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.
.
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.
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