Descriptions, Descriptions, Excessive Descriptions!

While reading the story of Erec and Enide from The Complete Romances of Chretien de Troyes this week there was one thing that stood out to me above all the rest: the lengthy and often excessively repetitive descriptions! At every turn it seemed that the story’s momentum (which was seriously lacking in the beginning) paused for a moment in order to provide the reader with description after description. This didn’t entirely bother me at first, since I’m typically a huge fan of descriptive imagery and was enjoying the scrumptious visualizations the text was creating in my mind, however, as the story continued to progress I couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that things were getting a bit excessive.

For example, I understood the purpose of the first long passage describing Enide’s intense beauty and the pains Nature took in creating her on pg. 6… but did the text really have to repeat itself over and over again? I mean as if this first passage wasn’t enough, the reader encounters a dozen or so more instances where the story slows to describes Enide’s beauty and list a great number of her many virtues (pg. 20, 21, 22, 31, 42). By the middle of the story / at the point where Enide begins to question her husband about his lack of chivalrous behavior, I found myself beginning to question what these long-winded descriptions were all about.

At first I had just figured there was a lot of detail provided because it made the story more interesting to its original audience; that maybe medieval readers wouldn’t have seen the amount of descriptions as excessive. I considered the fact that while I may have been attempting to read at a rather quick pace, original readers might not have been trying to do the same and that what I saw as an excess of description they might have seen as typical. However, by the midpoint in the reading I began to reconsider.

It was at this point that I began to widen my scope and started taking notice of not just the many examples of long descriptive passages throughout the story, but also of the general theme of excess that persisted throughout. For example, there is an overabundance of characters, places, food, clothes, celebration etc. that becomes all the more noticeable as the reader delves further into the tale. Indeed almost all of the guests in attendance at Erec and Enide’s wedding came in massive parties and brought along hundreds of attendants or horses (pg. 24-25). Again at first I thought that the lengthy descriptions that characterize the text were just included to make it more appealing and interesting, but once I began to notice the many examples of excess I began to wonder if there wasn’t a bigger picture I was missing out on.

After considering the descriptive text and the fact that the majority of it is concerned with detailing examples of excess, I am starting to feel like there is a more significant reason as to why the text is written in such a lengthy way. From the very beginning the reader is cautioned with the proverb: “what you scorn may be worth much more than you think.” Enide learns this quickly when she opens her mouth and changes the relationship between herself and her husband. However, Erec doesn’t appear to have caught on yet as he is not treating Enide’s concern for their lives very respectfully when we leave him in the forest at the conclusion of the reading this week. Overall I am quite ready to move on and finish the rest of this story, if for no other reason than to get some answers about Erec’s character. At this point I am very intrigued and confused by his behavior and am having a super hard time predicting what will come next. Mainly, I’m interested to see if the general theme of excess plays out in whatever events befall Erec and what that would possibly mean for the overall message of the story.