The Man with No Name: Identity in French Arthurian Verse Romance

Abstract

The Man with No Name:Identity in French Arthurian Verse Romance Sarah E. Gordon (bio) Incognito participation in tournaments reveals the fluidity of notions of identity as the success of the no-name knight calls into question the importance of naming conventions and notions of reputation in romance. (SEG) Who is who? What does identity mean in the chivalric world, and what does it tell us? And how do we know how to determine and evaluate it?' asks Norris J. Lacy in a recent essay focusing on armor and its relation to knightly identification in Chrétien's romances, the Merveilles de Rigomer, and the Prose Tristan.1 Lacy devotes his study to knights who appear with multiple shields or swords or who appear unarmed. The present article offers further consideration of identity, or rather the lack of identity, by investigating how incognito tournaments paradoxically construct identity and reputation while presenting an opposition to the romance conventions of naming and reputation. Questions of identity and changing identities are fundamental to character development in the romance genre.2 Through the actions of the incognito hero in romance tournaments, identity is transformed, the familiar becomes strange, the known unknown. When a knight fights incognito at a tournament or changes the color of his armor, he alters his identity in the public eye, or his 'perceived identity,' to use Lacy's term.3 Disguises or refusals to give one's name may in one sense question chivalric roles, courtly hierarchies, and fixed identities. The tournament in which the incognito hero appears has a dual purpose: to test the hero and to test the court's conventions. Protagonists don short-term disguises and conceal their names to test the court and courtly conventions, just as the chivalric contests test knightly prouesse. Following Chrétien de Troyes, later romancers respond to this ironic two-fold function of the anonymous hero in tournaments: the incognito scenes represent unconventional behavior within the context of a complex intertextual dialogue between the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, Guillaume le Clerc, and Raoul de Houdenc.4 Giving one's name, formal introductions, and public reputations are commonplaces of Arthurian romance. When knights become temporarily anonymous, the lack of naming is conspicuous by its absence and raises [End Page 69] questions about the very nature of knightly identity. Knights go incognito in some way in all five of Chrétien de Troyes's romances. The theme of anonymity assumes a variety of forms in verse and prose Arthurian romances after Chrétien, including refusals to reveal names; failures to recognize friends or family; misidentification; requests to remain unnamed; anonymous encounters and battles with friends and strangers alike; the deliberate hiding of one's identity; and the earning of new names, epithets, and reputation. Anonymity and incognito are used by Chrétien's heroes both to prove their worth and to test others. Many heroes throughout the Arthurian verse and prose romance traditions appear as young unknowns who must prove themselves through quests and combats under the auspices of the Arthurian court. In Chrétien's Conte du Graal, for instance, Perceval does not know his own name when he leaves home for Arthur's court; his adventures lead him to discover his identity, cementing the court's acceptance of him and lending meaning to the use of his name. Elsewhere, knights disguise themselves as fools, as women, and, most commonly, as nameless knights. By appearing incognito in Chrétien's romances, Perceval, Cligés, Yvain, and Lancelot show they are worthy fighters and lovers independent of the court's spectatorship and construction of their identity. On one level, it may be said that romances are about the construction or performance of both individual and group identities. Individual identities in romance may be developed over the course of a quest or constructed by the gaze of tournament spectators. Social psychologist Roy Baumeister, whose theories on subjectivity and identity are often applied in literary criticism on identity, generalizes that often in the Middle Ages: People were differentiated mainly by certain roles—family, rank, occupation… The public self dominated. The medieval person's identity was defined by a society within a firm network...