{"title":"Tristan’s Origins","authors":"Giulia Boitani","doi":"10.1215/00358118-9812474","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n The initial section of the thirteenth-century Tristan en prose has been the subject of multiple critical investigations, mostly devoted to identifying its teleological purpose or figurative function in relation to the rest of the romance. This article proposes to reframe the question by reading the narrative of incest that dominates the “prehistory” of the prose Tristan against two key concepts that inform Michel Foucault’s 1971 essay “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire.” First, Foucault’s focus on the succession of discursive formations allows for a reinterpretation of the “guerre des récits” that traverses the Tristan: within this critical framework, Foucault’s work on judicial forms permits the identification of the points of emergence of new power/knowledge relationships within the prehistory, with the advent of ecclesiastical authority embodied by Saint Augustine and affirmed in the context of the saint’s public ordeal. Second, Foucault’s reading of the body as the surface of inscription of such discursive conflicts sheds light on the ways in which the saint’s discourse rewrites the bodies of the two protagonists, Apollo and Chelinde, and frames them within the lines of lineage. However, once Augustine’s narrative of “origin” is reinscribed in its discursive context, it clearly appears as purposefully chimeric. Because Tristan’s Arimathean lineage is founded on the revelation of Apollo and Chelinde’s incest, the very idea of unbroken continuity and ordered descent within genealogy is revealed as an illusion: it is a genealogical stemma that only exists in virtue of an archetypal error—the “bad grammar” of incest.","PeriodicalId":39614,"journal":{"name":"Romanic Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Romanic Review","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00358118-9812474","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE, ROMANCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
摘要
13世纪特里斯坦散文的最初部分一直是多种批评调查的主题,主要是为了确定其目的论目的或比喻功能与浪漫小说的其他部分的关系。本文建议通过阅读在散文《特里斯坦》的“史前史”中占主导地位的乱伦叙事,来重新构建这个问题,反对米歇尔·福柯在1971年的文章《尼采,我的)》中的两个关键概念。首先,福柯对话语形成的继承的关注允许对穿越特里斯坦的“guerre des rcits”的重新解释:在这个批判框架内,福柯关于司法形式的工作允许对史前时期出现的新权力/知识关系的点进行识别,伴随着圣奥古斯丁体现的教会权威的出现,并在圣人的公共磨难的背景下得到肯定。其次,福柯对身体的解读,作为这种话语冲突的铭文的表面,揭示了圣人的话语重写两个主角阿波罗和谢林德的身体的方式,并将他们置于血统的范围内。然而,一旦奥古斯丁的“起源”叙事被重新写进它的话语语境中,它显然是有目的的嵌合。因为特里斯坦的亚利马西亚血统是建立在阿波罗和切琳德的乱伦的启示之上的,所以家谱中不间断的连续性和有序的血统的想法被揭示为一种幻觉:它是一种家谱体系,只存在于一个原型错误——乱伦的“坏语法”。
The initial section of the thirteenth-century Tristan en prose has been the subject of multiple critical investigations, mostly devoted to identifying its teleological purpose or figurative function in relation to the rest of the romance. This article proposes to reframe the question by reading the narrative of incest that dominates the “prehistory” of the prose Tristan against two key concepts that inform Michel Foucault’s 1971 essay “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire.” First, Foucault’s focus on the succession of discursive formations allows for a reinterpretation of the “guerre des récits” that traverses the Tristan: within this critical framework, Foucault’s work on judicial forms permits the identification of the points of emergence of new power/knowledge relationships within the prehistory, with the advent of ecclesiastical authority embodied by Saint Augustine and affirmed in the context of the saint’s public ordeal. Second, Foucault’s reading of the body as the surface of inscription of such discursive conflicts sheds light on the ways in which the saint’s discourse rewrites the bodies of the two protagonists, Apollo and Chelinde, and frames them within the lines of lineage. However, once Augustine’s narrative of “origin” is reinscribed in its discursive context, it clearly appears as purposefully chimeric. Because Tristan’s Arimathean lineage is founded on the revelation of Apollo and Chelinde’s incest, the very idea of unbroken continuity and ordered descent within genealogy is revealed as an illusion: it is a genealogical stemma that only exists in virtue of an archetypal error—the “bad grammar” of incest.
Romanic ReviewArts and Humanities-Arts and Humanities (all)
CiteScore
0.20
自引率
0.00%
发文量
23
期刊介绍:
The Romanic Review is a journal devoted to the study of Romance literatures.Founded by Henry Alfred Todd in 1910, it is published by the Department of French and Romance Philology of Columbia University in cooperation with the Departments of Spanish and Italian. The journal is published four times a year (January, March, May, November) and balances special thematic issues and regular unsolicited issues. It covers all periods of French, Italian and Spanish-language literature, and welcomes a broad diversity of critical approaches.