The Challenge of Incongruence in Richard de Fournival’sBestiaire d’amour

Abstract

This article considers Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amour, a French text from the second quarter of the thirteenth century. The Bestiaire’s narrator combines a love-lyric and a bestiary to advance his amatory quest with his lady. While scholarship has often remarked on the incongruences which arise from this type of discourse, this article proposes a novel approach that centers on the thought processes induced in the text’s readers. It traces three types of incongruence — in genres, in logic, and in readerly subject-positions — and argues that incongruence challenges readers to mentally rearrange the Bestiaire’s discursive elements. The linear reading of the Bestiaire yields jarring effects that call on the readers’ ability to make connections to question the narrator’s claims and produce alternative knowledge. Because incongruence pervades the text, the mental activity of readers does not result in a stable outcome but forms a sustained process. With this argument, this article shifts emphasis away from interpretive closure towards the process of reading the Bestiaire and proposes a method to engage with a text of this kind. It notably draws attention to logical connections as a key element of the text.

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