more on the fisher king

I've done a bit more reading on the story of the Fisher King and I also listened to an edition of In Our Time on the subject. (I've put the link at the end of this post.) I'm actually quite gratified to find that a few of things I said in my last post weren't entirely stupid.

First, I talked about my sense that fishing was the 'wrong' activity for a legendary king and, yes, it seems that in the medieval versions the king's wound quite obviously prevents him from taking part in the appropriate aristocratic pursuits, riding and hunting in particular. Fishing as the poor relation to hunting seems a familiar idea and we might think of the early sections of the The Compleat Angler, where Piscator, Venator, and Auceps debate the relative merits of their individual 'recreations'. The modesty of fishing is a part of its meaning here - stillness rather than movement, sitting on the bank and not on horseback.

Second, I also wrote about my sense of a connection with the story of the Salmon of Knowledge and, again, it seems that this has received a lot of attention. The Victorian period in particular saw an attempt to elucidate the relationship between the medieval poetry and the stuff of Celtic myth. But the tenor of the radio discussion was very much that, although the writer of the original medieval poem, Chrétien de Troyes, may well have had access to Celtic material, not least through contact with the culture of Brittany, it is almost impossible to establish the nature of the connection clearly. There are similarities with the story of Bran from the Welsh mythological source, the Mabinogi. But, as one of the contributors - Carolyne Larrington - said, the story of Bran is 'light on fishing', and, anyway, the Mabinogi itself has a fragmentary quality. There isn't really a monolithic corpus of myth to work from. The Victorians desperately wanted to find a relationship - and certainly the idea that fishing is in some way symbolic of the pursuit of wisdom does seem to be a line of connection. But the connections are dark and difficult to follow.

Third, I worried a little about the relationship between the Fisher King himself and Parsifal who is charged with healing him. Fishing seems to represent an attempt to change things - the pursuit of something hidden and elusive. But is is Parsifal who is destined to bring about that change - the king cannot do this on his own. The relationship is complex and it's interesting that in Eliot's poem, 'The Wasteland, there isn't really a Parsifal figure. The fisherman sits by the canal in the early lines of the 'Fire Sermon' and is still there as we come to the end of 'What The Thunder Said', although, during the radio programme, Stephen Knight referred to the three Sanskrit terms that appear just before the refrain of shantih, shantih, shantih. They are Datta (giving alms), Dayadhvam (self control), Damyata (compassion) and come from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. These, he suggested, are pretty much the qualities that Parsifal is expected to display.

All in all, I'm struck by how the elements of the tale - the king, the wound, the grail, the knight, the act of fishing, the state of the kingdom, and so on - fit together differently in each retelling and resist any very straightforward reading. The pieces enter into relationships that produce suggestions of meaning in excess of the rather simple interpretive frames we often want to bring to them. They are, dare I say it, like fish in the water and, as Johan said when we last met, you cannot keep fish in plain view and then bear down on them with a weapon. You have to create the conditions for them to come to you and ultimately catch themselves.

Parzival-Darstellung Washington (D.C.), Libr. of Congress, Rosenwald Collection, Ms. 3, Bl. 6v, beginning of the 15th century.