Allegory and Violence by Gordon Teskey (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS125 the Lancelot-Grailcycle accords with the claim in the prologue to the Estoire delSaint Graal that the cycle's textual authority derives directly from God. The legacy of Chrétien is implicit in several essays on subsequent generations of Arthurian romance. Richard O'Gorman's discussion ofthe sacrament ofpenance in Robert de Boron'sJoseph d'Arimathie suggests how that work bridges the gap between Chretien's Conte du Graal and the Lancelot-Grail cycle. Stacey L. Hahn analyzes the ideological significance' (139) ofLancelot and Galaad's genealogy in the prose Lancelot. Bart Besamusca and Frank Brandsma compare the Middle Dutch verse Lanceloet to the French and Dutch prose Lancelot romances, noting how its more highly developed first-person narrator contrasts with the impersonal narrative authority of 'Ii contes.' Emmanuele Baumgattner considers how the prose Tristan reflects the tension between the mystical and the secular in the Lancelot Grail, showing how the 'collageincrustration du Lancelotdans Ie Tristan (^) at once completes and reworks Arthurian legend in order to 'réécrire les versions en vers de la légende sous le signe de la quête de la joie' (13). Dhira B. Mahoncy analyzes Malory's adaptation ofthe prose Tristan, noting that while the narrative follows its source closely, Malory's manipulation of the chivalry topos reveals a subtly different emphasis: love 'has neither the energizing force nor the destructive power that it has in the French' (314) because for Malory 'the chivalry topos is rather a method ofaffirming knighthood than of motivating it' (324). Similatly, Sandra Ness IhIe sees ideal knighthood as the central idea in Malory's Grail quest: 'Malory intends his story to express a human and secular truth rather than the theological truth ofthe Queste' (181), so his Lancelot is elevated rather than 'systematically undetmined' (186) as he is in the Queste. The essays in this collection are a valuable contribution to Arthurian studies. The very few typographical errors noted by this reader ('ofthe the texts' [115]; 'bizzarly' [121]; 'ionical' for 'ironical' [155]; missing opening quotation mark, p. 233; 'The question ofwhethet love encourages or inhibits love [instead of'chivalry,' p. 311 n. 2]) attest to the careful editing ofits six hundred plus pages. It is regrettable that the high cost of the volume may keep Conjunctures from many institutional and private bookshelves. Busby and Lacy have assembled a fitting tribute to Douglas Kelly's erudition and scholarship. DEBORA B. SCHWARTZ California Polytechnic State University Gordon teskey, Allegory and Violence. Ithaca: Cotnell Univetsity Press, 1996. Pp.xiv, 195. Illustrations, isbn: 0-8014-2995-1. $35. What lies beneath allegory, what human problems motivate it, what makes it possible historically, what accounts for its numinousness and its violence—these are the kinds ofquestions Gordon Teskey probes in Allegory and Violence. Moral and philosophical rather than formal in emphasis, Teskey's study includes chapters on allegory and Christianity, allegoty and politics, and allegory and literary history. It tanges widely from classical to modem times, from writers like Homer, Plato and Quintilian, to 126ARTHURIANA Dante, Spenser, Betkeley and Locke, Coleridge, Yeats (a powerful reading of 'Leda and the Swan'), Benjamin, and de Man, not to mention pertinent illustrations such as Goya's 'Saturn' and Beckman's 'Bird's Hell.' Repeatedly, howevet, Teskey returns to Spenser's epic romance The Faerie Queene, in whose Cantos of Mutabilitie he finds an exploration of 'the political unconscious ofuniversal order' and a Nietszchean undermining ofthe metaphysical basis ofallegorical expression' (173, 175). Teskey's argument is an unfolding one, itselfa version ofallegorical narrative that is difficult to render summarily. His first chaptet discovers beneath allegory a rift berween the material and ideal, between nature and an alien consciousness that is nevertheless embedded in nature. On the surface, however, 'allegory categorizes [natural] bodies as the material basis ofan order ofsigns' (16). It is thus the ur-form ofabsttaction and idealism, whose metaphysical basis is a 'singularity,' a focal point outside time that organizes meaning much as does the vanishing point in linear perspective. But allegorical meaning is also violent in essence, violence being understood as 'the forcing ofsomething out ofits ptedetetmined, natural course' (75, 163). Allegory, asTeskey conceives it, seizes matter in a raptus and seeks to...