Narcissus and Trauma: Chrétien de Troyes’s Story of the Grail

Ealy, Nicholas

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-27916-5_5

Nicholas Ealy³

Part of the book series: The New Middle Ages ((TNMA))

251 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter treats narcissism and selfhood, through the lens of trauma, in Chrétien de Troyes’s Story of the Grail (c. 1181). Trauma, etymologically related to “wound” and “piercing” in Greek, appears in the text in a series of woundings in narcissine imagery that define Perceval’s selfhood. Denying the wounded bodies of his father, the Fisher King, and the goose of the blood-on-snow scene, Perceval searches for an unwounded selfhood based on knightly principles and violent autonomy. The wounded bodies point toward Perceval’s confrontation with Christ’s crucifixion on Good Friday, the ultimate example of a traumatized body. Christ intersects with Narcissus’s myth and its emphasis upon the collapse of self and other, leading Perceval to accept himself as wounded by the needs of others through charity.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Chapter: USD 29.95; Price excludes VAT (USA)

eBook: USD 69.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Softcover Book: USD 89.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Hardcover Book: USD 89.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

1.
Chrétien de Troyes, Le Roman de Perceval ou le conte du Graal, ed. William Roach (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1959), vv. 4186–88, 123. Quotations in Old French, with verse and page numbers cited, come this edition. English translations are mine.
2.
Ovid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Books 1–5, ed. William S. Anderson (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), v. 3.423, 98, my translation.
3.
Michelle Freeman, “Problems in Romance Composition: Ovid, Chrétien de Troyes, and the Romance of the Rose” in Romance Philology 30 (1976), 162 . In addition, Rupert T. Pickens has written about various scenes within the Grail that treat similar notions of mirroring. See: Perceval and Gawain in Dark Mirrors: Reflection and Reflexivity in Chrétien de Troyes's "Conte du Graal" (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2014).
4.
Lacan uses this term in his “Mirror Stage.” Méconnaissance, as Lorenzo Chiesa posits, occurs as the onlooker, viewing his or her image in the mirror, does not recognize the image as such, the “other as other.” Because of this, such misrecognition (méconnaissance) is always dual, for “the ego not only as it were, ‘finds itself’ at the place of the other […] but also provides the subject with a deceptive impression of unity.” This is the same process evident in Ovid’s myth when Narcissus sees his image. See: Jacques Lacan, “Le Stade du miroir” in Ecrits (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966); Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 16.
5.
Michael Newman, “The Trace of Trauma: Blindness, Testimony and the Gaze in Blanchot and Derrida” in Maurice Blanchot: The Obligation of Writing, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill (London: Routledge, 1996), 157.
6.
Jean LaPlanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis , The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholason-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 465.
7.
Wendy J. Turner and Christina Lee, “Conceptualizing Trauma for the Middle Ages” in Trauma in Medieval Society, ed. Wendy J. Turner and Christina Lee (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 8.
8.
Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 18, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955), 12.
9.
Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2008), 3.
10.
Ibid.
11.
Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 21.
12.
Ibid.
13.
Luckhurst, Trauma, 9.
14.
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 1.
15.
Freud, Beyond, 22.
16.
Caruth, Unclaimed, 2–3.
17.
Cathy Caruth, “Trauma and Experience: Introduction” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 4.
18.
Caruth, Unclaimed, 61–62.
19.
Ibid., 3. Peggy McCracken has written about this notion of repetition in Chrétien's romances, claiming they prioritize notions of time that do not follow a traditionally sequential chronology. See: "Forgetting to Conclude" in Thinking Through Chrétien de Troyes, by Zrinka Stahuljak et al. (Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2011), 139-62.
20.
Chrétien, Graal, vv. 435–37, 13, my emphasis.
21.
Caruth, “Experience,” 5.
22.
Chrétien, Graal, vv. 127–34, 136–38, 146–49, and 153–54, 5.
23.
Ibid., vv. 176–81, 6.
24.
Jacques Ribard , Du philtre au graal: pour une interprétation théologique du Roman de Tristan et du Conte du graal (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1989), 67. My translation of: “péché originel […] au plein sens du terme, au sens théologique, car dans le sillage immédiat de cette diabolique tentation va se manifester la rupture, la révolte—trait éminemment satanique—de l’enfant vis-à-vis de sa mère, de la créature vis-à-vis de son Créateur. Car tel est bien le fameux péché de Perceval: ingrate et monstrueuse séparation d’avec la mère, laissée pour morte.”
25.
Jean-Charles Huchet, “Le Nom et l’image: de Chrétien de Troyes à Robert de Boron” in The Legacy of Chrétien de Troyes, Vol 2, ed. Norris Lacy (Amsterdam: Rodopoi, 1988), 14. My translation of: “‘l’image’ […] égare; elle capture les sens pour que les sens continuent à faire défaut. La chevalerie s’impose à Perceval dans un éclat de lumière où le blanc et le vermeil se marient pour mieux tracer la voie de son péché.”
26.
Chrétien, Graal, vv. 1823–24, 54.
27.
Ibid., vv. 2065–69, 61.
28.
Frederick Goldin, The Mirror of Narcissus in the Courtly Love Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 76–77.
29.
Chrétien, Graal, vv. 47–50, 2.
30.
L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 29.
31.
Ibid., 31.
32.
Chrétien, Graal, v. 2221, 65, my emphasis.
33.
Ibid., vv. 3342–43, 98.
34.
Ibid., vv. 3509–14, 102–3, my emphasis.
35.
Ann McCullough , “Criminal Naivety: Blind Resistance and the Pain of Knowing in Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal” in The Modern Language Review 101.1 (2006), 54.
36.
Chrétien, Graal, v. 3593, 105.
37.
Paule Le Rider , Le Chevalier dans le Conte du Graal de Chrétien de Troyes (Paris: Société d’édition d’enseignement supérieur, 1978), 69. My translation from: “Le cortège qui apparaît au cours du repas offert à Perceval par le Roi Pêcheur serait […] l’image concrétisée d’une faute, d’un crime. La lance sanglante qui le précède suggère un meurtre.”
38.
McCullough , “Criminal,” 61.
39.
Chrétien, Graal, vv. 4186–89 and 4194–201, 123.
40.
Chrétien, Cligés in Romans, ed. Charles Méla (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1994), vv. 686–97 and 706–11, 311, emphasis and translation mine.
41.
For falcons and love, see: Michael Camille , The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), 96–106.
42.
Susan Potters , “Blood Imagery in Chrétien’s Perceval” in Philological Quarterly 56.3 (1977), 304.
43.
Goldin, Mirror, 78.
44.
Chrétien, Graal, vv. 4202–12, 123–24.
45.
Ovid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, v. 3.434, 99; Ovid, Metamorphoses, 94.
46.
Kenneth J. Knoespel, Narcissus and the Invention of Personal History (New York: Garland, 1985), 11.
47.
Nouvet , Enfances narcisse (Paris: Galilé, 2009), 130–31. My translation of: “La frappe de la réflexion qui produit le sujet garantit également qu’il sera irrémédiablement déchiré par une fissure intérieure qui le condamne à une différence à soi que rien jamais ne pourra refermer. Le sujet s’origine dans une répercussion et comme répercussion. […] Le rouge sang qui colore le corps marmoréen de Narcisse fait office d’obscur mémento. Il rappelle la perte qui a blessé le corps narcissique.”
48.
Caruth, “Experience,” 4.
49.
See: Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 73–89.
50.
Caruth, “Experience,” 4–5.
51.
Ribard, Philtre, 51. My translation of: “l’éclatante beauté, en même temps que l’orgueil démesuré, cette caractéristique proprement démoniaque.”
52.
Isaiah 1:18; Psalm 51:7, 14 (Revised Standard Version). Susan Potters points out this connection between Chrétien’s text and the biblical verses. See: “Blood Imagery,” 305.
53.
Chrétien, Graal, vv. 6282 and 6297–300, 185.
54.
Huchet, “Le Nom,” 2.
55.
Robert Javelet , Image et ressemblance au douzième siècle: de saint Anselme à Alain de Lille, vol. 1 (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1967), 301. My translation of: “Non seulement image de Dieu pour les hommes, mais semblable aux hommes, le Christ assure l’indispensable médiation du salut. Il fallait un médiateur entre nous et Dieu, qui nous approche de Dieu et approche Dieu de nous.” For a discussion of Christ as a mediating image, see chapter 8 of Javelet, Image, 298–367.
56.
Javelet , Image, 302. My translation of: “La face du Christ est comme un soleil; en elle éclate l’image et ressemblance divines; par elle passe la force qui sauve.”
57.
Ibid., 303.
58.
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 105.
59.
Douglas Gray , “The Five Wounds of Our Lord” in Notes and Queries 10.3 (1963), 129.
60.
John 19:31–37 (RSV).
61.
Zechariah 12:10, 13:1 (RSV).
62.
John 7:37–38 (RSV).
63.
Raymond E. Brown , “Comment” in The Anchor Bible: The Gospel According to John (xiii–xxi), ed. Raymond E. Brown (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 949–50.
64.
I John 5:6–8 (RSV).
65.
Caroline Walker Bynum , Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 144.
66.
Song of Songs 5:10 (RSV).
67.
Javelet , Image, 308. My translation of: “‘consemblables’, comme les propres fils de Dieu. Le fils de l’homme est celui qui porte l’image du céleste, l’image du Christ. Cette métamorphose, par le Christ et dans le Christ, se réalise ‘vers’ Dieu: elle comporte une sorte de mort, de disparition ou ensevelissement et de réapparition ou résurrection dans la pleine vie.”
68.
Chrétien, Graal, vv. 580–81 and 583–88, 17–18.
69.
Le Rider, Le Chevalier, 71–72. My translation of: “Les chrétiens du temps de notre auteur vivaient la messe comme un sacrifice. […] La messe […] était sentie au XII^e siècle comme un recommencement de la Passion.”
70.
Richard Viladesau , The Beauty of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology and the Arts, from the Catacombs to the Eve of the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 7.
71.
Chrétien, Graal, vv. 114–20, 4.
72.
Vibeke Olson , “Penetrating the Void: Picturing the Wound in Christ’s Side as a Performative Space” in Wounds and Wound Repair in Medieval Culture, ed. Larissa Tracy and Kelly DeVries (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 320.
73.
Chrétien, Graal, vv. 6495–96, 191.
74.
Walker Bynum, Wonderful, 145.
75.
Allie Terry-Fritch , “Proof in Pierced Flesh: Caravaggio’s Doubting Thomas and the Beholder of Wounds in Early Modern Italy” in Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Allie Terry-Fritch and Erin Felicia Labbie (New York: Routledge, 2012), 28.
76.
John 19:35 (RSV).
77.
Brown , “Comment,” 952.
78.
Ibid., 949.
79.
Cathy Caruth , Literature in the Ashes of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 81.
80.
Chrétien, Graal, v. 6468, 190.
81.
Rachel Fulton , From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 20–21.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Trans. Ronald L. Martinez. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press.
Google Scholar
Brown, Raymond E. 1966. Comment. In The Anchor Bible: The Gospel According to John (xiii–xxi), ed. Raymond E. Brown, 944–960. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Google Scholar
Camille, Michael. 1998. The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire. New York: Harry N. Abrams.
Google Scholar
Caruth, Cathy. 1995. Trauma and Experience: Introduction. In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth, 3–12. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Google Scholar
———. 2013. Literature in the Ashes of History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Google Scholar
———. 2016. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Google Scholar
Chiesa, Lorenzo. 2007. Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Book Google Scholar
Chrétien de Troyes. 1959. Le Roman de Perceval ou le conte du Graal. Ed. William Roach. Geneva: Librairie Droz.
Google Scholar
———. 1994. Cligés. In Romans, ed. Charles Méla, 285–494. Paris: Livre de Poche.
Google Scholar
Fradenburg, L.O. Aranye. 2002. Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Google Scholar
Freeman, Michelle. 1976. Problems in Romance Composition: Ovid, Chrétien de Troyes, and the Romance of the Rose. Romance Philology 30: 158–168.
Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. 1955. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and Ed. James Strachey, vol. 18, 7–64. London: Hogarth.
Google Scholar
Fulton, Rachel. 2002. From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200. New York: Columbia University Press.
Google Scholar
Goldin, Frederick. 1967. The Mirror of Narcissus in the Courtly Love Lyric. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Google Scholar
Gray, Douglas. 1963. The Five Wounds of Our Lord. Notes and Queries 10 (3): 82–89.
Article Google Scholar
Huchet, Jean-Charles. 1988. Le Nom et l’image: de Chrétien de Troyes à Robert de Boron. In The Legacy of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Norris Lacy, vol. 2, 1–16. Amsterdam: Rodopoi.
Google Scholar
Javelet, Robert. 1967. Image et ressemblance au douzième siècle: de saint Anselme à Alain de Lille, Vol. 1. Paris: Letouzey et Ané.
Google Scholar
Knoespel, Kenneth J. 1985. Narcissus and the Invention of Personal History. New York: Garland.
Google Scholar
Lacan, Jacques. 1966. Le Stade du miroir. In Ecrits, 93–100. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Google Scholar
LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Google Scholar
LaPlanche, Jean, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. 1973. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Donald Nicholason-Smith. New York: W. W. Norton.
Google Scholar
Le Rider, Paule. 1978. Le Chevalier dans le Conte du Graal de Chrétien de Troyes. Paris: Société d’édition d’enseignement supérieur.
Google Scholar
Luckhurst, Roger. 2008. The Trauma Question. London: Routledge.
Google Scholar
McCullough, Ann. 2006. Criminal Naivety: Blind Resistance and the Pain of Knowing in Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal. The Modern Language Review 101 (1): 48–61.
Google Scholar
McCracken, Peggy. 2011. Forgetting to Conclude. In Thinking Through Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Zrinka Stahuljak et al., 139–162. Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer.
Google Scholar
Newman, Michael. 1996. The Trace of Trauma: Blindness, Testimony and the Gaze in Blanchot and Derrida. In Maurice Blanchot: The Obligation of Writing, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill, 153–173. London: Routledge.
Google Scholar
Nouvet, Claire. 2009. Enfances narcisse. Paris: Galilée.
Google Scholar
Ovid. 1993. The Metamorphoses of Ovid. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Google Scholar
———. 1997. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Books 1–5. Ed. William S. Anderson. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Google Scholar
Pickens, Rupert T. 2014. Perceval and Gawain in Dark Mirrors: Reflection and Reflexivity in Chrétien de Troyes’s “Conte du Graal.” Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company.
Google Scholar
Potters, Susan. 1977. Blood Imagery in Chrétien’s Perceval. Philological Quarterly 56 (3): 301–309.
Google Scholar
Ribard, Jacques. 1989. Du philtre au graal: pour une interprétation théologique du Roman de Tristan et du Conte du graal. Paris: Honoré Champion.
Google Scholar
Terry-Fritch, Allie. 2012. Proof in Pierced Flesh: Caravaggio’s Doubting Thomas and the Beholder of Wounds in Early Modern Italy. In Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Allie Terry-Fritch and Erin Felicia Labbie, 15–38. New York: Routledge.
Google Scholar
The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha (RSV). 1977. Ed. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger. New York: Oxford University Press.
Google Scholar
Turner, Wendy J., and Christina Lee. 2018. Conceptualizing Trauma for the Middle Ages. In Trauma in Medieval Society, ed. Wendy J. Turner and Christina Lee, 3–12. Leiden: Brill.
Chapter Google Scholar
Vibeke, Olsen. 2016. Penetrating the Void: Picturing the Wound in Christ’s Side as a Performative Space. In Wounds and Wound Repair in Medieval Culture, ed. Larissa Tracy and Kelly DeVries, 313–339. Leiden: Brill.
Google Scholar
Viladesau, Richard. 2006. The Beauty of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology and the Arts from the Catacombs to the Eve of the Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Google Scholar
Walker Bynum, Caroline. 2007. Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Google Scholar
Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.
Google Scholar

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

University of Hartford, West Hartford, CT, USA
Nicholas Ealy

Authors

Nicholas Ealy
View author publications
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Ealy, N. (2019). Narcissus and Trauma: Chrétien de Troyes’s Story of the Grail. In: Narcissism and Selfhood in Medieval French Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27916-5_5

Download citation

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27916-5_5
Published: 01 October 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-27915-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-27916-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics