Meaning 'spryngyth, burgenyth, buddyth, and florysshyth': Reading Malory's May Passages

After 1947, Malory criticism was derailed by reactions to Vinaver's Works, with critics pursuing the phantoms of unity and originality. New developments in critical theory were ignored, and criticism remained fixated on formalist concerns. This essay addresses the May passages through insights from deconstructionism, embracing the May passages' complexities and shifting implications. (SA)For the few active Malorians, if not for the world at large, 1933 was a very good year. They had a definitive text to work with, Oskar Sommer's 188991 edition of Caxton's 1485 printing of Le Morte Darthur. There was relatively little real Malory criticism in publication, so the field was largely open. If the biography of the generally presumed author was somewhat unsavory, isolating the text from the author-or indeed from 'extratextual' considerations of any sort-was becoming widely accepted with the development of the New Criticism. True, there was the challenge posed by Eugene Vinaver's publication of Malory in 1929, with its impressive familiarity with Malory's French sources-already largely recognized by scholars and critics, though never examined in such detail with regard to the Morte-and its disturbing assertions that in consulting those sources Malory combined ignorance of their subtle structural complexities with bourgeois insensitivity to their uniquely aristocratic beauties.1 The challenge was, however, not terribly daunting. Malory's work had stood on its own for four and a half centuries, and Vinaver's unique perspective could, in a sense, be set aside. Thus, there was no frantic response to Vinaver from the then small Malorian community.If Vinaver's 1929 work only rippled the Malorian waters, the appearance of his 1947 edition of Malory's Works, based on the Winchester MS, discovered in 1934, generated a major storm, an upheaval which endured for decades. Vinaver's Works became overnight the definitive text, and Malory's relationship to his sources became a far more prominent concern. But it was Vinaver's assertion that the Winchester MS represented the 'real' structure, that Malory wrote eight distinct works which were only assembled in the manuscript and then printed by Caxton as one book with one title, which seemed a threat to Malory's accomplishment, and Malorians rushed to defend the Morte's unity and integrity. In hindsight, the whole uproar looks misinformed and hysterical. The idea of 'unity,' if useful at all, certainly means something quite different in a manuscript age. Chaucer's fifteenth-century readers appear to have had no problem understanding The Canterbury Tales as one distinct work, though the number and order of the tales differed among the various manuscripts in circulation; 'originality'-the other passionate assertion on Malory's behalf-seems to evoke an aesthetic centuries in the future. (Imagine trying to explain the term itself, much less its standing as a literary virtue, to Spenser or Shakespeare or Milton! ['See here, Will, if you want to write a serious tragedy, you can't just recycle King Leir. ']) Nonetheless, books like R.M. Lumiansky's Malory's Originality and Charles Moorman's The Book of Kyng Arthur had two major effects. The first was that Malory criticism stopped in its tracks, and the 'unity debate' became almost its only concern.2 When the debate had waned, unity in its anachronistic sense somehow remained, and Malory's work was now again singular. Though their work now looks simplistic, the defenders of unity and originality had achieved an almost accidental second accomplishment: much of Malory studies had become fixated at the stage of New Criticism in which Lumiansky and Moorman were situated; by the 1980s, they were thirty or forty years behind critical theory in general and the critical approaches to medieval texts in particular. Arguably, they have yet to catch up.A great deal of today's criticism treats the Morte-without acknowledging the fact, perhaps unaware of it-as if it were a novel. …