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. 

Courtly Love in Romance of the Rose

     The thirteenth century allegory Romance of the Rose was immensely popular. Over three hundred manuscripts exist, and other authors frequently allude to the poem. A reading of this poem cannot fail to bear on the most fundamental discussions of the nature of courtly love, still in dispute after almost a millennium. The combination of sensual, spiritual, aesthetic, social, and political ideals produces a fascinating play of tensions in the poem, as indeed in lived experience.
     To limit the scope of this consideration, I will discuss only the first 4058 lines, those by Guillaume de Lorris. [1] This decision is, I know, reductive. The poem, including the more than 17,000 lines added by Jean de Meun, was read as a single work for hundreds of years and I believe that produces the best results, just as it does with the Bible (and Huizinga was speaking of the Romance considered as a whole when he called it the “breviary of the aristocracy”).
     The physical, erotic element is central. Unlike Jaufre Rudel’s love from afar or the dolce stil novisti, physical consummation is the explicit goal. At the conclusion of his part of the poem, Guillaume’s speaker makes love to the rose and expects her to be available in future despite their temporary separation. (anonymous conclusion, l. 34) Initially he had been attracted by her scent (VII, 48) and, when the companions of Mirth abandon their dance, it is to make love “beneath the secret-keeping boughs” (V, 11). How could it be otherwise when, as the poet says,


. . .there’s no better paradise on earth
than any place where lover finds a maid
responding freely to his heart’s desire.
(V, 16-18)


     Even the artificial convention of love’s entering by the eyes accurately conveys the role of visual stimuli in people’s eroticism and the wounding by love’s dart implies a real life passivity and a “bittersweet” experience. (VIII, 10) This realistic biological focus provides the libidinous energy to support the elaborate structure of courtly love.
     Though contemplation of Ultimate Reality may seem far removed from sex, the two have been linked in many cultures. One reads in Frazer of traditional people having ceremonial intercourse on their fields to ensure their fertility. Daoist and Tantric adepts have sought to integrate the physical here-and-now with the eternal. For Plato the beloved leads naturally to the Perfect. Even in Christianity, with its deep suspicion of the body, the rhetoric of St. Bernard on the Song of Songs and of the Victorines, the poetry of Mechthild von Magdeburg and St. John of the Cross, to mention only a few names, all indicate deep and significant links between sexuality and worship. Indeed the whole approach of the devotional sensibility to the divine is susceptible to expression in the imagery of human love.
     The relationship may vary. The physical can present a comic or bathetic debunking of the pretensions of the holy. For Chaucer’s Prioress “amor vincit omnia,” yet for all the pious anti-Semitism of her tale, she is clearly no exemplar of the religious life. The love imagery may simply be the best worldly analogy for the devotional emotion of some devotees as in Hildegard of Bingen’s “Columba aspexit.” In such medieval lyrics as “Maiden in the mor lay” the two are so intimately commingled that critics debate whether the poems are secular or religious.
     Section XVI, in which Franchise and Pity intercede for the lover, features much religious terminology. They plead his case “for God’s love.” (6) When Danger (who had herself earlier sworn by Christ, XIII, 74) relents, he is “raised from Hell to Paradise” (72) as Fair Welcome leads in a recitation of the rosary. (74) Far from satire, the poet here emphasizes his case with the strongest language possible, rather like one saying his lover is most beautiful in the world or that their relationship is a unique marvel. The psychological reality may be that one feels such conviction at times, but these hyperboles are cultivated figures of speech as well, admired as elegant and artistic.
     In fact aesthetic criteria enter here no less than in the cast of unpleasant allegorical figures outside the wall. Obdurate rejection of the lover would be culpable “discourtesy” (50), a violation of taste and a lapse from the standards of one’s class. Danger is scolded, not for causing pain or doing wrong, but because “You dishonour but yourself .” (9)
     In a clever dodge of the moral implications of love, the lover’s particular infatuation in the Romance of the Rose arises not from the extraordinary qualities of the rose, but rather from a charm, rather like that in Tristan and Iseult. The lover is thus helpless, bound after a glance in the marvelous Mirror Perilous. [2] While this may convey the potent sense of compulsion felt by a lover, it also frees him from any responsibility for his actions.
     The aesthetic and the social meanings of courtly love are closely linked. Refinement and sophistication became important signifiers of high social position, a position they retain to some extent yet today. The earliest narratives about King Arthur focus almost exclusively on the king’s strength and martial valor, whereas the later ones dwell on the love-exploits of Galahad and Lancelot.
     Skill at love became another indicator of nobility (and treatment of women still provided the measure of the gentleman in Victorian times), but it was hardly the sole aristocratic skill. When King Mark’s huntsman first encounters Tristan in the woods, he shows them a more elegant way of butchering their prey, and then prescribes a ceremonious protocol for transporting it, impressing everyone including the king with his accomplished taste. From the quasi-martial tourneys, sports, and hunting to poetry, music, and wit, the courtly man sought to master each so that he might practice each with grace and ease. [3]
     The cultivated man, just like the man of sensibility in the eighteenth century (who survives today in etiolated form as the “sensitive” man) was necessarily a man of property. In fact, his aesthetic and cultural acquisitions imply wealth and may at least partly compensate for its lack. Tristan himself seemed a lost wanderer, but gained acceptance because of his sophistication. The same quality, however, made him a lover, and thus a threat to his patron the king.
     The first section of the Romance describes the ugly figures on the outside of the garden wall (which express in negative the glories within). Many are conventional moral failings such as hatred, anger, and covetousness, but others are purely aesthetic. Old Age, for instance, appears as hideous and apparently demented (II, 142 ff.), inspiring a wholly pagan riff on Time. Poverty is there as well, and the poet curses “the hour in which poor men are conceived” without any regard for their role in producing the wealth that supports the genteel.
     He does, however, recognize the essential characteristic of the ruling class when the dreamer is admitted to the exclusive garden by Idleness (III, 40), and in Part VIII (11 ff.) Love approaches the dreamer as a feudal vassal, reproducing even in the realm of desire the structures of society and thus reinforcing them.
     Surely, then, the most reasonable and productive concept of courtly love is pluralistic, recognizing a group of characteristics that may be selected and used by different writers over a number of centuries and over an entire continent (and beyond) [4] in a variety of ways and yet share enough elements to justify the common term. The continua I have suggested -- sensual, spiritual, aesthetic, and social -- may be useful for distinguishing one use of the concept from another while maintaining at the same time a clear view of the significant shared elements. Works that tend toward the encyclopedic (such as the entire Romance of the Rose, the Canterbury Tales, Confessio Amantis, the corpus of troubadour poetry or of romances) will be likely to vary considerably, even to the point of self-contradiction.
     In the Romance of the Rose the outright opponent of Love is Reason (XIV) which might imply an element of arbitrariness to all of those definitive social values for the upper class of the Middle Ages. One’s love, one’s god, one’s taste, one’s place in the structure of society – all of these perhaps would be equally liable to the assault of Reason, but the poet makes the human choice, rejecting logic for the endlessly absorbing pastime of elaborating the relations between men and women.



1. Some critics would have it that Guillaume’s section is less problematized than Jean’s. My partial reading here will make it clear that I cannot agree.

2. The incestuous father in Emaré is similarly under a spell. For a more extreme version of the Mirror Perilous, see Borges’ “Aleph.”

3. Castiglione’s The Courtier provides a full curriculum “to practice in all things a certain sprezzatura [nonchalance], so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.” 32

4. The partially Arab origins of Europeans’ courtly love has been demonstrated by Nykl and others. Beyond that rich evidence exists in Persian and Indian poetry, in Li Shang Yin, and elsewhere. Peter Dronke provides a nice collection of passages in Medieval Latin and the Rise of the European Love-Lyric. See also Discourses of Power, Grammar, and Rhetoric in the Middle Ages by Carol Poster and Richard J. Utz