H-France Review Vol. 2 (June 2002), No. 43
Sarah Kay, Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001. xiii + 382 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $55.00 US (cl). ISBN 0-8047-3079-2.3.95 U.S. (cl). ISBN 0-8166-388; $22.95 U.S. (pb). ISBN 0-8166-3887-X.
Review by Constance B. Bouchard, University of Akron.
Medievalists have recently begun to reconceptualize the nature of the
contradictions common in twelfth-century texts, arguing that they were not
(as was once assumed) set up almost accidentally by pre-modern authors
struggling with literary forms, but rather were put into those texts quite
deliberately by their careful and sophisticated authors. Within a four-year
period there will be three books published on the subject of contradictions
in medieval texts, written by three scholars who decided independently to
address the topic. Catherine Brown, who, like Sarah Kay, is a literary
specialist, was the first, and I myself, writing from a historian's
perspective, will be the third.[1]
Each of these books, of course, approaches the topic quite differently.
Sarah Kay, a scholar of Old French literature, is probably best known for
her edition and translation of the epic Raoul de Cambrai,[2] but she here
turns her attention from the epics to the romances, another aspect of
courtly literature. Concentrating especially on some of the works of
Chrétien de Troyes, on the Lais attributed to Marie de France, on vernacular
saints' lives, and on troubadour tales, all from the twelfth century, she
argues that stories built around a central tension or contradiction would
have proved enduringly popular with their audiences. Although she never
quite says so, she implies that our modern literary conventions were created
during the twelfth century, along with vernacular writing in general.
The most distinctive feature of Courtly Contradictions is the inclusion of
Lacanian psychoanalysis. Realizing that most medievalists will have little
familiarity with--and probably equally little interest in--theories that
Jacques Lacan developed in the 1950s to explain structures of human thought,
Kay provides a thorough introduction to someone she readily admits is "an
abstruse--indeed, sometimes an impossible--writer," and thus urges the
readers of her book to "skip the parts they find tiresome" (p. ix). The
result is a book that will, as she acknowledges, probably be read very
selectively by medievalists. Given its classification as a book of literary
history and criticism, its existence will probably not even be noted by
those interested in post-Hegelian thought, which unfortunately means that
Kay's careful and energetic efforts to make Lacan comprehensible will be
skipped both by medievalists and by those actually interested in
understanding his theories.
Kay includes Lacanian psychoanalysis in the first place because she sees
her book's major purpose as explaining why the courtly literature of the
twelfth century continues to resonate with readers at the beginning of the
twenty-first century. For her, modern sensibilities react well to
contradictory structures in literature, even if the modern version is
different in substantial ways from the medieval version of contradiction.
But by giving so much of her book to an attempt to fit medieval literature
into a modern psychological mold, that she herself calls "not . . . wholly
reconcilable," the medieval texts themselves end up in a position which she
characterizes as "piggy in the middle" (p. 300). Thus the works of courtly
literature sometimes threaten to become invisible in a book that is
supposedly about them.
The book still has a number of good insights into twelfth-century
literature, especially that written by Chrétien and by the troubadour poets.
Kay argues against a large body of scholarship that has sought to reconcile
the contradictions in these texts into unitary right answers, where the
apparent contradictions are brushed aside as no more than irony. She also
dismisses, almost in passing, Catherine Brown's suggestion that
contradictions were intended primarily for didactic purposes, suggesting
rather that the full flourishing of "courtly contradictions" came in the
last quarter of the twelfth century, when earlier didactic literature gave
way to what she terms a literary "object," a source of "pleasure and
diversion" (p. 2). Embedded in this discussion is also an implied dismissal
of the way in which any literature--medieval or modern--gains much of its
force through an underlying moral and critical commentary on its society and
its readers' expectations. To give Kay credit, she never reduces literature
to simple entertainment, but her Lacanian distinction between literature
that focuses on the "subject" or on the "object" certainly leads in this
direction.
Kay is weakest on the philosophical underpinnings of twelfth-century
contradictions. She asserts that the roots were strictly Aristotelian, and
indeed draws a contrast between Platonism (including Christian
neo-Platonism) and Aristotelianism, arguing that only the latter sought to
find answers through a balance of contraries, and that the neo-Platonists,
especially Augustine, favored unity. Her brief survey of ancient and late
antique philosophy omits the harmony through dissonance that played such a
large role in the thinking both of Plato himself and of such Christian
neo-Platonists as Boethius. Kay also skips the early twelfth-century growth
of scholasticism, where every question was answered both No and Yes, even
though this twelfth-century way of approaching philosophy, theology, and law
provides the context in which literary works were structured on similar
principles. It is unfortunate that she was not able to incorporate some of
the ideas of Richard Kaeuper about chivalry and courtliness, especially his
argument that the noble audience for courtly literature was intensely aware
of the inherent contradictions within a chivalric culture that stressed both
Christianity and violence.[3]
The major strength of the book is Kay's familiarity with a wide range of
vernacular (primarily French) literary sources, many of which have been
little studied by other scholars. Indeed, there are so many different
authors cited that she found it necessary to include an Appendix to list,
characterize, and date them all. As a historian I would have preferred to
see the book's focus squarely on those authors rather than on modern
psychoanalysis or the interplay of subject and object, the discussion of
which quickly becomes self-referential almost to the point of parody. And
yet there is a great deal here to engage both the historian and the literary
specialist. With three books on twelfth-century contradictions appearing so
close to each other, the discourse of opposites may soon become the new
paradigm of medieval literary structures, against which future scholars will
feel themselves compelled to rebel.
NOTES
[1] Catherine Brown, Contrary Things: Exegesis, Dialectic and the
Poetics of Didacticism. Stanford University Press, 1998. Constance
Brittain Bouchard, "Every Valley Shall Be Exalted": The Discourse of
Opposites in Twelfth-Century Thought. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 2002 (forthcoming).
[2]Raoul de Cambrai, ed. and trans. Sarah Kay. Oxford and New York:
Clarendon Press, 1992.
[3] Richard W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe.
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Constance B. Bouchard,
University of Akron,
CBouchard@UAkron.edu
Copyright © 2002 by the Society for French Historical Studies, all rights reserved. The Society for French Historical Studies permits the electronic distribution for nonprofit educational purposes, provided that full and accurate credit is given to the author, the date of publication, and its location on the H-France website. No republication or distribution by print media will be permitted without permission. For any other proposed uses, contact the Editor-in-Chief of H-France.
H-France Review Vol. 2 (June 2002), No. 43
ISSN 1553-9172
