ABSTRACT
Lancelot’s behavior provides the focus of passionate debate, not only in the romance whose very name suggests his paradoxical nature—what knight is properly to be associated with a cart?—but also in the many scholarly attempts to decide whether Lancelot is an extraordinary hero or a despicable fool, savior of Arthur’s kingdom or an adulterous traitor to Arthur as king and husband. Indeed the majority of scholars working on the Charrette can be divided grosso modo into partisans and opponents of Lancelot, with Lancelot located somewhere in the middle. 1 Some recent work on the Charrette, however, has shifted its attention from the arguments for and against Lancelot to the ambiguity that characterizes Chrétien’s narrative strategies and activates these diverging critical interpretations. Joseph J. Duggan affirms the value of ambiguity for Chrétien, 2 while Norris J. Lacy discusses his ironic techniques for obscuring narrative point of view as a means to keep open the question of meaning. 3 As Lacy also points out (1980: 58–9, 92–3), the activity of interpretation is not limited to Chrétien’s critics: narrator and characters are busy throughout the Charrette analyzing the knotty problems that intrigue us, trying to relate actions and values—and illustrating with their own errors and misapprehensions the pitfalls that await would-be interpreters. Indeed, Chrétien’s romance represents the problem of interpretation(s), as much as it does Lancelot’s quest for the Queen. While 20th-century interpreters tend to see the Middle Ages as a period of “closed” texts whose meanings are determined and determinable by reference to an external ideology, 4 a close reading of Chrétien’s work (and, I think, of romance in general) reveals a world where the ambiguities of signs may require an inexhaustible series of interpretations (cf. Howard Bloch 1974). We are not so very far, after all, from the modern preoccupation with “Fiction as Interpretation / Interpretation as Fiction,” 5 as I hope to demonstrate below.
