Marie de France: Bisclavret
At the end of her article "Translation and Animals in Marie de France's Laïs," Peggy McCracken makes the claim that:
"In Marie’s Lais, animal-human transformations are part of a larger project of translation; as such, what they imagine is less a boundary between the animal and the human than movement between forms of being.[…] In the context of Marie’s Lais, composed in Norman French in England, it is difficult to imagine that thisdefinition of difference is limited to animals. That is, if the metaphor of translation obscures the power relations that define animal submission and domestication, sotoo the translation of Breton oral stories to written French verse both invites and hides an acknowledgement of the power relations of colonization."
That is, there are other things at work in the presence of animals in our stories than the mere rewriting of the human. We touched on this in our discussion of the lion's affections in Yvain, and here in Bisclavret we have a similarly fantastic and loyal pairing of animal and master. Yet reading from McCracken's perspective on medieval postcolonialism might help us think differently about what animals do for our story:
- What power relations do these animals make explicit? How do they obscure other power relations, and why?
- What is the limit of the human in this text? What transgressions are not able to be transformed or transcended in animal form?
