Thomas's Raisun: Désir, Vouloir, Pouvoir

Summary

In an important contribution to the interpretation of Thomas's version of the Tristan romance, Matilda Bruckner built on previous critics’ discussions of structural patterns in the romance, in particular the obsessive recourse to doubling and the continual oscillation between images of unity and duality, one and two, coupling and separation – neatly encompassed, for instance, in the repeated use of the verb partir, and its nominal derivates, which can mean either “to leave, to separate, to divide” or its opposite, “to share” – but extended the framework decisively by including the gestures of the narrator figure in the mix. The latter's participation in this oscillating pattern suggests that there is no single conclusion we can draw about how he, and by extension Thomas, feels about his fictional characters and their actions. As Bruckner puts it succinctly, “[Thomas] can neither endorse nor condemn, but – to the best of his limited ability – only tell.

Space does not permit a full discussion of the critical situation to which Bruckner was responding, but suffice it to say that Jean Frappier's forceful restatement of the “courtly” foundation of Thomas's work, his articulation of the work's ideology of fine amor, “la religion de l'amour … principe d'une éthique et d'une foi,”

was then, and remains today, an unavoidable point of reference, most recently for those who disagree with Frappier's self-proclaimed idealistic stance (“la foi de Thomas dans l'idéal des ‘fins amants'”4).