Essay reading

Love

Noble: ‘Beroul shows little interest in the theory of love. Unlike figures in twelfth century romances, his characters do not indulge in introspective self-analysis, which can quickly pall for the modern reader. Instead we are shown the lovers in conflict with their society, and a rough, brutal society it is.

Pressier: Iseut parle de “repentir” - notion qui n’avait naguère aucun sens à ses yeux - comme si elle avait le sentiment d’avoir péché contre Dieu. […] Tristan, de son côté, ressent lui aussi lassitude et regrets ; mais il n’exprime aucun repentir et ne paraît pas vouloir renoncer à l’amour d’Iseut. Il est vrai que la reine a souffert plus que lui des duretés de la vie.’

Adams: ‘in structuring love as a secret, that is, a type of knowledge to be diffused among a group of elite listeners, Beroul is working consciously to reshape conceptions of love and marriage in twelfth-century Christian feudal society. Beroul, like his contemporaries, perceives love as an ambivalent and potentially harmful compulsion.’ 

Adams: ‘The text juxtaposes two interpretations of the lovers’ affair: that of the barons and that of the lovers themselves, expressed in the words of Marc. Marc’s understanding of his wife’s sexual behaviour is of course fixed by his position as king. Her relations with him are lawful, and with anyone else, treasonous.’ 

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen paraphrased in Adams’ book: ‘The unseen power written across Tristan and Iseut’s bodies - their intense mutual desire - is the private version of the force that emanates from them and operates upon the people of the kingdom.’ (contrast with Bloch’s interpretation that the lovers do not care for one another physically)

Lacy: ‘they do not cease to love each other even when the love potion wanes’ (could ponder upon the beginning of the novel, and what their relationship would have looked like before the potion)

Iseut

Noble: ‘Just as she can manipulate Mark, she can manipulate Tristan. The most obvious example of this is at her reconciliation with Mark, where Iseut persuades Tristan to break his word, a serious matter for an honourable knight.’

Frappier’s view of Iseut is disparaging and opposes the more celebratory view of her as linguistically and socially astute. Frappier writes that Iseut in Béroul’s poem ‘me paraît plutôt une victime fragile, en proie à ses contradictions.

[…] ‘celle-ci est destinée à demeurer sans issue tant que l’envoûtement fatal demeure aussi puissant qu’au premier jour de leur passion. […] Cette force obscure qui voudrait résister à l’amour, c’est l’autre “constante” de sa vie dangereuse. Elle se confond avec la volonté de vivre et la peur de la mort… Le conflit de ces deux “constantes,” l’amour et la peur, produit à lui seul les oscillations, tout le drame et tout le pathétique d’Iseut.

Marc

Noble: ‘very fond of Tristan.’ - Por Deu, beaus niés, ton oncle atent! (v. 2473)

‘it is this love, often resulting in compassion, which saves him from the ungrateful rule of the comic, cuckolded husband of the fabliaux. He is, however, haunted by the fear, at times the certainty, that his nephew and his wife are lovers…’ Li rois n’a pas coraige entier, / Senpres et ci et senpres la (the king has no courage/he is neither here nor there, flighty)

Pensom: ‘The isolation of the King represents his withdrawal from identity with the collective feudal structure and his reversion to his role as Tristran’s kinsman and the loving husband of Iseut.’

Bloch: ‘Marc’s refusal to grant the lovers what they secretly desire - oblivion (amnesty or pardon) - serves to perpetuate and re-affirm the cyclic dynamics of hopeless love. His compassion, combined with the ritual exchange of ring, glove and sword, re-establishes the marriage bond between Marc and Iseut as well as the King’s authority over the couple. […] He creates the conditions under which passion, having abated during the long exile in Morrois, will be nourished once again by the difficulties inherent to life at court.’

Béroul

Noble: ‘Béroul did not intend to give us a true picture of society but neither was he consciously creating a different world.’ 

Noble: ‘Béroul uses octosyllabic rhyming couples for his poem, using his metre with considerable freedom. He frequently practises enjambement, a relatively new technique, which enables him to use the metre for a great variety of emphases and to render dialogue more convincing and natural or to speed up the narrative.

Noble: ‘Beroul never hides his involvement with the lovers, and as a result succeeds in involving.

Narrator and relationship to the audience

Varvaro: ‘On even a superficial reading, one can see that Beroul neither evades nor conceals his relationship with the audience, but stresses and parades it. In fact it becomes immediately evident that for him ‘narration’ means ‘immediate communication,’ emotional co-participation of narration and audience in the uncertain vicissitudes (unwelcome change of circumstance or future) of the protagonists.’

Norris: ‘the narrator offers a consistently sympathetic treatment of the two principal characters, even though they are, apparently, habitual liars and unrepentant sinners. The romance seems in fact to glorify illicit love, condemning not the lovers but those who oppose them, and it comes very close to condoning personal betrayal if not literal treason.’ 

Nichols: ‘at crucial moments in Béroul’s poem, the reader views the lovers through Mark’s eyes, and that because of the author’s play on illusion and reality Mark is never absolutely certain that the two are carrying on an illicit affair.’ Nichols suggests that Béroul ‘exploits this technique (shifting attention to Marc at critical moments) to create an atmosphere of equivocation favourable to the young couple… and there is a “pronounced effort to accommodate the affair, if not a complete apologia.”

The potion

Varvaro: it is obvious that Beroul attributes the origin of the love to the potion, but his assessment of its effect does not seem to be consistent throughout the romance.

Confession to Ogrin: Tristan li dit: ‘Sire, par foi, / Que ele m’aime en bone foi, / Vos n’entendez pas la raison: / Q’el m’aime, c’est par la poison. / Ge ne me pus de lié partir, / N’ele de moi, n’en quier mentir.’ (vv. 1381-1386)

Bloch: The potion that is sometimes accepted as an “alibi for passion,” othertimes as an objective correlative of the wish for death and transcendence, becomes an even more potent symbol of personal and social transformation... While it works Tristan and Iseult are liberated from the interior psychological conflict that becomes apparent only after their awakening. Although they are able to perceive that something unfortunate has beset them ... they remain untroubled by the painful seeds of self-doubt until the “lovendrins” wears off... The potion functions as an antidote to interiority in general and to negative interiority, or guilt, in particular.

Curtis: does [Beroul] resort to the abatement of the philtre to explain their behaviour? The answer is quite definitely no. It is important to stress that Beroul takes in fact great care to prepare the reader and to account for the lovers’ decision psychologically.

‘Two people so totally in the grip of passion, in the sway of magic, that they cannot be held responsible for their actions. This, however, is only true of the first three years. The result of the philtre’s abatement is in fact to give back to the lovers their freedom to decide and to act.’

Feudalism/the barons

Pensom: ‘the barons then are not as feudal figures. They appear as hostile and therefore bad when they figure as members of a political system which necessarily condemns the kinds of attachment which tie Mark to Tristran and Tristran to Iseut as potential threats to its collective integrity.’ 

Bloch: ‘in a very real sense the fate of the feudal world hangs in the balance of Marc’s raised sword. His hesitation, reflection and eventual sublimation of the physical vengeance to which he was not only entitled but obliged brings with it an essentially altered notion of kingship and statehood.’

Bloch: ‘The repeated sequence of denunciation, verification and discovery is, furthermore, symptomatic of a state in which there is no distinction between private and public acts, a state in which adultery, the secret deed par excellence, automatically becomes a matter of public policy.’ 

Lacy: ‘there does appear to be one reliable guide to truth in Béroul: it can be understood to be the opposite of whatever the lovers’ enemies, the felons say. Their accusations and protestations, though factually correct, must be dismissed simply because they are the enemy.’

Narrative structure 

Poirion: En ce qui concerne la composition du roman de Béroul, les deux principales difficultés du texte tiennent d’une part à la perte du commencement et de la fin, d’autre part à une sorte de discontinuité dans la narration qui semble nuire à la compréhension de son architecture.

The escondit

Tracy Adams: ‘While the lovers wilfully mislead their listeners, their “lies” can reasonably be understood to describe their situation accurately if they are submitted to a “legalistic interpretation of the form of the words... In the “equivocal oath” scene, Iseut has two contradictory imperatives to fulfill. She must speak the truth in order to satisfy the requirements of the ordeal and simultaneously conceal the reality of her actions from the crowd in order to save her own life... Why do they not simply save their honour “par bel mentir” as the Hermit Ogrin suggests?’

‘The equivocal oath scene is the culmination of Tristan and Iseut’s “truthful lying.” Here Iseut announces herself innocent of the guilt her society attributes to her and is echoed not only by King Arthr and the spectators; but presumably by God, as well. The public and Arthur are as oblivious as Marc, failing to grasp the real significance of Iseut’s words.

Setting

Blakeslee: ‘the locus amoenus, in its most common manifestation as garden, pleasance, or forest glade, stands in contrast to Mark’s city and residence, the seat of a repressive social Order and the metaphorical prison of Iseut.’

Blakeslee: ‘The description of the life in the forest in [Beroul’s version], which stresses both the pleasurable and arduous aspects of that sojourn, is, as I have noted above, more ambiguous and complex than that of [other versions]. The forest in [Beroul’s version] is difficult of access, a conventional attribute of the Other World, a domain that in Celtic mythology is sometimes called the ‘forest sanz retor’

Tristan

Blakeslee: ‘the hero accepts the validity of the social and legal proscriptions against his love for Iseut and, therefore, in spite of his superior strength, never openly contests the status quo by virtue of which Mark possesses Iseut, although he does take revenge on his enemies, the felonious barons. 

Blakeslee: The motif of Tristan’s suffering is closely linked to that of his sorrow, of the tristesse that is alluded to in his name and that, from the moment of his birth, makes him for a life of travail. He suffers as a result of his heroism in the service of the social Order […] of Iseut’s anger, neglect, or (perceived) infidelity […] his character is a strange and inconsistent mixture of voluntary self-sacrifice and passive acceptance of his role as victim.’ 

Blakeslee goes too far by claiming that Tristan acts the ‘culture hero on behalf of his society, an erotic Counter-Order.’ … He also claims that Tristan is a ‘creature of the subconscious, of the libido.’ (exaggeration, overstating the role of physicality/desire… yes there is passion and trysts and ROMANCE, but not eroticism/libido. 

Noble: ‘Tristan is presented from a feminine point of view because he shares Iseut’s fear and suspicion, runs before Mark, weeps, thinks of his honour only after the potion has worn off, and is never concerned with his dignity as a knight.’

Understanding of pechié

Caulkins: common misreading of pechié as equating to the modern French péché = sin.

Can mean misfortune, outrage, unfortunately. Depending on context. Ogrin uses pechié with the full religious meaning of sin and sinner.