Love and War in Cligés

Abstract

C?ig?s is the only one of Chretien's romances in which he recounts a war. Critics have long noted the r alistic detail that Chretien uses to describ Angr?s's treason and Arthur's war against him in the first part of the romance, and they have often seen a disjunction between the realistic representation of the violence of war and the monologues full of metaphor and figurative language through which Alexandre and Soredamors come to understand and experience their love for each other. The perception of such a disjunction is heightened by the abrupt movements of the narrative from the war back to the lovers, then back to the war, then back to the lovers. In other words, the story of war is intercalated with a story of love, but the narrative style of each story seems to isolate it from the other in the romance. Sharon Kinoshita reads the two kinds of discourses in generic terms, noting that although the distinction between the epic-like discourse of war and the romance-type discourse of love is sometimes partially deconstructed in rhetorical conflations of love and war, 'the fundamental discursive incompatibility between the literal-mindedness of epic and the rhetorical excess of the monologues is both foregrounded and scrupulously ignored.'1 But how might these two narrative strands speak to each other across their differences of focus, of perspective, and of style? How might they be in dialogue with each other? What has the graphic description of war got to do with the metaphorical discourse of love, and what has the figurai and poetic description of growing love got to do with the violent narrative of war?