Christian Oster: From Courtly Love to Modern Malaise

Abstract

Even a cursory glance at Christian Oster's work shows an author hard at work drafting a new lover's map. From Volley-ball (1989) to Mon grand appartement (1999), Oster aimed to redefine the landscape of desire for a postmodern and post-romantic environment. If anything, his most recent production has not deviated from this goal. Indeed, Une femme de menage (A Maid) (2001), Dans le train (In the Train) (2002), Les rendez-vous (2003), and L'imprevu (The Unforeseen) (2005), set the stage for an even more rigorous investigation of love, its vagaries, and modus operandi. 1 Of course, the type of love that Oster investigates is a far cry from the fatuous sentimentality of Hallmark cards and contemporary telenovellas. Rather, it is a love anchored in the domestic and the trivial. It is a minimal love, more concerned with the mundane inner workings of the human heart (ludus), and remarkably unconcerned with pathos (mania). It is a love tempered by stoicism; this love does not amount to indifference, but seeks freedom from passion, which, etymologically, incorporates anguish and suffering. In his most recent works, Oster has gone to great pains to expound an Ars Amatoria that, unsurprisingly, draws from a familiar historical model: courtly love. Eros has always played a crucial part in Oster's fiction, but even more so in his current output. In his last novels, we encounter the same amiable losers, always looking for love, drifting between the loss of a former lover and the desire for a new one. Mihaela Voicu has argued that in Chretien de Troyes' Lancelot —and by extension, in all courtly love narratives—the hero is driven by a single thought, and that… all his acts are subordinated to his amorous contemplation. 2 Love, then, becomes the hero's idee fixe; it is all he thinks and seemingly cares about. And yet, that love cannot be consummated, lest the noble lover dishonor the object of his amorous longing, and himself in the process; one could argue that courtly love narratives cease to embody fine amor once love passes from desire to attainment. Thus it is incompleteness and lack that remain the mainstays of courtly love romances. In Lancelot, the eponymous hero conceives a passion for Queen Guenevere, though she is married to King Arthur and, in other