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SUSANNA GREER FEIN Thomas Malory and the Pictorial Interlace of La Queste del Saint Graal Scholars of medieval thought have occasionally noted the various manifestations of entrelacement in the literature, the art, the religious writing, and the scholarly treatises of the eleventh through thirteenth centuries. The term entrelacement refers to an aesthetic of the times, a mode of perception that can appear in different creative spheres and can assume various forms. Eugene Vinaver points out the parallels between interlace ornament in manuscript art and interlace structure in the French prose romances, and he suggests a further relationship to the scholastic principle of manifestatio.1 G. Webb also notes the similarity between the habits of thought producing the detailed, highly unified theology of the eleventh-century Cistercianwriters and the elaborate compositions in the areas of art and literature; he comments that, 'One is conscious of magnificently uncluttered minds that rejoiced in fitting masses of detail into coordinated schemes.'2 The notion that entrelacement appears in the French prose romances has had an important effect on the study ofSirThomas Malory's writing. In comparing the narrative structure of Le Marte D'Arthur to Malory's French sources, Vinaver detected a major difference between the fifteenth-century English work and the Old French tales. Malory largely eliminated the complex structural interlace of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century romances by presenting the events in connected chronological sequence; from the vast narratives of interwoven events, 'Malory set himself the task ofunravelling the threads and placing each of them individually on the canvas.'3 One writerhas called this demonstration of altered form Vinaver's 'greatest contribution and triumph.'4 Indeed , the notion ofinterlace structure in the French romances has proved a valid and useful point from which to compare Malory's writing - his last two tales in particular- to its sources. One of Malory's tales, The Tale of the Sankgreal, does not, however, have a narrative structure substantially different from its source, La Queste del Saint Graal; because his source lacked complex interlace structure , Malory did not have to unravel the threads. Hence, Vinaver considered the Sankgreal little more than a translation and called it 'the least original' of Malory's works.5 Vinaver's view that Malory did not make major changes in the structure of the Queste is clearly right, but enUTQ , Volume XLVI, Number ),Spring 1977 216 SUSANNA GREER FEIN trelacement can appear in literature in forms other than structural. This paperwill attempt to showhowLa Queste del Saint Graal conveys much of its religious message through a pictorial interlace, and how Malory removed that pictorial interlace from his source. Although Ferdinand Lot was the first modem scholar to observe that . the French prose Lancelot follows the 'principe de 1'entrelacement,'6 Vinaver gave the word interlace currency as a term to describe the narrative structure of the French prose romances. Vinaver takes the term to relate to narrative lines woven throughout an entire cyclic prose work. A character may engage in one adventure and, in pursuing it, be sidetracked by another, orhe maymeet othercharacters whose adventures are related first; an elaboration of this process may continue for several hundred pages before the narrative resumes the first adventure. Thus, by following this principle, the prose Lancelot has a very complex structure, which involves many of Arthur's knights engaged in several different episodes, all taking place concurrently and frequently interrupting each other in the narrative. The narrative lines are carried forward out of sight to give a pleasing suspension to the whole design as the reader waits to see how the threads will be resumed . This sort of complex design is what Malory altered; by unravelling the interwoven narrative lines, he made each episode into a continuous uninterrupted thread. To illustrate Malcry 's method, Vinaver describes the narrative arrangement of bits of stories as a series ofletters with numbers for their chronological order; for example, a1 b1 a2 b2 xb2 y b2 z b2 mb2 n b2 p a3 a6 a4 b3 as depicts.the narrative sequence of the French Mort Artu, which Malory converted to a1 a2 a3 a4 as a6 b1 b2 b3 for his Book of Sir Lancelot and Queen...

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