Alain Chartier and the death of lyric language

The fifteenth-century poet Alain Chartier uses the courtly contexts of his lyric, narrative and debate poems as enabling fictions to support his interrogation of the validity of courtly language and his metapoetic questioning of the rhetoric of his own, inherited poetic discourse. This mise en question is performed through several, interacting ironic strategies, which may most fruitfully be elucidated in terms of Linda Hutcheon's theory and politics of irony expounded in Irony's Edge (1994). Thus 'meta-ironically functioning signals', together with intertextual, 'relational' irony and the 'oppositional' irony constituted by his Belle Dame sans mercy's pro-ferninist discourse, articu­late Chartier's esprit critique regarding 'la,parole' as both the general unit of human communica­tion and the specific resource of poetic creativity. A satirical reading of his ouvre enables us to appreciate how the rhetorical play in which Chartier engages functions as an indictment of the courtly code's hermeneutic disintegration: its obsolescence results from a divorce between ethics and aesthetics as its language has lost the capacity to mean.