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WRITING OUT THE SIN: ARTHUR, CHARLEMAGNE AND
THE SPECTRE OF INCESTMIRANDA GRIFFIN11, Armitage Way, Cambridge CB4 2UE, UK
E-mail: [email protected] diculty in writing about the incest inherent in the French medieval tales of
Charlemagne and Arthur is that one inevitably nds oneself employing vocabulary
of rumour and supposition. Incest in many texts concerning both monarchs is a kind of
ghost: a presence which haunts the text without being entirely present, an unspoken
allegation written between the lines of literature and hanging in the air of oral tradition,
hinting at an unknowable past and crying out for an explanation some time in the
future. In this article, I focus on modern critical articulations of the spectral in order to
bring the nebulous sin with which Arthur and Charlemagne are accused into sharper
focus. Derrida theorises the presence of the spectre, which is only ever detected rather
than perceived, since it can only exist in a plane beyond human vision or chronology. In
Butlers terms, a prohibition instigates and maintains the spectre of its transgression.
These two formulations of the spectral illuminate incest in the literary traditions of
Charlemagne and Arthur, gured as it is by writing which cannot be incorporated into
the written narrative, but which is nevertheless crucial to that narrative, and can only be
seen with the benet of hindsight.The spectre of incestIn his 1992 study of kingship as it is manifested and mythologised in
the gures of Arthur and Charlemagne in old French literature,1
Dominique Boutet makes an interesting omission. As he discusses the
literary construction of the social and supernatural powers of Arthur
and Charlemagne, Boutet almost completely elides any mention of the
fatal aw which these two monarchs share: the sin of incest. He makes
a vague reference to the inclusion of rumours of incest in the archetypal heroic biography (p. 12), but does not expand upon the implications of the inclusion on this most heinous of sins in the literary
biographies of these royal characters. If, as Boutet claims, Arthur or
Charlemagne tend to gure as a vide in other literary studies (p. 8),
in his own study, as in the Old French texts which construct and
perpetuate the mythic status of Arthur and Charlemagne, the sinNeophilologus 88: 499519, 2004.