Poétique de la ruse dans les récits tristaniens français du XIIe siècle (review)

Insaf Machta's elegant and well-researched thèse de doctorat will be an essential addition to the bibliography concerning the Old French Tristan poems. Her study of ruse builds on the long critical tradition concerning these complex texts, and often engages with key studies from the past thirty years. Her Introduction offers an excellent survey of how Tristan in medieval French narratives has been viewed as a trickster figure. She notes in particular the opposition made by previous scholars between 'comic' tricksters such as Renart and the use of trickster material in a 'serious' love narrative (pp. 10-11). Machta redefines the earliest Old French Tristan tradition (which is completely fragmented) as a halfway point between episodic texts and the genre of romance (she discusses Cligés on pp. 331-35), then notes that stratagems and deceit play key roles in both strands of the tradition. Her starting point is that truth, lies, and fiction are porous categories; indeed, ruse can be a tool for creating a compromise with society's values and laws. Machta analyses several varieties of ruse in the Tristan texts, and, in so doing, succeeds in touching on every one of the key issues and debates that have been raised around the interpretation of these texts in the past fifty years. In Part I, the first chapter considers the lovers' exploitation of space for strategic and tactical ends. Chapter 2 examines the traps set for the lovers by their foes (for trickery is not confined to the lovers). Machta notes that 'la ruse est génératrice de récits' (p. 18), and affirms that one of the key aspects of the Old French Tristan poems is that narrative and ruse are consubstantial. Chapter 4, on disguise, contains excellent condensed essays on the significance of the leper and the fool. Part II examines the function of ruse within the economy of the récit, by tracing its birth in desire (once again, desire encompasses Marc and the barons) (Chapter 1), and via an exhaustive survey of the narrative devices that are deployed (Chapter 2). Chapter 3 turns its attention to the stratagems of the narrators, as well as of the narrator figures in the two Folies. Part III analyses the conceptual significance of tricks and stratagems. Its Chapter 2 suggests that ruse functions as a polemical device concerning the then emerging concept of courtly love, and stresses the significance in this respect both of the love philtre, and of Tristan's loveless marriage to the second Yseut. Machta notes that trickery determines the terms of the erotic relationship in both Tristan and the anti-Tristan Cligés. She concludes in Chapter 3 of this section that, given the ambiguity of divine intervention in Béroul and the complete absence of the religious sphere in Thomas, 'la ruse devient [. . .] le support d'une nouvelle vision de la transcendance peu conforme aux principes religieux' (p. 335).