La dégradation du personnage de Keu dans les romans de Chrétien de Troyes : survol critique et quelques remarques sur la mécanique de ce phénomène
Rezumat
The degradation of the character of Kay in the romances by Chrétien de Troyes: a critical survey and some remarks about the phenomenon
Abstract: The present article deals with the phenomenon of degradation of the character of Sir Kay in the first arthurian romances, those written by Chrétien de Troyes. It is well known that Kay, at first, is a heroic character in the early arthurian literature and tradition and that in the romances of Chrétien he appears to be an ambiguous character, the embodiment of the non-perfect, non-courteous knight who nonetheless is still among the “good”, he is not an enemy, nor is he a stranger, a character from the outer, chaotic world. This topic has been addressed by many scholars. The first part of the article presents the three main opinions concerning this degradation: that the very first signs of it are already present in the early literature, in the poem Pa gur, the Welsh tale Culhwch ac Olwen or in the Historia Regum Britanniae by Geoffrey of Monmouth and his “translation” into Old French by Wace the Norman; that it is linked to the tradition of the bad seneschal; that it is a pure invention by Chrétien for dramatic (or other) purposes. The latter half of the article shows some of the mechanics behind this devaluation: the “continentalization” of Kay (already in Monmouth) which turns him into a mere human deprived of magical faculties; the functional necessities ascribed to him by Chrétien, namely the basic ones – didactic and antithetic to which we should add his function of creator of crisis; his role in the inner dynamics into a configuration of characters typical for Chrétien – the chivalric triad including the antihero (Kay), the protagonist and the paragon (Gawain); Kay tarnished reputation is also due to the less than perfect image of the Arthurian court in Chrétien’s works, and especially the image of King Arthur who is more than anything a “roi fainéant”; Kay is opposed to many other characters, good or bad, which can be seen by comparing the attributive isotopies (what has been said about the characters by the narrator or by other characters) – thus, we observe some sort of transfer of attributes from one character to the other, for instance some attributes of Kay are transferred to Méléagant and then back again in the goal of rendering Kay more unpleasant when the latter protagonists of Chrétien seem to be more flawed than the early ones, and that in order to maintain the antithetic function of Sir Kay.
Keywords: Kay, Keu, degradation, antihero, attributes, Chrétien de Troyes, Monmouth, Pa Gur, Culhwch ac Olwen
Citation suggestion: Sungarski, Vladimir. “La dégradation du personnage de Keu dans les romans de Chrétien de Troyes: survol critique et quelques remarques sur la mécanique de ce phénomène”. Transilvania, no. 8 (2025): 72-83.
https://doi.org/10.51391/trva.2025.8.07.
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