Translation and ideology: The case of Ywain and Gawain

TRANSLATION AND IDEOLOGY: THE CASE OF YWAZNAND GA WAZN

How can genre’s historical change be described if the genetically general [Allgemeine] is to [be] understood neither as a timeless norm nor as an arbitrary convention? How can the structure of a genre transform itself without losing its uniqueness?

H. R. Jauss, “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature”’

I

Genre’s historical change The Middle English romance, Ywain and Gawain, is a fourteenth-century translation of Chretien de Troyes’s Yvain, Le Chevalier au Lion. As such, it poses the problem, for a criticism traditionally dominated by the aesthetic of originality, of the study of medieval texts that are blatantly derivative and unoriginal. While we are supposedly accustomed to the derivativeness and lack of originality which underlay the medieval literary aesthetic, so that such texts should not pose a special problem, it is true nevertheless that much said to be axiomatic in medieval literary study is often forgotten in criticism and, typically, unoriginality in a text is counted as a mark against it. Criticism of Ywain and Gawain provides a predictable enough example of this, as the poem has been judged more or less aesthetically successful according to how it is perceived as a translation of Chretien’s Yvain. The prevailing attitude to the romance is summed up in John Finlayson’s definition of “the problem of deciding whether to treat this poem as a work of art in its own right or as merely a translation,“2 an aesthetic opposition between “work of art” and “translation” apparently brooking no argument.

Whether or not the poem is a “work of art” in the traditional sense is not a question likely to occupy more theoretically oriented forms of criticism than Finlayson’s; however, crucial difficulties for the historical understanding of medieval literature are posed by a translation such as Ywain and Gawain, as the quotation from Jauss’s “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature” suggests. Wherever else they differ, the different forms of historical criticism attempt to tie the text in some fashion to a context: Yvain, for example, has been historicized by the Marxist critic Stephen Knight in relation to the real practices of twelfth-century feudalism.3 How then can the “same” text-as a translation-appear essentially unchanged in a milieu completely different geographically, temporally and, most importantly, ideologically? If Yvain was so closely related to the feudal conditions of late twelfth-century France, what are the relations of

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David Matthews - Ywain and Gawain 453

Ywain and Gawain to both Yvain, and mid fourteenth-century England? How, in other words, can the historicizing project account for genre’s translation? It is the purpose of this article to discuss some proposals and counter-proposals, and suggest as a result of them ways of reading my paradigm example, Ywuin and Guwuin.

II

Juuss Though Jauss has a way of posing the critical questions, his answers are not always equally adequate. Seeking to confront the problem posed by genre’s “variability within historical appearance” in his essay, Jauss, dis- appointingly, rewrites the medieval scene into modern aesthetic catego- ries. Answering the question, “How can the structure of a genre transform itself without losing its uniqueness?“, Jauss proposes that:

the relationship between the individual text and the series of texts formative of a genre presents itself as a process of the continual founding and altering of horizons. The new text evokes for the reader (listener) the horizon of expectations and “rules of the game” familiar to him from earlier texts, which as such can then be varied, extended, corrected, but also transformed, crossed out, or simply reproduced.4

Problems with this formulation of genre as a linear series are immediately obvious, as it rather easily gives way to a privileging of “original” texts. This is confirmed when Jauss goes on to suggest that in the process of the altering of horizons, there are two extremes to the activities which deter- mine the boundaries of a genre: on the one hand, the “break with the convention” and on the other, “mere reproduction”; he then constitutes this transformative pair as a binary opposition in which the break with convention is clearly privileged. Reproduction results in “that stereotypical kind of literature into which, precisely, successful genres such as, for example, the chanson de geste in the twelfth century or the fabliau in the thirteenth soon sink” and, he continues, “The more stereotypically a text repeats the generic, the more inferior is its artistic character and its degree of historicity.“5

The ramifications of this approach are clear: the implication that artistic superiority results from a break with generic convention; the insinua- tion of the subjective category of “artistic character” into the discussion as if it were the objectively measurable result of generic success or failure; and the notion that the persistence or survival of a genre is an indicator of its “sinking” into stereotypicality. Each of these assumptions brings dis- tinctly modern conceptions of innovation and originality to bear on the problems of medieval textuality; the last point is particularly perverse given that it might more accurately be maintained that stereotypical reproduction is precisely the measure of medieval generic success. Romance

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seems to have been a successful genre because there are so many surviving examples, hackneyed and stereotypical though they may be. There are modern equivalents which support this: Mills and Boon novels (a modern version of romance) are written under strict generic controls, varied occa- sionally according to perceived social demands, but generally perpetuat- ing a rigidly defined genre. Obviously, by commercial standards, they constitute an extremely successful genre, despite repetition and stereotypicality.

The linkage of artistic inferiority with a decreased degree of historicity, both resulting from the “mere reproduction” of a genre, has critical im- plications for the study of the social formation of texts and genres. The link suggests that it is only those texts that are artistically important (already canonical) that reveal their social formation; and a text reproduc- ing a genre bears a weaker relation to its historical and social formation than the original example of the genre. By virtue of a break with convention, a genre may again establish a stronger degree of historicity, but if it is only thus, through originality, that a genre’s historicity is restored, Jauss’s path to the “historicization of genre poetics” is followed at considerable cost to the concept of historicization.

Pierre Menard A second approach is suggested by the work of the Australian Marxist literary theorist, John Frow, and his use of the Borges short story, “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote”. Frow suggests that the story “is a perfectly serious joke that we are still learning how to take seriously.“6 Menard’s version of the Quixote is not a translation or a transcription, simply a verbally identical rewriting, in the twentieth century, of Cer- vantes’s seventeenth-century tale. The result is a “fragmentary Quixote . . . more subtle than Cervantes’.“’ Borges’s narrator, friend and supporter of the Symbolist poet, compares two identical passages and finds that “The contrast in style is . . . vivid. The archaic style of Menard - quite foreign, after all-suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time.“*

Frow makes the point, on the basis of the reading of “Pierre Menard”, “that intrinsic structures are not given but are variably constructed in accordance with changing intertextual relations.” He proposes:

that every text is marked by a multiple temporality: the time of its production (the “internal” time of its rewriting or repetition of prevailing literary and ideological norms), and the times of its reception (in which this textual process is transformed by its entry into new intertextual relationships).9

Literally enough, Ywain and Gawain is Yvain, written in fourteenth- century words. The lesson of Menard is that the later text must have its own distinct ideological function, and Frow’s concept of the text’s multiple temporality allows a consideration of Ywain and Gawain as an ide-

David Matthews - Ywain andGawain 455

ological moment in itself, along with its ideological relation to Yvain. This avoids the Jaussian schema in which, inevitably, the later text would be seen as a kind of diminutive of the earlier. Multiple temporality allows one to pose a difference to Yvain - in Ywain and Gawain’s inscription into the contemporary rhetorical, political and textual relations of fourteenth- century England-and sameness, in its obvious generic quotation.

Sameness must be accounted for because there is an extent to which Ywain and Gawain does “merely reproduce,” responding more to its intertextual referent than to ideological conditions. As Georges Duby makes clear, the peculiar conditions of late twelfth-century northern France to which romance was a response had changed by the very end of the century. A growth in wealth, its more rapid circulation, and an increase in population were among factors which relaxed social pressures and al- lowed families to absorb and make provision for the previously disruptive juvenes, the landless young men whose destructive and antisocial tenden- cies, Knight suggests, were what romance euphemized with its chivalrous young knights.rO It can scarcely be considered coincidental that at the same time, the Arthurian verse romances which had responded to these social pressures declined, eventually to become “moribund” in the thirteenth century, displaced by the prose cycles.” A fourteenth-century En- glish text, therefore, could only apprehend the text of Yvain, not its context. But Y~ain and Guwuin is overdetermined in relation to Yvuin, in that it is structured both by intertextuality and its relation to its immediate context. In its difference to Yvuin ideology can be read, in precisely those modalities which distinguish Menard’s text from Cervantes’s (albeit not quite as inscrutably as Menard’s work).

This approach can be used to modify earlier judgments on Ywuin and Guwain. Traditionally, critics have tended to find the author responsible for the artistic and ideological divergence of the later text, considering the changes to Yvuin as resultant from an English avoidance of introspection or from the English poet’s “sterner temperament.“‘* More recently, the reception theorist Keith Busby has suggested that audience demand ac- counts for the modifications, and Finlayson considers that Ywuin and Guwain is less sophisticated than Yvuin as it was “composed for a less sophisticated audience.“13 The audience must form part of the literary system but, crudely generalized as it is by Finlayson, the receptor becomes the determinant of the text. As Pierre Macherey suggests, “Readers are made by what makes the book,” and so, in seeking to reorient the discussion to one which considers the text in relation to a system, “we must not replace a mythology of the creator by a mythology of the public.“r4


III

Ywain and Gawain Given the multiple temporality of the text, opposing the time of production and the time of reception, it is possible to see that Ywain and Gawain is itself a form of reception of Yvain. Ywain and Gawain both rewrites “prevailing literary and ideological norms” and is “transformed by its entry into new intertextual relationships.” These transformations, in the case of an English and a French text, can be comprehended not simply as translation but as a kind of textual colonizing.

Ywain and Gawain is an apparently unsigned and unattributed version of Chretien’s Yvain, which does not acknowledge its status as translation. It places the tale entirely within a new frame, which effectively “recolo- nizes” the narrative from the French. The English poem begins:

Almyghti God @t made mankyn, He schilde his servandes out of syn And mayntene barn with might and mayne, Pat herkens Ywayne and Gawayne; Pai war knightes of b tabyi rownde, parefore listens a lytel stownde. (l-6)

This is not simply the hackneyed invocation of a minstrel, one which, if lines 4 and 5 were removed or adjusted, could stand at the head of any poem.i5 The reframing is a divergence from Yvain, which began without the expected positioning prologue. The new frame rearranges what it contains, so that in contrast to the openness of the French beginning, loosely translated in the English poem from line 7, Ywain and Gawain begins with a clear sense of purpose and narrative order. Unlike Yvain, the poem is given a title clearly indicating the subject matter. The narrative is carefully framed within the dictates of conventional piety and an implicit relationship is established between God and the literary arts. This represents a recuperation of romance - profane writing often condemned as frivolous-within a religiously purposeful frame: “mayntene barn with might and mayne, / Pat herkens Ywayne and Gawayne.“16

The English poem is also rather clearer about the end of the narrative. Where Chretien’s narrative ends on the positive note of Yvain’s and Laudine’s reunion and renewed love, Ywain and Gawain rapidly sketches in the life of the pair after the reunion, “Until bat ded haves dreven barn down” (4026). As in Yvain, the narratorial conclusion claims to have heard “na mare” of the story, “Nowber in rumance ne in spell” (4027-4028). This is followed by the closing prayer, parallel to the invocation of the opening.

The frame that is thus completed, placing the narrative entirely within it, is a redrawing of the narrative boundaries of the poem. It effectively re- colonizes the narrative, given that Chretien’s own use of Arthurian material was itself a colonizing of English material. Chretien’s “borrowing” of


the British narrative made Arthur and his court thoroughly French; in his poems, national boundaries, and therefore national identities, are obscured by the ease with which the knights pass between a notional Britain and Brodliande, and by the equivocal signification of Bretaingne which, as T.B. W. Reid points out, can mean Brittany, Britain or even simply England.i7 In Ywain and Gawain, reference to Broceliande is de- leted, implying that all the action takes place in England, a change considered by the editors Friedman and Harrington to be an improvement.‘* More complexly still, while Ywain and Gawuin reclaims the French narrative as British, Arthur is the conqueror of Wales, the country from which Arthur and Arthurian narrative once derived. By the late stage in the development of English Arthurian narrative that Ywuin and Guwuin represents, after the subjugation of the Welsh by Edward I, Arthur’s Celtic nature is elided to provide a story ideologically assimilable by English- men. As Friedman and Harrington note, “For the English adapter, though not for Chretien, the story of Ywain was part of his own country’s early history and Arthur a predecessor to the English Kings.“19 Arthur, and the story, are in Ywuin and Guwain made English in opposition both to the immediate French heritage, and the Welsh origins.

The English narrative has the same sequence of narrative events as the French, so that at the evenemental level, the two appear identical: Yvain/ Ywain falls in love with the lady of the castle on first seeing her from the place where he is imprisoned; Yvain/Ywain tights, unwittingly, with his best friend and knightly equal, Gauvain/Gawain; despite their separa- tion, the knight and Laudine/Alundyne are reunited, with the help of Lunet/e. However, the narrative mechanisms through which events un- fold are quite different, deriving as they do from different sociocultural intertexts.

Eugene Vance has shown the importance to the narrative of Yvuin the logical principles of Abelard and other twelfth-century logicians. As I have argued elsewhere, as a result of this, paradox is the essential narrative “mechanism” in Yv~in.~O Two examples suffice. The first is Yvain’s lengthy monologue on his love for Laudine after he has been entrapped in her castle. The monologue expresses the paradoxicality of his falling in love with the woman who has most reason to hate him, as he is the killer of her husband. The result of his initial quest, paradoxically, seems to have stalled the narrative altogether, making Yvain a prisoner of love as well as of Laudine’s castle and unable to proceed in narrative terms. Only when the paradox is resolved can the narrative continue.

A similar situation arises later in the poem when Yvain and Gauvain fight each other incognito, neither realizing he is fighting his best friend. The combat that results is paradoxically irresolvable, as neither knight can defeat the other. It is preceded by a monologue in which the narrator meditates on the paradoxicality of the fact that the knights both love each other (they are the greatest of friends), and hate each other (they see each


other as enemies). But paradox is relatively unimportant in the English poem. Paradox,

the figure in which two apparently opposite “truths” can coexist, is re- placed as a narrative mechanism in Ywain and Gawain by trowth which, in contrast, asserts without contradiction. In its emphasis on trowth, Ywuin and Gawain fulfils the expectations created by the pious discourse of its reframing.

The changed emphasis is made clear at the outset. Where the French narrator laments the decline of love -

Mes ore i a mout po des suens; Que a bien pres l’ont tuit leissiee, San est amors mout abeissiee (18-20)

-the English rewriting exhibits a different concern:

i’ai tald of more trewth barn bitwene Pan now omang men here es sene, For trowth and luf es al bylaft (33-35)

As the rest of the poem shows, trowth is privileged over Zufhere. Certainly, the critical consensus is that the theme of the poem is trowth. As Nicolas Jacobs and A. V. C. Schmidt put it: “The author of Ywuin and Guwuin is not greatly interested in love, but he is interested in fidelity, and his special concern with the chivalric virtue of trewth is what distinguishes his work from its source and at the same time makes it peculiarly representative of English romances of the period.“*’

In this way, Ywuin and Guwuin is the result of a complex overdeter- mination. It has a relationship to a fourteenth-century context partly determined by contemporary perceptions of an earlier, twelfth-century context; this earlier context had a determining relationship to Chrttien’s Yvuin, which in turn has a determining relation to Ywuin and Guwuin. Ywuin and Guwuin is doubly related to the twelfth-century, and doubly distanced from it, as both Yvuin and fourteenth-century chivalry are ideological fictions rather than representations. Sorting this double relation is a matter of reading the sameness and difference between the two poems. As the change from paradox to trowth shows, this is not simply a matter of finding where Yvuin says one thing and Ywuin and Guwuin another, for at some points they express sameness and difference at the same time. The “same” things happen - the two knights fight, the knight and lady are reunited-but they are “different” happenings at the same time.

The link between the fourteenth-century “reception” of Yvuin and the twelfth-century original is the use in the later period of Arthur as an ideological legitimation, and the consequent looking-back to earlier uses of Arthurian narrative. There are aspects of Arthurian courtly romance which serve the needs of both periods, sufficiently so to enable the realiza-


tion, within the later context, of essentially the “same” romance as in the earlier. As one would expect, there is not a perfect ideological “fit” between the twelfth- and fourteenth-century productions of the narrative and, consequently, a number of differences between the two narratives can be read for their historicity, rather than for decreased artistic character. Friedman and Harrington list what they call “confusions” in the later text, where it fails to correspond with Yvui~,** which tends to support the view of Ywain and Gawain as a corruption of the French romance. But such confusions are potentially evidence of the ideological translation of the text, indicating that some details in the later version are emptied of the ideological import they had in the earlier.

The handling of the issue of Yvain’s paternity provides an example. This arises at the same points in the two poems, but is slightly altered in the English. In Yvain, the matter is raised twice. Lunete tells the knight:

Et reconeii vos ai bien: Fiz estes au roi Uriien Et avez non mes sire Yvains. (1017-1019)

Laudine reacts well on first hearing her suitor’s name:

Par foi! cist n’est mie vilains, Ainz est mout frans, je le sal bien, Si est fiz au roi Uriien. (1816-1818)

The same exchanges take place in Ywain and Gawain, with a slightly different emphasis:

bou ert b Kyng son Uriene, And fii name es Sir Ywayne. (732-733)

So gentil knight have 3e noght sene, He es @ Kin[g]s son Uryene. (1055-1054)

In the second instance, it is Lunet who tells Alundyne the knight’s lineage, where in the French, Laudine knows it, as soon as she hears the knight’s name. The point of Laudine’s recognition of Yvain’s lineage, as Knight puts it, is to euphemize the fact that it is really through the exercise of violence that Yvain has won her; his lineage and love remove “the spectre of a crass, murderous arriviste from the text.“23 The fact that Lunet tells Alundyne the lineage of her intended husband weakens the force of the original. While some of the euphemizing force remains- Ywain, also, proves not to be a crass arriviste - it is of greatly diminished importance. Ywain and Gawain reveals less anxiety over the issue. While the com- modification of landed women was always a medieval reality, the specific social danger posed by the landless young knight’s search for an heiress, euphemized in French romance, was a problem specific to twelfth-century France. As a factor in social life, it was less important in fourteenth-


century England, and is not manifested in the romance. For a text to be translatable, narrative mechanisms such as these must

be able to shift between ideologies. Both Ywain undGawain and Yvain are ostensibly about knighthood, but there are very different visions of knighthood in the two poems, simply because that institution in late medieval Britain was very different to what it had been in twelfth-century France. As I have already suggested, knighthood in Edward III’s time was partly shaped by the perception of knighthood in the romances. But, like the romances themselves, Edward’s tournaments and jousts were a blatantly ideological treatment of an institution which fell into greater corruption through the course of the century. Marc Bloch, speaking of this decline, mentions:

the abounding literature which, during the last centuries of the Middle Ages, drained to the lees the symbolic significance of the dubbing ceremony and, by its final extravagances, proclaimed the decadence of an institution which had become more a matter of etiquette than of law, and the impoverishment of the very ideal which men professed to rate so high.14

It is inevitable that signs of this decline should be detectable in such a late text as Ywain and Gawain, even as it tries to narrativize the glories of the institution, and evident in a way not possible in the earlier text, which dealt with the institution in its nascent form.

In Yvain, although the vocabulary of feudalism is muted, feudai real- ities are there to be read. In the quest narrative, a precise movement through the orders of feudal society can be traced, when first Calogrenant and later Yvain himself leave the (feudal) Arthurian court, encounter a vuvuss~r, then a viluin and lastly the territory of Laudine, not yet infeu- dated. The distinction between Laudine’s and Arthur’s territories is made by the trappings of the otherworld which initially pertain to Laudine’s realm, and the necessity of traversing Broceliande to reach it.

The later poem, however, in its context of a feudalism nearing its end, is not able to draw such clear distinctions. When Colgrevance leaves the court, he encounters a hospitable host in exactly the same fashion as his French predecessor. But this host is not a vavasour, but a knight himself (168). As such, the host is potentially Colgrevance’s equal, but for the fact that he already has the sovereignty which Colgrevance, the young landless knight, seeks. He has a castle and domain of his own, which Colgrevance himself fails to achieve through his adventure. In the French, the host is notionally Calogrenant’s social inferior, the “man” of another man, whereas Calogrenant, as a knight, has a less mediated relationship with his king. Ywain and Gawain, by contrast, counterposes a landless and errant knight with a landed knight. In the English version, it is not even clear that the host’s castle is wooden and therefore inferior to Arthur’s court, as is made explicit in the. French.

The host in Yvain has a very neutral role, simply providing a staging post in the adventure. But the host in Ywain and Gawain, because he is


primarily another knight, figures the possibilities of knightly quest-a successful knight presumably obtains a fine castle as he has done. This is not the case in Yvain, because to become a VUVUSSO~ is implicitly to join the petite noblesse, a rather mean destiny. 25 Colgrevance fails to reach even the level of the host through his adventure; when Ywain himself sets out on his quest, he too is a knight of lesser achievement than his host, a position which he proceeds to improve. Ywain’s success as a knight can be measured by his superior status to his erstwhile host but, in the French, the host belongs to a different social grouping altogether.

In England, as Bloch points out, the knighthood had not formed a clearly delineated aristocratic class as it had on the continent, because it did not “serve as the focal point for the formation of a class founded on the hereditary principle,” and there was not, in consequence, a nobility in the French or German sense .26 Although England had its own strong aristocracy in which power was inherited, “this group was too ill-defined not to remain largely open” and thus, “any family of solid wealth and social distinction” was able to assume the status of knighthood.27 The host’s promotion in the social ranks, and the consequent haziness of social distinction in Ywuin and Guwuin, is a symptom of these blurred social boundaries. In contrast, as one would expect, there is a rather clearer transiation of the v&in into a cherel; the description of the cherelis a spirited translation from the French of the creature’s bizarre charac- teristics, and in the dialogue between knight and churl that follows, the translation is very close to the original. Through the minutely close description, the later poet had no difficulty in maintaining the essential otherness of the villein class.

Traditionally, the English romances have not done well at the hands of critics, especially when compared to the French. Even a relatively compe- tent poem such as Ywuin and Guwuin has been written off as merely a “bowdlerized” version of Yvuin, an attitude by no means untypical.** The consideration here of “translations” in relation to their context and intertext is not so much an attempt to answer as to set aside the question expressed by Finlayson which considers whether such a text is a “work of art in its own right or . . . merely a translation.” As I have tried to show, there is nothing “merely” about a translation; however close the corre- spondence to the original may seem, the later text is necessarily imbued with the ideology of its times of production, as the example of Menard’s Quixote reminds. Neither have I been concerned with “artistic character” here, to return to the Jaussian terms of the debate, because this criterion too easily lends itself to a criticism which modernizes and normalizes medieval literature. In any case, the reorientation of critical study to intertext and context should dispense with the need for the rhetoric of comparative literary “value” which, after all, reduces to the meaningless question of which is the “better” poem. The issue of the translation’s


“degree of historicity” is far more important; as I have indicated, it is not only possible, but desirable to approach history in the translation on the same level at which it is considered in the original.

University of Newcastle DAVID MATTHEWS

Notes

1. Hans Robert Jauss. Toward an Aesthetic of Receution, trans. Timothy Bahti, Theory and History of Literature’2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 88. _

2. John Finlayson, “Ywain and Gnwain and the Meaning of Adventure,” Anglia 87 (1969), 312-37, p. 312.

3. See his Arthurian Literature and Society (London: Macmillan, 1983). 4. Jauss, “Theory of Genres”, p. 88. 5. Jauss, “Theory of Genres”, p. 89. 6. John Frow, Marxism and Literary History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 170. 7. Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quirote,” Labyrinths, ed. and

trans. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 62-71, p. 68. This is a different translation to that used by Frow.

8. Borges, “Pierre Menard”, p. 69. 9. Frow, Marxism, p. 171. 10. Georges Duby, The Knight, the Lady and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage

in Medieval France, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Pantheon, 1983), pp. 275-6. 11. Douelas Kellv. “Chretien de Troves: The Narrator and his Art” The Romances of

Chretien de yTroyes: A Symposium, ed. Douglas Kelly (Lexington: French Forum, 1985), 13-47. D. 25. Cf. also Keith Busbv. “The Characters and the Settine.” The Leeacv of Chretien

de Tr;?;es, ed. Norris J. Lacy, Douglas Kelly and Keith Busby (AzsterdamuRodopi, 1987) 57-89, p. 315n.

12. The first opinion is that of Jessie L. Weston and other critics, summarised and rejected by Finlayson, “Ywain and Gawain”, p, 313; Ywain and Gawain, ed. Albert B. Friedman and Norman T. Harrington, EETS 254 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), p. xvii. All quotations from Ywain and Gawain are from this edition.

13. Keith Busby, “Chretien de Troyes English’d,” Neophilologus 71(1987), 596-613, pp. 602-3; Finlayson, “Ywain andGawain”, p. 313.

14. Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 70.

15. The topos is common: Friedman and Harrington list several romances in which the oraver is used as a nroloeue. Ywain and Gawain. D. 110. * <

16. On this st&ject, &e relation between thkblder romances apparently having little to do with religion, and those which Dieter Mehl sees as being related to homiletic and didactic texts, see Janet Coleman, English Literature in History: 1350-1400 Medieval Readers and Writers (London: Hutchinson, 1981), p. 70, and Mehl, The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (London: Routledge, 1969), pp. 17-18.

17. See Chretien de Troyes, Yvain (Le Chevalier au Lion), ed. T. B. W. Reid (1942 rpt Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1961), p. 187n 1. All references to Yvain are to this edition.

18. Ywain and Gawain, p. xxiii. 19. Ywain and Gawain, pp. 182-3. 20. Eugene Vance, From Topic to Tale: Logic and Narrativity in The Middle Ages,

Theory and History of Literature 47 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). I have made the areument about naradox in mv unnublished doctoral dissertation, Narrative and History in Arfhurian Verse Romances (University of Melbourne, Australia, 1990). Some of mv araument is based on the work done by Runert T. Pickens on Perceval in The Welsh Rntgkt: Faradaxicality in Chretien’s Conte del draal (Lexington: French Forum, 1977).

21. Nicolas Jacobs and A. V. C. Schmidt, Middle English Romances, vol. 2 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977), p. 12. Tony Hunt likewise maintains that trowth, rather than luf (which he sees as the defining characteristic of French romance), is the poem’s most important virtue. See “Beginnings, Middles and Ends: Some Interpretative Problems in


Chrktien’s Yvain and Its Medieval Adaptations,” The Craft of Fiction: Essays in Medieval Poetics, ed. Leigh A. Arrathoon (Rochester: Solaris, 1984), 83-117, p. 91.

22. Ywain and Gawain, p. xxix. 23. Knight, Arthurian Literature, p. 84. 24. Marc Bloch, FeudalSociety, trans. L. A. Manyon(London: Routledge, 1961), p. 317. 25. On the role of the vavussor, see Knight, Arthurian Literature, p. 89. 26. Bloch, Feudal Society, p. 330. 21. Bloch, Feudal Society, p. 33 1. 28. John Stevens, Medieval Romance. Themes and Approaches (London: Hutchinson,

1973). p. 72.

Documents

Translation and ideology: The case of Ywain and Gawain