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As I noted yesterday, I attended other panels than those for the Tales after Tolkien Society at the 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies. One of them bears in on my formal academic specialty, Malory; its title was Malory and Causality. While I did have a bit of trouble getting to the panel--I had initially set up in a room across the hall from it, having misread the program--I enjoyed it greatly, as the papers presented in it were quite good.

The first of them was Marc Guidry's "'He told him not the cause': Motivations without Explanation in Le Morte Darthur." He contested the received wisdom voiced by Vinaver that Malory eschews hypotaxis at the levels of sentence and narrative structure. Instead, Malory appears to deploy the construction in his own native dialogue, rather than presenting it in direct narration or in the materials he retains from his sources. Guidry asserted that the sentence structures mirror the larger narrative structure of the sprawling text, particularly in the overarching structure constructed through presentations of adultery in the text. It was a complex, nuanced work that will do well as a longer version, which I look forward to reading if it is ever put into print.

Scott Troyan's "Chivalric Causality or Chivalric Casualty? Knighthood, Quests, and the Failure of Rhetoric in Malory's Morte" came next. The unity of Malory's work is much discussed and contested, and the conflicting rhetorics of chivalry and Christianity in the text offer no clear resolution to that contestation. The text deploys chiasmus--the closely-placed inversion of the order of key terms and phrases, such as JFK's "Ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country"--to produce tension and promote the perception of causation, drawing the reader along by encouraging repeated recontextualization. Of note was the assertion that the meaning of the text may always already be in place, but uncovering that meaning is far from a given.

Benjamin Utter's "Malory's Secular Pelagianism: Worshyp, Will, and Heroic Destiny in the Morte Darthur," an excellent paper, followed, Utter argued that Malory's text partakes of both the "peculiarly English" Pelagian self-determination and Augustinian predetermination. Self-salvation and worldly salvation are pried in the text, but only those who are born of already-heroic or ennobled bloodlines seem to be able to effect or receive them. A false sense of social mobility, exemplified by Beaumains and others, is thus presented. (The implications for further analysis of the work raised by Utter's excellent reading are somewhat startling. Malory would appear to be asserting himself as orthodox, perhaps as a means to seek clemency or pardon for his misdeeds and political misadventures.)

Leigh Smith concluded the panel with "Two Unhappy Knights and Lady Fortune: What Boethius Meant to Malory." As the title suggests, the paper explicated the Boethian in Malory, which likely derived from both prevailing cultural discourse (one comment noted that "Boethius was in the air at the time") and from Chaucer's Boece (the constraints of conference talk precluded doing more to tie the latter in more fully). In Malory, "hap" refers both to bad luck and the contrivances of Providence; it is both chance and Fortune, and the two are not at all the same. They collude to bring about the tragedy of Camelot, aided by poor decision-making at the Round Table. It is an important concept, although it must be remembered that importance is not the same thing as casuation.

The Malory panel was not the last one I attended outside of Society work, to be sure. Reporting on the conference, though, is outside the other work to which I must attend today. I expect I will offer another installment of conference reporting tomorrow...