Competing Perspectives: Guillaume De Machaut’s Voir Dit

Abstract

When Anne Berthelot refers obliquely to “un texte d’où sortira, finalement, tout armé, l’’écrivain moderne’ […] aux alentours de 1350” [a text from which, finally, the “modern writer” will spring fully armed (…) around 1350], she could be describing Guillaume de Machaut’s Voir Dit (1360s).¹ While, as Berthelot documents, thirteenth-century texts explore writerly functions through a range of fictional characters who, nonetheless, are not the implied writers of the texts in which they appear, fourteenth-century vernacular literature is marked by a seismic shift, as writers from Dante to Chaucer to Machaut make fictionalized versions of the writer of the text into central characters in the text. This shift is also a gendered one. Poet heroines of thirteenth-century narrative are frequently the principal artist figures within their texts: their tantalizingly self-reflexive voices emerge from worlds that are otherwise largely concerned with chivalry and adventure. In the fourteenth-century dit, by contrast, male characters engage with poetry as much if not more so than female characters, narratives increasingly focus on the clerk rather than the knight, and plots are often structured around the writing process.²