Chrétien Continued: A Study of the Conte du Graal and its Verse Continuations (review)

In her examination of the four verse continuations of the Conte du Graal, the first such study to appear in book length, Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner seeks to illuminate what she calls the 'poetics of continuation' (2) that underpins both this cycle and much medieval literature. The book considers patterns and problems inscribed in Chrétien's unfinished work as they are taken up again and developed by his successors. The discussion focuses on three areas of continuity between these texts: love, violence, and religion. The volume opens with an introduction laying out the aims, scope, and methods of the study, and follows with five chapters addressing, in order, the nature of authorship, relationships within couples, relationships between mothers and sons, violence in Arthurian society, and the narrative structure of the cycle. Concluding the discussion is a summary of the results of the study, two appendices presenting the segments of the four continuations and an ordering of the books of the Bible, and, finally, a bibliography and an index.

Bruckner draws attention to the miscellaneous character of the continuations, even as the medieval manuscript tradition—by combining them and the Conte (in various ways) together—grants these diverse and often discordant voices a certain unity. In particular, the continuations diverge in the roles they assign to the Conte's two protagonists, the importance they accord the original themes, and the resolution they provide (or fail to provide) to the problems of the master text. In addition, the author considers the multiple tensions and puzzles underlying these works, their deferral of ending, narrative excesses, and paradoxical structure. She argues that these features of the continuations reflect the Conte's own suspension of closure and its 'decentered' (passim) character.

In highlighting the diversity of the continuations and their relative narrative instability, Chrétien Continued offers a valuable insight into the medieval reception of the Conte du Graal. From this perspective, the corpus suggests that Chrétien's work, yielding multiple and often conflicting readings, was already enigmatic for his contemporaries. The continuations can shed light on the interpretative challenge that the Conte has posed, as the author argues, from its very appearance. But the concept of 'decentered textuality' used to account for the opacity of Chrétien's work and its rich reception history seems ultimately unsatisfying. In developing this key concept of her book, Bruckner points to the 'series of enigmas, contradictions, and incongruities that confront [in the Conte and in the continuations] the paradoxes of human experience without resolving them' (17). Through this emphasis, the discussion addresses a pervasive aspect of the romances. Indeed, as the successive chapters show, conflicting values underlie each of the themes examined. Yet it is not clear that the romances' engagement with oppositions, contradictions, and competing ideologies produces a poetics that can justifiably be described as decentered, since what is meant here seems to be their inherent resistance to resolution.

Chapter 3, which discusses the figures of mothers and sons in the Conte and the First Continuation, provides an example. As the chapter helpfully explains, motherhood and sexuality, nature and nurture, and mutual protection and destruction between mothers and sons are connected in unexpected and often uneasy ways in these romances. But the step the author takes here from highlighting connections in the cycle between such often contrasted notions to arguing that they create a text where we have only an 'illusion of moving forward toward meaning,' where 'we find ourselves caught in the circular paths of a labyrinth,' and where 'the play of semblances seems to multiply beyond our control' (119), seems unjustified.

Another difficulty arising from the book's engaging with the concept of decentered textuality is that it does not dictate a clear focus for the discussion. Given the vast body of material considered (the continuations alone approach 75,000 verses), the study is necessarily selective. Serving as a main...