French Literature: A Very Short Introduction (4 page)

The Song of Roland, like the approximately 120 other surviving
chansons de geste - literally, `songs about the things done'
from the Latin res gestae - concerns events during the reign of
Charlemagne (King of the Franks from 768 to 814, and crowned
Emperor in 800), but it was composed three hundred years after
the events concerned. The Song of Roland recounts a battle that
occurred as the Frankish army withdrew from northern Spain
leaving a rearguard commanded by the hero, Roland, who is
described as Charlemagne's nephew. The details, including this
kinship, vary markedly from current historical representations of
this rather minor battle in the Pyrenees against what are described
as `pagan' and polytheistic Saracens (in the historical encounter that was the basis for the Song ofRoland, the adversaries were, in
all probability, not Muslim).

1. The Emperor Charlemagne finds Roland's corpse after the battle of
Roncevaux, fromLes Grandes Chroniques de France, c. 1460

All is magnified in Roland, through huge numbers, intensely gory
description of combat and injuries, repetition of incidents and
formulaic descriptive phrases. In an exclusively male society, the
characters demonstrate their valour in fights that dismember and
kill a large number of combatants at the battle at Roncevaux, but
the core dilemma for the hero is actually a moral one: whether
or not to send an alarm to the main body of the army, the only
reasonable course in view of the disproportion of the opposed
troops (twenty to one). Yet Roland refuses to call to Charlemagne
for help by sounding his horn, the Olifant, as his companion
Olivier urges. Roland replies, `God forbid that my kinsmen
through me be blamed / Nor that sweet France fall into dishonour'
(Ne placet Damnedeu / Que mi parent pur mei seient blasmet / Ne
France dulceja cheet en viltet).

This heroic, almost superhuman, unreasonableness is what
elevates Roland as a subject to be celebrated in song and worthy,
within the epic itself, to be the object of vast mourning on the part
of the Emperor and his army. And yet this pride is also a terrible
flaw that leads to the death of the twenty thousand members
of his detachment. The paradoxical nature of this dilemma is
emphasized by Olivier's change of attitude in the course of the
battle. Having at first urged Roland to sound the Olifant when
there was still the possibility of assistance, by the time Roland
realizes that defeat is imminent, Olivier veers to the opposite
position and argues that he should not call for Charlemagne but
recognize his own culpability: `The French have died because
of your irresponsibility' (Franceis sunt morz par vostre legerie).
Through the character of Roland, the anonymous writer presents
the burden of delegated authority in a feudal system, where
physical strength, skill, and courage are important, but where
the requirements of loyalty and individual and collective honour
create contradictory demands.

Romance

The protagonists of the romances have other problems and
quite different virtues - or, rather, loyalty and honour are tested
in different ways in a world in which the knight's relation to a
woman is at least as important as his relation to his lord and
his companions in arms. Originally, roman was simply a way of
designating the Old French vernacular language as opposed to
Latin, but by the late 12th century, it designated a type of story,
in which an individual hero, through a quest, grows in virtue and
self-understanding, and in which the love of a woman plays a large
role. Indeed, the status of women in the romance tradition, where
they are portrayed with respect and accorded great deference,
is one of its striking innovations with respect to most classical
models. The romances are traditionally divided into three groups
by subject matter: `The matter of Rome' (from antiquity, though
more often concerning Greek legend and history), `The matter
of Britain' (from Celtic and English sources), and `The matter of
France' (about Charlemagne and his knights).

Erec and Enide is one of the five surviving romances by Chretien
de Troyes, whose name indicates his connection to the city of
Troyes, site of the court of the counts of Champagne. While
Chretien was at that court, it was essentially ruled by the regent
Marie de Champagne, daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Like his
four other romances - Yvain, the Knight of the Lion; Lancelot, the
Knight of the Cart; Cliges; and Perceval, or the Story of the Grail -
Erec and Enide belongs to the Celtic repertory of tales of the court
of King Arthur, materials that had been translated into Latin and
French from Breton. Erec, a young knight at the court, is escorting
Queen Guinevere and her maidservant in the woods during a
hunt when they come upon an unknown knight accompanied by
a lady and a dwarf. The dwarf strikes Guinevere's maid with a
whip and subsequently also wounds Erec on the face and neck.
Erec is obliged to remedy this insult to the Queen, but he is not
armed for battle. There is an odd echo of Roland's situation in Erec's, since the two women and he are behind and out of touch
of the company of hunters with the King. In fact, they are so
far behind that they cannot hear the hunting horns, but unlike
Roland, Erec resigns himself to deferring revenge until he is better
armed, because rash courage is not real nobility (Folie nest pas
vasalages).

Subsequently tracking down the knight with the dwarf and
defeating him, Erec falls in love with Enide, the daughter of
an impoverished nobleman who loaned the hero the necessary
arms and armour. Erec, blissfully married to Enide and living at
Arthur's court, would seem to 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. The first is Christine de Pizan (c. 1364-c. 1434) and the
second Francois Villon (c. 1431-63). Christine de Pizan, born in
Venice, came to Paris as an infant when her father became advisor
to King Charles V. Much of her work takes an autobiographical
form, such as `Christine's Vision' (LAdvision Christine, 1405) and
particularly `The Mutation of Fortune' (Le livre de la mutacion de
Fortune, 1403). For Christine (the use of the first or given name
for this author, and many other woman writers of the early period
such as Marguerite de Navarre, in preference to the surname, is a
feature of the literary-critical tradition), the use of the first person
singular, the `I', in writing is itself an important gesture, or rather
a construct, the creation of an authoritative voice for a woman.
This is vividly conveyed in a passage of `The Mutation of Fortune',
in which Christine, become a widow, is symbolically transformed
into a man, her voice deepening so that she can pursue the career
of a professional writer.

Francois Villon, though his life was brief and his writings few,
has commanded a place of choice in French letters since the 15th
century, reprinted continuously since the Renaissance, when he
was popularized by the poet Clement Marot (1496-1544), who
recognized in Villon a precursor both in lyricism and misfortune.
Villon is the quintessential poete maudit ('the accursed poet',
or poet with endless bad luck). His mythic life, very much
embellished, has been the subject of a half-dozen films, and his
poems have often been put to music - in 1953, Georges Brassens
recorded a musical setting of Villon's `Ballad of Ladies of Olden
Days' (Ballade des dames du tempsjadis). A student, poet,
thief, and convicted murderer, Villon may be called the first of
a long series of criminal protagonists (whom we see later in the picaresque novel). Although many, if not most, French poets have
been middle or upper class, there is a persistent attraction in the
lyric tradition to the marginal (perhaps precisely to compensate
for the rigid social stratification of society).

Villon sets the pattern for much subsequent French poetry
in which the passing of time and the coming of death are the
overwhelming themes, linked to concrete details of life in Paris. The main character, the poet, defines himself as a creature whose
ephemeral existence is measured by the fragility of the world
around him, as in `The Ballad of Ladies', which gave the world the
ubiquitous refrain, `Where are the snows of yesteryear?' (Mais ou
sont les neiges d'antan?). Despite the anti-heroic nature of Villon's
self-description as literate singer living on the fringes of society (a
persona very welcome to such 19th-century successors as Nerval
and Baudelaire), there is much in this description that parallels
the life of a saint, for the saint also lives in the constant presence
of death, in abjection, and in disillusion.

In the poem known as the Balade des pendus', Villon takes his
typically elegiac stance. Here is the first stanza.