Represent the Desire: Iseult’s Statue in the <i>Tavola Ritonda</i>

Abstract

A desire that has been hidden for such a long time to the realms of the inexspressible will find alternative ways to begin to speak, even if this means to subject its content to a metamorphosis that could make it unrecognizable. As the dream activity translates thoughts in images, the unspeakable can be representable. This happens even in the Tavola Ritonda, one of the Italian rewritings (beginning of the 14th century) of the Prose Tristan, a 13th Arthurian French compilation. Tristan, became the unhappy husband of Iseult of the White Hands,tries to fill the absence of Iseult the Blond by realizing a statue of his lover. This episode’s model, absent from the Prose Tristan, can be found in the famous scene of the “Salle aux images” coming from Thomas, that the Tavola Ritonda rewrites in a “bourgeois” way by transforming the statue in a proper fetish symbol. This paper, that will turn to the notions of Unheimliche and Witz, will point out how the Tuscan writer canalizes the return of the repressed through ékphrasis, and how he tries to mitigate the uncanny of the inanimate double of Iseult by a comic conclusion.

Keywords

• Tavola Ritonda
• Isotta
• Ékphrasis
• Medioevo
• desiderio