La Mort le Roi Artu: The Tragedy Machine

After the Queste's altitude, the Mort Artu descends into air with no grace in it. The survivors return; Lancelot, warned and shriven, relapses with the queen "more foolishly than before"; and the machine starts. What distinguishes this tragedy from every other medieval ending is its engineering: no devil intervenes and no marvel is needed — cause locks into cause with actuarial calm. A poisoned apple meant for another kills a knight at the queen's table and puts her under judgment; the fair maid of Escalot dies of unrequited love for Lancelot and her boat drifts to Camelot bearing the letter that indicts him; Agravain speaks aloud what everyone knows; the rescue of the condemned queen kills Gaheriet, the one brother Gawain cannot forgive; Gawain's vengeance drags Arthur to war in France; Mordred — here revealed as Arthur's own incestuously begotten son, the sin of the king surfacing at last — seizes the kingdom; and on Salisbury Plain the tradition's bleakest battle annihilates the Round Table almost to a man. Above it all turns the image the book made canonical: Arthur's dream of Fortune's wheel, the king raised to the summit and told, as the wheel turns, that such is earthly glory's whole contract.

Read the Mort asking the unit's question with real pressure, because the text supports three incompatible answers: it is a tragedy of sin (the adultery and the incest reap their harvest), a tragedy of fortune (the wheel turns for tall and small alike), and a tragedy of form (the cycle must end; the interlace's threads must all be cut; the book itself says no more can be told "without lying"). The closing movement — the wounded king commanding Girflet to cast Excalibur into the lake, the knight's two lies, the hand that catches and brandishes the sword, the barge of ladies — is among the most perfect endings in literature, and Malory's English rendering of it (Unit 29) will be the version the language keeps.