On a First Kiss

Posted by: MFLC Team 12 years, 1 month ago

By Nicola Morato

It is essential to keep alive the sense of fresh discovery in one's own research. It is even more important when it seems that your discoveries are undermined by about a century and a half of scholarship, in which every possible experience or break-through appears to have been experienced already, thoroughly described, published, and integrated into the bibliographies.

Reading through the scholarship, however, we can manage to see our own personal experience within a more universal framework. We can indeed return to the moment in which that experience was not only new for us (in a personal narrative of discovery) but new in more general terms – i.e. historically new. This is how Gaston Paris spoke about the work of his father, Paulin Paris, on what he defined as the «selva selvaggia» of the Arthurian prose romances:

"Le premier et le seul depuis des siècles, il avait lu dans leur entier ces immenses compositions [...] Et cette lecture, fastidieuse pour tant d'autres, avait pour lui un attrait infini. Je le vois encore, courbé sur ces énormes volumes du XIII siècle, aux innombrables feuillets couverts sur trois ou quatre colonnes d'une écriture fine et serrée, laissant passer les heures sans en avoir conscience [...] Ses dernières paroles, en terminant le livre où il a essayé d'en faire revivre une partie pour les autres, indiquent aussi le plaisir qu'il goûta en s'y absorbant ainsi." (ParisG 1882: 17)

Apparently Paulin Paris had initiated an immediate contact, an Einfühlung that jumped across the centuries. Were the objects, the manuscripts simply considered in their material evidence, the key that disclosed the past? Was that really possible? Perhaps in some way it still was, though we can also bet that the experience was at that time largely mediated. Paulin Paris himself alludes to this fact, when he speaks about the extreme limits of his exercise:

"Combien de fois alors n'ai-je pas mis un frein à mon enthousiasme, en me rappelant avec une sorte d'effroi l'aventure du chevalier de la Manche! Honnête don Quichotte! Les romans coupables de ta folie n'étaient que de longues paraphrases décolorées... Que serais-tu devenu si tu avais lu les originaux?" (ibid.:8)

And Gaston Paris confirms the preeminence of mediation, again in a figure of literary tradition, as a sort of a driving force for both emotion and pleasure:

"il dit dans une note, après avoir rappelé le moment d'entraînement fatal qui perdit Francesca pour l'éternité: «Il est impossible d'exprimer quel plaisir j'éprouvai en retrouvant, il y a quelque temps, dans le Saint Graal [= Lancelot-Graal], le passage même dont parle Dante»." (ibid.: 7)

The anachronism is not completely subjective, just as our way of reading it cannot be completely subjective. What is objective here is the gap between Paulin Paris' way of reading the tradition of the Lancelot-Graal, our own way, and, of course Dante's way. Again, it is a matter of things happening for the first time (a first time has a sort of greater symbolic power: it starts the series, it structures the continuum) at least in Romance literatures. According to Lorenzo Renzi:

"Il canto di Francesca è il primo esempio ben definito di personaggio letterario che, indotto dalle letture, ne imita un altro, come sarà poi nel Don Chisciotte, dove il protagonista si comporta come i cavalieri di cui ha letto le avventure nei libri della sua biblioteca." (Renzi 2007: 31)

We might take this as our first point about the relation between literary tradition and the manuscript tradition. There is indeed an important detail that both Paulin Paris and Gaston Paris didn't explicitly mention, one that has since been examined by Nicola Zingarelli, Vincenzo Crescini, and Pio Rajna. In Dante’s text, Paolo kisses Francesca exactly at the moment when the couple reads that Lancelot kissed Guenièvre, while in the Lancelot-Graal it is Guenièvre who kisses Lancelot, not the other way around, and the scene (another important detail, noted by Rajna) is seen indirectly through the eyes of the Lady of Malohaut. We can ask ourselves whether Dante was, more or less consciuosly, crossing the roles (as Zingarelli and Renzi argued) or if he had read or heard a version of the story in which Lancelot was the first to kiss Guenièvre (following Crescini’s hypothesis). Such a reading can be found, for instance, in British Library Landsdowne 757, a MS of the 13th century, for which Roger Middleton suggested the possibility of an insular provenance, and in the Laurenziano 6, pl. 89 inf., a 13th-century ms of unknown provenance. In the latter, however, the rubrics, as Rajna noted, contradict the text and restore the correct order. If we then focus more widely on the Lancelot-Grail textual tradition instead of on Dante's Inferno V, we realise that it does not actually react very much to Lancelot and Guenièvre's kiss. The scene was probably far from being problematic for the average copyist.

The scandal of their liaison and the need for an interpretation or censorship seems to have been much more tangible in the second-degree representations of the story. In reference to the same illustrations of the Lancelot-Graal’s illuminated witnesses, Maria Luisa Meneghetti has pointed out that:

"nelle immagini che decorano i testimoni miniati del Lancelot du Lac i momenti più realistici dell'episodio vengono rappresentati molto parcamente" (Meneghetti 2009: 102)

Censorship is even more strongly felt in the Arthurian compilation attributed to Rustichello da Pisa:

"bien furent entre m. Lancelot et la reïne aucune cousez li quelz ne veaut li maistre metre en escrit, pour le onor de les uns et de les autres. Or voz a li maistre contés l’afer de cestui fait, ce est someemant coment il avint et comant il fu. Et bien sunt autres livres que le content en autre mainieres, mes sachiez de voir que ce est la plus vertables qui soit escrit en trestous li romainz et les livres dou monde. Mes atant laisse li contes a paller de cestui fait, que plus ne pallera a cestui point. Et pallera li maistre d’une mout belle aven<ture qui avint> en celui tenz meïsmes <a la cort dou roi> Artus." (Ed. Cigni: 278)

This comment draws a not entirely unexpected humorous response by Paulin Paris:

"Il est déplorable que Françoise de Rimini ne soit pas tombée sur un exemplaire de Lancelot expurgé par notre bon Rusticien." (ParisP 1840: 58)

On the other hand, in the intimate and sensuous setting of the camera Lanzaloti in Frugarolo (ante 1402), the courtly interpretation seems to insist on the more erotic and dramatic moments of the plot:

"una rappresentazione degli amori di Lancillotto e Ginevra incomparabilmente più articolata, più aderente alla trama del romanzo e, perché no, più disinibita di quelle fornite da qualsiasi miniatore contemporaneo." (Meneghetti 2009: 103)

Textual tradition, illumination, compilation, and wall painting seem then to dig their own largely independent channels. The moments in which they diverge or cross each other, their competition and their contamination, are therefore determining factors in the drawing up of their history and geography – in structuring their extent in space and time and conferring a new objectivity on them. For history and geography are, at least in philological terms, but our latest sketch of rich literary traditions considered in their complexity: something always challenging and new.