Self-determination in the post-vulgate Suite du Merlin and Malory's Le Morte, Darthur.(Critical Essay)

Eugene Vinaver's three-volume edition of the Winchester manuscript version of Malory's Le Morte Darthur includes much valuable comparison of Malory's text with its sources. (1) The subject has been taken further, for example in the series of essays edited by R. M. Lumiansky under the title Malory's Originality, and in the work of Terence McCarthy. (2) These studies have tended to interpret discontinuities between Malory's writing and the works on which it drew as reflective of varying interests in the content of the narrative, or varying ways of structuring this content. But it is possible, I shall contend, to relate many of the deviations between the Morte and its sources to a revision of philosophical issues implicit in the material that Malory adapted. That Malory was interested in abstruse concepts has been discounted by critics, one of whom has written that 'Malory's style suggests that his mind was strikingly unacademic', and that Malory shows no apparent interest in the 'fashionable intellectual issues' that occupied other late-medieval authors of English literature. (3) This essay will argue that the stylistic simplicity of the Morte is not matched by an intellectual simplicity on the part of its author, and, contrary to many interpretations of Malory's writing, that a continuity with foregoing English writers is discernible not only in the issues raised by the Morte but in Malory's stance towards those issues as well.

Malory's principal source for the first 'tale' of the Winchester manuscript Morte, the section entitled 'The tale of King Arthur' by Vinaver, was the Post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin, a continuation of the Roman de Merlin that post-dates the Vulgate Cycle of Arthurian narratives of which the Roman de Merlin is itself a component. (4) The version of the Suite that Malory knew seems to have been incorporated into a composite text that also included the Roman de Merlin and a continuation of the Roman de Merlin that is part of the Vulgate Cycle - the other sections of the first tale of the Morte are based on material corresponding to the contents of these originally separate works, and it appears that Malory did not conflate the French texts himself because a similar amalgam of them survives in Cambridge University Library, MS Additional 7071. (5) The episode involving Balin 'le Saveage', the knight with the two swords, has been the focus of critical discussion of Malory's tale. It has been noted that the Morte recasts the relationship of Balin's adventures to the narrative enfolding them, dissociating them from their connection with the story of the Grail that is established in the Suite. (6) Here, it is the 'Dolereus Cop' struck by Balaain that calls down the adventures that will come to an end only when Galahad comes to the kingdom of Logres, an event that will be a prelude to the demise of Arthur and his knights. The Morte, by contrast, emphasizes the pattern that links what Balin does with what Malory's key protagonist, Lancelot, will do later. As Balin slays the man he loves best--his brother Balan--so, Merlin says, Lancelot, in the final disintegration of the Round Table, '"shall sle the man in the worlde that he lovith beste: that shall be sir Gawayne"'. (7) I shall return to the issue of the orderliness of events in the Morte, of which the narrative patterning pointed to by Malory is one aspect. First, however, the presentation of Balaain in the Suite needs to be considered in detail.

Balaain's role in the narrative in which he is involved is not the only way in which he differs from Malory's Balin. He does so also in the nature of his responses to what happens to him. (8) Balaain perceives himself as persecuted by Fortune, and he reacts to the sequence of disasters that befall him with a crescendo of self-pity. When a knight who has been accompanying him on his journey is killed by the lance of an invisible knight afterwards identified as Garlon, Balaain remarks that he is 'li plus chetis et li plus mescheans chevaliers de tous cheus qui onques portaissent armes, car ore voit il apertement que Fortune li est plus contraire et plus anemie que a nul autre houme'. (9) When he later reveals the unfaithfulness of another knight's 'amie', prompting the knight to murder her and then turn his sword on himself, Balaain claims that '"ceste male aventure est plus avenue par male meskeanche que par autre chose, car sans faille je sui li plus mescheans chevaliers qui soit"'. (10) When he is killed by his brother, here called Balaan, he laments that '"la mesqueanche i est si grans que vous me raves mort"'. Balaan echoes this when he states, epigrammatically, '"onques si grant mesqueanche n'avint a .II. freres coume il nous est avenu"'. The two brothers' agony and perplexity at their fate is expressed in a joint protestation: '"Ha! Diex, pour coi aves vous souffert que si grant mesqueanche et si grans mesaventure nous avenist?"' (11) The reverberation of mescheans and mesqueanche gives Balaain's speeches the quality of a refrain, making him seem trapped in the misery of which he complains. (12)

Critics have pitied Balaain as much as he has pitied himself. Sympathy for him has centred on the view that he is a good individual whose fate is at odds with what he has earned for himself. In his introduction to Dominica Legge's edition of the Balaain section of the Suite, Vinaver comments that 'The catastrophe is prepared in no rational manner', and that Balaain's 'finest deeds turn to disaster ... not because he is a guilty man who deserves punishment, but because fatality pursues its course and turns his noblest thoughts into crimes'. (13) It may be true that Balaain has fine intentions--he discovers the infidelity of the knight's 'amie', for example, in the course of an attempt to bring the couple together. Fine intentions, though, should not be equated with innocence. Balaain enters the text with a great deal going for him--he is 'riches de cuer et de hardement et de proueche' (14)--but what he does subsequently appears rooted in sinfulness. After he has removed the sword attached to a damsel who enters Arthur's court, she warns him that if he refuses to return it, '"vous emportes vostre mort avoecques vous"'. But he does refuse to return it, 'car trop li samble l'espee boine et biele'. (15) To his covetousness is joined an arrogant confidence in the self-sufficiency of his abilities. When an anonymous 'puciele' tells him that his death will be the outcome of his assumption of a shield other than his own, 'ce le rasseure moult qu'il se sent sain et delivre et fort et legier et preu as armes': (16) he is in such good shape, and is such a good knight, that he will survive. Before Balaain strikes the 'Dolereus Cop', Merlin advises him to turn back, telling him of the repercussions his deed will have if he does not; Balaain refuses to abandon the quest on which he has embarked. (17) Pride according to St Augustine, is the start of every kind of sin, an evil committed in secret that leads to evil committed in the open. (18) The open 'crimes' that Balaain commits are preceded by precisely this secret wrongdoing in their perpetrator.

Pride--a turning away from God to worship oneself (19)--was also, for Augustine, the sin that led Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, and further correspondences between Balaain and our 'first parents' are made clear by the author of the Suite. After his departure from Arthur's court, Balaain is told by Merlin that '"Nous avons recouvre en toi Evain nostre mere"', and just as all the pain of humanity derives from Eve's action, so, says Merlin, all miseries in the world of the Suite will derive from Balaain's 'Dolereus Cop', through which three kingdoms will be put '"en essil"'. (20) The first words that Balaain speaks connect him with Adam and Eve, as if pointing forward to the deed that will build on the similarities between them. Scorned by the damsel who bears the sword because he is 'povres d'avoir', he asks her not to despise him because '"je fui ja plus riches"': (21) he has lost the wealth he once enjoyed as, after their fall, Adam and Eve lost the abundance that they enjoyed in paradise. And, as Adam and Eve's transgression was punished with the sentence of death, so is Balaain's: 'a Nostre Seignur ne plout mie qu'il durast grantment', the author of the ...