Zweifel an der Liebe: Zu Form und Funktion selbstreferentiellen Erzählens im höfischen Roman by Christian Buhr (review)

The opening chapter of Christian Buhr’s study commences with a discussion of the “book in the book” in Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen and the function of this self-referential fragment, an instance of metafictional narrative. The author points out that scholarship has generally considered self-referential and self-reflexive narrative the domain of modern literature, beginning with Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Excluded from consideration has been medieval literature, which contains abundant examples of metafictional discourse in both narrative forms and lyric poetry. In a comparative study of twelfth- and thirteenth-century narratives, chiefly romances focusing on love, the author proposes to investigate instances of metafiction in premodern literature, the occurrence of self-referential and self-reflexive narrative techniques heretofore attributed chiefly to modern literature.

Buhr’s comparative study includes German and French texts: Konrad Fleck’s Flore und Blanscheflur; Aucassin et Nicolette, the French chantefable; the German and French Tristan romances by Béroul, Eilhart von Oberg, Thomas de Bretagne, and Gottfried von Straßburg; Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligès; and Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Frauendienst, an amalgam of autobiography, courtly narrative, and lyric poetry. In his study, the author seeks to analyze systematically the tendency of authors of courtly narratives to play self-reflectively with form in a process that serves to constitute meaning or else to generate a literary discourse from within the narrative.

Beginning with Flore und Blanscheflur, Buhr engages in close reading as he analyzes the function and effect of texts within texts; the relation of frame story to framed narrative; tales iconographically represented in the narrative in which they are depicted; the function of the locus amoenus as site for the creation of literature and its contemplation. The author suggests that the creation of a monumental sepulchre for Blanscheflur, who is not dead, can be interpreted as a key to the literary creation of fictional worlds. The ekphrastic depiction of the Trojan War on the goblet Flore is given when he sets out on his search for Blanscheflur competes with the main narrative into which it is interpolated. As is the case with the depiction of the sepulchre, the goblet’s ekphrasis interjects a disparate narrative structure into the story of Flore and Blanscheflur. The romance narrating the love of two children contains at the same time instances of self-reflexibility on the nature of narrative art.

The tale of Aucassin et Nicolette is a fitting complement to Flore und Blanscheflur, given that the basic plot of the prosimetric chantefable is similar in many respects to that of the German romance. Yet the serious nature of a love story, as depicted in Flore und Blanscheflur, is subverted in Aucassin et Nicolette by a plot that repeatedly elicits laughter. It is an omnium gatherum of motifs, such as cross-dressing, and narrative elements from disparate genres, from chanson de geste, courtly romance, and troubadour lyric. Buhr argues that the reversal of male and female roles in Aucassin et Nicolette humorously subverts the notion of courtly love.

The longest chapter in Zweifel an der Liebe (pp. 95–246) is devoted to four Tristanian romances, the French by Béroul and Thomas, and the German by Eilhart and Gottfried. The discussion commences with the observation that in the romances devoted to the love of children, as in Flore und Blanscheflur, the focus is on the genesis of love, its development, and its genealogical consequences, whereas the Tristanian romances are concerned with an uncontrollable passionate love that is not only temporary but also contrary to societal norms. Other than exhibiting the self-referentiality present in medieval courtly romance, the Tristan narratives permit and make possible several forms of critical introspection. Béroul’s Tristan is characterized by a high degree of recursivity reminiscent of the laisses similaires of Old French...