A Perfume of Reality? Desublimating the Courtly

Summary

For Tilda: Narrative invention, shaping romance with multiple interpretations, creates truths continuations, history and knowledge live or die by.

The primacy of materiality is universal

Louis Althusser

The advent of “the courtly” marks a turning point in European literary history – a “beginning” in culture or civilization, rightly celebrated. Yet, as long recognized, something about it isn't quite kosher.

Expressions like “courtliness,” “courtly literature,” “courtly love,” or the shamed, self-annulling citational periphrasis “the literature once called ‘courtly,’” have currency in both medievalist and modernist discourses. They purportedly ground the sublimity of literary representations by referring to a historical institution that guarantees the historical existence of the substance designated – manners, literature, love – by connecting representations and a historical institution – standing in for “reality.” The verbal coupling [courtly + noun], its essentialization [courtliness], or even the reference by ellipsis, suggest a conceptual identity derived from lexical contiguity allowing semantic seepage from court to text – or vice versa.

Might the usage suggest examination of historical courts? Might such examination discover that the semantic content assumed for “court” disfigures it? Is “courtly” an unexamined ontological warrantee, a seeming historical reference turning into an alibi for the slide into cultural ruminations or a dehistoricized Lacanism built on metonymic strategies of evasion: not false, but as extravagantly anamorphic as the skull in Las Meninas?