A Tentative Theory of Feirefiz

We finished on Thursday with mention of the profound strangeness of the backstory Wolfram invents for his text of Parzival: translated from the French version of "Master Kyot," which is in turn translated from the "heathenish script" authored by "the infidel Flegetanis" (232), who apparently learned it through astrology. This fictional genesis of the poem can, I think, be connected to our main preoccupation from Thursday's class, Feirefiz and the nature and quality of his conversion. Is there a way in which the hybrid, exuberant, Love-obsessed, ultimately (if just technically) sanctified character exemplifies or encapsulates the hybrid, exuberant, Love-obsessed, ultimately sanctified text?

Perhaps the most arresting and thought-provoking description of Feirefiz's admittedly outlandish appearance occurs during the exhausted stand-off into which his incognito single-combat with Parzival lapses. Parizval, trying to characterize the infidel half-brother whom he knows only by report, likens his "complexion" to "a parchment, with writing." (This is not the first time a German poetic hero has been described in explicitly textual terms: at one point in the Nibelungenlied, Siegfried appears "as though limned on parchment with all a master's skill" [48].) In such an otherwise verbose poem, Feirefiz's immediate and starkly emphatic response carries extraordinary force: "'I am he,' replied the Infidel" (372).

In other words, Parzival represents Feirefiz as just such an example of "heathenish script" as Wolfram has already claimed his poem, in origin, to have been - and Feirefiz lends credence to this representation by the clarity of his assent. It makes sense that the two elements in the poem whose written-ness is most insisted upon (or, in Feirefiz's case, metaphorically ascribed [inscribed?]) are also the two which were Wolfram's personal additions: the fictional "heathen" textual history and the character of Feirefiz (with his own heathen backstory).

So Feirefiz, in appearance and in identity, is black, "heathenish" "writing" upon white (Christian?) "parchment." This seems to establish the white, Euro-Christian element - the parchment, without which basis the writing could not exist - as the more essential or integral aspect of Feirefiz's identity, a move which Parzival voices when telling Feirefiz that at Arthur's court, "we shall find our own true race" (375). (I think this holds even if you interpret "race" in more limited terms as "family" or "kindred.") If we go back to the example of Wolfram's feigned textual history, we find a yet stronger basis for an inherent or foundational Christianity pervading these "heathenish" textual artifacts. Flegetanis' writings appear to have been "heathenish" only in form, their "script": in content they evidently possessed all of the Christian connotations, at least in potentis, of Wolfram's "translated" version. There is a hint that, in this original version, form obscured content: "No infidel art would avail us to reveal the nature of the Gral and how one came to know its secrets" (232). (This obviously reminds us of Feirefiz's inability, while still non-Christian, even to see the Gral; he and other infidels can only know it through its effects, not in its Christian essence.) All it apparently took was translation to a new form to unlock the innate meaning of this content.

Similarly, Feirefiz's "writing" could be seen as conveying essentially Christian content in a garbled, "heathenish script" that warps or obscures the clear understanding and expression of that content. He seems, for example, to evince an unconscious and a priori understanding of Christian doctrine, as when good Trinitarian dogma leaks through his speech about the relationship between himself, Parzival, and their father: "If I lay hold of truth, both my father and you, and I, too, were but one, though seen as three distinct entities" (374). This may be why Feirefiz's conversion takes place so easily and with such conspicuous lack of conscious spiritual avowal. Nothing in Feirefiz needed to be changed, revised, rewritten. His conversion is simply his more or less mechanical translation into a new form. After his baptism, he was a Christian all along.

Feirefiz's relative indifference to spiritual matters should not pose too insurmountable of a hurdle for us in any case, since this is another trait that he shares with the "translated" poem. Or rather, Wolfram is not indifferent to spiritual matters, but he sees them, even at their most exalted, as indissolubly linked with the humane, the physical, the fleshly. Even Parzival the enlightened Gral-king gets to keep his wife too. The attainment of higher and higher degrees of selflessness and fidelity in the service of human Love can not only parallel (as in Gawan's case) but facilitate (as with Parzival) higher and higher spiritual attainments. And, as Jolie and Katlyn have been exploring in their postings, the feminine Love-object shades into and blends with the goal of the poem's spiritual endeavors. Feirefiz's trajectory in this regard, at least from the point of view of a contemporary reader, is less clear (one does tend to feel sorry for Secundille), but devotion to Love certainly leads to his sanctification too.

Just as only his love for Repanse de Schoye and conversion for the sake of that love allow Feirefiz to see the Gral, so the Gral in Wolfram's poem only appears through the conceptual prism of the love-service tradition and the general chivalric institutionalization of Love. I can imagine Wolfram writing a poem about Love without the Gral, but I don't think a Wolfram poem about the Gral but without Love (like, for example, the French prose Grail romances) is even conceivable. And indeed, in his final lines Wolfram insists that any (purely hypothetical, of course) woman for whom he was writing "must" admit to having been pleased (411). In short, to propose a tentative answer to the question raised on Thursday about Feirefiz's role in the poem: with reference, again, to Wolfram's fictional backstory about the translation of his own text out of "heathenish script," Feirefiz's role in the poem may be that he is the poem.