The Fisher King

One of the central symbolic figures in the literary tradition of the Holy Grail is the Wounded King, also known as the Rich Fisher or the Fisher King. And the wonderful thing about this figure is that it possesses no cultural or literary stability. In Malory and the Galahad tradition, the Wounded King is a plastic concept and migrates from figure to figure (King Pellam, King Pelles, King Pescheour, and the unidentified “Maymed King” healed by Galahad) in a logic common to dreams. Some critics read this as a problem Malory never ironed out, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think nailing down a stable marker for the Fisher King would subvert the spiritual truth that the Wounded King is, in the final analysis, an Everyman, a fact that is the central theme in Terry Gilliam’s film The Fisher King, in which the distinction between Wounded King and Grail Knight is intentionally blurred.

In Chrétien de Troyes’ unfinished Perceval, the Story of the Grail (late 12^th century) and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (written in 1210) the Wounded King motif is confined to only one character which invites attention to the healing itself and the nature of the wound. While in Malory and the Galahad cycle the plasticity of the woundedness of the Wounded King can easily invoke a meditation on Original Sin, the stability of a particular king allows a more personal meditation on the relationship of the individual to another’s suffering, which is why, in both Chrétien and Wolfram, the failure of Parzival to ask the question burning in his heart while in the presence of the Grail and Anfortas, the Fisher King, strikes the reader with a deep unease. In this way, Parzival is the true Everyman, because we are all as guilty and, hopefully, as remorseful as the naïve young knight, which is why his eventual return to the Grail Castle and asking of the question arrives with such profound feelings of relief and beatitude.

Wolfram writes of Parzival’s return to the Fisher King:

“All in tears then, Parzival said, ‘Tell me where the Grail is kept here. If God’s goodness triumphs in me, this throng of people shall be witness to it.’

“Then, facing in that direction, he genuflected thrice in honor of the Trinity, praying that help might be vouchsafed for this sorrowful man’s pain of heart. He rose and said, ‘Uncle, what is it that troubles you?’”

In the continuation of Chrétien, the questions are Why does the lance bleed? and Whom does the Grail serve? The beautiful thing about these questions is that none of them are ever answered. And that is how it should be.

However, in the 1981 film Excalibur, not only are the questions answered but Arthur himself is the Wounded King:

I actually love that John Borman, the film’s director, takes liberties in making the story his own. If there is one tradition in the long trajectory of Grail literature to the modern day, it is that there is no traditional understanding of the Grail, only misty suggestions, intuitions, portents.

Nevertheless, a lot of people really want the Grail to be only one thing and want the tradition (whichever tradition) to be only one, stable, reliable edifice, unchanging until the end of time. Such a rage for stability borders on instability. That is to say that the projection of stability upon our idea of anything—be it the Holy Grail, the Catholic Church (or any other ecclesial tradition), The United States of America (or any other country), or, dare I say?, our concept of God—indicates psychological and emotional instability, and therefore some variety of mental illness, from mild to severe.

Brother, what ails you?

The thing is, all of these concepts upon which we project so much hope and invest so much of our identity prove to be nothing but glittering generalities, empty signifiers that collapse as soon as we begin to question them (my chapter on the Grail in Sophia in Exile is titled “Filling the Empty Signifier” for precisely this reason.) But we almost never do question our precious glittering generalities. Doing so would threaten the very core of our constructed identities.

Nevertheless, we can still entertain these concepts with genuine interest and the desire for wisdom. Just don’t make a religion of it.

As you can tell, one of my takes about the Fisher King is that he represents all of us—as does Parzival (Galahad? Not so much. Sorry, Malcolm.) But I also think some medieval cultural criticism snuck into the Grail literature.

For one thing, as many scholars have observed, the Grail literature arose following two (maybe three) gigantic movements in Western European Christendom: the removal of the chalice from the laity following the reforms of the Fourth Lateran Council and exposure to Byzantine Christianity (the Grail procession in the literature has not a little in common with the Great Entrance of Byzantine liturgy). The third movement, obviously, is the Crusades which made the exposure to Byzantine liturgy possible for many Crusaders from the West. But let’s leave that for another time.

For another, I think the corruption of the papacy (which is not, as our Rad Trad bros might have it, a “Modernist” problem) probably influenced the figure of the Fisher King. The Fisher King, like St. Peter (the first pope, for those who might not know), was a fisherman. That’s kind of an icepick-in-the-forehead kind of clue. In most versions of the story, the Fisher King was wounded “in the thigh,” which implies impotence. This impotence motif provided Jessie Weston with a green light for interpreting the entire Grail tradition as a kind of Frazerian agricultural mythos. I certainly think that’s in there, but I don’t think that’s all there is to it. But while impotence is not a requirement for being elevated (what a word!) to the papacy, fertility and procreation are not exactly in the job description. (I won’t get into the introjected Neoplatonic Manichaeism or Catharism that spread into the Church as a virus early on, but you get the idea).

In the back of my mind, over at least the past thirty years, I have always thought that at least a resemblance or resonance exists between the figure of the impotent Fisher King and the papacy. I thought this was my idea—only to find out that Arthur Edward Waite stole it from me almost 120 years ago! The nerve of that time-travelling magician! Here’s what he has to say about it in The Hidden Church of the Holy Grail (1909):

“I do not confess that it would be putting the case truly if it were said that at the period of the Graal literature the highest minds of the Church had grown weary of the Vatican and all its ways. I think that for long, and for very long indeed, there had existed an uncompetitive stream of tendency which raised no voice, but pursued its path unobtrusively towards a very high term. It had no remedies to offer on the practical side of things and it was too wise to denounce abuses which it was powerless to remedy…. At a later period I do think that the unknown mystics who wrote upon spiritual alchemy had got to see not only where the path of sanctity led, but that the Church as a whole had lost the power of leading. They were made circumspect by the anxiety of their position, and they spoke only in parables….

“… one might be disposed at first sight to conclude that the Graal Church may stand for Latin Christianity and the Rich Fisherman for its central authority. He is the Keeper of the Divine Mysteries, the possessor of the valid forms, but he and his environment have been laid waste by the spirit of the world.”

I think there is much of truth in these insights. It is more and more obvious that the hierarchy of the Catholic Church (but not the Mystery of the Catholic Church itself—the Hidden Church of the Holy Grail) has without question been laid waste by the spirit of the world.

At the end of Le Morte D’Arthur, Malory reports on the story of departure of Arthur for Avalon after the Battle of Camlann. But he also cites the inscription on Arthur’s burial site: Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus. “Here lies Arthur, the once and future king.” (Malory was able to live pretty securely with what John Keats called “Negative Capability.”) Similarly, I can’t quite shake myself that the Church itself is in such a place—that we are indeed inhabiting a kind of bardo state in which we await (though we might not be aware of it) the arrival of the Once and Future Church.

To all those who wander in the Wasteland.