« Par le sornon connoist on l'ome » Le roman de Perceval ou l'art du romancier
« Par le sornon connoist on l'ome » Perceval's novel or the art of the novelist

Summary/Abstract: The Conte du Graal has constantly interested critics, not so much because of the Grail whose mystique only developed in the 13th century among the prose continuators of Chrétien's novel, as for the enigmas it conceals in its two parts, rather weakly linked by the customary composition "conjointure" to the novelist. Gauvain's quest, the second part of the novel, remains unfinished. In the spirit of what happens to the character from the Ivain and especially the Charrette, Gauvain loses much of his illustrious and protected status and seems to announce the dereliction of a certain supremacy of Arthurian chivalry. Conversely, the young Welshman's quest, structured and full of promise, presents the future Perceval as an ingenuous man whose abruptness has a comic, even caricatural force, as Peter Haidu had previously noted. We could see only an educational novel, but the adventures of these "enfances" where the caricature comes from an obvious sense of reality call for the search for a meaningful, social and psychological reality as well as historical and literary. The hero's adventure sets him apart and takes him away from Arthur and his court to focus on a family environment and on the emancipation of the young man without the Grail being immediately sacred. The purpose is thus to judge the meaning of this caricature in order to try to understand, beyond a reality well-known by listeners of the time, the meaning effects revealed by the hero's choices, his behaviors, suggested by successive nicknames. To this reception which seeks to infer the intentions of the author, our modern reception can add the heuristic vision which situates in its complexity and its completion this final tale put into a novel by Chrétien de Troyes in an attempt to reveal the mysteries of the quest from Perceval.

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