The Invention of Romance: Erec and Cligès

Somewhere around 1170, at the court of Champagne, Chrétien de Troyes wrote Erec et Enide and a new literary form existed. The romance differs from the chronicle in unit and in engine: its unit is the single knight, not the kingdom; its engine is the aventure — the meaningful encounter that comes to meet the one who rides out. In his prologue Chrétien boasts that from a mere adventure-tale he has drawn "une molt bele conjointure," a beautifully wrought joining; the phrase is the form's manifesto. Structure itself will carry the meaning.

And the meaning is a problem, freshly stated: Erec, the perfect knight, marries the perfect Enide — and stops. He lies late, neglects arms, and the court murmurs that love has made him recreant. Overhearing Enide's grief, he orders her to ride out with him, forbidding her to speak, into a punishing sequence of adventures that tests both of them toward a remade marriage. The question — how do private love and public excellence live in one life? — is the romance form's native question, and Chrétien will pose it again from a new angle in every poem. Cligès, his second romance, poses it as parody: a Greco-Arthurian confection whose heroine Fénice refuses to be another Iseult ("I could never agree to the life Iseult led; love was too debased in her"), skewering the Tristan matter (Unit 17) while borrowing its machinery. Read these two first not because they are the most famous but because they show the form thinking — about itself — from its first breath.