Modern Retellings of Chivalric Texts ed. by Gloria Allaire (review)

Abstract

Reviews gloria Allaire, ed., Modern Retellings of Chivalric Texts. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1999. Pp. viii, 176. isbn: 1-84014-612-5. $69.95. Chivalric stories have not only been told and retold throughout the centuries; as Gloria Allaire notes, they have also been reinvented 'by new authors with new voices for new audiences.' Among those new authors, as Allaire's volume illustrates, are nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers of various nationalities (English, Danish, French, Italian, and American) whose adaptations include a wide variety of genres (poetry, novel, short story, film, oral performance, drama, and popular theatre). And the reinvented stories that those authors tell and that some of the contributors to the volume discuss—from modern versions ofthe legend ofRobert ofSicily to retellings ofthe Carolingian cycle narratives; from modernist recastings of the well-known Renaissance poems Orfando furioso and The Fairie Queene, themselves early modern reworkings ofstill older chivalric material, to refigurations oftheTristan legend, the Grail stories, and other elements ofthe Arthurian myth— demonstrate that modern chivalric retellings are as broad in their scope as they are enduring in their appeal. Of the five Arthurian essays in the volume, perhaps the most interesting is Deborah Lesko Baker's study ofdesire and mythic intertext in Marguerite Duras's Moderato cantabile. Baker focuses not on Bédier or other Tristan sources but on the intertextual dimension of Duras's writing and the hermeneutic implications ofthe novel and its cinematic adaptation. According to Baker, the re-enactment, or doubling, ofvarious tropes and narrative elements—e.g., unattainability, the love potion, the metaphor of the sea—occurs not only on the literary level but also within the physical and psychological dimensions ofDuras's characters and underlies the novel's structure. Kathleen Coyne Kelly, in her revisionist reading of the Lady of Shalott, also explores notions of intertexuality and doubling. Taking a Bakhtinian approach, Kelly violates chronicity by reading in 'great time' four texts that contain the figure— or analogue—ofElaine in works by Malory, Tennyson, Zelazny, and Pynchon. She concludes that as woman moves from 'object to subject position' and 'comes into her full powers,' as 'the phallic is explicitly engaged with mirroring itself in the feminine... [and] is obsessed, fix(at)ed on bondage and other-as-object,' her autonomy is affirmed. In contrast to Kelly's exploration of the feminine, Lee Tobin McClain examines the masculine, specifically the deflation ofmasculine chivalric ideals in Arthur Rex, and argues that Bergers reshaping of Malory allows him to show the chivalric code as an inadequate moral system. MaryLynn Saul examines a number of modern ARTHURIANA I0.2 (2OO0) 102ARTHURIANA stories (all but one from the same collection) in which the Grail is recast as a quasireligious object with powers ro corrupt or destroy those who possess it and identifies the various ideologies and anxieties—from Nietzchean and Sartrean philosophies to 'cold war fear of the ultimate destructive weapon'—behind the refashioning of what she terms the new 'Unholy Grail.' And, in the concluding essay, Myriam Swenncn Ruthenberg explores the significance ofL'isola diArturo (1957) by analyzing the ways in which the author, Elsa Morante, consciously revises the prescribed neorealism of the postwar novel and implicates the reader in her romance. Arthurian scholars and readers are always delighted to learn about unfamiliar texts, and here Allaire's volume—which introduces a number of such works and suggests interesting approaches to them—succeeds. The volume, however, is less effective in other aspects: connections ate occasionally tenuous and arguments thin in a few of the essays, the jargon distracting in others. The suggestion that Berger, 'unaware of what he is about,' reveals 'hostility toward the period he claims to admire' in Arthur Rex, for example, or that Bergers need to 'equal or surpass' formidable predecessors like Chrétien and Malory demonstrates his 'Bloomian/ Freudian anxiety' seems to overstate the case. Similarly, an analysis ofunholy Grails appears incomplete without reference to the significant use ofthat theme in major works like Percy's Lancelot or Barthelme's The King. Nonetheless, as its title suggests, Modern Retellings ofChivalric Tales offers insights into the process of retelling; and it confirms the scope and versatility of chivalric stories, both Arthurian and non...