The Medieval Presence in Modernist Literature: The Quest to Fail by Jonathan Ullyot (review)

In Culture and Society (1958), Raymond Williams influentially observed that criticism of nineteenth-century political reform and the Industrial Revolution was often voiced in the "accents of an older England" (3). Thinkers as varied as Mill, Carlyle, and Arnold looked back to the Middle Ages in their efforts to imagine alternative futures. Following Williams, numerous critics and historians have been fascinated by Victorian medievalism in the visual arts, literature, and social thought. In particular, commentators such as Mark Girouard (1981), Beverly Taylor and Elisabeth Brewer (1983) and Debra N. Mancoff (1990) explored an "Arthurian revival" in literature and art. The most recent and ambitious of these works is Joanne Parker and Corinna Wagner's monumental collection, The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism (2020), which rejects "the traditional view of medievalism as characterized by distinct battle lines" (7) and in doing so both renews and deepens Raymond Williams's insistence on seeing the critique of modernity in its full political and aesthetic range.

Discussion of modernist medievalism has been slower to emerge, but Simone Celine Marshall and Carole M. Cusack's recent collection, The Medieval Presence in the Modernist Aesthetic (2017), which contains chapters on, among others, Yeats, Proust and Ionesco, highlights the productiveness of the "philosophical paradox" that there is, as Chris Ackerley observes in the Foreword to this essay collection, "a medieval sensitivity in the aesthetical awareness of so many Modernist writers" (vii). That Henry James has been largely absent both from studies of Victorian and modernist medievalism is in itself a striking fact. Jonathan Ullyot's book, which starts with a chapter on The Golden Bowl, therefore provides a useful opportunity to redress the balance and to situate James within a tradition many of whose leading lights (Tennyson, Arnold, Ruskin, Morris, and Burne-Jones, for example) he knew personally. [End Page E-12]

The central claim of Ullyot's study is captured in its title: the medieval Grail narrative remains present in modernist literature but has become a "quest to fail." Ullyot shows that Kafka, Céline, and Beckett were familiar with medieval Grail literature and demonstrates the presence of romance motifs in a range of their writings. His point is not simply that modernist writers represent the quest as an impossibility, however: although the Grail is not "achieved" in these works, the reimagining of the medieval evokes "pleasure in never arriving at a goal" (163). Ullyot contributed a paper on Pound to a 2014 conference that was subsequently published as a chapter in Marshall and Cusack's collection. Marshall and Cusack's subtitle—"unattended moments"—neatly captures the signature experience of these modernist quests, which in Ullyot's view conclude with "a moment of stopping, a sudden shift or reversal" (165).

Ullyot persuasively traces both Kafka's and Beckett's indebtedness to Chrétien de Troyes's Perceval and to parallel narratives in the German Perlesvaus and the Welsh Mabinogion. Indeed, this knight—so frequently baffled and disorientated, so prone in his errancy to err—begins to seem like a modernist figure avant la lettre. Yet the chapters on these twentieth century writers are preceded by two others (the first on James, the second on Jessie L. Weston and T. S. Eliot), which establish a platform for what follows. In his second chapter, Ullyot presents a comprehensive analysis of Eliot's "structural and methodological" indebtedness to Weston (48). Perceval—refracted through Wagner's Parsifal (1857)—is again important, and Ullyot has much to say about Weston's role in leading the Eliot of The Waste Land (1922) to imagine a movement through literary fragments to their originating forms: from ritual, in other words, to ritual.

It is Ullyot's first chapter, however—"The Golden Bowl and the Holy Grail"—that is likely to be of most interest to readers of the Henry James Review. Unfortunately, however, it is here that the argument and approach seem less convincing. Ullyot reminds us of Carl Van Doren's 1928 assertion that...