The Function of the Visual in the Troubadour Love Canso:

Dreaming and Envisioning the Domna

            In the canso, the troubadour sings of an intense desire to unite with his beloved domna or lady.  The longing that infuses troubadour love lyric finds a momentary suspension in the accounts of dreams and imaginary visions.  The classical optical theory which suggests the beauty of the lady pierces through the eye of the lover to wound his heart informs the troubadours’ theories of love and sight as presented in the love canso.  However, the dream or vision sequence offers a reversal of traditional precepts allowing the lover to wield his capacity to envision as a weapon against the confines of physical reality.  The dream or vision is a space in which questions of identity and the inscription of the subject and object into reality can be examined and ultimately undermined.  This paper is two pronged in that it seeks to explore the role of the dream in the poet’s composition but also in the lover’s quest for fulfillment.   

            The paper begins with the reminder that reference to a dream-state brings into question the solid stance of subjectivity.  The relation between subject and object and the way the subject functions change shape in the realm of the dream.  The way troubadours describe their mental states at moments of envisioning the domna allow these daydreams to be considered equally powerful as those dreams that invade sleep.  The poet thus presents himself as a permeable subject with fantasy powerful enough to override his own needs while fulfilling every desire.

            The inability of the self to remain intact is further demonstrated in the many references to dismemberment that accompany the telling of these dream sequences.  The lover’s heart or eyes disjoin themselves from the subject in order to join the beloved.  The poet’s body parts thus belong more to the object of desire than the desiring subject.  The dismemberment of the poet-lover is not confined to these dream sequences but exist throughout the troubadour corpus.  However, it would seem that the function of the traveling body parts does indeed differ between the waking and nocturnal hours.  The significance of sight manifests itself only in those moments when body parts travel nocturnally; the power of seeing and being seen reverses during dream-states.  In this sense the dream sequence in the troubadour lyric seems once again a moment to reverse the usual presentation of phenomena in the lyric.

            The troubadour canso’s laws of love, of subjectivity and the relationship between subject and object are not the only laws subverted in the dream.  Envisioning and dreaming allow the physical laws of time and space to lose power.  Many troubadours attest that their dream-states are more real than their waking moments and many of the lovers wish for nothing more than the dream.  Arnaut de Mareuil claims he would rather pine away at night for his beloved than be held by another woman.  Real physical contact, reality in fact, holds less attraction for these lovers than their love envisioned.