Mahaign

This essay examines the Conte du Graal, Chrétien de Troyes’s final, incomplete romance and the earliest known text in the Grail tradition. Chrétien’s narrative takes its structure from an elaborate architecture of imperfect doublings. Like Chrétien’s bifurcated romance, my argument on these pages also has two strands. The first considers the legacy of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s description of Perceval as an ‘inverted Oedipus’ in relation to the intellectual history of the twentieth century. The second examines the imprint of Anglo-Norman legal history and the intertextual allusions that tie Chrétien’s historical romance to Wace’s Brut as romanced history. The necessity of the relation between the two lies in the lexicon that surrounds the Old French root mahaign. In this essay I will show how the shadow of a juridical violence of a sexual nature has the potential to bring greater harmony between distinct approaches to the Grail romance by reconciling psychoanalytical or myth-inflected readings of the text with a social logic characterized by Wace’s Arthurian history and a vision of transcendent chivalry.

The Isles of the Sea

Le Conte du Graal opens with an image of lush but treacherous innocence. A teenage boy cavorts in a green forest, serenaded by birdsong. Chrétien’s description abounds in the tropes of the lyric, but the romance begins with a fall into History. A group of five knights arrive, the clang of their armour shattering the morning’s calm. The conversation the boy has with them leads to further discoveries. It turns out that the boy has not always lived in this Welsh forest. The paradise where he hunts deer and kisses the servant girls turns out to be a kind of hinterland. He and his mother are refugees from a war that destroyed their lands on the far-off Isles of the Sea and all of their lineage. It turns out the boy once had two older brothers, and a crippled father now dead from grief.