To a fallen away medievalist like myself this great company is intimidating. It reminds me of my yearly examinations at the Ecole des Chartes. After a fourty year absence from the field, I may be a little rusty. If it shows too much, please, blame Brigitte; she was extremely generous when she asked me to speak but she may have been unwise.

The following observations might me entitled: Impressions in a vacuum. I am not as well read as I should be and I may be saying things that have become banal. Re-reading Yvain, I was struck by something very banal, indeed, the importance of fame.

Knightly fame, in Chretien, is not a static value but something mobile and unstable because eminently competitive, as competitive as the public image of politicians today, or prestigious businessmen, artists, basketball players, etc. The ultimate question is always: «who is the best knight?» The answer does not depend on the king, or some other infallible authority; it depends on all the other knights. Each knight tries to impress his fellow knights so much that they will be forced to admire him more than they admire themselves.

We have many indications of hysterical competitiveness in Yvain. At the beginning, Arthur’s seneschal, Keu, derides Yvain in front of the queen and accuses him of bragging. This is as potentially deadly as plagiarism in the academic world. It is the reason why Yvain rushes to Esclados le Roux ahead of the expedition Arthur is preparing against this mysterious knight. Yvain is jumping the gun on his fellow knights and his initiative is ethically questionable; he is cheating his peers of their share in an affair that interests their reputation as well as his own. He is guilty of unfair competition.

A knight fighting in a distant land had a problem of information with the people back home. Nowadays, many cameras would be following him; in the Middle Ages, his stories of monsters and giants exterminated with the greatest of ease encountered the kind of skepticism that has disappeared from our world as a result of television.

After killing Esclados, Yvain hides inside his victim’s castle but, in spite of the danger, he does not want to leave; in addition to his love for Laudine, he has a «professional» reason to stay: his efforts would be wasted if he returned to court without some fragment of his opponent’s body, a relic of Esclados, convincing proof of his own victory. He must validate his claim with his peers who are suspicious by definition, being also his rivals. Only his peers can give an ambitious knight the fame that he seeks and we can well understand why they would give it most reluctantly.

To a conventionally «modern» critic, a value as explicit as this one, the competition for fame, must be a critical dead end; it must be discredited, therefore, and replaced by hidden motivations, the sexual unconscious of Freud, for instance.

Chretien puts chivalry at the top and subordinates everything to it, including sex. In his world, fame is not sex in disguise; more often than not, the reverse is true. Sex has not yet become the instrument of fame that it will become later, but it always surrenders to fame whereas fame never surrenders to sex; it does not have to; sex makes itself the humble servant of fame.

When a Freudian sees this hierarchy, he automatically assumes that it must be deceptive, not because it is intrinsically unbelievable — we only have to look around us — but because it contradicts the number one Freudian dogma.

The idea that the competition for fame could influence libidinal desires more than it is influenced by them does not seem like a serious proposition. Wherever sex is not the dominant force, we have been taught to conclude that repression is at work. The predominance of fame must be a cover for a sexual desire that cannot express itself directly; fame seems too highminded not to be a form of sublimation.

The problem with this view is that sexual desire is far from hidden in Chretien. Its expressions are symbolic, no doubt, but of a kind so transparent that they cannot seriously qualify as symptoms of repression; they sound more like humor.

You all remember the young lady in waiting who finds Yvain lying unconscious in the wilderness, entirely naked. After scrutinizing him at great length — an undressed hero is hard to identify — in a state of great agitation, she goes back to her mistress who hears her story with interest and gives her a box full of very strong medicine. The patient should be rubbed with it, the mistress says, but very sparingly, and his forehead only because his illness is obviously in the head.

The lady tackles her job with such zeal that she forgets these wise recommendations; she rubs the entire content or the box over the entire body of Yvain who, not surprisingly, is most successfully revived.

The critic venturing into this kind of text with heavy Freudian artillery reminds me of Tartarin de Tarascon hunting for lions on the outskirts of modern suburbia… What about the famous fountain at the entrance of Esclados’ domain? Whenever a strange knight presumes to meddle with it, the fountain goes wild. Esclados shows up and defeats the intruder. After Esclados himself is defeated and killed, his beautiful wife, Laudine, worries greatly about the magical foutain which is now revealed as her own: «With my husband dead, she keeps repeating, who is going to defend my fountain?»

Chretien plays with sex quite wittily and freely and yet it is true that sex does not come first in his work. He has enough of it to make his demystificators seem more naive than himself but not enough to satisfy their pansexualist creed. Sex plays second fiddle to chivalry in his work but for reasons that no psychoanalyst will ever demystify; they are beyond his grasp, more profound than any psychoanalysis in my view.

After marrying Enide, Erec feels so comfortable at home that this promising young knight stretches his honeymoon beyond the permissible. Enide is not pleased by this extreme devotion to her. She tells her husband that a knight with a beautiful wife or lady friend cannot afford to be lazy. A well born woman will cease to admire the man in her life and therefore to admire herself if, because of her, he becomes a worse rather than a better knight.

There is a veiled threat in these words. In order to keep her own desire alive, Enide needs a famous husband. If she cannot be proud of Erec, her love for him will starve to death.

It is just as wrong to interpret Enide in terms of Freudian repression as it was to interpret her in terms of nobble-minded devotion to duty. She should be interpreted literally; she is not one of these wives whose real happiness lies in keeping their husbands at home, and who sacrify their own feminine goals to a purely masculine ambition.

Admiration for the most successful knight is so ingrained in Chretien’s women that it governs sexual desire. We must not ritually oppose duty and pleasure as if the two necessarily contradicted each other. In our world, success in business or politics can be as erotic as good looks; so can an Olympic medal or a Nobel prize; why not chivalry?

Enide is the ambitious wife of those times when prestigious careers were closed to women. She competes vicariously; she makes the best of a bad situation. Her husband is her one trump card and she does not want to waste it.

This feminine involvement in the competitive aspect of chivalry reappears in Yvain and in a more extreme, even caricatural fashion. The novel shows us a husband who does something even worse than staying away from the battlefield; he suffers a defeat so complete that he dies as a result. What can a wife do when her lord and master lets her down in this fashion?

According to the logic of mimetic and chivalrous desire, she must fall in love with his murderer. Women always fall in love with a winner in Chretien. If you think that I exaggerate, just listen to a slightly abbreviated version of the conversation between Laudine and Lunete:

Lunete: You should think about defending your fountain.

Laudine: No one can give me a husband as good as this one.

Lunete: I have an even better one for you.

Laudine keeps silent for a little while; Lunete continues:

Arthur is about to show up with his knights. None of your own knights can help; they are all cowards. Only Esclados could do it; now you have no one.

Laudine becomes angry but Lunette is the voice of the entire culture:

A great lady should not mourn for long. There are other knights as brave or even braver.

Laudine: Name one who is as brave and deserves as great a reputation.

Lunette: If I do name the one, you will get mad at me.

Laudine: No, I promise.

Lunette: You will accuse me of insolence but I must tell the truth: two knights have fought together in mortal combat; when one has defeated the other, which is the better of the two?

Laudine: This seems to me like a trap. You want to take me at my word.

Lunette: The knight who vanquished your husband is better than your husband. He won and he forced your husband to retreat into his castle.

After a sleepless night Laudine decides that Lunete is right; she wants to meet the victorious Yvain. For the sake of decency, Lunete had planned that five days should elapse before a first amourous rendez-vous could take place between the griefstricken widow and her husband’s murderer, but now Laudine is becoming impatient and she forces Lunete to hurry things up.

Chretien develops with amazing audacity the logic of a competitive desire much more scandalous, «radical» and amusing than anything Freud or Lacan can put in its place, much more realistic as well. Those who portray this novelist as a cold rationalist and a lighthearted man do not understand him. I see him as a satirist unraveling what he regards as the logic of devouring ambition in the feudal aristocracy of his time.

The political expediency of Laudine’s actions is unquestionable but, if we rashly embraced a socio-political interpretation of her behavior, we would fall into a trap that parallels the one in which our psychoanalytical friend is already entangled. The two traps lie on opposite sides of the straight and narrow path which consists in sticking to the text of Chretien and understanding what he is really saying to us. His own story is much more interesting, really, than the perpetually rehashed message of our tired old master thinkers.

The true reason for the precipitous marriage of Laudine with Yvain is a desire of the same type as we already found exemplified in Enide, a mimetic desire but, this time, it arises in circumstances that make it seem less respectable than in the other novel. Laudine needs an excuse to justify her falling in love not even at first sight but at no sight at all and with such a man as Yvain, the murderer of her husband, and at such a time as she does, immediately after the murderous deed. As an excuse for her new infatuation, the only pose she can strike is the pose of the coldly rational politician. The dreadful truth is that she falls in love not in spite of what Yvain did to her husband, but because of it. She falls in love with the champion.

After Yvain and Laudine have decided to get married, Lunete organizes an assembly of her vassals; it will be more honorable to remarry, the two women surmise, if these vassals beg Laudine to do it. It goes without saying that they all find Yvain the best possible choice, for reasons not very different from hers. The only difference is that she likes him as a lover even more than they like him as a lord and a military protector.

This unanimity is foreordained and we can easily see why; criteria of choice are the same in the political field and in the erotic field. Yvain’s victory makes him most desirable in the eyes of men and women alike. All desires follow the same path, contagiously, mimetically. That is why the agreement is complete between Laudine and her vassals.

In our cultural world, and probably in quite a few others, competition is the soul of sex, not the Freudian libido. We understand nothing if we imagine that Laudine did not really love Esclados, or that she was beginning perhaps to be a little tired of him. Not at all; as long no one could defeat him and he looked like the best knight in the world, she loved him as much as she knows how, in the only way she knows how to love, and now she loves Yvain for the very same reason.

Everybody is a spectator at the same tournament; a beautiful heiress, or a widow will applaud the winner as enthusiastically as everybody else, so enthusiastically that they want to marry him; they all want to marry the winner; when they finally marry him, if they ever do, they feel at one with the crowd and this is what they want. I cannot put it better than Chretien himself in the concluding lines of the episode:

Yvain is lord and master and the dead man completely forgotten. The one who killed him is married to his widow. They sleep in the same bed and the people have more affection for the man alive than they had for the dead one.

*

The most climactic and puzzling text in Yvain is the description of the fight between the two best knights, Yvain and Gauvain. Everything I said so far was an effort to establish the proper context for this remarkable text. The proper context, I believe, is the enormous role of mimetic competitiveness among the knights and in feudal culture generally.

The ostensible reason for the fight of Yvain and Gauvain is a quarrel of sisters about their inheritance. Without investigating the case, Gauvain accepts to champion the older sister, in a typically chivalrous and most literally quixotic fashion. He is such a champion that no other knight, now, dare take up the cause that happens to be the just one, the cause of the younger sister.

At long last, a fully armed knight answers the challenge without giving his name. He is Yvain, of course, but Gauvain too, is already fully armed and:

… Those two who were about to fight did not recognise each other, though their relations were wont to be very affectionate. Then do they not love each other now? I would answer you both «yes» and «no». And I shall prove that each answer is correct. In truth, my lord Gawain loves Yvain and regards him as his companion, and so does Yvain regard him, wherever he may be. Even here, if he knew who he was, he would make much of him, and either one of them would lay down his head for the other before he would allow any harm to come to him. Is not that a perfect and lofty love? Yes, surely. But, on the other hand, is not their hate equally manifest? Yes; for it is a certain thing that doubtless each would be glad to have broken the other’s head, and so to have injured him as to cause humiliation.

Chretien gives a credible enough excuse for the fight of these two excellent friends. Their medieval helmets cover their faces entirely. A modern equivalent would be two fighter planes trying to shoot each other down at two or three times the speed of sound. Even if the two pilots had been friends at an earlier time, they cannot identify each other’s features and there is no hate in their hearts. If a writer told us that they both love and hate each other in a modern transposition of Chretien’s text, we would find the point a little puzzling. There seems to be no valid justification for the elaborate parallel between love and hate.

Chretien, as a rule, is not long-winded and yet, here, he goes on for ever:

Upon my word, it is a wondrous thing that Love and mortal Hate should dwell together… Just now Hate is in the saddle, and spurs and pricks forward as she can, to get ahead of Love who is indisposed to move. Ah! Love, what has become of thee? Come out now, and thou shalt see what a host has been brought up and opposed to thee by the enemies of thy friends…

Would this be what medieval scholars call an allegory? The English translator must think so; otherwise he would not capitalize Love and Hate as much as he does. Yvain and Gauvain fight one another and so do Love and Hate. The causé of Yvain is just, whereas Gauvain’s is unjust. Hate is compared to a knight in the saddle, spurring his mount and pricking it forward.

Can we conclude from all these apparently converging signals that each knight corresponds to one of the two allegorized sentiments and to this one only? No at all. Neither knight personifies anything. If Love and Hate could be quantified, there would be the same amount of each inside each knight. Instead of one single battle of Love against Hate, we really have two and they take place not between the two knights but inside each one. Both men are divided against themselves.

This text does not fit any of the traditional conceptions of medieval allegory. Should we, therefore, regard it as a meaningless assemblage of words? Chretien is «playing with words», no doubt, but we have no right to say that he is merely playing as the current fashion demands. This text is highly literary, but it is not an example of the narcissistic self-indulgence that Barthes called littérarité; its interest is of a kind that the dead end linguistic school is unable to explicate. It makes marvelous sense in terms of the competition for fame, the mimetic rivalry of the two knights.

In order to see this, we must take everything into account, beginning with the fact that our two knights are the two highest embodiments of the chivalric ideal at Arthur’s court. Gauvain «illuminates chivalry just as the morning sun illuminates with its light all the places on the earth…;» so does Yvain. Seeing eye to eye on every subject, our two knights have excellent reasons to be excellent friends. Their friendship is not a matter of chance, a historical accident, but a direct consequence of what both of them are.

Each one, in his humility, ranks himself lower than the other and sees the other as the perfect illustration of what he himself shoud be. To each, therefore, the other is a revered model. This emulation is the quintessence of chivalry.

Who, therefore, is in a position to make the star of Yvain shine less brightly in the firmament of chivalry? Gauvain, of course. Who can overshadow the glory of Gauvain, if not Yvain? The mutual imitation cannot fail to generate a tension that will remain invisible most ot the time because both knights do their best to hide it, even from themselves, for the sake of their beautiful friendship.

Two identical desires that converge toward the same goal necessarily interfere with one another. If all knights are rivals for the same fame, the two greatest rivals must be Yvain and Gauvain for the simple reason that they are the best, the same reason that motivates their friendship. On the ladder of prestige, they occupy the highest rung together; each wants to occupy it alone. Their two loves and their two hates are really the two sides of the same coin.

Gauvain, we are told, was so well treated by Lady Laudine that, according to obviously ill-intentioned people, she must have fallen in love with her husband’s best friend. If this is mere gossip, as Chretien suggest, why does he mention it? He is really very sly, and he understands this type of rivalry very well; the possibility of an erotic component in the relationship means no more and no less than the socio-political component in the marriage of Yvain and Laudine.

The principle of rivalry stands above all possible fields of application and, as soon as it appears somewhere, it can stir up trouble everywhere. This principle is what our text is about; the love of each knight for the other goes to the admired model and the hate goes to the obstacle and rival that the two also are to each other. We found earlier that Laudine hates Yvain, then loves him for one and the same reason. This is true as well in the case of Yvain and Gauvain. Hate and love are always one and the same in this hypermimetic world.

Chretien expresses the ceaseless reinforcement of the two roles, the beloved model and the hated obstacle/rival. If we understand this we can see exactly what his language is doing and why:

The enemies are these very men who love each other with such a holy love; for love, which is neither false nor feigned, is a precious and a holy thing. In this case Love is completely blind, and Hate, too, is deprived of sight. For if Love had recognised these two men, he must have forbidden each to attack the other, or to do any thing to cause him harm. (In this respect, then, Love is blind and discomfited and beguiled; for, though he sees them, he fails to recognise those who rightly belong to him. And though Hate is unable to tell why one of them should hate the other, yet she tries to engage them wrongfully, so that each hates the other mortally.) You know, of course, that he cannot be said to love a man who would wish to harm him and see him dead. How then? Does Yvain wish to kill his friend, my lord Gawain? Yes, and the desire is mutual. Would, then, my lord Gawain desire to kill Yvain with his own hands, or do even worse than I have said? Nay, not really, I swear and protest. One would not wish to injure or harm the other, in return for all that God has done for man, or for all the empire of Rome. But this, in turn, is a lie of mine, for it is plainly to be seen that, with lance raised high in rest, each is ready to attack the other, and there will be no restraint of the desire of each to wound the other with intent to injure him and work him woe.

Since the knights acquire fame at each other’s expense, and since this fame is supremely competitive, their relations must inevitably lead to this climactic encounter. It is logical that, after defeating countless strangers and outsiders, the victorious knights, those with the greatest reputation, would dream only of defeating one another in fair combat, in front of all their peers. When no potential opponents remain outside the group, the most prestigious insiders cannot acquire any more prestige except irresistible. The logic is the logic of world championship.

Indications that this logic dominates our text are everywhere. The timing is no less significant than the location. The combat occurs at the very end of the novel and its real purpose is to answer the ultimate question: «who is the best knight?» or rather to show that it cannot be answered. The combat occurs at court, in front of everybody and thus the problem of information that I mentioned earlier cannot arise.

Each knight is fighting for the purpose of becoming the sole object of admiration and desire for everybody else, and above all his opponent. The duel is a tournament not in the sense that it is not a fight to the death, it certainly is, even if it does not result in death, but in the sense of taking place at home and being watched by all those whose judgment counts and who can express a competent opinion on the fighters and on their fight; the presence of many spectators is mentioned before anything else, at the outset of the battle:

Then all the people crowd about, as people are wont to do when they wish to witness blows in battle or in joust.

The two knights are so well matched that no decision can be reached:

… the battle is waged so evenly that it is impossible to judge which has the better and which the worse. Even as the two men themselves, who fight, and who are purchasing honour with agony, are filled with amazement and stand aghast, for they are so well matched in their attack that each wonders who it can be that withstands him with such bravery… they are in such distress that it is no wonder if they wish to rest. Then they both withdraw to rest themselves, each thinking within himself that, however long he has had to wait, he now at last has met his match.

The two sisters are forgotten at this point, except perhaps for the fact of their sisterliness which should remind us of the brotherly symmetry between their two champions, moral, physical, spiritual, psychological, etc.

When they finally identify each other, each knight proclaims the victory of his friend with such somber energy that they seem close to exchanging blows once again over this paradoxical matter. They both want to prove not their superiority this time, but their inferiority; this is the modern sense of courtoisie in French: neither one will yield to the other the privilege of yielding to the other. As in the primitive rituals of the potlatch type, conflictual symmetry reappears in the symmetrical efforts that the rivals make to exorcise it once and for all.

The perfect match of the two knights is really the key to the significance of the entire text. If Yvain and Gauvain are equal in strength, equal in courage, equal in fighting skills, equal in endurance, then they can only go on fighting until they have annihilated the best soliders of their King for no good purpose, or rather for a purpose that is simultaneously nothing and everything in this competitive world. It ressembles the definition of Being in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, or rather the impossibility of defining Being.

The circular relationship of attraction and repulsion turns the two knights into a graphic illustration of the biblical stumbling block (skandalon) physically represented by their ever renewed assaults against each other and their ever repeated failures, by the equal severity and sterility of the damage that they inflict to one another.

The interminable and undecidable nature of the fight is hyperbolic praise of both knights of course; it is a happy end in the sense that neither champion is killed or even humiliated but it has sinister connotations as well.

When things come to the point at which the better knights fight one another instead of outsiders, the very same force that protects the culture against hostile outsiders turns against itself and threatens to destroy the system from the inside.

The presence of the two doubles and their unending fight suggests that the novel should be defined as a mimetic and sacrifical crisis after the tragic and mythical pattern. Even the names, Yvain and Gauvain, are almost the same, hardly differentiated, like those of Romulus and Remus, Fafner and Fasolt, and many other mytical embodiments of mimetic rivalry at its most destructive. This fight has something to do with that quintessential drama during which differences violently suppress each other and turn back into that warring confusion from which, they formerly emerged and they may or may not re-emerge in the future.

All our observations so far can be defined in terms of undifferentiation, between sex and fame, men and women, inside and outside, Mars and Eros, etc. We first witnessed hysterical competitiveness destabilize the institution of marriage and distort sexuality, then we witnessed the destruction of something even more essential to the preservation of feudal institutions, its fundamental cement, mutual loyalty, friendship between the best knights.

The paradox of this society is that the more harmony there is between its highest value and the actual behavior of its members, the greater the danger of self-destruction becomes. It simply means that, in the eyes of Chretien, feudalism is what many historians have always seen in it, barely institutionalized anarchy. The king’s authority is purely honorific and nominal.

This is the worm in the apple, the enemy at the heart of the system. The life giving principle is also a principle of death. This most beautiful thing, chivalry is a self-devouring monster. The same force, mimesis, that generates and perpetuates cultural differences dissolves its own creation as soon as, losing its transcendental quality, it turns to mimetic rivalry. The battle of Yvain and Gauvain comes close to showing this process explicitly and yet it never really does; the truth hides behing the conventional veil of the two opponents’ ignorance of their respective identities.

The real message behind our text is so disturbing that its full impact must be eluded. Chretien is not the only one who eludes it; the theme of the two best fighters who would not be fighting if each could recognize his best friend is a popular one and it must always signify more or less the same kind of mimetic paroxysm as in Yvain.

The medieval tournament was carefully regulated not because it is an inherently playful affair but for the opposite reason: it satisfies that dangerous urge that the best knights have to fight it out among themselves. The tournament is the most dangerous fight not only for those directly involved but for the entire society which it may deprive of its best fighters.

The theme of the unidentified knight can be interpreted as a paradoxical symbol of desymbolization, another clue to the total crisis of identity brought about by the levelling effects of mimetic rivalry.

This crisis is not some individual pathology but a collective affair, a crisis of symbolicity itself, which can never be expressed directly and it remains beyond the grasp of all the schools, structuralist and poststructuralist, that place language and differentiation above the vicissitudes of history.

Our text tells us how the two knights, and all those whom we might choose to substitute for them, all competitive elites in the Western world, never really apprehend the substance of their own experience; they never recognize themselves in the perpetual metamorphosis of «love» into «hate», and vice versa. They see a mere conjunction of «opposites» that literary playfulness alone can justapose because it is rationally meaningless.

Our text points to the psychological mechanism of this misprision in a few lines that located before my last quotations but I have postponed reading them until now:

God! How can two things so opposed [Love and Hate] find lodging in the same dwelling-place? it seems to me they cannot live together; for one could not dwell with the other, without giving rise to noise and contention, as soon as each knew of the other’s presence. But upon the ground-floor, there may be several apartments: for there are halls and sleeping-rooms. It may be the same in this case: I think Love has ensconced himself in some hidden room, while Hate had betaken herself to the balconies looking on the high-road, because she wishes to be seen.

The inner life of the two knights is hopelessly fragmented. The various rooms do not communicate. This metaphor evokes the idea of something unconscious but in a sense different from Freud. Both Hate and Love are fully conscious of each other’s presence but they manage never to meet; each one separately dominates the entire psyche in turn; they try not to be conscious of their relatedness; they hardly realize that they are the divided unity of the same consciousness.

This schizophrenic division also prevents Yvain and Gauvain from seeing that their hate is their love and vice versa or, in other words, that there is no real love in them, no real love in the sense of John’s first letter:

He who says he is in the light and hates his brother is in the darkness still. He who loves his brother abides in the light and in him there is no cause for stumbling. (1, 2, 9-10)

Thanks to the trick of the two helmets, Chretien feigns to cut off the umbilical cord that ties his text to the novel as a whole; he enables us to see this page as a purely decorative addition to his novel, a useless supplement, the verbal game of oxymora that rhetoricians and critics always describe as literary artifice. Literary theories are often recipes for perpetuating the mental compartments that Chretien is talking about. Like the feudal lords and ladies, we convince ourselves that we have nothing to learn from this.

If you examine this text, you can see that little or nothing would have to be changed if its object were erotic desire. The same text could be used in the case of two, three, four lords and ladies playing with each other as in the physical combat of Yvain and Gauvain.

There is a universal applicability of this language to all desires, regardless of their object which it is tempting to interpret in purely libidinal terms, once again. The root of it all, many people invariably surmise, must be homosexual or bisexual desire. All types of sexuality may indeed show up in the context of mimetic rivalry, as well as social problems of all types but the one and the other are only aspects of mimetic configurations that remain the same regardless of the content which they inform.

In all major writers, I believe, the rhetoric of oxymora significantly alludes to the vicissitudes of some mimetic interplay and obscurely reenacts the fundamental human drama of the mimetic stumbling block, the skandalon of the gospels which no psychoanalytical, no social, no purely linguistic interpretation can ever apprehend.