'Cest cunte est mult divers': Knowledge, Difference, and Authority in Thomas's "Tristan"

The Old French version of the Tristan legend attributed to Thomas of Britain demonstrates an obsession with imitation, doubling, and mimetic desire. This article argues that the poem's narrator is concerned to distance himself from the compulsive mimesis that ultimately leads to the tragic denouement of Tristan and Yseut's deaths. In doing so he seeks to assert narrative authority over the text, thereby assuring his own survival and inscription in literary posterity. However, the fundamental paradox haunting Thomas's poem is that the diegetic (narrative) project is ultimately founded upon a mimetic gesture that forces the text back into the trap from which its narrator seeks to extricate it.