Simulation and Dissimulation in the Folie Tristan d’Oxford

Abstract

Historians of medieval medicine have argued persuasively for a semiotic understanding of diagnosis, in which externally visible symptoms are understood to signify internally inaccessible humoral imbalances. Successful treatment is predicated on the correct identification and description of a stable symptom-referent pair. Illness can thus be understood as inherently performative: the infirm body performs its illness in representing externally what is present internally. Simulation—the performance of symptoms divorced from their referents—threatens to destabilize the efficacy of medical semiotics, especially in regards to mental illness, due to its inherent interiority. In a complex system of simulation and dissimulation, the twelfth century constellation of Tristan romances exploits to great effect this notion of performative truth. Nowhere is this more significant or problematic than in the Folie Tristan d’Oxford, where Tristan, lovesick for Yseult, masquerades as a madman in order to gain access to his uncle’s court and thus his beloved. Given the proximity of lovesickness to madness, the distance required to produce irony and distinguish between the original and the simulated states is reduced to zero, resulting ultimately in their conflation. Despite this, it is this very act of embodying the madman that allows Tristan’s malady to be cured.