Lisa Nicholas <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>The blessing and the curse is that the continuations and later
redactions of Chretien's grail story (such as the Quest of the Grail) place
explicit religious interpretations on things that Chretien himself left
ambiguous (or perhaps, rather, things which the unfinished tale leaves
unexplained)
to the point of extreme tediousness, in the case of the work you mention, if
my memory serves. i believe that on occasion he even goes so far as
to tell us wha he's going to tell us; then tells us (in a distressingly bland
and unimaginative sort of way); then tells us what he's told us;
and *then,* just to be sure, he tells us what it all *Means,* on the off
chance we didn't get it, first time round.
duh.
more there than just a question of the earlier work being "unfinished" (not to
say that you implied that there wasn't). the sense of wonder --and of the
essentially ineffable nature of the wonderful has been replaced by the utterly
pedantic and --in spite of the purported subject matter-- the mundane.
that fellow is the literary equivelant of the master of the sculpture on the
West facade of Amiens cathedral.
a perfect paradigm for Friedrich Heer's idea of things starting to close down
and re-trench, intellectually, from the early 13th c.
no wonder Walter Map didn't like them third generation cistercians.
none of which helps you with this "memorial culture" business, however.
christopher
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