IV - Convention, Comedy and the Form of La Vengeance Raguidel

Summary

La Vengeance Raguidel, by Raoul, is doubtless remembered best – by readers who know it at all – for its inclusion of a fabliau-like scene that, as Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann points out, ‘is generally regarded as the most improper in the whole of French Arthurian literature.’ That the romance is otherwise not widely known may be due in part to dismissive judgments from past generations of scholars. Micha, for example, suggested that it lacks unity,3 and long before that Bruce had found it a ‘rambling’ composition, inferior in interest to Meraugis de Portlesguez – no mild criticism since he considered Meraugis poorly constructed, extravagant, and often insipid.

Fortunately arrayed against these condemnations are the views of a number of more recent scholars (e.g., Schmolke-Hasselmann, Busby, Pallemans, Thompson, and others5) who have praised La Vengeance Raguidel as a fascinating study of Gauvain and/or as an appealing parody of romance themes and motifs. In fact, the composition is distinguished by the author's unremitting manipulation of familiar Arthurian motifs, which he regularly transforms in novel ways, often for humorous effect. The most innovative of these changes occurs near the midpoint of the text, when the character of the protagonist, Gauvain, is abruptly inverted and he becomes everything that experienced readers of French Arthurian romance expect him not to be.