Lovely Violence: Chrétien de Troyes’ Critical Romances (review)

This study constitutes one more example of the fascination that Chrétien de Troyes’s romances continue to hold for non-medievalist readers. The premise that this modern appeal mirrors the diversity of reception of medieval audiences of Chrétien de Troyes leads Jørgen Bruhn (a self-avowed non-medievalist) to re-examine the romances from a comparatist’s perspective. Although Bruhn, in his Preface, invokes Stanley Fish’s notion of ‘interpretive communities’ as an analytical framework (p. xii), in the introductory chapter, ‘The Question of Context’, he eschews the potential application of that concept to the medieval contexts of reception, manuscript transmission, and epigonal tradition. Nevertheless, the postmodernist focus on the narrative and authorial self-reflexivity of the romances still delivers on the comparatist’s promise, although Bruhn conflates uneasily the critical stance of the narrator/lector and that of an author figure who goes against the grain of literary tradition and the very ideals of the romances. In Chapter 2,on Érec et Énide, it is argued that Chrétien asserts himself vis-à-vis the established tradition by effecting a parodic requital of antique literature and by deferring his sources in a process of intertextual différance. Bruhn uses, for instance, the representation of the four liberal arts on Énide’s robe to demonstrate that the source of the reference that Chrétien explicitly ascribes to Macrobius is more evocative of Martianus Capella’s concept of liberal arts. While the references to (Tristan and) Iseut in the prologue and elsewhere in Cligés have previously shaped a tendentious and repetitive interpretation of the story, Bruhn draws the reader’s attention, in Chapter 3, to the epilogue in a rather interesting rereading of the Tristan motif. He re-examines not only the ethical choice of Fénice’s adultery but also its consequential implication in the Byzantine custom of confining empresses to the gynaeceum. In Chapter 4, in a discussion of the relationship between love and violence in Yvain, the titular concept of ‘lovely violence’ is limned. From the perspective of the Pléiade edition Bruhn used, based on the manuscript from which the conservative scribe Guiot excised the most gory details, ‘lovely’ may very well characterize the stripe of violence that survives in the ‘Guiot copy’ of Chrétien’s romances, but this is indeed much less the case in Yvain. In Le Chevalier de la Charrette (Chapter 5) and Le Conte du Graal (Chapter 6), not overlooking religious interpretations of these romances, Bruhn rehearses the debate over Chrétien’s questioning of contemporary chivalric ideals in the context of Christian ideology, arriving at the rather simplistic conclusion that Lancelot and Perceval stand as imperfect knights and that the Grail ‘is, perhaps, just a plate’ (p. 124). In spite of, or perhaps because of, these postmodernist interpretations, the wider (non-medievalist) audience Bruhn targets should find these readings of the romances nonetheless informative and thought-provoking. The traditional medievalist should appreciate the context of this study and the contribution it makes to the diversity of scholarship on Chrétien de Troyes’s romances.