A Very Rough Diamond:
Béroul’s The Romance of Tristan
Although not as ubiquitous as the various versions and
adaptations of Romeo and Juliet—which predate Shakespeare and which afterward
have spread to nearly every language and art form in the world—the story of
Tristan and Iseult is one of the most potent and enduring tales of doomed love
in Western literature. As a freestanding romance, or as part of the
Arthur-cycle, or as an opera or film or inspiration for a novel (Graham
Greene’s excellent The Heart of the Matter, for instance), this strange and
mutable story of love and death is one of our central narratives about how
romantic love does and doesn’t work.
In brief,
the story goes like this: The orphaned Tristan joins his uncle Mark’s court at
Cornwell, proves himself a worthy warrior, goes on a wooing expedition to
Ireland to win Iseult the Fair for Mark, brings her back by boat, and
accidentally drinks a love-potion with her that was intended to bond her to
Mark. The pair then embark on an illicit affair that after discovery leads them
to escape together into the wilderness, where after a time they become
reconciled to returning to Mark’s court, where they continue their affair,
which is discovered again, causing Tristan to flee to lands in Brittany.
Joining another court there, he resigns himself to marrying his new sovereign’s
sister, who also happens to be named Iseult (in Béroul’s version, both women’s names
are spelled Yseut). When Tristan is mortally wounded in battle, he sends a
message to the first Iseult (who is a powerful healer), but the second Iseult
(Iseult of the White Hands) overhears his instructions and foils them, causing
Tristan to die just before the arrival of Iseult the Fair, who in despair lays
down next to Tristan and dies of grief.
Like the
tales of King Arthur, whose love-triangle between Arthur, Guinevere, and
Lancelot is predated and influenced by the Mark-Iseult-Tristan triangle, the
story of Tristan and Iseult is almost definitely Celtic in origin, and as with
the Arthurian tales, its descent through different ages and traditions has
spawned interpretations that mirror the values and conventions of each culture
that retells it. The earliest extant full (or nearly full) versions fall into
two categories: the “common,” of which Béroul’s The Romance of Tristan is the
most exemplary, and the “courtly,” of which the mostly lost Tristran of Thomas
served as the template, later finding its highest expression in Gottfried von
Strassburg’s unfinished Tristan. As a product of evolving folklore, it’s not
possible to arrive at the true original version of the story, but almost all of
its core elements are present in Béroul’s version, and this is probably why his
Romance of Tristan has come down to us, fragmentary and peculiar as it is.
Nothing is
known about Béroul other than that he composed the poem in Norman French in the
middle of the twelfth century, and even this is somewhat uncertain. Béroul
refers to himself and his version of the tale throughout the poem, but some
scholars have suggested that this “Béroul” may have been a later scribe who
either embellished the poem or simply inserted his name to make the poem his.
In any of these cases, the only surviving manuscript is poorly copied and
incomplete, the ravages of time having torn away both the beginning and the end
and created several short lacunae throughout the text. Presenting even more
problems for a modern reader looking for a complete and coherent narrative,
what’s left of the poem itself (about 3,000 lines) is rife with incongruity,
illogical motivation, strange assumptions, and unclear characterization. The
accumulation of narrative inconsistencies is often hilarious, but even so, the
poem’s raw power and unadorned thrust makes it as enjoyable and moving as many
much “finer” Medieval romances. What Béroul lacks in subtlety and precision, he
more than makes up for with his gift for keeping the reader engaged in his
vivid, exciting, and heartwrenching rendering of this dramatic and ruinous love
(to borrow a phrase from Jeanette Winterson). Like the early gospel of Mark,
which served as the template for the more elaborately fleshed out gospels of
Matthew and Luke, Béroul’s version shocks and amuses with its roughness, but it
nonetheless stands as the startling original.
In order to
create a more complete and comprehensible reader’s edition, translator Alan S.
Fedrick has filled in the holes at the beginning and end by adding summaries of
Joseph Bédier’s 1900 reconstruction of the romance (which Bédier traced back to
a conjectural lost prototype of the poem by drawing on all known sources), as
well as by including a short anonymous episode, “The Tale of Tristan’s
Madness,” near the end. Fedrick also puts the poem’s style and approach in the
context of its times with his excellent introduction, which draws attention to
the poem’s oddities and clumsinesses while helping the reader to see them as a
common characteristic of the part-oral/part-written style of his era. Fedrick’s
apologies aren’t fully convincing, however—or even necessary—because Béroul has
the agency to make his own mistakes, and his poem has the verve to remain
unfazed by its own carelessness. Béroul’s The Romance of Tristan may not be an
imperfect masterpiece anywhere near the scale of, say, Don Quixote, but this
wonderfully memorable and poignant poem clearly stands on its own lopsided
terms as one of the great flawed gems of Western literature.
—David Wiley
No comments:
Post a Comment