Parzival Book

Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival is one of those stories where the more you put into it, the more you get out of it. I just want to preface this review by saying that any review of this book will be lacking, as the allusions, subtexts and connections made by Wolfram are truly astounding. This really is one of those books where each re-reading will bring out new ideas worth exploring further. My focus here will be relegated to one area that particularly struck me on my first reading.

Parzival, among other things, is in many respects a reflection of the collective western European conscience during the horror of the Crusades, as well as its sense of doubt that they were acting in God's will when they finally lost control of Jerusalem (about 20 years before Wolfram wrote Parzival). There is also a strong indication of the seeds of the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Europe's eventual secularism. I was originally attracted to the story because of the more mystical elements of it, in the allusions to various elements of Kabbalah and alchemy, and there is a lot I could say about that still, but my immediate focus shifted after finishing the book to more socio-historical concerns.

First of all, and significantly for a society which was extremely patriarchal, women are the true heroes here, showing the men through example how to live. It is said that only men seek the Grail, because women already possess it. While most women in the story are "free of falsity", humble and gentle (with the exception of Orgeleuse and Cundrie, who don't take shit from anyone but still teach much to the men around them - perhaps more than anyone else), the men are mostly prancing around the countryside looking to start shit for nothing more than vanity, pride and fame. The men wear a thin veneer of humility and honor through their knightly traditions and ways, but they are usually just going through the motions without understanding the underlying meaning, and will jump at the chance to deviate from those ways if it will benefit them in some way. The arc of the storyline itself is embedded in the names of the three main women in Parzival's life: Herzeloyde, his mother ("Heart's Sorrow"), Condwiramurs ("Love Leads the Way"), and Repanse de Schoye ("Overflowing Happiness").

There are also several political threads running through the story. Parzival's father, Gahmuret, claims he will only serve the best and most powerful lord, who ends up being Muslim. That alone must have raised some eyebrows among some of the elite who were familiar with Wolfram's book. This notion is later reinforced when Feirefiz, also a Muslim, is shown to be one of the most upstanding knights in the story, not to mention the fact that King Arthur, the ideal of European royalty, is sometimes portrayed as something of a reactionary dolt instead of as a true leader.

Now the Grail, in one of its main symbolic functions, represents a mobile altar where the Eucharist would be served, which would have been used anytime Mass was performed throughout the story. This effectively means that while Parzival is roaming the earth looking for the Grail, it is always right there, under his and the readers' noses, but we cannot see it for what it is initially (ever?). Blindness is infact a running theme throughout the novel. There is a narrative device which frames this wonderfully when in the beginning of Parzival's adventures he ignorantly kills Sir Ither, the Red Knight, by throwing a javelin through his eye, and at the end of the story, his brother Feirefiz is granted the ability to see the Grail when he becomes baptized.

I believe this story is where western Europe begins to show the extent of it's infatuation with Aristotle. Without going into too much detail for the sake of brevity, Plato essentially believed in ideal Forms as the true reality of our world and often reads more like a Taoist at times than what we might think of today as a philosopher, while his student Aristotle broke with this and said objects and things in and of themselves were the extent of our reality. Basically, it is the difference between "as above, so below", and "as below, so above". It might seem like a negligible difference at first, but there are very wide-ranging implications involved, especially if one assumes one or the other without ever really asking themselves why on anything more than a superficial level. This relates to the story insofar as the people who can no longer experience a mystical connection with God begin searching instead for God within physical objects, thus creating the need to search for a Grail. In the real world during this time, the Catholic Church was doing essentially the same thing by misinterpreting the idea of a Holy Land as an actual, physical location which God somehow needed us to take back for Him. This line of thinking continued after the Crusades in the form of Dante's vision of hell as a physical location (instead of as a spiritual orientation), and in the Protestant's general embrace of chiliasm, which had already been declared a heresy by the early Church. It is worth mentioning here that the Crusades began 50 years after the Great Schism, when the more scholastically inclined Western Church officially broke off from the more mystically inclined Eastern Churches. I believe this is at least part of the point which Wolfram was trying to make, albeit subtly because of the sensitivity of the issue, because his description of the Grail procession borrows much from the Byzantine Rite of St. John Chrysostom, which was (and still is) in use in the Orthodox Church. Wolfram was also writing his story only 3-5 years after the Fourth Crusade, in which the ancient seat of the Eastern Church, Constantinople, was sacked by Crusaders who were diverted from their original goal because of lack of funds. There is also the thread in the story of brother fighting brother based on ignorance and naivety, in Parzival's fight with his brother Feirefiz, but also in his encounters with Gawan and Ither, whom are his cousins. Wolfram purposefully made all of the main characters in the story related to each other to make a larger point about how, in his view, all humans were related as sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. In this view, all war is reprehensible as an act of fratricide, and merely a replay of the story of Cain and Abel.

Of course, the seeds of the Renaissance, and ultimately, secular humanism as we know it today, go back much further than this, but this story in my mind really serves as a sort of tipping point in the history of this idea, where we see it transformed from the notion of a few people writing in books to an a priori way of looking at the world adopted by a whole society.