Camelot or Corbenic?: Malory’s New Blend of Secular and Religious Chivalry in the “Tale of the Holy Grail”

Abstract

C A M E L O T O R C O R B E N I C ? : M A L O R Y ’ S N E W B L E N D O F S E C U L A R AN D R E L I G I O U S C H IV A L R Y IN T H E “ T A L E O F T H E H O L Y G R A IL ” M U RR A Y J . EV AN S University of Winnipeg _Lhe nature of Malory’s treatment of the Grail story remains a matter of critical controversy, particularly since Eugène Vinaver’s comment in 1929 that “the ultimate debate is not between the ideals of Camelot [Arthur’s secular civilization] and the ideals of Corbenic [the Grail castle]. Faced with two main themes and forced to subordinate one, Malory made Cor­ benic a province of Camelot.” 1 In his “ Sankgreal,” “Malory is primarily concerned with ‘erthly worship,’ not with any higher purpose, and his one desire seems to be to secularize the Grail theme as much as the story will allow.” Thomas C. Rumble, too, speaks of Malory’s “persistent secular­ ization of the Grail episodes.” Opposed to Vinaver’s and Rumble’s positions is Charles Moorman who argues that although Malory trims the religious matter of his source, La Queste del Saint Graal, he keeps its doctrinal core.2 Between these two extremes there lie a variety of critical positions which discern some balance of Camelot and Corbenic in Malory’s Grail story. Larry D. Benson affirms that in Malory “ the quest becomes an Arthurian adventure as well as a spiritual one, and earthly worship remains a positive value.” C. S. Lewis argues that the point of Malory’s quest is to forsake not knighthood itself, but wicked knighthood, in favour of a chivalry founded on patience and humility. P. E. Tucker describes the relationship of Camelot and Corbenic as an interpenetration, Charles W. Whitworth, as a union, and Mary Hynes-Berry, as an identity.3 The matter of re-assessing Malory’s Grail story is complicated by the larger problem of analysing any piece of medieval literature. Critics such as Vinaver, D. S. Brewer, Larry Benson, Robert M. Jordan, and Arthur K. Moore have variously argued that novelistic, Coleridgean, or “universal” conventions of literary criticism are inappropriate for illuminating the pecu­ liar structure and meaning of medieval literature in general, and/or Malory in particular. According to Brewer, Benson, and Moore, the critic’s analysis of medieval texts must be informed by sorely needed paradigms of medieval literary unity and structure.4 E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , vm, 3, September 1982 Medieval literary theory is a sensible place to look for these paradigms; an increasing number of studies have made it clear that the literary theory of the period is medieval rhetoric. The more recent of these studies have established a clear relationship between medieval rhetoric and literature well beyond a descriptive cataloguing of rhetorical figures in particular works, a relationship not necessarily dependent on direct influence, but on a poetic tradition common to both rhetorical theory and literature.5 Rhetorical treatises important for the age of Chaucer include Cicero’s De Inventione, the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium (hereafter Rhetorica ), Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, Horace’s Ars Poetica, and the twelfth- and thirteenth-century rhetorics of Matthew of Vendome and Geoffrey of Vinsauf (Payne, 35-36). Although no substantial study exists on rhetoric in the fifteenth century, Malory’s period,6 there is considerable evidence to support Richard Schoeck’s assertion concerning medieval rhetoric “ that from the late thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth, for all of the changes and developments, there is an essential continuity.” 7 Not only do Chaucer’s suc­ cessors and imitators persist in referring to him (whom we call poet) as a rhetorician,8 but the survival of over two hundred and fifty manuscripts of the Poetria, and its continual reprintings into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, underscore its importance beyond Chaucer’s period...