Week 9 - April 9
The
Questing Knight and the Holy Grail and the Magic Girdle
Background:
1. Derek Pearsall: Arthurian Romance
a. Romance,
by contrast, deals in adventure and not survival(21)
b. To show a fictional character capable of being embarrassed
and
humiliated in the way that Gawain is embarrassed and humiliated
is a new art of the interior self (though not, one presumes,
a new
experience for human beings. (81)
2. Eugene
Vinaver: The Binding of Proteus
a. the joy
of remembering or half-rememberi9ng a number of un finished
stories. (132)
b. …our conventional standards of aesthetic judgment, our
ideas as to how literary form should function, are applicable
only to a very restricted range of works… There are vast
stretches of our creative imagination that have been consistently
excluded from our aesthetic horizon. and to do real justice
to our literary and artistic heritage we have to adjust our
perception accordingly…(137)
c. it was not a question of literature imitating life, but life
imitating literature. (138)
Sir Gawain
"I am a knight unworthy"
a brief reading of excerpts
the pleasures of amplification
the pleasures of dismemberment
the challenges of the journey
the always present temptations
the magic girdle
Perceval: The Story of the Grail
a brief re-telling, with the help of Wikipedia and Emma Jung and
Jesse Weston
and Chretien de Troyes
This is the book of thy descent.
Here begins the story of the Holy Grail.
Here begin the terrors.
Here begin the marvels. (Lancelot Grail qtd. in Jung 31)
Emma Jung:
1. To be fatherless appears to some extent to be one of the
attributes of the mythological hero (Jung 45)
2. That the vessel is so frequently considered to be life-giving
or life-maintaining is readily understandable when we realize
how extremely important it must have been for earliest man to
possess a receptacle in which, for instance water, the stuff
of life par 0065cellence could be transported or stored. (Jung114)
Jesse Weston
and the Wasteland
Closely connected with the wounding of the king is the destruction
which has fallen on the land. (48)
Joseph Goering: The Virgin and the Grail
a brief re-telling of the story as spun by Chretien De Troyes
You
were with the Fisher king
And saw the bleeding lance.
Was it so irksome then
To open your mouth and ask
The reason why those drops of blood
Spilled from the white iron?
(Perceval, le Conte du Graal)
small groups:
1. in a poem of no more than 8 lines
imagine/create a poetry martyr/saint and a relic/sacred object
for this martyr
draw a picture
DO NOT SAY who the martyr/saint is - let us guess!
2. explore what code of honor informs each of your own poems being
workshopped - what principles does the poem seek to adhere to?
"He has no friend but his horse"
A chivalric CODE OF HONOR for poetry:
1. we each bring a set of principles to our poems
things we must honor; acts we must not stoop to or lapse into
2. codes must always be tested
Assignment:
Skim Faerie Queen books 1 & 2
invent a hero and for that hero a test or quest
(by hero we mean both feminine and masculine -as in a poet)
To have behaved
with more heed would have behooved one of sense" (v. 29)
