Malory's Grail Quest. Invention and Adaptation in Medieval Prose Romance (review)

216 operation or function of Language, but it is none the less Language." The debate on this issue can still not be thought of as concluded, though perhaps there are grounds for at least a mild optimism. It remains nevertheless the case that recently, indeed this year, in the Australian National University, it was argued that language studies might be divided off from literary studies and taught separately in a language centre. Fortunately, although academics are as capable as the next person of getting things grotesquely wrong, this piece of intellectual nonsense did not contrive to make much progress. At the beginning of the valedictory address Tolkien made a reference to his "ineffectiveness as a lecturer" as a reason for his not ever having delivered an inaugural Address. That piece of self-criticism is too modest and deprecatory, but those who attended his lectures will understand the point. Many years ago a fellow-undergraduate described Tolkien's method of delivery, not unkindly but also not inaccurately, as resembling a performance by Danny Kaye. But there was no doubting the quality of the content of his lectures, and in seminars the inadequacies of the formal style of lecture disappeared. This book is a standing monument to the level of Tolkien's scholarship. And the style of the exposition and the command of language reveal without a doubt how considerable his mastery of the subject was. L.J. Downer Medieval Studies Australian National University Sandra Ness Ihle, Malory's Grail Quest. Invention and Adaptation in Medieval Prose Romance. Madison, Wise, Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1983. A turning-point in U.S. Malory studies occurred in the mid-seventies with the publication of Mark Lambert and Larry Benson's books.* Instead of continuing to discuss unity in the inappropriate terms of the Romantic organic metaphor and iterating that the unifying theme of Le Morte Darthur is the rise and fall of a corrupt, chivalric order, caused by the adultery of Lancelot and Guenivere, they turned to other questions—Lambert to style Benson to a consideration of the Aforte as a fifteenth-century romance—and so ended the critical impasse. An orthodoxy collapsed. In Sandra Ness Ihle's Malory's Grail Quest, it is as if that U.S orthodoxy had never existed; the author makes only passing reference to earlier Malory studies by her compatriots, and as far as the quest of the Holy Grail is concerned, this silence is for the most part deserved. As others have * Lambert, Style and Vision in 'Le Morte Darthur1 (Yale U P Benson, Malory's 'Morte Darthur1 (Harvard U.P., 1976) 217 done before her, Ihle relates Malory's Quest to its early thirteenth-century source, La Queste del Saint Graal, a branch of the Lancelot-Graal, or Vulgate, Cycle. Her concern is with structure and meaning, and her study has the strength that she is aware of the necessity of understanding that singular romance, the Queste, in its own terms before one can begin to see what Malory did to it. It would be gratifying to be able to say that, having posed many of the right questions, Ihle had offered convincing answers, but one cannot. Many reservations need to be entered. The aim of the first chapter of Malory's Grail Quest is to establish a framework within which the structural principles governing the composition of the Queste can be understood and explored. Ihle seeks those principles in the architecture and rhetoric of the twelfth century. This, the weakest part of the book, promises much and delivers little. The structural analogy proposed, between High Gothic architecture (as exemplified in the great French cathedrals) and the Queste (and by, implication, it seems, the whole Lancelot-Graal Cycle), fails to compel assent. Using Frankl's determining characteristics of the Gothic (division into parts, diagonality, and free flow of forces), she claims that these features have analogues in rhetoric, which, as used in the Queste, are equally constitutive of its structure. Now, in Chapter V of The Rise of Romance, the late Eugene Vinaver (to w h o m the book is dedicated) also presented an art-historical analogy to illustrate the structure of the Lancelot-Graal...