Irony in Aucassin et Nicolette

 

 

 

     It may surprise the modern reader of Aucassin et Nicolette, the eight-hundred-year-old chantefable [1], to learn that it was long regarded as a straightforward story of two perfect partners, according to one scholar “the purest example imaginable of characters motivated by idyllic love” [2].  The modern age is admittedly suspicious of ideals and finds a particular appeal in paradox and irony.  Even those who would not label themselves post-structuralists are liable to see earlier authors burlesquing or otherwise undermining themselves.  Yet, quite apart from a modern taste for cynicism and iconoclasm, this particular tale of love’s overcoming obstacles seems at times explicit in its own self-satire [3].

     The episode of Torelore is the most undeniably comic passage.  In this up-side-down land, women fight by tossing foodstuffs while the king lies “en couvade,” as though in childbed.  There is surely caricature, too, in Aucassin’s declaration that he could never enjoy the afterlife without his beloved.  While the basic sentiment is more or less conventional, his depiction of heaven as boring, packed with tiresome old fogeys, in contrast to a hell populated by courtly sophisticates is certainly meant more to raise a smile at his silliness than to impress the reader with the depth of his devotion or to shock with his apparent irreligion. 

     Apart from these farcical passages, Aucassin is regularly presented as an incompetent hero.  Initially unwilling to fight at all, he is lost in a dream when he does enter the battlefield.  The reader sees him in  warrior mode only when he attacks the helpless Toreloreans including their feckless bed-ridden king.  Separated from his beloved, Aucassin makes no attempt to find her and he is, indeed, slow to recognize her in the end.  On the other hand, Nicolette is an unusually active heroine.  Her seeking out her lover while disguised is more often a man’s ploy (as in the case of Odysseus) than a woman’s.   

     Apart from the satirical comments on romance conventions and on the church, at the outset the poet makes an extravagant self-reflective claim. 

 

 

Nus hom n’est si esbahis,

Tant dolans ni entrepris,

de grant mal amaladis,

se il l’oit, ne soit garis,

et de joie resbaudis,

     tant par est douce.

 

There is no one so downcast, afflicted and in poor shape, so very ill that he would not, at hearing this [story] recover health, joy, and vigor, so sweet as it is.

(Lines 10-15)

 

     To what degree of irony is this assertion pitched?  Taking it as a direct assertion of truth may seem somewhat fanciful, but in fact the idea that poetry (or music or stories) might have healing power, though entirely magical, is widespread, indeed, all  but universal in human culture.  The Chinese character for medicine contains the sign for music (as well as a radical indicating herbs).  As it happens I can present more than one bit of contemporary evidence of this belief.  I was once acquainted with a Gnaoui musician from Marrakech who had not attended even a Koranic school.  He said that in his youth he was most often hired, not for weddings or parties, but to play by the bedside of sick people.  He had not the slightest doubt that his art was an agent of healing.  In modern American culture, my wife worked in an inpatient mental health unit that employed a full-time music therapist whose work was considered to contribute to effective treatment [4].    

     To most readers the author’s declaration of the healing powers of his composition seems satirical.  The primary object of the humor might be the literary conventions of the day, paralleling the lovers’ puffed-up professions of devotion, but it might also have seemed a burlesque of the spiritual rewards sometimes promised for the reading of religious texts like saints’ lives. 

     Those who wish to salvage some of the promised benefits of consuming such stories might respond to this ironic reading by insisting that while a poem cannot cure illness, it can improve life by heightening a person’s sensitivity.  Surely the catharsis Aristotle expected from tragedy was therapeutic.  The humanistic approach to literature, unfashionable in the twenty-first century, but dominant in various forms earlier, rests on the notion that literature in some way is “improving.”  

     The theoretical critic might answer that artists know no more than others about how properly to live the good life, that their particular skill lies instead on the artful arrangement of forms or words or sounds, and that it is thus futile to look to poets for wisdom. 

     This back-and-forth dialectic is generated by the special capacity of art to deal with ambiguities and contradictions.  Further elaboration is possible but would require ingenuity more than hermeneutics.  Fundamentally, the proposition is in a sense true and also false.  The oscillation between the possibilities creates a rich resonance and avoids reductive formulae.  This is one example of the transformation of convention characteristic of literature in which to employ a formula or repeat a phrase instantly enables variations and contradictions that render the idea more precise as well as thickening the plot of narrative.  Aucassin et Nicolette makes its parodic values clear to most contemporary readers, but the same phenomenon is traceable in less strident form in most aesthetic texts.

 

 

 

1.  While the combination of prose and verse exists elsewhere, under the name of prosimetrum in Latin literature (e.g. Petronius and Boethius) and (變) in Chinese tradition (e.g. Jiang Mo Bianwen [降魔變文], “Magical Combat”) as well as elsewhere, but Aucassin et Nicolette is unique among French narratives.  For a comparison of Aucassin et Nicolette with the biànwén form, see Li-Li Ch'en, “Wen Chantefable and Aucassin et Nicolette,” Comparative Literature, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Summer, 1971).

2.  Robert Harden, ‘"Aucassin et Nicolette’ as Parody,” Studies in Philology, Vol. 63, No. 1 (Jan., 1966). 

3.  Apart from the article already cited above, additional evidence is presented in Barbara Nelson Sargent, “Parody in Aucassin et Nicolette: Some Further Considerations,” The French Review, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Mar., 1970).

4.  In America this artist played with the likes of Don Cherry and Miles Davis and worked regularly here with three bands: one traditional, one jazz, and one rock.  Listening to his Arabic singing with the rock ensemble, I asked him to translate the lyrics.  They were all cliches of the Islamic shahada: Allah is great, there is one god, Allah determines all things.  “Of course,” he said, “music is always an offering to Allah.”  According to him, in Morocco they would often perform through the night, and generally found their patient better by daybreak. 

Ken Burns' American Revolution

 

     With The American Revolution everyone’s favorite documentary maker Ken Burns (aided by co-directors Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt) has done it again.  The series is entertaining and enlightening, using judiciously researched words, often from correspondence, and a wide variety of images to relate the story of this country’s struggle for independence.  The sound track is too often cloyingly nostalgic or elegiac (as it was in The Civil War) and might have used more eighteenth century tunes, and the visuals suffer from the fact that photography was yet in  the future, leading to the frequent repetition of certain portraits (such as Benedict Arnold’s) as well as an overuse of maps (though they are informative in reporting of battles).  In spite of such quibbles, the programs remain eminently watchable for their entire twelve hours. 

     And even the reasonably well-read non-historian will learn a few things.  Though every school child knows of loyalists, the traditional nationalist story of our origins is slow to admit to what an extent the Revolution was a civil war.  This has led to a vague but satisfying notion that the fight was us against them and to the suppression of incidents of vigilante action like the sadistic treatment of customs official John Malcolm who in 1774 was twice tarred and feathered.

     The most significant revelation was perhaps the fact that both enslaved Africans and native peoples had reason to expect better treatment from the British than from the colonists, leading some members of these groups to choose to fight on the side of George III.  For their own strategic reasons, even before the Americans had risen in arms, Britain had sought to minimize conflict with the indigenous tribes by forbidding settlers to cross the Appalachians.  On the other hand many Americans had significant interest in westward expansion, some in order to gain land of their own and some, who had been in a position to secure a claim to western lands, to realize huge profits.  George Washington was a leading example of this second group. 

     While the Southern colonies blocked early abolitionist attempts in the Constitutional Convention, and the issue was divisive even in the North, the British army offered freedom to enslaved persons who escaped to their lines and enlisted in their cause and a good many accepted the opportunity.  Both Indians and African-Americans pursued their own interests, just as colonists and English were doing, though both non-white groups were to suffer long past this country’s founding; indeed, neither has achieved equality yet today. 

     Further, Burns makes it clear that the rebels might never had won the war had it not been for the support of France and, to a far lesser extent, Spain.  Not because they supported the ideals of the revolution, but purely due to their centuries-old rivalry with Great Britain, these European powers played a significant role in convincing the English Parliament that they should settle this dispute in order to deploy their forces elsewhere to defend their expanding empire.   

     Some of our patriotic clichés survive.  The fact is that the American Revolution was the first major rejection of monarchy and feudalism, though the British king had lost significant authority in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.  In spite of baronial Southern planters, much of America’s leadership was in the hands of middle-class tradesmen -- a silversmith, a brewer, a printer.  As long as land remained available, if one does not consider the fate of its aboriginal inhabitants, a new arrival who had nothing in Europe might become a property holder here and, before long, could aspire to gentility.  Eliminating birthright aristocrats may have made America seem crude and vulgar to some two hundred and some years ago, but it was a step forward in human rights.

     The viewer gets a lively sense of the significance of George Washington’s contribution.  His demeanor alone impressed everyone as noble and dignified, encouraging all to defer to him.  His giving up first the supreme military authority and then the presidency, though it was only to return to trying to amass a greater fortune through business dealings, was rare and praiseworthy among revolutionary leaders. 

     And the rebellion of people, most of whom were in more or less adequate circumstances but who were inspired by a call to liberty indicates what power the concept had in those days when it was so exciting and new.  Ken Burns’ The American Revolution seems timely indeed at a time when many Americans seem to be turning toward authoritarianism and it is necessary once more to raise the banner militantly declaring that in America we want no kings.

Notes on Recent Reading 60 (Greene, de Sévigné, Cary)

 

The Potting Shed (Greene)

     Greene’s plays are little-known compared to his fiction which, in the case of The Potting Shed, is just as well.  He attempted to write a tendentious piece in support of old Jehovah using the plot structure of a mystery, but succeeded at inspiring neither faith nor suspense.  The plot, concerning a militant atheist and an alcoholic priest, requires not only the suspension of disbelief necessary for all fiction, but a rather idiosyncratic view of Christianity itself.  To accept the premise of the plot, one must accept the idea that God miraculously restored James’ life in trade for the priest William’s faith, leading the former to a fevered search for the resolution of his own dissatisfaction while the latter stews in even more miserable wretchedness.  Christian and non-Christian alike might wonder what sort of a God would participate in such a deal, but I suppose this is a sacred mystery.  As a play-goer (or reader), though, one expects a more solid foundation to a work’s themes.  The hero’s tragic anagnorisis is managed with appropriate drama as long as one does not think about it much.  The enormous lion that appears in the closing image must surely be a close relative of C. S. Lewis’s Aslan, though his appearance here seems an artificial graft.

 

 

Selected Letters (Mme. de Sévigné)

     Reading Mme. De Sévigné’s letters one is brought into the world of the seventeenth century French court, but not the court alone.  She was acquainted with the chief writers and intellectuals of the day and delivers opinions of plays by Molière, Racine, and Corneille when they were fresh.  She was a close friend of Rochefoucauld as well as of woman writers like Mme. de La Fayette and Madeleine de Scudéry.  Still, despite its vivid recreation of its time, I found this collection unsatisfying.  Though these are genuine letters, full of gossip and news and emotion, they are not very artful.  The author turns out a nice bit of wit now and then (often a catty sort of remark), but most of the writing is formless and very often pedestrian (the Penguin volume I read translated by Leonard Tancock contained perhaps one quarter of the extant correspondence and might have been cut further yet in my opinion.)  The lady never ventures an original opinion which makes her an excellent source for historians but sometimes dull for other readers.  Most of the letters are to her daughter, living far off in the South of France and her intense maternal concern for her child, for her health in particular, and her delicate management of her son-in-law M. de Grignan, a man with a weakness for gambling and little financial acumen are fascinating at first encounter, but very shortly a bore.  The glittering Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné who frequented the court of the Sun King, comes to seem like a guest who stayed too long, blathering about her offspring until one found one was no longer listening. 

 

 

Prisoner of Grace (Cary)

      Though the novel is explicitly engaged with politics, the real thematic center of Prisoner of Grace is psychological.  Chester Nimmo’s every position is presented as expedient, as his real passion, his most strongly felt “cause” is consistently his own career, from advocacy for the Boers through pacifism and then patriotic support for WWI.  Thus the actual validity of, for instance, his denunciation of “baby-starving landlords” is never an issue; the rhetoric is a means for him to the end of political success.  likewise, Jim Latter’s defense of the Luga tribespeople seems merely an aspect of the errant quirks of that rather shallow individual rather than as either vindication or condemnation of colonialism.  Likewise, the defenders of the status quo like Nina’s cousin Slapton seem to espouse the politics into which they were born with little regard for rightness or wrongness, while Chester’s class consciousness seems like simple resentment of a piece with his pettiness otherwise.

     Nina Woodville is not only the narrator; she is the center of the novel, though she reacts to others and allows herself to be swept along by the current of her life, taking no decisive action.  Though even her love-making, with both Jim and Chester, is altogether passive, she is a fascinating character, as little in control of her destiny at the end as at the start.

     Along the way the reader is exposed to a good deal of history (wars, change of government, social movements) as well as developments like the introduction of lipstick among respectable women, but these documentary elements are consistently secondary to the psychological portraits, principally of Nina, but also of Chester and Jim on down to lesser characters like Aunt Latter and Bootham.