It may sound somewhat strange, even paradoxical, to speak of Reynard as anti-hero. Most of the time, he is considered as the hero of the fables and the tales in which he appears. Hero is then taken in its wider and weaker meaning, i.e. main protagonist, chief personage. Reynard is described as a manipulator, an instigator, a trickster, and, as such, he is very often called a hero. Moreover, the anti-hero is a modern notion, not to be applied to medieval literature. The anti-hero, in modern fiction, is characterized by absence: absence of heroic qualities, absence of reaction, sometimes even absence of personality. The anti-hero, more often than not, is a shadow, an outsider, a nobody, moving in a world full of absurdity he is quite incapable of either understanding or controlling. If we can say that Reynard is also characterized by a complete absence of heroic qualities, we cannot speak of his absence of reaction. He is no passive witness: on the contrary, he is the one who pulls the strings. Moreover, he perfectly understands and controls the world he lives in and that world is not full of absurdity but fraught with meaning. To draw a comparison between Reynard and modern anti-heroes would be a total absurdity. What I will try to show in this paper is that Reynard is an anti-hero in so far as he gives an inverted image of what a medieval hero was supposed to be. One could even call him a counter-hero. - [Author]

Language: English

ISBN: 0-85991-415-1