Thematic Instability in Le lai du cor

 

 

 

from the 1634 edition of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur

     Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; those in parentheses to line numbers in C. T. Erickson’s The Anglo-Norman Text of Le Lai du Cor (1973).

 

 

     The level of gravitas of Robert Biket’s Anglo-Norman “Lai du cor” (ca. 1200) is difficult to specify.  On the one hand, the story is an amusing anecdote: some have even called it a fabliau rather than a lai [1] and, indeed, the author himself assures listeners he knows many good jokes (590).  The laughter of the characters and the harmonious conclusion emphasize the author’s playful tone in his evocation of tensions around the relations of married men and women.

     Stories on that theme, however, may be comic or tragic or simply realistic.  A more serious tone is suggested by the holiday that provides the occasion for Arthur’s party.  The setting on Ascension Thursday brings to mind Christ’s unique moral perfection, and the specific ethical issue of fidelity to one’s lover is foregrounded by the interloper’s disturbing gift.  Just as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight a festive and courtly occasion becomes a test of virtue and, here as in Gawain, the genteel sophistication of the nobles is not entirely congruous with either Christian morality or the implied authorial intentions. 

     Such doubling characterizes the whole poem, leaving it poised between amusing anecdote and cautionary moral, between courtly sophistication and Christian humility. Though the occasion is a religious holiday, the celebration is far from wholly pious.   The king’s festivities in his court in Carlion are unmistakably regal in scale, an example of “grant curteisie” (20) indeed, with tens of thousands of guests among whom every knight is matched with a lady (as in formal dinner parties in more recent times), “checun out sa paraille” (16).  It's a party until the mysterious visitor arrives.

     Once the ritual of the chastity text [2] has foregrounded the theme of sexual morality, humanity in general is chastened for falling short until Garadue (Caradoc, sometimes Sir Craddock) steps forward toward the end.  Until that point the poem has implied an orthodox Christian theme echoing, for instance, the passages in Romans saying “all men have sinned” (3:23) and “there is none righteous, no, not one" (3:10).  The fact that the exemplar Arthur is included emphasizes the universality of people’s guilt.  Yet this reading is confounded by the appearance of the one wholly faithful couple. 

     Garadue’s preeminence, incidentally, does serve a subsidiary function in reinforcing the tale’s verisimilitude.  Biket says that the story’s hero was also the first to tell it (he assures the reader that he has the permission of a certain abbot).  Further, he notes for pilgrims and other travelers that a visitor may see the fabled horn itself while visiting Cirencester Castle.

     Fundamentally, though, the theme is muddied by the appearance of one apparently flawless marriage.  Since Garadue is not Christ, he must be infected with original sin and the creation’s fallen nature.  Why then spotlight him as perfect, an exception to an otherwise all-inclusive rule meant to chasten all who hear the story?

     The aesthetic text excels at representing certain experiences resistant to linear rationality: the experience of pleasure or emotions, the mysterious, and the ambivalent or self-contradictory.  In this poem the dialectic of love, at once absolute and flawed, is illuminated by several subtle image systems.  The enchanted horn is said to have been made by a malicious fairy (229-230) and Garadue’s wife is said to be herself like a fairy (512), thus conflating the most and least virtuous figures of the poem.  The attendants at the banquet are so shaken with the appearance of the emissary of the king of Moraine that they spill the wine they are serving anticipating the guests’ spills and cut themselves rather than cutting the bread which foreshadows the king’s lunge at his wife with a knife and her own later identification of a good husband with good grape wine and wheat bread.  Thus men are twice associated with bread and wine, in one instance with waste or violence and in the other with pleasure and enjoyment.  Sexuality by implication is likewise powerful with the potential to bring great rewards and also sometimes to bring conflicts.

     Biket has, then, artfully expressed an ambivalence, not from perversity or carelessness, but only to represent reality.  The fact is that both propositions are true: that, if infidelity is broadly enough conceived, all women have “strayed,” many of them inadvertently or innocuously, while it remains a fact that marital loyalty is required by religious mandate as well as by jealous husbands.  In the gap between the real and the ideal the play or art arises, with lyrics and serenades, and courts of love and pledges of love-service, all performative acts for negotiating male-female relations, albeit with only the men’s accounts recorded [3]. 

     This lai then both exposes and downplays the potentially disruptive force of sexual jealousy while avoiding rejecting the traditional goal of absolute devotion to one’s husband.  When one after another of the nobles finds his wife has been to some degree unfaithful, and the general reaction is good-humored laughter rather than a passion for revenge, we have clearly entered a social realm among worldly adults who recognize the universality of sexual temptation.  Without altogether abandoning the ideal of fidelity, the author has made its literal accomplishment marginal, an unusual special case while many technically imperfect relationships flourish while tolerating trivial or symbolic incidents of “love” like the queen’s.

     If one wished to sound au courant, at least with the trends of a generation or two ago, one might say that Biket presents the listeners with a scene “always already erased,” but post-modernism is not required to make sense of his story.  As in Blake’s Ascension Day poems in Songs of Innocence and in Songs of Experience, the holiday highlights the possibility of purity alongside the fallenness of the world. In Blake the charity of the “grey headed beadles” is dubious while the glory of the children, called “lambs” and “angels” remains. 

     In the conclusion to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, while the king is laughing over Gawain’s venial falseness and declaring that every knight shall in solidarity wear a similar garter, for Gawain himself it remains “þe bende of þis blame I bere in my nek” which signifies “couardise and couetyse.”  Though the only known sinner, he seems the most morally scrupulous of the court, while the majority of his fellow knights have settled on a laxer definition of fidelity.  Similarly, in Biket’s lai the court accepts a tolerant standard while the stricter one seems meaningful only to Caradoc and his wife.  The precise extent to which transgressions should be overlooked is left unsaid.  Ladies and gentlemen will be presumed to know the rules

     That the poem embodies two contradictory value systems is scarcely an impediment to its success as a narrative.  The listener or reader may experience both the satisfaction of righteous orthodoxy and the titillation of hints of sensuality.  Perhaps the taste around the year 1200 C. E. had something in common with the audiences for those gangster movies of the ‘thirties that open with a solemn statement about the regrettable rise of urban crime followed by an hour and a half of violent action.  The combination is no more inconsistent than human beings are inconsistent, and to depict the contradiction in art is simply to be psychologically if not rationally accurate. 

    

 

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1.  See C. T. Erickson, The Anglo-Norman Text of Le Lai du Cor, 11-16. 

2.  For the theme in general, see parallels in Stith Thompson H 411.4.  In the Livre de Carados, first continuation of Perceval, Caradoc’s wife Guignier sacrifices herself by letting a venomous serpent bite her breast.  See also the close parallel in the ballad “The Boy and the Mantle.”

3.  See Jeff Rider, “Courtly Marriage in Robert Biket’s "Lai du Cor," Romania Vol. 106, No. 422 (2) (1985) who maintains the poem is “not anti-feminist” and the horn “not a chastity-testing device.”  His claim is unconvincing as, though he claims the horn tests men as well as women, it is only the men’s “jealousy,” that is, their suspicion of their women and not their own sexual exclusiveness that is mentioned.

4.  Bk. III, stanza 22.

 

Ubu Roi and the Charm of Artlessness

 

 

x

Program from the premiere of Ubu Roi

 

      Jarry does not turn up here for a few pages. His critic has perhaps the obligation to diddle his readers a bit.

     On the wall of my dining room is a sampler saying “Home, Sweet, Home.”  My motive for acquiring it at the Salvation Army and then displaying it differs from that of the work’s maker, who presumably wished to express a simple affection (and an implied wish with perhaps a nudge of sympathetic magic) for a harmonious household.  Anyone in my culture might guess that, to me, that straightforward sentiment would be outworn and unattractive, were it not that it may be conceived ironically.  Educated people are more likely to regard the piece in a self-conscious way.  “How countrified!  How naïve, yet how charming that life once seemed so simple!”  Standing in this way at one remove from the object of contemplation, the technical merits of the needlework become revalued.  Like the paintings of Grandma Moses, the work’s very failures are made into advantages: how homey, how rustic, how authentic!  If the needlework is coarse or the brushstrokes clumsy, they affirm instead of undermining the image.

     I have as well figures of Shiva dancing and Rama fluting and a nightlight of Jesus Christ, though I remain an unbeliever in them all, finding such images only symbolically true.  Indeed, the adoption of exotic symbols for their own sake is far from confined to the oversophisticated.  A person getting a tattoo of Chinese characters without a clear view of their meaning is similar.  This sort of meta-aesthetic thinking is characteristic of the new territories marked off for aesthetic value during the twentieth century.

     This mode of appreciation became itself self-reflective following Susan Sontag’s seminal essay on “Notes on Camp” (in the Partisan Review 1964).  Apart from the sensibility she defines which is associated with homosexual culture, similar approaches have been adapted to kitsch and hip reception. These have in common that each adopts a meta-aesthetic.  Images with little interest or merit in themselves gain significance with aesthetic attention.  Values are subject to transvaluation with the viewer's gaze.

     The adoption of mass symbols by artists like Warhol’s soup cans or Liechtenstein's romance comic panels arises from a similar impulse, but the technique is quite a different matter.  The distancing, having been done already by the artist, cannot be repeated by the viewer.  While such images had, at first, expressed a certain brashness, the artists’ versions are already mediated, and the gallery-goer appreciates the professionalism of, for instance, the elegantly shiny surfaces of Koons’ balloon animals.

    Ironic appropriation is also unrelated to the concealment of craft, recommended by the formula “ars est celare artem” [1].  In this case the artist has intentionally created a representation of apparently artless art, but the analytic critic can reveal the strategies by which that impression is constructed.  Thus the admirer appreciates the maker’s skill while acknowledging that a good part of its appeal in in its inconspicuousness.

     One variety, perhaps the purest and most unlikely, of this second-level appeal is the enjoyment and valorization of incompetence itself.  Among imaginable instances one might include admiration of the stick figures in a preschooler’s drawing, the picturesque charm of an off-tune community marching band in Chulula, or condescending praise of Onitsha market literature for its “cute”  illiterate usages.  In these cases the critic is looking down on the work while enjoying it for its very failings.  Yet accomplished artists in movements such as Dada, Situationism, and punk music have ignored their own skills to present work which invites ironic reception.  Non-professionalism can be an intentional strategy in performances such as it was in the shows of the Cockettes whose de facto leader Hibiscus insisted that ability to sing or dance was no qualification for participation.

     Among the most celebrated works that exemplify this anti-aesthetic aesthetic is Jarry’s notorious Ubu Roi.  When one reads of the scandal that attended the work’s premiere, one can feel only nostalgia for the days when a theater audience could still be surprised and even sometimes shocked.  This work, the original appearance of which at Aurélien Lugné-Poe's Théâtre de l'Œuvre in 1896 caused a riotous reaction followed by a ban, has now a secure place in dramatic history. 

     In his total rejection of verisimilitude, Jarry anticipates such later developments as Brecht’s Epic Theater, Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty and the later Theater of the Absurd.  The characters he places on stage and the setting in which they operate have little direct relation to lived experience.  Notoriously, the language is transgressive from the opening “merdre” (itself a deformation).  It is also inventive, featuring neologisms like “phynance.”  Far from respecting the classical norms of unity, symmetry, and accepted forms of beauty, Jarry’s play is free-wheeling and unstable, as suggested by his lifelong attempts to complete it. 

     With its formless narrative, its anarchic lexicon and delight in transgressing, with its roots in rebellious adolescent hijinks, Ubu Roi conveys a mood but little in the way of real theme.  Ubu himself is a monster of devouring energy – hence the parallels with Rabelais – and a certain carnivalesque spirit, at once gleeful and terrible, prevails.  Père Ubu confines even his familiarities with his wife for the most part to threats and warnings; his relations with his subjects are confined to collecting money; he is a naked raging ego without variation or refinement.

     Yet thus very disorganization is what uncontrolled freedom looks like.  Were the author’s professionalism discernable, he would seem a slave rather than a flouter of convention. As with Rimbaud, that other enfant terrible, his faults serve as the seal of authenticity of his radicalism.  Indeed, Jarry was far from alone in his rejection of the norms of the day, indeed, of all norms.  One example is Jules Lévy’s Incoherents, whose 1883 exhibition in the Galerie Vivienne promised “drawings by those who cannot draw” [3].

     In his essay “Questions of the Theatre,” Jarry notes that “various little Ubists” have found wit and purpose in Père Ubu’s pronouncements which in fact were simply “stupid” as Mère Ubu keeps saying.  Such critics assume that a work they like must surely be artfully designed because they are blind to the source of the play’s charm in its very artlessness.  Ubu Roi is pleasing, even to many beautiful, because of its slapdash outrageousness.  The play’s passionate rejection of social proprieties, not exempting artistic expectations constitutes the one emphatic theme.  Some viewers might find the counter-cultural reflex aging before their eyes, itself becoming a predictable and meaningless revolt, bit Jarry never tired of poking fun at his old schoolmaster, long after his classmates had lost interest.

     He not only kept extending and reconsidering the Ubu material, he found it so seductive and volatile that Jarry began himself to enact the role of Père Ubu, using the same staccato, flat intonation in his everyday life and, what is more, he seemed so stylish in doing so that he inspired a vogue of others acting in the same odd manner.  Readers might find this the less surprising since we, too, continue to turn to the play, occasionally even performing it, for we have all encountered our own Ubus and have felt, whatever our chronological level of maturity, like cocking a snoot at them. 

 

 

 

 

1.  The phrase is attributed to Ovid Ars. am. 2.313, also closely paralleled in Metamorphoses 10.252.   The same principle is mandated in Quintilian 9.3.102 and mentioned in Steele, The Tatler 191 and in Wilde’s preface to Dorian Gray inter alia.  It resembles the quality of sprezzatura recommended by Castiglione.

2.  Cf. also the Hydropathes and the Fumistes.

3.  The exhibit accepted all submissions “that were neither obscene nor serious,” including an Paul Bilhaud’s all-black canvas titled “Negroes Fighting in a Tunnel,” Bataille’s “Mona Lisa Smoking a Pipe.”  The show was a success, attracting twenty thousand visitors, and proceeds were donated to charity.   

The Uses of High Places

 

 

    Great heights have long been inspirations fora sense of the sublime, the physical altitude stimulating high thoughts. In China scholars and poets like Tao Qian, Wang Wei, and Han Shan found contemplative roosts in the mountains and even today contemplatives meditate in Tapovan near the source of the Ganges. Symbolic heights like ziggurats, pyramids (in Egypt and Mesoamerica), and soaring Gothic cathedrals encouraged people’s consciousness upward while, even to the less spiritual, mountain views are universally considered beautiful, even exhilarating.

     Having recently lingered for a spell in the Colorado Rockies, I was struck by the distinctly American use to which some of the grandest regions in our magnificent mountains have been put. Our most glorious sites have been bought up by the one percent. Though they must tolerate hoi polloi to some extent, it is only as intruders in their bought-and-paid-for domain.

     Vail, Colorado, is scarcely a town at all, but more closely resembles an upscale shopping mall. It came into existence only with the development of ski resorts in the ‘sixties, and now housing of one sort or another has usurped the most scenic spots. As a single-family dwelling currently averages over two million dollars in the community, a difficulty has arisen in figuring out where to put people to do the plumbing and landscaping and childcare and stock the shelves in the local market. 

     Aspen looks something more like an actual community, but even the tidy, well-kept cottages are in fact second homes for the fatter among the fat cats. Here the average price is fourteen million. An airport with no scheduled flights accommodates only the wasteful jets of America’s oligarchs.  A company boasting it offers "the world's largest yachts" has a showroom here, a thousand miles from the sea.  In Jackson, Wyoming, homes average two million while the existence of working people in the outskirts is attested by the average income of Teton County: a mere half million.

     Even before the ever-increasing wealth gap enabled this usurpation of areas which are indeed national treasures, turning them into trophy leisure locations, of course, the Rockies were viewed through a different financial lens. While the mountains were simply an obstacle to those seeking level farmland further west, the discovery of gold, silver, and other metals brought settlers hoping for more rapid wealth than agriculture could bring. Their eyes were focused on the subterranean realms in which the minerals were hidden, scarcely on the grand landscapes above ground. For these pioneering prospectors the conditions were harsh, at times dangerously so. The industrialization of mining brought dangerous and exploitative working conditions for miners and ferocious repression to any who tried to better their condition. Hundreds died in Cripple Creek, Telluride, Coeur d’Alene and elsewhere, victims of the rapacious greed of the bosses.

     When the ore was exhausted, mines were abandoned and their structures allowed to deteriorate. Now the workers’ struggles are forgotten and even the ugly heaps of tailings are perceived as “historic,” and thus, to the Chamber of Commerce, as assets. As a practical account book matter, the mountains were significant to the land's owners only as a shipping inconvenience.

     Apart from the reduction of mountains either to a marker of prestige or a source of money, they are today a focus of athletic activity. In recent years skiing has vastly increased while hiking, rock climbing, biking, and other strenuous activities have grown as well.  Physical exertions are, of course, wholesome, yet for me the stink of money lingers about the fit bodies one encounters in these glorious mountains.  Whereas George Mallory originally rejected carrying oxygen as “unsporting,” and Edmund Hillary went up Everest wearing hunting tweeds, today special clothing and costly equipment are as significant as performance, signifying affluence like country club membership did for golfers in the past.  The high peaks remain incidental, appreciated by many only for the glamorous background they provide for a display of one’s physique and one’s sophisticated gear. 

     The poets can remind us how to regard mountains as mountains.  Their suggestion is consistent over the centuries.  The old Tang poets knew the proper uses of high places.  Han Shan who adopted the mountain’s name as his own, collapsing the gap between ego and object, atman and Atman.  The mountain is all but invisible, since he inhabits it.

 

Bird-song drowns me in feeling.

Back to my shack of straw to sleep.

Cherry-branches burn with crimson flower,

Willow-boughs delicately trail.

Morning sun flares between blue peaks,

Bright clouds soak in green ponds.

Who guessed I’d leave that dusty world,

Climbing the south slope of Cold Mountain?

                      (translated by A. S. Kline)

 

Almost half a millennium later Shiwu’s motives are the same.

 

Forty-some years I've

Lived in the mountains,

Ignorant of the world's

Rise and fall.

Warmed at night by a stove

Full of pine needles;

Satisfied at noon by a bowl

Of wild plants;

Sitting on rocks

Watching clouds and empty thoughts;

Patching my robe in sunlight;

Practicing silence

Till someone asks

Why Bodhidharma came east,

And I hang out my wash.

                    (trans. By Bill Porter)

 

     And a similar poetic respect for mountains as mountains appears no less in European literature, in Shelley, for instance. 

 

from Mont Blanc

                                     V

Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there,

The still and solemn power of many sights,

And many sounds, and much of life and death.

In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,

In the lone glare of day, the snows descend

Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,

Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,

Or the star-beams dart through them. Winds contend

Silently there, and heap the snow with breath

Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home

The voiceless lightning in these solitudes

Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods

Over the snow. The secret Strength of things

Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome

Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!

And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,

If to the human mind's imaginings

Silence and solitude were vacancy?

 

     In Shelley’s Mont Blanc he finds “the secret Strength of things” all the more present when “none beholds them there,” since their power transcends human vision.  Though “voiceless,” the mountain signifies Ultimate Reality for the poet specifically because he cannot encompass its vastness.  No further commentary is needed (or even possible) since the mountain is neither more nor less than itself. 

     For Gary Snyder the mountain setting has a purgative effect, clearing his mind of obstacles and distractions, allowing the consciousness to focus with precision. 

 

 

    Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout

 

    Down valley a smoke haze

    Three days heat, after five days rain  

    Pitch glows on the fir-cones

    Across rocks and meadows

    Swarms of new flies.

    I cannot remember things I once read

    A few friends, but they are in cities.  

    Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup  

    Looking down for miles

    Through high still air.

 

     Getting a perspective on the landscape may be elusive for today’s visitor to Vail.  Procuring a parking space and ten-dollar scoop of ice cream may rise to the foreground of thought for today’s mountaineer.  But the high altitude remains in spite of exploitation and development, in spite of skis that cost thousands of dollars and lifts that cost hundreds, the cold is there and the indifferent thin air and now and then even an affluent athlete, we are liberal enough to observe, may catch a whiff of what’s real and what will last.  The shops, like the miners, may prove in the end a brief and passing phase.