Category Archives: Musings

Yonec and the Hawk

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Yonec particularly interested me this week, mostly for its shape-shifting King.  I was curious about why it was a hawk this king was able to transform into.  Although the lai doesn’t come out and say he is a hawk, it does say the bird that flies into the lady’s chamber “looked like a hawk / of five or six moultings” (Lines 110-111).  I think the likeness of the hawk instead of a definite claim to be a hawk is to avoid the king being characterized as less than human.  I found the use of a hawk as opposed to any other bird to be interesting because of the hunting skills hawks possess.  Not only is this King rich, noble, Christian, and courteous, he’s also an excellent hunter, even when he is in an un-human form.  Hunting seems to be a recurring theme in the lais we’ve read.  A knight’s desire, and ability, to hunt is something natural and accepted (as long as it doesn’t prevent other knightly duties).  Even in Equitan, the use of hawks for hunting purposes is presented to the reader.  We’re told the seneschal would never “neglect his hunting, his hawking, or his other amusements” (Lines 27-28).

The description of his castle when the lady (who goes unnamed) follows his trail of blood is similar to the descriptions of fairy possessions we’ve encountered.  “The feet of the bed were all of polished gold, / I couldn’t guess the value of the bedclothes; / the candles and the chandeliers, / which were lit night and day / were worth the gold of an entire city.” (Lines 389- 392).  So, here we have a King from a far away land who has always loved a lady, but had to wait until the right time to appear, and has unimaginable wealth and many followers.  Why not make him a fairy instead of a hawk?  Does this representation retain more of his humanity?  Or is he a fairy who takes the shape of a hawk to travel?

I think I need to encounter the text again before drawing any definite conclusions about the use of the hawk opposed to other birds.

Body and Soul

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Typically, objectification is a demeaning and disempowering practice. Object-oriented ontology, though, elevates and empowers objects, inverting the typical implications of objectification (perhaps even encouraging it). An object-oriented reading of Marie de France’s Yonec objectifies bodies in a peculiar way. It distinguishes them from the minds or souls that reside within them, while insisting that there should still be parallels (if not union) between the two.

The young lady uses this technique herself to deny her old husband a soul, referring to him as “this jealous man, / who married me to his body” (83-4). Demonizing and objectifying him, the lady rejects any spiritual tie to her husband, making their marriage a mere marriage of bodies. Her own body tainted by his, she lets its beauty go “as one does who cares nothing for it” (48). Divorcing herself from her body takes quite a toll on it, but hopefully preserves her soul.

She later learns, though, the value of the body (and beauty, for only beautiful bodies have value, it seems). Her newfound lover reminds her that the soul and body are ideally one, using his body (though her appearance) “to receive the body of our lord God” (162). The lord’s very body is sacred, and can be accessed through the body. Given this reminder that the body is meant to house the soul, “[h]er body had now become precious to her” (215). Re-embracing her body as her own, her home for Christ and romantic love, “she completely recovered her beauty” (216). The body cannot house the soul if they do not reflect each other. By this mutual dependency, the soul cannot be preserved by abandoning the body (as she tried with her marriage of bodies), any more than the body bloom without a soul.

A Negative Assemblage

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Is there such a thing as a negative assemblage? In Marie de France’s Equitan, we see how the love affair between the king and his seneschal’s wife is wrong and will have terrible consequences for them in the end. Marie is clearly subverting the courtly love virtues of the time (like ones espoused in Guigemar for instance) in her cynical (rather than sincere or straightforward) presentation of the love affair.

In the courtly love tradition, love was not really love without pain and suffering. Truly loving someone could be described as fundamentally irrational, but necessary for the love to say alive. However, it is obvious that, in this story, their love is characterized by destructive tendencies. The affair literally destroys them—it is a lack of loyalty, honor, or discretion leads them toward a painful demise.

Ultimately, the message is one of reciprocity: your evil deeds will not go unpunished. At the end, she admonishes: “whoever wants to hear some sound advice/can profit from this example:/he who plans evil for another/may have that evil rebound back on him” (lines 307-310).  The “love” assemblage in this story, not only does not work, but proves to be fatal for both lovers. They committed the sin of loving too strongly, the irony being than in any other story “loving too strongly” is often viewed as a virtue.

We think of assemblages as working toward the common good, but are they all necessarily performing this function?  The affair (demonstrating the “power” of love) in Equitan does not end well for the ones involved. The resolution of the love affair suggests that something was out of balance in the first place. The king values his love over his loyalty, and in doing so, allows his passion to overwhelm his reason. Considering the primary imbalance of the assemblage, it is clear that the fate of the unfaithful couple will not end well.

The dangers of deliberate obliviousness

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The protagonists in Equitan are characterised by a lack of understanding over how their agency will affect others, and what actions others will take in response. None of the characters can escape that they are part of an assemblage, with only partial power over their fate, and their denial of this fact is what destroys them.

This is clear in the title character’s behaviour, as he consistently disregards the consequences of his actions, or deliberately creates ridiculous ones he knows to be incorrect: “he certainly can’t hold her all by himself”. This is different from acknowledging what real reactions you may provoke through use of your agency, but deciding to accept these potentially negative consequences, because the reward is worth it. The king never examines the situation for actual outcomes; instead, he willingly allows his desires to lead him down a path, without properly checking whether the end point could be fatal. In contrast, the woman whom he pursues considers the matter carefully, asking for “some time to think”, and thus respects the different actants involved. However, she is persuaded by Equitan’s words, rather than his true sentiments, which leads her to falsely believe that he thinks their love is worth risking their lives for. In reality, he’s a coward who considers damaging effects only when they occur, as shown by his illogical, panic-stricken decision to dive into boiling water, rather than protect his lover. The seneschal is the only one of the love triangle who takes into account others’ potential reactions to his agency, which is reflected in his deep-set loyalty to his king.

In an assemblage, each actant must consider how their agency will affect others, and how, in turn, these reactions will affect them, before they use their thing-power. There is always a risk in enacting one’s agency, but Equitan shows that this risk is greatly increased when those involved fail to acknowledge how their agency might influence others.

Agency and Virtue in “Yonec”

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In our discussion of Yonec the question was raised of why the zombie-king was executed after his change of heart.  Personal journeys of spiritual redemption are commonplace in Marie’s works, yet the king’s redemption (he “never assaulted or abused [the lady]” after the knight’s death) is disregarded (456).  Marie’s denial of the king’s redemption reflects a fundamental flaw in his change of heart- it is the ring that exerted its agency to change the king’s ways, overwhelming the agency of the king who would otherwise have preferred to be an abusive husband.  In an assemblage, agency shifts between different actants within, and in the king’s network the ring shifted agency from the king’s will, rendering his redemptive actions as morally weightless as they were not backed by the king’s true will.  Marie seems to be saying that virtue can only exist in a knightly world if it comes from the soul, something the zombie-king either lost to the ring or never possessed in the first place.

If these things could talk…

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This week while reading “Yonec” I was reminded a lot of “Guigemar” because of the same wife locked away in a room scenario.  However, I liked that in “Yonec” the wife has more of a voice.  In “Guigemar” we are given a description of the king that is very much like the description of the king in “Yonec.”  he is “a very aged man who ha[s] a wife” (Guigemar 210).  In “Yonec”, the king is “rich, old and ancient” (Yonec 12).  So in “Guigemar” the king is characterized in terms of having a wife, and in “Yonec” the king is identified by his money.  I don’t really see anything out of the ordinary here, but in “Yonec” we are provided with the wife’s perspective of her husband which I thought was just great.  She calls him a “jealous old man” (71), and says that “when he should have been baptized / he was plunged instead in the river of hell; / his senews are hard, his veins are hard, / filled with living blood” (87-90).  Whoa!  I didn’t realize how much of a woman’s voice was lacking in the lais until this one finally spoke.  I know women do speak occasionally in the lais, but this is the first time I really felt like I heard one with a voice.

Another exclamation of the wife’s that made me think is when she cries that she should have never been born, her fate is terrible, and that she is imprisoned until death (67-70).  Most intriguingly she thinks, “What is this jealous old man afraid of / that he keeps me so imprisoned?” (71-2).  If we place everything on a horizontal plane like Bennett suggests, I wonder how many other “things” like the wife are screaming inside to be allowed to be the director of their own agency instead of being forced to serve the agendas of others (humans).  Going back to the wife’s earlier opinion of her husband:  what if things could talk?  What would they say about their “owners”?

Love is grand…

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Marie de France seems to praise the grandness of love in most of her lais by depicting love as something that brings great happiness as well as great suffering. This is a characterisitic seen in most tales about courtly love. Love’s intensity exists in romantic relationships as well as platonic relationships. We see intense love between Sir Cleges and his King even after he has fallen from grace. Cleges’ love for his King demands that he still defend the right and justice in the name of his King in order for the kingdom to represent these moral rights. In class we discussed how the love seen in Laustic is somewhat bland because the lovers have no real barrier between them and their love is orientated towards the physical rather than the abstract idea of love as something beyond the physical. While we discussed the lack of love between the lovers there also seems to be a lack of love between two men of the same court as well as a lack of love for the beautiful. The absence of the love between noble neighbors and of beauty is unusual when compared to other lais.

These two noblemen live as neighbors and are favored by the same king but little is said of their relationship and it could probably assumed that their relationship hardly exists since one of the neighbors is so content to have an affair with his fellow nobleman’s wife. Although, throughout the lais we see several affairs of married individuals we see fee in which a knight or nobleman of one kingdom has a relationship with a fellow knight or nobleman’s wife. Most of the affairs occur far from their home kingdom. In other lais their have been great love between neighbors and fellow individuals with noble blood. For example in Le Fresne by Marie de France  the two neighbors have such a close bond that when one of them has twin sons he basically names his neighbor as his son’s godfather. There is no such strong bond of friendship and love seen in Laustic.

Love between romantic lovers and friends is clearly diminished of status in this text but there is also a lack of appreciation and love for beauty. Beauty is embraced and revered in many of the lais. In Milun this beauty is seen in the swan that the lovers use to exchange letters. The beauty of the nightingale is destroyed in this text when the wife uses it as a way to fulfill her need for an explanation. This in itself is crime against the beauty of the nightingale.

 

Viruses as Backstabbing Allies: A Fever-Induced Rant on the Definition of LIFE and the End of TIME

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We just can’t get through a class discussion recently without mentioning alliances or networks, now can we?  Alliances with objects are inescapable in the lais we’ve read, including “Emare,” whose plot is driven by letters, a ship, and a robe, among others.  Emare’s “alliance” with the robe had its up and downs, as it both led to her love with her husband and led to her banishment by the mother.  But in the end, as in all lais, the story ended with Emare on top, with the net result of her alliance leading to fortune and a happy life.  Does this suggest that all alliances with things are for the best?  Perhaps, but a happy ending is an essential quality of the British lai, and perhaps not all networks and alliances end for the better.  Especially since I’ve entered into an alliance with a special “thing” this week, a virus.

Now, the “thingness” of viruses has been up to debate for a while now.  In short, they are composed of organic matter, eat, and reproduce, yet they do not autonomously self-reproduce and are thus damned by the scientific community to the level of “thing,” as opposed to the vibrant level of organism.  Yes, we have beaten to death the idea that all matter is on the same level of existence, as things (anything, really) are only judged by their ability to act as actants, to influence or redefine other things.  And this virus certainly is an actant, which led to my absence yesterday and has directed my discussion towards its existence.  Does that mean the virus has agency?  It certainly changed my plans for this week, limiting my actions and “forcing” me to feel rather miserable.  I’m really not sure how to answer that question at this point, but hopefully I’ll be able to when my body is done hosting this rude guest.  Whether the virus “wants” to or not, it’s destroying my cells and making clones of itself.  In fact, that is its very purpose- to inject its RNA and produce clones of itself.  But calling this agency is the same as claiming that a river chooses to flow into the ocean.  This is its natural predisposition, and consciousness may be far removed from the virus and its natural life choices.

Is my alliance with this actant going to be beneficial in the end?  I’m full of questions today, and I’m afraid that this one in particular may be impossible to answer.  Who knows, maybe missing class was for the best, and allowed me to avoid some tragic end the other day, maybe I’ll emerge from this sickness with a greater appreciation for life, and do great things because of it and change the world.  Maybe my changes will lead to a post-apocalyptic dystopia far after I’ve passed away and become one with the grass.  With lais or any writing, there is a clear ending point in the text.  A last word, a final page.  But in life, there is none, at least none that I can comprehend.  The net result of my life, or actions I took while under the influence of an actant, are an eternal mystery that can only be judged at the end of time.  But for now, I judge this actant as harmful to my alliance with things, yet I think it for helping me create these thoughts as I type in a feverish delirium.

Reputation

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Reputation, Reputation, Reputation. Reputation is a huge theme in all the medieval Breton Lais it seems. Lanval’s reputation is slighted when he doesn’t receive a gift from his lord King Arthur. Again his reputation is sullied when Guinevere lies and says he tried to sleep with her. We see the importance of reputation in Eliduc, when he has given his word to his wife that he will be faithful. Reputation is huge in Milun because the girl has gotten pregnant without being married. Almost the entire first part of Milun, a love story, focuses on her reputation and the worry she has if anyone finds out about the baby. The love part of the story takes a backseat. In fact love takes a backseat to reputation more often then I would have guessed. Milun and Eliduc are two lais in which this happens so I wanted to explore the agency of reputation in some of the lais we’ve read.

First off reputation in the romantic court is quite possibly the most important aspect of a knight. Every deed, action, adventure a knight does is done for his reputation. The same can be said of the woman in the court; they can’t have their reputations sullied. The society of the time of these lais stress reputation beyond anything. Reputation travels throughout the land. In Eliduc and Milun the love interests hear of Eliduc and Milun before they have ever laid eyes on them. The reputation of the two knights is what draws the knights and woman to each other. I think I can say that the woman fall in love with the knights’ reputation.

Reputation drives the society. The livelihood of the knights is dependent on reputation. When Eliduc’s reputation is slighted by the lies told to the King, he is kicked out of the King’s service and goes over seas to find a lord. The power of reputation to me is above even the power of love. Reputation has a higher relevance than religion or God in these lais. Reputation, Reputation, Reputation.

The Transcendent Power of Love in “Eliduc”

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What is the significance of the weasel scene in Marie de France’s Eliduc? Eliduc’s complicated love life comes to a head when his wife finds out about his affair with another woman. Surprisingly, her reaction is one of acceptance rather than anger. In fact, she goes so far as to bring his love back to life in an imitation of how the weasel brought his companion to life with the red flower.

It is significant that the weasels exemplify love’s power in this scene—its power to heal or destroy. In resituating its mate, the weasel also embodies the importance of loyalty or fidelity in the relationships between Eliduc and the two women. It is interesting that weasels would be used as the medium to express the ways in which love can overcome potential pettiness or jealousy and even death itself. The weasels’ love is not inferior; the love between the two weasels is analogous to the love between the two humans.

The wife’s reaction (i.e. to imitate their actions rather than dismiss them) shows how love transcends the divide between human and nonhuman. The exhibition of loving traits, even in the bodies of animals, does not alter the meaning of love itself but reaffirms the power of love to transcend body, space, and time. There are certainly different forms of love (and a ‘divine’ love may indeed be more important than an earthly one), but the fact remains: the weasels show how, in at least one respect, animal behavior mirrors its human counterparts.

The weasels may be important in and of themselves but, in renewing life through an act of love, they almost rise above the animal body itself—that kind of power is no respecter of artificial bodily boundaries. In portraying the scene as charming rather than ridiculous, the story illustrates the agency of love and the implied agency of the nonhuman actants as well.