SIMON PENDER

                             VIDAL IN FURS:  LYRIC POETRY, NARRATIVE, AND MASOCH(ISM)

MASOCHISM IS DIFFICULT to understand. How is it possible for a subject to enjoy pain, to take pleasure in what is, by definition, the opposite of pleasure? How can the subject come to such a position? Since Freud, psychoanalysts have been virtually obsessed with this difficulty: the Freudian pleasure principle set them on this course, as can be seen from the fact that it was nearly named the unpleasure principle. Similarly difficult to grasp are the songs and biographies (vida and razos) of the troubadour Peire Vidal, in which he variously appears as castaway; delusional self-proclaimed emperor, womanizer, and knight; thief of kisses (a rapist, perhaps?); and loyal lover who bears the arms of and calls himself a wolf for his lady, na Loba (“Lady She-Wolf”).  Na Loba is in turn amused to find him beaten half to death by some shepherds, presumably for molesting their flocks: even the biography does not suggest he was actually mistaken for a wolf.

Intriguingly, these problems are brought together in the late nineteenth-century writings of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Masoch’s name is known today mostly for its appropriation by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who coined the term masochism to label a specific perversion in what was to become perhaps the most influential pre-Freudian treatment of sexual deviance, his encyclopedic Psychopathia sexualis. Krafft-Ebing—like most readers of this neglected writer—relies largely on Masoch’s novel Venus im Pelz (Venus in Furs), itself an explicit intertext of Peire’s biography: “I envied the poor troubadour whose capricious mistress sewed him into a wolf’s skin and hunted him like game.”  Masoch is of course quite wrong here: for all his complaints, Peire’s lady most certainly does not sew him into a wolf skin. Rather, this is accomplished by Peire’s biographer, and even Masoch himself. The questions I shall try to answer here are how and why. My contention is that Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of masochism, Le Froid et le Cruel (Coldness and Cruelty), together with Masoch’s Venus in Furs offer us not just the insights into masochism we might expect, but also a means to unpack Peire’s difficult songs and biographies. Because the same difficulties are raised in Masoch’s text as in Peire Vidal’s songs and biographies, Masoch’s text and Deleuze’s essay give us a theoretical approach to Peire Vidal, and in particular to his biographies. Alternatively, Deleuze, Masoch, and the biographies can all be read as efforts to make sense of fantasy, exemplified here by Peire Vidal’s poetry.

Deleuze intended in his essay both to correct the usual psychoanalytic view of masochism as a simple inversion of sadism and to rescue Masoch from the sort of literary oblivion to which Sade was never really subjected. Deleuze’s legacy for psychoanalysis seems reasonably secure. In the case of Masoch, however, his rehabilitation effort largely failed: Masoch’s texts remain difficult to obtain, with Venus the only readily accessible text—often presented as a mere accompaniment to Deleuze’s essay. In pursuit of these aims, Deleuze’s first chapter specifically proposes regarding Masoch as a “great clinician,” reminding us that it is the name of the doctor not that of a patient or sufferer that is typically given to a disease. While Deleuze ultimately leaves this question open, one of my aims here is to resolve the question in favor of Masoch as clinician rather than patient. Crucially, this would mean that Masoch himself was not a masochist, that he diagnoses and defines masochism as a clinical entity, and that his work, like that of Deleuze, should be considered theoretical in nature. Specifically, I would argue, Masoch diagnoses masochism in courtly love, using the example of Peire Vidal, to whom he refers in Venus in Furs.