Malory's Morte Darthur: Remaking Arthurian Tradition (review)

The Passion of the Old and the New: Saga Studies on the Fatal Shore 193 Parergon 20.1 (2003) Reviews Batt, Catherine, Malory’s Morte Darthur: Remaking Arthurian Tradition (The New Middle Ages), New York/Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2002; cloth; pp. xxiii, 264; RRP US$49.95; ISBN 0312229984 This study offers a welcome resolution to what is a continuing challenge in literary analysis of the Morte Darthur, namely the need to take into account the book’s relationship to its immediate sources and to foregoing Arthurian tradition. Catherine Batt selects for discussion aspects of five narrative blocks suggested by the arrangement of the Winchester manuscript of Malory: the Merlin narratives (Book 1); The Tale of Arthur and Lucius, The Tale of Launcelot and The Tale of Gareth; The Book of Sir Tristram; The Tale of the Sankgreal; and Launcelot and Guenevere and the Death of Arthur (Books 7 and 8). Her deliberations are illuminated throughout by an expert knowledge of the material on which Malory drew. The commendably broad textual coverage supports a multi-faceted argument, the fundamentals of which it may be helpful to summarise here. Batt proposes that a metaliterary dimension of the Morte Darthur ‘conflates the roles of reader, writer and text, and this highlights the possibility of choice and responsibility at the formal level of narrative direction’ (p. xvii). This degree of textual independence and self-consciousness reflects English transmissions of Arthurian legend, in contrast with French prose Arthurian cyclic romance, where ‘access to a moral framework and a more straightforward pattern of narrative causation ... are corollaries of its stress on self-validating written authority’ (p. xvii). However, the collaborative construction of narrative by writer and readers of the Morte involves the author in an anxiety, implicit yet detectable in the writing, over the gap that is exposed between the imagined Arthurian world, which is ideologically simple, and its difficult textual realisation. Additionally, Malory’s focus on the vulnerable (especially male) human body, exemplified by the body of Launcelot, uncovers the complexities of the chivalric hero as an agent in the formation of culture. Narrative progress in the Morte, which depends on violence, therefore opens the idea of heroism and the associated basic principles of social order to ‘a worrying dissolution and reformulation’ within the text (p. xix). The distance perceived by Batt between the apparently straightforward ideology of Arthur’s world and its textual expression is demonstrated initially 194 Reviews Parergon 20.1 (2003) by an original exposition of Malory’s famous reverdie in praise of stable and disciplined love. Batt argues that the nostalgia expressed in this passage for Arthurian ideals of the past is contradicted by narrative events already known to readers who have progressed this far in the Morte. Thus they will recognise that the past offers no more assurance of comfort than a present which is stripped, according to Malory, of patience, faithfulness, honour and wisdom. The terms of the reverdie have the further effect of revealing to readers the complexity of their relation to the text, while at the same time it implicates them morally and culturally in the issues raised. These ideas are skilfully developed and applied in Batt’s analyses in later chapters. This shapes Remaking Arthurian Tradition as a work of formidable scholarship. Batt moves confidently among medieval productions in both French and English, and demonstrates an impressive command of existing critical interpretations of Malory and his Arthurian predecessors. Her writing also brings into play an extensive range of modern theories. While the sophisticated abstraction of the argument is daunting at times, readers who persist are likely to learn from the display of applied critical methodology, lucidly expressed. The bibliography usefully lists primary texts and Arthurian critical resources, while detailed endnotes and an index oriented to proper names offer further generous assistance. In view of this level of accomplishment, I am reluctant to mention the few minor reservations that occurred to me when reading. These can however be summed up as a feeling that the terms of the Morte Darthur are sometimes bustled into a present-day idiom without sufficient acknowledgment that a process is involved. For example, the word ‘violence’ is applied unceremoniously from the Preface...