British & French
A lot of us agreed today on how Malory’s telling of stories we have previously read by French authors (The Knight of the Cart, The Death of King Arthur from Vulgate Cycle) were a bit distant and a little dry. I certainly felt that way at least. Even though the events of the narratives were the same in both stories, there was a big difference in the way the authors told them and these difference are very telling of the British and French cultures.
The French stories we read focused a lot on the character’s feelings and thoughts. The narrator either got inside the characters head or revealed enough of their thoughts through speech that the reader can understand and sympathize with them. Even though we know Lancelot and Guinevere are going behind Arthur’s back you still want things to work out for them because the author wants us to understand their love, and if we understand it we’ll most likely want it to triumph. Not just L&G though, readers are meant to explore the internal workings of all principle “good” characters in these stories. Eric, Enide, Perceval, Lunete, Gawain, Arthur, Yvain, etc. At some point in the story, we feel for these characters. Because, even if they are “misbehaving”, their thoughts and feelings are still exposed to us. So, the reader understands and sees a bit of themselves in them (once you get past the intense idealization of course).
These French qualities became more apparent after reading Malory. Malory’s characters are more distant and less dimensional. Mordred is 100% bad, and Arthur is 100% good. We get to know his characters by either his description of them or by what other characters are saying about them – never through their own thoughts. By doing this the characters actions and words become our only ways of judging them. When they do something bad we see them as bad, or if they speak and act like a hero then we believe they are a hero. Since we never know what is going on internally their appearance is all we can build an opinion with.
These differences in the way the British and French authors write implies a lot about the ideals they are endorsing. The French are concerned with the individual. They focus on why people behave the way they do, the qualities all humans have and the forces all humans succumb to (love, duty, jealousy, pride, etc.) They perpetuate the idea that humans are complex creatures and that nobody should be judged based simply on what they do because you never know what they may be thinking. Even though Enide disobeys her husband time after time, she is actually doing it because she is so madly in love with him. And even though Erec is so rude to his wife, he is actually battling a deep insecurity.
The British are more focused with the society and an individual’s image. They value society’s opinion so that an individual’s actions define who they are. Nobody knows your thoughts, feelings, or intentions so besides your actions and words how else can we judge you? They endorse the idea that one should really behave nobly in order to be respected. That society’s opinion of you is the only one.
I hope these generalizations about the British and French are taken with a grain of salt, I don’t mean to stereotype anyone. Just pointing out how by reading two versions of the same story we can now see some beliefs/attitudes/ideals about the cultures they came from. The French individualism in Chretien’s “The Knight of the Cart” would not have been as noticeable if we didn’t have Malory’s British-society-image-actions version to compare it with (and vice versa). Anyone else see this? or disagree?
Agravaine wrote:
The fascinating part of that interpretation, which I think is the appropriate one from the books we’ve read, is that it’s totally reversed from the direction those two cultures took. (Though I would read the Green Knight as a British work skeptical of central authority and society).
Whereas the English political tradition is the more individualist/classical liberal (dating back to the Magna Carta ), French political culture has downplayed the individual (first at the expense of the state- see absolutist monarchy, then in the French Revolution at the expense of societal equality).
Posted 07 Nov 2007 at 4:21 pm ¶
mollie wrote:
Would Malory’s simplification of the characters have to do with his and Caxton’s nationalistic purposes? In terms of the history we talked about in class, having Arthur be 100% good and all the “villians” 100% bad would certainly help solidify any nationalistic tendencies, especially once Henry VII came to the throne and wanted to parallel himself with Arthur in order to legitimize his rise to power.
We also talked about Malory’s recovery of Arthurian legend, essentially an English nationalist project, from the French. It makes sense that although his source is a French text, he would want to make sure the stories sounded really British, possibly by taking out a lot of French cultural elements and adding British ones.
Posted 08 Nov 2007 at 12:18 am ¶
ajc02005 wrote:
Perhaps the difference in character depth is a result of the difference in scope. Chrétien’s romances were focused on narrower subjects, a specific person or quest. Naturally his characters have more depth, otherwise his stories would be two pages long. The Vulgate Cycle covers much more material, but each part was written by a different author. Again, they focused on a fairly specific topic, and explored it in some depth. Malory, on the other hand, covers the entire Arthur story from conception to after his death, so it seems to follow (to me at least) that each event and character is covered with less depth. In this respect, Malory’s version is more akin to Geoffrey of Monmouth than the romances we have read in between. His book is pretty long as it is, can you imagine what it would be like if his went into as much detail as Chrétien for every tiny episode? Like the folksy wisdom says, you can dig a mile deep and an inch wide, or an inch deep and a mile wide.* Chrétien and the other romances do the former; Malory and Geoffrey do the latter.
*Actually, it’s probably impossible to do either of those things, but that’s a different discussion.
Posted 08 Nov 2007 at 1:32 pm ¶
Mary wrote:
I think you might be giving Chretien a little too much credit. Sure, he goes more into depth with the feeling of the characters than Malory does, but how deep does he make the people? Not very. When I read Chretien’s stories all I got out of them was that those people were all pretty shallow. Erec, for example, is horrible to Enide simple to prove a point about his masculinity. He never steps back from the situation and thinks, “Hm… Maybe I shouldn’t be utterly horrible to my wife simply because I lack self-confidence…” He only makes up with her once he completes his heroic trials.
Also, the Lancelot in Chretien’s “Knight of the Cart” bothers me a lot. There’s a lot of narrative happening in Lancelot’s head in that story that discusses how Love always wins over Reason in his mind, and some of his actions based on that logic make me want to smack him sometimes. For example, love drives him to break into Guenevere’s room at knight, causing her and Sir Kay to get into massive trouble with their captors. He should have just not done that and worried about his up and coming fight with Meleagant.
I, personally, love the way the characters are portrayed in the British versions of the same stories. I’ve always believed that actions speak louder than words, so I love the style of writing that reveals the goodness of a character with actions instead of awkward interior monologues.
Posted 08 Nov 2007 at 2:37 pm ¶
Caprica Six wrote:
I agree with Mary. I actually think Malory’s characters are a lot more complex and ambiguous than Chretien’s, even though Chretien gets inside their heads more. With Chretien, the heroes are always noble and brave and obviously gorgeous, and even if they do something that appears wrong (i.e. Erec putting his wife through hell just to prove a point), Chretien tries to make it all seem okay at the end (”I was just testing you, and guess what? You passed!”)
I found Malory’s characters much more flawed. For instance, at his wedding banquet, a girl who came asking for help gets carried off by a knight, and Arthur is happy she’s gone because she was making too much noise. He only agrees to send someone to rescue her when Merlin guilt trips him into it.
There’s another episode where the Lady of the Lake and Balin accuse each other of killing their respective family members. Malory never says who’s right in the argument. All we have to go on is the character’s words. I like the idea that we never know who was really right or wrong. I think it lends much more complexity to the tale.
Posted 13 Nov 2007 at 2:28 pm ¶