Outsiders

The Humanity and Inhumanity of Giants in Medieval French Prose Romance

Sylvia Huot

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780268031121, 9780268206659
• eBook ISBN: 9780268081836
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: French Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Giants are a ubiquitous feature of medieval romance. As remnants of a British prehistory prior to the civilization established, according to the Historium regum Britannie, by Brutus and his Trojan followers, giants are permanently at odds with the chivalric culture of the romance world. Whether they are portrayed as brute savages or as tyrannical pagan lords, giants serve as a limit against which the chivalric hero can measure himself. In Outsiders: The Humanity and Inhumanity of Giants in Medieval French Prose Romance, Sylvia Huot argues that the presence of giants allows for fantasies of ethnic and cultural conflict and conquest, and for the presentation—and suppression—of alternative narrative and historical trajectories that might have made Arthurian Britain a very different place. Focusing on medieval French prose romance and drawing on aspects of postcolonial theory, Huot examines the role of giants in constructions of race, class, gender, and human subjectivity. She selects for study the well-known prose Lancelot and the prose Tristan, as well as the lesser known Perceforest, Le Conte du papegau, Guiron le Courtois, and Des Grantz Geants. By asking to what extent views of giants in Arthurian romance respond to questions that concern twenty-first-century readers, Huot demonstrates the usefulness of current theoretical concepts and the issues they raise for rethinking medieval literature from a modern perspective.

CHAPTER 1

Inhuman Men and Knightly Fiends

The Vexed Humanity of Giants

The giants of Arthurian legend, for all their exotic alterity and their distinctive designation as jaiant, are neither a supernatural race nor an alien species. Francis Dubost stresses the troublingly ambiguous nature of the giant’s difference, noting that “les différences que l’on renie comme inhumaines s’inscrivent cependant sur un fond de ressemblance avec l’humaine nature.”¹ Jeffrey Jerome Cohen makes a similar point in his forceful assertion: “The giant’s body figures not an alien corporeality but an intimate strangeness that is human embodiment.”² Though they may carry associations with both the bestial and the demonic, giants must ultimately be seen as people in varying states of assimilation or resistance to both pagan and Christian societies. If some live rough in forest lairs and mountain caves, others are knights and lords with strongly fortified castles, however problematic this identity may always be. Tales of giants are set in that difficult borderland between peoples and cultures, and they explore the problems of human difference: just how much difference can be tolerated, to what extent it can be neutralized, when conversion or assimilation are possible and when they are not. In beginning this extended study of giants and the cultural ideologies they both question and confirm, we will start with the most fundamental of questions: How can we evaluate the humanity of giants? And whatever the answer, just what does it tell us? How is the category of “human” defined, and given meaning and substance, by tales of giants, knights, and ladies?

Giant, Man or Monster?

A giant is not simply a human being of above-average size. And the subtle but crucial difference between a giant and an oversized knight is already apparent at the beginning of the Old French Arthurian tradition, in Chrétien’s Erec et Enide. Erec fights two giants who have abducted the knight Cadoc de Cabruel and are beating him savagely as they carry him off to their lair. Like Harpin de la Montaigne in Le Chevalier au lion, the giants are ruffians, armed only with huge clubs and whips. Though Erec does initially ask them to relinquish their prisoner peacefully, it is clear that this is only a formality, and once they have refused he is quick to kill first one and then the other. Though they are formidable, and one delivers a blow that nearly stuns him, Erec is able to take advantage of their lack of armor to stab one in the eye and slice through the other one’s head. Later, in the “Joy of the Court” episode, Erec also faces a large and powerful adversary in the person of Maboagrain. In fact, Maboagrain’s massive size is portrayed as a defect that prevents him from embodying the true ideal of masculine beauty:

… s’il ne fust granz a enui

soz ciel n’eüst plus bel de lui,

mes il estoit un pié plus granz,

a tesmoing de totes les genz,

que chevaliers que l’an seüst.³

———

[If he hadn’t been excessively tall, there would be no one under the heavens more handsome than he, but he was a foot taller, according to what everyone said, than any knight known.]

As a profoundly isolationist figure who kills any knight that enters his domain and displays his head on a pike, and who is jealously guarding a beautiful maiden from contact with any knight who might aim to return her to the world of the court, Maboagrain has much in common with the typical Arthurian giant. When the giant-sized enemy appears, shouting his challenge, the reader might well suppose that Erec is about to face yet another giant—and that his death, in liberating the damsel, is the event that will trigger the anticipated Joy.

Yet the word jaiant—consistently used to designate the two bullies from whom Erec liberates Cadoc—is never applied to Maboagrain, who instead is termed “li granz chevaliers” (the big knight).⁴ And in fact, his behavior turns out to be far from giantesque.⁵ He accepts defeat graciously, explains the reasons for his behavior, and is delighted to learn that Erec is the son of a king at whose court he once served; and it turns out that far from holding the lady prisoner, he is the one being held by her, in a sinister parody of the “prison of love.” In attacking anyone who enters their garden, he is acting under constraints imposed by the lady herself rather than expressing an unbridled libidinous aggression motivated by the sheer joy of lethal violence. He and his beloved do form a skewed paradigm of chivalric prowess and courtly love service, which must be dismantled and righted before they can rejoin court society. But since it operates on the fundamental principles of channeling chivalric combat into a form of service to a lady, protecting her from other knights in accordance with her wishes, and remaining true to one’s word at all cost, it is possible for their relationship to be reconfigured in such a way as to bring heterosexual love into harmony with the male homosocial world of the court and the chivalric community. Just as Erec has recovered the proper balance between love and chivalry in his own marriage, now he enables Maboagrain as well to assume his place as both knight and lover—something that would be unthinkable if he actually was a giant.

If a giant is something other than a very large man, then, does that make him a monster? The example of Holland, giant ruler of a small island in the late medieval prose romance Perceforest, offers an interesting perspective on the question of the giant’s simultaneous humanity and monstrosity.⁶ Holland is described as being two feet taller than ordinary men, and this alone justifies the term geant that is frequently applied to him. He is also deformed in body, having an extra head and extra pairs of arms and legs. None of these superfluous members are functional; they simply “pendent aval comme mors” (hang down as if dead) and “ne lui font que empescement” (are nothing but an obstruction to him).⁷ Finally, when angry he exhales toxic fumes that kill all living things. This bodily freakishness earns him the further epithets of “monstre” and “creature defformee.” Holland’s character, finally, is one of unmitigated barbarism; he is repeatedly designated “cruel” and “tyrans.” He imprisons Hollandin, his twenty-year-old nephew and stepson, to prevent him from establishing an amorous relationship with a maiden on the neighboring island; he terrorizes his subjects; he kills and eats any outsider who strays onto, or even too close to, his island.

Holland, then, is characterized both by bodily deformity and by the savage behavior so typical of giants. Earlier, he killed his brother and kidnapped his pregnant sister-in-law, whom he loved for her beauty. He respected her wish that the forced marriage not be consummated until she had given birth; but in her dread of a liaison with the giant, she died immediately after the child was born. He embodies tyrannical rule, such that his subjects are overjoyed at his death and praise the knight “qui nous a delivré d’un tant pesant encombrier” (1:121; who delivered us from such an oppressive burden). Both his violence and his toxicity force sailors to give his island a wide berth. Sador—usually identified by his cognomen of “Dieu des Desirriers” or “Chevalier au Delphin”—asks to be taken there so that he can confront the giant, but the sailor to whom he appeals replies: “Je n’y puis aller, car mieulx ayme que par inobedience me fachiés morir que estre occis par la puanteur de celle inhumaine creature” (1:109; I cannot go there, for I would rather that you killed me for my disobedience than be killed by the stench of that inhuman creature). The giant is thus an obstruction to commerce, and his death not only liberates his people from tyranny but also opens the island to travel, diplomacy, and trade. The Chevalier vows that Holland will be slain and “toute la contree delivree de lui, tellement que toutes personnes privees et estranges pourront illecq frequenter et marchander” (1:108; the entire land liberated from him, so that residents as well as foreigners can come and go, and engage in commerce). The giant’s imprisonment of Hollandin was an effort to maintain his isolationism, in resistance to chivalric culture, marriage, and political alliances. After Holland’s death, however, both his stepson and the island itself are absorbed into the larger world of feudal Britain: “Hollandin receut l’ordre de chevalerie, puis espousa Marse la pucelle qu’il aymoit tant, parquoy les deux isles furent par l’acord de l’une partie et de l’autre adjoustees a une seignourie” (1:127; Hollandin received the order of knighthood, then married Marse, the maiden whom he so loved, whereby the two islands were, by mutual accord, united into one estate).

Is this giant human or monster? On the one hand, his grotesque bodily doubling and the dragonlike toxicity of his smoky breath place him truly beyond the pale; and the Chevalier au Delphin targets precisely this monstrosity in the battle, systematically amputating the giant’s extra limbs. These excessive and useless members are a blight on nature itself: of the two heads, for example, “L’une estoit naturele et l’autre contre nature” (1:113; One was natural and the other counter to nature), while at another point the knight cuts off “la jambe dont nature estoit blamee” (1:116; the leg that was a reproach to nature). Indeed, the narrator explains that the giant’s aversion to visitors derives from “la vergoigne qu’il avoit de luy meisme” (1:111; the shame he felt at his own person). Once all such limbs have been severed, the Chevalier taunts Holland, exclaiming: “Vous avez perdu le nom de monstre, ou lieu duquel on vous puet bien nommer geant a cause de vostre haulteur” (1:117; You have lost the name of “monster,” instead of which you can appropriately be called “giant,” because of your height). Even as a “mere” giant, however, Holland is beyond redemption. Indeed, despite having been purged of his monstrous limbs, in the final moments of the battle “Il sambloit mieulx demoniacque que autrement” (1:119; He seemed more truly demoniacal than ever) in his rage at being unable to harm his attacker. Holland’s human status flickers in and out of focus, depending on the perspective from which he is viewed. The Chevalier au Delphin, when he first sees his adversary approaching, is momentarily transfixed to see “la maniere de ce inhumain deable” (1:112; the manner of this inhuman devil). But as the giant puzzles over his enemy’s ability to withstand his fumes, concerned to have encountered the first opponent able to stand and fight him, the narrator terms him a “pervers et inhumain homme” (1:113; perverse and inhuman man)—perhaps the first sign of his human vulnerability, as he suddenly faces man-to-man combat with an opponent who is not merely a victim but an aggressive threat. In the eyes of his subjects, in turn, Holland is a “pervers et inhumain tyrant” (1:127; perverse and inhuman tyrant). Finally, it must be noted that Holland apparently came from a normal family: as far as one can tell, neither his brother nor his nephew is gigantic, deformed, or rapacious. Demonic in battle, hideous in form; tyrannical and isolationist as a ruler; envious of his brother’s successful marriage and showing both brutality and an odd respect to the woman he desires; cruelly jealous in his paternal love; ferociously aggressive but also ashamed in the eyes of the world—the giant is a contradictory and lethal mix of human emotions, flaws, and excesses and of inhuman grotesquerie. This simultaneous presence of the alien and the all too human is, perhaps, what is most truly expressed in the designation of geant. Whether it is applied to the monstrous offspring of otherwise normal parents or to an aberrant people endowed with their own, quite separate lineage and history, the term geant naturalizes this notion of the “inhuman man.” Rather than expanding the definition of natural humanity, the giant is the aberration that helps define the more limited norm. The Orwellian implications of the text are perhaps that all men are human but that some are more human than others.

I will return to Holland toward the end of this study. Along the way, we will see that in medieval literature overall there is no one way that giants are portrayed. One can certainly identify features that very commonly adhere to giants, such as violence, intemperance, and a resistance to organized political and commercial networks. But along this spectrum of more or less typical giant behaviors, the individual giants that figure in medieval literature have a shifting profile that gives them slightly different status in different texts. Examining these variations will shed light on the question of just how giants are used, and in service of what sorts of narrative and ideological agendas; how they figure in an implicit discourse of personal, racial, and cultural identity; and how their presence can warp the very fabric of culture and the coherence of historical narratives.

Monstrous Origins: The Biblical Background

The book of Genesis famously identifies giants as the result of sinful miscegenation, though of what sort exactly is not entirely clear: either a mingling of incompatible human bloodlines or an even more sinister mix of human and demonic. The Vulgate describes the advent and immediate aftermath of the giants as follows:

Cumque coepissent homines multiplicari super terram, et filias procreassent, videntes filii Dei filias hominum quod essent pulchrae, acceperunt sibi uxores ex omnibus, quas elegerant. … Gigantes autem erat super terram in diebus illis: postquam enim ingressi sunt filii Dei ad filias hominum, illaeque genuerunt, isti sunt potentes a saeculo viri famosi. Videns autem Deus quod multa malitia hominum esset in terra, et cuncta cogitatio cordis intenta esset ad malum omni tempore, poenituit eum quod hominem fecisset in terra.

———

[When men began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair; and they took to wife such of them as they chose. … The Nephilim [giants] were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown. The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.]⁸

Exegetical tradition was split on the identity of the “sons of God and daughters of men,” which were alternatively seen as referring to demons—that is, fallen angels—impregnating human women or as the male descendants of Seth consorting with the female descendants of Cain.⁹ Augustine examines this question in the City of God, acknowledging that the former interpretation is often put forward. He likewise admits that the stories of women having sexual relations with incubi are so widespread that one cannot really deny the existence of such things, while holding back from any definitive conclusion as to whether spirits “possint hanc etiam pati libidinem ut, quo modo possunt, sentientibus feminis misceantur” (are also able to experience such lust and so have intercourse in such a way with women who feel the sensation of it).¹⁰ For all that, however, Augustine sees the giants not as demonic but as the result of lustful miscegenation between the lineage of Seth and that of Cain. The opening emphasis on male attraction to female beauty, as well as the detail in the Septuagint version of Genesis that these men “generabant sibi” (engendered progeny for themselves), indicated that the women of the cursed line of Cain were corrupting the virtuous lineage of the “good” son given to Adam as replacement for Abel, that “antequam sic caderent filii Dei, Deo generabant, non sibi, id est non dominante libidine coeundi, sed serviente officio propagandi, non familiam fastus sui, sed cives civitatis Dei” (before the sons of God fell as they did, they engendered children for God, not for themselves, that is, that sexual lust was not their master but the servant of their reproductive function, and that they did not engender a family for their own pride but citizens for the City of God).¹¹ Whereas Original Sin occurred because the first man listened to his wife and valued her word above that of God, the birth of giants results from a further descent, in which libidinous pleasure is valued as an end in itself rather than a means to procreation, and in which procreation becomes an extension of personal power and pride rather than a means of serving God.

Giants, in Augustine’s reading, are a sign of the moral depravity of their parents: their maternal lines are tainted by descent from Cain, who first introduced violent aggression into the world, while their fathers’ lustful desires caused them to take wives from a cursed and taboo people. Fratricide, wrath, arrogant pride, and sexual transgression mark their very being. The size and strength of the giants, in turn, encode a further moral lesson into their bodies: God created them, Augustine explains, “ut etiam hinc ostenderetur non solum pulchritudines verum etiam magnitudines et fortitudines corporum non magni pendendas esse sapienti” (in order to make it known in this way too that the wise man should attach little importance not only to physical beauty but to physical size and strength as well).¹² In support of this point Augustine cites the book of Baruch, in which the giants are also held up as examples of irrational violence. As the Vulgate states: “Ibi fuerunt gigantes nominati illi, qui ab initio fuerunt, statura magna, scientes bellum. Non hos elegit Dominus, neque viam disciplinae invenerunt, propterea perierunt; et quoniam non habuerunt sapientiam, interierunt propter suam insipientiam” (In it were born the giants, famous to us from antiquity, immensely tall, expert in war; God’s choice did not fall on these, he did not reveal the way to knowledge to them; they perished for lack of wisdom, perished in their own folly).¹³

Giants relied entirely on brute force to accomplish anything, for they were incapable of social organization, negotiation, or rule of law. Their propensity for violence led them into constant conflict; their lack of rational wisdom deprived them of any means by which this violence might be mitigated or suspended through truces or alliances. They were a people uninformed by any ethical framework and utterly lacking the human capacity for self-knowledge or remorse. And as a result they were a race doomed to extinction—by God’s hand in the Flood, but also at one another’s hands.

Rather than a tale of supernatural parentage resulting in fantastic offspring, then, the giants are glossed by Augustine as a moral allegory for the effects of sin and the failure of spiritual community. Despite the influential role of Augustine’s writings, however, the alternative interpretation of demonic engendering never entirely disappeared, kept alive perhaps in part by the very fact that Augustine considers it at all. It appears, for example, as a secondary, but still plausible, interpretation of the passage in Pe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Inhuman Men and Knightly Fiends: The Vexed Humanity of Giants
• Chapter 2 An Alien Presence: Giants as Markers of Race, Class, and Culture
• Chapter 3 Touching the Absolute: Violence, Death, and Love
• Chapter 4 Giants and Saracens in the Prose Tristan: Rival Narratives, Hostile Desires, and the Struggle to (Re)write History
• Chapter 5 Outsiders in the Story: Galehot, Palamedes, and Saladin
• Chapter 6 Desire, Subjectivity, and the Humanity of Giants
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index