The Anonymous Marie de France

Modern Language Review, The, July, 2005 by Jane Gilbert

The Anonymous Marie de France. By R. HOWARD BLOCH. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2003. xii 367 pp. 31.50 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-226-05968-5.

R. Howard Bloch's latest book is a very personal work. Dedicated to the memory of his wife (Naomi Schor), it is also written with a declared fondness for and identification with its subject, of a sort not often encountered today. Personal too is its interest in Marie de France's psychology, a sense of which Bloch claims can be reconstructed from a study of her oeuvre as a whole. Its intimate tone renders the book's meditations on love, death, and memory genuinely touching, and it seems inappropriate at times to assess them on strictly academic grounds. Although in certain respects this project is self-consciously old-fashioned, in others Bloch's work is, as always, timely. His theoretical framework draws on ethics, postcolonialism, and debates about community, as well as on his long-standing interests in deconstruction, psychoanalysis (despite some stinging rebukes), feminism (despite some provoking remarks), anthropology (in the distinctively Blochian sense of the word), and New Historicism.

Bloch weaves arguments around a number of themes, of which two are primary: language and the state. He considers language both in relation to the literary (particular emphases are translation and cultural memory) and as an element in ethical philosophy. Accepting the traditional chronology of Marie's works, he posits the Lais and Fables as thesis and antithesis, with the Espurgatoire Seint Patriz combining what is satisfactory in each while responding to lacks in both. Whereas in the 1980s Bloch's writing celebrated language for its comic and transforming potential, here the Lais are considered to document its inevitable turn to tragedy; there is 'a fatalism of language such that one is wounded or dead in the instant one speaks' (p. 242). The Fables allow language some positive efficacy (one may save one's life by speaking), but limit it through a political context in which might remains right. Bloch shows the philosophical sophistication of the Fables and their author, drawing out parallels with Aristotle and Abelard. In the Espurgatoire, theology (glossed as a concentration on absolute values, as in the Lais) combines with an insistence on the efficacy of the will (found to some extent in the Fables) to produce a 'salvific language [...] according to which saying the right word at the right time produces a liberating result' (p. 223). This view of language is not confined to the religious text, whose similarity with courtly romance Bloch draws out. As always, Bloch's arguments tend to rely on analogy as much as on logic, while his discussions of language often concentrate on alleged plays on words. A defensive tone clings to some of these (Bloch repeats that he is not the first to have noticed particular connections). Since some of the material included on the Lais was first published and responded to twenty years ago, it is unlikely to make many new converts among scholars familiar with the counter-arguments, but its reproduction here will make it available to a new generation.

Bloch also argues that Marie was responding to social and political changes brought about by Henry II's administration, which took the Anglo-Normans from a feudal age to recognizably modern forms of social, political, and economic organization. Rather too recognizably: one could wish that the modernity portrayed here as a late twelfth-century phenomenon did not share quite so many traits with US-style liberal capitalism. This is one of a number of points where Bloch's identification with Marie succumbs to projection. Nevertheless, Bloch does raise interesting perspectives, especially in his reading of the Espurgatoire as a contribution to the colonization of Ireland.

The Anonymous Marie de France is a stimulating and provocative book, important principally as the first work on the author to discuss at length all three of the works ascribed to her. Its most obvious failing is Bloch's repeated insistence that he stands alone among modern critics in appreciating the writer's complexity: 'in contrast to almost all that has been written or said about Marie to date [...]we have encountered an extraordinarily coherent, sophisticated poet' (p. 312). It is remarkable how Bloch elides the many distinguished contributions of the last half century or so, preferring to construct an image of Marie scholarship based on (what now appear the more imperceptive) comments drawn from critics writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

JANE GILBERT

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON