<<<Epithète rajouté le 5 oct. 2004>>>

“Il n’est guère que Lavinia pour découvrir l’amour sous les traits d’Enéas et former avec lui le couple fondateur de la puissance romaine. L’amour en effet, ce par quoi le personnage romanesque invente et exprime sa subjectivité, n’est pas encore, dans ces romans, une fin en soi. Il participe aussi, il en est la plus belle des métaphores, de la réflexion d’ensemble qui s’y dessine sur un autre ‘amour’, sur l’harmonie nécessaire à la pérennité de toute société. Que cette harmonie soit également liée à l’exigence de la beauté reste peut-être la plus riche ‘invention’ des romans antiques. [...] Le retour à l’Antiquité n’a rien alors d’une quête archéologique du passé. Il s‘inscrit dans la modernité du XIIe siècle. A charge, pour l’écrivain ‘en roman’ (en français), de formuler le secret des fondations réussies, de forger à neuf la très subtile alliance de l’amour humain et de la beauté du monde.” -- Emmanuèle Baumgartner, “Les romans ‘antiques’”, Magazine Littéraire 382 (1999): 40.

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Fifteenth-Century Studies 17 (1990): 57-66 [The Medieval Text:  Methods and Hermeneutics:  A Volume of Essays in Honor of Edelgard E. DuBruck.  Ed. William C. McDonald and Guy R. Mermier.

EILHART'S SEMINAL TOWER OF PLEASURE

Raymond J. Cormier

Eilhart von Oberg postpones the denouement of his tragic Tristan love story by inserting a cameo that mirrors the sad destiny of his main characters.l  This observation refers to the tale of Gariole and Kehenis, who find themselves deeply in love but thwarted by an evil, jealous husband.

         In the words of Eilhart (as translated by J. W. Thomas, 137-38):  "Not far from Karahes lived a mighty lord named Nampetenis...".  This warrior, having retired from high, knightly deeds and pursuits, now spends all his time at the hunt shooting game or stays busy watching over his beautiful wife whom he keeps guarded in complete custody, grimly even and dishonorably. That is, he has very high castle walls built and three moats dug around the structure.  Nampetenis himself carries the keys to the castle;  he is the gatekeeper and allows no males young or old, bondsmen or nobles, to remain within whenever he rides out to hunt.  Only women can stay to watch over and keep the company of the sorely vexed Lady Gariole.

         Now Gariole, before her marriage, had promised Kehenis secretly that she would receive him if he came to visit.  When Nampetenis heard of this, he had the watch doubled, but nevertheless, since both Kehenis and Gariole were filled with thoughts of love for each other, Kehenis succeeded and came in secret to visit one day when Nampetenis was off hunting.

On this quiet, windless day, Gariole up above the gated wall, sees and welcomes her lover.  Kehenis reminds her of her promise of pleasure before the hateful marriage.  The lady is perfectly willing, but recalls her state--locked up so that no one can reach her.  "'You have surely heard,' she calls out, 'how my lord guards me, but my heart is so inclined toward you that I shall do your will if you can get in here to me'" (138).  To help his brother-in-law (Kehenis is, of course, Isolde of the White Hands's brother) solve this logistical problem, Tristrant the consultant in adultery advises Kehenis to have a wax impression of the castle keys made so that another set can be cast from the imprint.

         Eilhart interrupts this suspenseful episode with the unexpected news of Tristrant's father's death.  The hero must leave Kehenis, but will return soon.  Once Kehenis has the keys and Nampetenis goes off to his daily hunt, the youth, along with his companion Tristrant, goes to tryst with Lady Gariole.  But Nampetenis, upon his return, because of the visitors' foolishness and brazen carelessness, realizes that both Tristrant and Kehenis must have entered the castle tower.

        The jealous, enraged husband enters the chamber, draws his sword, then threatens Gariole with death unless she tell the truth (151):

Nampetenis: "'What did he do to you?'"

Gariole: "'He kissed me.'"

--"'Did you make love to him?'"

--"'No, I didn't.'"

--"'You're lying.'"

--"'Lord, I am.'"

--"'It did come to that.'"

--"'It came to what?'"

--"'He pulled me down under him against my will.'"

--"'How did he get in?'"

--"'Lord, I don't know.  He did it without my help.'"

Thereupon, Nampetenis rides off with eight armed knights to chase his enemies--for vengeance.  Kehenis and Tristrant are obliged to take a desperate stand, and try to save themselves, but to no avail.  Kehenis is slain and Tristrant mortally wounded by Nampetenis's poisoned lance--a wound that only Isolde the Blond can heal.

The Kehenis and Gariole mini-love story of adultery and its tragic consequences stands inside of the Tristrant and Isolde frame so that it echoes and enhances the imagery.  It is not unlike a "narrative illusion," a pun on the story of Tristran and Isolde.

The character of Nampetenis will culminate in Moliere's Arnolphe, an individual obsessed with maintaining order and control over his life.  Such obsessed monomaniacs refuse to accept that the universe has its own design, its own ineluctable and often irrational structure.

        To come directly now to our topic, towers of love and towers of

pleasure, which are so common in medieval literature, it seems that the antecedents may lie first of all in the Carthaginian cave of adultery into which Dido and Aeneas withdraw from a storm in Virgil's Book IV (and perhaps this was fused to the Elysian Fields notion in Book VI of the Aeneid).  Numerous stories of love in Ovid's Metamorphoses feature a lookout post or watchtower for the maiden.  But the image may also arise from some confusion regarding two key words in medieval Latin:  arx, arcis, a Classical Latin form meaning "castle, citadel, fortress," which appears concurrently with turris, turris, "tower."  Over and above this, one finds also arca, arcae, a chest, box coffin, and of course, the ark, i.e., both of the Covenant and of Noah (there are about 200 references in the Old Testament).  These two terms became confused as early as the 4th century A.D., when Servius used them together toward the beginning of his commentary on the Aeneid (ad 1. 262).2

Closer in time to Eilhart, one thinks of the historically novel wooden forts (donjons or "keeps") brought to England by William the Conqueror in 1066.  The essentials were transported across the Channel in prefabricated form and erected at Hastings beachhead for the battle.  The fort consisted of a raised mound of earth (motte), with a flattened top, which was then surrounded by a barbican or palisade, within which a tall tower of light timber (not heavy stone) was constructed, then further encircled by a bailey or ward, i.e., a ditch, the earth from which was thrown inward to form a bank behind which stood the wooden spiked palisade.3

Moreover, there are a number of romances dating from the third quarter of the 12th century that incorporate a pleasure dome of some kind.  One thinks immediately of the tower of Lavinia in the Roman d'Eneas, so admired and so irresistible to the hero's longing stare.  Lavinia in the tower is the image with which Eneas falls in love, for he never speaks to her face-to-face (Roman d'Eneas, ed. Salverda de Grave, vv. 8903-8907; 8661-9099; 9236-9252).  The mal

mariée in Marie de France's Guigemar is imprisoned in a tower-garden;  Chretien's Erec et Enide also come to mind with its intriguing Joie de la Cort episode.  In Chretien's Cliges, the hero has a secret underground dwelling designed for his beloved Fénice, mindful of both the Cave of Lovers and the Hall of Statues in the courtly Tristan tradition.

I should like to review these texts now to focus on the constructs in question.  Because of its semiotic position in the Tristrant story of Eilhard, the tower-garden prison of his Lady Gariole seems to me significant and seminal.

For Marie de France's Guigemar, salvation is paradoxically found in an old fortified place, the capital of the kingdom (Lais, ed. J. Rychner, vv. 200 ff.). Like Nampetenis, the jealous lord's lovely spouse is of "high birth, noble, courtly, beautiful and wise."  He had her locked up in a garden, at the foot of a donjon or tower, where the enclosure was surrounded by a high green marble wall.  The single exit was under guard night and day.  On the far side, the sea blocked any passage and no one could reach his wife--except by boat.  Enter Guigemar hopelessly in love, by boat of course!

In Chretien's Erec et Enide, at Brandigan castle, a self-contained and impregnable fort, the hero willingly undertakes a dangerous and fearful adventure (ed. Roques, vv. 5340 ff.).  At a nearby orchard, he finds no palisade, only a magical wall of air that encloses the place.  Within are varied and exotic fruits that cannot be brought outside because one cannot leave with them, unless they wither.  The singing birds, the sweet spices and herbs all suggest to Erec a foretaste of Paradise.

Within this vale of life and death, Erec sees a silver bed, covered with gold-embroidered sheets:  in the shadow of a sycamore, there reclines a maiden fair, lovely and noble.  Her knight champion (named later:  Mabonagrain) threatens the hero because he came near the maiden;  a battle ensues (vv. 5890-5990) and Mabonagrain is defeated.  Now he explains the situation;  their enthralling passion led him to accept a rash boon from his beloved

--pronounced once he became a knight:  the lady "... ordered him

forthwith to keep his word," and made him swear "never to leave [from the orchard] until an armed knight should come who could submit [him] to his power" (vv. 6028-6030; 6250 ff.).

This is why Mabonagrain must stay--or break his word.  The lady, because of her immoderate love, thought to keep him there a long time, in prison with her--dominated and outside of the social order.  By liberating Mabonagrain from this frightful bind, Erec brings joy to the whole court and countryside.

In Fourquet' s interesting explication (as Burgess reports), this episode functions at two levels, courtly and mythical or non-courtly.  In the latter view, a series of young men arrive at an enchanted world that is governed by a fairy princess;  the entrance is protected by a fierce guardian, whom the predestined hero defeats and thereby can take possession of the enchanted kingdom. The wall of air, the permanent springtime atmosphere, the stakes with impaled heads and helmets, the vacant pike, Mabonagrain's size, the magic horn that will announce the call to joy--all belong here.  On the chivalric level, one should stress Mabonagrain's overdeveloped sense of honor and his adolescent infatuation with the damsel. He actually becomes a "prisoner of words" (Burgess, 88), and submission to the damsel's wishes means "slavery."

"Defeat for him means liberation.  He wanted to be beaten, provided that his honor was safeguarded.”4

In Chrétien's Cligés, the architect/engineer Jehanz (Jean) leads the hero to a secret dwelling, never seen by any human, and proposes it as a safe location for Fénice, la fausse morte.  It is Jean's workshop, where he paints and sculpts (ed. A. Micha, vv. 5840 ff.).  He designed this isolated dwelling in the tower with great art and painted the interior with lovely illuminated images. Cligés visits the whole place, realizes it is commodious, beautiful, and appropriate for his beloved.

Jean assures Cligés no one will find her there since ingenious and cunning hiding places exist within.  Featuring a well-stocked larder and hidden stone doorway, the tower is ever more fair and comfortable, vast in its underground flooring (vv. 5531 ff.).  Jean then leans against a polished and colorfully painted door that magically opens to a spiral stairway, leading to Jean's solitary workshop.  For Cligés and his amie, there are bedrooms, bathrooms, and hot, running water in the bathtubs.

This labyrinth-like retreat--vaguely mindful of Vonnegut's pleasure-dome on Trafalmador--almost seems like an objectification of the human brain.  Perhaps Chrétien is hinting here at the "hall of statues" found in the Tristan tradition.  The tower-basement, a structure whose design wins freedom for Cligés' engineer/vassal is, according to the critic Lucie Polak, an "artificial paradise, a world of illusion, as well as of death."5

Deep inside and below the tower, Fénice revives and is nursed from her false death and wounds by Thessala and by Cligés' love (vv. 5570 ff.;  6079ff.).  There she spends some fifteen long, dark months, until spring arrives.  Hearing the nightingale, she wishes to go outside (vv. 6259 ff.).  Jean leads them through another magical door to a delightful, sun-drenched orchard (v. 6305).  In its midst rises a huge leafy tree in full bloom, shaped like a cradle (perhaps a weeping willow?), its branches hanging down to the ground.  Like a latter-day Tristan and Iseut in Beroul's Morois forest--who recline for rest and pleasure in a leafy bower--Fénice and Cligés make their bed under the shady, blossoming tree, whose thick branches had been artfully pruned by Jean so that the sun could never penetrate the intimacy of their flowery bower (but see vv. 6342 ff., for the interruption that leads to the dénouement) .

         In the so-called courtly version, Thomas d'Angleterre (i.e., Thomas of Britain) and Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan describe two different hideaways, the Lovers' Cave (Hatto, 261 ff.) and the Hall of Statues.  In flight from the King, Tristan, Isolde, and Curvenal hasten through the forest and find an abandoned cavern in the wilderness, on a tree-covered mountainside.  The cave, hewn in heathen times by giants, is a high, snow-white, round, and broad grotto that features a bronze door.  Like a cathedral for love, the vault boasts tiny, high windows for light and, on the keystone, an engraved crown of gold-encrusted jewels with a pavement of smooth, green marble.  In the center sits a high crystal bed, dedicated to Venus.  Three lime trees shade the entrance, and nearby a brook flows "clear as the sun."  The flowers, a green glade, singing birds and breezes all complement this pagan locus amoenus (263). Here was the lovers' court of love, like heaven on earth, and, as if in a company of courtiers, Tristan and Isolde enjoyed the green limes, the sunshine, the shade, stream and flowers (264).

Later in the story tradition, by defeating a huge giant and accepting his homage, the Tristan of Thomas d' Angleterre orders the loser and his skilled minions "to make a hall in a cavern, then to fashion lifelike statues of Queen Ysolt and Brengvein" (315). Ysolt is represented with a sceptre on the tip of which a bird is perched that beats its wings.  In her left hand she holds a ring with an inscription, the words she uttered at the lovers' parting.

At her feet cringes the image of the Dwarf-Traitor, and the dog Petitcreu rests next to her;  as it shook its head, bells would jingle.  Brengvein's statue holds forth a vial containing the potion.  Whenever Tristan could, he would visit and kiss and embrace the image.  Here in this Hall of Statues, all his emotions can be expressed:  he talks to them, weeps, and laments...(316).

Brother Robert's Saga (Schach, 101) reiterates the depiction of the underground vault in the forest built by heathens.  The fragrant herbs, the beautiful, tall shade tree, and running brook are lovely indeed, but the star-crossed hero must keep busy with hunting (for food, not just simple amusement).  Subsequently, Tristan fights and defeats an African giant, who then constructs for him a vaulted edifice, "Hewn and carved with the greatest skill" (16 ff., 118).  Situated near Mont St. Michel, it can be entered only at ebbtide.  Here within, the giant's craftsmen set up in secret carved and veneered figures--wooden carving colored and gilt.  These lifelike and artistic images cunningly exhaled a fragrance from their mouths.  It was Tristan who devised the idea of placing tubes down the mouth into a hidden container of sweet-smelling herbs. Brother Robert follows the courtly tradition in most details, but adds to the entry-way a huge statue of the giant (it recalls the villein in Yvain).  A lion guards the other side of the entrance and its tail lashes around another statue, that of the traitorous steward.  Tristan visits Isolde's statue for consolation and recalls their former happiness and joy. (122).

A study that would analyze in more depth than time or space allowed here could doubtless show how crucial and original Eilhart's Lady Gariole episode is.  But the image of the tower and its inverted form, the underground dwelling, remain fascinating icons in a broad selection of medieval narrative texts.  More study and more examples of the image--from the Tower of Babel on--will doubtless bear out Hanning's observation (Individual;  cit. Noble 45) regarding the tower in Cligés, namely that it represents in visual and palpable terms the imprisoning effect of the lovers' enthralling affair, which, ironically, is supposed to liberate them, especially Fénice.6

Both the enclosed underground basement or tower-dungeon, the isolated and abondoned cavern to which the lovers retreat, and the high tower-prison, all suggest a positive and a negative interpretation.  On the one hand, the mal mariée is a prisoner of love, forcibly confined and guarded by a jealous, aged husband.  On the other. the tower is an enclosed refuge for the lovers, a sacred locus cut off from the profane.  From the frequency of the rich and creative image of the tower of pleasure in the twelfth-century it may be inferred that we are dealing with yet another unique innovation arisen from a fusion of a distant antique model and an indistinct Christian doctrine.

NOTES

1  This study was the object of a short presentation at the Tristan Studies Symposium, 21st International Congress of Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, May 1986.  I am grateful for the useful remarks made by respondents, especially for those by Professor Merritt R. Blakeslee.

2  Professor Blakeslee recalled also, along these lines, the ambiguity of the Vulgar Latin phrase in montem ("into, in").

3  "Engineering, Military." Encyclopaedia Britannica III, Vol. 6.

4  G. Burgess, Chrétien de Troyes:  Erec et Enide, pp. 89-93. Burgess hints at the paradox inherent in all this.  Sara Sturm-Maddox presents cogent arguments in favor of seeing the Sparrowhawk episode and the winning of Enide by Erec (plus the récréance theme evoked in Laluth) as a foreshadowing of the Joie de la Cort episode--with Erec's defeat of Mabonagrain.

5  L. Polak, Chrétien de Troyes:  Cligés, pp. 66-67.

6 Noble, Love and Marriage, p. 45, refers to R. Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth Century Romance (169).

REFERENCES

Bédier, Joseph.  Le Roman de Tristan par Thomas.  2 vols.  SATF.  Paris: Didot, 1902-1905.

Beroul.  Romance of Tristan.  Ed. Alfred Ewert.  2 vols. Oxford:  B. Blackwell, 1939, 1967, 1970.

Burgess. Glyn S. Chrétien de Troyes:  Erec et Enide.  Critical Guides.  London:  Grant & Cutler, 1984.

Buschinger, Danielle.  Le 'Tristrant' d'Eilhard von Obert.  Lille:  Université de Lille III/Service de reproduction des thèses, 1974.

Chrétien de Troyes. Cligès.  Ed. A. Micha.  Paris:  Champion, 1957.

Cormier. Raymond J.  "Bédier, Brother Robert and the Roman de Tristan."  Pp. 69-75 in Etudes de Philologie romane et d'Histoire Littéraire offertes à Jules Horrent.  Ed. J. M. D'Heur and N. Cherubini. Liège:  Université de Liège, 1980.

Cormier, Raymond J.  ″Frappier, Eilhart, and the Roman de Tristan."  Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 34 (1991): 67-76. [An abbreviated version appeared in Tristania 14 (1993): 9-13.]

Cormier, Raymond J.  ″Open Contrast:  Tristan and Diarmaid."  Speculum 51 (1976): 589-601.

Cormier, Raymond J.  "Remarks on 'The Tale of Deirdriu and Noisiu' and the Tristan Legend. "  Études celtiques 15(1977): 303-315.

Cormier, Raymond J.  "Tristan and the Noble Lie." Studies in the Humanities 4(1974): 10-14.

Delage, M. J.  "Quelques notes sur Chrétien de Troyes et le Roman de Tristan."  Pp. 11-19 in Mélanges Jonin.  Aix-en-Provence: Senefiance 7 ;  Publications du CUER MA, 1979.

Eilhart von Obert.  Tristrant.  Ed., trans. Danie1le Buschinger. Göppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik, 202.  Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1976.

Eilhart von Obert.  Tristrant.  Trans. J.W, Thomas.  Lincoln, NE and London:  University of Nebraska Press, 1978.

Frappier, Jean.  "Structure et sens du Tristan:  Version commune, version courtoise." Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévalee 6 (1963): 255-280; 441-454.

Friar Robert.  The Saga of Tristram and Isönd. Trans. Paul Schach.  Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973.

Gottfried von Strasburg.  Tristan.  Trans. A.T. Hatto. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960, 1967.

Marie de France.  Les Lais.  Ed. J. Rychner.  Paris:  Champion,

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Noble, Peter S.  Love and Marriage in Chrétien de Troyes.

Cardiff:  University of Wales Press, 1982.

Patch, H. R.  The Literature of the Other World According to Descriptions in Medieval Literature.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1950.

Polak, Lucie. Chrétien de Troyes: Cligés.  Critical Guides. London:  Grant & Cutler, 1982.

Schach, Paul.  "The Saga of Tristram de Isodd:  Summary or Satire?"  Modern Language Quarterly 21(1960): 336-352.

Schoepperle, Gertrude.  Tristan and Isolt: A Study of the Sources of the Romance.  2 vols.  2nd ed.  New York:  Burt Franklin, 1963.  [RP Frankfurt a. Main, 1913.]

Shirt, David J.  The Old French Tristan Poems.  Research Bibliographies and Checklists, 28.  London:  Grant & Cutler, 1980.

Sturm-Maddox, Sara.  "Hortus non conclusus:  Critics and the Joie de la Cort," in Oeuvres et Critiques (ed. R. J. Cormier), 5,2 (1980-81): 61-71.