The unfinished nature of Chre´tien’s romance was undoubtedly a spur to those who wrote in his wake, but they were surely inspired as well by the strangely allusive, not quite allegorical, proto-revelatory quality of what he left behind, qualities which invited others to find in it what they were seeking and to take it in new directions. Despite the enormous amount of scholarship that has appeared on the Conte du graal and its successors, no one reading has emerged as the standard against which all others are measured. For some it is a tale of spiritual quest: Perceval is the Christian soul, marked with original sin, who seeks to redeem his imperfection through service and self-abnegation. For others it is one of the following: a misinterpreted Celtic tale; a Lacanian allegory of identity formation; an exposition and condemnation of the violence and vengeance that lies just behind chivalric rhetoric; the remnant of an ancient vegetation cult; or an allegory of the voyage to archetypal masculinity.9
My intent here is to focus on Perceval as an individual subject – not as an allegorized everyman forging a masculine identity through submission to the cultural fantasy of knighthood, as in some of the more idealizing and “New Age” readings. Instead, I will argue thatPerceval is subjected to a discourse of elite masculinity into which men are interpellated so as to keep them striving toward an ideologically constructed ideal, an ideal which sets their desires and is, from the outset, unattainable. The particular form of elite masculinity that we find in the Conte du graal is so completely naturalized by ideology that even in contemporary critical commentary it passes unmentioned. It is assumed that Perceval is indeed guilty of something, that he must atone for his sins, that his service to humanity is voluntary, that his quest is spiritual. The knights he defeats in battle are less pretentious in their evaluations of Perceval: when they describe him it is almost invariably as the best knight in the world – one of them, only better. Only exceptionally do his adversaries recognize that his greatness derives from some previously ordained ontological status as savior. There is, in fact, a good deal of slippage within the romances between Perceval’s status as warrior and mystic, as if physical strength were already a sign of a semi-divine status; and this slippage is symptomatic of a broader inability or refusal to distinguish between the Christian and the chivalric. The authors of these tales want us to believe that Perceval’s chivalric greatness is an effect of his status as sacred knight but they never really explain the necessary connection between his amazing physical prowess and his relation with God.
Perceval is a curious choice for savior, not least because he seems to have very little personal relation with his God. Most, if not all, communication between them is indirect. It is up to those around him to keep him informed as to how he has displeased this God. The purported signals from beyond which tell him how to proceed with his quest could just as easily have their source in the demonic or fairy world. When his amazing prowess is discussed, it is generally attributed to his good genes and knightly training; God’s role or investment in the distribution of talent and character is never clearly delineated. Thus the romances slip continually from the register of the sacred into the more mundane register of epic warrior exploits. In Gerbert de Montreuil’s Continuation, for example, when the knight Faradien has been defeated, one might expect that he would realize that the force against which he has fought is somehow more than human, that his unexpected defeat can only be a sign of divine favor for his rival or of his own moral failing. We wait for some appropriately moral proclamation such as “I will never do wrongagain”; “I am converted”; “I will fight for the right”; “I was wrong.” Instead, he remains firmly in the chivalric register, proclaiming only that Perceval surpasses all other knights of the Round Table in prowess. Nor does Perceval impose upon his adversaries immediate confession, a visit to the church, or a good deed, as one might expect, given the overall argument of the later romances. Instead, he sends them on to King Arthur for what contemporary prison officials call rehabilitation, so that they might better serve the King’s cause.
None of this is surprising unless we persist in seeing the Conte du graal and the subsequent romances as sacred allegory. It is not, at least at this early stage in its development, and Perceval is more comprehensible as a victim of the cultural forces for whom he believes he is working than as their sacred spokesman. Rene´ Girard has written that a sacrificial myth is simply the version of truth told by the victor: Oedipus is guilty because we are told he is guilty and we believe what we are told against all our better instincts. Can sin be the cause of natural disasters and are sinners who are unaware of their transgression still held to be guilty?10 Can the blame for a drought or the collapse of social order really be attributed to one individual, as they are in the case of Perceval? The more one reads the Conte du graal, the more it looks like a classic sacrificial myth: economic collapse is followed by social disorder and a plague of violence; one man alone, a virtual orphan, is blamed for the disasters and ordered to redeem the collective through his sacrifice. His task is impossible and he will fail; but once murdered or banished, he will return as a sacred figure.11 The Grail romances, at least in a selective reading, offer a truncated version of that scenario.
In Chre´tien’s originary tale, we meet a young man who is offered actualization of the self, chivalric renown, riches, glory, eternal salvation, and a family reunion, i.e. everything that he thinks he desires, in return for sacrificing his time and immediate pleasures to a higher goal that he clearly does not understand. That goal is to find again the Fisher King and ask him to explain the apparitions of grail and lance once witnessed in his castle. If he can accomplish that one goal then all of these benefits will be his. He learns only as he travels through the gaste terre, however, that all that had once been promised him as the expected recompense of an exemplary knight is, in fact, dependent on his curing the Fisher King of his mysterious thigh wound, a clear metaphor for sin and sexualdysfunction. When Perceval’s will or talents falter, and he appears for however brief a time to be unable to perform the task for which he has been drafted, a number of different arguments are deployed by both his Arthurian and Grail mentors to encourage, or rather, coerce him to persist. These include the suggestion: (1) that he has been chosen for his task in fulfillment of a prophecy; (2) that it is some defect within himself that, despite his mystical calling, prevents him from reaching his true potential; and (3) that the path outlined by his elders will solve the mystery of his origins and lead to familial reconciliation and world peace.
Perceval, like Plato’s pharmakon and Girard’s scapegoat, is thus cred- ited with being both the source of social malfunction (it is revealed by his mysterious cousin that he is of the Fisher King’s family), implicated in their cycles of violence/vengeance (his brothers and father have already perished), and guilty by association of their crimes. Moreover, he is the potential savior of collective unity (as the one whose death/access to the mysteries could reinstate peace).12 Despite the contention that the Grail can deliver brotherhood, an active economy, sexual potency, and cultural identity, the object itself is left shrouded in mystery.13 Only those close to it, or to the family to whom it is linked, seem to know what it means. In their case, it is therefore not an answer they seek but a question. They demand simply that someone else be forced to learn and take responsibility for what they already know and to signify that will- ingness, however unwitting, verbally. Thus, the grail is clearly an object of fantasy; it functions like the objet a in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory or the McGuffin in Alfred Hitchcock’s films. It is an imaginary object which determines meaning through its presence or absence, deferral and displacement. It has no power in and of itself and its ultimate signifi- cance is, and can only ever be, veiled. It “means” only as a function of its relation with those who attribute value to it; it is their gaze which empowers it. They, in turn, acquire power and meaning through their positioning with regard to it: to being, or claiming to be, positioned within its gaze. The knights of the Round Table are intensely mim
etic performers: they identify with one another, compete with and desire each other’s desires, through the intermediary of the object at the center of their collective gaze. The object gains in significance as it becomes the mirror or screen onto which desires are projected and gazes meet.So Perceval sets out on a quest for something whose value is deter- mined by the desires of the people around him: people who claim once to have had it, but lost it. It is a quest whose objective and path are predetermined for him by those who always know more and better than he does, and who reveal their secrets, when at all, in the smallest of doses and in coded language.14 The importance of secrets cannot be over-emphasized in this romance. Perceval’s ignorance of the most basic information about his family identity and the culture around him are explained away with reference to his age (adolescent), ethnicity (Welsh), and seclusion in the forest, and it is this proliferation of secrets, including the identity of the grail, which motivates the entire quest. The Waste Land through which Perceval travels could thus be compared to the panopticon discussed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish. The young knight is tracked and watched; information is dispensed only insofar as its dissemination enhances the control of those who observe. The text is therefore studded with double-binds, aporias: for example, Perceval’s quest has as its purported final goal the return to peace and prosperity, yet it is only through incessant fighting that such a goal can be reached.15 Foucault’s description of one of the key moments in the evolution of political subjection could be read as an allusion to the institution of chivalry, positioned as a hinge between two models of power:
If the economic take-off of the West began with the techniques that made possible the accumulation of capital, it might perhaps be said that the methods for administering the accumulation of men made possible a political take-off in relation to the traditional, ritual, costly, violent forms of power, which soon fell into disuse and were super- seded by a subtle, calculated technology of subjection.16
The particular discipline that Foucault claims replaced these traditional, ritualized forms of violence “fixes . . . arrests or regulates movements; it clears up confusion; it dissipates compact groupings of individuals wandering about the country in unpredictable ways.. .”17 His explana- tion for the spread of such disciplines involves the gradual move from enclosed institutions on the confines of society (religious institutions, military groups) to the application to the larger community of the tech- niques of discipline developed in those institutions. Thus, the randomand senseless violence of medieval knighthood would be transformed in the Conte du graal into a chivalric quest, an organized venture that borrows from spiritual and military discourse without entirely endors- ing either. Chivalric knighthood might itself be seen as a manifestation of a new disciplinary regime:
One also sees the spread of disciplinary procedures, not in the form of enclosed institutions, but as centers of observation disseminated throughout the society. Religious groups and charity organizations had long played this role of “disciplining” the population. . . . In England, it was private religious groups that carried out, for a long time, the functions of social discipline; in France, although a part of this role remained in the hands of parish guilds or charity associations, another – and no doubt the most important part – was very soon taken over by the police apparatus.18
These disciplines have as one of their primary functions to create what Foucault called “useful individuals.”19 While these developments might normally be associated with the later Middle Ages, Foucault is clearly implicating an earlier period, the twelfth century, in which the Church was moving toward the internalization of monitoring techniques and increased ecclesiastical control over the private and domestic spheres.20
This notion of knighthood itself as a sort of proto-police force is, however, problematized in the Graal: the disciplining knight is himself disciplined by the task, in keeping with Foucault’s notion of power. Perceval moves through the blanche lande and the forests of the gaste terre as if tracked at each turn by a superior force. As he travels, almost everyone he meets knows of him. They are aware of his quest and spare little time in letting him know that he has failed.21 In a sort of tangled hierarchy, that failure is not only the result of his quest, it is the cause of it. It is at the very heart of his ambiguous sin. He is thus called upon both to re-establish his reputation as best knight and to expiate his (original) sin, as if the two were inevitably linked. And all the while, he is watched and his wanderings are reported.
Foucault called the Panopticon a machine:
for dissociating the “see / being seen” dyad: in the peripheric ring one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower one sees everything without ever being seen. . . . He who is subjected to a fieldof visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the con- straints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own submission.22
This move to assumption of responsibility for one’s own subjection sounds like blaming the victim, yet it describes quite accurately the pro- cess by which Perceval is transformed from a young naif who checks his every action against his mother’s commandments to a more “mature” individual who has replaced the mother by an Other: an internalized sense of culpability that directs his quest.23 What his sin might be is never quite clear and gives rise, once again, to considerable slippage. Ini- tially we are told that it consists of having left his mother alone to suffer at his departure, and of not having returned to help her when he saw her faint from grief. That sin is then compounded by his forgetting to perform religious duties (confession, etc.) and, in later versions, of hav- ing engaged in sexual relations. In other words, the initiatory milestones celebrated in many cultures as the determining steps toward developing an individual, masculine identity (separation from the mother, ritu- alized sexual relations, adherence to new non-familial codes of com- portment) are colored in such a way that all men are, like Perceval, “sinners” and therefore unable to complete the much-vaunted quest for the grail. Instead of acknowledging this impossibility, this double- bind, the disciplinarians in the tower – the elders, clans, the imagined gaze of the Other, as you will – exploit this paradox to enhance the appeal of the call to action. Men are urged to pit themselves against each other in a never-ending quest to be recognized as the finest knight of the land; the best is then identified and redeemed through rituals in which all are called and only one is chosen. It is significant that as the romances move away from Chre´tien’s material into new interpreta- tions of the Grail, the question of Perceval’s sin recedes in importance. Whereas in Chre´tien it is up to Perceval to cure the Fisher King’s (i.e., his uncle’s) thigh/genital wound and thus restore the land, in the Queste del saint graal (1225–30) the association between the wounded King and the barren land is never mentioned. The quest has become entirely a matter of individual rather than familial redemption. And in Perlesvaus (first quarter of the thirteenth century), the barren land and maimedKing are the direct result of Perceval’s failure, not a condition into which he was born or for which he could bear guilt only as part of a familial trace.24
At times, the appeals to pursue the quest merge with the call to prove oneself in tournaments, contests of chivalric excellence, thereby suggest- ing that these are two concomitant paths, both leading to salvation. In the Second Continuation, for example, Perceval follows the advice of a mysteriously beautiful young woman on a white mule to head for the Mont Dolerous. There, she tells him, he will find a pillar built by Merlin for Utherpendragon after the birth of Arthur, the entire function of which is to determine the finest knight in the land. Later, Perceval is again told that to make it to the castle of the Fisher King he must prove himself the greatest knight alive by participating in a tournament at the Chastel Orguellos (l. 26194). Why is the connection between elite mas- culinity and spiritual excellence so closely knit that one strand cann
ot be separated from the other? At what point would absolute mastery of war and combat have become the essential attribute of the one man holy enough to learn the secrets of the grail? How many hermits, under such conditions, could ever hope to complete this pseudo-spiritual quest? As in a judicial duel, it is understood that only knights favored by God will succeed, but it is never clear to the reader that the winner is winning because of that added divine boost rather than through innate physi- cal prowess. If strength and training are prerequisites to induction into sacred knighthood, then all but a few are excluded. Yet all knights are encouraged to enter the battle to make their name, and many will die for no higher aim than to be admitted to this elite class. Simon Gaunt sees this competitive spirit as particularly characteristic of romance as opposed to the corps d’esprit of the epic:
the eroticism of romance sets potential heroes against each other rather than binding them as companions or implacable enemies as epic does. If romance charts the regulation of heterosexual desire, desire is nevertheless essential to its structures since without it the comradeship of the battlefield might well prevail once again.25
Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature Page 12