Achieving the Grail

Everyone knows King Arthur had something to do with the Quest for the Holy Grail. Any one reading this blog probably knows that Galahad succeeded in the Quest. But what exactly did Galahad do with regard to the Grail in order to succeed? What was the goal of the Quest? To discover it in some forgotten dungeon? To bring it to Camelot? To save it from destruction? To pick it out from among a tableful of grails so Sean Connery can drink from it?

Having just finished Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur for the second time in five years, you’d think I would know the goal of the Quest. But this point isn’t really very clear to me. Malory often uses the phrase “achieving the Quest of the Holy Grail” or simply “achieving the Grail,” but he doesn’t ever explain what the phrase actually means. Part of the problem is that Malory tried to collate all the French stories on Arthur that he could find, even where they contradicted each other. For instance, at one point he reports that King Pelles is the Maimed King. And yet, when Galahad gets to Castle Corbenic, Pelles brings out another king altogether and asks Galahad to heal the grievous wounds in his thighs. So having placed odd mistakes like this one in the crucial story, it isn’t surprising that Malory didn’t give us a crystal clear picture of what the goal of the Quest for the Holy Grail actually was. Maybe the sources just couldn’t be reconciled on the issue.

One interpretation is that the goal of the knights on this Quest was simply to see the Grail. Certainly when Lancelot gets close to the Grail in Corbenic, his only desire is to lay his eyes on the sacred vessel. He pays no heed to the warnings that a sinful man should come no closer, though, and falls down in a stupor that lasts twenty-four days, one day for each year of his sinfulness. When Galahad, righteous enough to get closer than his father, reaches the Grail, he sees a vision of the Crucifixion coming out of it and hears a voice from Heaven telling him that he is witnessing some of the secrets of Jesus. So again, it seems that simply seeing the Grail (or the visions inside it) is the point of the Quest. This theory poses two problems, though. First, the Quest is begun when the Grail appears to the knights of the Round Table in Camelot. So they’ve already seen it. How is seeing it a second time more special than seeing it a first time? Second, even though it eventually takes Galahad a couple of years to find the Grail, it’s in a castle all the time that many knights are familiar with, and it’s seen every day by King Pelles and his daughter Elaine, people whom Lancelot has known for quite some time (in the case of Elaine, known in the biblical sense).

Alternatively, maybe the Quest is simply a matter of following the Grail to the home of the Maimed King (whoever he might be) so that Galahad, the only knight pure enough to perform the miracle, can heal his dolorous wounds with the blood of Christ still lingering on the spear of Longinus, the soldier who pierced his side on the cross, and end the curse on the Waste Land. But then if healing the Maimed King is the true goal, why, when the Grail appears at Arthur’s feast, do all the knights depart on the quest when they all know that Galahad is the only one worthy of handling the holy blade?

The thing is, the tale of the Holy Grail is that rare story actually made better by its plot holes. How do the knights know that the appearance of the Grail is a call to go on a Quest? They just do, and our lack of understanding only speaks to the power of the Grail and the holiness of the Quest. Why do they all leave when they know Galahad is the only one who can achieve the Quest and when they know that the mass departure means the end of the Fellowship of the Round Table? They just do, and the lack of explanation only tells us that had we been there we, too, would simply have understood that a futile search for the mysteries of Christ was worth the loss of everything that was good about Camelot. Why does Galahad take two years to find a castle the location of which is known? He just does, and the geographical mystery makes the reader feel the sacred nature of the Quest since no noble act should be done lightly and quickly.

So Malory may have left these gaps because, as in the case of the identity of the Maimed King, he tried to fit in too many contradictory sources and just left out everything that caused problems. And he might have left mysteries unsolved because he knew the story would then resonate with more awe. But I can mention a third possibility. He may well have skimped on explanation only as a matter of established tradition. Earlier versions of the Grail story have their own prominent lacuna. In some of the prior forms, King Pelles tests the worthiness of each knight who reaches the castle that houses the Holy Grail by telling the knight that he is allowed to ask one question and that it must be the right question. Only Percival, the knight who achieves the Quest in the earliest manifestations of the story, satisfies the Alex Trebek of medieval romance by coming up with the right question. We learn the questions asked by several of the knights who arrive before Percival: How did the Grail get here? Who stabbed the Maimed King? Is that really Christ’s blood on the spear? What am I supposed to do now? Is Elaine seeing anyone? If Monty Python had been in charge of the story at this early date, these lame attempts would have gotten their respective knights rightfully tossed into the canyon. I may have remembered some of those questions incorrectly. But what I haven’t forgotten is that Percival’s question isn’t revealed to us; we only read that he is told that he has asked the right question and proven himself worthy of bearing the spear and healing the Maimed King. Movie critics made a huge deal out of Bill Murray’s inaudible words to Scarlett Johansson at the end of Lost in Translation, as if such a thing had never been done ever before in the history of storytelling. I’m here to declare that Percival’s unreported line, tantalizingly hidden from readers eight hundred years before Sofia Coppola ever knew how to hold (or withhold) a pen, is exactly twenty-one times more interesting than Bill Murray’s whisper.

Now, when I write my own enduring and beloved version of the Arthurian legends (you can read about another of my ideas for this grand project here), I plan on restoring the test of the question. Galahad will be the one who achieves the Quest in my book; the story of Lancelot stumbling into Corbenic and of Pelles knowing that a son of Lancelot’s named Galahad is destined to heal him so that he must cast a spell on his daughter making Elaine look like Gwenevere and enabling her to entice Lancelot to beget the destined child within her is just too weird and wonderful to pass up. Twenty years and many chapters later, it won’t be enough that Galahad has been mystically led by the Holy Grail to the home he doesn’t remember, that Pelles now sees his grandson for the first time since he was a baby, that Elaine sees her son grown into the greatest knight in the world, or that Merlin has created a magical seat at the Round Table that offers in glowing golden gothic letters the message “This Is The Dude You’ve Been Waiting For” when Galahad places his pure rump in it. Pelles will still have to make sure he has the right guy by instructing Galahad to ask one question. And I will have it happen this way because I know the question Galahad asks!