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Passion as a Form of Communication in Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan
- Essays in Medieval Studies
- West Virginia University Press
- Volume 18, 2001
- pp. 31-42
- 10.1353/ems.2001.0008
- Article
- Additional Information
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Essays in Medieval Studies 18 (2001) 31-42
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Passion as a Form of Communication in Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan
Sharon M. Wailes
Indiana University, Bloomington
The love between Tristan and Isolde in Gottfried von Strassburg's version of Tristan is seen to be unique. Gottfried has striven to transcend the tradition established by his contemporaries and presents his audience with a new form of love that is endlessly complex, full of paradox, and seemingly without boundaries. For this reason, contextualizing the work within the tradition of medieval narrative has proven difficult, and scholars admit that many aspects of Tristan and Isolde's love still remain inscrutable. C. Stephen Jaeger has recently argued that the kind of love found in Gottfried's Tristan evolved from "ennobling love," an ethic of love and friendship that was prevalent in medieval monasteries and universities as well as at court. According to Jaeger, "Ennobling love had always been primarily a way of acting and behaving, and only secondarily a feeling." It is "love subjected to reason and discipline, love as a source of virtue, love as a learnable discipline that one can put into practice like any other ethic of behavior." 1 Self-discipline and virtue came from overcoming the sexual impulse and abstaining from the physical expression of sexuality. In Jaeger's view, the twelfth century "completely revalued and redefined" ennobling love by attempting a "reconciliation of ennobling love with physical love" (196). Jaeger calls this phenomenon "passionate love." He finds evidence of its social manifestation in the letters of Abelard and Heloise and considers Gottfried's Tristan to be a literary expression of passionate love. Jaeger asks how passionate love can confer "aura, prestige, [and] rank": "How can it claim virtue, while admitting virtue's old enemy, the sexual act, as the natural end of love and full partner in the exalting process?" (159).
The most radical change brought about by the union of what had been incompatible forces was the migration of love from the public to the private sphere. Passionate love was at odds with public reputation and social institutions, but the [End Page 31] esoteric nature of passionate love nevertheless aided the nobility in setting themselves apart from the rest of society. "Those who . . . accept[ed] the difficult philosophy of love-suffering, love-passion, align[ed] themselves with nobility of mind and soul," Jaeger writes (193). However, when removed from the public sphere, love stood in opposition to aristocratic social values. At this juncture, "love with high potential for disgrace and for the destabilizing of states is declared the source of all worth and reputation" (194).
Jaeger identifies the paradox of a noble love opposed to noble values in Tristan. The paradox is not resolved in Gottfried's work, however, but remains deliberately unexplained so that such love will remain esoteric and inaccessible to all but the most noble hearts. It is as if the poet had said, "You, reader, will just have to deal with that mystery. . . . If you don't understand it, no one can explain it to you, and anyway no one is interested in making explanations" (194). Likewise, the union between ennobling love and sexuality is never completely resolved, according to Jaeger, who claims that no work of western culture from the twelfth century to the nineteenth "generally succeeded in rationally justifying a reconciliation of virtue and passion. A history of ennobling love [in this context, passionate love] after the twelfth century...is a history of romantic catastrophe generated by the illusion of a truly ennobling passion" (202).
Ennobling love led to the betterment and increased social status of the individuals involved; passionate love, polluted by sexuality, led to tragedy and self-sacrifice. Passionate love "premises virtue and ennoblement on willing self-sacrifice in love," Jaeger writes. "'Honor' and 'praise' are attainable in tragic love through the magic of predestination, not through discipline and education" (196). But I submit that love which is an incomplete union of two irreconcilable forces, at odds with social institutions, fraught with deliberately unexplained paradox...