Word: lancelot
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...logical, more intellectual, more "grown-up." The nakedness of Arthurian events seems too simple, the characters sound naive. But the characters and events of Arthur's court are in fact as psychologically complex and possible as those of any novel. If they are considered simplistic, bare chains of events (Lancelot loves Gwenyver but she's married to his lord, Arthur), its's because modern readers and rewriters faced with the intricacy of Middle English have simplified the idiom to an extreme, ignored the subtleties in style and reduced the work to the lowest common denominator of its plot. In this...
...often, in trying to make Malory understandable, Steinbeck explains away all the magic, substituting psychology for enchantment, and sociology for mystery. The frequent analysis of motivation, such as "When he (Lancelot) was confronted with treachery, Lancelot grew frightened, and only then could be cruel," are glib and gratuitous...
More even than his uncertain conception of Malory, Steinbeck's misunderstanding of the nature of the legend itself creates problems in the work. He seems to have had little grasp of the innate flaws in the characters of Arthur, Lancelot or Gwenyver that led them inevitably to their end. He wrote to Otis, "Why this work should come to be known as the Morte d'Arthur I will never know." The comment indicates that he didn't see the story as a series of sevents leading to a climactic and all-encompassing death, a statement about human life...
...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...
...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...