Dear Malorians:
After the break we will begin discussing Chrétien’s Yvain. It actually makes pretty good beach reading.
March 9, 2007
March 9, 2007
Dear Malorians:
After the break we will begin discussing Chrétien’s Yvain. It actually makes pretty good beach reading.
March 21, 2007 at 10:40 am
I found the ring on page 307 to be very interesting. It reminded me a little of the ring in The Lord of the Rings with its power to make one unseen by others. Although, in its desscription it appears it is power may not neccissarily make you invisible, but makes you blend into your surroundings.
March 21, 2007 at 12:39 pm
I’m intrigued by the way Chretien personifies Love (and Hatred, and Death). On 311-312, Love strikes Yvain through the eyes like a vicious little winged Cupid, except one who regularly goes slumming. She’s a tricksy little creature with wiles, luring the man like a hunter would lure an animal. I wonder if “Yvain’s enemy” on p 311 is Love? On 313, Shame and Love “h[o]ld him back,” and on p 370, Love and Hatred are sharing a house, and then a battlefield. Here Hatred is vain and perches on the balcony in order to attract attention and Love is passive, weak, and easily defeated.
March 21, 2007 at 3:48 pm
We talked a little bit about the seemingly anachronistic elements of Chretien’s narrative (i.e., interiority, the imagined conversation with Yvain, etc.) but the most striking example of Chretien’s ability to write ahead of his time comes in the Castle of Dire Adventure section. As the footnote points out, this social critique seems entirely (but pleasantly) out of place in medieval literature. I would sooner expect to find a similar passage in a pamphlet from Victorian London than in Malory or Geoffrey. Should we read this as social criticism, or as merely a plot construction that allows Yvain to fight some villains, rescue some enchanted damsels, and keep the narrative train a-rollin’?
March 28, 2007 at 12:26 pm
I wonder if Chretien’s comments on love and hate at the beginning of the Yvain section and throughout the piece are there to teach the reader about the sustenance of love? At the beginning, Chretien informs us of how people today don’t understand what real love is, and he refuses to make further comment by informing the reader that they would “be quick to say I speak of idle tails” (362). Yet, at the end of the section, Yvain and his Lady are reunited through love. It is almost like Chretien is showing the reader that they should care what love truly means, because through love they can endure many hardships, but still reunite with those they thought were lost. Isn’t that what Romances are all about?
April 1, 2007 at 10:19 pm
What’s interesting, though, is that “romance” before — what, the 17th century? — didn’t necessarily have anything to do with love at all. I’m not sure when and where it shifts from describing a narrative in verse to dealing with chivalric/heroic stuff, or even if it solidly “meant” one or the other in any stable way, but I wonder if you could use this idea of a shift in meaning (if there really is one) to trace the tensions between love and chivalry in the text. The concept of love is certainly problematic, fraught as it is with trickery, deception, fits of rage, weeping, self-destruction, madness, hair-pulling, and threat to life and limb, so I’m triply intrigued by this notion of “what Romances are all about” as Shelley said. How much of the hardship that they’re enduring is self-created and self-perpetuated? Strange little cyclical sort of thing.
April 6, 2007 at 12:19 am
I find it interesting the way Chretien approachs the grail. It’s almost secular. There’s not a lot of spiritual emphasis. And it’s actually kind of brief. It basically only serves the purpose to show how Perceval fails to ask the questions about it and the lance. And of course it totally messes up his life because he didn’t ask about it.
April 8, 2007 at 11:52 pm
I wonder if the Grail bit seems to have little spiritual emphasis in part because we have Malory to compare it to. In comparison, it’s certainly less Christian in a codified way anyway. But if you are Perceval (and the reader), traipsing along more or less happily through whatever forest of adventure, and suddenly you come across a mysterious castle and a feast with a tablecloth described as whiter than that of any “pope, cardinal, or prelate” (421), the whole episode might resonate with some sort of spiritual significance?
On second thought, I’d perhaps like to make a distinction between the clearly Christian and the spiritual. There might be a less codified sort of spirituality working here that shouldnt’ be necessarily set aside Christianity as an equal term.
On third thought, I think what I’m suggesting might be true for the reader but not so much for Perceval himself.
And on fourth thought, I wonder what would have happened if Chretien had actually finished the story. I wonder if that would change or at least deepen the resonance of the Grail segment.
Bah. This is complicated.