The ›Historical-I‹ in Guillaume de Machaut’s ›Livre du Voir Dit‹

Abstract

›Le Livre du Voir Dit‹ (»The Book of the True Poem«), likely composed in the early 1360s, is Guillaume de Machaut’s summative work in the dit amoureux tradition that he had done so much to advance for more than two decades. The ›LVD‹ is a massive work, consisting of a lengthy verse narrative, a substantial portfolio of love letters exchanged between the narrator, who reveals himself as an intratextual version of the poet and a much younger woman whom he names Toute-Belle, a number of lyrics in the various formes fixes that are generated by this epistolary exchange, as well as the musical settings for many of these. This present essay addresses the most striking formal, and also referential, element of the ›LVD‹, Machaut’s deployment of a historical-I, a speaking/composing voice who references his authorial activities and the real-life romance. These are presented with a wealth of detail that with some investigation reveals itself to be genuine, not fabulized. This ›I‹ narrates the story, but also connects it to his actual experiences, offering a text that, as he avers, is both true AND a dit. Such an ›I‹, the narrating source of the story and its subject, becomes, of course, a not uncommon feature of modern fiction, and Machaut must be counted as one, perhaps the most important of the late medieval writers who made their own experiences the subject of the stories they would tell. He is both in the text as an ›I‹ that refers obsessively and accurately to his existential self, as well as a storytelling consciousness that is equally comfortable with narrating mundane events and describing the doings of a celestial goddess who descends to earth in order to chastise Machaut’s fictional alter ego for his inattention. In organizing the multi-layered pastiche that is the ›LVD‹, this ›I‹ anticipates the incorporative rhetorics of both modern and postmodern fiction.