LLT 180 Lecture 12 Part 1

Today we're gonna talk about the part I'm not gonna have you read and I'm not gonna ask any questions on this. But we need to go through and talk about the part on Lancelot, the ill-made knight, as he refers to himself -- the Chevalier Mal Fet -- because it has an effect upon the outcome of the work. It's just kind of a long section and we don't get a lot out of it, I can just tell you, and I didn't want to spend such a significant part of the semester reading just White's book. I wanted to get on and read some other stuff. And so we're just gonna kind of go through this. And rather than having you write down everything -- I'm such a nice person -- I thought that if I gave you some basic notes so you can kind of scribble stuff that might be informative to you as we went along. And so if I get too tele-grammatic and kind of function in my own brain but not in reality, would somebody say, "Wait, you know, dumbling. You're not making any sense." This part is referred to as the ill-made knight. Lancelot refers to himself as that. And we really deal in this part -- these sections overlap. We pick up with the story of Lancelot from the time he's about 15 years old into his forties somewhere. So we get an overview of who Lancelot is. And we saw in our preceding material -- maybe it was even the very first chapter -- we talked about him being the son of King Ban, one of the two kings came to Arthur's aid when he became king at the end of the very first book. And he grows up in France in the Castle of Benwick. His initial name -- now, he's gonna have a son later with Elaine the pure, the super-pure -- she was boiled in water for five years -- and they're gonna call him Galahad. And we know by later tradition, Galahad is gonna be the one who finds the grail. Galahad was Lancelot's original name and his name changed when he became a knight. Lancelot always loved Arthur. Remember he was a kid at Arthur's court when they had the games afterwards and he did so well. And he's very much interested in Arthur's order of chivalry and this fight against might, and they give you the French word for it there which Lancelot says is also how the world functions in France. Lancelot calls himself, in French, Chevalier Mal Fet -- a nice trivia question. And unlike the pretty boy in the movie, Excaliber, Lancelot -- and this is not a tradition; this is White trying to say something super simplistically -- is Ugly with a big G. I think somewhere else I typed in here -- about halfway down I typed in about five G's and a couple of extra L's. The boy definitely was in a battle with axes and lost. I mean, he's really, really ugly. He's not romantic and not debonair. So, you know, we immediately ask, "Well, how come he and Guenever get together later?" Everybody in here has tutors. Of course, Merlyn was Arthur's, St. Toirdealbhach is the Orkney's faction, the four boys. And so we look to tutors as being symbolic of somehow how the product's gonna turn out. The old thing about the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree. And his tutor is gonna be Uncle Dap. And Uncle Dap, whose real name is Gwenbors, plays Merlyn's role, then, for Arthur. And he is a great armor. He is like -- supposed to be the best armor in all of continental Europe. And so what we expect for Lancelot, then, is to be the perfect knight more in a sense of prowess. In other words, he's a great swordsman, he's all these things, but he doesn't have any socialization. His socialization -- he has like half the education that Arthur has. He just has the athletic part of the education. Guenever -- by the time he's gonna show up in England, Guenever and Arthur have been married for quite some time and they have gotten a present from her father, King Leodegrance, of a table plus 100 knights. And so this round table that Leodegrance gives them is supposed to seat 150 knights. Big thing. Big thing. And he gave them, as part of the wedding present, 100 knights. And Arthur on his own, through knighting people, admitting them to the round table, has filled another 29. This kind of upsets Lancelot because he hoped to be one of the first ones. In other words, he thinks he's been honing himself to be the perfect knight, to be the perfect representative of chivalry. He is jealous of Gawaine, of the fact that Gawaine has become a knight of the round table, and he hears about Guenever. And kind of interestingly, Guenever here has black hair and blue eyes. And so I think if, you know, somebody in Hollywood was casting these movies generally, they'd probably pick out some blonde. But you notice in that material, and really in a lot of Germanic material, your heroines or your main characters do have brown hair and whatever color eyes. But here, Guenever has black hair and blue eyes. We refer once again to the Orkney faction, just trying to keep some of these terms familiar to you, which remember is Gawaine and his group. Lancelot -- and this gets back to original sin -- had this intrinsic feeling that not only was he ugly but that he was bad, and so that he had to do good because he was bad. And so he is going to endeavor at all junctures to do good as a very conscious effort on his part. He has lots of adventures and there's a lot of, you know, characters that turn up in here like Sir Kadagost, Sir Turkin, who represent two of the very evilest knights, kind of like Sir Bruce Sans PitiÈ but much, much worse. And so we have all these adventures where he's saving maidens, he's saving fellow knights. He saves Gawaine. He saves Gaheris. And so when we get to the last part of this book, Candle in the Wind, at one point Gawaine, I think, says in Candle in the Wind -- you know, when Agravaine and stuff is after Lancelot -- "How can you guys be after him? He saved all of us at some point." Well, it doesn't matter to Agravaine. It doesn't. But that refers to stuff that happens in this particular part. There's a civil war of ideologies, new versus old, and obviously the new is the Arthurian view of things but the old is still out there. And it's gonna take a certain period of time. We're going to have a time lapse in there. In other words, if we're taking Lancelot from the time he's 15 and bring him over, we have about 20 years. And so we're, you know, back to the old cyclical aspect. It's one of the things I always get a kick out of, when people always talk about the '60s, you know. "Well, that was true in the '60s." Well, having gone to high school in the '60s and started college at the end of the '60s, that's so strange for me to hear. Because the early '60s were much more like the '50s than what most people think of the '60s. When most people say the '60s culturally, what they're thinking of is really about the last two to three years of the '60s and the early '70s. You know, things in the earlier part of the '60s was much more of a forum culture. I grew up in Long Island, I think I told you, and actually Saks Fifth Avenue had a fashion board. And they invited two people from each of 10 high schools in the New York City area to be on this thing. It was a sweet deal, let me tell you. And, you know, it's reflective of how forum was. I mean, when I went to high school -- my wife is 7 years younger than I am. When she went to high school in Des Moines, you couldn't wear jeans to school. I mean, it was still very much of a forum culture. That really changed very late in the '60s or early '70s. So again, we're having a civil war of ideologies. Arthur is trying to put in more of a forum. We know what he's trying to put in. We talk about the relationship of Guenever and Arthur. And remember, this is a made marriage, so to speak, or not made. That Guenever has no passion -- this is kind of sad. There's some really sad stuff in here. Has no passion for Arthur. She likes him. It's kind of like First Knight. He's a nice guy. But we say here at some point their relative ages -- Arthur's supposed to be about 30 and Lancelot and Guenever are supposed to be seven, eight years younger. So, you know, not like First Knight where you're 102 years old or -- yeah, I'm just kidding. I like Sean Connery. But, you know, I mean, somewhat older. Somewhat older. Now, being your age, 30 might sound really old. To me, it does not sound very old at all. In fact, the first time I lied about my age I was 27. No, no. I know. I was teaching here. And I had just turned 28 and somebody said, "You had a birthday, didn't you?" and I said, "Yeah." They said, "How old are you?" and I said, "27." Because somehow 27 was nearer 25 which was young and 28 was nearer 30 which sounded old. As you get older, the little numbers don't matter to you anymore. You just don't want to change the first number. The other numbers are okay. You know, what's 41 or 42 -- but no 50. What's Lancelot like? Lancelot is courtly, he's merciful. To repeat, lest you missed it, he's ugly and he's invincible. All swords again, just miscellaneous stuff, and kind of curiously joy -- the word joy is associated with Lancelot. And later when we get his castle -- I did that wrong -- is associated with Lancelot. Lancelot believes there is a right so he believes in absolutes and he believes that chastity gave him strength -- or gives him strength. And so he's gonna do a miracle and, in his mind, he can only do this miracle because he is chaste. King Pelles -- and I think we've heard this name in one of the movies I've shown you and the documentaries. King Pelles is the fisher king. And we're gonna talk a little bit about the grail today. That's gonna be the significant focus of the last part of the course, but it's gonna come up in this part because the quest for the grail and what happens for it. But King Pelles is the fisher king. Now, the fisher king is by tradition the keeper of the grail. And the fish is a very old symbol -- you see fishes on cars. Of course, the fish got Republic in trouble and the City of Republic could've been really smart in this whole thing if they'd just said, "Well, you know, this is, you know, an old symbol which -- since antiquity which represents wisdom and all these things." And so he is a fisher king. His daughter is Elaine. So we're gonna have a bunch of people with the same names floating around. Of course, one of the three sisters, the Cornwall sisters, is Elaine. We never see that Elaine. We see this Elaine. And so she and Lancelot are gonna get together and have Galahad. But anyway, they are -- she is the most beautiful damsel -- and rescuing her is gonna be the last adventure of Lancelot's virginity. He always wanted to do a miracle and he's out there, doing adventures, having adventures, and he comes to this town and everybody knows him by name. And they say, "Wow," you know, "it's so great you've been here." And what's happened is the fisher king's daughter, Elaine, has had an enchantment put on her by Morgan le Fay. And Morgan le Fay was jealous because she had heard how beautiful Elaine was supposed to be. So she put an enchantment on her when she was like 13 -- again, of course, puberty -- and put her -- she had to sit in a pot of boiling water, a tub of boiling water, until the perfect knight came and freed her. So Lancelot -- they all tell him, you know, "You gotta go up here. There's this maiden in boiling water." And so he goes up, offers her his hand, and presto-chango she gets to come out, and they run up with the proper attire for her. Whatever the proper attire is, I don't know. He thinks she's beautiful. They make a point -- White makes kind of a sarcastic point. He says, "Of course, she's the first person -- the first female he ever saw naked." Whether that had any effect on it at all, he wasn't sure. But she is much taken by Lancelot, as you probably would be too if somebody got you out of a big barrel you've been sitting in for five years being poached. They get him drunk -- the poor boy, you know. And guys are bad enough as they are. So you get 'em drunk, they're really bad. But they get him drunk and then they send him this note. And the note is kind of written in a strange way, so he thinks it's from Guenever, in his drunkenness. And it says, "Hey, Lance Baby. If you'll meet me in this next castle over here, you know, we could have sweet times." And so he says, "Oh, cool deal." So he hustles, or staggers, over to this other castle, spends the night, has a sweet time, and wakes up and goes, "Hey. This isn't Guenever. This is Elaine." And so he's fairly upset. But she says she just wants to have his baby and that she loves him, and she's gonna call their baby Galahad. I didn't show the chapter divisions in here. That is actually the break of a chapter then. And we come back to look at Guenever. Guenever is 22 years old at this particular point. And balance -- they're talking about this whole idea of balance. And, of course, it's important, important literature, and they say balance is much easier to have as you get older -- which I'll concur with. And that since Guenever is only 22, she's still in chaos. The idea that she can really behave as she might later think she wishes she had is not possible. Elaine -- some of these words we apply to Arthur -- simple. Not meaning a simpleton, but I wrote on here "not clever." That is, she's just kind of a straightforward person. Again, she's been sitting around being poached, so she didn't have much chance for experience. White, in this section, spends a certain amount of time kind of labeling people. Well, not "kind of." He really is labeling people. And he says Arthur is kind, simple, and upright. Again, so simple -- I think in the idea of not being devious. Without malice, vanity, suspicion, cruelty. Sounds like a pretty good person, to me. Those are good things to be without: malice, vanity, suspicion, and cruelty. His three great virtues are courage, generosity, and honesty. Talking about Galahad. Now, Lancelot, of course, leaves after this one- nighter, goes back to Camelot. Not bragging about this, to be sure. And so Galahad is born out here and, you know, his mother's kind of -- you know, she's left alone. She takes him to a convent and raises him which would seem to make your mysterious child if nothing else did. And he is raised there, by himself, in this totally religious environment. We then have a lapse of 15 years. So much like in the movie, Excaliber, we're gonna kind of leave our hero as a young child. I think the last we saw of him here was he was three. And we're gonna go ahead and leave Lancelot. And we're also doing what? We're leaving these people from the time of their chaos, and so we can imagine what's been going on, sneaking around from castle to castle, being bad children. And now, all of a sudden, they're gonna be in their late 30s which we assume a lot of that badness is gone. And so they tell us in here -- and again, it's always hard to put pencils to these years in here. But he tells us specifically in the book that Lancelot and Guenever are now 39 and that 21 years have been spent building Camelot. And so what's true in England now is the chaos, the anarchy, all those things we saw at the end of the first book, were still true when Arthur became king, are gone. Arthur is the champion of civilization. He is the champion of right, of unity. And so civilization is now the rule. It's a golden time. Arthur, though, is now coming to realize that might in any form is bad. Because even though it's been in the service of right, it's become kind of a mania in and of itself. Like I can do more right than you can do. And so it's back to that Norman games mania that Merlyn complained about again. It's still alive. And so he's come to the realization that we have to have right established through right. And so his next big project is going to be law.