From One Mask to Another: The Trials and Tribulations of an Author of Romance at the Time of Perceforest

Abstract

Whether it be the prologue to the Lais by Marie de France or the prologues to the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, twelfth-century texts are never evasive about the importance of the issue of authorship: how does one write a text, how does one claim for oneself the status of writer, how does one justify the unbelievable presumptuousness of undertaking any mise en écrit [writing down], made worse by the choice of the vernacular and the audacity of appending one’s signature, be it fictional? Chrétien, Marie, Gautier d’Arras, and Païen de Mézières, and, somewhat later, Renaud de Bâgé and Jean Renart keep on rehashing various ways of answering these questions. That is not to say that Robert de Boron and his thirteenth-century successors were less interested in this issue, but there is a certain sense in which the choice of the prose form brought about some sort of balance for authors in this area and solved the problem temporarily by pushing it back into the narrative space. Robert and Hélie de Boron, Luces de Gast or Walter Map (that is, the improbable reincarnation of the genuine twelfth-century Latin polygraph!) are mostly fictional figures, each one playing his role on the threshold of the romance as if he acted on the parvis of a church in a play staging the conditions of the romance writing, thereby saving any hypothetical real authors the trouble of placing themselves in a not yet imaginable system of representations.