The Romance of Tristan: The Tale of Tristan's Madness (Classics) Read online

  Before trying to answer that question two further examples should be considered. In the scene of ‘The Tryst under the Tree’ Yseut swears ‘before God’ that she has never loved anyone except the man to whom she came as a maiden. Her words are literally true but, as we have seen, they are spoken in order to deceive the king. A similar and even more blatant piece of deception is the declaration made by Yseut in the presence of King Arthur (p. 142). With her hand stretched over the holy relics she solemnly swears that she has never held any man between her legs except King Mark her husband and the leper ‘as everyone who was watching could see’. Once again her words are literally true and at the same time misleading, for once again King Mark is deceived as to her real meaning. The dramatic irony of these two situations is apparent: the first time what Mark takes to be a protestation of her innocence is in reality a re-affirmation of her love for Tristan; and the second time she simply states a fact which has implications that the king is unaware of. Both these statements, however, are made with God as witness. In both cases Mark, not God, is deceived. Are we therefore to conclude, as Gottfried von Strassburg did, that ‘Christ in His great virtue is pliant as a windblown sleeve…. He is at the beck of every heart for honest deeds or fraud.’* For it is clear that God either connived at the lovers’ illicit passion or in some sense considered them innocent. Even if we assume that God’s attitude to the lovers is an extension of the narrator’s sympathies and that He takes advantage, so to speak, of the literal truth of Yseut’s words to let her go unpunished, some sort of justification is still called for.

  In 1835 the distinguished French medieval scholar, Paulin Paris, pronounced that the adulterous love of Tristan and Yseut was morally superior to the adulterous love of Lancelot and Guinevere on the grounds that the love potion relieved the former pair of moral responsibility. If this view is accepted, no further explanation of God’s mercy is needed. And this is indeed the view that Beroul seems to point to when the lovers tell Friar Ogrin that their love is caused by a magic potion when they meet him accidentally in the forest. This reference to the potion is made during their period of exile in the forest, which is perhaps where they undergo their deepest suffering. A reward has been offered for their capture by Mark, which forces them to be constantly on the move, and they have no food apart from the game killed by Tristan. In the course of their meeting with the hermit Ogrin it is the sinful aspect of their love which is stressed for the first time. Although they can now safely indulge their passion it is only at the expense of every material and spiritual comfort; while they are in the forest they live in a state of guilt-edged security. But the poet tells us several times that because of their great love neither felt any hardship.

  When the lovers tell Ogrin of the potion, there is of course no reasoned argument; they do not present it as their excuse. Nor do Tristan or Yseut or even Ogrin pause to examine the implications; for this is not the way of the poet. Ogrin simply exhorts them further to repent. But when the lovers come to him later, after the potion’s effect has worn off, to seek his advice about returning to Mark, his sympathy for them and his joy are evident, and he does his casuistical best to help them, although Yseut makes it clear that she does not repent and still loves Tristan honourably. Ogrin strengthens the help he is able to give them by making use of Mark’s legal error in condemning the lovers wrongly.* But before we can consider the love potion as absolving the lovers from moral responsibility for their passion we shall have to give some consideration to what is perhaps the potion’s most surprising attribute, namely that it wears off after three years.

  First of all, there is something intrinsically odd about limiting the duration of the love potion’s efficacy. Without doubt, Yseut’s mother acted wisely and thoughtfully in trying by magical means to ensure affection between her daughter and the husband she had never seen. But it is difficult to imagine that this thoughtfulness extended to giving back to Yseut the freedom of her affections after three years. However, the potion’s limitation is very precisely marked: three years to the day after it was drunk Tristan is out hunting a stag; the exact hour comes back and Tristan immediately stops, apparently caught in mid-stride, and begins to think of the harm he has done to Mark and of the wretchedness of the life in the forest.

  The limitation of the potion’s efficacy is first mentioned a few lines earlier in the poem without any warning. Although our present-day literary aesthetic discourages this sort of unexpected turn in the narrative, the reason for Beroul’s sudden revelation of the potion’s limitation is not far to seek. It is of great importance to bear in mind the strikingly episodic structure of the romance, for we have to deal here with two distinct episodes. When the potion is drunk, the important detail is that it has the power to make Tristan and Yseut fall irresistibly in love; at that point it is not a narrative requirement to know that that power is of limited duration. When the potion’s efficacy ends, however, the situation in the narrative is more complex, and the story indeed appears to be heading for an abrupt and highly unsatisfactory end. Tristan made a mistake in analysing Mark’s motives in leaving recognition tokens behind when he found the lovers asleep in their bower, for he thought Mark had done this only to deceive them and had in fact gone for more men (p. 95). As a consequence, the lovers have taken flight and are crossing the forest of Morrois apparently well on their way to Wales. The story could not continue with Tristan and Yseut safe in Wales while Mark remains in Cornwall. Mark’s presence is indispensable for the story and some way has to be found to bring him once more into the same setting as the lovers. While the lovers are under the potion’s influence, however, it is unthinkable that they could ever seek a reconciliation with Mark, for that would be hardly compatible with the basic theme of their love.* It is at this point in the narrative that the potion’s efficacy comes to an end and the lovers immediately think about returning to Mark. Clearly, the limitation of the potion’s efficacy fulfils an urgent requirement in the story. Has it at the same time a deeper significance than that of a narrative device?

  The obvious answer is that the love of Tristan and Yseut continues to the end of the romance and does not end when the potion’s efficacy ends; without their love there would be no story. The fragment of Beroul’s poem opens with Tristan paying a clandestine visit to Yseut in the orchard of Mark’s castle; at this time they are under the influence of the potion. Then the potion’s efficacy ends, and Yseut announces proudly to Friar Ogrin that she no longer sleeps with Tristan; but the friendship she bears him remains evidently very close, for the fragment stops when Tristan is paying another clandestine visit to Yseut, this time in her bedroom in Mark’s castle, while the three barons arrange to spy on ‘the sport that Tristan was enjoying’. Furthermore, we may remember the affection in their parting words to each other, indicating that the bonds between them are still strong – an impression borne out by the fact that they do not actually part until after the Beroul fragment ends. There seems to be no doubt that the end of the love potion’s efficacy does not correspond to the end of love, illogical as this may be. It follows from this that the limitation is precisely a narrative device which gives a superficial plausibility to the lovers’ seeking to end their life in the forest and so return to Mark.

  The suggestion that the potion is the lovers’ justification can now be seen in a wider perspective. If we accept the truth of Yseut’s affirmation to the hermit after the potion wears off, then the nature of her love for Tristan has changed. We learn nothing from the poet which explicitly contradicts the idea that their love has now become blameless, provided only that we discount the suspicions of the three barons. Since a magic potion as the cause of love evidently does absolve the lovers from moral guilt, there is equally no reason that we should not accept Paulin Paris’s confident assertion.

  The love potion is clearly a great convenience for the story, firstly by removing the moral stain from the lovers’ adulterous passion when its influence begins, and secondly by enabling the lovers to return t
o Mark when its influence stops. In addition, the poet’s treatment of the potion theme highlights a principle of his aesthetic which is in sharp contrast to modern notions. To state this simply: before we can begin to appreciate the story in Beroul’s terms we have to ignore the impulse to carry over the facts learned in one episode to a second episode. It may well happen that all the details of a given scene are not relevant in another scene dealing with the same theme; and this is doubtless the explanation, at least in part, for a number of discrepancies and contradictions in the narrative.

  It is necessary to insist on this question of episodic structure because Beroul’s poem, written in rhyming couplets, has all the appearance of a long continuous narrative; in this respect it contrasts with the older French epic poems, composed in narrative units known as laisses, varying in length from a few lines to over a hundred, in which all the lines end with the same assonance or rhyme. Hence these epic poems actually look as if they have an episodic structure. What Beroul did may be broadly described as combining the structure of the epic poems with the verse form of continuous narrative, with the result that his poem may be considered a chanson de geste in octosyllabic couplets.

  That Beroul’s narrative proceeds in a series of episodes is something that can be easily observed and accepted; that this episodic structure is a cornerstone of the aesthetic which underlies the poem is less easy to accept. Where the narrator’s attention is concentrated on the single episode, on what M. P. Le Gentil has called ‘the impression of the moment’, a detail which has its place in one episode may implicitly or explicitly contradict a detail in another episode.

  The love potion itself seems to be one example, and this point can be further illustrated. When Mark is reassured of the lovers’ innocence after the scene of ‘The Tryst under the Tree’, he resolves to have the evil dwarf put to death; the dwarf learns of the king’s intention and immediately flees towards Wales. At the beginning of the episode of ‘The Flour on the Floor’, which follows soon after, the three barons arouse Mark’s suspicions again and, to help in devising a means to trap the lovers, send for the dwarf; he has apparently been waiting outside the room, for he comes in quickly (p. 61). The poet tells us neither where the dwarf has come from nor what is Mark’s attitude to him. A sharper contradiction appears later in the story when Yseut is returned to Mark, and the three barons advise him not to allow Tristan at his court for a time. Mark accepts this advice, saying that he will always follow their advice, whatever happens (p. 112). But less than a month later, when the same three barons advise Mark to order Yseut to vindicate herself publicly against the accusation of loving Tristan, the king refuses angrily and his wrath is so fierce that the barons retreat in alarm (p. 115).

  It is the existence of these and other similar discrepancies which has led to the appearance of a number of different theories of the work’s composition, ranging from the serious and recondite to the frankly entertaining. This is not the place to discuss these theories, and I have already suggested that it may not be necessary in approaching Beroul’s poem from a purely literary angle. But I will call attention to a strange theory which was advanced a century ago by the German scholar Heinzel. He noted that the poem could be divided into nineteen episodes, some of which contradict each other in some way; he believed he could detect the passages where these episodes had been cobbled together; and in consequence postulated nineteen different authors. Now this is not very good logic: Ockham’s razor will shave away most of those nineteen hypothetical figures. Even so, Heinzel’s theory holds to my mind a valuable clue to a truer appreciation of Beroul’s poem simply by underlining the possibility of a comparable division of the narrative. With the principle of division into episodes we cannot seriously take issue; but in place of Heinzel’s interpretation I would advance a much simpler suggestion: that since Beroul’s poem exists as a narrative made up by joining together a series of single episodes we should accept this as a legitimate means of telling a story. As the author of Beroul’s poem I would propose, not Heinzel’s collaboration of bunglers, but one man who knew what he was doing; not nineteen men who failed to produce a story according to our literary standards, but one man who composed a story according to his own standards. I do not mean to imply that contradictions in the narrative, which seem to us to be faults, are in reality virtues according to Beroul’s aesthetic; but an assessment of the poem’s artistic merit cannot be made until these fundamental differences are known and allowed for.

  If the foregoing argument is correct, it follows that Beroul and his audience could enjoy a story, unworried by discrepancies existing between different episodes. This is a crucial point in Beroul’s aesthetic, for Beroul’s poem is an example of the purely fictional mode of narrative literature.* An essential feature of that mode is that it is unquestioning, in contrast to the so-called thematic mode, in which the reader is expected and invited to ponder on the meaning of the material before him. This point may be clarified with an example, and there is in Beroul’s poem an excellent illustration of the author’s cultivation of the fictional mode as opposed to the thematic. When King Mark comes upon the lovers asleep in the forest and is convinced of their chastity when he sees the sword placed unexpectedly between them (p. 92), it is probably fair to say that the king’s surprise is matched by the reader’s, for this is an example of one aspect of Beroul’s narrative art which is diametrically opposed to our own. The events leading up to the scene which the king witnesses may be briefly retold: Tristan comes back to the bower after hunting a stag; he is tired and wants to sleep. The poet describes with care the positions taken up by the lovers: first he tells us that Tristan placed his sword between their bodies, next that they are fully clothed. This is a strange way for two lovers to go to sleep, and the poet hastens to assure us that their love has not diminished by adding that their arms were round each other and their lips close, although there was a space between them. The poet’s comment on this extraordinary situation is most illuminating: he does not say why the lovers were fully clothed, nor why Tristan’s sword was placed between them. All that he does say is that if Yseut had been naked that day dreadful harm would have come to them. This comment looks forward to their discovery by Mark; in other words, these remarkable details have their place in the context of the fictional mode, but not the thematic mode.

  None of the remarks made in the preceding pages has a direct bearing on an assessment of the poem’s literary merit. I have simply attempted to give a broad outline of the aesthetic framework within which such an assessment can be fairly made. In judging the poem’s literary merit we find ourselves on familiar ground, for we need only apply to this poem the standards by which all literature is judged. It is not for me to usurp the reader’s function at this point, although I willingly confess to a great liking for the poem.

  We cannot, however, praise it unreservedly, and no one would think of claiming that Beroul’s poem is without faults. For instance, it is disconcerting to find that the death of one of the three barons in the forest is apparently overlooked in later episodes; no less disconcerting is Tristan’s unannounced arrival at some point during Yseut’s monologue after the potion has worn off (p. 97); and there are other similar examples. It is also true that Beroul’s versification is mediocre, although I would plead that the skill of the poet is sufficient compensation for the clumsiness of the versifier.

  It is important to remember that the poem’s structure, which requires attention to be concentrated on one episode at a time, does not preclude an overall theme which binds together the different episodes; and this is precisely the role of the theme of tragic love, which runs through the entire poem and gives a sense of unity to the whole. There is consistency, too, in the presentation of the characters, however much we may doubt the narrator’s expressed opinions: the villains are always villainous; Governal and Brangain are always loyal; Mark is consistent in his vacillation; and the love of Tristan and Yseut does not waver in intensity, although its nature seems to chang
e.

  The narrative itself is full of excitement and swift action, and here the abrupt transitions between episodes are a contributory factor, for the element of surprise is always at hand. The vigorous narration of the lovers’ escape from Mark’s court (p. 68ff.), with Tristan’s sudden and daring leap from the chapel and the quick and violent rescue of Yseut from the lepers’ clutches – a scene which includes touches of comedy in the lepers’ puffing and panting – offers a good example of the ease with which the story can move rapidly. Suspense is constantly created through ominous remarks by the poet (p. 55): ‘The king failed to find his dwarf (God, so much the worse for Tristan!)’; and through the poet’s anxious intervention at moments of crisis (p. 63): ‘God, why did [Tristan] do this?’

  The poet has an undoubted gift for bringing his descriptions to life by his skilful use of telling details. For example, when Mark rushes into his chamber hoping to catch Tristan with Yseut (p. 64) and suspense is at its height, the poet achieves a most unexpected comic effect by telling us suddenly that Tristan was in his own bed pretending to be asleep and snoring loudly. The danger of Tristan’s leap from the chapel is emphasized by saying that not even a squirrel could hope to jump down that high cliff and live (p. 68). One further example from many may be quoted, this time a single detail which evokes a whole period of physical hardship for the lovers: when Mark finds the lovers asleep in the forest, he exchanges his ring with Yseut’s; formerly the ring had to be forced on but now it slips off easily, so thin have her fingers become. These small but unerring descriptive touches are one of the most admirable features of Beroul’s poem, and they may well have been for him a virtually indispensable element of the story-teller’s art: bearing in mind that the poem was designed for oral recitation, there is clearly no place for extended descriptions of people or events; hence the special importance of the significant detail.