Aspects of Jewish Culture in the Middle Ages

WHY IS THE GRAIL KNIGHT JEWISH? A PASSOVER MEDITATI0N

WHY 1S THE GRA1L KN1GHT JEW1SH? A PASSOVER MED1TAT10N Leslie A. Fiedler Of all the legends, the communal dreams which have possessed the imagination of the West, that of the Grail seems the most tantalizing and evasive. It not merely remains-after eight hundred years of writing, rewriting , emendation, and commentary-contradictory, inchoate, and incomplete; but it slips maddeningly through the fingers of all who strive to possess it. It belongs finally to no one and to everyone: the critic and scholar, the prophet, the priest and the politician as well as the poet, the sculptor, and the illustrator of children's books. Most of all, however, it belongs to the children who read such books or listen to them being read aloud -or merely look at the pictures-and have blessedly never heard of Chretien de Troyes or Wolfram or the Pseudo-Wachier or Malory.l It is therefore in the voice of what survives in me of the child that 1 prefer to speak of the Grail: a child moved by wonder in the presence of a dream presumably first dreamed by others, but so like dreams he has already dreamed himself that he sometimes believed he had invented it; though, in fact, its wonder contained, as I52 I Why is the Grail Knight ]ewish? he somehow sensed from the start, a hint of terror, a threat. At any rate, 1 feel committed to an attempt to redream that Passover dream as if it were my own; or to put it somewhat less metaphorically, to try to relocate the myth which exists before, after, outside all of the Christian texts which pretend to embody it, by demonstrating the sense in which it is a ]ewish myth. Or perhaps 1mean rather a myth about ]ews: a reflection of the plight of my own people at a particular historical moment-recorded first by one who may have been a ]ew converted to Christianity, and then revised by a score of gentiles, some more, some less aware of what in mythological terms they were doing. Think of Wolfram , for instance, who traced the ultimate origins of the myth to something the ]ew Phlegetanis had read in the stars. But how to locate the myth of the Grail is the question , since like all myths, it exists outside of any particular combination of words-exists first of all as an ever-expanding and changing set of magical names: Gawain and Perceval, Galahad and Bors, ]oseph and Pelles and Bron. But also it preexists as a set of archetypal misadventures: the unasked question of the sclJlemiehl son, the mysterious wound of the invisible father, the failed first quest, and the inconclusive second chance. Ultimately, however, and primordially as well, the legend consists of a cluster of wordless images and ikons, called by names no one quite understands, like "Grail" itself. At first even the number of the aboriginal ikons was unsure; though they focused finally to four clearly defined symbols-Cup and Lance, Sword and Dish-which in turn became pips on playing cards-diamonds and clubs, hearts and spades-as the dream which became 153 I Leslie A. Fiedler literature (though it aspired first perhaps to the statu5, of scripture) ended as an amusement, a parlor game. "But what does it all mean?" we are driven to ask, having learned from the discomfiture of the schlemiehl Knight not to keep silent about such matters. Whom does the Grail serve? For a long time we have teased ourselves with the notion that if only we could see it all-the total pattern, the whole gestalt, the completed tale with a proper beginning and end-we would know. But we possess only fragments, scraps, "a heap of testimony," which is in Hebrew Galaad, the final name of the many-named Grail Knight. And at the beginning of it all there is the mysterious and contradictory poem of Chretien de Troyes, the text of which hastens to assure us that it is not a beginning, that before it there was already a tradition written down in books, ancl which breaks off rather than concludes, presumably at the death of its author. No wonder that the readers of Chretien's fragmentary poem have most often felt it more challenging than satisfactory, an invitation to finish the tale and thus answer the questions it posed and left unanswered; or perhaps it would be better to...