Singularity and Spectrality: Desire and Death in Girart de Roussillon

Abstract

It is difficult to read the chansons de geste otherwise than in comparison with romance, though that comparison can be undertaken in many different ways.In an earlier book, The Chanson de Geste in the Age of Romance, I experimented with envisaging it as a dialectical engagement over a third, occluded term: that of an inadmissible political reality, the point where, as Fredric Jameson puts it, History is what hurts.More recently, I have approached the relationship between the two genres from a different angle in "L'éthique dans Raoul de Cambrai."It is striking to what extent the chansons de geste are impervious to the dominant intellectual interest of courtly literature from the mid-twelfth century onwards: namely dialectic, with its formal negotiation of coherence and contradiction, and its philosophical engagement with universality (Kay, Courtly Contradictions).The world of the chansons de geste seems, by contrast, to be committed to individuality, a commitment which confirms, although from a different point of view, what Boutet and Strubel identify as the Augustinianism of the genre (Littérature, politique et société, pp.39-67 1 ).I shall expand on this point later.Romances may disport themselves with dialectical display, typify or contest universal values in their characters, and embark on allegorical inventions that gauge the relative merits of nominalism and realism.The chansons de geste, however, insist on the moral uniqueness of each and every agent, and are left wrestling with the difficulty of finding unity and coherence in the troubled world which results from their acts.

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