CONJOINTURE IN CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES
Chrétien de Troyes, the apparent author of five twelfth-century verse romances set at King Arthur’s court (Erec et Enide, Cligés, Yvain or Le chevalier au Lion, Lancelot or Le
chevalier de la charrette, and Perceval or Le conte du graal), in many ways invented the genre
of Arthurian romance. “Whilst the possibility of lost romance predating Chrétien can never be ruled out,” Keith Busby concludes, “it does look very much as if he created the genre practically single-handed”1 Arguably, some of the most significant of his innovations are in the realm of character: such essential Arthurian characters as Lancelot and Perceval, for example, appear in literature for the first time via Chrétien, and the explorations of these heroes’ developments and psychology have been of great interest to scholars hoping to define Chrétien’s achievements. But Chrétien’s treatment of character has another, no less significant impact on the genre of
Arthurian romance: by his use of recurring characters to join a body of ostensibly separate narratives, Chrétien creates a connected “interfictive world”2 of which he himself is the master but to which others are invited to contribute.
Much of the scholarship of Chrétien’s authorial self-presentation focuses its attention on the explicit discussion of his craft in the romances’ prologues, endings, and narratorial
1 Busby, “The Characters and the Setting,” in The Legacy of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Norris J. Lacy, Douglas Kelly,
and Keith Busby, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987), 57–89, at 65.
2 This is the term used by Dennis H. Green, who notes this kind of intertextuality in German romances but argues
that it already appears in Chrétien, “the action of whose various works presupposes, at least in part, the same general background . . . In addition, Chrétien can incorporate a romance into an overarching wider narrative world by including in it references to the action of another” (The Beginnings of Medieval Romance: Fact and Fiction, 1150– 1220 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 55–56).
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interventions.3 I would like to propose, however, that a distinctive idea of Chrétien’s authorship is presented implicitly in the characters that tie his works together: by self-consciously exploiting ideas of memory and a novel multiwork format in ways that anticipate both cognitive theories of character and serial narrative studies, Chrétien’s works present him not only as the author of a set of texts but as the author of a new literary tradition. Character performs a key role in this self- presentation by presenting models of reading and topoi for future writers to amplify or modify.
I should clarify at this point that the “Chrétien de Troyes” established as the author of the five Arthurian romances attributed to that name is not the equivalent of the historical person who authored these romances; despite references to other works by this author in, for example, the prologue of Cligés, his status as the “author” of the unified creation presented in the romances is not dependent upon whether the same historical person did or did not write Guillaume
d’Angleterre, Philomena, or the lyric poems attributed to Chrétien de Troyes.4 Instead, the
“author” here is a construct, visible in the apparent autonomy of Chrétien’s Arthurian world implied by the stereoscopic perspective of recurring characters and the ways they suggest a full fictional universe with rich literary potential.5 The authority Chrétien claims by this method is
3 Cf., for example, Tony Hunt, “Tradition and Originality in the Prologues of Chrestien de Troyes,” Forum for
Modern Language Studies 8 (1972): 320–44; “Chrétien’s Prologues Reconsidered,” in Conjuncture: Medieval Studies in Honor of Douglas Kelly, ed. Keith Busby and Norris J. Lacy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 153–68; Claude Luttrell, “The Prologue of Crestien’s Li Conte du Graal,” Arthurian Literature 3 (1983): 1–25; and Roberta L. Krueger, “The Author’s Voice: Narrators, Audiences, and the Problem of Interpretation,” in Lacy et al., eds., The Legacy of Chrétien de Troyes, 115–40.
4 See Sarah Kay, “Who Was Chrétien de Troyes?,” in Arthurian Literature XV, ed. James P. Carley and Felicity
Riddy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 1–35, for a description of the ways authorial attribution of “Chrétien” texts has been governed by “the principles summarized by Foucault in his account of the development of the ‘author function’ in modem thought . . . namely consistency with respect to quality, subject matter, expression, and outlook” (3). Cf. Michel Foucault. “What is an author?,” in Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: The New Press, 1999), 205–222, esp. 214, for an explanation the principles described here.
5 See Michel Zink, “Une Mutation de la Conscience Littéraire: Le Langage Romanesque à travers des Exemples
Français du XIIe Siècle,” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 24 (1981): 3–27, and “Chrétien et Ses Contemporains,” in Lacy et al., eds., The Legacy of Chrétien de Troyes, 5–32, who argues that the self-conscious writing of fiction is key in the construction of Chrétien’s Arthurian persona. As Roberta L. Krueger comments, “As an ‘author,’
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not only for the individual writer, by virtue of his writing talent, but also for the vernacular and Arthurian traditions more broadly.
This authority was being claimed explicitly by other twelfth-century vernacular writers; we might compare Marie de France’s claim in the prologue of the Lais, that she was capable of writing a roman d’antiquité but chose to translate Breton lais instead, because translating Latin into French had already been done,6 or Chrétien’s own reference in the prologue to Cligés to the
translatio imperii, the transfer of cultural power from Greece or Rome to France. Character,
however, offers an alternate means of implying authority through the cultivation of audience memory. That is, the importance of character in establishing the illusion of an interfictive universe in Chrétien’s romances is less about the characters’ psychology thanabout the reader’s psychology. A stereoscopic or three-dimensional image works by presenting two slightly different two-dimensional images that the brain merges into one; similarly, the presentation of members of the Arthurian court across multiple romances, even in static or sparse depictions, provides the material that readers need to combine different versions of the characters or their stories into a developed fictional world. As in contemporary conceptions of character as a mental construct in the memory of the reader, Chrétien conditions his readership to add to their
understanding both of individual characters and the imaginative storyworld with each successive romance he adds to his oeuvre.7
Chrétien affirms the autonomy of his fiction, demonstrates his mastery of romance composition, and posits the truth of his endeavor not in its faithful preservation of the past but in the telling of the story itself” (“The Author’s Voice,” 119).
6 Marie de France, Lais de Marie de France, ed. Karl Warnke and trans. Laurence Harf-Lancner (Paris: Livre de
Poche, 1990), Prologue, ll. 28–33.
7 For explanations of theories of characterization as dynamic cognitive process, see the “Character” section of the
introduction, above; cf. also Ralf Schneider, “Toward a Cognitive Theory of Literary Character: The Dynamics of Mental-Model Construction, Style 35 (2001): 607–640; and Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, and Ralf Schneider, “Characters in Fictional Worlds: An Introduction,” in Characters in Fictional Worlds: Understanding Imaginary
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Conjointure and Serial Narrative Theory
Although the chapter will largely focus on the presentation of individual character in the construction of Chrétien’s fictional universe, I would like to begin by considering perhaps the most often-debated item of the critical vocabulary provided by Chrétien in his explicit statements of authorial purpose: conjointure. The term appears in a celebrated passage from the prologue of
Erec et Enide:
. . . raisons est que totes voies Doit chascuns penser et entendre A bien dire et bien aprendre Et trait d’un conte d’aventure Une mout bele conjointure. (10–14)8
[It is reasonable for everyone to think and strive in every way to speak well and teach well, and from a tale of adventure to draw a beautifully ordered composition.]
For obvious reasons, explanations of Chrétien’s meaning of “bele conjointure” here tend to focus on the author’s processes of composition. Douglas Kelly, for instance, in one discussion of the term, offers the “‘effort’ to conjoin matiere [source material] and san [meaning],” the
“description” of “hot and cold, love and hatred” and other apparent contradictions coming together to form a whole, and “interlaced and interlocking” versions of the same story within a romance as different aspects of conjointure’s role in the writing of romance.9 Eugene Vance proposes a more philosophical notion, defining conjointure as “a sense that, like terms in a
Beings in Literature, Film, and Other Media, ed. Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, and Ralf Schneider (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 3–64 at 30–38.
8 Citations from Chrétien’s romances will come, unless otherwise noted, from Chrétien de Troyes, Romans, ed.
Michel Zink (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1994), and will be noted parenthetically by line number. English translations will come from Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances, trans. William W. Kibler and Carleton W. Carroll (London: Penguin, 1991).
9 Kelly, “Narrative Poetics: Rhetoric, Orality and Performance,” in A Companion to Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Norris
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proposition, things and events not only signify, but consignify, which is to say that their
significations become mutually determining in narrative discourse.”10Conjointure, then, seems to refer to the reader’s ability to understand the text’s composition—the mutually determining characters and events of the story—in addition to Chrétien’s ability to draw the “mangled and corrupt” versions of inferior storytellers into a coherent and aesthetically pleasing narrative.
This passage and the prologue as a whole, then, can be approached not only as an artistic statement but as a guideline for the audience, one that would have taken on new meaning as Chrétien’s body of romances grew. The opening lines of Erec et Enide focus on perception, the ability to discern between that which should be valued and that which should be despised:
Li vilains dit en son respite Que tel chose a l’en en despit,
Qui mout vaut mieuz que l’en ne cuide. Por ce fait bien qui son estuide
Atorne a sens, quell que il l’ait; Car qui son estude entre lait, Tost i puet tel chose taisir
Qui mout venroit puis a plesir. (1–8)
[The peasant in his proverb says that one might find oneself holding in contempt something that is worth much more than one believes; therefore a man does well to make good use of his learning according to whatever understanding he has, for he who neglects his learning may easily keep silent something that would later give much pleasure.]
This opening and the narrating voice’s later recommendation that everyone “penser et entendre” present the processes of reading/listening/learning and writing/speaking/teaching not in
opposition but as connected steps in an interpretive transaction, Chrétien using verbs with double meanings to destabilize the boundary between writer and audience. Entendre in one
interpretation takes the sense “to strive,” but the word can also mean “to listen to,” “to pay attention to,” or “to understand,” an interpretation that the enjambment at the end of the line
10 Vance, From Topic to Tale: Logic and Narrativity in the Middle Ages, with a forward by Wlad Godzich
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draws attention to before the complementary infinitives in line 12 complete the verb phrase.
Aprendre, meanwhile, can be read both as “to teach” and “to learn.”11
Similarly, the perspective in the prologue shifts between passive actions of perceiving and recognizing, in the figure of the vilains, to the active verbs of the educated man who must not “taisir” his learning, then back to the listener who might derive “plesir” from his words. The ambivalence between audience and speaker, the importance both of expressing valuable words and of recognizing them, suggests that the “bele conjointure” is a product of the listener’s work as well as the writer’s. As a medieval reader hoping to memorize a work must divide it into comprehensible parts and put them back together again mentally in order to reproduce a work by heart,12 the reader of Chrétien must be able to find the “tel chose . . . qui mout vaut mieux que l’en ne cuide” in the narrative and put these things together in a meaningful way in order to understand the work that the writer has done in composing it and derive the most value from it. These processes of thinking, remembering, and learning are frequently highlighted in characters’ actions and thought processes in the romance, but Chrétien’s use of memorable images, complex plots, and contemporary vocabulary about memory all signify that readers are included in this process as well. Perhaps Eugene Vance is exaggerating when he says that “Chrétien’s critics are unanimous, moreover, in underscoring the primacy of judgment and understanding to heroic action in his romances,”13 but it is certainly true that numerous scholars have drawn attention both to the portrayal of cognitive processes within the romance and the mental demands they
11Anglo-Norman Dictionary, Universities of Swansea and Aberystwyth, s.v. “entendre 1” and “entendre 2,” and
“aprendre,” accessed August 7, 2017, http://www.anglo-norman.net/gate/.
12 See Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), on the role of memory in learning to read and compose literary works in medieval education.
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make on readers.14 Like the task of writing the romances, the task of reading them might be labeled a kind of composition or conjointure.
This labor of readership would have changed as Chrétien continued to build his corpus of romances. As Keith Busby notes, Erec et Enide would probably have confounded its original audience’s expectations, both in its focus on an obscure knight and its use of a complex literary form to talk about what had been the topic of oral fabulae, but as the later romances were written, Chrétien “could build on [audiences’] previous knowledge, not only of Arthurian and other literary traditions, but also on a cumulative knowledge of his own work.”15 Chrétien, then, conditions his audience both to pay close attention in understanding an individual plot and to construct the world of his romances as a connected series imaginatively. These processes would not necessarily have been far apart in the medieval imagination, and in fact, the connection in medieval education between memory and composition may have made Chrétien’s Arthurian world particularly conducive to rewriting, responses, and new additions by later writers.16
The model of authorship created by Chrétien’s texts thus is both expansive and inviting. His labor of conjointure extends beyond the bounds of a single narrative to the management of a recurring body of characters who ostensibly populate a literary world, but the reader is similarly
14 See, for example, Norris J. Lacy, The Craft of Chrétien de Troyes: An Essay on Narrative Art (Leiden: Brill,
1980), who notes that Chrétien’s technique of interlacing plots and character arcs “required the audience to keep in their mind a large amount of information”(67) while also stoking audience anticipation; Zrinka Stahuljak et al.,
Thinking through Chrétien de Troyes (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2011), who, in chapters devoted to imagination, subjectivity, and forgetfulness, among others, read the texts attributed to Chrétien as exemplifying a set of thought- processes; and Jody Enders, “Memory and the Psychology of the Interior Monologue in Chrétien’s Cligés,”
Rhetorica 10.1 (1992): 5–23, who argues that mnemonic imagery was one way Chrétien used to comment on the process of writing and himself as an author.
15 Busby, “The Characters and the Setting,” 88.
16 See introduction above, 6–9. Both reading and writing in medieval education required the ability to analyze a
text’s parts and be able to put them together, frequently using vivid images; to draw attention to processes of composition and memorization, as Chrétien does, might associate romances with the more prestigious school texts in a different way from direct allusions.
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encouraged to engage in the work not only of untangling an interlaced plot but also of putting together textual clues to create—and, for other writers, contribute to—a unified fictional universe. If Douglas Kelly is correct when he says that “the notion of bele conjointure, a truly original coinage, led to awareness of romance as a narrative mode and genre,” surely this is connected to the “rich potential for those kinds of retelling and rewriting” popular during Chrétien’s era.17 The notion of a composite or multiauthor work, or a shared body of fictional stories and personages to write about, would not of course have been unfamiliar to twelfth- century vernacular writers,18 whose modus operandi was one of imitation and rewriting, but the nonchronological progression of the romances, their extended length, and the porous boundaries between the individual narratives lend themselves neatly neither to a straightforward model of continuation nor to the historical and genealogical interests of the epic cycle. The work done on modern serial narratives might prove a more helpful point of comparison.
The comparison between Chrétien’s romances and serials may at first appear
counterintuitive. Scholars of serial narrative, whose work often focuses on such popular media as television shows, video games, and comic books, frequently attribute the appearance of serials
17 Kelly, “Chrétien de Troyes,” in The Arthur of the French, 173
18 Alastair Minnis gives the examples of the Psalter and Ovid’s Heroides as composite works that offered challenges
to medieval commentators; Gilbert of Poitiers, writing in the first half of the twelfth century, found in glossing the Psalter that “each psalm has its special materia, modus, finis and titulus” but the Psalter as a whole is a unified text “in which the parts interact and ultimately harmonise with each other, thereby serving the whole, while the whole accommodates a variety which is expressed through its different parts” (Medieval Theory of Authorship, 52–54). Leah Tether, meanwhile, considers the distinction between sequels and continuations in works like the epic Charlemagne cycles or the Perceval continuations, using the work of Gérard Genette to argue that a continuation “suggests that an unfinished work needs, and is brought to, a conclusion, while [a sequel] seeks to exploit the success of a finished work by responding to some desire for more” (The Continuations of Chrétien’s Perceval: Content and Construction, Extension and Ending [Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012], 58). A sequel builds upon the narrative possibilities of a closed text. By her definitions, then, Chrétien’s romances are neither sequels nor