Strangers of the Round Table

If you asked me what Arthur looked like (or Guinevere, or any of the knights), I’d only be able to describe him in pieces: his armor, his crown, his posture. Even then, I’d have to generalize. I wouldn’t be able to tell you what color of hair he had, or how tall he was, if he had a beard, or what his voice sounded like, because none of that seems to matter in Arthurian legends; the stories tend to outsize the people they’re about.

The writers of older texts appear to put more care and effort into what their characters represent, rather than exploring their individuality. As a modern reader, I expect to “know” literary characters inside and out, but this type of intimacy is missing from the early accounts of Arthur; the narratives demand a completely different relationship between text and reader, and establish a unique method of engagement between the two.

The classic characters in these legends (the noble knights, the pure maidens, and of course, the deceptive lords and promiscuous ladies) are mostly archetypes. Contemporary readers have been trained to evaluate characters’ psychological motives based on their quirks and thought processes, which grant them accessibility. When writers value actions over reasons, the characters become much more distant than what we’re used to these days, forcing us to examine the ideas of the characters more than the characters themselves. In terms of reader engagement, I’m not sure if this provides more opportunity for identification than contemporary texts, or less.

Though the internal monologues of “Cliges” offer insight into the characters’ emotions, we’re still denied the details of their everyday existence; we never get a real sense of who they are, but I suppose that’s the point. The story isn’t about Cliges -- it’s about the ideas of love and devotion, and their various levels of meaning. By keeping the characters slightly out of reach, Chretien asks that we shift our attention from the people in the story to the emotions that govern them.

What little physical descriptions we get (beyond the vague “beauty” of the central characters) are based on the segmentation of physical attributes. Soredamors and Alexander, for instance, constantly think of their eyes and hearts as organs that have betrayed them. Soredamors calls her eyes “traitors,” and curses her tongue for not obeying her heart. The lovers are mostly presented in pieces, which emphasizes the author’s elevation of abstraction over physicality. Chretien also refers to love and largess as “him” and “her,” to underline their significance.

Alexander and Soredamors are ruled by love, so much so that they physically suffer from it. They’re only able to recognize themselves as wholes when the queen unites them with each other. After she does this, Chretien writes, “Thus [Soredamors] had what was hers, and [Alexander] what was his; she was his entirely, and he entirely hers” (151).

As a reader of contemporary fiction, it’s sometimes hard for me to respect the type of characters in the legends we’ve been discussing because I don’t see them as authentic. (Though I realize they would have seemed novel at the time the tales were first published.) They appear to serve only as instruments of instruction. I appreciate the writerly intentions, but I can’t say it makes for pleasurable reading. Maybe it’s a generational difference in taste? Or a cultural difference in values? Or maybe it’s just me...

Once and Future

I want to talk about time as it works in the Arthurian Legends we have read, how it may come to work in the Legends we will read, and what we may hope to make of that, if anything. I think there’s something seemingly circuitous at work in regard to time, or, at least, I get a sense of it in Monmouth. In the introduction we are told that Merlin’s prophecies were so intriguing to Geoffrey’s Medieval readers because they “first and foremost, imply the idea that the future is, in some sense, pre-existent, and that its patterns are knowable by human beings” (25). I’d argue interest in the future as pre-existent and understandable to human beings is something that still rings rather true today a la Madame Marie in Springsteen’s ‘Sandy.’ Where the present and the future starts to become part of something that isn’t linear so much as cyclical, is when Arthur, the Boar of Cornwall is referenced in the same prophecy as “the House of Romulus” (131). The House of Romulus meaning Rome. Arthur, as a Briton, is a descendent of the first proclaimed Briton and leader of the Britons who was a Roman in exile. By referencing Arthur and then the House of Romulus, which Arthur is however diluted, somehow a part of, there begins to be a sense of things folding back into themselves in the “snake eating its own tail” sort of way. The prophecies continue with reference to renewal with women turning “continually into serpents” and the “campus of Venus” being “renewed” (135).

Several important events in Uther, and then Arthur’s, lives happen around Christian holidays that highlight renewal. Uther’s coronation is at Easter. Arthur’s is near Pentecost. Uther, Aurelius Ambrosias and Constantine are all buried within the Ring of the Giants, a pagan symbol that is a circle—okay, renewal theme might be a stretch there, but I’m just trying to open it up for discussion. Is this where the seeds are planted that later become the theme of Arthur being the “Once and Future” King? The Britons lose the land, but are told they will “regain the island […] after the predestined time had passed” (216), suggesting a return to the glory they once held that has not so much ended with the death of Arthur as it has gone into slumber with him. This is perhaps more in line with what was discussed in the intro to Marie de France, where the death of the nightingale is mentioned as symbolizing in the poem not “the end of love, only of the idyll.” There is no end to Arthur, or what he symbolizes, only an end to that moment in time of his rule, and from there is born the hope of the Britons regaining control of their lands and their former glory with the return of Arthur.

And okay, this second thing doesn’t fit with my theme of time, but it had me wondering what we make of the moment of the lake with the weird fish in Geoffrey’s Kings of Britain when compared to the treatment of Marie de France’s lovers and society as described in the intro?

The weird square lake is an interesting moment; one I don’t completely know what to do with. “No one knew whether” the lake had “been shaped by nature of by the craft of men” and in the lake there are “four different kinds of fish in its four corners, and the fish from one corner never mingled with the fish from the others” (169). The knee-jerk reading is to look at this as a statement discouraging racial intermingling amongst what I assume would be the Britons, the Pics, the Scots and the Saxons. Which, upon consideration, becomes insane. When you consider the history of the collective peoples in the History of the Kings of Britain, and the number of times one conquered another only to invade another and be invaded by yet another, you realize the purity of any given collection of people was compromised years ago. Should this moment of the lake, with the four different fish, be read in the obvious way? Or as some kind of weird throw away by Geoffrey? What do you make of it? What do you make of it, too, when considering Marie, who concentrated “on the individuality of her characters” and as such was “not very concerned with their integration into society.” The major appeal to the Arthurian Legend, to me at least, always seemed to be Arthur’s ability to draw his people to him, to create unity. Then again, Arthur is himself such an amazing character that complete unity is impossible, he will always stand out from his people and even the smaller circle of his knights.