French Literature: A Very Short Introduction

by John D. Lyons

  In the pages that follow, we will meet a number of protagonists who were often controversial at the time when their stories were first told or published, but who now are central to the French literary tradition and to our vision of the epochs from which they come. We will also see, for the sake of comparison, some of the other figures against whom they define themselves by their difference. In each of the chapters described below, which largely correspond to conventional historical periods of French literature, three or four representative texts will be taken up in some detail, while others will be mentioned for brief comparison and suggested for future reading.

  The protagonists of medieval texts tell us about the worldview of the period that chose to focus on them. When a literature arose in the vernacular, Old French, as distinct from Latin, in the 11th century, the territory we call France had different boundaries and nothing like the national identity or organization we know today. We would describe it as highly decentralized geographically and politically (the concept of `de-centralization' is itself our way of projecting backwards the presumption that France should have a `centre') and personalized in its social organization. In the feudal system, power, identity, land ownership or use, and even the sense of the passage of time from one epoch to another, depended on the person in power in a given place at a given time. Allegiances shifted, power and wealth within the leading families varied from generation to generation depending on the skill and luck of individuals. Threaded throughout this society was an international institutional framework, the Church, that provided a kind of meta-identity delineating the southern and eastern boundaries of Europe. In this context, it is not surprising that the protagonists of literary works, almost invariably in verse form, should be represented primarily in terms of their loyalty, the principal value of a feudal society.

  Lives of saints

  The text that is usually identified as the very first substantial work of French literature concerns its hero's decision about the lord to whom he will be loyal. The Life ofSaintAlexis (c. 1050) is the story of the only son of a wealthy nobleman in 5th-century Rome, who was married in his adolescence and fled on the night of his marriage, telling his bride that `In this life there is no perfect love' (En icest siecle nen at partite amour). He travelled across the sea to Syria, where he lived for seventeen years in anonymous, ascetic spirituality. But because he began to be honoured, he fled from where he was living, and setting sail, he was involuntarily carried back to Rome. He returned, unrecognizable, to live for seventeen more years as a holy beggar under the staircase in his father's house. His identity was discovered only at his death, from an account of his life that he wrote on his deathbed, but The Life ofSaintAlexis that we read must be significantly different from Alexis's own account, which was written from his point of view. The narrative Life continues after this death to include the lamentations of his mother, father, and virgin widow and points towards the complexity of the project of holy heroism, saintliness, itself. His mother cries out, speaking to her dead son, `Oh son, how you hated me!' (Efilz... cum m'ous enhadithe !). There remains an ambiguity about whether she supposes that Alexis resented her for not recognizing him upon his return from abroad - he did not: the narrative of the Life makes it clear to the reader, but not to the family, that Alexis was determined not to be recognized during his life - or whether she supposes that this hatred drove him to his initial departure and animated his whole withdrawal from his family.

  The poem makes it clear, in any event, that this type of heroism exacts a cost. The emotional cost is greater for those who love the saint than for the saint himself, since he, after all, has chosen his priorities. Yet while the family suffers, the community as a whole is shown to benefit from the presence of a saint, whose soul has gone directly to live with God in heaven: `The soul separated from the body of Saint Alexis; / it went straight to paradise' (Deseivret l'aneme del cors sainzAlexis; / Tut dreitement en vait en paradis). The people of Rome, the Emperor, and the Pope all celebrate that they have the body of a saint, who will henceforth serve as their advocate with God. The Life of Saint Alexis, like many texts from other periods, is open to varying interpretations, to varying arguments for and against the values represented by the hero. Yet this does not imply that the writer of the Life was himself ambivalent. It appears clear that for the writer, and for most 11th-century readers, Alexis represented a triumph of Christian, transcendent values. Family ambition and sexual love are less important than large social units, such as the Church, the city, and the empire. On the other hand, this edifying reading does not prevent us from seeing similar conflicts of values in later works in which protagonists sacrifice their families, like the hero of Corneille's Horace (1640) or the heroine of Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856), for what appears to them a higher calling.

  Werewolf - a nameless hero from Celtic sources

  Werewolves, like saints, make difficult bedfellows, and yet loyalty to a werewolf is the crux of a story (perhaps meant to be sung) that appeared in a collection of verse narratives a little over a century after the Life ofSaintAlexis. The Lais of Marie de France (c. 1160-80) draw on two literary traditions from within what is today France: the troubadour poetry of Provence and the Celtic oral narratives of Brittany. They were probably composed at the English royal court for a French-speaking Norman audience. Many of the Lais concern unhappily married women (discussions about love were pursued with great sophistication in the milieu of Eleanor of Aquitaine, who had been successively Queen of France and of England), but one of them stands out both for the peculiarity of its title character, Bisclavret, and for showing sympathy to a husband married to a disloyal wife.

  Marie points specifically to the Celtic origin of the story of Bisclavret while recognizing that her audience is French: `I do not want to forget Bisclavret: / Bisclavret is his name in Breton / But the Normans call him Werewolf' (Ne voil ublier Bisclavret / Bisclavret ad nun en bretan, / Garwafl'apelent Ii Norman). The hero - simply known as `a lord' (un ber), he is thus really nameless - is just like other people except for a need to shed his human identity several days each week. This metamorphosis no doubt represents the fondness of Celtic literature for magic and for permeable boundaries between humans and other living or imagined creatures. But it has often been noted that Marie minimized the supernatural elements in traditional stories that she retold, and in the case of Bisclavret, the hero's transformation into non-human form may simply be a way of representing ordinary outbursts of violence or times when one is not `oneself'. Simply put, the husband's eccentricity consists of taking off his clothes and running around naked in the woods. The narrator tells us at the outset that `in the old days, many men used to become werewolves', so that this characteristic is not in itself presented as being evil or necessarily alarming. The real problem, one that appears as a theme in texts of many other periods (such as Jean de La Fontaine's `The Loves of Psyche and Cupid', LesAmours de Psyche et de Cupidon, 1669) is the absence of trust in the person one loves. He never showed her anything but gentleness, and he trusted her enough to reveal the deep secret that he is a werewolf. Yet the husband gets in return only fear and disgust. His wife steals the clothes that he needs to return to his human form, so that he is trapped in that of the animal, until the happy ending of the lai when justice is done. Tellingly, the husband's behaviour while in canine form, exhibiting great loyalty to the prince, is the value that assures his triumph and return to human identity.

  Langue d'OII and Langue d'Oc

  The Old French language appeared in writing in 842 in the `Strasbourg Oaths'. What we call Old French was the language of the north of what is now France and is sometimes called the Longue d'Oil - that is, the `language of oui', after the word for `yes' - to distinguish it from the language spoken and written in the south (Langue d'Oc, or Occitanian, of which Provencal is the best-known dialect), where `yes' was said as oc. Provencal was the language of the troubadours (trobador in Provencal: poets who recited or sang their own compositions) and of the trobai
ritz (women troubadours). Old French differs much from Modern French, which has remained largely consistent in written form since the 17th century. Today many French readers rely on the increasing numbers of bilingual editions of medieval poetry which present the Old French original and a Modern French translation side by side.

  Epic: the chanson degeste

  Although the gentleman wolf of Bisclavret was a knight, the lai does not concentrate on what he did while in human form. Yet the conduct of the knight is the core of the characterization of protagonists in two other major genres of the period, the chanson degeste and the roman. In a highly personalized system such as feudalism, the protagonist's usefulness as well as loyalty was repeatedly scrutinized. Heroes sought occasions to demonstrate their cleverness and valour. In the chanson de geste, of which the earliest and greatest is the anonymous 12th-century Song ofRoland (La chanson de Roland), military prowess and loyalty to the sovereign come to the fore. In the contemporaneous roman (or romance), the knight is challenged to find an equilibrium between military glory and success in a relationship with a beloved woman, as we see in Chretien de Troyes's Erec and Enide (Erec et Enide, about 1170).

  The Song of Roland, like the approximately 120 other surviving chansons de geste - literally, `songs about the things done' from the Latin res gestae - concerns events during the reign of Charlemagne (King of the Franks from 768 to 814, and crowned Emperor in 800), but it was composed three hundred years after the events concerned. The Song of Roland recounts a battle that occurred as the Frankish army withdrew from northern Spain leaving a rearguard commanded by the hero, Roland, who is described as Charlemagne's nephew. The details, including this kinship, vary markedly from current historical representations of this rather minor battle in the Pyrenees against what are described as `pagan' and polytheistic Saracens (in the historical encounter that was the basis for the Song ofRoland, the adversaries were, in all probability, not Muslim).

  1. The Emperor Charlemagne finds Roland's corpse after the battle of Roncevaux, fromLes Grandes Chroniques de France, c. 1460

  All is magnified in Roland, through huge numbers, intensely gory description of combat and injuries, repetition of incidents and formulaic descriptive phrases. In an exclusively male society, the characters demonstrate their valour in fights that dismember and kill a large number of combatants at the battle at Roncevaux, but the core dilemma for the hero is actually a moral one: whether or not to send an alarm to the main body of the army, the only reasonable course in view of the disproportion of the opposed troops (twenty to one). Yet Roland refuses to call to Charlemagne for help by sounding his horn, the Olifant, as his companion Olivier urges. Roland replies, `God forbid that my kinsmen through me be blamed / Nor that sweet France fall into dishonour' (Ne placet Damnedeu / Que mi parent pur mei seient blasmet / Ne France dulceja cheet en viltet).

  This heroic, almost superhuman, unreasonableness is what elevates Roland as a subject to be celebrated in song and worthy, within the epic itself, to be the object of vast mourning on the part of the Emperor and his army. And yet this pride is also a terrible flaw that leads to the death of the twenty thousand members of his detachment. The paradoxical nature of this dilemma is emphasized by Olivier's change of attitude in the course of the battle. Having at first urged Roland to sound the Olifant when there was still the possibility of assistance, by the time Roland realizes that defeat is imminent, Olivier veers to the opposite position and argues that he should not call for Charlemagne but recognize his own culpability: `The French have died because of your irresponsibility' (Franceis sunt morz par vostre legerie). Through the character of Roland, the anonymous writer presents the burden of delegated authority in a feudal system, where physical strength, skill, and courage are important, but where the requirements of loyalty and individual and collective honour create contradictory demands.

  Romance

  The protagonists of the romances have other problems and quite different virtues - or, rather, loyalty and honour are tested in different ways in a world in which the knight's relation to a woman is at least as important as his relation to his lord and his companions in arms. Originally, roman was simply a way of designating the Old French vernacular language as opposed to Latin, but by the late 12th century, it designated a type of story, in which an individual hero, through a quest, grows in virtue and self-understanding, and in which the love of a woman plays a large role. Indeed, the status of women in the romance tradition, where they are portrayed with respect and accorded great deference, is one of its striking innovations with respect to most classical models. The romances are traditionally divided into three groups by subject matter: `The matter of Rome' (from antiquity, though more often concerning Greek legend and history), `The matter of Britain' (from Celtic and English sources), and `The matter of France' (about Charlemagne and his knights).

  Erec and Enide is one of the five surviving romances by Chretien de Troyes, whose name indicates his connection to the city of Troyes, site of the court of the counts of Champagne. While Chretien was at that court, it was essentially ruled by the regent Marie de Champagne, daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Like his four other romances - Yvain, the Knight of the Lion; Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart; Cliges; and Perceval, or the Story of the Grail - Erec and Enide belongs to the Celtic repertory of tales of the court of King Arthur, materials that had been translated into Latin and French from Breton. Erec, a young knight at the court, is escorting Queen Guinevere and her maidservant in the woods during a hunt when they come upon an unknown knight accompanied by a lady and a dwarf. The dwarf strikes Guinevere's maid with a whip and subsequently also wounds Erec on the face and neck. Erec is obliged to remedy this insult to the Queen, but he is not armed for battle. There is an odd echo of Roland's situation in Erec's, since the two women and he are behind and out of touch of the company of hunters with the King. In fact, they are so far behind that they cannot hear the hunting horns, but unlike Roland, Erec resigns himself to deferring revenge until he is better armed, because rash courage is not real nobility (Folie nest pas vasalages).

  Subsequently tracking down the knight with the dwarf and defeating him, Erec falls in love with Enide, the daughter of an impoverished nobleman who loaned the hero the necessary arms and armour. Erec, blissfully married to Enide and living at Arthur's court, would seem to have everything and to be at the end of his story, but this is only the first third of the romance, and now the real challenge arises. Overcome by amorous pleasure with his wife, Erec begins losing his reputation as intrepid warrior. It falls to Enide to give him the bad news, `Your reputation is diminished' (Vostre pris en est abaisiez). In a certain sense, Enide has lost her husband through his surrender to her. She had married a respected knight and finds herself with a besotted lover. Erec's solution is to set out, with Enide, looking for challenges in order to prove himself once again. The series of dangerous encounters that follows looks in many respects like the sort of initiatory ordeal through which a young man would pass in order to reach adulthood and marriage, but in this case Erec is accompanied by his wife, on whom he has imposed the requirement that she not speak. It seems like a regression on Erec's part: he wants to have adventures as if he were still alone and not part of a couple. However, at the crucial moment in each of Erec's dangerous encounters, Enide violates the condition of silence to give her husband important information or advice. Thus Erec and Enide prove that they can function as a couple and reconcile erotic love and knightly valour. Their last adventure leads them to encounter a couple that has failed to find this balance and have ended up cut off from the society around them, failing both in love and in service to the outside world.

  The lyric `I'

  In the texts about Alexis, Roland, and Erec and Enide, there is no doubt who is the protagonist, even though there is another figure in the text, the `I' who tells the story. The writer, or the writer's self-representation as narrator, appears very early in French literature. Marie de France frequently reminds her audience that she
has composed the story of Bisclavret and the stories of the protagonists of her other Lais, as in the opening verse of `The Nightingale' (Laiistic): `I will tell you of an adventure' (Une aventure vus dirai). But this use of the first person puts the poet in the position of presenting someone else's story.

  Later in the Middle Ages, the poet moves to the central position as protagonist and tells her own story or his own story. In a certain sense, we could say that the poet, the person who tells the story and says `I', is at the centre of one of the most important texts of medieval Europe, the Romance of the Rose (Roman de la Rose), a long verse narrative written in two parts: the first by Jean de Lorris towards 1230 and the much longer second part by Jean de Meung towards 1275. But in the Rose, the poet as concrete individual quickly explodes into his thoughts and the various psychic forces that either drive him towards the woman he loves (the `rose') or hinder his pursuit. These forces become allegorical characters - Idleness, Love, Fear, Shame, Nature, Reason, and so forth - whose speeches and acts fill the romance, as they do the thoughts of the lover, in the literary tradition of the psychomachia, or `battle in the soul', so that the writer does not appear in his everyday, concrete existence but as a kind of everyman experiencing the suffering and perplexities of love.