Moving Cataclysm: Journeys of Quest, Landscapes of Loss in Late French Medieval Romance and 19Th-Century Travel Narratives

Moving Cataclysm: Journeys of Quest, Landscapes of Loss in Late French Medieval Romance and 19th-Century Travel Narratives Margaret A. D’Amico A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2013 Reading Committee: Denyse Delcourt, Chair Douglas Collins Louisa Mackenzie Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Comparative Literature ©Copyright 2013 Margaret A. D’Amico University of Washington Abstract Moving Cataclysm: Journeys of Quest, Landscapes of Loss in Late French Medieval Romance and 19th-Century Travel Narratives Margaret A. D’Amico Chair of Supervisory Committee: Associate Professor Denyse Delcourt Department of French This dissertation examines the relationship between human movement, social processes, and changing landscapes in 12th-13th-century French romance (roman de quête) and early to mid- 19th-century French travel narratives and romans d’ailleurs. The intentional journey, which we can apply to secular as well as to spiritual goals of both medieval heroes and Romantic journeyers, connotes a place of juncture in an individual life that seeks resolution through movement, through return to origins, and through alignment with ongoing human processes and the processes of history. How narratives of traversal of natural and lived spaces assign meaning to both traveler and place and how humans construct themselves and attempt to re-order their universes by intentional journeying comprise the focal concerns of this study. The term cataclysm refers to any sudden, violent change, whether local, global, or in one’s perception of the universe. Late medieval quest, initially a prescribed practice designed to re-educate the wayward knight for service to society, emerges as a complex response to natural and social degradation, associated with incompatible, yet co-existing, moral discourses, forces of progress, and progressively mechanized human identity. As Ken Hiltner puts it, environmental consciousness occurs when one becomes “thematically aware” of one’s environment “at the moment of its withdrawal” (What Else is Pastoral 38). 19th century travelers, for whom pilgrimage into unknown and “exotic” territories often accompanies social or political exile, attempt to mediate between the multiple dimensions of being and being French in relationship to post-Revolutionary France. Whether from the vantage point of Chrétien de Troyes, 13th-century prose adaptations of the Arthurian legend, or early-to-mid-19th century reflections of Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Nerval, texts from each period grapple with codified and re-imagined scenarios of encounter between individuals, unknown wildernesses, and the lost local: their authors articulate perceived threats, document uncertainty, and seek resolution through projects of self-renewal. Whether as pilgrims, exiles, or flâneurs, the landscapes within which these travelers wander loom with an aura of impending eclipse that, nevertheless, never entirely loses hope of régénérescence. As they progress through space, these journeyers move around and about cataclysm that, presumably, through transformation, they can move, distance, reverse, or avert. Monnie and Dominic Guy Contents Acknowledgments i Introduction ii Part I: ‘Moyen Age’ Preface 2 1. Vanishing Towards the Self: the Topography of Becoming in Perceval ou Le Conte du Graal 26 2. Baring Landscape: Humanity and Nature at the Edges of Love and Death in the Arthurian Cycle 114 3. Getting to the Arthurian Wasteland: Gender, Violence, and the Ecology of Feeling 173 Part II: ‘Dix-Neuvième Siècle’ Preface 243 4. Ambivalent Harmonies: Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Wandering and Reclamation En Orient 248 Nerval: All Roads, No Road, and Nowhere Left to Go: 5. La Route et la Vapeur: Destination and Discourse in Lorely and Notes de Voyage 312 6. ‘La Nature Pourrie’: Bipolarity and Environmental Conscience in Voyage en Orient and Aurélia 349 Concluding Thoughts 412 Works Cited 419 Acknowledgments I would like to express appreciation for my committee, Chair Denyse Delcourt, an excellent teacher who has offered generous insights and encouragement over the years; Douglas Collins, and Louisa Mackenzie, thanks to each of you for sharing your expertise, attentive reading, and perspectives. Special thanks to Stephen Hinds who generously acted as Graduate Student Representative for my general exams and dissertation defense. In earlier stages of this project, I received advice and encouragement from the late Eugene Vance, for which I continue to be grateful. Thanks to Holly Waddell for her encouragement and enthusiasm during my first years as a graduate student. Thanks also to Vinay Swamy whose initiative made it possible for me to benefit from an influential nine-month fellowship at the Université de Genève, in Switzerland. I cannot forget Donna Yowell for her dedicated teaching of Dante and the Italian Middle Ages. Thanks also to Giuseppe Leporace, Claudio Mazzola, and Albert Sbragia for instilling in me a continuing appreciation of Italianistica. My gratitude to the departments of Comparative Literature and French and Italian Studies for the variety and breadth of teaching experience I received at the University of Washington. Louisa Mackenzie and Susan Gaylard deserve added thanks for their generous professional advice and mentoring of students. Thanks to Cecile Kummerer, David Miles, Yuko Mera, and Jennifer Keene for invaluable logistical support. Finally, thanks to Stella for providing me with feline companionship and encouragement during the last eight years. And, not least by any stretch of the imagination, Guy Burneko, for his continuous moral support, humor, astute comments, and patient reading of countless drafts of this project. What I express here can only approximate my thankful appreciation. ii Introduction The primary objective of this dissertation is to examine the relationship between human movement, social processes, and changing landscapes in the 12th-13th-century French romance (roman de quête) and the early to mid-19th-century French travel narrative and roman d’ailleurs. How narratives of traversal of natural and lived spaces assign meaning to both traveler and place and how humans construct themselves and attempt to re-order their universes by intentional movement through these spaces comprise the focal concerns of this study.i By ‘human movement’ I intend first and foremost intentional journeying (also known as pilgrimage or quest), undertaken ‘solo’ for formative or reparative purposes, whether by heroes of late medieval romance or by first-person narrators of the Romantic voyage. The idea of the intentional journey, which we can apply to secular as well as to spiritual goals of both medieval heroes and Romantic journeyers, connotes a place of juncture in an individual life that seeks resolution through movement, through return to both known and unknown origins, and through alignment with ongoing human processes and the processes of history. Du Bellay speaks of the “malheur” created by the movement of travel, whose residual narrative connotes exile, not merely by virtue of distancing oneself from one’s community, but, more to the point, by the very fact of displacement, “dans le fait d’avoir ‘laissé’ et d’avoir ‘été laissé” (24-36).ii As initiates, journeyers become marginal figures; they move at the interstices of their own society and the societies with which they interact; they create as much as they experience environments and, in turn, are created by them. Related phenomena, such as social migration and altered density and iii demographics of population, provide an underlying sociological subtext to both the hopes and anxieties expressed by the authors of Arthurian romance and 19th-century first-person travel narratives. With respect to this last point, the term cataclysm refers to any sudden, violent change, whether local, global, or in one’s perception of the universe. As Ken Hiltner puts it, environmental consciousness occurs when one becomes “thematically aware” of one’s environment “at the moment of its withdrawal” (38).iii Whether from the 12th-century vantage point of Chrétien de Troyes or the early-to-mid-19th century reflections of Alphonse de Lamartine and Gérard de Nerval, the narratives I discuss herein evidence ongoing negotiation between the fixed and fluctuating dimensions of humans and their environment, between localized, expanded, and marginal territories, between the “interior space” of individual selves and the broader environmental spectrum where human activity occurs.iv The primary texts I have chosen, namely Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval and Le Chevalier de La Charrette, the prose Lancelot, or Lancelot du Lac, and La Mort du Roi Arthur, in the first part of this dissertation, and Chateaubriand’s Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem, Lamartine’s Voyage en Orient, and varied narratives by Gérard de Nerval, Voyage en Orient, Lorely, Sylvie, Aurélia, among others, in this dissertation’s second part, pertain to more than narratives of evolution or devolution of individuals with respect to their communities; they act as retrospective and forward-looking environmental testaments and offer methodologies for locating order within states of disorder that remain relevant to human-environmental themes of the 21st-century. Let me turn to some ways in which my two selected periods and their respective texts might be relevant to one another. I would first argue that the Middle Ages should not be looked at as a fixed model but, rather, “in terms

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