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Abstract
Responding to this volume on genre, and especially to the Introduction, “Forms-of-life”, this Afterword contemplates genre as it is uttered through forms of semantic death: truisms, clichés, and dead metaphors. Taking its cue from Jacques Derrida’s essay “Living On,” from Bakhtin on speech genres, and Samuel Beckett’s bilingual “La Fin/The End,” it turns to love lyric writing by the English poet John Gower and his older contemporary Guillaume de Machaut. It argues that Gower uses the genre of the ballade sequence, in the wake of Machaut’s own novel explorations, to explore the dead but potent lacunas between one utterance and another, between one ballade and another, and between one language and another. In the process he works with the capacity of love discourse to offer truths even into old age (a major preoccupation of his love poetry): truths about how language might be shown to respond to language as it lives on from one cliché to the next.
Notes
1. See also Nancy Bradbury’s fine exposition of Bakhtin’s essay earlier in this issue.
2. This essay originated as a lecture entitled, “Gower, in other words,” given at the Third International Congress of the John Gower Society, University of Rochester 30 June–3 July, 2014, at the gracious invitation of The Gower Society. My thanks to Bob Yeager for his inspiring scholarship and tireless advocacy of Gower’s poetry, in all its trilingual forms.
3. See Ricks’s discussion, 66–69.
4. Distinguished exponents of this work include Nicholson, R.F. Yeager, and J.A. Burrow. See also Butterfield “French Culture,” “Articulating the Author,” “Confessio amantis,” “Chaucerian Vernaculars,” Familiar Enemy. I am grateful to Nicholson for generously sharing with me his forthcoming article “Cinkante Balades.”
5. See “Replies and Responses,” Goffman (Ch.1, 5–77).
6. There seems little need for the purposes of this Afterword to supply these in full: I provide here a selection.
7. All citations of Gower’s Cinkante Balades are from French Balades, ed. Yeager. I have largely used Yeager’s translations, but made occasional changes.
8. All references to the Voir Dit and translations are taken from Leech-Wilkinson, ed., and Palmer, trans. Verse citations refer to line numbers; prose citations, to page numbers.
9. All citations of Machaut’s Prologue refer to Œuvres, ed. Hoepffner, vol. 1.
10. An account of this process is given in “The Art of Repetition.”
11. The discussion, largely by Yeager (“Politics”, “John Gower’s Audience,” and “John Gower’s French”), has been directed towards the question of when Gower’s French works might have been composed. On the envoy (historical and poetic) more broadly, see also Butterfield 2009 (187–200).
12. For the classic exposition of this view of French courtly language, see Zumthor, Paul, Essai de Poétique Médiévale, Collection Poétique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972.
13. As Yeager points out, this rubric is “found in those manuscripts, like F, when the Traitié follows CA (“ci devant en Englois”).” <http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/yeager-gower-french-balades-traitie-selonc-les-auctours-pour-essampler-les-amantz-marietz-introduction>. The translation is Yeager’s.
14. Compare also Revelation 1.18; The Rule of St Benedict, 12.
15. See Kermode, The Sense of an Ending.