Yvain, ou le chevalier au lion
Yvain is full of goofy stuff right out of Monty Python: a nameless knight, a magical fountain, gnomes and giants, horny women, dangerous secret passageways, and a naked madman running through the forest with a lion. It is also one of the most important surviving romances, a story composed by one of medieval France's most prolific authors, Chrétien de Troyes, who moved among the truly elite of medieval France and whose patroness was none other than Marie de Champagne. Please take a moment to browse through a digital copy of the manuscript, courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale:
Part I: Début au v. 1724: Présentation de Yvain, Laudine, et Lunete; lutte autour de la fontaine
Narration et la création d'un genre à travers le genre
Yvain is a romance. How is that genre narrated in the opening sections of the text? During your reading, pay attention to the specifics of storytelling: how is it the same from the Roland, an epic? In what ways — and there are many! — is the narration really different? How and when does the narration start? What is it that launches the story?
Another question we can ask about narration is its audience. There are both an internal and an external audience in Yvain — who are they ? How do they give us clues about the ethos of the text, who it's written for, and what kinds of values it is interested in?
How, in this text, is narration tied to identity? We have considered that question a little bit in talking about epic chivalric identity in the Roland, but how is narration tied to community and to the self — what passages show you this?
How, in the scenes in the first third of the novel, are narration (that is, our word, genre) and gender (the french word, genre) tied together?
Finally, how do gender and power relate in the opening sections?
Balance
I'm a yogi, so I spend a lot of time thinking about balance, on the mat and off. In yoga, we think through oppositions — stretching and strength, force and grace, giving and taking. In many ways, so does this text. At first glance, and in the easy reading of the world Chrétien crafts in Yvain, the whole court is obsessed with the creation of perfection: the perfect knight. The striving for perfection — the obsession with perfection — seems to me a very un-yogic ideal, which is fine, since this text stems not from a yogic but from a Christian context. Yet if we cast aside the ending — that is, the strived-for, perfected RESULT of the text, and instead approach the balance of the text from the idea of journeying, of the path of Yvain’s apprenticeship in courtly identity, rather than his terminal destination, we might begin to be able to see the text as a medieval reflection on balance.
What kinds of things does the text balance for you? For me, I see the most glaring of inbalances: Yvain's initial identity as a knight, but not a lover — a balance that is leveraged between public and private identities, a balance that waffles between personal feelings and knightly duties. But there are also other things that hang in the balance in Yvain — gender and power? gender and narrative? authority through narrative vs. authority through acts? Madness and sanity? Emotion and reason?
What exactly, is in the balance in Yvain's madness, described by one of Laudine's attendants who finds him in the forest:
Mais elle dit à sa dame en pleurant:
"Dame, j'ai trouvé Yvain,
le chevalier le plus renommé
du monde, et le plus accompli;
mais je ne sais par quel péché
il est arrivé un tel malheur à cet homme noble.
Il a peut-être éprouvé une grande douleur
qui l'oblige à se comporter ainsi,
car on peut facilement devenir fou de chagrin.
Pour le moins on peut se persuader et voir
qu'il n'a plus toute sa raison,
car jamais, en verité, il ne serait arrivé
qu'il se conduisît de manière si indigne
s'il n'avait pas perdu la raison.
Si seulement Dieu le rendait maintenant
aussi sain d'esprit qu'il ait jamais été par le passé,
et qu'il acceptât ensuite
de rester pour vous venir en aide!
Car le compte Alier, qui vous fait la guerr
vous a durement attaquée." (2920–39)
Thinking about balance and what constitutes the "Good," we might see some of the same struggle for praise-worthy personal identity in a public forum (here the lover as a reasonable knight) in some political tensions articulated today, especially in this story, whose link is "Dick Cheney denounces Clinton's Iran as Madness," but whose storyline is rewritten to talk about competing versions of a relationship:
OR, we could talk about Caitlyn Jenner and our culture's obsession with making the personal, private become representational, communal and public, balancing expectations about gender against people whose performances seem misaligned. A quick googling gives such a panoply of opinions and critiques of mis-performances of gender that we can't even begin to represent them here:
While there are some medieval romances in which transgender is actually discussed (such as Silence), of course in Yvain that's not the issue. But the idea of balancing between masculine and feminine, the idea of being OUTSIDE the system of performance in his madness, does course throughout, bringing us back to the medieval text and its main question: can we balance outside the system?
