Arthur and Love

Abstract

When I started writing this piece, I was surprised to discover that psychoanalytic discussions of Arthurian literature were not, bibliographically speaking, tagged as such. A search on 'Arthur and Lacan' revealed only some ten articles, one by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen on the armor and masculinity,1 one by Robert Sturges under the brilliant title 'La(can)celot,'2 which made me feel the next thing I want to write is La(cancan)celot, one on the Grail, none on Guinevere or Perceval or Galehot or Galahad or Camelot. There are a handful of books and articles on medieval subjects and psychoanalysis (including Louise Fradenburg, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, and in French Claire Nouvet and Alexandre Leupin). I wanted to find out why, since Lacan talks about courtly love all the time. There is fantastic work done on medieval romance by a French scholar whom I have always admired, Henri Rey-Flaud (who does the typically French version of it, 'mythoanalysis'3) and there are psychoanalytic excursions in every book that is written on the Middle Ages under the influence of French theory, but there isn't a sustained discourse on psychoanalysis and Arthur with the exception of masochism as a way to read the humiliation that knights frequently undergo as part of the heroic paradigm (as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), so I have set out to find out why there is so little explicit bibliographic connectedness. Can Arthur be analyzed? In French psychoanalytic discourse, Arthurian material is less prominent than, first, the troubadour lyric and, second, the Romance of the Rose. This is true, for instance, of the medieval chapters in Kristeva's Love Stories (in addition to Occitan lyric and the Rose, she also discusses Bernard of Clairvaux and, perhaps most famously, Stabat mater).4 But Kristeva's emphasis on the lyric has to be linked to her interest in language, and especially in deliberate linguistic indeterminacy. The centerpiece of her chapter on courtly love is the translation of a poem that gives two or three versions for each verse, very different from one another, and this profusion of meaning, of course, is a characteristic trait of troubadour poetics. Arthurian material in French is not at all written like that, with the exception of Chretien de Troyes, who can be complex (but not nearly as complex as lyric poetry). If troubadour poetry is like reading John Ashberry, the Lancelot-Grail reads like Bridget Jones' Diary. That is the reason why Lacan or Kristeva, who want to see language at work, are more interested in courtly love as scripted by the lyric poetry of the troubadours rather than by romances. However, I think that just like Bridget Jones, Arthurian material, in spite of its obvious shortfalls, can lend itself to the kind of psychoanalytic approach that is not like mythoanalysis. I am thinking in particular of some characteristic features of Lancelot Proper, the part of the French Lancelot-Grail that focuses on Lancelot, Guinevere, and Galehot.5 One feature is what I would call, borrowing Bryan Reynolds' label, 'paused consciousness,' and what the translators render as 'lover's trance.'6 The love of Lancelot for Guinevere is almost exclusively shown through this one feature: when he falls into a reverie as he looks at her. There are a number of variants, which are all interesting. On one occasion, he almost drowns with his horse. On another, he tells Guinevere she can come into the castle of Dolorous Guard, but then he is thinking about her standing on the battlements and she's waiting below and thinks he's made a fool of her, until he sees her leave in a huff and realizes what he has done, upon which he lets her in, but is so afraid to face her that he just leaves. Mild forms of trance occur when he looks at her and someone accosts him, but he does not answer for a very long time. This very prominent feature begs for a psychoanalytic approach, it seems to me. …