When working with medieval texts one is working with a composite, a tale that has been spread by troubadours even before being written, one that has been re-articulated and circulated times and times again. I kept from using Distant Reading methodology on such objects during this course since I couldn’t shake away the feeling that I would transform my object into a messier and more opaque text than the one I was currently working with. I’d face a mess so dense that I’d lose all bearings. When I realized that this week was about overcoming the fear of ‘fucking things up’, I knew exactly what I had to do for this week’s boot camp.

When looking at Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, the sites of alterations are abundant—just the editing of Sir William Caxton―one of the first printers in England―is a major one. Scholarly incertitude relating to Malory’s direct and indirect sources in crafting his own version of the tales is another layer of complex alteration: the lost manuscripts, the lack of information on who Malory was and to his access of literary sources are all elements that would, if not obscured, alter our analysis of the Morte. And what to say of the very characters from which the Arthurian legends sprung, and who were speeded in the four corners of Europe? More and more composites, dense networks eroded by time and deformed by its multiple circulations. The Morte is already a composite of alterations, so fucking this up should be easy.

To limit my discussion to a briefly interesting boot camp, let’s look at just one of Malory’s most celebrated characters in the Morte, the paradoxical Lancelot, who is the most loyal and disloyal of Arthur’s knights. Lancelot is a coded character, one embedded in the discourse of fine amour:

The interplay with existing texts serves to create links… it underlines two main themes, the quest for identity and the relationship between love and chivalry, both of which are already typical of twelfth-century Arthurian romance in general and of the earlier Lancelot tradition in particular. (Kennedy 81)

Considering that the common thread for the varying renditions of Lancelot is his adulterous  relationship with Guinevere, Malory had “to make a number of decisions about how to treat Lancelot and Guinevere, which sources to follow, how to order them, and what original material to add”(Archibald 314-15). Now that we know how Lancelot’s character was essentially coded and circulated, let’s look more closely at how we could further alter his presence in Malory’s narrative.

McGann and Samuels’ methodology encompasses four types of poetic deformations:

reordered (for example, reading backward), isolating (for example, reading only verbs or other parts of speech), altering (exteriorizing variants–potential versions–of words in the work; or altering the spatial organization, typography, or punctuation of a work), and adding (perhaps the most subjective of our deformative poetics). (McGann and Samuels 11-12)

I will be altering the text by removing certain kinds of word to see how the character of Lancelot is altered by such modifications. To do so, here is a very short extract from the first events occurring in Malory’s “The Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake”:

First Stage of Alteration

As you can see the writing itself, the ‘typography’ of the story when digitized already alters the object I am trying to observe, but let’s try to look past this layer of deformation. Malory offers in this passage a very summarized rendition of Lancelot’s relationship with Guinevere, and does not mention how the two met and/or fell in love—information that is given in the Post-Vulgate cycle (of Arthuriana), which is likely to be one of Malory’s sources. Malory hence appears to be threading lightly around the transgressive lovers: are they the truly lovers in this version of the tale, if so, how obvious is their relationship to the other knights of the Round Table, how obvious is it to Arthur? The readers are entitled to those questions when hearing the name of Launcelot. Malory, however, delays answering those questions until the final tales of his narrative, at which point the fellowship of the Round Table collapses into civil war.

Since Malory integrated Lancelot in his narrative, he must negotiate the transgressive connotations of of Lancelot by asserting his association with Guinevere, and yet withholding certain information until the opportune moment in his narrative.

Now let’s move away from this “normative conceptual way of ‘figuring out what it means’” (McGann and Samuels 11), let’s try altering this fixed component—his association with Guinevere—in the characterization of Lancelot. Consider this altered version of the same tale:

Letter Code

This is my first attempt at removing the identity of the lover’s identity. However, the presence of the lover trait in Lancelot―or a Lancelot look-alike―is still too strong. Altering names hence does not seem to alter the characterization enough in this tale. Perhaps that was caused by the character’s identity being still distinguishable, still fixed by a marker―a letter rather than a full name. Consider this next attempt:

:

Celebrating Anonymity

In this version of the tale I got rid of most all the names, locations, and titles to replace them with pronouns. Lancelot’s singularity is missing in this version, which is a step forward in the direction of my goal, but the tale has become quite messy. The plot has become very confusing now that most characters have become indiscernible now that the all-encompassing pronoun ‘he’ has made them interchangeable. Who is attacking, who is sleeping, and who is imprisoned: it is impossible to say whether it is all the same ‘he’ or multiple ones if only granted access to this version of the tale. Now consider my very last attempt:

Final Attempt

Something quite surprising happens in this last attempt at altering Lancelot’s persona in the Morte: by removing most particles, locations, names, and pronouns, the narrative becomes (more particularly in the second paragraph) quite poetic. The backdrop of the story is suddenly visible, the relationships between characters are obscured, and the landscape itself becomes the focus. The very setting of the tale comes to life and it interacts with the persona’s journey: the succeeding deep forest and plain, the armed horses, the heat of midday, and the fair shadow of an apple tree–all these factors come into play for the readers to picture the ‘sleep lust’ that the persona feels. This dimension of Malory’s text is lost when one is focusing on the clashing literary discourses, on Lancelot’s involvement with Guinevere, Arthur, and the Round Table in this case―rather than to enjoy the story as it is being told. By removing a good portion of the markers, a persona emerges, a voice not burdened by past traditions nor limited to the reader’s expectations. This persona is opening a space within Malory’s narrative where the unknown becomes the centre of the story, where the storyline is stretching in the ‘moment’, getting rid of the reader’s assumptions. There Lancelot’s character comes through, not by his association with Guinevere, but via his interaction with his direct environment, becoming an active agent solely rooted in the (unknown) ‘now’.

Works Cited

Archibald, Elizabeth. “Malory’s Lancelot and Guenevere.” A Companion to Arthurian Literature. By Helen Fulton. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 312-26. Print.

Kennedy, Elspth. “The Figure of Lancelot in the Lancelot-Graal.” Lancelot and Guinevere: A Casebook. By Lori Walters. New York: Garland Pub., 1996. 55-78. Print.

McCarthy, Terence. “Malory and His Sources.” A Companion to Malory. By Elizabeth Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1996. 75-97. Print.