Queeste. Tijdschrift over middeleeuwse letterkunde in de Nederlanden. Jaargang 2009

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Naar aanleiding van...

Recovering the Roman de Fergus for the romance canon
Alexander Devine

With regard to: Roel Zemel, The Quest for Galiene. A Study of Guillaume le Clerc's Arthurian Romance ‘fergus’. Amsterdam: Stichting Neerlandistiek vu, 2006. 256 pp. isbn/ean 978-90-8880-004-7/ean 978-3-89323-756-2. price: € 27,50.

Fergus is an early thirteenth-century Arthurian romance written in Old French by an anonymous author known only as Guillaume le Clerc who used Chrétien de Troyes' romances as source material from which to concoct a gloriously humorous patchwork of allusions and subversions. Guillaume's romance follows Fergus, a bumpkin peasant whose noble blood (from his mother's side) is inflamed by the sight of Arthur's knights, inspiring him to leave his native Galloway for Arthur's court, imitating, yet reversing Chrétien's Perceval. Through a subsequent quest, he falls in love with Galiene and, having rejected her love for the pursuit of knightly glory, undergoes a cycle of madness, penance and redemption, spending the rest of the narrative embroiling himself in a series of increasingly piquant and fantastical adventures to win her back. Ultimately, Guillaume's improbable antihero triumphs, emerging as messianic redeemer to be reunited victoriously with his beloved Galiene.

Fergus is superficially similar to its source material but integrally different; the original sum of unoriginal constituent parts. Guillaume's methods of literary composition were intertextual and intergeneric, borrowing freely from the wider Arthurian canon, as well as particularly from the works of Chrétien (mainly Perceval but also assimilating Le Conte du Graal, Yvain, Erec et Enide and Cligés) to produce humorous effect through the opposition and juxtaposition of styles, dictions, characters and literary registers. Through these parodic strategies, Guillaume's new text is simultaneously reverent and irreverent in its treatment of sources.

However, scholars have neglected Fergus for too long. Indeed, this new book by Roel Zemel is the first monograph devoted primarily and independently to Fergus. Previous scholarship has afforded the text only minor references (with Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann and D.D.R. Owen being the notable exceptions, especially Owen's lengthy essay in his translation on identifying and contextualising Fergus' author¹), ransacking Fergus for clues to historical authenticity, or have dismissed Fergus as merely a derivative and frivolous ‘neo-Perceval’, and imprisoned it within the restrictive category of what Schmolke-Hasselmann termed the ‘epigonal’, or a ‘second-phase’ romances.

Zemel's central thesis is his titular interpretation of Fergus as a profane re-telling of Perceval, in which Guillaume subverts Chrétien's tale, ‘permeated with a Christian-religious spirit’, through re-focusing the protagonist's quest from the Grail to Galiene and causing his (anti)hero to be motivated by chivalrous rather than religious impulse. Zemel expands on this hypothesis in his fifth chapter, first offering a series of informative chapters exploring: Fergus within the canon of Arthurian Romance; the intertextual dialogue between Guillaume and Chrétien; thorough contextual analysis of Fergus' convoluted Scottish connections; Galiene's foregrounding and function in the text. In his Epilogue, Zemel neatly unites all his themes by considering the textual tradition of the Fergus MSS. Any textual analysis of Fergus must include a parallel exploration of Guillaume's use of Chrétien; Zemel recognises this and

1 D.D.R. Owen (ed. & tr.), Guillaume le Clerc, ‘Fergus of Galloway, knight of King Arthur’. London: Dent, 1991 (Everyman), vii-xiv, 114-169 and Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann, The Evolution of Arthurian Romance, tr. Roger & Margaret Middleton. Cambridge: Cambridge up, 1998.

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does so, offering painstaking deconstructions of Guillaume's ‘creative use of Chrétiens work’ in every chapter, especially his second and third.

A few particularly noteworthy examples of Zemel's explorations include his thought-provoking readings of Guillaume's invocation of classical and biblical allusions, especially the section in his first chapter on Fergus evoking Christ-like symbolism to become the messianic Knight of the Shield (pp. 49-65). He writes imaginatively on the symbolism of the shield, the Grail's profane counterpart and simultaneous symbol of Galiene (pp. 30-31, 105-106) and offers a fascinating reading of Fergus, as character and text, invoking the typological model of figura and implementum, characteristic of medieval biblical exegesis (pp. 112 -114, 123-127). Zemel also wisely acknowledges that in the case of this text, as an intertextual ‘literary comedy’ whose meaning was so heavily dependent upon its audience's knowledge of its source material to produce parodic, or at least humorous effect, a scholarly understanding of the text is inseparable from considerations of context. It is, of course, in dialogue with the audience's prior knowledge of Guillaume's sources that Fergus' humour becomes parodic; to the uninformed, Fergus can be witty and enjoyable, but its multi-layered parodic potential cannot be realised. He is thus right to spend much of his second and third chapters emphasising and exploring the importance of Guillaume's presupposed ‘audience of literary initiates’ (p. 75). Fergus is a text of ambiguities, contradictions and incongruities, galloping joyously along the line between seeming derivative and being colourfully inventive and rather than apologising for this, Zemel rightly celebrates it.

However, Zemel would have better served Fergus by further addressing the historical questions and broader issues relating to romance canonicity. Implicit in these considerations is the question of how the text should be classified. Such distinction is significant since it directly determines Fergus' place and status in the Arthurian canon and the scholarly respect afforded it. Admittedly, one should tread cautiously when affixing terminological labels, since they can have restrictive and far-reaching implications. ‘Parody’ seems the most appropriate name for Guillaume's intertextuality, but it is doubtful whether parodia is an appropriate term for Fergus by the criteria of medieval romance itself. Zemel neatly sidesteps this problem by offering bland, insubstantial evaluations - he makes much of the text as ‘An act of literary play’ (p. 114), which it certainly is, but surely Fergus warrants a more definite term to describe its skilful and intelligent production of humorous effect. Zemel should also have offered further consideration in wider historical terms about why Fergus has not largely figured (with the honorable exceptions of D.D.R. Owen and B. Schmolke-Hasselmann and their bibliographies) in discussion of continental, English, or Anglo-Norman romance. Arguably, this is attributable to the fact that Fergus did not fit important paradigms for earlier romance research, such as comparative consideration of insular versus continental romance, whereas Fergus combines both, being a humorous imitation of Chrétien set in Scotland. Nonetheless, Fergus should be central rather than marginal in considerations of medieval romance, and this foregrounding is unlikely to be accomplished if scholars continue to postulate Fergus, as Zemel does, as little more than ‘a literary game’ (p. 84).

Despite this omission, Roel Zemel has produced a useful and comprehensive study of an overlooked and understudied text, in which he convincingly demonstrates that Fergus is an original and important text entirely worthy of scholarly attention. He fills the critical lacuna admirably, offering a book which will be used profitably by students new to or already familiar with the text. He summarises Fergus and contextualises it scrupulously within the existing criticism on the issues of authorship, date, language and literary definition. At the same time, he also offers significant new readings of the text. But more importantly, Zemel re-animates Fergus, offering new ways of thinking about this forgotten text and bringing it to the forefront of debate in Arthurian Studies. This is a welcome, although long overdue addition to the scholarly canon and Zemel deserves praise for having synthesised the existing arguments with new theses so productively.

Address of the author: University of Pennsylvania, Department of English, 3340 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, pa 19104-6273, usa; [e-mail]