Mathematical Bodies and Fuzzy Logic in the Couplings of Troubadour Lyric

Abstract

Mathematical Bodies and Fuzzy Logic in the Couplings ofTroubadour Lyric An auraofredcats and suspect body mechanics inevitably lingers in the airwhen the Société Guillaume IX sponsors a session on "Bodies and Texts." Such is the horizon ofexpectation in which this study originated . And, while my discussion here will prove to be disappointingly unpornographic, I yet hope thatsome oftheplayfulness andgame-playing offacc-to-face performance, so characteristic ofthe first troubadour's poetic posturing, may inspire these mathematical fantasies on the body of troubadourpoetry.1 My topic concerns that old chestnut ofthe critical tradition on troubadour lyric: how to sort out real bodies and fictional constructs that appearin and around these poems. A briefand reductive summary ofthe logical possibilities staked out by the history ofscholarly tradition describes a kind ofHegelian dialectic: ( 1 ) Thesis: The songs are the expression ofreal bodies, according to the viewpoint taken by thirteenth- and fourteenth-century vidas and razos and the early stages ofmodern criticism operating underthe influence of Romanticism and its esthetic ofauthenticity and sincerity, from the 19th century to the early decades ofthe 20th. (2)Antithesis: With the workofscholars like Robert Guiette, Paul Zumthor, and Pierre Bee, in the 1960s and 70s, emphasis shifted to formal invention and fictional bodies orpersonae projected by the verbal fabric ofthe songs. In this view, "I" is a shifter, a universalizing subject pronoun taken on by any singerand unrelated to the vagaries ofpersonal embodied experience . (3)Synthesis: More recently apostmodernist swing toward reopening the dialogue between fiction and what lies outside it has been pursuedin multiple guises but especially in relation to issues like performance and performativity. Feminist approaches return, on the one hand, to real bod1 MATILDA TOMARYN BRUCKNER ies connected to the ideologies inscribed in poetry andtheirreflections of, as well as political effects on, contemporary society. On the otherhand, the notionofthe performative and itsconstructions ofgendercall attention to images, fictionsprojected, masculineandfeminineidentitiesconstructed in individual poems orthroughout the repertoire.2 Zumthor's own evolution after the Essai depoétique médiévale led him to continue earlier interests in voice and performance, theatricality and the body, text embodied in the voice of a performer. In his 1991 interview with Helen Solterer, published last year under the title "Performing Pasts," he declared that Medieval poets are profound bodily voices. And that is for a number of reasons. The principal one is that the voice represents the medium ofhumancommunication; it makes for social contact; it creates links. And the voice is intrinsically an emanation ofthebody. (p. 620) Ifthere is currently general agreement that we can neither read thesepoems simply as direct, organicexpressions ofthe poets' hearts and bodies noras totally disembodied lyric conventions, we still need to work out strategies and come to some understanding ofhow to handle the textual bodies before us. I take it as a given that these poems are indeed fictions but that they ask constantly to be read as fictions and nonfictions atthe same time—arequestwe need totake seriously without losing sight ofthe game-playing. They layclaimtothe fictionalbenefitsofplay, as well as the serious burden ofnonfictions that involve real bodies, whether those ofthe contemporary circle ofpoets and their audiences or those ofmodem readers who make an effort through imagination toenterintothe bodies ofthese fictions. In orderto turn this generalprise deposition into amodus operandi , I would like to explore the possibilities opened by fuzzy logic, as popularized by Bart Kosko in Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic. Since the rhetoric oftroubadour lyric aimed at persuasion, troubadours themselves frequently used the tools oflogic to build con- MATHEMATICAL BODIES vincingarguments,proofs andconclusions invariably slantedin theirfavor. They constructed complaints couched in thejuridical language ofargument and obligation; they articulatedrequests based on the application of general principles topersonal cases and claims. This process ofreasoning through the demands anddesires oflove not surprisingly takes full advantageoflogic , notonlyin itstraditionallyrecognized forms, butespecially in the guise ofwhat modern mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers have baptized fuzzy logic. Whereas traditional logic is basedon theprinciples ofnoncontradiction and exclusion—A and not A cannot both be true—fuzzy logic suggests that they may both be true ... to a certain degree. It graphs the space between these two poles and calibrates the percentages that link them. To take a simple example, considerthe issue ofheight...