Marie de France and the Poetics of Memory (review)

Whalen argues that Marie’s writing followed an overarching project, that of transmitting the memory of earlier narratives to her future audience and also of ensuring that her own achievement, and specifically her name, was remembered. He suggests that Marie used vivid description as a means of fixing her work in the reader’s memory, and that, writing before the production of any medieval artes poeticae, she would have learnt her technique of description from Priscian’s Praeexercitamina. Though he finds less descriptive material in the Fables and Espurgatoire than in the Lais, Whalen nevertheless makes a convincing case for the importance of memory tied to brilliant mental images. He posits that the evidence of illumination and rubrication in the many surviving MSS of the Fables indicates that memorization formed part of the reception of this work. Of particular note is his inclusion of the Vie de seinte Audree in the canon of Marie’s œuvre. His demonstration that this poem contains the same techniques of description, of explicit focus on memory in prologue and epilogue and of authorial self-naming, as do the texts normally credited to Marie, adds a cogent argument to the case for the poet’s authorship of the Audree. However, Whalen’s study is somewhat undermined by an insecure linguistic knowledge. His translations of both old and modern French contain errors. ‘Force de persuasion’ becomes ‘strength from persuasion’ instead of simply ‘power of persuasion’ (p. 119). The verb in Chrétien de Troyes’s ‘Qui toz jorz mes iert en memoire’ is read as past tense and first person, when in fact it is future tense and third person, and the relative-pronoun subject is taken to be an object (‘That I have always remembered’ instead of ‘Which will always be remembered’, p. 8). The tense of remirai becomes future instead of past definite (p. 178). Most crucially for Whalen’s argument, ‘Marie/Ki en sun tens pas ne s’oblie’ from the Prologue to the Lais (‘Marie, who in her day is not neglectful of her own self ’) is misread to eliminate the active present tense of the author’s self-portrayal, and becomes blandly ‘Marie [. . .] who was not forgotten’ (p. 55). Having thus missed Marie’s key linking of the significance of memory to her deliberate self-positioning as author, Whalen as a result fails to exploit the remarkable parallel in the epilogue of the Audree, ‘Mut par est fol ki se oblie./Ici escris mon non Marie,/Pur ce ke soie remembree’ (‘Anyone who neglects his reputation is very foolish./Here I write my name Marie,/so that I may be remembered’). The similarity of both concept and wording is not commented on by Whalen, who instead relegates these striking lines from the Audree to a statistical footnote on the occurrences of terms such as remembrer in the poem (p. 165, n. 48). It is unfortunate that these misreadings were allowed to stand in an otherwise thoughtful and persuasive study.