[In the following essay, Pensom maintains that the poem emphasizes the concept of “recognition” as a unifying theme in the adventures of the perpetually-separated Aucassin and Nicolette.]

Aucassin has now returned
To his city of Biaucaire,
Holding the lands of his domain
As uncontested sovereign.
He swears by God's almighty power
That Nicolete is more to him
Than all his kith and all his kin,
If he were suddenly to die.
‘My dear sweetheart of the bright face,
I don’t know where to look for you.
Never was kingdom made by God,
Whether on land or upon sea,
That, had I hope of finding you,
I would not search!’

Now we will leave off talking of Aucassin and return to Nicolete.

The ship in which Nicolete found herself belonged to the King of Carthage who was indeed her father. Also she had twelve brothers who were all either princes or kings. When her captors saw how beautiful Nicolete was, they treated her with great respect and entertained her royally, pressing her with questions about her origins, for she seemed to them to be a well-born woman of high lineage. But she was unable to answer their enquiries because she had been carried off by pirates as a tiny child. So on they sailed until they found themselves under the walls of Carthage, and when Nicolete saw the stronghold and the countryside, she suddenly remembered who she was, that she had been brought up in this place and carried off as a tiny child, but not so tiny as not to know quite well that she was the daughter of the King of Carthage and that she had been brought up in this very city.

.....

VERSE:

Aucassin's dilemma has been transformed by his newfound status as lord of Biaucaire. Now political responsibility has replaced Chivalry as the antagonist of love. He has received the oath of homage from his vassals and is thus bound to them in a compact of mutual support and responsibility. Although he reigns as lord of Biaucaire, his inner thoughts are still of his sweetheart. He is no longer a rebel against parental authority, since he has now literally become the man his father was, Lord of Biaucaire. But he wears his power with a difference. Love is part of him as it was never part of his father. Although it is suppressed in his life as a political magnate, in his speech to himself, he makes it clear that it is still the most important thing in life to him. In the life of his father, love had been not suppressed but repressed, that is, lost to conscious awareness in a way that forced it to re-emerge unbidden as a destructive force. The suppression of powerful desires is the price the mature adult pays for the security of himself and those who depend on him. What is desired is everpresent to his mind, and his life is a search for a way between the opposing claims of his desire and his duty. So it is that Aucassin has become his father yet not his father. He has found in his experience the strength to confront the contradiction in his being without banishing from consciousness that part of himself which causes him pain. Because business of state and feudal responsibilities have the first claim on his time and energy, love is banished to a remote conditional tense:

Never was kingdom made by God,
Whether on land or upon sea,
That, had I hope of finding you,
I would not search!

The emergence of the theme of heterosexual love in the literature of twelfth-century France created a language for the articulation of the concept of the individual in social life. The world of the Old French epic was dominated by mainly homosocial family ties and feudal allegiances. The affective bonds which count outside family ties are between peers fostered together (as was the custom) in the same aristocratic household, Roland and Oliver, Gerin and Gerers and so on. We have already seen in the case of the nightwatchman in Chapter Eight how the words denoting the concrete qualities of the feudal vassal were progressively attached to moral and psychological qualities as the twelfth century advanced. It is just as interesting to see how words denoting kinbonds and feudal bonds were expropriated to describe partners in an essentially illicit heterosexual love relationship.¹ Here are the knight and the niece of the Duke of Burgundy (from the Chastelaine de Vergi) meeting secretly at the niece's house:

And he returns her kiss and hug
And says,’ Lady, my friend (m’amie),
My love, my heart, companion, (druerie) …
And she replied, ‘My sweetest lord (seignor),
My sweetest friend (amis), my most sweet love. …(2)

Here the words amie and amis were in their earliest use applied to kinsmen and kinswomen, while druerie and seignor originally described homosocial feudal relations:³druz is used to describe a close companion and vassal of a feudal lord and seignor the lord of that vassal. It seems that cultural and social changes as they appear in the literature led to the transformation of areas of Old French vocabulary in a way which assimilated this new heterosexual mode to the models provided by the existing social and political institutions of the family and feudality.

Thus when Aucassin, as an uncontested sovereign swears by God's almighty power that he loves his sweetheart, his douce amie, more than all his kin, we see someone who is seeking to draw together domains of human allegiance which are opposed. But now he has the strength to endure the paradox, to discharge his duties as Lord and to keep his own wishes to himself.

PROSE:

Now that the lovers are separated, the narrative proceeds in the mode known as interlace. This is the dominant mode of construction for the vast and complex prose-romances of the thirteenth century. Its polar opposite is the single plot-stand structure of the classical seventeenth-century French tragedy. Interlace gives us two or more strands of narrative woven together in such a way that episodes from different stories alternate. This is the nearest narrative can come to what in music is called polyphony, that is two or more melodies played simultaneously. Since narrative exists only in time, simultaneity is impossible for it; simultaneity presupposes articulation in space, which of course, is what music has in common with the visual arts.

Interlace probably began as a way of introducing variety into story-telling, but its poetic and constructional potential soon became clear to the professionals. Readers of Malory will be familiar with the formula in such cases as Now leave we Sir Tristram and turne we to Kynge Marke. This is derived from the French prose romances in which interlace was put to work to produce unexpected and unparaphrasable poetic meaning. Let us take a hypothetical example for brevity's sake. Let’s imagine a romance which juxtaposes two episodes from different stories: one is the tale of lovers, one of whom eventually deserts and hence indirectly causes the death of his former beloved. The second tale is of a King and a vassal who breaks his oaths of fealty to the King and betrays him to an enemy, thus causing his death. In this overly obvious example, our imagined romance is creating thematic structures in the succeeding episodes which, despite the discontinuity of plot-material, are perceived by the reader as metaphorically related. Although the characters are different and the nature of their relationship is different, clear similarities emerge which perhaps suggest to the readers a relationship between a love affair and a feudal bond.

It clear that something of the kind is happening in our own story at this point. It is more than possible that the interlace formula:

Now we will leave off talking about Aucassin
and turn to Nicolete.

would have triggered interpretative activity in the listener's mind, stimulating him to scan subliminally the following prose episode for parallel structures. Nicolete, although far away in Carthage, is also the object of anagnorisis, the universal dramatic device (labelled by Aristotle in his Poetics) according to which a lost person is recovered through recognition and restored to his rightful place. While Aucassin is recognised literally by people who knew him, Nicolete is at first only recognised, as she was in Torelore, as a person possessing innately aristocratic qualities. But the text also subtly carries us into a more secret manifestation of the principle of anagnorisis. This is closer to the literal meaning of the Greek word which mean something like ‘bringing up into awareness’, which of course is exactly what Nicolete is slowly doing here. So ‘the return of something lost’ in anagnorisis, does not have to be a person; it can also be the true recollection of something forgotten.

We see in this that the text reiterates the idea of ‘recognition’ as a common theme in interlacing of the adventures of the separated lovers. While recognition for Aucassin is a single and uncomplicated process of being reknown by people who had known him years before, the process of anagnorisis operates for Nicolete at a double level; first, she is ‘recognised’ by others for what she really is, an aristocrat, but more importantly she recovers from forgetfulness in herself her own real social identity.

Incurable readers of mythology and folk stories will certainly have spotted the theme which culminates in Nicolete's rediscovery of her royal identity. This is a theme whose significance is explored by Freud in his essay called ‘Family Romances’, and it is that of the child who believes that his parents are not his real parents but that he is in reality the child of someone far more important. This idea that one's parents are, as it were, ‘illegitimate’ is the symmetrical obverse, from the child's viewpoint, of the fear of the illegitimacy of male offspring suffered by feudal patriarchs. Stories in which this theme figures are many and important: Oedipus was abandoned by his royal father and brought up by humble people, Jesus Christ, brought up by a carpenter as his own child, turns out to be the Son of God, Arthur, also the illegitimate offspring of a King, lives as the son of Pellinor and the brother of Kay before drawing the sword from the stone and becoming King of the Britons. Readers can take a Freudian line on these stories, seeing in them the child's desire for revenge on parents who have not lived up to a desired ideal, or they may prefer the Jungian approach which sees in the child's fantasies of lost grandeur a remembrance or an anticipation of his spiritual vocation. Whichever view they take, the story remains powerfully suggestive and its magic is used by the storyteller in a characteristic way. As we will see, it doesn’t end the story, but shows rather a further phase in the evolution of Nicolete's self-awareness.

Notes

1. The love affairs which attracted most attention in the literature were adulterous, (the love poems of the troubadours and trouvères, Tristan and Isolt, Lancelot and Guinevere). The love of Aucassin, though not adulterous, is illicit in the sense that it goes against feudal custom.

2. Frederick Whitehead's edition, lines 405-13.

3. As defeat approaches, Roland, at the Battle of Roncevalles, calls upon the absent Charlemagne, his mother's brother:

   1697 E! reis amis, que vos ici nen estes!