Comments on: British & French

By: Caprica Six

Caprica Six — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 21:28:44 +0000

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.

By: Mary

Mary — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 21:37:28 +0000

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.

By: ajc02005

ajc02005 — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 20:32:31 +0000

Perhaps the difference in character depth is a result of the difference in scope. ChrÃ©tienâ€™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 ChrÃ©tien 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.* ChrÃ©tien and the other romances do the former; Malory and Geoffrey do the latter.

*Actually, itâ€™s probably impossible to do either of those things, but thatâ€™s a different discussion.

By: mollie

mollie — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 07:18:45 +0000

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.

By: Agravaine

Agravaine — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 23:21:10 +0000

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).