Leeds 2010
Because I didn’t have enough on my plate this Spring and Summer with potential paleography, the impending PhD exam, and a prospectus defense, I decided to return to the question of those curious angels in Chretien de Troyes’ La Conte du Graal. For other monstrous MEARCSTAPA offerings for Leeds 2010, visit the MEARCSTAPA blog. (Yes, we have t-shirts.)
“The Angels Men Complain Of”: Monstrous Masculinity in La Conte du Graal
While traveling through a forest one day, Chretien de Troyes’ young hero, Perceval, encounters a group of knights for the first time, and is nearly overwhelmed by the sight of their shining, armored bodies. He recounts the experience to his horrified mother, who exclaims, “Tu as veu, si com je croi, / Les enges don la gent se plaignent, / Qui ocient quan qu’il ataignent” [You have seen, I believe, the angels men complain of, who kill whatever they come upon].
In examining Chretien de Troyes’ elusive and previously unexplored reference to “the angels men complain of,” this paper will argue that the romance diverges from the dominant chivalric narrative to imagine a masculinity susceptible to the ravages of affect. Critics such as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Leo Braudy have suggested that the chivalric body in medieval romance is built from the outside in; in this articulation, the armor really does make the man. When Perceval sets out on his journey towards knighthood, it is this construction which drives him. Spurred on by a vision of the shining and beautiful knights he at first takes to be angels and filled with a burning desire to possess the armor and other accoutrements of knighthood, Perceval conceives of knightly identity as entirely composed of surfaces. He pursues a construction of chivalric masculinity in which the knight’s body is seamless, static, immune to affect, and impenetrable. But this ideal melding of body and armor, of identity and accoutrement, removes the knight from the category of what is recognizably human. The courtly violence of death-dealing knights renders them as beautiful, cold, and deadly as “the angels men complain of, who kill whatever they come upon.” In figuring the angel-knight as physically and morally monstrous, La Conte du Graal suggests a new masculine subject position emerging from the paradoxes of twelfth-century chivalric romance, and creates a heroic trajectory which dismantles the traditional hero/monster binary.
Staffordshire Hoard
Photos of the Staffordshire hoard on flickr, courtesy of the Portable Antiquities Scheme.
reading notes – The Once and Future King
In lieu of real content, I have reading notes. In addition to reading for the PhD exam right now, I’m also doing a directed reading on medievalism in literature. And taking Latin. So this is kind of representative of where my head is these days. (See how I sneakily sneak in some Old English like a sneaky person?)
Timor mortis conturbat me
As part of the Wart’s education, he is sent to the mews to spend the night with the hawks. The solemn formality, and indeed the real danger, of his ritual ordeal with these birds is clearly meant to contrast with the silliness of the human knights in White’s story. Where Pellinore and Grummore fight like schoolboys during their joust – Pellinore mumbling “non” under his breath while Grummore calls him a cad (65) – the birds of prey converse a mid a “silver silence” with an air of restrained dignity (75). Where Kay’s knightly vigil will result in not much more than taking a bath, having his spurs popped into the soup, and receiving a lecture on ideals from Grummore and Pellinore (183), the ordeal in the mews is overseen by hawks and falcons as “motionless” as a “statue of a knight in armor” (74), in a mews described with the solemnity of a chapel, amidst a congregation of birds described as the “rapt nobility of the air” keeping “their knight’s vigil with knightly patience” (74). However, through White’s treatment of their nocturnal rituals, their seemingly dignified traditions only serve to further emphasize the novel’s focus on the problems of Fort Mayne.
The hawks’ ordeal song evokes a sense of ancient traditions of hereditary nobility and knighthood. The peregrine refers to the ordeal song as the “Ancient but not Modern No. 23,” or the “Ordeal Hymn” (78), and indeed even its vocabu lary conjures an air of ancient formality. [1] Its refrain is taken from the solemn tradition of the medieval meditation on the inevitability of death. Timor mortis conturbat me [Fear of death troubles me] appears in several medieval lyrics, such as this anonymous 15th century lyric in which a weeping bird explains her tears: “I am a musket both fair and gent; / For dread of death I am all shent: Timor mortis conturbat me” (Morley 231). The Latin line is taken from the office of Matins, traditionally recited at midnight: “Peccantem me quotidie, et non me poenitentem, timor mortis conturbat me: Quia in inferno nulla est redemptio, miserere mei Deus, et salva me” [The fear of death doth trouble me, sinning daily, and not repenting: for that in hell there is no redemption, have mercy upon me O God, and save me] (Gunhouse). But to the birds, timor mortis conturbat me is a “lie” which is “proffered” to “beasts of chase” (79): the birds of prey sing a different hymn, in which they are excited by their prey’s fear of death, which is a fear of the predator: “Timor mortis exultat me” (79). By virtue of their talons, their strength, and their noble bloodlines, the hawks turn a meditation of humility and memento mori into a service of slaughter. Whether White meant to contrast this hymn with the meditative context of the Book of Hours, or perhaps Anglican hymn No. 23 (“Through the day Thy love hath spared us, / Now we lay us down to rest”), or even Psalm 23 (“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil”), the hawks’ hymn of dignified formality and hereditary knighthood contains another critique of Fort Mayne, against which the Wart will continuously struggle as he grows into kingship.
[1] See, for instance, line 2, “dree,” derived from the OE dreogan, to suffer, and the Gothic driugan, to do military service; line 6, “bruckle,” from the OE brucol, fragile; and line 6, “slee,” from the ON slægr, able to strike; sly, cunning, skilful (OED).
Works Cited
Gunhouse, Glenn, ed. “Matins, Third Nocturne.” Hypertext Book of Hours. The Primer, or Office of the Blessed Virgin Marie, in Latin and English. Antwerp: Arnold Conings, 1599. Available http://www.medievalist.net/hourstxt/deadmatd.htm
Kelly, Thomas. “Through the Day Thy Love hath Spared Us.” The Lutheran Hymnal.
St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1941. No. 553.
“Matins.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Available http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10050a.htm
Morley, Henry and William Hall Griffin. English Writers VI: From Chaucer to Caxton. London: Cassell and Company, 1890.
Oxford English Dictionary. Available www.oed.com
Singleton, Robert and Edwin George Monk. “Through the Day Thy Love Hath Spared Us.” The Anglican Hymn Book. London: James Parker and Co., 1871. No. 23.
White, T.H. The Once and Future King. New York: Ace Books, 1996.
The bad news: my Anglo Saxon directed reading got called off.
The good news: I got the go-ahead on teaching “monster lit” next semester. Given the state of the market and economy, this may very well be the only time I ever get to teach Beowulf, so I’m going to make the most of it.
My Latin teacher is scary.
That is all.
