Auditive Subversion und (un)erhörtes Skandalon in der höfischen Literatur des Mittelalters (am Beispiel von Kürenberger und ‚Tristan Menestrel‘)

Abstract

In Kürenberg’s ‘Zinnenwechsel’ and Gerbert de Montreuil’s ‘Tristan Menestrel’, the public performance of a knight’s song and the performance of a flute tune played by Tristran, disguised as a one-eyed minstrel, offer to (certain parts of) the audience a twofold way of understanding and interpretating. Superficially, the courtly public listens to a song referring to a fictitious lady’s unrequited love for an equally fictitious knight, and it listens to a random tune which, only ostensibly, has nothing to do with Yseut’s and Tristran’s adulterous love. In fact, Kürenberg’s song tells the ‘real’ tragic conflict between the lady and her knightly singer, who are part of the same courtly society which intradiegetically listens to the performed song. In Gerbert, Tristran performs a tune which Yseut alone knows to be the one that her lover once composed as a background to the ‘Lai du Chievrefoil’, which is about the same kind of lovers’ secret encounter as is told later in ‘Tristan Menestrel’. Thus, the tune permits Yseut to iden­tify Tristran secretly. This all is pure auditive subversion, for ‘dangerous’ intimacies are flagrantly voiced in public and are immediately perceived by the public’s ears, yet without being understood as such at all.

Keywords Kürenberg; ‘Tristan Menestrel’; Auditivity; Subversion; Scandalon