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Article Excerpt
The opening section of the Prose Tristan, like the Estoire del Saint Graal in the Lancelot-Grail cycle, establishes the prehistory of the Tristan legend, focusing on the Christianization and interrelations of kingdoms that will be important in the story to come: Cornwall, Leonois, and, to a lesser extent, Ireland. (1) Though relatively short--the `prehistory' occupies less than half of the first of twelve volumes in the modern edition of the Prose Tristan--this opening narrative sequence is of. considerable complexity. The adventures recounted here involve two distinct but intertwined storylines: one tracing the shifting pattern of alliances and rivalries among the various men who successively marry the Babylonian Princess Celinde, and one tracing the spread of Christianity through the efforts of St Augustine of Canterbury. This double focus on sexual passion and rivalry on the one hand, and the revelation of sacred mysteries on the other, prepares for the later development of the narrative that will trace the intense and frequently disastrous rivalries of the many knights in love with Iseut, and the quest for the Grail. (2)
The question, or problem, of desire arises at the very beginning of the story in the distinctive choices made by two of Joseph of Arimathea's twelve nephews. Asked by the boys' father to find them suitable wives, Joseph questions his nephews and learns that although ten of them are happy to accept the marriages arranged for them by their uncle, two have other wishes. Helain le Gros prefers to consecrate his virginity to God and to devote himself to serving the Grail; Sador insists on selecting his own wife, choosing Celinde, daughter of the King of Babylon, who washes ashore as the sole survivor of a shipwreck. Joseph grants both requests, but whereas he is pleased and gratified to give his blessing to the keeper of the Grail, he views the prospect of a marriage grounded in personal desire with considerable trepidation. As he tells Sador: `Or t'en coviegne bien ... puis que ce veus faire a ta volente, je m'en soferrai. Mes je dout que tu en la fin ne t'en repentes' (PT I, 41). Joseph's fears are soon realized, as Sador's brother Naburzadan rapes Celinde and is murdered in turn by Sador. The latter's flight with Celinde in the aftermath of this murder sets in motion a series of adventures that will culminate in Sador's death at the hands of his own son, Apollo li Aventureus, who in turn marries Celinde, unaware that she is his mother, The two individualized life choices made by Sador and Helain le Gros respectively open the space for the competing ethical systems that will dominate both the prehistory and the main narrative to follow. Though countless knights figure in the Prose Tristan, this founding dichotomy is most dramatically illustrated in the interlaced stories of its three central heroes, the first two as famous for their adulterous passion as the third is for his militant virginity: Tristan, Lancelot, and Galahad. (3)
This opening segment tracing the interlaced tales of desire for Celinde and desire for God is marked by frequent enigmas, in the form of riddles, dreams, and visions. These enigmas present a coded representation of both the ineffable and the unspeakable--of divine mysteries and of sinful abomination--and converge upon the question of personal identity and of the individual's exemplary relationship to both sin and salvation. One might say that these riddling texts and images are a means by which the central characters of the narrative confront the fundamental question, `Who am I?' And this question is answered, often in multiple ways, with reference to both personal and universal history and in terms of both divine grace and abject sin. The riddle of identity is one that must be answered both synchronically and diachronically, defining the individual--in this context, the aristocratic male individual--as part of a social and genealogical network that is active in the present, while encompassing the past and the future. And this network of human alliances, lineage, and history is marked by desires of both the flesh and the spirit, and motivated ultimately by the incessant human search for the knowledge of both good and evil.
The depravity of sin finds intricate expression in a series of verse riddles that are exchanged between a cannibalistic giant lurking in the forests of Cornwall and the unfortunate knights who fall into his clutches. (4) If the knight fails to solve the riddle he is killed. Even if he succeeds, however, he is still forced to remain with the giant and provide him with `compaignie' until another knight comes along who is deemed by the giant to be wiser, at which point the newcomer must stay and the former companion to the giant is free to leave. Three of the giant's four riddles are confessional in nature: they recount, in coded language, terrible sins committed during his youth. In the first the giant tells how he raped his daughter, then ate her; in the second, how he killed and ate his mother, for which he was burned by celestial fires; and in the third, how he killed his brother by burying him alive. The fourth is about a tree that is made into a boat; but as explicated by the young hero Apollo li Aventureus, son of Sador and Celinde, the image of the boat itself is further decoded as a figure for an adulterous woman.
On one level, then, the giant's riddles are simply a catalogue of sins, and identify him as a horrific embodiment of violent depravity. But unspeakable as these sins might seem, the giant clearly takes pleasure both in expressing them through figurative language and in hearing his crimes repeated back to him more explicitly. (5) The giant defines himself through his past actions; his way of posing the fundamental question--`Who am I?'--is by asking, in effect, `What have I done?' Sador, who must save his life and that of Celinde by answering the first riddle, hesitates momentarily before verbalizing the awful truth, clearly feeling that such actions would be better passed over in silence:
Et quant il a une grant piece panse, il se torne vers le jaiant et dit: `Je te dirai, si com je cuit, la verite de cele devinaille, se je ne cuidasse que tu m'en seusses mal gre.' Et il dit que ja mal gre ne l'en savra. (PT I, 77)
Pelias, to whom the next two are posed, is even more taken aback at the giant's autobiographical riddling:
Or oi merveilles, fait li rois Pelyas, les greignors que je onques mes oisse, que raconter en tel maniere ta felonie et ta deleaute ne te targes, enz te plest et enbelist tant que tu ne te puez tenir que tu ne regeisses ta mauvese vie. (PT I, 80-1)
Far from being silenced, transgression emerges as the very substance of the giant's poetic discourse; and the skilful manipulation of this riddling language of sin is fundamental to a game of power that determines the life or the death of the players. As the giant reiterates when Pelias says that he will state these crimes openly only if the giant really wants him to do so: `Ce n'a mestier; a dire te covient la senefiance, ou tu ies morz' (PT I, 79).
In addition to chronicling the youthful excesses of the giant, however, the series of riddles also has its own unity as a set of four interlocking poems. The middle two are linked through the motif of fratricide, which forms the surface imagery of one and the covert meaning of the other. Oddly, the giant's crime of cannibalistic matricide is expressed through the figures of Cain and Abel:
Dui vessel furent jadis bel, L'un fu Chaym et l'autre Abel, L'un fu leal, l'autre trahi, L'un ama, et l'autre hai. Qui en l'autre ot este enclos Fist tant qu'il ot l'autre en soi clos. (PT I, 79)
As Pelias explains, the treacherous giant plays Cain to his pious and loving mother's Abel. The riddle of fratricide, in tutu, employs imagery of motherhood:
Une beste ot en cest pais, Qui deus faons ot; de lais Les poist l'en apercevoir. Li uns vost l'autre decevoir; ... Tant fait que l'autre a atrape, Et de sa mere si le charge, Qu'a mort le met par cele charge. (PT I, 80)
In Pelias's explication, the mother here refers to the earth, `que nos apelons mere, por ce qu'ele est mere de chascun' (PT I, 81). If the giant has become the container for the maternal body that once contained him, his unfortunate brother, in being buried alive, has been sent back to the womb. One riddle generates and responds to the other, as the dialectic between the literal and the figurative serves to reiterate the betrayal of kinship, the primal crime of fratricide, the violation of the mother.
Framing these two riddles are the riddles of incest and of the tree. Again, the covert meaning of the second is generated by...
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