The Romance of Tristan: The Tale of Tristan's Madness (Classics)

T
RISTAN
and Yseut are not the only pair of tragic lovers the world has known, and they were certainly not the first. Yet this tragic tale of love, more than any other, has succeeded in capturing men’s imagination from the time when it first appeared in the twelfth century. For eight centuries it has been the inspiration of countless story-tellers, poets, dramatists, painters, sculptors and composers. The unique fascination of the Tristan legend seems to lie not in the accretions which have been added to it with the passage of time, however firmly attached to the Tristan legend these have become, but rather in the unadorned central theme: the unsought passion which draws Tristan and Yseut irresistibly together at a time when the memory of Tristan slaying Yseut’s uncle in combat is still fresh in their minds, and which compels them later to cut across the moral code and the social and family obligations which are the framework of their existence. Because of their passion they undergo a range of suffering through moral guilt, social degradation, and material hardships of all kinds until at last the anguish of separation is forced on them. Tristan’s unhappy life reaches a new intensity of grief when he is falsely told, as he lies desperately ill in Brittany, that his beloved Yseut has not answered his last plea and come from Cornwall to see him; his spirit can stand no more, and
he dies thinking that his loved one has failed him at the last.

The mystery which surrounds the cause of all this suffering, the love potion, is undeniably an essential part of the legend’s fascination. In the earliest versions of the story the love potion comes into the narrative suddenly and unexpectedly, and its effect is to bind together two people who have no reason to like each other and whose relations are indeed more hostile than friendly. The potion may well have been originally no more than a narrative device which supplied the mainspring of the story, but later adaptors, from Gottfried von Strassburg in the thirteenth century to Richard Wagner in the nineteenth, endowed it with immense symbolic value. The theme of the love potion is probably the best-known distinguishing feature of the Tristan legend, and it is in their attitude to this theme that later authors differ most widely. This is perhaps partly because in the very earliest poems the love potion is presented by the narrator with a complete absence of explanatory comment; so much is left unsaid that later authors are, as it were, invited to fill the artistic vacuum surrounding the potion with some sort of elucidation. But in Beroul’s poem we have not yet arrived at the, ‘explanatory’ stage of narrative fiction, and Beroul’s treatment of the potion theme is discussed below.

There are in existence now hundreds of different versions of the Tristan legend, written in practically every European language, and the majority of them reflect an individual interpretation of the legend and treatment of
its basic themes. In the early years of this century an epoch-making discovery was made by the great French scholar, Joseph Bédier: in the course of his studies of the Tristan legend, he found that all Tristan poems now known, medieval and modern, can be traced back to a single poem, now lost, which is the fountain-head of the whole tradition and the archetype of all Tristan stories.
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Amongst all the extant romances, Beroul’s
Tristan
has a special claim on our attention not merely because it happens to be the oldest but because it comes closest to preserving what may be called the raw material of the legend.
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Most of the unexplained and mysterious events of the story, which contributed so greatly to its fascination for later ages, are found in Beroul’s poem, and Beroul presents them just as they are without any attempt
at explanation. In reading Beroul’s poem we are not only transported into the medieval setting for a tale of tragic love, but we are confronted with a conception of the story-teller’s art which is foreign to our own. Partly for this reason, Beroul’s poem contains much that will startle and baffle a present-day reader who judges it by the modern aesthetic criteria of fictional narratives. There is no doubt that Beroul’s poem is sadly defective by modern standards; for it is far from easy to imagine that a piece of narrative fiction can exist as a serious work of art while dispensing with elements as fundamental as a coherent plot, an ordered flow of events with a clearly discernible causal nexus, and convincing characterization. Narratives of that kind existed nevertheless at a stage in the history of literature which is still only imperfectly understood, in the ‘pre-literary’ period before our present-day aesthetic began to be formed, when romances were designed for oral recitation and when men knew no better than to believe what they saw and heard. It is as a representative of this earlier aesthetic
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that Beroul’s poem is to be judged, not as a quaint and clumsy attempt to write a story according to modern literary criteria. Before dealing with some of the strange features of Beroul’s poem, however, there is a problem which merits a brief preliminary consideration, namely the authorship of the poem.
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The single manuscript of Beroul’s
Tristan
is faulty in several respects and wholly unworthy of the poem.
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The text has been much studied and the puzzles it presents are the centre of controversy amongst scholars. In an effort to solve some of the literary problems a number of ingenious theories have been evolved concerning the actual composition of the manuscript. It has been suggested that the manuscript is in fact riddled with interpolations; and philological experts have claimed to detect features showing that the early part of the poem was written by a different author from the later. The philological evidence adduced looks extremely convincing, although I am not sufficiently well-informed to pass opinion. However, it is obvious that theories of multiple authorship or heterogeneous composition leave the literary problems of the text intact. The mere fact that controversy over the authorship exists, with scholars of international distinction on both sides, suggests strongly that there is little to be lost by simply taking the text as it stands. It does not require a trained scholar to point out the oddities of this poem, and the philologists’ theories have only brought confusion worse confounded. Let us begin instead with what we
know: I do not think the fact is contested that one man was responsible for the romance as it is now preserved in the manuscript; behind him there may have been dozens of unknown contributors, but there is no doubting the reality of what we may call the man behind the manuscript. This shadowy figure may have been in reality a humble scribe, acting for whatever mundane practical reasons and utterly ignorant of the literary implications of what he did, nonetheless one man composed what is now preserved in that manuscript. Our concern here is with the poem as a piece of literature: we should tackle its problems in literary terms without making
a priori
assumptions of its faulty transmission. If elements of doubt subsist, let us give the benefit to Beroul
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by granting that the poem which was actually written was also the poem he meant to write.

We may pass without further preamble to some of the strange features of Beroul’s poem, beginning with a consideration of the poet’s techniques of characterization. It is immediately apparent that at least one aspect is different from modern practice, namely the complete absence of what Jean Genet has called, in a perceptive phrase, ‘the author’s politeness towards the reader’, signifying that the author does not seek to impose his own judgements. Thus, an author who wished to portray a virtuous character would not now be content with stating that this character is virtuous: on the contrary, he would present a character who thought virtuously and acted
virtuously; it would then be up to the reader to draw his own conclusions, or if the author did pronounce an explicit judgement there would at least be no question of the reader disagreeing. This will doubtless seem too obvious to be worth saying; but the curious thing is that Beroul’s technique is quite different. In the manner of the poets of the Old French epic poems, the
chansons de geste
, Beroul never argues the case for his characters: in Genet’s sense, Beroul is far from ‘polite’, for he constantly intervenes in the narrative to proclaim his sympathy for the lovers and his hostility to their enemies. But there is more to this than the question of whether or not the author makes his sympathies known, for Beroul’s expressed opinions are at times not wholly borne out by the facts he presents.