Word: arthurian
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Percy elevates the stuff of soap opera to a medieval morality tale. The parallels between Arthurian chivalry, Southern gentility and Christian militancy are in fact a single strand in Percy's fabric. He is a severely and sincerely Christian novelist who may speak from the fictional mouth of a potential madman to acknowledge the difference between a Cassandra and a crank...
Lancelot's book-length monologue is addressed not only to the reader but also to Percival, a priest-physician and boyhood friend. His name rings of both the author's own and of Lancelot's companion in the Arthurian legend. He is silent, staring at a girl out the window until the book closes with his response to Lancelot that is Percy's hope for a rejuvenated Christianity...
...believe these stories to be moral parables," he wrote to Otis just before he gave up working on The Acts, in August 1959. On this assumption, he moralizes the Arthurian legends--changing them from tales to lessons, from eternal image to example. Retelling the tragedy of Arthur, or that of Lancelot, he optimistically leaves loopholes by which these characters could have altered their destiny without changing their own nature. Such rationalizing, moralizing and ordering destroys the essence of tragedy, castrating the work in much the same way that his diagramming of the characters' motives deprives them of life...
Steinbeck has tried to feel the Arthurian apestry, not just to look at it from a distance. The Acts tries to re-weave the fabric of this legend in colorfast and pre-shrunk threads of modern idiom. Casting nostalgia aside, one must admit that any tapestry furnishing the room of a modern mind must be able to go in the wash, to be treated as something useable and abusable, not as a museum piece. Steinbeck has come a long way towards making Arthur wash...
...pattern, so he re-ordered it to make more sense. The Acts, though a noble effort, fails because Steinbeck refuses to accept the irrationalities of questing struggle and fate in Arthur's day, and by implication in ours. But if we are to understand Arthur and the Arthurian myth, it will be not with intellect but with emotion, with that part of us which is unashamedly irrational and which, without needing to know what "sytthen" or "clypped" signify, comprehends the desperate love of the woman pouring out her desire to Lancelot...