Poética de la busca en la literatura medieval francesa

Zusammenfassung

From the origins of western literature, the Quest for a person, a place, an animal or an object have given meaning to thousands of stories, beginning with The Odyssey by Homer, The Aeneid by Virgil or the stories of Pyramus and Thisbe, Orpheus and Eurydice from the Metamorphoses by Ovid, awakening and feeding the imaginary collective for centuries. In medieval Europe of the 12th and 13th centuries, especially during the reign of the Plantagenêts, this literary motif reached its absolute apogee with a complete series of romans in verse and prose, of Celtic, Greek and Latin influence, such as those of Chrétien de Troyes: the Conte del Graal y the Chevalier de la Charrette. The roman of the medieval Quest produces a certain fascination and enchantment, due to its inextricable mesh of meanings, for the beauty of its form and the intensity of the stories. By reading a medieval work of the Quest, we soon feel lost, like the handsome Narcisus in the fountain. Reading, tempted by the Quest, the same narration invites us to go on a Quest, to find our path, and in doing so, to decode the signals that configure it. Therefore, as readers, we take up our own Quest, parallel to that of the narrator and that of the hero or heroine. We can find the object sought, at the same time as the heroes do, but from another level or plane. In this way, it is probable to find more results of the Quest than the hero himself.