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COPYRIGHT 2005 Adam Mickiewicz University Press
ABSTRACT
The essay proposes a reconsideration of Chretien de Troyes' Le Conte du Graal as an existentialist romance, where Perceval's failure to help the Roi Pescheor, Fisher King, and to reach the Grail ultimately results from his failure to interpret the instruction he receives from the romance's women. Le conte du Graal, therefore, may be viewed as a romance of failure, although Perceval's fiasco may not only betoken the fiasco of chevalerie grounded in vainglory. The romance becomes a lesson in accepting and coping with failure, and Perceval learns this lesson from the women he encounters. The essay focuses on the prophetic figure of the Laughing Maiden as the most influential and yet the least conspicuous of them. Her character is discussed here as an example of the roles played by other feminine figures of Le conte du Graal. Like the Laughing Maiden, they provide the romance with narrative development, commentary and, more importantly, appear to be in possession of the knowledge Perceval is unable to decode and internalize.
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Perceval, ou le conte du Graal, the last of Chretien de Troyes' romances is, doubtlessly, the most intriguing and mysterious of his texts. Unfinished and twisting between the story of Perceval and Gauvain, it gave rise to a number of medieval continuations and, in recent times, to a number of critical works discussing it from almost every possible perspective. Indeed, the words with which Lazamon's Brut describes the phenomenon of King Arthur, comparing his body to food and wine nourishing poetic imagination, and saying that "pis solde ilaste; to pare worle lange" (Lawman 1994: 11499) may well be applied to Chretien's Grail romance, incidentally describing also the position of literary critics. None other Arthurian romance can boast more continuations or versions, and none of Arthurian motifs can rival the creative potential of the quest for the Grail. The intriguing nature of Le conte du Graal lies, however, not just in its incompleteness, neither can it be linked solely with the Grail theme. If Chretien's earlier romances were concerned with the matters of amour and chevalerie, their author presents us with his last and most mature composition, a Bildungsroman, where chivalry for its own sake is scorned and the love theme is visibly less significant than before. Le conte du Graal is the only of Chretien's five romances not written for the courtly audience of Marie de Champagne, where chivalric stories were also stories of the challenges and complexities of love. Instead, it is dedicated to her cousin and Chretien's second patron, Philippe d'Alsace, the count of Flanders, who lived under the influence of the ideas leading to his crusades and ultimately death in the Outremer, and for whom the mission of knighthood would have been synonymous with religious challenge. And yet, it is through feminine characters that Chretien shapes his story, albeit the significance of those figures is markedly different than in his previous texts.
My intention here is to discuss Chretien's Grail-romance, and in particular its parts concerning Perceval, as a narrative virtually designed by the women appearing in the romance's most decisive points. A corresponding perspective on the position of women in twelfth- and thirteenth-century French romances has recently been proposed by Ben Ramm (2003), who emphasises feminine roles in relation to the Grail quest as "the very support for the male homosocial structure of the Quest" (Ramm 2003: 518). Ramm presents an outline of feminine characters across the romances, focusing on the Grail quest and rejecting the conventional reading of women as bringing the downfall of the quest. The present examination will centre on the narrative and interpretative significance of the figure even more marginal than the women characters Ramm discusses. The Laughing Maiden of Le conte du Graal briefly appears twice in the romance and does not participate directly in the Grail quest, but she is, I will argue, a controlling character, allowing for an interpretation of the romance as a philosophical study of failure. I will ultimately speculate about a possibility of viewing Le conte du Graal as a romance that is, in a way, complete, not on its narrative but on its interpretative level, which was first tentatively suggested by Burns (1988: 264). In contrast to what has been traditionally postulated (Frappier 1959 [2001]: 188-189; Topsfield 1981: 218-219), I believe that if, in the figure of Perceval, Chretien posed before his audience a vision of a Christian knight, as opposed to the courtly knights of his previous romances, this vision is ultimately a vision of failure, or rather a deeply humanizing vision of one's attempt at coping with failure.
Such a view on Le conte du Graal and Perceval, is predominantly engendered by two concepts narratively essential for the romance--that of encounter and that of misinterpretation. While the former is an indispensable element of any romance, the emphasis on the latter and the multiple meanings resulting from it are peculiar to Le conte du Graal. On the narrative level of the romance these two notions are frequently combined into misinterpreted encounters, and as such are...
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