Aucassin & Nicolette,
or how to tell when you finally "belong" somewhere
I was listening to NPR on the way home from class yesterday, and Sandra Cisneros, the wonderful latina author of The House on Mango Street and other critically-acclaimed stories, was being interviewed on her latest work. In the interview, which I highly recommend, she talks about what it is that makes her feel at home — in fact, she discusses how, in a post-911 world, she often doesn't feel at home, she has the feeling of being what the French would call "dépaysagé" because of the politics of borders, race and ethnicity in this country at this time.
The interview reminded me that these questions — and their underlying political causes of warfare, cross-cultural mistrust, and nationalized protectionism — are nothing new, and in fact, are what I have long been studying in the Middle Ages, and Marla Segol has written about this as well. As a Mediterraneanist, I am interested in cross-cultural connectivity in a time when the Crusades and other forms of structuralized inter-religious, inter-cultural, and cross-national violence were not only sanctioned, but encouraged. As such, our reading of cross-cultural love in Aucassin et Nicolette becomes all the more interesting given our current political dilemmas about migration, the ethnic makeup of Europe, and inter-religious warfare.
As we turn to this 12th century Old French tale about the crossing — the violation, even — of many boundaries in medieval culture, let's think along with Cisneros for a moment:
- What is it that the text defines as being "at home?" Or, put another way, what does it mean to be a stranger, in Cisneros’s sense, at the beginning of the text? Is one's habitus created through one's social connections? That is, through the inclusivity of class or religion? Through inherently individual characteristics? Are there other ways that one is meant to be "at home" in this text?
- How are bodies implicated in this feeling of habitus? What relationships does Aucassin et Nicollette imagine are created through the body?
- The text, so interested in the hybridity of bodily form, is itself a hybrid. How does the genre — the prose romance perforated by music and verse — help or hinder the audience's participation/stake in the tale? Why do you think this particular form is used to talk about the cross-cultural love affair?
- How does the text use the idea of home to complicate the discussion of love we have seen in twelfth-century romances and in the laïs? What are the frontiers of this "home"stead — what is at stake in imagining love on the borderlands?
