A Neo-Tristan

In “Cliges,” Chretien de Troyes refers to the legend of Tristan and Iseult several times, usually with revulsion at Iseult’s inappropriate, unchaste behavior and the dishonorable nature of her love with Tristan.

Fenice tells her nurse:

“I’d rather be torn limb from limb than have our love remembered like that of Tristan and Isolde, which has become a source of mockery and makes me ashamed to talk of it. I could never agree to lead the life Isolde led. Love was greatly abased in her, for her heart was given entirely to one man, but her body was shared by two; so she spent all her life without refusing either” (161).

And, Fenice tells Cliges:

“If I love you and you love me, you will never be called Tristan nor I Isolde, which would suggest that our love was not honorable” (187).

In the notes to “Cliges,” translators William Kibler and Carleton Carroll note that the references to Tristan and Isolde in this story have led many critics to read the story “as an ‘anti-Tristan,’ or as a recasting of the Tristan story in a comic mode” (509).

How we read “Cliges” in reference to the story of Tristan and Isolde has implications for our understanding of Troyes’s attitude towards love and the proper forms in which it should appear or its victims behave. If we read “Cliges” as an ‘anti-Tristan,’ this would lead us to believe Troyes is offering an idealized version of how Tristan and Isolde should have behaved, submitting Cliges and Fenice as models of how to properly attain their loved one. After all, their tale ends happily ever after, which would imply they did the right thing, doesn’t it?

Not quite so. As we’ve seen in other Troyes tales, miscreants are not always punished. In “The Knight With the Lion,” the damsel serving the lady who aids Yvain lies to her mistress about the ointment, claiming that she lost the box in a stream while crossing a bridge (334). Her lady is angry, but pardons the damsel. Therefore, we can’t expect Troyes to, as many other writers are prone to doing, enforce justice upon those characters who perform moral errors. We can reasonably expect that Cliges and Fenice could be in the wrong and get off scot-free — although Fenice doesn’t quite get off without a scratch, literally.

Furthermore, reading “Cliges” as an ‘anti-Tristan’ doesn’t explain the severity of Fenice’s abuse at the hands of the three doctors, nor is this reading supported by Troyes’s conclusion to the story, in which he references subsequent empresses locked up by their husbands.

Robert Levine is one scholar and critic who expresses skepticism about reading “Cliges” as ‘anti-Tristan.’ In his essay, “Repression in ‘Cliges,’” available on JSTOR, Levine suggests, rather, that we read ‘Cliges’ as a ‘neo-Tristan,’ a “new version of the legend … [in which] Chretien seems to have attempted to moralize the Tristan-story” (210). His essay focuses on a Freudian analysis of the highly sexualized material in the tale, of which I’ll offer a little taste here:

The story “includes the flagellation of a naked heroine, mock necrophilia, displaced incest with fantasies of the impotence of the father-figure, symbolic castration of a voyeur, urogenital fascination, and some mild hair-fetichism” (Levine 209).

That aside, I won’t go into further detail, but a particular claim by Levine stands out and is relevant to a reading of “Cliges” as ‘neo-Tristan’: “Cliges is, at least, a strange poem whose peculiar incidents and shifts of tone can only partially be accounted for by considering the poem a brave attempt to idealize vulgar material” (Levine 209).

Essentially, one could argue that the elements of “Cliges” that Levine views as peculiar stem from Troyes’s dislike of the tale he’s allegedly repeating from another book. Troyes views his story as not a response to the Tristan story, with a moralizing influence, but as a new, twisted version that is just as morally repugnant. This reading is driven home by Fenice’s extreme punishment by the doctors, Cliges’s seemingly senseless punishment of Bertrand, and Troyes’s aside at the conclusion of the story.

In this aside, particularly, Troyes delineates the lasting consequences of Cliges and Fenice’s behavior for subsequent generations, as “every empress, whoever she is and regardless of her riches and nobility, is kept like a prisoner in Constantinople, for the emperor does not trust her when he recalls the story of Fenice” (205). Cliges and Fenice may have lived happily ever after, but every empress after Fenice suffers for her pseudo-Isolde-like conduct.

Thus, Troyes offers a new Tristan by punishing not the miscreants themselves, as Tristan and Isolde were punished — limiting the implications of their behavior to their lifetimes — but rather the heirs of Fenice’s legacy, extending the impact through future generations. Troyes shows unchaste, improper expressions of love as potentially adversely affecting others, usually innocents, long beyond the lovers’ lifetime, suggesting that other lovers had, indeed, better be very careful about how they go about loving.

Levine, Robert. “Repression in ‘Cliges.’” SubStance, Vol. 5, No. 15, Socio-Criticism. University of Wisconsin Press, 1976. 209-221.