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.