on the prizes. Arranged hierarchically, the King was seated on an elevated chair where he could see everyone, next the judges (mantenedors) sat at a lower level to the 27 Nothing is known as to who participated in these first floral games. Rolando Pérez 559 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 right and the left of the King, the scribes who took notes below the judges, and finally the poets at ground level from where they recited their poems, all of it staged pretty much like in an altar ("como un altar" 357). After listening to the poets the judges met in private where they assigned points to the different poems according to the rules of the gay science28. The books on the art of composition and the rules of the award (la joya) were placed on a table (357). The accepted topics were poems dedicated to the Virgin Mary, to arms (armas), love (amores), and good behavior (buenas costumbres). Of the four mantenedors (a lord, an expert on law, an honored citizen of the community, and a theologian), the most important member was the master of theology ("maestro en theología" 357). For it was he who announced the rules of the game ("loores de la gaya sciencia" 357) before the competition began. Villena's description of the competition reveals that the Consistori had acquired a greater cultural significance than the very poets it awarded. The lower position of the poets in the physical hierarchy described by Villena makes it obvious that the poets were there to glorify the Consistori, and by extension the crown and the church. Crude as it may sound, the poets had become the entertaining monkeys (mere juglares), court jesters, to be kind, of the established power. Their very artistic expression was controlled by the Consistori's rules on what did and did not constitute acceptable poetry. The Church in conjunction with the crown turned a dynamic poetry into an ossified product of power. To put it in Foucauldian terms, it turned a free, individual expression (poetry) into a discursive formation29, and its discourse into a manifestation of institutional power. The Consistori, and what has come to be known as the gay science associated with it, may very well be, on close inspection, a sad, early instance of the kind of Christian-European, cultural decadence so much critiqued by Nietzsche. 5. Nietzsche's "Gay Science" "The body is a great intelligence," wrote Nietszsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (61), thus making of his own bodily pain (migraine headaches) a source of knowledge. "There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom" (62), he concluded: as a response to the Cartesian dualism of the previous two hundred years. For until Foucault, Nietzsche stood alone as the modern philosopher who put the body back into philosophy. And to this corporeal life-affirming philosophy he gave the name "gay science." Moreover, according to Nietzsche, the pre-Socratics represented the last school of philosophers for whom the body had epistemic legitimacy. Unfortunately, Christianity with ascetic hatred of the body put an end to that. According to Nietzsche, the end of an appreciation of the body came with the advent of Christianity. Priests nuns, monks, these Christian "despisers of the body,"30 as Nietzsche called them, 28 For an example of the comments made by the judges on the margins of the page containing the poems recited in the competitions see Riquer's "El Consistori de Barcelona" (1964, 573). 29 "Whenever...one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions, functionings, transformations)...we are dealing with a discursive formation..." says Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge (38). A discursive formation as Foucault defines it, in turn produces a certain discourse (associated with an institution or a discipline (178-181): sexuality, medicine, grammar, etc), and such discourse becomes the science (178-181) and knowledge (savoir) and ideology (181-186) that gives an institution its power. Institutions then create historical monuments (7, 137, 139), such as the artificially constructed "gay science" of the "troubadours": in order to preserve a specific (cleansed) cultural "memory" (7). 30 "They despised the body: they left it out of the accounts: more, they treated it as an enemy. It was their delusion to believe that one could carry a 'beautiful soul' about in a cadaverous abortion– To make this conceivable to others they needed to present the concept 'beautiful soul' in a different way, to revalue the natural value, until at last a pale, sickly, idiotically fanatical creature was thought to be perfection, Rolando Pérez 560 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 treated the body as a mere material vessel of all that was evil in the world; and consequently, as the opposite of a "good" soul. Fortunately, said Nietzsche, there was an antidote to this Christian hatred of the body, and his name was Epicurus. In fact, without the Epicurean notion of embodied happiness there would be no The Gay Science. It is Epicurus' idea that all knowledge and "happiness" originatee in the senses that is the basis of Nietzsche's joyful wisdom. Ironically, it was Epicurus' conception of happiness that informed the American "Declaration of Independence," and particularly Thomas Jefferson's imperative "to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (my italics). This was indeed the summum bonum of life, according to Jefferson –a happiness that comes from reflection and a certain balance between our bodies and our minds.31 In fact, Jefferson himself advised his friend William Short, that if he wanted a healthier, more robust life, to follow in the steps of the Epicurean philosophy. He wrote: Your love of repose will lead, in its progress, to a suspension of healthy exercise, a relaxation of mind, an indifference to everything around you, and finally to a debility of body, and hebetude of mind, the farthest of all things from the happiness which the well-regulated indulgences of Epicurus ensure; fortitude, you know is one of his four cardinal virtues. (To William Short, October 31, 1819 in The Thomas Jefferson Papers online) The enemy of a healthy life, in both body and soul, he said –in anticipation of Nietzsche–was Platonism and its reworking of "incomprehensible" "mysticisms" into Christianity by "ultra-Christian sects" (Ibid). Cicero, for instance, had failed to understand Epicurus, and had other overvalued Plato," said Jefferson to John Adams in a letter of July 5, 1814 (Ibid). But in any case, what did Epicurean philosophy actually consist of, and how did Nietzsche connect it to his notion of gay science? Epicurus' corpus is fragmentary, brief, and laconic; and because this is so, he is a difficult philosopher to grasp. What little we know about him, is from Diogenes Laertius' Life of Epicurus, and from Lucretius' On the Nature of the Universe. Yet, laconic as Epicurus' writings may be, some of his most important philosophical positions are actually quite clear, if we only take the time to unpack them. In his letter to Herodotus, Epicurus sets out to explain what it is that he means, first by knowledge, and secondly how one comes to know things. He states it indirectly, but the meaning is quite clear. Epicurus writes: [a student] is able to make immediate use of the things he perceives and of the resulting concepts by assigning them to the 'angelic,' transfiguration, higher man," writes Nietzsche in The Will to Power (#226, 131). And he continues in the next aphorism (#227) with: "Ignorance in psychologicis –the Christian has no nervous system–; contempt for, and a deliberate desire to disregard the demands of the body..." (131). 31 "The summum bonum is to be not pained in body, nor troubled in mind," noted Jefferson at the end of his letter to William Short (Ibid). And Daniel Greenleaf Thompson writes: "It has not been appreciated that since cognition, feeling, and volition are all but different sides of the same experience, our emotional enjoyments are only representations of our sensational pleasures. Therefore, it has seemed to many that our ideal joys were something different in kind from our sensations, and while the term pleasure had a relevancy to the sensational enjoyments, the thinking mind, having failed to grasp the relations of ideas to sensations, could not associate the joy of higher faculties with animal pleasure, and was unwilling to mark the two by the same designation. Instead of identification they made an opposition which was part and parcel of an opposition running through their whole philosophy between the sensational and the ideal, the experiential and the intuitional. They ought to have made an opposition between one pleasure or set of pleasures and another; instead of this they wrongly opposed all pleasure to something they insisted was different from pleasure, and which they called joy, blessedness, complacency, or virtuous bliss" (70). Rolando Pérez 561 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 simplest classes and by calling them by their own names; for it is not possible for anyone to hold in mind in condensed form the whole interrelated system unless he is able to comprehend by means of short formulas all that might be expressed in detail. Therefore, since such a course is useful to all who are engaged with natural science, I, who recommend continuous activity in this field and am myself gaining peaceful happiness from just this life, have composed for you such a brief compendium of the chief principles of my teaching as a whole. (9) Firstly, knowledge is attained through the senses. Upon perceiving the world, the mind gives a certain order to the chaos it perceives: it organizes it and gives it a name. It is in this name giving that concepts are created, as are the interrelations between different concepts. This is what Epicurus means by "short formulas." "There are no simple concepts. Every concept has components and is defined by them. It therefore has a combination...There is no concept with one component. Even the first concept, the one with which a philosophy 'begins,' has several components..." (Deleuze, 17). The question, then becomes, how to conceptually organize the world –how to give order to things. This the mind does, says Epicurus, by creating concepts out of perceptions. For what else is there? Hence, "we must base investigation on the mental apprehensions, upon the purposeful use of the several senses that furnish us with knowledge, and upon our immediate feelings. In these ways we can form judgments on those matters that can be confirmed by the senses and also on those beyond their reach" (Epicurus, 9, my italics). Secondly, then, we acquire knowledge not through a passive gaze, but rather through the "purposeful use" of sensation, or what in phenomenology is called "intentionality." Thirdly, it is not true that Epicurus failed to define "happiness." In fact, a "happy life," he says, is a life of "peaceful happiness" that comes from contemplation into the nature of things. And Deleuze similarly writes: Sensation is pure contemplation...Contemplation is creating, the mystery of passive creation, sensation. Sensation fills out the plane of composition and is filled with itself by filling itself with what it contemplates: it is "enjoyment" and "self-enjoyment."... These are not Ideas that we contemplate through concepts but the elements of matter that we contemplate through sensation. (212). However, where Deleuze wants to limit the pleasure of knowledge gained trough sensation to only that which can be perceived, Epicurus ends his epistemological formulation by reserving a place for Ideas which are "beyond the reach" of sensations. What remains intact for Epicurus, is of course, the body, for without the body there is no sensation, and without sensation there is no knowledge, pleasure, or happiness. It is not that he denies the soul, but rather that the soul itself is material (Epicurus 23), and instead of the soul being the entity that animates the body, it is the body instead that animates the soul (24). In essence, to destroy the body is to destroy the soul. Pleasures that are not of the mind, says Epicurus, can only detract a rational being from following the kinds of virtuous, rational principles that lead to inner peace. "[B]y pleasure we mean the state wherein the body is free from pain and the mind from anxiety," writes Epicurus (57). He continues: Neither continual drinking and dancing, nor sexual love, nor the enjoyment of fish and whatever else the luxurious table offers ring about the pleasant life; rather it is produced by the reason which is sober, which examines the motive for every choice and rejection, and which drives away all those opinions though the greatest tumult lays hold of the mind. (57) Rolando Pérez 562 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 Though the body, then, is the nexus of sensation, and therefore of physical pleasure, it is most importantly the nexus of intellectual joy32 and the peaceful happiness that comes from knowledge and wisdom.33 It is this Epicurean notion of the world, which I believe, informs Nietzsche's reformulation of gay science.34 The position of Nietzsche within German Romanticism is highly problematic. Friends with Wagner, admirer of Goethe's and Beethoven's "joyful" artistic expressions, of Hölderlin, and of the ancient Greeks, he was a Romantic of sorts at odds with the idealism of Romanticism. His interpretation of the Greeks differed from that of many of his contemporaries like the Schlegel brothers, who saw in the ancient Greeks the very serenity lacking in the modern world. Under the direct influence of the Romantic rationalism of Kant's Critique of Judgment, and Johan Winckelmann's work on the Greeks, Schlegel wrote On the Study of Greek Poetry, wherein he went on to portray Greek poetry as the externalization of knowledge, and beauty as the mind's imitation of nature's harmony (On the Study, 42-43). Artistic and moral beauty were inseparable for the Greeks, declared Schlegel, for one could not separate the moderation of ethical behavior from the moderation of artistic imitation. A chaotic, disordered world, in which beauty had ceased to be an ideal of art, could only produce "representations of the ugly" (18). It was against this idealized Pre-Raphaelite interpretation of the ancient Greeks (e.g., the paintings of Alma Tadema) that Nietzsche wrote The Birth of Tragedy. For Nietzsche, like Aristotle,35 tragedy originated with the Greek chorus of the dithyramb performed at the Dionysian festivals in Athens (Birth of Tragedy, #7: 56). The dithyrambic chorus allowed the spectators to bodily and aesthetically experience the most difficult, painful aspect of existence, wrote Nietzsche: This process of the tragic chorus is the dramatic proto-phenomenon: to see oneself transformed before one's eyes and to begin to act as one had actually entered into another body, another character. This process stands at the beginning of the origin of tragedy. (Birth of Tragedy, #8: 64) In partaking of the dithyrambic suffering of Dionysus, the Greeks were able to identify with their god's overcoming of suffering, and as such proclaim "the truth from the heart of the world" (Ibid., #8: 65). Such Dionysian truth, as bloody and as painful as 32 Lucretius, following Epicurus, writes: "...I maintain that mind and spirit are interconnected and compose between them a single substance. But what I may call the head and the dominant force in the whole body is that guiding principle which we term mind or intellect. This is firmly lodged in the midregion of the breast. Here is the place where fear and alarm pulsate. Here is felt the caressing touch of joy. Here, then, is the seat of intellect and mind. The rest of the vital spirit [anima] diffused throughout the body, obeys the mind and moves under its direction and impulse. The mind by itself experiences thought and joys of its own at a time when nothing moves either the body or the spirit" (100). 33 Nietzsche writes: "Epicurus.-Yes, I am proud of the fact that I experience the character of Epicurus quite differently from perhaps everybody else. Whatever I hear or read of him, I enjoy the happiness of the afternoon of antiquity. I see his eyes gaze upon a wide, white sea, across rocks at the shore that are bathed in sunlight, while large and small animals are playing in this light, as secure and calm as the light and his eyes. Such happiness could be invented only by a man who was suffering continually. It is the happiness of eyes that have seen the sea of existence become calm, and now they can never weary of the surface and of the many hues of this tender, shuddering skin of the sea. Never before had voluptuousness been so modest" (Gay Science, #45: 110). 34 Nietzsche like other thinkers before him had a unified Epicurean-Stoic vision of the world. And though he spent a great deal of ink writing against the philosophers of the Stoa, his concept of the "eternal return" is a thoroughly Stoic concept, balanced, if you will, by his own existential, Epicurean, life-affirming imperative. The joyful, "scientific" idea of an "eternal return" appeared for first time in The Gay Science (#341: 273-274). 35 See Aristotle's Poetics 49a10. Rolando Pérez 563 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 it could be, was also joyous in that it acknowledge the tragic, the darkest aspects of the human spirit, but did not judge it evil. It did not turn –Apollonian fashion– suffering into something negative to be overcome with self-knowledge36. Dionysian art sings of "eternal joy of existence," declared Nietzsche. Only we are to seek this joy not in phenomena, but behind them. We are to recognize that all that comes into being must be ready for a sorrowful end: we are forced to look into the horrors of individual existence –yet we are not to become rigid with fear...We are pierced by the maddening sting of these pains just when we have become as it were, one with the infinite primordial joy in existence, and when we anticipate, in Dionysian ecstasy, the indestructibility and eternity of this joy. (Birth of Tragedy, #17: 104-105) Distinguishing Apollonian knowledge (Socratic logos) from the more "Epicurean-Lucreatian"37 bodily knowledge of the Dionysian experience, Nietzsche held that the joyful wisdom that resulted from the latter was inextricably connected to the lyric music of the satyr. Music and tragic myth are equally expressions of the Dionysian capacity of a people, and they are inseparable. Both derive from sphere of art that lies beyond the Apollonian; both transfigure a region whose joyous chords dissonance as well as the terrible images of the world fade away charmingly; both play with the sting of displeasure, trusting in their exceedingly powerful magic arts; and by means of this play both justify the existence of even the "worst world." (Birth of Tragedy, #25: 143) In addition to being a philologist and a philosopher, Nietzsche was also a composer of music (Piano Music CD) and a poet. He wrote dithyrambs,38 and poems inspired by the poetry of the German troubadours or minnesinger. No one wonder, then, Nietzsche's Zarathustra is dancing poet, a sprit of lightness, "enemy" as he says, "of the Spirit of Gravity" (Zarathustra, 210): of seriousness and pessimism.39 Nietzsche writes: In the great majority, the intellect is a clumsy, gloomy, creaking machine that is difficult to start. They call it "taking the matter seriously" when they want to work with this machine and think well. How burdensome they must find good thinking! The lovely human beast always seems to lose his good spirits when it 36 "For Apollo wants to grant repose to individual beings precisely by drawing boundaries between them and by again and again calling these to mind as the most sacred laws of the world, with his demand for self-knowledge and measure" (Birth #10: 72). And Silk and Stern explain: "In classical tragedy as we know it [the tragedy of Aeschylus (525-456) and Sophocles (496-406)], the drama, as represented in the dialogue, gives a uniformly Apolline impression of form, precision, lucidity, and beauty, much like Homeric epic. But the heroes who convey this impression are merely embodying the Apolline response to life's horror: the attempt to make that horror acceptable. This is the real meaning of the famous 'Greek serenity,' so often misinterpreted as some kind of untroubled cheerfulness" (71). 37 In the 1886 edition of The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche included a preface which he entitled "Attempt at a Self-Criticism". There he asked the question whether one could interpret Epicurus as a response to the emerging pessimism of Greek society. "Was Epicure an optimist –precisely because he was afflicted?" (#4: 22) In other words, was Epicurus' "yea saying" a sort of Dionysian optimism that affirmed life in spite of all its pain? And on the very first page of The Birth Tragedy Nietzsche cites, Lucretius (Epicurus commentator and disciple) as one who understood the power of dreams as a transformative medium of (Dionysian) art. "It was in dreams, says Lucretius, that the glorious divine figures first appeared to the souls of men: in dreams the great shaper beheld the splendid bodies of superhuman beings..." (Birth #1:33). 38 In 2001 R.J Hollingdale published a bilingual (German/English) edition of Nietzsche's DionysosDithyramben/Dithyrambs of Dionysus. 39 In the section on Thus Spoke Zarathustra of Ecce Homo Nietzsche wrote: "My gaya scienza...even offers the beginning of Zarathustra, and in the penultimate section of the fourth book ["The Intoxicated Song" 326-333] the basic idea of Zarathustra" (296). Rolando Pérez 564 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 thinks well: it becomes "serious." And "where laughter and gaiety are found, thinking does not amount to anything": that is the prejudice of the serious beast against all "gay science." (The Gay Science, #327: 257) This kind of disembodied thinking belonged to the "rationalist," for whom all thinking, according to Nietzsche, was reduced to a series of cognitive functions, stripped of their emotions. The bloodiness of the world, the horror that Nietzsche famously called "human, all too human," was made heavy with the pessimism of rational thought which imposed a logical explanation on every aspect of human life. This spirit of gravity or seriousness, said Nietzsche, has even changed the way we read a work like Don Quijote: poisoned by the Christian spirit of guilt and a bad conscience (Genealogy, 2: 7 66-67). Published as an Appending of Songs to the The Gay Science are Nietzsche's "Songs of Prince Vogelfrei," a series of poems no doubt inspired by the poetry of the minnesinger. These songs of freedom, of gay science, as the "Vogelfrei" (literarily free bird) of the title indicates is also an allusion to the greatest of the German "troubadour" poets, Walther von der Vogelweide (c. 1170-1230), who for some time was a wandering poet writing in a style similar to that of Provençal troubadour song.40 In Ecce Homo Nietzsche interpreted first his book, The Gay Science, and then the "Songs of Prince Vogelfrei" thus: "The Dawn is a Yes-saying book, deep but bright and gracious. The same is true also and in the highest degree of the gaya scienza: in almost every sentence profundity and high spirits go tenderly hand in hand" ("Gay Science"/Ecce Homo, 293).41 And of his "Songs of Prince Vogelfrei" and their relation to the troubadours he wrote: The "Songs of Prince Free-as-a-Bird," written for the most part in Sicily,42 are quite emphatically reminiscent of the Provençal of gaya scienza –that unity of singer, knight, and free spirit which distinguishes the wonderful early culture of the Provençal from all equivocal cultures. The very last poem above all, "To the Mistral," an exuberant dancing song in which, if I may say so, one dances right over morality is a perfect Provençalism. (294). And in a discarded draft for the section, "Why I Am So Clever" of Ecco Homo, Nietzsche suggested a (philosophical) connection between Dionysian, Provençal, and Roman poetics (specifically Petronius), as examples of anti-Christian, anti-moralistic, free-spirit expressions of "gay science". He wrote: Of all books, one of my strongest impressions is that exuberant Provençal, Petronius,43 who composed the last Satura Menippea. Such sovereign freedom 40 Erich Köhler writes in Sociologia della fin'amor: saggi trobadorici that the poetry of Walther von der Vogelweide lacked the free spirit of Provençal poetry. According to Köhler, Vogelweide was a stuffy, conservative, want-to-be-aristocrat that shared none of the values (like that of largueza) with his French counterparts (281). "[French] troubadour poetry is much closer to real life, and more realistic than that of Minnesang which instead is idealistic and spiritual," says Köhler (282., my translation). If the poetry of the Gay Science Consistori was the mouthpiece of the Church, the poetry of Minnesang was the mouthpiece of the high nobility (282). What all this demonstrate, once again, is that Nietzsche's knowledge of the French and German troubadours was probably second hand, and most likely a result of his conversations with Wagner. 41 Note Nietzsche's insistence in equating depth and profundity with brightness and high spirits –qualities that are traditionally associated with gravity and seriousness. 42 It is no coincidence that Nietzsche mentions Sicily as the place where he wrote most of the poems of the "Songs". Sicily was home –as was Germany– to its own tradition of troubadour poetry. Frederick II, one of Nietzsche's heroes, was responsible for bringing the poetry of the troubadours to Sicily. 43 Incidentally, in 1928 Philip Schuyler Allen in his book The Romanesque Literature compared the Romanesque lyric of Petronius to that of the medieval romance. "As the political extinction of Rome proper approached and the overwhelming interest of the City ceased to absorb individual passion and Rolando Pérez 565 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 from "morality" from "seriousness," from his own sublime taste; such subtlety in his mixture of vulgar and "educated" Latin; such indomitable good spirits that leap with grace and malice over all anomalies of the ancient "soul" –I could not name any book that makes an equally liberating impression on me: the effect is Dionysian. In cases in which I find it necessary to recuperate quickly from a base impression –for example because for the sake of my critique of Christianity I had to breath all too long the swampy air of the apostle Paul– a few pages of Petronius suffice me as a heroic remedy, and immediately I am well again. ("Appendix"/Ecce Homo #1: 339-340) The book that followed The Birth of Tragedy was Human, All Too Human, and was subtitled "a book for free spirits". It was a book of personal liberation for Nietzsche. The academic world had attacked The Birth of Tragedy for not being a serious scholarly book –for being full of errors: imputing qualities to the dithyramb, the Dionysian, and Apollonian spirit that were incorrect. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möellendorf,44 the most respected classical philologist of the time, practically advised the young philologist to leave the profession (Groth, 185-186). Even fellow philologist and friend, Erwin Rohde, distanced himself from Nietzsche. And in the end, Nietzsche retired from his position at the University of Basel, more interested in pursuing a life in philosophy than one in philology. Where "Wilamowitz asked 'What can we do for philology?'; Nietzsche preferred to ask, 'What can philology do for us?'" (Lloyd-Jones 13). Nietzsche would re-evaluate his life as a philologist years later, as one spent in the pursuit of meaningless, dead knowledge. His break with philology made him realize how much time he "had wasted." Or as he put it: "how useless and arbitrary my whole existence as a philologist appeared in relation to my task. I felt ashamed of this false modesty" (Ecce Homo, #3: 286). He continued: Ten years lay behind me in which the nourishment of my spirit had really come to a stop; I had not learned anything new that was useful: I had forgotten an absurd amount for the sake of dusty scholarly gewgaws. Crawling scrupulously with bad eyes through ancient metrists –that's what I had come to! It stirred my compassion to see myself utterly emaciated, utterly starved: my knowledge simply failed to include realities, and my "idealities" were not worth a damn. (#3: 286) Nietzsche had been rudely woken up from his dogmatic slumber by the rejection of the philologists, and from now on he would embrace "physiology" –everything that had to do with the body over and above any activity that atrophied the "instincts" (#3: 286). It was at this point that Nietzsche became the philosopher of the gay science. Or to put another way that Nietzsche became a philosopher. For one cannot understand such a concept as "gay science" in Nietzsche without first considering this transformation in his thought. The Nietzsche of the gay science was one who no longer believed that language revealed the metaphysical truths of the world. He had come full circle to his emotion, the tension of poetry and art became relaxed. Feeling grew more humane and personal, social and family life reassumed their real importance; and gradually there grew up a thing new to literature, the Romanesque, the romantic spirit. With its passionate sense of beauty in nature, idyllic poetry reacted on the sense of beauty in simple human life; the elegy and epigram are full of a new freshness of feeling, and the personal lyric is born, with is premonitions of a simple pathos which is as alien to the older Roman spirit as it is close to the feeling of the medieval romance. Now no one has brought the phantom of freshness into the Latin poetry of love and nature more definitely than Petronius. In fact, if we except a very few of the best poems of Propertius, Latin elegiacs have nothing to show that combines such perfection of form with such sensuous charm" (Allen, 73). 44 See Wilamowitz's My Recollections, p. 150-152 and J.H. Groth's article, "Wilamowitz-Möellendorf on Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy" in the Journal of the History of Ideas April 1950: 179-190. Rolando Pérez 566 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 earlier interests in rhetoric and in the inventive, metaphorical dimension of language45. In his essay "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense" he had come to identify language, with its mobile army of metaphors, as an expression of the will to power. But Nietzsche had no idea that the poetics which he called "gay science" had actually been the tomb stone of the troubadours he so much admired. And yet, philosophically speaking, it does not really matter; he simply reinvented the term to mean (unbeknownst to him) quite literally mean the opposite of what Molinier and the Consistori had intended. He wrote of the troubadours in Beyond Good and Evil because for him the troubadours represented, the highest expression of the individual artistic will, who sang and danced "right over morality" with their love songs. The troubadours created the world and themselves through language. They did not sing to God nor the Virgin, as the poets of the Consistori would later do, but of love, and of joy. Nietzsche writes: ...artful and enthusiastic reverence and devotion are the regular symptoms for an aristocratic way of thinking and evaluating. This makes plain why love as passion –which is our European specialty– simply must be of noble origin: as is well known, its invention must be credited to the Provençal knight-poets, those magnificent and inventive human beings of the "gai saber" to whom Europe owes so many things and almost owes itself" (Beyond Good and Evil, #260: 208). These poets were "aristocratic" in the original (and not in the economic) sense of the word; i.e., like Zarathustra they were light enough to give birth to a "dancing star". Opposed to everything Christian, their poetry defied –as Nietzsche saw it– the "Spirit of Gravity," of everything low, and weighed down with guilt and vapid moralism. In the end, these troubadours and their gay science, were a creation of Nietzsche's natural, beyond good evil" romanticism. Interestingly, Nietzsche was not so much interested in the work of individual troubadours as he was in the creative, linguistic and cultural drive behind their poetry. The Provençal troubadour was for Nietzsche a nexus of active forces –an übermensch. 6. Conclusion The story of the troubadours and the gay science must be seen as the unresolved tension between art and science, between science qua logic and rationality (cognition) and the affective knowledge of the body; between langue (grammar) and parole (the living, spoken word). The philologist/philosopher Nietzsche paid for this terrible 45 "Consequently, metaphor serves Nietzsche as bridge to cross from language to the body," writes Luis Enrique de Santiago Guervós in "El poder de la palabra: Nietzsche y la retórica," (The power of the word: Nietzsche and Rhetoric) his masterful introduction to Nietzsche's 1872-1874 lectures on rhetoric published in translation in Spain under the title Escritos sobre retórica (2000; Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, 1989). And at the same time, Guervós says, "metaphor served him as an instrument with which to ground the driving "forces" which seek their expression in the body, before they are encapsulated in words and concepts. As such, consciousness, the conceptual world, abstract thought, and the soul, are nothing more than bodily modes, a plurality of drives that make up the unconscious penetrated by the great force to interpret. That is because before man creates concepts and judgments, he is first a creator of forms, so that in reality the body is the source whence the creative forces emerge..." (36-37). Metaphor is one of the creative ways through which the body externalizes its impressions, drives, desires, and instincts through language. Sarah Kofman, on the other hand, distinguishes the use of metaphor by the lyric poet from rhetoric and music. "Metaphor must be understood here not as a rhetorical figure, but as 'a substitutive image which the poet really perceives in place of the idea,' a live spectacle at which he is present. The lyric genius expresses in his way what the Dionysian musician, by identifying himself with the primitive echo of the world, is able to make resonate without having to resort to images," writes Kofman (8). However, what she fails to take into account is that for Nietzsche the "rhetorical figure" no less than metaphor and music, was an active force (pulsion) of the will. Rolando Pérez 567 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 tension –from which we have not yet escaped– with bad eye sight and migraines. A lover of knowledge (philo-sophia) and a lover of words (philo-logia), he wanted to bring the latter closer to the former. For he lived in an age in which scientific positivism reigned supreme. Philology as we know it was in fact, an invention of the nineteenth century. The great philologist, Gaston Paris, invented the term "amour courtois" or courtly love, if only to prove to his father, Paulin Paris –an impressionist, Romantic critic– that even love could be analyzed under the scientific microscope of philology (Hult, 202-206, 212-213). Enrique de Villena defined science ("sciençia") in his Arte de trovar as the "order of things immutable and true" (359). Molinier, Vidal, Foixà, the mantenedors of the Consistori, the supporters of the crown and the church turned the poetry of the Provençal troubadours into a science ("saber"), and in so doing transformed a lay poetics of freedom into something safe, predictable, regulated, and coded. It might prove fruitful to at some future date to investigate the possible relation between the Consistori and the rise of the European university, for there is much in the Consistori that reminds one of the medieval university. Today we live with the same intellectual split in the academia world, that Paris and others like him had already anticipated, and even promoted, over a hundred years ago –the thorny chiasm between philology or literary studies and literary theory. Before there was the Roland Barthes of The Pleasure of the Text, with his emphasis on the jouisance of textuality, there was the work of E.S. Dallas who, in a two volume work on the Epicurean interpretation of literature, had attempted to imbue literary criticism with the spirit of gay science. Dallas wrote: I have called the present work the Gay Science, because that is the shortest description I can find of its aim and contents. But I have ventured to wrest a little from its old Provençal meaning...The lighthearted minstrels of Provence insisted on the joyfulness of their art. In the dawn of modern literature, they declared, with a straightforwardness which has never been surpassed either by poets or by critics, that the immediate aim of art is the cultivation of pleasure. But it so happens that no critical doctrine is in our day more unfashionable than this –that the object of art is pleasure. (I: 3, 4) Why not, asked Dallas in 1886, "a Science of Pleasure"? Does the body yield less knowledge than the mind? Does the logos of the philologist and the philosopher, guarantee the scientific immutable truth and meaning alluded to by Villena? In the last section of his essay, "La parola e il sapere," Agamben reminds us of Wittgenstein's conclusion –that language can yield no knowledge outside of itself because whatever we say, whatever categories we refer to (substance, essence, qualities, and so on) are themselves categories of language; linguistic signs referentially pointing to themselves and to no other (external, transcendental), external reality. If such conclusion ends in the pessimism of silence, there is still a way out it, and such a way is to be found in the realization that in a very Epicurean fashion, the body and the mind are not mutually exclusive of each other –that we are not in any way forced to subscribe to the modernist Cartesian split. The history of the gay saber or gay science is the history of an error, whose solution may found in the space between gay and saber. From Nietzsche we may learn the need for a historical saber of literature (even with his errors, and perhaps even more because of his errors), as well as the joyful (gay) knowledge derived from an affective, physiological interpretation of literature.46 His ideas had a profound impact on 46 "Only through forgetfulness can man ever achieve the illusion of possessing a 'truth'...If he does not wish to be satisfied with truth in the form of a tautology –that is, with empty shells– then he will forever buy illusions for truths. What is a word? The image of a nerve stimulus in sounds. But to infer from the Rolando Pérez 568 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 classical philology, and he may very well be credited as the founder of comparative literature. Who else could have put Petronius, the Provençal troubadours, and the cult of Dionysus together in a way that made philosophical sense, if not the philosopher who announced the death of God, and for whom language had at last been liberated from its metaphysical moorings? And yet there is problem here, for in Nietzsche's abandonment of philology for philosophy, there was also an abandonment of intellectual responsibility, for which we have dearly paid with all kinds of banal conclusions.47 What Nietzsche's error regarding the gay science (as well the Dionysian/Apollonian dialectic) did was to usher in the age of hermeneutics, chaperoned into the twentieth century by Heidegger (National Socialist mythos) and Vattimo (2010, 2011: neo-liberal relativism). To respond to Nietzschean hermeneutics it may be worthwhile to return something akin to a Kantian critical project. A student once said that to me that Hobbes was a Marxist, and though I sort of understood what he meant by it –given the popular interpretation of Marx in the United States– I did my best to explain to him why this could not be so. And I think most of us would do our best to correct such a student's mistake, so why should a great philosopher like Nietzsche, be allowed to get away with a similar mistake? Yet, unfortunately, lack of intellectual rigor is rampant in our culture today. The artist, the philosopher, the philologist, and the critic, each in his/her own discipline ought to recognize the importance of craftsmanship and philosophical inquiry, without which there may be very little of any worth. For when we speak of "creative writing" as opposed to academic writing, for instance, we do both a great disservice; for what is not creative in "academic writing" and what is not subject to a science, to craftsmanship, in "creative" writing? The reason for this science/art binary equation lies in the romantic notion of Art (understood in its most general terms) as the result of genius and inspiration rather than labor. Concerning this split, Agamben writes: The existence of a dual status for man's poietic activity appears so natural to us today that we now forget that entrance of the work of art into the aesthetic dimension is a relatively recent event, and one that, when it took place, introduced a radical split in the spiritual life of the artist, changing substantially the aspect of humanity's cultural production. Among the first consequence of this split was the rapid eclipse of those sciences, such as rhetoric and dogmatics, of those social institutions, such as workshops and art schools, and of those structures of artistic composition, such as the repetition of styles, iconographic continuity, and the requires tropes of literary composition...(1999, 62) Ironically, what at first seemed like a liberation of the artist, has become the death of the artist as a maker, as an individual who know his/her craft. The result is that today there are artists, and specially poets, everywhere, who have no idea that writing a poem requires material as well as intellectual labor. Nietzsche's romantic notions no doubt contributed to this inebriated "Dionysian" thinking. Therefore, this monograph has been nerve stimulus, a cause outside us, that is already the result of a false and unjustified application of the principle of reason..." wrote Nietzsche in "On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense" (45). 47 Even Peter Sloterdijk in his apologia of Nietzsche, Nietzsche Apostle, cites a letter in which Nietzsche expresses some apprehension regarding the reception of his bombastic conclusions and its possible cultural ramifications (2013, 73). All which unfortunately has come to fruition in the capitalist marketplace of doxa , where ideas are turned into consumer products (in political terms: "issues") of exchange value. This is what Nietzsche's intellectual irresponsibility has led to. And while Marx has rightly been taken to task for proposing a "dictatorship of the proletariat," Nietzsche has always had plenty of apostles making all kinds of excuses for him. Perhaps in Nietzsche's case more Judases, with a good conscience, are needed. Rolando Pérez 569 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 an attempt to correct a major mistake made by a major thinker, and to shed some light into the history of a concept (gaya sciensa) and an institutional practice (gay trobar) that has been mistaken for something else by a great many people. Does it contain errors of its own? No doubt. But I don't want my readers to let me off the hook. Philosophize and analyze, not with a hammer, but rather with the rigor of meticulous critical inquiry. For now at least, let us say farewell to hermeneutics and to its often facile analogical expressions. Rolando Pérez 570 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 Works Cited Abrahams, Israel. Jewish Life in the Middle Ages. New York: Meridian Books, 1958. Agamben, Giorgio. "La parola e il sapere." Aut Aut 179-180 (1980): 155-166. Print. ---. Georgia Albert trans. The Man Without Content. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1999. Allen, Philip Schuyler. The Romanesque Lyric: Studies in its Background and Development from Petronius to the Cambridge Songs, 50-1050. With renderings into English verse. Howard Mumford Jones. Chapel Hill: The U of North Carolina P, 1928. Anglade, Joseph ed. Etudes sur les Leys d'amors. Book IV of Las leys d'amors. Paris: Edouard Privat, 1919. Anthology of Troubadour Lyric Poetry. Alan R. Press trans., ed.. Austin: U of Texas P, 1971. Bogin, Meg. The Women Troubadours. New York: W.W. Norton, 1980. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. H. Rackham trans. De finibus bonorum et malorum. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1914. da Brescia, Albertano(us). Sharon Lynne Hiltz ed. Liber de amore et dilectione Dei et proximi et aliarum rerum et de forma vitae. Liber primus. Internet: <http://freespace.virgin.net/angus.graham/DeAmore1.htm> [Pagination corresponds to Word printout] Dallas. E. S. The Gay Science. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1969 [1866]. 2 vols. Dante. Allen Mandelhaum trans. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Inferno. New York: Bantam Book, 1980. ---. Sergio Cecchin ed. De vulgari eloquentia. Torino: TEA, 1983. Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari. Hugh Tomlinson & Graham Burchell trans. What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia U P, 1994. Doctrina de compondre dictats. The Razos De Trobar of Raimon Vidal and Asssociated Texts. J. H. Marshall, ed. New York: Oxford U P, 1972. 93-98. Epicurus. Russel M. Greer trans., intro., notes. Letters, Principal Doctrines, and Vatican Sayings. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1964. Foixà, Jofre de. J. H. Marshall ed. Regles de trobar. The Razos De Trobar of Raimon Vidal and Associated Texts. New York: Oxford U P, 1972. 55-91. Foucault, Michel. A. M. Sheridan Smith trans. The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. Groth, J. H. "Wilamowitz-Möellendorf on Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy." Journal of the History of Ideas 11, 2 (1950): 179-190. Gubern, R. "El Primers Joc Florals A Catalunya: Lleida, 31 de Maig, 1338." Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 34 (1957): 95-96. Hult, David F. "Gaston Paris and the Invention of Courtly Love." R. Howard Bloch & Stephen G. Nichols eds. Medievalism and the Modernist Temper. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins U P, 1996. 192-224. Jeanroy, Alfred. Les Origines de la Poésie Lyrique en France au Moyen Age. Paris: Librarie Honoré Champion, Editeur, 1965 [Fourth Edition]. Jefferson, Thomas. The Thomas Jefferson Papers. Washington: The Library of Congress-American Memory. Internet: <http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query> [Last visited: 12/10/13] Kippenberg, Burkhard. Stanley Sadie & John Tyrrell eds. "Minnesang." The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. New York: Macmillan Publishers Limited, 2001. Vol. 16. Rolando Pérez 571 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 Kippenberg, Burkhard & Lorenz Welker. "Tannhäuser." Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell eds. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. New York: Macmillan Publishers Limited, 2001. Vol. 25. Kofman, Sarah. Duncan Large trans., introduction, notes & bibliography. Nietzsche and Metaphor. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1993. Print. Köhler, Erich. Mario Mancini trans., introduction. Sociologia della fin'amor: saggi trobadorici. Padua: Liviana Editrice, 1976. Lapesa, Rafael. La obra literaria del Marqués de Santillana. Madrid: Ínsula, 1957. Lloyd-Jones, Hugh. "Nietzsche and the Study of the Ancient World." Jamec C. O'Flaherty, Timothy F. Sellmer & Robert M. Helm eds. Studies in Nietzsche and the Classical Tradition. Chapel Hill: The U of North Carolina P, 1976. 1-15. López Estrada, Francisco ed., notes. Poéticas castellanas de la edad media. Madrid: Taurus, 1984. Lucretius. Ronald Latham trans., introduction. On the Nature of the Universe. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1951. Madaule, Jacques. Barbara Wall trans. The Albigensian Crusade: An Historical Essay. New York: Fordham U P, 1967. Marshall, J. H. ed. The Razos De Trobar of Raimon Vidal and Asssociated Texts. New York: Oxford U P, 1972. Molinier, Guilhem. Joseph Anglade ed. Las leys d'amors: Manuscrit de l'Académie des Jeux Floraux. 4 vols. Paris: Edouard Privat, 1919. ---. Facsimile of Molinier, Guilhem. Las leys d'amors: Manuscrit de l'Académie des Jeux Floraux. Ed. Joseph Anglade. Charleston: Nabu Press/Amazon, 2011. 4 vols. ---. Las leys d'amors: Manuscrit de l'Académie des Jeux Floraux. 4 vols. Ed. Joseph Anglade. Paris: Edouard Privat, 1919. Internet: < https://archive.org/details/lasleysdamorsman01angluoft> Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thomas Common trans. The Joyful Wisdom. Poetry rendered by Paul V. Cohn and Maude D. Petre. London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1914. ---. Walter Kaufmann trans., ed., introduction, prefaces, notes. "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense." The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Penguin Books, 1954. 42-47. ---. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book For Everyone and No One. New York: Penguin Books, 1961. ---. Walter Kaufmann trans., commentary. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. New York: Vintage Books, 1966. ---. Walter Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale trans. The Will to Power. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. Print. ---. Walter Kaufmann ed., trans., commentary. On the Genealogy of Morals & Ecce Homo Appendix. New York: Vintage Books, 1969. ---. Walter Kaufmann trans., intro. The Gay Science With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. ---. Lawrence J. Kramam producer. The Piano Music of Friedrich Nietzsche. Providence: Newport Classic. NPD 85513. 1992. Time: 68:29. Music CD. ---. Carole Blair & David J. Parent trans. Sander L. Gilman ed. Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language. New York: Oxford U P, 1998. ---. Luis Enrique Santiago de Guervós trans., ed. Escritos sobre retórica. [Nietzsche's 1872-1873 Lectures on Rhetoric]. Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2000. ---. R. J. Hollingdale trans., introduction, notes. Dithyrambs of Dionysus. London: Anvil Press, 2001. Rolando Pérez 572 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 ---. Ignacio de Llorens trans., prologue. La gaya ciencia. Mexico, DF.: Editores Mexicanos Unidos, S.A., 2001. ---. Luis Jiménez Moreno trans. El gay saber o Gaya ciencia. Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 2002. Oldenbourg, Zoe. Peter Green trans. Massacre at Montségur: A History of the Albigensian Crusade. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1959. Patterson, Warner Forrest. Three Centuries of French Poetic Theory. New York: Russell & Russell, 1966. Vol I. Powell. James M. Albertanus of Brescia: The Pursuit of Happiness in the Early Thirteenth Century. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992. Press, Alan R. ed., trans. Anthology of Troubadour Lyric Poetry. Austin: U of Texas P, 1971. Riquer. Martín de. "El Consistori de Barcelona." Història de la literatura catalana. Barcelona: Ediciones Ariel, 1964. Vol I: 565-577. ---. "Introducción a la lectura de los trovadores." Los trovadores: historia literaria y textos. Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1975. Vol. I: 10-102. Santangelo, Salvatore. Dante e i trovatori provenzali. Catania: Università di Catania, Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, 1959. Santiago de Guervós, Luis Enrique. Introduction: "El Poder de la Palabra: Nietzsche y la Retórica." In Friedrich Nietzsche. Escritos sobre retórica. [Nietzsche's 18721873 Lectures on Retoric]. Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2000. 9-77. Santillana, Íñigo López de Mendoza; Marqués de. Ángel Gómez Moreno & Maximilian P. A. M. Kerkhof eds., introduction, notes. Obras completas. Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1988. Schlegel, Friedrich. Stuart Barnett ed., trans., notes. On the Study Greek Poetry. NY: State U of New York P, 2001. Schutz, A. H. "Some Provençal Words Indicative of Knowledge." Speculum. 33, 4 (oct. 1958): 508-514. Sedgwick, Henry Dwight. Italy in the Thirteenth Century. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1933. Silk, M.S. & J.P. Stern. Nietzsche on Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1981. Sloterdijk, Peter. Steven Corcoran trans. Nietzsche Apostle. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2013. Stone, Gregory B. The Death of the Troubadour: The Late Medieval Resistance to the Renaissance. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1994. Strayer, Joseph R. The Albigensian Crusades. New York: The Dial Press, 1971. Sumption, Jonathan. The Albigensian Crusade. London: Farber & Farber, 1978. Terramagnino da Pisa. J. H. Marshall ed. Doctrina d'Acort. Razos de trovar. The Razos De Trobar of Raimon Vidal and Asssociated Texts. New York: Oxford U P, 1972. 27-54. Thompson, Daniel Greenleaf. "The Summun Bonum." Mind 6, 21 (1881): 62-81. Valla, Lorenzo. Kent Hieatt & Maristella Lorch trans. Maristella de Panizza Lorch introduction. On Pleasure/De voluptate. New York: Abaris Books, 1977. Vattimo, Gianni. María Teresa D'Meza trans. Adiós a la verdad. Barcelona: Gedisa Editorial, 2010. ---. William McCuaig trans. Robert. T. Valgenti foreword. A Farewell to Truth. New York: Columbia U P, 2011. Vidal, Raimon. J.H. Marshall ed. Razos de trovar. The Razos De Trobar of Raimon Vidal and Associated Texts. New York: Oxford U P, 1972. 1-26. Print. Rolando Pérez 573 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 Villena, Enrique de. Pedro M. Cátedra ed. & prologue. Arte de trovar. Obras Completas. Madrid: Biblioteca Castro, 1994. Vol. 1: 356-70. Wilamowitz-Möellendorf, Ulrich von. G. Richards trans. My Recollections: 1848-1914. London: Chato & Windus, 1930. Rolando Pérez 574 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 Appendix: Selections from Guilhem Molinier's Las leys d'amors Rolando Pérez 575 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 Rolando Pérez 576 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 Rolando Pérez 577 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 Rolando Pérez 578 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 Rolando Pérez 579 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 Rolando Pérez 580 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 Rolando Pérez 581 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 Rolando Pérez 582 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 Rolando Pérez 583 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 Rolando Pérez 584 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 Rolando Pérez 585 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 Rolando Pérez 586 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 Rolando Pérez 587 ISSN 1540 5877 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ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/IVITRA 5 (2014): 546-703 About the Author Rolando Pérez is professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages at Hunter College-CUNY. While generally his specialization is in the area of twentieth century Latin American literature, he has also written and published on Peninsular literature, and specifically on Medieval Literature. His research is primarily focused on the relationship between philosophy and literature, and between literature and art. His on-going projects consist of reading literary texts vis-à-vis the philosophical concepts of thinkers like Nietzsche, Deleuze, Guattari, Baudrillard, Badiou, Levinas, and Dussel, to name a few. In fact, with Prof. Nuria Morgado (College of Staten Island & The Graduate Center of CUNY), he has co-edited a book of articles on the encounters between literature and philosophy, entitled, Sin fronteras: encuentros transversales entre la literatura y la filosofía en las letras hispánicas. His most recent book publication is Severo Sarduy and the Neo-Baroque Image of Thought in the Visual Arts (Purdue UP 2012).