Tristan’s World

This view of Tristan was written after I recently read the great romance in A. F. Hatto’s Penguin translation. Many years ago in graduate school I had slogged through the text in MHG. I cannot bring myself even now either to discard or to reread the voluminous notes I made at that time, but these comments make no scholarly pretense. I do not claim familiarity with the critical literature either, but this approach is, so far as I know, new. Parenthetical numbers refer to the Hatto paperback.

The study of literature I think would be enriched if more common readers were to record their reactions. Scholars might suggest ideas outside their areas of expertise. I suspect that even professors could learn a few things from non-specialists. Alas, I am afraid that no one today could make a living writing about literature as Edmund Wilson did without a university appointment.


     Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan is in part a hero in the old style: peerless physically, able to win every competition or single combat, a potent fighter in war. Yet he is far more an Odysseus than an Achilles, and his expertise at artifice is evinced by his cunning, trickery, and disguise, but also by his chivalry, elegance, and good taste. Tristan appears as a mysterious trickster, a shape-shifter, almost but not quite able to transform the tragic reality into which he is born. Tristan assumes disguises as a merchant’s son and as Tantris the minstrel, just as his mother Blancheflor had disguised herself to gain access to his father Rivalin. While the somewhat similar figure of Melville’s Confidence-Man plays hide-and-seek with the reader and remains wholly elusive in spite of the solid reality of the river boat, Tristan is wholly engaged in human suffering. Rather like Jesus, but lacking the promise of restorative justice after death, Tristan, a courtly elitist, a refined connoisseur among heroes, achieves his end through a love-death after enduring to the utmost the most ordinary of passions: love-longing, frustration, and mortality.
     The hero’s end, misled into thinking that his beloved is not arriving, affirms the sadness his name suggests while underlining the central motif of signs improperly interpreted, of counterfeit and genuine, deceptive and truthful, generating a scintillating play of appearance and reality. Different readings of Tristan are then unsurprising. One might read the epic as a post-modern spectacle with participants identifying themselves with conventions or ironic tropes on conventions to pass the time like Estragon and Vladimir though in Gottfried the setting may be a palace or a field of war and in Tristan a great deal happens, though the events generally seem governed by chance and guess-work and error. For all the sententiae dealt out here and there, Gottfried seems a profoundly skeptical man.
     The story itself is decentered. Unlike many authors of fiction until well into the nineteenth century, Gottfried does not claim that the story is true, only that it is of the sort that can uplift and entertain “noble hearts.” He notes the multiplicity of versions and promises to provide the very best using Thomas as his principal source, and, indeed, he does not wander far from his predecessor in the narrative. At various points in the telling, he emphasizes his own deviations from others who had told Tristan’s story. Beginning with an invented story current in many variations, he gives then his own reworking of what he considers to be the best of its past storytellers. It is a free play of fiction, governed by taste.
     Again and again along the way Gottfried stresses ambiguity and ambivalence. Tristan is above all else a lover. Yet a glance at the beginning and end of the narrative suggests that this status is dubious. His affair with Isolde begins only with the external chance of their accidental consumption of the love philtre. Then, at the end, Isolde’s double, Isolde of the White Hands, causes him to reflect. “Tristan was in two minds about whether he wanted Isolde or not . . .’Do I desire her or don’t I,’ he was constantly asking himself. ‘I think I do not, and then I think I do.’” (294) He marries the new Isolde, but does not make love to her and finally Tristan dies after she misinforms about the sail indicating the arrival of the Irish Isolde. His amatory career is thus muddied by chance, uncertainty, and lies, none of which affected his martial prowess.
     He realizes the inadequacy of language and declares “I do not know how to begin.” (108) He proceeds only after imagining a prayer to Apollo and the Muses and throughout the poem frequently pauses in self-reflection, commenting on his authorial decisions, asking himself such questions as “What fresh matters will I now set in train?” (121)
     In his prologue Gottfried sets forth his dialectical program, saying that, though his goal is distraction and entertainment to soothe the burden of life, his story is not for the many who value pleasure alone but for a more sophisticated audience that appreciates the “bittersweet.” (42) The hypnotic couplet of the prologue is a meditation on duality as much as an announcement of the author’s topic.


A man, a woman; a woman, a man;
Tristan, Isolde; Isolde, Tristan.


     He goes to say “Their life, their death is our bread” (44) Surely this means not only that his contemporaries could relish the story but also that such polarities define our everyday reality. The realization that such oppositions as joy and pain, male and female, truth and lie form the fabric of the human experience is transformative. Thus Tristan’s father Rivalin in his passion for Blancheflor not only learns that love is sadness; this insight so affects him that it “changed his whole cast of mind.” He “became quite a different man, since all that he did was chequered with strangeness and blindness.” (53)
     Even Christianity provides no reliable truth in Gottfried’s world. In one of the most-discussed figures of the story, Gottfried declares, upon Isolde’s success in the ordeal of hot iron that Christ is “pliant as a wind-blown sleeve.” (248) There could hardly be a more powerful statement of the uncertainty in which people live than to claim that Christ, in Christian ideology the central focus and bedrock of reality, is no more stable than a passing breeze. Indeed through the story Christ is consistently assumed to take the part of love with little regard for the church’s traditional moral doctrine.
     The oscillation between possibilities is evident in the hero’s identity and disguise, in the multiple versions of the story, in the limitations of language itself, in emotions, even in the divine. In this story in which the heroic knight is a trickster and an artist, valor is assumed and refined taste is the criterion of value. Yet Tristan must function in a world of disguises, misinterpreted signs, and contradictions. Whereas some have regarded Gottfried as the founder of a religion of love, it seems more accurate to say that he portrays a world of chance, ungovernable compulsion, and impenetrable obscurity in which one must, like Tristan, blindly grope forward until the end without the benefit of revelation. Along the way is magnificent pageantry, beauty, pleasure, and constant hazard into which our hero has no nobler choice then to throw himself fully into the game, rather like an existential “man of action,” and we, the readers, pass our time by following along as the hero makes his way in the “darkling plain.”