Show notes
The lai, a short narrative poem from the Middle Ages that treats themes of courtly love, was originally accompanied by music and sung by minstrels. But in the 1170s, poet Marie de France translated a series of Breton lais into French and, in so doing, converted an oral tradition into text. It’s no wonder, then, that her lais’ narratives are so often preoccupied with methods of communication: both the spoken word, with its spiritual, incantatory, or even magical qualities, and the written word—physical, embodied, and analogous to the art object (particularly and, appropriately, the textile, a medium associated since antiquity with female artistry). Wes & Erin discuss two of the poet’s most famous lais—”Laustic” and “Guigemar”—and how their narratives marry the “flesh” of text, art, and symbology, to the “spirit” of the spoken word (via dialogue, oaths and covenants, and authorial commentary), in order, perhaps, to communicate something of the mysterious and dangerous union that is romantic love. Upcoming Episodes: Arthur (1981), Medea (Euripides), A New Leaf (Elaine May). Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:20 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Lay, a short narrative poem from the Middle Ages that treats themes of courtly love was originally accompanied by music and sung by minstrels. But in the 1170s, poet Marie de France translated a series of Breton lays into French and in so doing converted an oral tradition into text. It's no wonder, then, that her lais narratives are so often preoccupied with methods of communication, both the spoken word, with its spiritual, incantatory, or even magical quality, and the written word, physical, embodied and analogous to the art object, particularly and appropriately the textile, a medium associated since antiquity with female artistry. Today we're discussing two of the poet's most famous lays, Laustic and Guigemar, and how their narratives marry the flesh of text, art and symbology to the spirit of the spoken word via dialogue, oaths and covenants, and authorial commentary, in order perhaps to communicate something of the mysterious and dangerous union that is romantic love. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. 1:40 Wes: Point of order. This podcast was a Breton lay, or the Bretons made a lay of this podcast, and now we are just adapting that. 1:50 Erin: We're adapting it. 1:51 Wes: Yeah, she was a great adapter. 1:54 Erin: Yeah. And I wonder, actually, I wonder how much she just came up with herself, where she was like, you know, wanted to give herself the mantle of authority by saying, this is a Breton lay and I'm taking it. And I'm, you know, the Bretons wrote about this. It's totally. She made it up. You're getting to how I wanted to start this conversation, which I was going to ask if you had heard of Marie de France prior to me suggesting this because. 2:15 Wes: Well, it's a coincidence, because I was going to ask you who she is. Tell us who she is and what she's about. I hadn't. No, I had not, actually. Not at all. And I had read some medieval romance stuff like Le Morte d'Arthur, which I was very into in high school, and Arthurian legend type stuff, which this seems to be related to. But I think this is. I don't know if this is categorized as medieval romance exactly, or it's adjacent to it. Yeah. Tell us about her and how you happened upon her. 2:49 Erin: One of the professors on my committee for my PhD qualifying exams is a medievalist and suggested this because the special topic for my qualifying exams is poetic ekphrasis. So if people aren't familiar with. With that word, it's just the vivid description of, usually of a work of art. The Greeks took it to mean any kind of description that brought something vividly before the eye, I think, is what the rhetoric manuals from ancient Greece say. But typically now it's associated with a very vivid description of a work of art, usually some kind of visual art, be it a painting or a statue within a text. So poetic ekphrasis within a poem. So it's kind of an artistic turducken, you might say, one art form encased in another. The classic example is, of course, Homer's description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad. And so anyway, you know, I have a historical section of my reading list which encompasses a broad swath of texts from antiquity to, you know, sort of the early modern era, and have this wonderful medievalist on my committee who suggested Marie de France's poems because they have many instances of ekphrasis in them, particularly in these. These two poems. So, as I think will become clear over the course of our conversation, I'm particularly interested in the descriptions of art here and how these maybe tie her to a classic feminine tradition, like, especially in Laustic, I think, where, as I'm sure you probably caught this connection, where the body of the nightingale is wrapped in the lady's woven message to her lover, which is obviously meant to reference the tale of Philomela in Ovid. And so that places her within a particular kind of tradition. But anyway, yeah, I was really disappointed that I hadn't heard of until there was a book that came out about her a couple years ago, that was when I first heard of her. And I had heard of Lanval, one of her lays, but not her name associated with that Arthurian story. 4:39 Wes: And it's about Guinevere. 4:41 Erin: Yeah, yeah, I think so. It's a knight, I think, who maybe. I think he spurns Guinevere. 4:47 Wes: Maybe it's not another name for Lancelot. Right? It's a different one. 4:51 Erin: No, no, it's a different knight. Yeah. And so medieval. It isn't, you know, isn't my specialty by any means, but the fact that I hadn't heard of her really exposed a huge. Either a huge gap in my education or just a sad lack of recognition for Marie de France. Or both, probably. But if it's the latter. I wonder if it's because she's a woman. I mean, partially. It has to be. Right. But also perhaps she's not writing at length like so many other medieval poets. Most of these are really short, though. Certainly they have the quality of little epics. But. Yeah. So I suggested this because it's on my reading list, and I was bowled over by these. But did you enjoy them or were you as impressed as I was? 5:31 Wes: Yeah, I enjoyed them a lot. I was pleasantly surprised, actually. I don't get excited by the phrase medieval literature, despite. Le Morte d'Arthur is medieval, right? It's like, 15th century. Well, it's not technically. How do you categorize Le Morte d'Arthur? It's sort of at the end of that, but, yeah. 5:48 Erin: You don't like Chaucer. 5:50 Wes: Yes. I mean. I mean, but it's been a long time. We have to do Chaucer. Yes. And sure, I think as an adult, you know, it's been. Since I was basically. Well, I guess, yeah, I did it in college. Honestly, I was too young to fully appreciate it. 6:03 Erin: Sure. 6:03 Wes: But I think I would now. Definitely. What are some of the other medieval big hits? Beowulf. 6:09 Erin: Beowulf, the Pearl poet. The Gawain poet, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I really love. And then Dante for the other side of the coin. 6:19 Wes: Right. Yes. So all things that we should do. I found these very charming. And this is the sort, again, the sort of thing I was into as a kid and in high school, mainly by way of Tolkien and C.S. lewis and Le Morte d'Arthur and a book called the Once and Future King by TH White, which this kind of. The tone of it reminded me a bit, even though it's not the same. But the use of enchantment and fairy tale, maybe what I'm thinking of is fairy tale to some extent, which I was also very into, but I don't know how you describe it, but the mood or tone of enchantment is very immersive and winning. And it's like this era's version of magic realism in a way. It's hard not to kind of be delighted by it, despite the fact there seems to be a real interest in infidelity as the only true form of love. Who wants to be married? 7:15 Erin: Yeah. 7:16 Wes: Yeah. 7:17 Erin: Well, courtly love continues to fascinate and kind of horrify me. But, yeah, maybe I've talked on the podcast before about my love of Tennyson, and so I was introduced to all this stuff through Idylls of the King and, you know, especially the lady of Shalott and also the musical Camelot, which actually has a lot of, you know, sort of classic qualities of these poems. And then some of the stuff I then read in high school, like the, you know, Chaucer and stuff like that. But anyway, yeah, I mean, you know, and I'm surprised. Cause my mom was really into the medievals, so I'm surprised that this is someone who I. Because I asked her and she hadn't heard of her either. So. Justice for Marie de France. 7:52 Wes: We are going to revive her. 7:54 Erin: Yes, yes. 7:55 Wes: Via this podcast. 7:56 Erin: I hope so. 7:56 Wes: I mean, I'm sure there's an academic sub field now, but yes, for the general public. 8:01 Erin: Well, I think we're going to start with Laustic, which is shorter and it'll just get us right to the heart of condoned infidelity, or infidelity as maybe an important spiritual practice. I don't know. But before we do. So, I found these translations online from. I think it was a 1910 or 11 translation, which actually transposes the poems into prose. And I thought they were pretty good, pretty interesting translations. But there's also one that I found through Wikipedia, which is a verse translation of Laustic that was done in 1991. Which one did you favor or did you read? Both. 8:37 Wes: So I did the Gutenberg translation. I looked a little bit at the others and maybe. Do you want to, since these are short, just give a very high level sketch of the story. 8:48 Erin: Sure. 8:48 Wes: Which is so short it won't take long. But then also, if you want to read some lines from the original from the translation that is closer to the poetry of the original to give the flavor of that. Sure, maybe that's good. Before we do that, did we want to say anything else about Marie de France? Not much is known about her, but apparently she might have been part of the court of our old friend Henry ii, who we seem to keep revisiting. Yes, an old lady, the old Eleanor of Aquitaine. 9:18 Erin: Yeah, we love those courtly ladies. I mean, I suppose we should say that she was living in England. I mean, this is where things get a little confusing because she's taking these Breton lays, translating them into French with maybe quite a bit of her own spin, her own flavor. But she's living in England and so I think that's somewhere. I read that that's why she calls herself Marie de France. Otherwise it would be odd to say, like, I'm Wes, United States, when. Right. 9:49 Wes: So this distinguished her and the Bretons in particular. So there was a Celtic culture. Breton is sometimes called Little Britain. Right. As opposed to Great Britain. 9:59 Erin: Right. 9:59 Wes: And not to mention the fact that a century early, earlier, the Normans had conquered England. Right. And so all the upper classes were French speaking. I don't know what's going on at this point in history, but French and the earlier Celtic and Anglo Saxon admixture of cultures have now undergone their own mixture. But there's a special relationship between this part of northern France and England. 10:23 Erin: Yeah, a special, special colonial relationship. It's special violence. Yeah. No, I think that. I think you're highlighting something which is. Which is also really complex about the heritage of these stories. Right. Because they came originally from Celtic. They came into the Breton language, into Brittany, and then they're sort of fed back to, you know, so they're leached from. And then fed back to this abused population in the United Kingdom. Right. Filtered through French and regurgitated back to the colonized people. 10:57 Wes: Oh, yeah, we can't forget that Beckett, that the fictional version of Becket. Right. Was one of these aggrieved, colonized people. Yeah, forgot about that. 11:05 Erin: Yes, yes, exactly. Exactly. No, but, you know, there's something really weird that goes on with these Arthurian legends because of the fact that they're filtered through France, so Heav. And through. You know, there's a whole strain of this also that goes into Italy. And so it's, you know, it's sort of like if we really adopted we as Americans, you know, who came Europeans, if in the 1700s maybe adopted, like the full mythology and different narrative stories within, you know, an indigenous tribe, a Native American tribe, and then made that, like part of our self myth and then like taught the, you know, subsequent generations of Native Americans these stories as if, like, we had come up with them or something. You know, there's a little bit of a mind. They're screwing around with people's minds going on here. 11:56 Wes: I was thinking of William James being the one who wrote Huckleberry Finn or something, but maybe that's not the. Right. The English were communicating American ness back to Americans. They were the great transmitters of. I don't know, is that analogous or 12:13 Erin: maybe not William James, but I think 12:15 Wes: you're thinking of someone else closer to. Well, I'm just picking a random. 12:20 Erin: Oh, sure, sure. 12:21 Wes: Think of. But he's not close enough to who's a writer. English writer. That's closer to Twain's time. 12:29 Erin: Dickens, if Dickens is older. Yeah, I know. 12:31 Wes: There you go. 12:32 Erin: Yeah. 12:32 Wes: Which he probably could do. A really good job of, actually. 12:34 Erin: Probably. Yeah. See, that's. That's part of the problem is, like, you know, these were these Breton minstrels just better at telling these stories. We don't know. 12:44 Wes: Maybe we would be better off as Americans if our self concept. No, I think Twain is. Twain did a good job. So let's. But we would. You know, it would be cool. 12:54 Erin: Yeah, for sure. 12:57 Wes: But anyway. 12:58 Erin: Okay, so it's kind of like when. Here. Here we go. It's when Daniel Day Lewis plays Lincoln in a Spielberg movie. Something that people in my family have still not gotten over. They couldn't find an American to play that part. I'm like, okay, anyway. 13:12 Wes: And also, didn't you need someone with Lincoln's specific condition, whatever that was? I can't remember what it is. 13:18 Erin: Tallness. 13:19 Wes: That made him. 13:20 Erin: Stovepipe syndrome. I don't know. 13:24 Wes: All right, so. Yeah. So it is a very interesting cultural history behind this. So thanks for sharing some of that. 13:31 Erin: Sure. 13:32 Wes: Shall we jump to. You want to summarize and. Yeah, give it a little bit of the flavor of. Yep. 13:37 Erin: Okay, so here's a. Here's a story. There. There are two knights. They're living in adjoining castles. Sort of adjoining. 13:42 Wes: Right. 13:42 Erin: They're butting right up against each other. One is married, one isn't. The bachelor is in love with a married knight's wife, and she's in love with him. 13:50 Wes: It's kind of like an od…
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