French Literature: A Very Short Introduction Read Online Free Page A

have everything and to be at the
end of his story, but this is only the first third of the romance,
and now the real challenge arises. Overcome by amorous
pleasure with his wife, Erec begins losing his reputation as
intrepid warrior. It falls to Enide to give him the bad news,
`Your reputation is diminished' (Vostre pris en est abaisiez). In a
certain sense, Enide has lost her husband through his surrender
to her. She had married a respected knight and finds herself with
a besotted lover. Erec's solution is to set out, with Enide, looking
for challenges in order to prove himself once again. The series
of dangerous encounters that follows looks in many respects
like the sort of initiatory ordeal through which a young man
would pass in order to reach adulthood and marriage, but in this
case Erec is accompanied by his wife, on whom he has imposed
the requirement that she not speak. It seems like a regression
on Erec's part: he wants to have adventures as if he were still
alone and not part of a couple. However, at the crucial moment
in each of Erec's dangerous encounters, Enide violates the
condition of silence to give her husband important information
or advice. Thus Erec and Enide prove that they can function
as a couple and reconcile erotic love and knightly valour. Their
last adventure leads them to encounter a couple that has failed
to find this balance and have ended up cut off from the society
around them, failing both in love and in service to the outside
world.

    The lyric `I'
    In the texts about Alexis, Roland, and Erec and Enide, there is no
doubt who is the protagonist, even though there is another figure
in the text, the `I' who tells the story. The writer, or the writer's
self-representation as narrator, appears very early in French
literature. Marie de France frequently reminds her audience
that she has composed the story of Bisclavret and the stories
of the protagonists of her other Lais, as in the opening verse of
`The Nightingale' (Laiistic): `I will tell you of an adventure' (Une
aventure vus dirai). But this use of the first person puts the poet
in the position of presenting someone else's story.
    Later in the Middle Ages, the poet moves to the central position
as protagonist and tells her own story or his own story. In a
certain sense, we could say that the poet, the person who tells the
story and says `I', is at the centre of one of the most important
texts of medieval Europe, the Romance of the Rose (Roman de
la Rose), a long verse narrative written in two parts: the first by
Jean de Lorris towards 1230 and the much longer second part
by Jean de Meung towards 1275. But in the Rose, the poet as
concrete individual quickly explodes into his thoughts and the
various psychic forces that either drive him towards the woman
he loves (the `rose') or hinder his pursuit. These forces become
allegorical characters - Idleness, Love, Fear, Shame, Nature,
Reason, and so forth - whose speeches and acts fill the romance,
as they do the thoughts of the lover, in the literary tradition of
the psychomachia, or `battle in the soul', so that the writer does
not appear in his everyday, concrete existence but as a kind of
everyman experiencing the suffering and perplexities of love.
    At the time the Rose was being written, the poet Rutebeuf
(c. 1245-85) offered a much more concrete poetic persona when
he made himself and his everyday misfortunes the subject in such
narratives as`Rutebeuf's Lament about his Eye' (Ci Encoumence
la plainte Rutebeuf de son ceul ). Willing to write about the non-heroic events of his own life (such as his own unfortunate
marriage -'I recently took a wife / A woman neither charming
nor beautiful'), he also creates a poetic voice that tells of the
concrete happenings of his time in a world that was falling into
decay. Rutebeuf had two major successors, poets who, like him,
made themselves and the events of their lifetime the focus of their
work.