9 - Refining the Center: Verse and Prose Charrette

Summary

Aknight paradoxically associated with a shameful cart rescues the Queen, liberates the captives, and becomes Guinevere's lover. In its barest outline, that is the plot of Chrétien de Troyes's Chevalier de la Charrete, the romance that catapulted Lancelot into fame and forever changed the course of Arthurian history. What existed before Chrétien remains uncertain, but there is no doubt that his version became the starting point for all subsequent tales of Lancelot as the knight whose extraordinary prowess is inextricably linked to his love for Arthur's Queen. Identity and love, the two great themes of the Charrete, set the agenda for the prose Lancelot, where they were amplified, redeployed, and ultimately redefined. Across the large canvas of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, the Cart episode remains at the center of Lancelot's story, even as it marks an important shift in Lancelot as hero, still the best of Arthurian chivalry but not ‘the good knight’ who will achieve the Grail.

The manner in which the prose author exploits Chrétien's model is as idiosyncratic as Lancelot himself for subsequent romance tradition. In Myrrha Lot-Borodine's words, the prose Lancelot literally incorporates Le Chevalier de la Charrete. Fully digested, Chrétien's text reappears as ‘li contes de la Charete.’ The reference is a tribute to the fame of Chrétien's romance, but the loss of authorial connection corroborates the extent to which the episode has lost its separate boundaries within the interlaced space of the prose narrative. How does the prose romancer both recapitulate and transform Chrétien's romance? Comparison of their opening passages will give a detailed sense of what the global change in context entails on the levels of style and narrative shape. That analysis will lead in turn to a better understanding of the thematic consequences observable with particular clarity in two sets of episodes, the eponymous cart and the marvelous tomb adventures.

Chrétien's romance opens with a prologue, which places author, story, and public in a triangular dialogue:

Puis que ma dame de Chanpaigne

vialt que romans a feire anpraigne,

je l’anprendrai molt volontiers

come cil qui est suens antiers …

Del Chevalier de la Charrete

comance Crestïens son livre;

matiere et san li done et livre

la contesse, et il s’antremet

de panser, que gueres n’i met

fors sa painne et s’antancïon. (lines 1–4 and 24–9)