The Continuations: An Unfinished Book's Afterlife

Chrétien's fragment was too alive to leave alone. Within a decade continuators set to work, and by about 1230 the Conte du Graal traveled in manuscripts swollen to four times its size. The First Continuation (once ascribed to "Wauchier") abandons Perceval for Gauvain, who reaches the Grail castle and partially welds the broken sword — and in this telling the asking of the question begins to restore rivers and greenery to a wasted land: the Waste Land motif, only implicit in Chrétien, here steps forward. The Second Continuation brings Perceval back to the castle by inches. Manessier finishes the story with vengeance, the healing of the king, and Perceval's end as a hermit; Gerbert de Montreuil, working perhaps simultaneously, inserts a vast moralizing course-correction. Around the whole accreted two prologues — the Elucidation, with its haunting pre-story of violated well-maidens whose rape by a king causes the land's wasting, and the Bliocadran, a biography for Perceval's father.

Scholars long treated the Continuations as quarry rather than literature; this unit treats them as evidence of the highest value. They are the tradition's first interpretive community caught in the act: each continuator is a reading of Chrétien, and their disagreements — is the Grail's logic vengeance, healing, or holiness? is the hero's obstacle sin or ignorance? — map exactly the fault lines along which Robert de Boron and the prose cycles will shortly rebuild everything. Read selectively (the corpus is enormous) but read genuinely, watching one motif — the broken sword, or the Waste Land — evolve across tellers.