Theresa Crater

Since my latest novel is set in Avalon, it partakes of the rich mythology of that land, particularly the Arthurian romance and Grail quest stories. In this post, Sue Burke talks about what happened when the Arthurian legends came to Spain and how attitudes toward romance made a once popular novel almost disappear.

Written out of history

By Sue Burke

Who loves a love story? Literary critics don’t when they can label it a romance novel, especially if it includes sorcerers and magic. As a consequence, Europe’s first best-selling novel has been almost completely forgotten.

That book is Amadis of Gaul by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, published in 1508. Never heard of it? Maybe you’ve heard of Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes, published in 1605. That book made fun of Amadis and the hundred other novels of chivalry that were its sequels and spin-offs. But the whole thing started much earlier.

Tales of King Arthur, Merlin, and the Knights of the Round Table were brought from Britain to France by Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1170, and from there they spread across Europe. In Spain in the early 1300s, troubadours fused the virtues of the knights Tristan and Lancelot into Amadis, the greatest knight in the world, who lived well before King Arthur but in the same medieval fantasy world.

Amadis loved Princess Oriana, the most beautiful woman in the world, in a story filled with sorcery, enchanted weapons, giants, monsters, and magical locales, along with lots of blood-spattered jousts and battles. Rodríguez de Montalvo collected older versions of the story and created a “corrected and polished” edition for the newly developed printing press. It soon became the most popular book of its time, a favorite of kings, New World conquistadors, and illiterate peasants who attended public readings of books the way we now go to movies.

But even before then, it had critics whose complaints still sound familiar. Around 1380, Spanish chancellor Pero López de Ayala wrote a poem against “books of idle pursuit and proven fictions, Amadis and Lancelot and invented falsities, in which I wasted long hours of my time.”

As novels of chivalry became more popular, the criticisms increased until King Phillip II of Spain banned their printing in 1590, although he had been a fan of them in his youth. Cervantes wrote in the preface to Don Quixote that his aim was “the destruction of the ill-founded machinations of the books of chivalry.”

Still, they remained popular, and though they couldn’t be printed or reprinted, old copies were passed from reader to reader, and new books were written by hand and entered circulation — at least 20 new longhand novels of chivalry, neatly bound like printed books, appeared in the 17th century. They had dashing heroes devoted to beautiful princesses, but not always the “correct” morals. Amadis himself was conceived outside of wedlock, as was his son with Oriana. Later novels became even more racy.

Women loved these books, which made them especially dangerous. A Spanish friar called them “golden pills that, with a delicious layer of entertainment, flatter the eyes to fill the mouth with bitterness and poison the soul with venom [and ruin a young woman's] honest estate of modesty and shame.”

I don’t think women loved these books for the sex — that’s a male fantasy. Renaissance women loved them because in these fantasies, and in contrast to their real world, women were important. Ladies and damsels appear on every page. There are damsels in distress, of course, but so much more: powerful queens and sorceresses, schemers, healers, best friends, brave errand-runners, witnesses, assistants, lovers, temptresses, and beloved wives — even female knights.

How could self-appointed arbiters of literary quality take such books seriously? Amadis of Gaul and the century of chivalric literature that it inspired were too subversive to include in the official history, and when they were mentioned, they were vilified as trash by people who had never read them.

Even today, genre novels — fantasy, science fiction, and romance — remain ridiculed as sub-literate and childish. And yet, like Amadis of Gaul, they sell well, proof that someone loves them. I hope we never forget them, new and old. That’s why I’m translating Amadis of Gaul from medieval Spanish to English, a chapter at a time, at http://amadisofgaul.blogspot.com/

Today I’m guest blogging at Justine Graykin’s website about what going digital will bring to the publishing industry. Should you buy those eReaders now?

Read Stephen Mehler’s blog on his upcoming tour of Egypt in October.

If We did not Laugh…

By Justine Graykin

Humor is mysterious.  What we laugh at varies from person to person and from culture to culture.  But that we laugh is well-nigh universal.  Babies start within months of birth.  Even primates seem to enjoy a good joke, generally at someone else’s expense. Why did we evolve this capacity for humor?

It may well be that, as we developed the ability to understand the world around us, we needed a sense of humor to survive.  How else could we deal with concepts like death, futility, and hopelessness? Once we began to realize how nasty, brutish and short life was, we needed something to get us through the day. Finding our situation (or somebody else’s) ridiculously funny may have done the trick.

We tend to take our art seriously.  Think how we talk about it.  Important works discuss serious subjects.  Other books are just for fun.  Shakespeare had a delightful, often naughty sense of humor, but that is considered gravy.  The meat of his work is the profound, dark, serious commentaries on the human condition.

There’s a value judgment here which skews our perspective, and inclines us to dismiss humor as frivolous and unnecessary.  There’s a certain puritanical pathology in this dismissal that does us all a disservice.  It conjures a vision of scowling men dressed in black writing up prohibitions on music and dancing because it takes people’s thoughts away from the proper contemplation of higher things.

No wonder depression is epidemic in our culture.

Humor is critical to human mental health.  It is the sugar that makes the medicine go down. We can deal with a lot of tension if we just get to release it all now and then with a good belly laugh.  The most grim and oppressive enemy loses a good deal of his power over you if you can but contrive to drop his pants.

But humor can be difficult.  It can be overdone, it can be inappropriate, it can be, well, just not funny.  It takes a skillful hand to coax the right
tone and balance between the serious and the smile.  It’s a bit like cooking.  Consider humor to be a spice or a condiment which must be used wisely, and with a certain restraint, otherwise it overpowers the other flavors.  There’s many types of humor, some sweet, some spicy, some bitter, some subtle and some strong.  The choice of what humor you use depends on the effect you want.

And, like cooking, it’s largely a matter of taste.  Humor evades analysis.  Making a serious study of humor is almost a contradiction in terms.  It is like trying to understand why a fresh peach is delicious by studying its chemistry. You may get some insights; you may even be able to duplicate the flavor in a laboratory.  But the best way understand the flavor of peaches is to eat lots of peaches.

The best way to understand humor is to immerse yourself in it. Read lots of it and notice what works.  But also listen to comedians and comedic actors.  Groucho Marx, Robin Williams, the acerbic exchanges of Spencer Tracy, Kate Hepburn and Carey Grant, anything by Mel Brooks. (Okay, I’m showing my age here, but you get the point.) This is how you get a feel for humorous dialog.  If you watch hours and hours of it for years it begins to come naturally to you.  You get an instinct for it.  And it will begin to merge effortlessly into your writing.

Life is too important to take seriously, and even the finest dish benefits from a touch of seasoning.\

Science Fiction doesn’t have to be cold to be hard.
www.justinegraykin.com

I blogged at Delphi’s Daughters on Morgen le Fey.