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9 Genealogy Introduction: Medieval Romance as Genealogical and Intertextual Fable Marriage in the twelfth-century romance promises the possibility of a stable intertextual genealogy, a seamless transference of the past to the present, and the present to a future still to come. Helen, classic exemplum of adultery, figures in this setting above all as a threat to cultural succession and therefore legitimacy. At the same time, ironically, her example proves that the poet is the successor of the past and certifies his own legitimacy. Consider the reference to Helen in Chrétien de Troyes’s romance Cligés, a tale, as we have already seen, about cultural succession. Chrétien begins by inserting himself into a cultural genealogy, the latest heir to the translatio studii that moves from Greece to Rome to France. The story Chrétien proceeds to tell, itself inherited from his cultural fathers, is about dynastic genealogy gone wrong. Alexandre, heir to the throne of Constantinople, marries Soredamor, attendant to Queen Guenièvre; their son is Cligés (Cligés is thus a hybrid figure, half-Byzantine and half-Celtic). When Cligés’s uncle Alis usurps Alexandre’s throne and weds Fenice (that is, the Phoenix), the daughter of the empress of Germany, the lineage that leads to Cligés is threatened.Cligés and Fenice, meanwhile , have fallen in love. Here institutional marriage has been rendered fraudulent ; the ‘‘real’’ marriage, still unrealized, is that between Cligés and Fenice. To preserve the legitimacy of this marriage, Fenice ensures that her union with Alis remains unconsummated and her love for Cligés secret. She is trying to avoid the example, set by earlier poets, of Iseut and Tristan. Thus Fenice refuses Cligés’s offers to ‘‘kidnap’’ her: ‘‘I shall never go away with you in this fashion, 143 144 Part 2. Helen in France for then the entire world would talk of us the way people do of the Blond Iseult and Tristan’’ (‘‘Ja avoec cos ensi n’irai, / Cars lors seroit par tot le monde / Ausi come d’Ysolt la Blonde / Et de Tristant de nos parlé’’ [Micha 1957: ll. 5250–53, trans. Staines 1990]).1 But Fenice’s refusal, it must be said, serves Chrétien’s purposes well. For the poet, too, is interested in legitimacy and wants to avoid the examples set by others. At the same time, and for the very same reasons, he relies on those examples . And, indeed, Cligés is everywhere haunted by the ghosts of Tristan and Iseut.2 But other ghosts loom as well: most notably, that of Helen of Troy. It is Cligés who mentions Helen as he tries to persuade Fenice to flee with him to Arthur’s court: ‘‘For never would there be so much joy as when Helen came to Troy brought by Paris’’ (‘‘C’onques ne fu a si grant joie / Eleinne reçüe a Troie, / Quant Paris li ot amenee’’ [ll. 5239–41]). Fenice chooses not to play either role—Iseut’s or Helen’s. Or not intentionally. For Fenice manages to remain both married and faithful to Cligés only through an elaborate series of ruses, ‘‘pharmacological tricks and rhetorical figures’’ (McCracken 1998:42) that deceive Alis and create illusory Fenices: ‘‘He believed that he held her and he held her not. But he took much pleasure in nothing, for he received nothing , kissed nothing, held nothing’’ (‘‘Tenir la cuide, n’an tient mie, / Mes de neant est a grant eise / Car neant tient, et neant beise’’ [ll. 3316–18]).One cannot help but note the irony here: in the very moment when Fenice strives hardest to avoid the example of one Helen, she plays the part of another, assuming the role of the eidolon. The irony is intertextual as well, for the more Chrétien strives to distance his work from prior poetic traditions, the more firmly he ties himself to them. Peggy McCracken puts it this way: ‘‘The accumulation of Fenice’s literary predecessors in the narrative suggests that adultery . . . cannot remain hidden’’ (1998:45). Neither, I would add, can Chrétien’s adultery, his commerce with the poetic past. Perhaps what Chrétien is haunted by, in the end, are the ghosts of all those books that came before him: so many phantoms of empires now dead and buried. Genealogy and Translation in Early Modern Europe By the fifteenth century, marriage, with all of its genealogical implications, is a state affair...

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