Making Something of Nothing: The Excesses of Storytelling in the Lais of Marie de France and La Chastelaine de Vergi

The notion of exemplarity in literary texts is beset by irony and paradox, for the example must serve the dual and contrary functions of being both a one-off and also a paradigm to be copied. This article seeks to explore ways in which a 'tactic of exemplarity' at work in the text seizes upon the inherent ambiguity of the example in order to question the purpose and indeed the very viability of an exemplary narrative. The discussion focuses on two Old French texts which share common narrative material and employ this 'tactic of exemplarity': the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman Lais, attributed to Marie de France, and the anonymous thirteenth-century poem La Chastelaine de Vergi. Through analysis of the texts' narrative framework—their prologues and/or epilogues—it is argued that a fundamental disparity emerges between the proclaimed didacticism of the narrative example and the way in which that example is then (not) worked through the text. The example is constituted by these texts as an absence or narrative hiatus, suggesting that the example represents a fundamental aporia in the text, and that any claim to exemplarity necessarily implies a problematic narrative standpoint which leaves itself open to deconstruction.