Breeding Lilacs
Cover
I looked forward to reading Malcolm Guite’s Galahad and the Grail, the first part of his four-volume retelling of the Arthurian corpus, which has the overall title of Merlin’s Isle. The series title comes from Kipling’s Puck’s Song:
She is not any common earth,
Water or wood or air,
But Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye
Where you and I will fair.
Guite has set himself two tasks. The first is to organise the Arthurian corpus and cast it into ballad metre. Like common metre, ballad metre alternates tetrameter and hexameter with an ABCB rhyme scheme. Thus:
When Galahad was still a child
they let him run full free
and roam the castle holds and halls
and hear the minstrelsy (Book one, Stave 1, 1-4)
The form is very flexible and extendable, particularly with the C lines:
The stroke that brought the ruin down
the stroke that maimed the king,
the dreadful stroke that Balyn gave,
that ill-starred knight whom none could save,
who brought his brother to the grave,
as the old minstrels sing. (One, 1, 29-34)
Unlike common metre, ballad metre is more flexible in the number of unstressed syllables in a line, and this is something I’ll come back to as it threw me in places. The rhythmic structure and rhyme scheme mean that a writer of Guite’s skill can tell a story that fairly zips along, and zip along it does, in lively accessible language. Pleasingly, the book is handsomely produced in a cleanly bound and cased hardback printed on notably good quality paper. It also features excellent woodcut illustrations by Stephen Crotts.
I must say now that I was right to look forward to it: I enjoyed Galahad and the Grail and am pleased that I bought it. I have no doubt that I will buy the subsequent volumes. What follows is more by way of thoughts arising from Guite’s approach together with one or two editorial observations.
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Guite is a Church of England priest and a theologian. His theology is squarely in the tradition of Anglo-Catholic orthodoxy with a leaning towards the ideas of CS Lewis and Owen Barfield. This informs the second task he set himself which is to ‘make a poem that restores the spiritual elements that have been shorn away and renews their deepest meaning’ (p318) and to,
make an epic poem that would … awaken again in the modern world that openness to beauty and mystery that prepares the heart for the coming of Christ.’ (p316)
I knew that going in because I subscribe to his YouTube channel. It remains to be seen how this flows through the rest of the volumes but I think that, in the abstract, it begs several questions.
An important and influential writer in the study of folklore and Arthuriana was Jessie Weston (1850 – 1928). Her best-known book was From Ritual to Romance (1920) which TS Eliot cites as a major influence on his The Wasteland. Weston was concerned to uncover the origins of the Arthur stories but identifies an immediate and important problem. She sets out her stall thus:
The main difficulty of our research lies in the fact that the Grail legend consists of a congeries of widely differing elements—elements which at first sight appear hopelessly incongruous, if not completely contradictory, yet at the same time are present to an extent, and in a form, which no honest critic can afford to ignore.
Thus it has been perfectly possible for one group of scholars, relying upon the undeniably Christian-Legendary elements, preponderant in certain versions, to maintain the thesis that the Grail legend is ab initio a Christian, and ecclesiastical, legend, and to analyse the literature on that basis alone.
Another group, with equal reason, have pointed to the strongly marked Folk-lore features preserved in the tale, to its kinship with other themes, mainly of Celtic provenance, and have argued that, while the later versions of the cycle have been worked over by ecclesiastical writers in the interests of edification, the story itself is non-Christian, and Folk-lore in origin.
Both groups have a basis of truth for their arguments: the features upon which they rely are, in each case, undeniably present, yet at the same time each line of argument is faced with certain insuperable difficulties, fatal to the claims advanced.
Thus, the theory of Christian origin breaks down when faced with the awkward fact that there is no Christian legend concerning Joseph of Arimathea and the Grail. Neither in Legendary, nor in Art, is there any trace of the story; it has no existence outside the Grail literature, it is the creation of romance, and no genuine tradition …
In the same way the advocate of a Folk-lore origin is met with the objection that the section of the cycle for which such a source can be definitely proved, i.e., the Perceval story, has originally nothing whatever to do with the Grail; and that, while parallels can be found for this or that feature of the legend, such parallels are isolated in character and involve the breaking up of the tale into a composite of mutually independent themes. A prototype, containing the main features of the Grail story—the Waste Land, the Fisher King, the Hidden Castle with its solemn Feast, and mysterious Feeding Vessel, the Bleeding Lance and Cup—does not, so far as we know, exist.
Discussing the Wasteland, Guite writes,
I resist Jessie Weston’s reductive, re-paganising reading of [the Grail] and see its full Christian meanings not merely as a Christian gloss on an essentially pagan symbol, but as the full realisation of that pagan symbol’s true meaning. (p352, my emphasis.)
I do not adopt Weston’s reconstruction of the origins of the stories, which have been comprehensively criticised over the past century, but I do think that her identification of the problem of origins is clear and precise, and I don’t think her reading is reductive. Guite is entirely entitled to assert a decisively Christian reading of the text of the Fisher King and Waste Land tales, and goes for it with skill and gusto. However I don’t think it is at all persuasive for the non-Christian reader that he sidesteps her criticism for reasons which do not arise from the tangled texts themselves but simply from an overarching assertion of the truth of Christian belief, adopting Owen Barfield’s formulation that the Christ myth is a master myth that holds the key to the true meaning of all others (something I have commented on previously)
That is to say, I don’t think Guite is on any firmer ground in Christianising than Weston was in paganising, for reasons that Weston herself understood and stated. I think also that he veers perilously close to the same charge of reductionism that he levels at Weston.
I might add that the notion of Christianising the texts tends tacitly to assume a continuity and essential unity of Christian thought and doctrine. I don’t think this is true even in the writings that now constitute the canonical New Testament in the Western tradition (other traditions and views of canonicity are available) let alone over the millennium and a half, give or take, that the elements of the Arthurian corpus have been present and developing. In this sense, although Guite reflects aspects of the sheer weirdness (to the modern eye) of, for example, Gawain and the Green Knight and The Alliterative Morte Arthur, I’m not sure that he fully engages with that weirdness; the earliest forms of Christianity in these isles (or, indeed, in the eastern Mediterranean) were not Anglo-Catholic.
Christianity has a long history of incorporating and syncretising elements of cultures it came to dominate, most notably the incorporation of substantial aspects of Roman worship of gods and Imperial bureaucracy from around the turn of the fourth century onwards. We might note Paul and John incorporating elements of Aristotelianism and Stoicism into their respective letters and gospel. It is no great stretch to posit the incorporation of elements of native cultures into a Christian framework without (reductively) intellectualising it as the revelation of the ‘true meaning.’
Buddhism did something similar when it was taken to China. Again as I commented previously,
I mentioned in my Hangzhou diary that I had bought a copy of Journey to the West in Shanghai. I enjoyed it but think I probably need to find a better translation to do it justice. One of the things which I found intriguing is the character of Buddha who plays an occasional role in the story. Unlike in the Indian tradition, this Buddha is a magical immortal and one of a pantheon, NOT the Siddhartha Gautama who found enlightenment. I found the conception of him in the stories to be surprisingly reminiscent of the “magical” Jesus of some of the the apocryphal gospels and mystery plays. Even more strikingly, the Heavenly Court of the Jade Emperor is very like a manifestation of the earthly Imperial court – just like the structure of Roman Catholicism reflects that of the Imperial court in Rome around the time of the Emperor Constantine.
Finally, the notion of re-sacralising in opposition to Enlightenment rationality and objectivism is not something that can or ought to be confined to a resurgence of Christian thought: it applies equally to any of the major world religions or, indeed, to paganism. I might come back to this in a later post.
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I mentioned a couple of editorial observations. The first is that casting the verse in ballad rather than common metre led to some jarring moments for me. Guite encourages his audience to read the text aloud in an ‘incantatory’ manner, which is fine until ones accent/dialect reads non-stressed syllables differently. I regularly found myself thrown out of the rhythm by lines that, for me, read as having ‘too many’ syllables. Second, and here I am an old man shouting at clouds, I suppose it is because the primary publisher is American that double rather than single speech marks are used throughout (though spelling is British English.) Third, some stanzas seemed awkward to me and I’m a bit surprised they survived revision. For example
Not far from here, if I am right,
the drear Wasteland begins—
barren and bare, lifeless and drear,
because of human sins. (Three, V, 119-122)
That repetition of ‘drear’ clunks.
For all that, I must stress that I did enjoy the book and look forward to what comes next.
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