ROMANCE
Imaginative transformations
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`Barber explores the richness of the Holy Grail's cultural influences by mapping out the literary origins of the grail legend.'
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RICHARD BARBER in The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief explores the richness of the Holy Grail's cultural influences by mapping out the literary origins of the grail legend. As Barber probes into the imaginative transformations of the grail through the different ages, his journey takes us across a large part of Western Europe, the Great Britain and the Near East, unfolding the fantastic process of the Romantic imagination which draws its influences from a range of ideas and concepts related to theology, history, culture, literature and arts. The extraordinary diversity involved in the Grail stories displays an abundant wealth of the Holy Grail's cultural impact from the beginning of the Celtic prose romances of the medieval period to the popular culture of the 20th Century.
Between imagination and belief
In his survey of the history of grail literature, Barber locates the existence of the grail between the dynamic interplay of poetic imagination and religious belief, which are the two recurrent influences on its development. Reflecting on the central mysteries surrounding the grail and the Christian faith, several questions have been raised with no adequate answers. What is the Holy Grail? When the medieval Church never officially recognised (it is nowhere mentioned in the Bible) the Holy Grail, how did it then become a powerful religious icon? And why does it re-appear with renewed vigour to writers and artists of different times assuming myriad imaginative forms?
For over eight centuries the grail has been an inspiring ideal in Western literature. It was said to be the bowl from which Christ and his disciples ate at the Last Supper or, in some versions, the cup from which they drank the wine. In other stories, Joseph of Arimathea found this chalice and used it as a receptacle to collect the blood of Christ when he was pierced by a Roman soldier with a lance on the cross. Through Joseph's act of veneration, the grail acquired its aura of perfection. It was a divine symbol of spiritual nourishment and fulfilment.
The beginnings
The grail romances placed this holy relic within the culture of medieval knighthood. In different versions, the grail was supposed to be lost and recovered, hidden and guarded by kings, magicians, occultists, theosophists, angels and knights. The most famous of all grail stories was King Arthur's romance. His knights searched for the grail believing that their quest was the supreme test of Christian heroism.
Barber's book opens in the 12th Century unfolding the rich imagination of the French poet Chrétien de Troyes who wrote the The Story of the Grail. He reinvents King Arthur's story, focusing on the veneration of the relics — the grail and the lance — relating them to the bravado of Percival and Gawain's adventures. Chrétien died in 1191 without completing the story. The unfinished part of the story left enough and more creative space for a variety of French romances to re-invent new stories. The major literary figure in the development of the grail story was Robert de Boron. He approached his story from a radically different point of view. For him the focal point was not Percival but the grail itself. He takes the story back to the time of Christ and narrates how the grail found its way to Joseph of Arimathea. Barber informs that the romances written by Chrétien and Boron primarily narrated the chivalric culture of the knighthood, while reflecting also on the social mores and standards of their times.
The next complete and comprehensive form of the grail story came from Wolfram von Eschenbach. His German epic entitled Parzifal is a massive literary production and was highly ornate in style. The book focussed on the spiritual aspirations of knighthood and on the power of the Eucharist. The grail in Wolfram's imagination transformed into an awesome symbol of miraculous power, representing immortality. It was in this form that the story came to the German composer Richard Wagner. Wagner's opera Parsifal's impact on the music world was enormous. In every re-invention, a different grail was born with different and higher set of values. Writers began to portray the function of the grail as a main link between the spiritual and the physical worlds. Barber's account of the grail stories holds one common resonating factor, which is the sharp contrast drawn between the grail as the ultimate ideal of human aspiration and the reality of a society's ugliness and spiritual decay.
From the end of the 13th Century, tales of the grail were told and retold. During the period of the Reformation, the religious concept of the grail became a matter of bitter theological controversy. The debate stimulated a number of 18th Century scholars across Britain and Germany to grapple with the grail as a possible subject for research. Now, why were the scholars, in an age of Reason, searching for the right kind of keys to unlock the fantastic medieval myths? The reason was evident in the intellectual output which aimed to establish facts, logics and sources of the grail. Barber provides an in-depth analysis of grail-scholars promptly warning them of the danger of placing far too much emphasis on the sources of evidence which could end up in a fruitless denial of the imagination.
Symbol of national confidence
The grail re-appeared in Victorian times by uncovering the great canvases of the medieval romances. It also occupied a huge space in the newly developed disciplines of literary criticism and literary history. With the re-publication of Malory's "Morte Darthur" in 1816, the gates of the Arthurian legends re-opened. The renewed interest in the legends became the focal point of British national consciousness which reached its peak in this self-confident age. Through the colours of Arthur Hughes, Burne-Jones, William Morris and D.G. Rossetti and the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson, the grail once more represented the desire for spiritual perfection. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who were dedicated to the matters of medieval art, began the murals on Arthurian legends at the Oxford Union. While their exotic work represented an escape from the ugliness of English industrialisation, their penchant for the mysterious was viewed suspiciously. Victorian writers focused on the art of the grail matter but remained politically correct and silent on religious matters. As a consequence, the grail became a symbol of secular luxury — the first of the many changing and often inappropriate forms.
The 20th Century grail avatars tend to ignore the fundamental Christian character of the grail. Jessica Weston's Ritual to Romance, which was heavily drawn from John Frazer's The Golden Bough, takes the grail as a symbol of the Pagan past. Other writers have argued for an origin in Zoroastrian religion and even in Jewish Passover rituals.
Irreverent attitude
The comic interpretations of the grail tend to target nothing but just humour often stripping the grail of its splendour and reducing it to an insipid state of irreverence. While one can appreciate the modern humour in Mark Twain's satire A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, versions like Monty Python and the Holy Grail are a general chaos. It is hard to admire some of the 20th Century's popular culture versions of the grail as they tend to perversely "shatter a belief" in the post-modern sense and target a mere sensational effect. While subversions are welcome, the grand conspiracy theories and pseudo-entertaining strategies practised by the writers of books such as The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail leave no space for literary invention.
Richard Barber's own quest of the grail-literature encompasses a whole range of interpretations, showing how the concept behind the grail is extraordinarily persistent and open to all kinds of new creative imaginings. And why does the grail continue to fire the imagination of writers and readers alike? Barber answers this query indirectly through kyot — who is one of Umberto Eco's characters in Baudolina which is a new fantastical story of the grail quest. He says: "(the grail)... has the power of moving men only when it can't be found...what counts is nobody must find it, otherwise others will stop seeking it". The grail is, in one of its aspects, a mystery and a historical and a literary puzzle and there is an insatiable appetite for creative solutions to such mysteries and puzzles.
Enriching experience
Barber's book does not offer solutions or provide keys to unlock these mysteries and puzzles but offers a valuable and a knowledgeable account of the grail legends enriching our own experience of literature in relation to history. He usefully steps in to evaluate the quality of good literature when he claims that the best literary products were those whose writers consciously turned to the grail for inspiration in the medieval times. Through the grail these writers reached for the spiritual and the intangible. The quality of writing produced in our materialistic age in terms of the "reach" is much limited; as Barber puts it, "our age reaches only for the top shelf in the supermarket".
RENUKA RAJARATNAM
The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief, Richard Barber, Allen Lane, 2004.
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