Aggression and Love in Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain

 

miniature from the Roman de Lancelot

      Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain has all the trappings associated with medieval romance: valiant knights, lovely ladies, and a measure of magic.  The poem is exemplary as well in its episodic structure, propounding and manipulating plot elements in part for the abstract beauty of the patterns so created, in part to mirror the dialectics of lived experience.  The poem embodies many of the commonest conventions of romances, yet, at critical moments, Chrétien opposes the fundamental passions of aggression and love in a tense ambivalence.  Though Yvain’s character and actions in many ways conform to heroic expectations, his story also indicates the knight’s need for the female other, for love and selflessness.   

     The principal theme of Yvain is announced clearly to be love at the outset.  Chrétien tells a tale of King Arthur’s court because he feels that love has suffered a decline since those days of glory when Amor was “dolz et buens” (17).  True love has since, he says, all but vanished since, dwindled to a mere “fable” (24), its devotees gone (19-20).  Moderns may imitate, however, the legendary times of Arthur by telling stories of great lives, just as those in earlier times had done.

Li un recontoient noveles,

Li autre parlaient d’Amors

Des angoisses et des dolors

Et des granz biens qu’orent souvant

                              (12-15)  

Earlier heroic epics such as Beowulf or the Song of Roland including early Arthurian stories such as those in the Geoffrey of Monmouth Wace’s Roman de Brut and Layamon's Brut likewise focused on war and derring-do rather than romantic love, but Yvain announces the paramount importance of love at the outset.

     While the glittering world of King Arthur’s court might seem at first charmed in its perfection, before long the reader encounter Sir Kex (Kay) who is anything but courtly, and Sir Qualogrenant (Calogrenant) who at the queen’s urging reluctantly relates the story of his defeat by a mighty and mysterious knight.  When the king emerges, he declares that he and anyone willing to join his entourage will investigate the unknown knight in two weeks.  Yvain, however outstanding in behavior generally, wishes to avenge his cousin Sir Qualogrenant and steals off in the night to confront the challenge himself.  Already King Arthur’s court has been shown to include a failure at arms, a rude mocker, and a hero who acts surreptitiously contrary to his ruler’s plan due to his ego.  A woman sets the narrative in motion.

     Yvain proves victor in the struggle with Esclados le Ros, but his success as a fighter, far from advancing his cause as his widow Laudine’s lover, makes his approach to her all but impossible as he is her husband’s killer.  However, her maid Lunete (Lunette) assists him and, though a combination of hiding the knight and advocating for him, succeeds in introducing him to her mistress.  She must use considerable argumentation to convince Laudine that he is honorable and without blame in Esclados’ death.

     Already the simplest heroic paradigm has been violated numerous times.  The fallibility of Arthur’s court is demonstrated by Qualogrenant’s failure.  Yvain himself has transgressed feudal propriety by acting on his own and, while he does defeat his foe, he could not have won Laudine without the help of Lunete, whose selfless devotion to his interests is unexplained but consistent.

     After his marriage Yvain lives happily for a time until Gauvain (Gawain) convinces him to compete in tournaments.  Gauvain specifically opposes such competitive masculine accomplishments with love which he thinks is likely to weaken a man (2484-2489).  His companionship and the challenge of competition so successfully distracts Yvain who wishes to win renown through such sports that he fails to return to his wife after the agreed year had passed, causing her to then reject him, and causing her husband what might be called a nervous breakdown. 

     He recovers from this low point only through the intervention of another lady who uses a medicine provided her by Morgue le Sage (Morgan le Fay) (2949).  Once he is physically and mentally restored he proceeds to rehabilitate himself, not by appealing directly to his estranged wife, but by further adventures, now motivated no longer by a thirst for fame but rather by the desire to practice love, not for the time romantic love, but love of others, of community, of humanity.  He undertakes a series of combats, each more altruistic than the competitions he had entered with Gauvain for the satisfaction of his ego.  Practicing disinterested love-service, he repays the lady of Norison (Noroison) who had nursed him in his recovery defeating the Count of Alier. 

     During that fight he was described as like a lion hunting deer (3198-3199), an image which is to be dramatically enacted when he next encounters a lion set upon by a snake.  “Pity” urges him to enter the fray (3369) on behalf of the lion whom he considers noble and great-hearted (“gentil et franche,” 3371), characteristics he reinforces in himself by his selfless combat.  The lion is an exemplar not only of valor and generosity but also of loyalty to the point that he contemplates suicide when he thinks Yvain may be dead.  Though Yvain regularly tells the lion not to intervene in his combats, the lion’s help is in fact critical to his success more than once.  The animal represents the nobility of disinterested courage.

     Yvain then assists Gauvain’s brother-in-law against Harpin of the Mountain as well ss Lunette who was to be executed because of her helping him.  He frees the unwilling laborers of the Castle of Misfortune and restores the inheritance of the younger daughter of the lord of blackthorn Noire Espine.  Each of these acts is in service to others and by such selfless acts he eventually gains readmittance to his marriage. 

     His deeds alone, however, would not have brought him victory.  Though Yvain is an outstanding warrior, he could not succeed with the aid of others.  Not only is the lion his invaluable companion who assists him even when directed to stand apart, but he relies also on a series of wise women.  From his rescue from Esclados’ men to the remedy originating from Morgan le Fay and provided him by another lady to Lunette’s tricking Laudine in the end, his own prowess is insufficient to bring him his victories; he requires alliances. 

     Though the poem is not assertively Christian at one point Yvain acknowledges the need to ask for divine help (3760). The aid of the lion and Yvain’s female allies parallels the Christian dogma of sanctifying grace, which is always undeserved.  The hero’s pushy egotism, so closely linked to his martial aggression and to the pride of original sin, is insufficient to win him what he wants; indeed, his desire for the sort of fame the Greeks called κλέος, renown derived from  both combat and tournaments, is what led him to disobey his king, lose his wife, and sink to a state of madness.  Unregulated by a female psyche, his aggression may prove destructive.  Yet, his match with Laudine is presented as ideal, and the poem concludes with the promise of continued balance in which the flourishing of love guarantees country-wide as well as personal harmony.

     The profound ambivalence at the heart of Yvain arises from the assumption that men can best distinguish themselves by valor, yet courage alone will be insufficient unless moderated and controlled by love.  The one is ego-aggrandizing; the other, selfless.  Yvain is an elegantly structured romance in which the nice aesthetic discernment of the artist authenticates the salutary integration of love and death, altruism and aggression in the hero’s progress to maturation. 

Sir Isumbras and the Functions of the Fabulous

     As soon as language appeared, it became possible to describe things contrary to reality, facilitating lying and allowing the emergence of religion and literature. The appetite of the pious for marvels knows no boundaries in space or time; supernatural events provide marvelous entertainment and add the simplest seal of authenticity for every sadhu, faith healer, priest and shaman. Miracles continue to occur regularly if one believes the tales of the faithful.
     There is, however, no controversy over the unreality of all imaginative literature. Every story is made up, in this sense a “lie;” it makes no claim to have actually happened and thus be “true.” Every poem is also a little work of fiction, with a persona saying things the author imagined might be said. As Aristotle knew, literature provides quite a different sort of truth. In fact, both verisimilitude and fabulation are rhetorical figures, the former suggesting a complex of attitudes arising from an apparently plausible plot and the latter making use of a story’s improbability .
     Those utterly unsophisticated in visual art sometimes tend to think that the best painting is the most real-looking. (Naïve as it is, this notion has a continuous history reaching back to antiquity.) By a similar standard of judgment, verisimilitude would be the mark of the best writing. One might using this criterion criticize a novel’s conclusion as implausible, the description of a city as quite unlike the original, or dialogue as stilted. Such points are indeed salient, but only if the narrative had already established an expectation of realism making the offending passage dissonant.
     In fact a great deal of literature employs unrealistic turns of plot altogether appropriate, indeed necessary, for the effects and themes of a given work. The myths by which humans structure and understand their world include none of the restraints of lived experience. Heroes and villains die and are reborn, they possess the power of invisibility, heal the sick and raise the dead. Their reality is symbolic and not literal. Similarly, the conventions of romance involve the most incredible coincidences and pairings, the most improbable reappearances and denouements. Folk tales, too, are often utterly supernatural from the start, though many rely on spirits and goblins rather than deities.
     Verisimilitude and its opposite both make an impression on the reader. The many critics who have pondered whether Sir Isumbras is a courtly romance or a religious quasi-hagiography neglect to observe what the two genres have in common: both saints’ lives and chivalric narrative allow themselves conventions that stray far from realism.
     The sort of entertainment Sir Isumbras offers may seem in little demand today. in the narration of a medieval Job [1], whose travails mount until he accepts his guilt and, having performed extravagant penance, finds his material as well as spiritual well-being restored as a result. As a tail-rhyme romance, the account is clearly meant for popular amusement rather than for catechism; the poem certainly arose and circulated apart from any ecclesiastical imprimatur, yet is was an age when the canonical saints themselves had careers recorded as rather more lively with miraculous manifestations than the readers’ lived experience.
     The boldly dramatic turns in Sir Isumbras’ life are told with little concern for verisimilitude. After the talking bird sent by Christ sets the plot in motion, a reader or listener not swept along by the story might wonder at the lion, leopard, and unicorn that carry off his sons with such regularity, or at their miraculous reappearance in his hour of need without any explanation of what had happened in the meantime. His wife’s failure to recognize him after his long service as an ironworker is likewise implausible (as his her treatment by her captor and her immediate ascendance to rule in his absence). Sir Isumbras’ restoration to prosperity with which the tale ends is as flat and simple as the end of the book of Job. A griffin’s steals his gold, but then it fortuitously reappears. Anything can happen, it seems, that the narrator wishes to propose.
     All these extraordinary events are far from random. They serve the ends of the romance just as similar improbabilities fill other romances from Daphnis and Chloe to The Winter’s Tale. In the first place, use of the fabulous is a sign of the aesthetic text. Though marvels and the supernatural appear as well in texts centered on history, travel, or even science, as well as religion, such showy violations of natural law are characteristic of imaginative literature. The reader accepts with relish the fact that fictions have no limits as surely as did those who were listening to the Wife of Bath when she began “In th' olde dayes of the kyng arthour . . .”
     The fabulous plot elements also provide a measure of structural symmetry, marking off the central portion of the tale with its action from the backstory, the long central portion of penitential labor in the ironworks, and the denouement. Rather like the working out of a well-designed farce, every element – in this case, the wife, the three sons, and the throne – returns with a satisfying inevitability once the pattern is set into motion.
     The chief appeal of the fantastic is surely, though, the timeless pleasure of recreationally contemplating the amazing and the impossible. Indeed, England no less than India, enjoyed stories featuring marvels of all sorts [2] and a good many religious narratives as well as heroic battle narratives catered to a taste akin to that of lovers of science fiction and fantasy. Miracles in art and in language were the equivalent of the special effects so prominent in films today, relished for their very improbability. The world of superheroes in comics and films is part of a lineage that includes such varied texts as Jataka Buddha stories and Sir John Mandeville.
     Virtually all the romances include religious formulae and Sir Isumbras is not unique among them in its foregrounding of the theme of salvation. [3] The presence of miraculous events is a universal sign of divine activity, so the episodes related of the penitential knight might be considered to bolster the Gospel stories of Christ walking on water and raising the dead. The small bird that posed Sir Isumbras the question of whether he preferred happiness at the beginning or the end of his life was the direct agent of Jesus Christ. The whole story is a dramatic enactment of Providence modeling original sin, repentance and penitence, and the felicity that accompanies acceptance of God’s grace. Though the narrated events are sensational, they reflect thereby only the more strongly the culture’s hegemonic ideology about the course of every Christian life.
     Yet there lurks a contradiction in that Christian confidence. Sir Isumbras is not susceptible to the sort of programmatic allegorical reading applicable to, say, The Faery Queen or Pilgrim’s Progress. The story cannot be read purely as an ingenious thematic statement, and for that reason its realism cannot be wholly dismissed as an issue. The gap between the reader and the hero is yawning wide. Though one might call Sir Isumbras an everyman in his sin, repentance, and salvation, he is unlike anyone’s lived experience in his having lived so high, sunk so low, and endured such extraordinary suffering before his marvelous deliverance. The inexorable retributive justice which first condemns the hero to prolonged suffering and humiliation and later restores him to prosperity seems to belong to a world apart from that of lived experience just as Christ’s miracles and the supernatural events of the Hebrew scriptures are remote in time and place. After appreciating the justice meted out to Sir Isumbras, after all, the reader or listener returns to a far less visibly just world. The church would maintain that all accounts are balanced in the afterlife, but this assurance has not always determined the behavior of those who identify as believers. In a way Sir Isumbras is a poignant wish, reflecting more how the world lacks justice than solid confidence that all will be right in the end.
     The rhetoric of fancy in which anything can happen is exhilarating. The poet, like a magician, can attract a considerable audience by making rabbits appear out of hats or sawing attractive assistants in two. This entertainment value may indeed be its formal cause in the Aristotelean sense, but the role of the fabulous is significant in what a medieval churchman would have considered the poem’s central purpose to be its teaching of Christian precepts. Even dealing with dogma, however, art is subtle enough to introduce contradictions, tensions, and uncertainties into the narrative by use of the very same “unrealistic” incidents which at the same time hammer home central points of doctrine.



1. Sir Isumbras elides the central issue of Job by the knight’s clear sin of pride before his fall.

2. See, for instance my “Sacred Space as Sideshow” (http://williamseaton.blogspot.com/2010/02/sacred-space-as-sideshow.html).

3. Dieter Mehl’s The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries proposes a subgenre of “homiletic romances” which includes Sir Isumbras as well as The King of Tars, Robert of Sicily, Sir Gowther, Emaré, Le Bone Florence of Rome, Athelston, The Sege of Melayne, and Cheuelere Assigne.