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language: English
country: UK
year: 1955
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 10.5.22-18.5.22, 25.9.25-27.9.25
“It is my brother Gawain you should ask,” Sir Gareth said, and leant over, his face close, with the solemn affectation of those whom alcohol has slightly affected. And then: “Why was it not said that he achieved the Grail? Will you do him justice now that you have seen it with your own eyes?”
“It is not in my power,” said Dalyn. “Truly, I would that it were.”
“I thought that you could do whatever thing you chose,” said Gareth, “not being a sworn knight with a certain thing laid on him.”
“We too are in bonds,” said Dalyn. It would have been too complicated to try to explain to Gareth of Orkney about Lord Horny and the subs and all that. It would have meant pulling him through a narrow door into another world.
Naomi Mitchison’s To the Chapel Perilous is a book about this: tensions and frictions and unexpected doors opening between different worlds. the opening of doors. entering into and moving between histories.
the novel follows two journalists — Lienors, writing for the Camelot Chronicle, and Dalyn, writing for the Northern Pict — who have been assigned to report on the Grail quest. as the novel begins, they have been waiting at the Chapel Perilous for some time, watching knight after knight enter and emerge bruised and broken. on this day, however, many knights enter, and all of them leave the Chapel with what appears to be the Grail — that is, every knight bears the Grail, or something that might be the Grail, each convinced he has the Grail. (Lienors and Dalyn, recognizing the untenability of this truth as an account of the end of the Grail quest, settle on Galahad’s as the “real” Grail, for news purposes, a decision that continues to haunt them throughout the novel.)
these are the central worlds with which the novel is concerned: that of modern journalism — with photographers and sub(editor)s and demanding editors (Dalyn’s, colloquially called “Lord Horny” or “Lord H”, is certainly a (literal) devil and may be the Devil) and both political and readership considerations — and that of chivalric romance. I am particularly obsessed with the passage I quoted from above, both because it reads as kind of gay and, more importantly, because it really drives home the novel’s project. as I said when I read the book the first time, what’s so striking about this scene, and the novel as a whole, is the way it brings two highly conventionalized but radically different social worlds into contact: Gareth and Dalyn are both aware that their lives are lived according to very different rules, norms, and patterns, and neither of them quite knows how to communicate across that difference — Gareth can only try to bring Dalyn into the realm of romance, while Dalyn’s attempts to rebuff Gareth in those terms fail repeatedly because he doesn’t, really, understand the world of romance any better than Gareth understands journalism. in the end, the best Dalyn can do is to deflect Gareth with the promise that “I will surely call you should I be in dire need” — a deflection which, too, fails, because Gareth responds by giving him a token of his intention to fulfill this promise.
and yet, in spite of these differences, these worlds coexist, interact, and interpenetrate: the novel follows the slow dissolution of the perceived boundaries between worlds — not only newspaper journalism and chivalric quest but also, for example, pagan and Christian. (Graves was definitely an influence here, particularly in connection to Lienors, who has some relation to officially frowned-upon implicitly supernatural “sources” and especially the “White Lady”. but of course in the end even this boundary blurs: “I didn’t know that the pattern of the White Lady was going to be the pattern of the Grail” — which strikes me as as much a subsumption of the pagan into the Christian as vice versa.)
central to this dissolution is the concept of story — both a story in the sense of a knight on a quest and a story in the sense of an article submitted to a newspaper editor. as Lienors puts it, it’s all a matter of patterns — “different patterns that people can make themselves into. Or be made into if they aren’t strong and knowledgeable”. these stories, these patterns seem to Lienors — and, indeed, to others — to be in conflict (“at any one time and place there’s always one pattern on top”), but I’m not convinced that this is true. while different stories may be in tension and at times even in contradiction, part of the novel’s project is precisely to interrogate these tensions and contradictions; Lienors points to fear as the root of the conflicts between stories: “Most people are much too frightened to be tolerant”.
Lienors and Dalyn are painfully conscious of their role not (only) in transmitting news — and so history, a kind of story — but (also) in creating and determining news — and so history. they are storytellers, constrained as all storytellers by political, social, and economic considerations — will Arthur and Merlin (Lienors’s editor) frown on a story that assigns the “true” Grail to Lancelot? will anyone in a position of power stand for the story of Gawain’s Grail, the Cauldron of Plenty that feeds the hungry and fulfills deepest desires, obviating class power and the fear of or desire for an afterlife?
But should it come to [humans’] knowledge — knowledge is the word I emphasize — that the Grail quest could have more than one ending, that it might be explicable in other but the strictest terms of black and white —
this puts Dalyn and Lienors in a precarious — and unsustainable — position: they are meant to be outside of history, and yet the storytelling decisions they make do not merely report history but define it, setting further events in motion — they are not outside history at all, but caught up in and, indeed, actively shaping it, partly unwillingly, caught as they are within journalism as wage labor. the novel’s climax brings this tension to a head, forcing Lienors and Dalyn to choose: abandon history for good, or step fully into it and embrace a role not as ostensibly neutral, “objective” observers of history but as active agents in it — to participate in the events of the story, not simply in its telling.
[…] yet, when she was saying it, she was not a news-girl, but one of the actors, tangled in the action, in history.
as the hermit who watches the Chapel Perilous tells Lienors and Dalyn at the beginning of the novel, finding the Grail is only the beginning. history does not end; it only begins again.
The land is no longer waste.
moods: adventurous, emotional, inspiring, lighthearted, reflective