The Fall of Kings and Princes: Structure and Destruction in Arthurian Tragedy by M. Victoria Guerin (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER offers some insights, and often instructive insights, into the question of gender in medieval French literature. A lack of space (or time, ac­ knowledged in the introduction), produced perhaps by the pressure on scholars recently to publish at an artificially accelerated rhythm, has produced a simplification of arguments within each chapter, based on a reduced corpus of frequently well known material, and a structure for the study that relies on rather than investigates our received "map" of the corpus of Old French literature. PHILIP E. BENNETT University of Edinburgh M. VICTORIA GUERIN. The Fall of Kings and Princes: Structure and Destruction in Arthurian Tragedy. Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture Series. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 199 5. Pp.xi, 336.$39.50. The title of this book suggests a study of the de casibus tradition of tragedy in medieval Arthurian literature. But the book, an eclectic se­ ries of essays not always related to tragedy, is more idiosyncratic than that title leads us to expect. M. Victoria Guerin offers sometimes careful and sometimes fanciful readings of a series of medieval Arthurian texts. Accepting Chaucer's definition of tragedy in the Prologue to The Monk's Tale and in his Boece, Guerin finds it not incompatible with Aristotle: Many elements ofAristotelian tragedy are common in medieval literature: the concepts of reversal ...and recognition....Equally common are the means by which, according to Aristotle, this necessary recognition is to be achieved: signs and tokens, suddenly reawakened memories, logical inference, and reve­ lation through the intricacies of plot reunite lost lovers and family members in medieval romance as in classical drama.These reunions most often lead to a happy ending, but they frequently raise at least the specter of incest or kin­ slaying along the way, and in some cases these potential disasters are realized in what might legitimately be termed "tragedies" in the Aristotelian as well as the medieval sense.(pp.6-7) Guerin does not examine the central features of Aristotle's theory, but focuses on "the specter of incest or kin-slaying," which "adds an element of horror to the act and to the reader's reaction of pity and fear, bring250 REVIEWS ing the tale more closely in line with the Aristotelian paradigm for tragedy.Mordred is the demonic element in the Arthurian corpus, the ideal symbol for that forgotten or repressed action or, at times, aspect ofthe protagonist which arises unexpectedly to destroy and which is the essence of the tragic flaw" (pp.7-8).Thus Arthur's "tragic flaw" is, for Guerin, his act of incest, unintentional though it was. The opening chapter is an interesting and informed reading of the Vulgate Cycle from the perspective of the presence of Mordred, now in the Arthurian tradition the bastard and incestuous son of King Arthur. There are intriguing parallels drawn between Mordred and Lancelot, his "polar opposite" (p.51): both are raised in ignorance of their true fathers until they have proven themselves as knights; both have an ini­ tial virtue that fails; both covet Guenevere; and both betray the king and through this betrayal help to bring about the fall of Camelot.The irony, of course, is that "Lancelot has for many years been guilty in se­ cret ofthe crime to which Mordred aspires: betrayal ofArthur and adul­ tery with Guinevere" (p.66).Guerin thus sees Mordred as Lancelot, "re­ duced to the essence of his crime: betrayal of his lord and 'father"' (p.67).In the end Lancelot is "displaced by Mordred who embodies, by his birth and in the pattern ofhis treason, all the implications ofillicit love" (p.65).In this Mordred-centric reading, Mordred is, finally, "the necessary agent of Apocalypse" (p.65). Far less successful than Guerin's long opening chapter are the three subsequent and shorter chapters on Chretien's The Knight ofthe Cart, his Story ofthe Grail, and the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, selected because they "exemplify the veiled treatment ofArthur's neme­ sis ...and deal obliquely with the incest story" (p.17).Her careful reading ofthe Vulgate Cycle gives way here to fanciful speculations that find little support in the text and offer...