Malory: A Stylistic Approach

Description

This study is an attempt to describe the Malorian presentation of reality and to indicate the nature of Malory's permanent artistic value through an examination of his narrative style. It is suggested that Malory's important originality as a stylist lies not in any innovations he makes, but in his tendency to emphasize certain devices he inherits from his sources and to de-emphasize others. Malory narrows and intensifies rather than broadens and enriches. The first chapter of this study is concerned with a group of stylistic devices popular with Malory and other late medieval prose writers, but rare in later narrative prose. These devices express a vision of a reality in which values are fixed, and as "real," as objective and observable as physical phenomena, if not more so. We see things and men in terms of their conformity or non-conformity to norms rather than in terms of their individuality. What matters is rank within a category; we are not interested in the unique. As we see in the second chapter of this study, Malory focuses more narrowly on the normative, the excellent-withln-kind than his sources do. He is, we might say, further from the novel than they are. Malory has a marked tendency to "thin out" phenomenal parti­ culars. He also tends to cut or thin out passages devoted to psychological perplexity; indeed, he tends to de-emphasize or sim­ plify all kinds of references to the inner life and emotional states. The third chapter considers some of the ways in which Malory achieves emotional intensity in the last two tales of his very unnovelistic Works. Malory's respectful, painstaking narrator is most important in making us believe in and revere the events described. Also important are temporal distancing, an "autumnal" atmosphere in the seventh tale, and a large number of verbal and situational echoes of the seventh tale in the eighth. It is suggested that the force and mood of the tragedy are greatly enhanced by the multicentric and ultimately mysterious nature of the fall of Arthurian civilization.