1 - Contesting the Canon

Summary

Like life, literature is a matter of continuation. Each existence is a sequel to the existences of others, who remain vestigially alive within us […] Beginnings and ends are the most artificial devices of literature because they correspond to nothing in life […] There is always unfinished business, and the truest literary endings are those which demur about their finality.

In medieval culture, the origins of stories tend to disappear in a way that would please the most deconstructive post-structuralists […] The origins that we can trace are often of limited relevance to a particular manifestation of a narrative subject. What we must imagine is a skeletal, deep-structural form of a story floating in semiotic space, capable of being concretised, with widely different results, in any medium and in an immense variety of contexts.

In this chapter the donor-and-recipient model traditionally said to dominate later medieval literature is challenged in favour of a narrative model which in a related context has been termed the ‘literary tiltyard’ (Anne-Marie D’Arcy). Since I wish to argue from an extensive corpus of evidence cumulatively tending to oppose the common opinion, I commence with a contextualising excursus showing from a range of examples how the surprisingly tenacious notion that later authors were simply derivative of their predecesssors is in fact often flatly contradicted by the testimony of the literary archive. I then relate this finding to Wigalois and its position within its literary sequence, exploring ways in which Wirnt's work stands out by dint of eclectic and idiosyncratic working methods which could hardly have been bound by adherence to a canonical source or group of sources.

The ‘Post-Classical’ Challenge

In much the same way that the writers of the ‘deuxième époque’ aspired to extend the tradition launched by Chrétien de Troyes in France, later German writers of Arthurian romance strove to advance traditions set by those writers conventionally accorded ‘classic’ status in German literary historiography, namely, Heinrich von Veldeke, Hartmann von Aue and Wolfram von Eschenbach. Referring to ‘constant elements within the broad supranational genre of Arthurian romance’ and to findings complementary to her own in Christoph Cormeau's ‘Wigalois’ und ‘Diu Crône’, Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann noted the ‘extensive correlation between the generic characteristics of German post-classical Arthurian romances and those of the French romances.