LLT 180 Lecture 20 Part 1

We're picking up with Yvain, getting through this on Friday, moving toward a test. And we're commenting on the notes. And maybe it'd be best, in case you're not reading the notes, just to leaf over to the notes for a second and comment on a few things they say in here. There's all kinds of trivial stuff they say in here, but there's also some really good stuff in the notes, starting on page 515, the note regarding line 368: Some critics would see ChrÈtien's main message in Yvain as being a criticism of the chivalric quest of adventure from motives of personal glory rather than responsible social endeavour. A couple of other things that I wanted to mention in here. We notice, on line 2151, what we've mentioned many times, ChrÈtien here follows his frequent practice of delaying the naming of his chief characters [forever] until long after their first appearance. It talks about Erec, the other -- talking about the lion. I wrote "good" beside my footnote on page 518, line 3341. And we'll get back to Roland; there's a thing about Roland. I don't think the footnote is very useful on that. The rescue of the lion is structurally the central episode in Yvain. What significance ChrÈtien attached to it is by no means clear. The seekers for allegory see in the struggle between fire-breathing serpent and lion an evident figuration of the combat between good and evil, especially as medieval symbolism usually equated the lion [and, of course, Richard the Lion-hearted] with noble qualities and even with the Deity. And then I don't think we'll get quite this far, but another good footnote, 4819, The fact that ChrÈtien here presents Yvain [and we might notice how he's being a champion for women all the time] as a champion of women might imply that he sees his hero atoning for his desertion of for worldly prowess by henceforth devoting his chivalry to the service of the fair sex [however accurate that may be]. Another futile attempt to be humorous.

Anyway, back to the text. We left off on page 308 and hope to get about halfway through, which would put us on about 343, and not any further because I haven't read any further for today. So if we get close to that, I'll have to drag my feet to make the class period last that long. So maybe I'd better drag my feet at the beginning so I can say, "Oh, gotta get to 343" and make it look better. Anyway, we talked about the kind of seeming parallel between Erec and Yvain, the first part of this work being involved in how you find a wife -- or getting a wife. And so it almost seems like he has some kind of formula that he's working on to fulfill this. We left off here with this yucky romantic stuff, talking about heart, eyes, ears, love. And her condition, though -- you know, her condition for him, for total reconciliation, is what? And what Lunete had worked on her with -- "Hey, you need a defender for the fountain. Well, none of your guys are gonna do this." And so she says here, about line 2035, "And would you dare to undertake for me the defence of my fountain?" -- "Yes certainly, my lady, against all comers." -- "Then rest assured that we are reconciled." So however much they might be appealing to each other, without this agreement there would be no deal. The damsel, Lunete -- and I don't know if they purposely make these names like this just to confuse us. Somehow people always get these names mixed up. Laudine is the lady. I think one of the reasons they get mixed up is, I think maybe they only refer to her by name once or twice. Otherwise, they always refer to her as "lady." And Lunete they refer to more often, even though they still refer to her as "damsel," which is confusing. Because then another damsel shows up and you say, "Is this Lunete?" even if it's somebody else. So I got kind of confused in this. I don't know if it was because I was trying to watch a baseball game while I was reading it. Never do as your professor does; always do as they say, you know. Sit in a quiet place and read your work. A game I shouldn't have watched, by the way.

How long -- we talk about these numbers and sometimes -- you know, seven is supposed to be a lucky number. Lady has been married for seven years and her husband gets killed. Definitely not a lucky number for him. But sometimes we talked about the frequency of certain numbers and it's almost like people use these numbers just out of habit unless there's some reason to use some other number. This 60-year number, for example here, is kind of a curious custom, a curious number. The custom of the spring has been going on for 60 years. Again, ChrÈtien's writing. We're not in White anymore; we're back in ChrÈtien. We're back in medieval material where 40 is your standard number for kind of like a really long time. So I don't know if this is a real long time and a half, or what this is supposed to be. A super long time? We're not gonna make it 40; we're gonna make it 60. It's been a long time. You're dead, your kids are dead, your grandkids are dead. Somebody's alive but most of you are dead and long gone. Again, she's a political creature and she's trying to get the lord to answer to her, who evidently are in this lege pyramid underneath this castle, to buy into the fact that she needs to marry Yvain. And so Laudine is not above manipulating them and Lunete advises her how to manipulate them. "I wanna get married now, somehow, telephone, telegraph, satellite." They know Arthur's coming. And so we repeatedly in this material -- I think it's too big a project for writing a paper in a class like this, but we could certainly go back through ChrÈtien, certainly go back through this medieval material, and pick out proverbial type material. There are actually indexes.

Sometimes when you read -- if you read miscellaneously, there are all kinds of indexes out there. And so if you read folk tales -- have you ever read a folk tale and afterwards in parenthesis -- this isn't correct, but I forget how they're done -- but you'll see like XM374J or something. Those aren't the right letters or the right numbers. But you'll see something -- have you ever read a story and seen a code after that, like a collection of stories? There's some big indexes of folk tales and they're all typed. And so sometimes people go back and you can go back and look in the Arna Thompson tape index, and then go back and say, "Oh, that's like Cinderella but that's a modification according to subtype J." And so you go to this big index and you can find details. People do the same thing with proverbs. There's a lot of wisdom in here -- or apparently. On page 310 on the top, "If you act wisely, this day won't pass without your having concluded the marriage; for anybody who waits a single hour before doing what is good for him is very foolish." So we finally get her name, we finally get Laudine's name here, Laudine of Landuc. I don't know. Dr. Polly in French would just cringe if he was watching this show. And so they want to get married because Arthur is coming. So they get married, Arthur arrives at the slab. Yvain -- I'm sorry -- Kay again just continues in this work to be a total idiot. We go through our standard sequencing here with the matched fountain. Arthur pours the water. We have the tempest. Yvain arrives. And Kay, as Yvain anticipated, asks for the honor of being the knight to first challenge. He does and is defeated by Yvain -- Kay is. Yvain comes before Arthur and identifies himself and tells his story. So they all go to his castle, which would be a great honor for Yvain. In other words, Arthur is coming to his place. And he's excited about this. He'll spend a week and no longer. plays a decisive role at this particular point of work because Gawain and Yvain are friends. And Gawain says, you know, "You gotta continue to do this knightly stuff." Course he's probably thinking of Erec. Remember, ChrÈtien wrote this before he -- wrote this after he wrote Erec. So Erec is already messed up. And so the implication is, don't mess up like Erec. You gotta do knightly stuff.

And so he kind of keeps on his case. Does Yvain leave gladly? I don't know. Honesty's worth a lot, though. Volunteers? Who's read that far? He cried. He's a total wimp, you know. He says, "I don't wanna go. You know, I wanna be like . I wanna stay here with her." But, you know, he's just really intimidated. She seems ready to let go of him and that he is the first. "Yeah, yeah, you can go. But I tell you what, you know, Buster. You stay one day over a year and you're grass, you know. It's all over, you know. I'm not gonna love you anymore." You know, again never -- you know, we read last time how fickle women -- I didn't write this; ChrÈtien wrote this -- how fickle women are, and she can just turn it on and turn it off. "Gone. Don't love you anymore. You're an idiot." And he'll be trashed. So he gets to leave -- well, not that he particularly wants to. And so they're getting ready to leave, over on page 314. The king wants out of here. And he refers -- we have this Gawain kind of reference to Erec. He doesn't use Erec's name, but on line 2484 he says, "What? Will you now be one of those", my lord Gawain said to him, "who lose in merit because of their wives?" Shame on him, by Saint Mary, who marries and degenerates as a result! I thought if you didn't marry you became a degenerate. Different story. Women are totally justified -- women are totally justified if you degenerate, you know -- if you turn into a degenerate. They're totally justified on dissing you, saying you're worthless. "I stay, you go." He says on the bottom of that page, " . . . you'd also find yourself regretting the loss of her love, should you degenerate." So he tells him don't be scourged. And so he goes adventuring, which is questing -- he goes adventuring with Gawain. And so he's going just the opposite route that Erec did. Erec stayed home, didn't do anything. Here he doesn't stay home; he just goes and does knightly stuff in the sense of adventure and questing. She tells him -- she grants him leave. He asks her, hoping she'll say no, you know. But she says, "No, you can go. Get out of here." On the bottom of page 315, I guess it is, line -- gosh, it's right at the bottom: "I grant you leave until a certain date. But you may be absolutely sure that my love for you will change to hate."

And so one of the things -- I think the footnote made reference to this, about how ChrÈtien likes to deal with this relationship between love and hate. And this is a very romantic kind of view. In romanticism, literary romanticism, as it grew up in the early 1800s -- very, very late 1700s, early 1800s -- what romanticism as a movement tried to do was to be what they all talked about as being universale, being universal, and pulling everything into romantic -- into the realm of romantic thought. And so everything is worthy of being treated: the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly -- you know, all extremes are part of that. And what you want to do is, you want to meld everything together into one homogeneous hole. And so usually the person who's considered usually the best romantic would be Wagner. Because what Wagner does is, he even takes different forms. He takes music, he takes -- both instrumental and voice, he takes myth. He takes all this material and melds it into one. And so here again, the relationship of love and hate are the strongest hate grows out of love, you know. That these things are kind of extremes of the same thing. So she says here, "But you may be absolutely sure [so, you know, she's sure; she can wholly control her feelings] that my love for you will change to hate if you over-step the time limit I shall set you." And the boy stays -- I think one of the footnotes tells us he stays like six extra weeks or something? It's like bad. He's gone seven years and he's supposed to be gone one. And then -- but then he's depressed that she says he can stay so long, you know. He thought he'd go a month. She says, "Oh, go a year. Get outta here." It seems like a long time to him. She gives him a ring. We have all these magic rings. I haven't seen this one before. It's pretty cool. This seems to be the Palace of the Magic Ring, they should call it or something. 'Course Lunete had one that made him invisible. Pretty cool. And this one what? Makes him invincible, basically. I think it tied in, though -- it only makes him invincible if he loves. Isn't that what the condition was or something? She says here, in the middle of page 316,

"But now put on your finger this ring of mine, which I lend you; and I'll explain clearly to you the nature of its stone. No true, loyal lover can be held prisoner or lose any blood or suffer any harm provided that he wears and cherishes it and bears his love in mind: instead he becomes harder than iron." So basically, you're invincible and in all this time frame, he remains invincible. He remains undefeated in this time they're apart. So both of them leave bitterly, pretty sad, a sad parting. And he goes, as they tell us, unwillingly. They warn us, though -- they immediately warn us, on the top of 317. Again, Gawain is the one that sets them on this course and Gawain is what? Probably gonna make him late. And so we're kind of set up here that things aren't gonna work out. We read, line 2670, "He [that is, Yvain] will overstay it, I fancy, for my lord Gawain will not let him leave his company." So we're left without all these adventures. And so where in other places ChrÈtien has gone on and on about adventures, the adventures at this point are not important. They're just tournaments, they're just knightly stuff. It's the adventures after he overstays, that he then has to do his penance, come back into the good graces of Laudine, that are important, and these would be all the ones where he helps fair damsels. Where as before, I think we saw one small part here, right here, where he's just gonna terminate, just doing knightly stuff, you know. So a year passes. Actually, a year and a half passes, it sounded like. But I think in one of the footnotes, they say a year and seven weeks or something. And they -- Arthur's holding court and a damsel comes, and the damsel denounces. And so this is another thing that we'll have happen. This is a fairly common device. She says, on the very bottom of page 317, ". . . Yvain, the disloyal traitor, liar and deceiver, who has abandoned and duped her." And so what is his crime? His crime is he stole her heart. He stole her heart. So sad. Oh, what a scuz. And so he's injured her heart. They talk about dealing her a mortal blow, and that is obviously to her heart, to how much she loved him. And by not returning, he must've not held her in high respect. He displayed scorn for her.

She wants her ring back. Of course, this ring has made him invincible, you know. And the damsel just takes it. Yvain is speechless. He just -- you know, he didn't think and he's disgusted with himself. We read on 318, about line 2770, "Yvain, my lady has no further concern for you, but instructs you through me never to return to her." You know, she said what? Love would turn to hate and not to keep her ring any longer. He's like stunned, 2774: Yvain cannot reply to her, having lost his senses and power of speech. The damsel jumps forward and pulls the ring off his finger. He hates himself, he leaves nobles, and basically he's gonna go into the wilderness. And again, you know, we saw that in the movie Excaliber, kind of with , and we saw him come back and he looked, you know, like Mountain Man or something. We're gonna see it with Perceval, too. Once they've done something really bad, they kind of have to wander out into the wilderness to be healed, for times of reflection. And here he goes out, and much like all our characters when they're in grief, he tears and rends his clothes and goes fleeing across the fields. And they even describe him, in line 2827, as a madman. A madman. And so he's just totally lost it. He's just so disconsolate that he can't stand it. He strikes up a friendship with a hermit. They have kind of this cooperative deal. Evidently, they really don't talk, but it gives him some contact with humanity. And then over -- I found it interesting, on line 2887, how again, you know, this material, just the fact that we can be reading this material just like folk tales, there's a timelessness to the material in the fact that we're not particularly tying it to any place or time. We are but we aren't, you know. How much later is this? Exactly what's going on? When did this take place? In 2887, "That lasted him for a long time." So how long was he there, you know? Are we gonna make him be so old or, you know, make Laudine be an old, ugly hag now? You know, we don't know how long. So it's up to you. How long is this necessary? . . . iuntil one day he was found asleep in the forest by two damsels along with a lady, their mistress. Now, this one damsel wants to check him out because he's naked. No. She sees this naked man, however, and she wants to check him out. So whatever sequence you put that in. And the damsel -- I didn't have time to reread this when I was reading this yesterday and this morning. But they say she was -- they seemed to imply that they were looking for somebody and she recognizes him. This is not Lunete. So for some reason, whatever, Yvain's fame, she recognizes him by a scar. We read in the middle of that paragraph, ". . . a scar he had on his face seemed to her to resemble one my lord Yvain had on his." Now, whether this is that people know about heroes. In the Nibelungenlied, an important piece of German literature, really literature. You've heard of Sigfried and Brunhilde, and all those people -- you know, the comic strip Brunhilde. Brunhilde is actually queen of these Amazons. And when they show up at this distance court, when Sigfried goes to this distant court to help woo Brunhilde, somebody says, "That must be Sigfried because nobody else could look like that. We've heard stories of Sigfried." So whether this is analogous or not, it's like Yvain -- again, one of Arthur's great knights -- that maybe everybody knows he has a scar on his face. She doesn't wake him or touch him, but goes back and tells her lady that she thinks she found Yvain but he obviously is racked out. So the lady needs help and she has a magic ointment, always had a, you know -- gosh, tell the drug companies about this -- she had an ointment to cure madness. She has some from a guy called Morgan the Wise. That will not be on the test, believe me. The only time this guy's mentioned, Morgan the Wise. That would be getting extremely trivial. And so they go back to get him clothes, get him a horse, get the ointment so that he can be cured and maybe be, then, of use to the lady who needs a champion. Of course ladies in here evidently always need champions, at least in this part. She -- you know, we don't get into this at this point, but she tells the damsel only to rub it on his temples; that, you know, he doesn't need any more than that, and don't use too much, this is valuable stuff. But the damsel gets back. Finding him naked, she rubs it over his whole body, you know. What can I tell you? Just know what I read. 2987,

Taking the ointment, she rubs him with the entire contents of the box, being so anxious to cure him that she proceeds to anoint him all over. She rubs it into his temples and forehead, and his whole body down to his toes. Well, I mean, he is naked. It's not like she undressed him to do this. He's already naked kind of like Lancelot in the woods. She hides. This is instant working stuff. This is, you know, instant cure stuff. And he wakes up and goes, "Wow. Hey." Remembers everything, is happy to see clothes there. So he gets dressed and the damsel feigns an encounter and they go together to the castle since the lady needs assistance. So there's always a bad guy. Obviously, that's gonna have to be the damsel or the lady here in question is gonna have to be rescued from. And so they have the battle. He's gonna protect the lady's castle, her well-being. And he kills this guy, pretty soundly -- my note to myself was, "At least there are no flying brains" in this particular slaughter. On the bottom of page 323, ". . . for his heart burst in his breast [that'll do ya], and his backbone was snapped through." Why did they have to, like, kill people twice? You know, they slice 'em in half and they disembowel 'em or something. You know, it's just, "Okay, they're dead." Everybody's impressed by Yvain as well they should be. He's a great knight. And they even liken him to Roland. Time of Roland? Now, this is 1170 as we're writing here. Who's Roland? Any French students, take French? [Inaudible student response] Yeah. Chanson de Roland, a famous medieval work in French. He fought a rearguard action for Charlemagne. Charlemagne was coming back through the Pyrenees and that's what that song is about. So Roland is supposed to be a great knight -- you know, early Germanic times. Early Germanic times. And so again, this is stuff that will not be on the test. This is just miscellaneous stuff.