The Fall of Kings and Princes: Structure and Destruction in Arthurian Tragedy (review)

Abstract

L'Esprit Créateur M. Victoria Guerin. The Fall of Kings and Princes: Structure and Destruction in Arthurian Tragedy. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995. Pp. xvi + 336. $39.50. Guerin admits that ' 'the word 'tragedy' is problematic in the context of medieval literature " (3). Indeed, the concept as understood in classical and in modern times was unknown in medieval France and England when Arthurian romance was invented. The term "tragedy" denoted merely the unhappy fall of the great, as in Chaucer (4-5); it also connoted elevated style (Isidore of Seville). Utterly foreign to medieval mentality are tragedy's assumptions that good people can be abandoned by God and that some are beyond redemption . Guerin invokes the Oedipus paradigm (15, 31-33), reflected in the evolving character of Mordred, but she does not understand that the story of predestined parricide and incest, however horrific, is not intrinsically tragic. Sophocles's drama alone makes those events partake analeptically of the tragic action driving the king's investigation and discovery. Guerin's appeals to Aristotle (6-7) are uninformed, and she ultimately forces a tragic model upon her material by assertion (78-86, 148), sometimes insinuating the Greek notion of fate (95-97). There is no "medieval Christian concept of tragedy" as she would have it (81, cf. 79-80): Fortune's wheel does not a tragedy make (cf. 3-7, 78-81, 183-87), for the "medieval Christian" view (Boethius, Jean de Meung) is that Fortune, who is blind to good or evil in those she favors and lets fall, works independently of redemption. Tragedy thus fails as a "hook." This book's real interest lies in how Guerin develops the intertwined themes of incest, betrayal, and doubling in selected Arthurian romances. Four chapters are devoted respectively to the Vulgate Cycle: principally Lancelot and La Mort le roi Artu, Chretien's Chorrete, his Perceval, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Guerin regards Lancelot and Mordred in the Vulgate Cycle as twin causes of Arthur's downfall; she then reads "exegetically" backwards into Chretien's romances and forward into Sir Gawain. In Chrétien, Lancelot doubles and anticipates an absent Mordred: contemporaneously , Mordred was becoming more Arthur's son, via the legend of le péché (incestueux) de Charlemagne (8-15, 142), and less his rival for Guenevere. Guerin's work on Lancelot "reading" the procession bearing the wounded Kay (105-19) and looking into his own tomb (120-30) is dazzling. Regarding only the French material, the first two chapters are the most engaging. Guerin's study of Percevalis much less successful despite an effective critical elaboration of Eugene Weinraub's association of the Grail banquet with the Seder (150-58) and the concentrated attention she pays Gauvain (174-91). She begins with some good questions about sexual mutilation (140-41), but grows heavy-handed the moment she takes Mordred's relevance for granted. She should have referred to two scholars whose work she duplicates here: D. D. R. Owen, on the relationship between Perceval and Le Bel Inconnu (The Evolution of the Grail Legend [1968]), and David C. Fowler, who identifies Perceval's father as an incestuous Grail King (Prowess and Chivalry in the Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes [1959]). The chapter is further marred by overinterpretations—for example, of the Red Knight's affront to the Queen (145-47) and the rhyme pecheor: Roi Pescheor (158-61). Finally, we cannot take seriously assertions like "If the first of Perceval's two unasked questions would have revealed that aspect of Arthurian history he could not change, the king's incest with his sister, the second question would have shown him his own role in the machinations of fate, Mordred's adultery with Guenevere and his rebellion against Arthur" (163). The Fall's thesis founders, but some good readings and some good writing make selected parts well worthy of attention. Rupert T. Pickens University of Kentucky 116 Spring 1997 ...