Thinking Through Chrétien de Troyes (review)

The most striking aspect of this volume, aside from the stellar quality of its five chapters, is the collaborative effort that produced it. Within the rich bibliographical resources provided, the authors' previous publications furnish a sense of the deeply woven intellectual tapestry out of which this collective project spins its threads. The introduction indicates who contributed each chapter, but the continuity of critical tools, principles, questions, and goals highlights the degree to which this is a single project shared among participants who work distinctively within the common frame. Thinking Through Chrétien thus offers a model for future collective volumes and simultaneously enacts its key premises: shifting away from 'authorized authorship,' they read the works identified by Chrétien's name with a 'more plural, open and flexible' (1) approach, in order to study, within the intellectual history of the later twelfth century, the 'Troyes style' (4-11, 13-14) that emerges from them. Borrowing Lacan's notion of 'logical time' and taking Chrétien's lyrics as starting points for examining the romances as long poems, they concentrate on moments outside the linear movement of narrative which show reflection and reflexivity, 'thinking on the spot' (12): variants that multiply textual possibilities, paradoxicality that blocks progression, intertextuality that invites 'poetic spectrality' (39), unintelligible experience that obscures knowledge.

Sarah Kay's opening chapter sets the parameters with her analysis of Chrétien's lyrics within the variance of their manuscript transmission and their dialogue with troubadour songs. She suggests punningly how the poet's 'changeful pen' favors plurality and unresolved paradox, and creates through repetition and variation a lyric intensity that can also be found in romance, as shown briefly in Cligés. We may wonder if medieval readers had access to the plurality of textual variants so masterfully compared here, but Kay's ability to construct complex, 'cubistic' views of Chrétien's work provides a model for understanding the contradictory impulse inscribed in all his writing.

In Chapter 2, Virginie Greene investigates imagination as 'a form of thinking potentially capable of producing knowledge' (43). Medium meets message, as dialogue between 'The Poet' and 'Psychologic' (invented to connect court, cloister, and school) periodically interrupts to comment, often obliquely, on the unfolding analysis of the Charrete's opening segment. The dialogue's wittily allusive language, like Chrétien's, invites readers to join in the play. Greene's technique of 'closely digressive reading' (45) takes us by way of Peter of Celle's imaginative construction of a banquet to discover the particularizing 'effect of fiction' (49) and the intersubjective nature of thinking, in which the individual and interiority do not necessarily coincide.

A brief excursus into Guillaume d'Angleterre at chapter's end is immediately picked up by Zrinka Stahuljak's 'Adventures in Wonderland.' In four of Chrétien's romances (the unremarked absence of Cligés calls for comment), adventure time requires 'thinking in an emergency' but often blocks the acquisition of knowledge by creating cognitive disruptions, shifting attention away from signification to the importance of introspection, intersubjectivity, speech acts, and situational ethics (78). Agamben and Lyotard join Aristotle and Augustine to enrich the theoretical perspectives brought to bear in following Perceval's and Yvain's failures to return, as well as Enide's and Lancelot's emergent thinking.

In Chapter 4, Enide and the lady of Landuc allow Sharon Kinoshita to sidestep modern psychology and 'individuality' to concentrate on 'Feudal Agency and Female Subjectivity.' Refusing male chivalric dominance, she examines Enide's monologues and argues for understanding her education as counselor to Erec through the model offered by Queen Guenevere. Her analysis of Laudine as châtelaine further demonstrates how the play of intersubjectivity includes the female subject.

In Chapter 5, Peggy McCracken explores how remembering and forgetting relate to knowledge, experience, and logical time. As memory plays positive and negative roles in Cligés and the Conte du...