Pour un tombeau de Merlin: Du barde celte à la période moderne (review)

An Antichrist manqué and the prophet of the Grail, Merlin is a powerful hybrid of the demonic and the divine. He is also a shapeshifter and the author of his own tale. As if these were not enough suggestive motifs for one fictional character, Merlin is also vanquished by the woman to whom he has taught all his art. In the thirteenth-century prose romances of the Vulgate Cycle and the post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin, Merlin is lured by the future Lady of the Lake into a prison from which he cannot escape, and thus becomes his tomb. Knights who pass the tomb can sometimes hear Merlin's lamentations. This is the central image of Yves Vadé's book, in which he shows that Merlin's tomb is not hermetically sealed: far from being a space of closure and silence, the literature which frames and preserves Merlin continues to summon, provoke and bewitch authors into the modern era. Vadé demonstrates admirable breadth in tackling this subject, never, however, forgetting that Merlin, like Proteus, to whom he is often compared, is 'insaisissable' (p. 63), and that the task of pinning him down is therefore bound to be fraught, if not futile. Merlin's mutability invites the reader to trace his forms through Celtic mists and medieval retelling; but once Vadé has dutifully done so in his second chapter, noting along the way Merlin's affinity with fish, birds, forest deities and wild men, he concludes that it is the play between these flickering identities which is essential to the figure of Merlin, rather than the identification of his mythical roots. In his third chapter, Vadé compares Merlin to Orpheus as a paradigm of poetic production, through early-modern to nineteenth-century poetry. Although this is a persuasive comparison, the argument that Merlin represents plurality and mortality in contrast to the harmony and self-assured identity of the orphic voice feels a little overstated. In his later chapters, Vadé traces what he reads as 'merlinesque' characteristics in surrealism (notably Apollinaire and Breton) and the work of Michaux. The figure of Merlin becomes more diffuse as these chapters progress: Apollinaire's Enchanteur pourrissant draws heavily on medieval sources in which Merlin features; Michaux, on the other hand, does not explicitly mention Merlin. Vadé nonetheless argues that his work is haunted by the shapeshifting sage, who becomes a figure in Michaux's work for the transmutation of the imagination and the inner life. This book is ambitious in scope, and undergoes a shift of its own half way through, from folkloric exploration to a more rigorous reading of modern texts. Vadé's name itself acquires an unfortunate mutation on the spine of his book, which gives its author's name as 'Yves Vaté'. This is by far the most egregious, but certainly not the sole error in this volume, which is otherwise a wide-ranging and intriguing contribution to scholarship on one of the most enchanting and fugitive literary figures in European literature and popular culture.