3 - Interlace: The Themes of Lancelot Part 3

Summary

Prologue

The technical aspects of the interlaced narrative are, in a way, a theme in itself: the presentation of the text as a pseudo-chronicle gave a specific message to the contemporary audience. Whether the audience perceived the text as absolutely true or saw through the disguise and recognised the tale's essentially fictitious nature is hard to decide. The prologues traditionally cited in discussions of the verse–prose debate in France just after 1200 strongly argue for the truthfulness of prose narratives, yet the authors were making things up, inventing new adventures concerning for instance the Grail, a fact the probably well-informed primary audience may have been aware of. The idea that it is a game of ‘window-dressing’, showing outsiders an image of a true and complete Arthurian chronicle and, at the same time, letting knowledgeable insiders in on the whole set-up of prose form, eyewitnesses, and source fiction, may be a good hypothesis for further research with a wider focus than this study.

By means of the narrative technique of entrelacement, a story is told that has three dominant thematic lines, which lie on a different level from the all-pervading ‘chronicle’ theme carried by the formal aspects. The literary term ‘theme’ is applied here as a descriptive instrument and defined simply as the idea that emerges from the narrative elements (motifs). This definition sits well with the way themes are used in Kennedy's study of the first part of the Prose Lancelot. She discusses two main themes, Identity and Love, and a number of smaller theme-like elements (magic, feudal relations and the role of the court, Grail allusions). The main themes, continued in Part 2 of the Prose Lancelot, are still very much present in Part 3, yet here Identity becomes Status and the Grail now comes forward as a third dominant theme. Love and Grail coexist and connect in this part of the text and do not yet show the clash of interests that pervades the Queste del Saint Graal. This also means that the ‘double esprit’ of the trilogy finds its nexus here, as will be discussed in the epilogue to this chapter.