Just thinking back to the beginning of the White–to the scene where Arthur first sees a knight, Pellinore, and thinks it’s “the most beautiful thing he’d seen in his short life so far,” which sounds a lot like Perceval’s first encounter with a knight. White and Chretien (in the Grail narrative) then focus a lot on the formation of character and knightly pedagogy. This along with White and Chretien’s irony and concern with juxaposing contemporary issues with Romantic ideas suggests a stronger affinity between these two writers than between either and Malory (as I believe we’ve discussed).
Ok, I should probably say something more “scholarly.” Er. I don’t have Malory in front of me, but I think what White has done in terms of giving “psychological explicability” to his character here is fascinating. “…Agravaine…was moved because it was a matter which concerned his mother. He had curious feelings about her, which he kept to himself” (222). Indeed.
I think it was Gaheris who killed their mother out of shame in Malory over the whole Lamorak thing. He would cut off his own mother’s head but not kill Lamorak because he was unarmed. My mind has always boggled over the nastiness of that. The spectre of incest that haunts the lanscape of Malory is still present in White, just taking on a different form.
White makes Morgause a nastier character too. it works in terms of novelistic considerations, but the whole Lothian bit is just plain unsavory. Incest and unicorn slaughter puts the fun in dysfunctional. You could maybe make a case for innocence in White being not so much lost as much as violently stolen, carried away, raped. Not what I tend to expect in so-called children’s literature.
So the Church is aligning itself with Arthur, perhaps, who somewhere in his heart of hearts thinks there’s an escape clause from medieval Church doctrine
Martin Luther once said something to the effect that war enacted to prevent larger wrongs is a case of God wielding the sword, and not man. The idea, I think (I have no idea where I read this), is that war is part of God’s works, his plan, his judgment.
This puts a Christian king, I imagine, in an even crappier position, though, what with that limited human vision and all, and it’s this sort of pain of uncertainty that makes the end of the book so haunted. Even for a sort of “humanist” king like Arthur in a work where Christianity is handled only at a narrative distance as a sort of prop or setting, the uncertainty is almost overwhelming.
Arthur ponders that mankind is doomed as long as it “refuse[s] to forget the past” (668). This has got me thinking about the role of history — or historicity — in Christianity (or any religion with a belief in an afterlife in which mankind’s temporal sense as well as motivations are trumped by a Divine Intermission, a divine imperative, maybe a divine curtain call.) And then the part on the next page about non-action (which is probably logicaly impossible, but anyway) has got me thinking about religions with different senses of time and moral imperatives, adn different senses of the origins of sin, like Buddhism. the medieval Christian notion of non-action seems to get closest to manifestation with the retreat to the monastery, but even then it’s impossible to say that monks and clerks and scribes didn’t also throw pebbles in their own ways — especially in Arthurian romances where they were always nursing some knight or other back to life!
I’m afraid I don’t have much of a coherent point – just random musings.
April 16, 2007 at 11:13 am
Just thinking back to the beginning of the White–to the scene where Arthur first sees a knight, Pellinore, and thinks it’s “the most beautiful thing he’d seen in his short life so far,” which sounds a lot like Perceval’s first encounter with a knight. White and Chretien (in the Grail narrative) then focus a lot on the formation of character and knightly pedagogy. This along with White and Chretien’s irony and concern with juxaposing contemporary issues with Romantic ideas suggests a stronger affinity between these two writers than between either and Malory (as I believe we’ve discussed).
April 16, 2007 at 12:38 pm
Agravaine just gives me the creeps.
Ok, I should probably say something more “scholarly.” Er. I don’t have Malory in front of me, but I think what White has done in terms of giving “psychological explicability” to his character here is fascinating. “…Agravaine…was moved because it was a matter which concerned his mother. He had curious feelings about her, which he kept to himself” (222). Indeed.
I think it was Gaheris who killed their mother out of shame in Malory over the whole Lamorak thing. He would cut off his own mother’s head but not kill Lamorak because he was unarmed. My mind has always boggled over the nastiness of that. The spectre of incest that haunts the lanscape of Malory is still present in White, just taking on a different form.
White makes Morgause a nastier character too. it works in terms of novelistic considerations, but the whole Lothian bit is just plain unsavory. Incest and unicorn slaughter puts the fun in dysfunctional. You could maybe make a case for innocence in White being not so much lost as much as violently stolen, carried away, raped. Not what I tend to expect in so-called children’s literature.
April 20, 2007 at 10:40 pm
More on the Original Sin idea/problem, now with More Current News From The Vatican![tm]
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-limbo21apr21,1,7727834.story?track=crosspromo&coll=la-headlines-world&ctrack=1&cset=true
So the Church is aligning itself with Arthur, perhaps, who somewhere in his heart of hearts thinks there’s an escape clause from medieval Church doctrine
April 27, 2007 at 12:25 pm
Martin Luther once said something to the effect that war enacted to prevent larger wrongs is a case of God wielding the sword, and not man. The idea, I think (I have no idea where I read this), is that war is part of God’s works, his plan, his judgment.
This puts a Christian king, I imagine, in an even crappier position, though, what with that limited human vision and all, and it’s this sort of pain of uncertainty that makes the end of the book so haunted. Even for a sort of “humanist” king like Arthur in a work where Christianity is handled only at a narrative distance as a sort of prop or setting, the uncertainty is almost overwhelming.
Arthur ponders that mankind is doomed as long as it “refuse[s] to forget the past” (668). This has got me thinking about the role of history — or historicity — in Christianity (or any religion with a belief in an afterlife in which mankind’s temporal sense as well as motivations are trumped by a Divine Intermission, a divine imperative, maybe a divine curtain call.) And then the part on the next page about non-action (which is probably logicaly impossible, but anyway) has got me thinking about religions with different senses of time and moral imperatives, adn different senses of the origins of sin, like Buddhism. the medieval Christian notion of non-action seems to get closest to manifestation with the retreat to the monastery, but even then it’s impossible to say that monks and clerks and scribes didn’t also throw pebbles in their own ways — especially in Arthurian romances where they were always nursing some knight or other back to life!
I’m afraid I don’t have much of a coherent point – just random musings.