Romance and history: Designing the times

Shortly before the middle of the past century, one of the most distinguished literary historians of the modern period sought to trace the “representation of reality” [Wirklichkeit] in Western literature. To exemplify the perspectives of medieval romance, he chose a twelfth-century French narrative by the founder of Arthurian romance, Chrétien de Troyes. His discussion of Chrétien’s Yvain opened with an account of a retrospective passage near the beginning of the poem, in which a knight tells members of the Arthurian court about an adventure he had some seven years beforehand. After riding through a forest, the knight recalls to his listeners, he had eventually reached an exotic spring and poured water from it onto a special stone. A torrential downpour suddenly followed; the defender of the spring soon appeared and vanquished the knight; the discomfited adventurer later made his way back to the Arthurian court. Closing his long-untold tale, the knight admits to his audience that he felt like a “fool” then and considers himself a “fool” now for relating the story. For Erich Auerbach, offering in Mimesis a mid-twentieth-century retrospective on romance, the circumstances of this tale exposed a broad tendency to escape from the very "reality" that he sought to find represented in literary form. In his account a conspicuous aspect of that tendency was the treatment of history and time in the romance. Though some seven years had elapsed since the knight told his tale, when one of the listening knights subsequently (and more successfully) replayed the adventure, it seemed as if temporality had been suspended in the interim. In Auerbach's words, "Nothing has changed; the seven years have passed without leaving a trace, just as time usually does in a fairy tale." While Auerbach granted that courtly romance included "colorful and vivid pictures of contemporary reality," he argued that such literature lacked the "politico-historical context" of the chanson de geste. The view was conventional at the time he was writing. By the middle of the twentieth century, the notion that chivalric romances were elaborate ways of eliding the temporal world was itself already in medias res, and the notion had been developing for far more than seven years.