Of Cligés and Cannibalism

Reading Cligés in light of the two Ovidian tales Chrétien cites in his prologue leads to a deeper understanding of his cannibalistic art.

(MTB)

‘J’ay une chanson faicte par un prisonner, où il y a ce traict: qu’ils viennent hardiment trétous et s’assemblent pour disner de luy; car ls mangeront quant et quant leurs peres et leurs ayeux, qui ont servy d’aliment et de nourriture à son corps. “Ces muscles, dit-il, cette chair et ces veines, ce sont les vostres, pauvres fols que vous estes; vous ne recognoissez pas que la substance des membres de vos ancestres s’y tient encore: savourez les bien, vous y trouverez le goust de vostre propre chair.’”¹

‘Take another little piece of my heart, now baby…you know you got it, if it makes you feel good.’²

Among Cligés’s many artifices, the secret doors constructed by Jehan offer particular insight into the nature of the romancer’s crafty games. A figure of the author like Thessala—a guaranteed truth teller, like the book found in the library at Beauvais, which serves as Chrétien’s putative source—Jehan leads Cligés to a door concealed in the tower’s wall and boasts about the invisibility of the joints. Later when he reveals a second door leading just as invisibly to a garden, the narrator disclaims any capacity to explain what Jehan alone knows. Chrétien thus insistently and ironically calls attention to the kind of ‘bele conjointure’ (Erec, vs. 14) that characterizes his own verbal fabrications, combinations of stories, bits and pieces like Jehan’s doors made of painted stones seamlessly joined into a whole that reveals its parts only when the door is opened (vss. 5533–93).³ But is Chrétien’s art as deceptively hidden as Jehan’s?

One might argue that Cligés foregrounds the varied materials from which Chrétien constructs his second romance. Literary historians have detailed his borrowings from antique romances, chansons de geste, troubadour lyric, and especially his reinventions of Ovid and Tristan, along with real geographical and historical references blended into the fabulous mix.⁴ It has been apparent to his modern readers, as it was no doubt to his medieval public, that Chrétien cannibalizes all the resources at his disposal to produce a bele conjointure. The prologue’s list of previous works not only furnishes a guarantee of the author’s credentials, it supplies a script for recognizing the major ingredients for intertextual play: romance writing, Ovidiana, ‘Dou roi Marc et d’Iseut la Blonde’ (vs. 5).

But one door in the prologue appears to have remained unopened by the critical tradition. Perhaps Chrétien does pull off deceptions worthy of Jehan’s craft. The two tales he translated from the Metamorphoses offer a compelling point of view from which to read Cligés, yet so far analysis has focused largely on how the Magister amoris taught him ‘l’art d’amors’ (vs. 3).⁵ Not that Philomena has been neglected: it provides a precious example of how Chrétien reworks his source, elaborating Ovid’s 248 verses into a narrative 1468 verses long. Its privileged views into Chrétien’s apprenticeship, his art and inclinations, have often been examined.⁶ But we still need to make the connection between Philomena and Cligés show its joints and open a new passage into the stories of Greek fathers and sons. Though we have no trace of ‘Le mors de l’espaule’ (vs. 4), I believe the tale of Pelops, as we know it from mythology and Ovid’s brief evocation, supplies an important piece of the story.

An act of involuntary cannibalism occurs in both the tales of the nightingale and the ‘bite out of the shoulder.’ Philomena’s sister Procne kills her child Itys and feeds all but his head to Tereus as an act of vengeance against the husband who raped her sister. When Philomena hurls the boy’s bloody head against his chest, the father realizes the ghastly nature of his repast and is about to attack...