Chapter 3 Lecture 2: Quickly [1]

2. Quickness Let me first tell you an ancient legend. Charlemagne fell in love with a German girl in his later years.The ministers in the palace were very anxious to see that the monarch was indulging in joy, neglecting the majesty of the emperor, and ignoring the government.It wasn't until the girl died that everyone in the palace breathed a sigh of relief, but it was short-lived, because Charlemagne's love did not die with the girl.The emperor ordered the embalmed body of the girl to be moved into his bedroom, and he guarded the body tightly, never leaving it.The Archbishop Turpin, horrified by this hideous passion, suspected that the Emperor was possessed, and insisted on examining the body.He found a jeweled ring under the tongue of the girl's body.But as soon as the ring was in Turpin's hands, Charlemagne fell madly in love with the archbishop, and hastily ordered the girl to be buried.To get out of this embarrassing situation, Turpin threw the ring into Lake Constance.Charlemagne fell in love with the lake again, and did not want to leave the lakeside.

This legend, taken from a book on magic and contained in the unpublished letters of the French romantic writer Jules Barbey dAurevilly, is more accurately recorded than my account (everyone See Notes on page I.1315 of the Complete Works of Babe Daulaway, Six Stars Edition).Since I read the legend, it has kept returning to my mind, as if the ring's magic was still at work through the medium of the story. Let me try to explain what makes this story so fascinating.What we see is a chain of utterly perverse episodes linked together: an old man's love affair with a maiden, some sort of necrophilia and homosexual urges, and at the end, the old king staring intently at the lake as everything sinks A kind of sad wait and see. "Charlemagne contemplated Lake Constance, and loved the bottomless abyss." Barbe Daulaway, in a passage from his own novel (Une vieille ma?tresse, p. 221) It is told in this way, and at the same time it is annotated with this legendary story.

What can connect these events is a word link, which is "love" or "passion", which establishes the continuity of different forms of intimacy.There is also a narrative link, which is the magic ring that establishes the logic of causal relationship between different plots.The desire for something that is not there, the lack or lack of something symbolized by the hollow ring, finds more expression in the rhythm of the story than in the stated plot.Likewise, throughout the story there is a certain sense of imminence of death, which Charlemagne seems to seize upon the last remnants of life in a violent struggle; this passion culminates in a meditation by the lake.

The real hero of the story, however, is the magic ring, because the action of the ring determines the actions of the characters, because the ring defines the relationships between the characters.A sort of magnetic field forms around this strange thing, the universe of the story itself.We can say that this strange object is an external and visible sign, which reveals the connection between people or things.It has a narrative function; the history of this function can be found in the Nordic heroic epics and chivalrous sagas; this function continues to emerge in the poetry of the Italian Renaissance.In Ariosto's Orlando furioso, there are innumerable scenes of exchanging swords, scabbards, helmets, horses, each of which has a special purpose.Because of this, the whole story can be said to be a change of ownership of a certain number of objects, each of which has a certain power to determine the relationship between certain characters.

In a realistic narrative, Mambrino's helmet becomes a barber's washbasin, but without losing its importance or meaning.Likewise, all the objects that Robinson brought down from wrecks or that he made with his own hands were heavy and heavy.I would say that the moment an object appears in a narrative, it is charged with a special force, becoming like a pole of a magnetic field, the core of an invisible web of relationships.The symbolism of an object can vary in degree of obviousness, but it is always there.We might even say that in a narrative every object is fantastic. Let's go back and look at the legend of Charlemagne.We can see that in Italian it forms a literary tradition.In (Lettere famigliar, I.4) Petrarch tells us that he heard this "not unpleasant story" while visiting the tomb of Charlemagne in Aix la Chapelle, but says He didn't quite believe it.In Petrarch's Latin text, the story is richer in moral and ethical commentary, richer in content and emotion (the Archbishop of Cologne, obeying the strange voice from heaven, felt with his fingers under the frozen tongue of the girl's corpse).However, as far as I am concerned, I prefer the concise and concise narrative, which leaves room for the reader's imagination, and the speed at which the plots follow each other gives people a feeling that the situation is out of control.

[#] Editor's note: Plume seems to be one of the characters in the life of Henri Michaux.