Love and War in Cligés

In the first part of Cligés, the intercalated stories of love and war suggest that each is articulated through the other.

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Cligés is the only one of Chrétien’s romances in which he recounts a war. Critics have long noted the realistic detail that Chrétien uses to describe Angrés’s treason and Arthur’s war against him in the first part of the romance, and they have often seen a disjunction between the realistic representation of the violence of war and the monologues full of metaphor and figurative language through which Alexandre and Soredamors come to understand and experience their love for each other. The perception of such a disjunction is heightened by the abrupt movements of the narrative from the war back to the lovers, then back to the war, then back to the lovers. In other words, the story of war is intercalated with a story of love, but the narrative style of each story seems to isolate it from the other in the romance. Sharon Kinoshita reads the two kinds of discourses in generic terms, noting that although the distinction between the epic-like discourse of war and the romance-type discourse of love is sometimes partially deconstructed in rhetorical conflations of love and war, ‘the fundamental discursive incompatibility between the literal-mindedness of epic and the rhetorical excess of the monologues is both foregrounded and scrupulously ignored.’¹ But how might these two narrative strands speak to each other across their differences of focus, of perspective, and of style? How might they be in dialogue with each other? What has the graphic description of war got to do with the metaphorical discourse of love, and what has the figural and poetic description of growing love got to do with the violent narrative of war?

Artifice and Affect

Cligés is a romance unique in its focus on arts—particularly through the characters of Thessala and Jehan, but also in its representation of the arts of war²—and in its use of artifice. On the one hand, Chrétien’s use of artifice demonstrates his craft, his use of motifs from other narratives, like the Tristan romances, to new ends in Cligés.³ On the other hand, the artifice of the narrative identifies the narrator’s distance from the story, a distance that leaves room for an ironic stance toward the characters who attempt to enact the values of courtliness, or that allows for a critique of courtliness and of an adherence to social forms valued over substance or intensity of feeling.⁴ In the first part of the romance artifice and courtliness are most clearly at stake in the monologues through which Alexandre and Soredamors explore their feelings and come to understand that they are in love. These monologues are far more extensive than those Chrétien includes in his other romances, and they offer the narrator a way to convey the feelings of the characters to his audience.⁵ Alexandre and Soredamors don’t know how to express their love any other way, and in this they are different from Fénice and Cligés, who have no trouble understanding their own feelings, and whose uncertainty about love focuses on whether the other returns love.⁶ Alexandre and Soredamors debate whether they love, and the question of whether they love begins with a question of how they have fallen in love, of how love has entered them—and for each character, this question is answered using conventional love rhetoric (love enters through the eyes, love is an arrow shot into the heart), but a rhetoric in which metaphors of embodiment become confused with literal bodies.

Alexandre in particular seems to have trouble maintaining rhetorical control over the figures that structure his first monologue about love. He describes being wounded by an arrow in the heart, debates how the arrow entered (through the eyes), accuses his eyes and heart of betraying him, and then says that he will describe the arrow of which he now has charge. The golden feathers of the arrow are like the...