Double Coding

Barbara Newman has argued in Medieval Crossover that we mistake medieval literature and thought if we look at it from a post-Renaissance angle of vision. Sacred and secular exist in every world, and the shift from medieval to modern doesn’t change that. The issue, though, is which is the default option. For us, the secular is the obvious, natural state. For medieval, “the sacred was the inclusive whole in which the secular had to establish a niche” (viii). This is why the profane comes up in the form of parody: “gargoyles on cathedral roofs, obscene marginalia in books of hours, marital squabbles on misericords, lecherous monks in fabliaux, foxes preaching to hens in beast epics, and so forth.” 

This isn’t transgressive: “To parody the sacred is emphatically to engage with it, not to create an autonomous secular sphere. The sacred might be viewed with skeptical, profane, or jaded eyes, but it was still the sacred” (viii). What makes Renaissance humanism different is “neither a love of the classical world nor a penchant to mock the holy, for both had been alive and well for centuries. It is rather the imagining of a secular realm that could, not did not necessarily, engage in any way with the sacred” (ix).

The fact that the sacred and secular are both in play means that we need to attend to the “double coding” of even apparently secular texts. Newman would object to interpretations such as that of Joan Ferrante (The Conflict of Love and Honor, 14), who writes that “Chretien [de Troyes] alternates, in his romances, between a serious attempt to reconcile the ideals of courtly love with social responsibility and marriage, as in Erec and Enid, and a satiric presentation of the unrealistic conventions of love-service, as in Cliges. He evades the problem in Yvain, and in Lancelot he seems undecided between the serious and satiric approach. Certainly he ridicules Lancelot’s devotion, but at the same time he makes of him a nobler figure, more humble and self-sacrificing than his other heroes. Chretien was apparently not able to resolve his own feelings about this story so he left the romance to someone else to finish.” To Newman, that is altogether too smoothly modern: Chretien doesn’t oscillate between the two registers, but keeps them together throughout the story.

Newman examines Chretien’s Charrette, the tale of Lancelot and the cart, as an illustration: “Whatever one finally thinks of Lancelot, a pattern of ‘messianic reverberations’ attends the hero, lending his feats a resonance beyond mere chivalric glory. For instance, his success is heralded by the fulfillment of prophecy. In the Future Cemetery episode, he lifts the cover of a tomb destined for the one who will free the captives of Logres. When his comrades warn that no one can cross the Sword Bridge ‘any more than a man could enter his mother’s womb and be reborn . . . , they echo the objection of Nicodemus to the teachings of Jesus. . . . To accomplish this feat Lancelot crawls on his hands and knees, removing most of his armor, and enters Gorre with hands and feet profusely bleeding. No attentive listener could have missed this allusion to the stigmata. If any did, King Bademagu’s offer to heal the knight with ‘the ointment of the three Maries’ . . . would have recalled the women who came to anoint Christ’s body on Easter morning. By an act of faith, Lancelot defeats what turn out to be imaginary lions – emblems of the power of hell – at the far end of the bridge. As he proceeds into Gorre, his countrymen hail him as their savior and vie for the honor of lodging him. When he liberates the queen, all the other prisoners go free and the custom of Gorre is broken.” It is a harrowing of hell (60).

But, Newman points out, Lancelot suffers and does all these Messianic things “to consummate a love that is both adultery and treason.” She doesn’t think that the tension should be relieved. The ambiguity is “a large part of Chretien’s sen” (64). Lancelot is motivated by passion for Guenevere, but that passion makes him a “knight of the cart,” suffering messianically for the sake of his beloved. At the center of Chretien’s story is the evangelical paradox of “shame as honor . . . whether we take that to be a sage assessment of fin’amor or a chivalric perspective on Christ’s passion.” Through the double-coding, Chretien leaves open either profane or sacred readings, and more importantly shows that Lancelot’s love is simultaneously “sublime and absurd; sublime and idolatrous; sublime and adulterous” (65).

The juxtaposition of the two is carried through not only in Lancelot’s shameful ride in the cart, but in his shameful performance (required by Guenevere) in the tournament. It reaches its peak in the erotic worship that Lancelot offers when he comes to Guenevere’s bed. She cites Lewis’s judgment that this reflects the “irreligion of the religion of love,” but also the claim of other critics that Lancelot “treats the queen like a cors saint – a holy body – because what she represents is indeed holy: the soul, the mystical body of Christ, Jerusalem, the Church.” 

Both reactions split apart what Chretien keeps together: “There could be no clearer case of double coding, as the poet’s hyperbole elicits hyperbolic responses in both directions.” She insists that “a double judgment is required: Lancelot’s love is sublime and idolatrous, his behavior heroic and ridiculous” (69).