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...
I've had a different experience from this same phenomenon. The fact that the characters are almost never described in the works of Arthuriana allows me to put my own interpretation of the appearance of what Gawain or Lancelot look like in my head across all of the stories. Instead of a dissonance where a character might be described as tall in one story and short in another, ruining the illusion that they are still somewhat connected, I can place my template for each knight into each story.
ReplyDeleteWhile the characters are obviously always somewhat different depending on who is writing them, it is still nice to have some continuity available in the stories. To some degree the subtle characterization of the knights allows for this as well. If they are more archetypal, with small character flourishes, it prevents the different incarnations of the characters from being unrecognizable in different works.
I cannot say if this was an active effort on the part of the authors to maintain continuity or simply a happy accident resulting from the predominant writing style of the time. All I can say is that it has allowed me to maintain some consistency while reading these texts from different authors in different centuries.