Studies in Lyric Time-Structure: Dreams, Visions, and Reveries

STUDIES IN LYRIC TIME-STRUCTURE: DREAMS, VISIONS, AND REVERIES As Augustine remarks in his Confessions, time is at once an entirely familiar and entirely inexplicable phenonemon. "If no one asks me what time is, I know," he writes, "but if someone asks me and I try to explain, I don't know" (11: 4). So, it seems to me, it is with time in lyric poetry. We accept references to the seasons, for example, as poetic commonplaces, or classify various uses of the Natureingang topos, but nevertheless somehow fail to account for the nature and function of time itself in the lyric. The nature of time in any particular lyric, I believe, is largely dependent upon the age in which the poem was written; even so fundamental an aspect of human experience as time is conceived differently according to culture, place, and era.1 Thefunction of time in the lyric, I suggest, is purely structural; it is this thesis that I seek to explore. This brief examination of dreams, visions, and reveries in the cansos of Jaufre Rudel and Bernart de Ventadorn focuses on a single aspect of a larger critical concept, a notion that I have elsewhere referred to as lyric time-structure ("Twelfth-Century Views of Time" 237-443). Iti a theoretical overview, I shall first define the concept of lyric time-structure, illustrating the structural function of time in the Provençal cansos by turning to the poems of Jaufre and Bernart. I shall then briefly examine the effect upon lyric time-structure of such unusual modes of duration as the fluid time of dreams, the "unreal" time of vision, and the hypothetical time of reverie. I will suggest that Bernait de Ventadorn, in his frequent use of reverie to generate lyric structure, is indebted to Jaufre Rudel, the first troubadour to experiment with these unusual modes ofduration. The concept of time-structure proceeds from certain basic assumptions concerning the differences between narrative and lyric time. To generalize broadly, time in the narrative provides a chronological continuum that maintains the identity of persons, establishes the sequence of events, and clarifies the causal connections that render these events intelligible. Even when narrative time is shaped by subjective perception, or when events are related in "artificial" order-to borrow a term from the medieval rhetoricians2~the reader is nevertheless able, perhaps even obliged, to reconstruct a narrative time-line, a chronological continuum that in some manner represents or imitates either the "real" time of the world or the experienced time of the individual. 22Charlotte Gross Narrative time, therefore, is characteristically both structural and mimetic. Lyric time, on the other hand, is non-mimetic—for the lyric does not imitate a sequence of events or tell a story-and purely structural. That is, in order to generate lyric structure the poet employs various temporal patterns, referents, and indicators, both linguistic and conceptual, which he and his audience share. Paradoxically, it is often by manipulating these fragments of temporality that the poet generates the sense of timelessness or eternity that critical consensus ascribes to the lyric.3 I now turn to a general survey of the indicators, referents, and concepts that together create the time-structure of the canso. First, purely grammatical temporal indicators (adverbs, conjunctions, verb tense and mood) are the simplest means of introducing lyric structure. The Natureingang, for example, relies upon a basic "when . . . then" structure often announced by the initial adverbs can and lanquan. Verb tense and mood generate a variety of complex structures that may govern the entire lyric; the common assumption that a sense of lyric "timelessness" arises from the predominant use of the present tense is not borne out by a study of the Provençal canso. Jaufre Rudel, for example, ensures the eternal absence of the lady from the poetic present by making amor the object of past, future, and subjunctive verbs. On a larger scale, Bernart de Ventadorn uses the recurring end-rimes -egra and -ara (terminations of the second conditional) to structure an entire canso in which each cobla contrasts the present suffering experienced by the lover with the perpetual joy that might have been his ("Amors, enquera-us preyara" PC...