I’ve been thinking about memory of late, reading the Lais of Marie de France1—narrative poems of courtly love. The stories are fascinating, in the way that centuries-old stories so often hold a sense of magic and mystery. The lais—courtly romance narratives that were a somewhat new genre at the time—focused often on transformation, with talking androgynous animals, werewolves, and women who not only had agency but often had some means of escape from a bad marriage, often with the help of other women.
But it’s the way that Marie de France introduces her stories, with a prologue in her own voice, that has been lingering in my mind. She frames her purpose in writing the stories down—an insistence on the merit of voice and the care for works of the past, her conviction of their significance for a future’s understanding of the world. She wrote all of this in the 12th century, when it is otherwise believed few women wrote2, and when writing out copies of manuscripts into books was a costly and labor-intensive work. And yet her work was wildly popular, circulated, and well known, translated into other languages, including Old Norse.
I often think about those past generations of selected and actual ancestors, who lived lives with eyes on the future, a belief in their relationship to it. It feels like the world is slipping away from the grasp of that illusory future I imagine she was writing to. And how intent the world is to erase voices from the past—erasing the connection we hold to the many generations who have lived on this earth before us—who wrote about it and had important things to share about it. And instead, we ignore, break and burn what those connections offer us—and in effect, break the connection we have to the future. What we witness every day in the media dumpster fire is a refusal to understand a past that has something to say to us—that we need it in order to link the present to a/the future.
Proust wrote that reality can only take shape in the memory—when we have time to reflect, to remember, to recognize the contours of occurrences, smells, and sights, when we can place them in our minds, keep them still to not miss the blur of their happenstance. When we can put our hands on them, so to speak, and recognize their definition.
If we lose capacity—or even respect for—memory, we might be left only with the blur of what occurs to us as it passes by, undefinable, with no way to connect it to past and future. A blinding blur of present tense.
In the Lais of Marie de France, she frames her stories—poems of transformation and romance, suffering and love—by beginning with these lines:
One whom God has given knowledge and good eloquence in speaking should not keep quiet nor hide on this account but rather should willingly show herself. When a great good is widely heard, then it is first in flower, and when it is praised by many, then it has spread forth its flower.
Such conviction of her own voice to be heard, and in the merit of her work.
She writes later to explain that she has heard these stories and wants to write them down, to remember them, to help them be shared even more widely, beyond the memory of individuals. She was committing her memory to the page in a time where writing involved ink that was made of acorns and oak gall, pens made from the strong flight feathers of goose or swan, quills that would need to be seasoned and made strong enough for paring into a pen tip, and parchment or vellum that would be tanned and processed. The act of writing itself would hold a power that was self-evident—it was a commitment of time and resources that were not easy to come by. All of it would be such a purposeful commitment of words to the page.
I can’t help but think of the stark contrast to how we write now—with words so quickly typed on a sheet of ephemeral, digital paper, or on a small screen of limited characters. The many words that fly into our vision each day, on screens that become drained of all information as they are drained of energy. The act of writing in such formats requires less conviction—the doubt and smallness that can seep into the human psyche also seep into the medium we use to now process thought, with tweets and posts. I wouldn’t necessarily advocate a return to laborious writing and the reintroduction of vellum3. But there is a quality of the voice in Marie de France’s lais that is striking—a strong belief in the value of its deliberateness, its merit.
Marie de France wrote about the power of memory—she wrote for the future, with an assurance that future readers would build on what she had set down:
It was the custom of the ancients, as Priscian bears witness, in the books that they once used to make to speak quite obscurely for those who were to come and who would have to learn them, who would be able to interpret the letter and supply the rest through their understanding. The philosophers knew this, and understood by their own experience how, the more people passed through time, the more subtle their intelligence would be, and the more they would know how to guard themselves from that which was to be passed over.
Marie’s prologue gives weight to the role but especially the responsibility of the poet-writer—and reader—in the transmission of knowledge. It’s an interdependent act, one that I love to feel a part of as I read her words. Her narratives were written explicitly for remembrance, for those who were to come—for those whom she and others of her time would otherwise be unable to relay these stories. And she expected that the future reader would supply the rest through their understanding. As Logan Whalen writes of Marie:
In this way, [Marie] takes center stage at the very beginning of her literary works, in her prefatory remarks, as she establishes the importance of continuing the tradition of translatio studii, the transfer of knowledge from one generation or culture to the next.
I kind of cringe when I think of what kind of understanding our current society is offering to the ancestors who wrote to us. Ancestors whose works are lost, willfully misinterpreted, banned, burned, discarded, ignored. Ancestors who wrote stories down—or carried them in memory to be passed to the next generation—specifically so that we could learn from and build on them. Instead, we insist on re-creating the world each generation—the more that this American present continues, it feels hell bent on forgetting everything for its own power, leaving little care for the future and little acknowledgment of the reality of the past.
When I read Marie de France, I can feel her conviction that our ancestors expected that we would live in a future that would do better, that would recognize and learn and understand and seek to know of the past, of how to move on with it, connected—to connect ourselves to a future that can continue that link. To make something of the soon-to-be future that takes advantage of the foundation set for us.
Needless to say, I’ve been struggling as I read Marie’s work—as I try to write my own thoughts down in the midst of the ADHD world we live in. The ephemerality of the screen leads to different ways of thought to the point that I’m sure it’s re-ordering the way that my thoughts race, rabbit hole to rabbit hole. Perhaps I need to go back to pen and ink, have conviction in a future of my own imagination, of the persistence of kind readers who will still want to read of what it’s like to live right now, to imagine the past and the future in this present. Maybe someday even in a book made of paper.
Robert Pogue Harrison writes in Dominion of the Dead—in echoes of Marie’s prologue, centuries later—of the “intrinsically posthumous character of the literary voice,” that
Works of literature, then, are more than enduring tablets where an author’s words survive his or her demise. They are the gifts of human worlds, cosmic in nature, that hold their place in time so that the living and the unborn may inhabit them at will, make themselves at home in their articulate humanity…
I cling to this idea—that stories of memory, whether written or held over generations—are more than the survival of individual voices. Writing becomes an act of holding that space of infinity open between living and unborn—of time collapsing as the story, the text, the memory becomes unbound by time. If only we can open those spaces and keep them held open. Create them, read them, value them, and remember them.
It’s that conviction of Marie’s prologue—written so matter-of-factly but so purposefully—that I try to hold space for as I read and write. To honor both as an act of reciprocity, both to the past and to the (hopefully) future.
The fantastic novel Matrix by Lauren Groff is historical fiction inspired by Marie de France’s work.
But it turns out that her works actually arose at a time closely associated with female literacy and patronage…
Although the Doomsday Book, a survey of England from 1086, still survives while information collected in 1986 as a digital Doomsday book was unreadable in 16 years. So maybe we should consider it?…
This line jumped out at me: "The act of writing in such formats requires less conviction—the doubt and smallness that can seep into the human psyche also seep into the medium we use to now process thought, with tweets and posts."
It's that word conviction. Are you familiar with the book, "The Great Cosmic Mother" by Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor? In the introduction, Mor writes about her commitment to the book, living as a houseless person in Tucson toting the manuscript around trying to find a home for it. I admire that so much, that level of dedication to the story, to the work. Totally different from how most of us creatives give up so much for comfort in the face of challenges to our efforts to bring art into the world. Thank you for this post.
Wow I had no knowledge about this illusive piece of literature. How incredible! I'm bookmarking this lit for later read. ❤️