Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature (review)

Jane Gilbert’s challengingly original study of a wide range of medieval texts is thoughtful and thought-provoking. Based on Lacan’s notion of the entre-deux-morts, Gilbert’s analyses and discussions are nuanced by reference to other theorists, notably Žižek and Barthes, but also social anthropologists of various schools. The Introduction lucidly presents the complex theoretical framework of the book, exploring the figure of Antigone as a model for the following chapters: living in death from the moment she decides to transgress and give formal burial to her brother Polynices, granting him second death in Lacanian terms through monumentalization. Each of the five chapters that follow analyses an aspect of the theme from medieval French (Roland from La Chanson de Roland, Galehot and Lancelot from the non-cyclic Prose Lancelot, the Ubi sunt? theme in Deschamps and Villon) and Middle English (Pearl and Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess and Legend of Good Women). The first chapter studies Roland’s death drive through the assonanced and the rhymed traditions, showing the complexity of the construction of the hero. The universality of the iconic figure, at least within Western Europe, is acknowledged (p. 53), and the atemporal existence of the tradition renders it impossible to ignore, as Gilbert wishes, the ‘valuation accorded by retrospection’ (p. 36). That retrospection, enshrined in the hero’s prospective concern with reputation (p. 34), is embodied in the poems that monumentalize and aestheticize his death from the beginning. Chapter 2 sets the problematic relationship between Galehot, ‘le Haut Prince’, and Lancelot, in which Lancelot becomes the object of desire rather than the desiring subject, in the broad context of fin’amor (‘courtly love’) as appropriated by romance discourse, placing the lover in a limbo of imagined death, or real or simulated madness. While basing her study on Lacan’s account of courtly love, Gilbert rightly indicates that it is now inadequate, because of the sources used by Lacan (p. 61). The complexities of this chapter are compounded by the rewriting over centuries not just of a story but of a concept. Her final, interesting analysis of the clash between chivalric love and courtly love is slightly simplified by her exclusion from the analysis of Galehot’s mistress, la Dame de Malehaut. The two closing chapters on Middle English really fit with Chapter 2, despite shifts in genre, because of the importance of the discourse of fin’amor in shaping the monumentalization of the female characters involved, even though Pearl is a daughter dead in infancy, the Duchess is a deceased wife, not an unattainable mistress, and the Good Women have diverse origins in classical legend. The intervening chapter indicates vital differences in the application of the Ubi sunt? topos by Deschamps and Villon, with the literariness of the latter’s constructs emphasized, although Gilbert fails to note the importance of inscribing Charlemagne as preux: one of the cultural Nine Worthies. An important feature of the book is that, while exploiting twentieth-century theoreticians, it questions the limits of applicability of the theories, and acknowledges the appropriation of medieval materials for modern ends.