This Is Not A Grail Romance. Natalia Petrovskia a review of sorts

This Is Not a Grail romance: Understanding Historia Peredur uab Efrawc.  Natalia l. Petrovskaia . University of Wales Press, 2023. 

 'If the material before us fails to conform to our present-day European concepts of logic and unity, perhaps instead of rejecting the text should reject the logic and find a new one'. (Llyod-Morgan. Qtd page. 15).

Beyond its value to students of the Welsh story, this book demonstrates the value of approaching a medieval text, not with the assumption that it is a flawed attempt at a modern narrative, but as an attempt, not so much to read it on its own terms, but to discover what these terms might be. 

Background.

The default approach to medieval texts is to see them as clumsy approximations of modern literature. To be sure there are 'works of genius' but 'Chaucer would be so much better without the digressions'. 

There are two strands to this approach which start at the same point but head in different directions. In one the 'literary flaws' of the text are enumerated. The lack of coherence, of character development, the digressions, the absence of a proper narrative arc, are all pointed out. The Writer is like a child who is trying to do something that is beyond him or her. Nice try, but...

The second approach, specific to this topic, is the one which sees the Welsh prose stories collected as 'The Mabinogion' as incoherent. The writer didn't understand or wasn’t in control of the material, the stories are the ruined, garbled remains, of lost precursors. There is a critical tradition in which the scholar, having  identified the incoherence, attempts to recreate the original, coherent, story.  Given such stories no longer exist, the reconstruction usually says more about the scholar than the story.

Both approaches are underwritten by the idea that literature is an organic entity subject to Darwinian evolution, and after the high point of Greek and Latin literature,  the awkward fumbling of the medieval Makar are the clumsy beginning of a progression which improves over time to whatever you currently think of as excellent.

This is both highly patronising to the creators of our texts: if only they'd have been to a modern writing workshop they might have done better, and insulting to their audience who were obviously willing to put up with any kind of rubbish because evenings were long and Netflix hadn't been invented.

But it  shuts down a proper consideration of medieval storytelling. It's not possible to learn from something that’s already been dismissed as inadequate.

End of background

So here's to Natalia Petrovskaia, and her willingness to treat Peredur on its own terms. Her analysis of the structure seems to prove that this is not just a random accumulation of events but a carefully built story working to its own rules. 

Her argument is based on the recognition that there are two surviving versions of this story.  The Short Version, which owes little to the French, and the Longer Version or Short Version +Continuation. The latter is what modern readers encounter in a translation of  ‘The Mabinogion’ and it is incoherent, inconsistent and repetitive.  

By focussing on the shorter version, which is the oldest surviving version,  she rejects the idea that Peredur is a badly written single narrative. She argues that the short version is three distinct stories, self-contained, which are linked by being about the same hero. The key is that the individual episodes ‘can be taken not merely as episodes in a grander narrative, but as complete semi-independent narratives forming distinct units that can be removed, replaced and re ordered. Most importantly, there are no internal contradictions or inconsistencies within each of these units.' ‘Any inconsistences that can be found (eg. the seemingly ever changing object of Peredur’s affections) are to be found between these episodes, not within them. '

She refines her argument to see the story’s organisation as a fractal structure,  specifically a Sierpinski gasket. This fractal model offers a mnemonic structure for the story teller: Three episodes, each composed of three sub episodes, each involving three consecutive scenes of encounter. 

Part of her argument reminds me of  Carol Braun Pasternack's arguments about the 'Movement' nature of Old English Poetry, and while that leap is mine, not Petrovskaia's, it adds weight to her argument.  

The coherence of her model would seem to prove her point as does the experience of rereading the story after reading her book.

Secondly, her argument that this is not a Grail Romance seems incontrovertible. Perdedur is not shown a Grail or does he seek one. (Hands up those who, like me, first read it as a Grail story because they had been told it was, and wondered what they'd missed.)

Thirdly this is not a Romance in the generic Medieval meaning of that term. 

We read in ways we've been taught. Our reading practices shape not only our responses to texts, but create the texts themselves. Modern reading practices get in the way of our engagement with medieval stories.  Rather than treat each text on its own terms, the critic and reader try to fit the text into learnt patterns based on teaching and prior reading. When a text doesn’t fit the pattern, it, rather than the pattern, is found wanting. Christopher Cannon made this point brilliantly in the context of post-conquest English literature in 'The Grounds of English Literature'. But it's a point that needs repeating. 

There are other arguments in the book. Whether the landscape of some of the episodes can be linked to specific places and the story contextualised geographically is a moot point. Certainly a Welsh /Border landscape supports the argument about the Welshness of the story. However while Identifying a specific castle by a convent where the Nuns are in poverty is difficult, the fact that the attempt is possible reinforces the idea that the original audience would have felt these landscapes familiar and plausible in ways a modern audience can’t.  

The Welshness of the story has been argued over. Petrovskia makes a sound argument that what she calls the 'Short Version' originated in Wales, and not as an attempt to copy a French original. 

Her conclusion:

This is not a Grail Romance nor is it  a Romance. Peredur is not a single narrative but carefully built episodes. 

What she designates as Episodes 1 to 3 not only show no trace of stylistic incompetence, but  demonstrate structural virtuosity; are anchored in Welsh historical, literary, legal and cultural contexts, and originated in Wales.  

Short, clearly written, carefully argued,  beyond its value to present and future students of Peredur Vab Efrawc, it is a demonstration of the benefits of approaching a  story with the assumption that the text is the way it is because someone who knew what they were doing made it that way for people who enjoyed and appreciated the end product. 

 

 

Review of Living with a Visionary by John Matthias.

 

John Matthias, Living with a Visionary, Dos Madres Press 2024.

This small but astonishing book is John Matthias’ lament for his wife, Diana. It illustrates the truth of Geoffrey Hill’s suggestion that if a writer gets the balance between trauma and technique right, the end result is great art.   

 

At the heart of the book is a 13 page prose narrative. Diana was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and then became the victim of increasingly frequent hallucinations. She died due to complications from Covid. There are poems on either side of the prose. The three that precede it were written for or about her before she became ill. The piece that comes after it, Diana’s Things, is a sequence of 8 short prose paragraphs. There is also an afterward by Igor Webb which feels like a fussy stranger at a funeral, telling the mourners how to react. This I could do without. 

 

The story is traumatic enough to have stopped many people from writing, but Matthias is one of the most interesting American poets I’ve read, and a technique developed over a life time holds the subject, stops it from overwhelming the writer, and shapes it into art.

 

The relationship, destroyed by illness and an implacable medical system caught up in the Covid pandemic, is revealed in the three initial poems. ‘Of Artemis Aging (For Diana on her 65^th Birthday)’ plays on her name, the Roman version of the Greek Artemis, the hunter goddess. It has its moments of gentle humour:

 

‘Actaeon turned/Into a stag. I’ve seen Diana at her bath but never was/devoured by my hounds, only by my longing.’

 

The Goddess does not get old, and cannot change. If she could change:

 

She might be like the woman called by her roman name,

Reading in a book beside the fire in my own house.

She has come down all these years with me, and she

Is getting old. She turns the pages slowly, then looks up.

Her wise ironic glance is straight as a shaft of gold

 

The comparison between sterile, unchanging Goddess and aging familiar namesake is handled in a way that the goddess comes off second best but the subject of the poem is celebrated and yet made particular. This skilful use of myth is carried over into the next poem. 

 

Good Dream  takes the story of Baucus and Philemon from book 7 of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Ovid’s story, as Matthias points out, is one of the few gentle ones in his book. The elderly couple, having offered the God’s hospitality when no one else did, are offered a wish. Their wish is to have their house turned into a temple; that they be its priests, and that above all they will not outlive each other. As they are dying they are changed into two trees, facing each other. What more do you need to know about the writer and his wife’s fifty years of marriage? The poem and the dream end:

 

The three remaining walls of my house collapsed

And I was standing in a marble temple, and I

Was not I. Beside me, Serpent Aesculapius arose

In flaming cloak. Diana spoke: I am a linden tree

And what I was replied: I have become an oak. 

 

But as the prose recounts, the poet does outlive his wife. He isn’t allowed to visit her when she is dying because of Covid. At the beginning of her hallucinations she has seen a ‘flowery man’ in the hall. At that stage she knew he was not there. Unable to visit her due to Covid restrictions, his last contact with her is over the phone. He is reading her the poem he wrote for her 65^th birthday: ‘I couldn’t continue. “You’re doing great dad,” my daughter said, “but she wants to know about the flowery man.” So I told her everything I knew.’ 

 

The emotion that generates the story is left outside, and the facts are assembled and related and allowed to speak for themselves. Although the poet’s own experience is harrowing enough: taken to hospital, kept separate from his wife, put into the psychiatric ward and only allowed out when a friend organises a legal intervention, the focus remains on Diana, not on himself. The result is much more moving than any wailing could be. 

 

What follows the prose is Some of Her Things, a meditation on a life through seven objects. In his dream he is standing in a river, with an impossibly large suitcase which contains all her possessions. He knows she is dead but she is present on the other bank of the river. She tells him ‘Do like Henry James’. He has no idea what that means. ‘ Do like Henry James,’ she repeats, ‘but save me seven things’. 

 

It turns out that Henry James was asked to dispose of Constance Woodson’s things. He drowned her clothes in a Venice lagoon. Or tried to:

 

‘A ball gown billowed up and wouldn’t sink. It seemed that Constance Fenimore Woodson swam beside them’. 

 

As Henry James discovered, drowning the past is not that easy. The danger is being drowned in it. In the seven sections that follow each thing is linked to a memory, or memories. It builds the kind of picture we all have of someone we know well, associated with items that have personal significance. Only once, in the last piece in the sequence, does the poet come close to a direct description of his own feelings. 

 

‘I suppose I stand midstream only in a dream, but I am broken to the point I can't tell.’

 

It’s one of poetry’s harsher realities that no matter how traumatic or ecstatic the experience or emotions that generate the writing, once they are written down and handed over to a stranger they risk becoming cliches. As human beings we might sympathise with the writer, but as experienced readers of poetry we may well be bored and wonder why someone wanted to tell us this. At the other extreme, a death becomes an occasion for poetry and the sincerity of the poet can be questionable. Even a great poet like Tennyson’s sincerity was and is questioned for the writing of In Memoriam.

 

What Matthias has achieved here is to produce a sincere lament for his wife but in such a way that the lament is interesting as a made thing. My discussion of doesn’t do it justice. Total strangers will share and feel his loss, but the book is also an exemplary lesson in how to turn trauma into art without in any way betraying the experience or the subject. 

 

 

Orla Davey reviews A Man of Heart.

Liam Guilar’s A Man of Heart transforms historical record into contemporary poetry, unearthing narratives of 5th-century Britain by blending reimagination with realism. His compelling sequel to A Presentment of Englishry continues his poetic retelling of the British history depicted in Layamon’s Middle English verse poem Brut. Filtering Layamon’s 12th-century imaginings into free verse, Guilar rewrites the foundations of Britain with relevance and urgency, grappling with the abandonment of the Roman Empire, threats of impending raids, and power politics.

You can read the rest of the review by clicking on the link below.

https://dura-dundee.org.uk/2024/04/01/a-man-of-heart/

Opening a review is always a fraught moment. But in this case the writer seems to have understood some of the things I was trying to do. It's like opening a package expecting a bomb and finding a cake.