Des voix joyeuses : dire le joi chez les troubadours du xie au xiiie siècle

Abstract

In the cansos of the troubadours, joi is sung everywhere, but nowhere is it defined. How can its intensity be captured in a narrow language? To express joi, one needs a breath, a tone, a voice. In light of seminal works on the medieval voice as “the place of an absence, which, in it, becomes a presence” (P. Zumthor), we suggest to insert the emblem of Occitan lyricism in a poetics of the voice. The aim is to show that, far from being reduced to a “cliché”, joi is also, sometimes a percept at the origin of the song, sometimes an affect that accompanies the song in its eternal movements ; in any case, joi engages a subjectivity, closely correlated to the spontaneous, sensitive and performative mode of expression that is the voice. From then on, the troubadours’ poetry is a space of expression for joyful voices.

Keywords

• troubadours
• joi
• voice
• poetics
• subjectivity