Did Fitzgerald Write A Grail Quest?
High schoolers have been reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby for decades. Since most sophomores are too, well, sophomoric to appreciate it for the great work of literature that it truly is, they usually leave high school with The Great Gatsby as one of many sour tastes left in the mouth. Since most teens hate what they have to read, most don’t re-read Gatsby once they have become adults.
That is a terrible shame, since it is truly a wonderful book. Despite being not read enough, The Great Gatsby remains one of the most familiar stories to date. It has been the subject of five movies and even an opera.
In the first half of this book I wrote on the matter of Nick Carraway as a narrator. This portion will explore Fitzgerald as another writer to tackle the Grail Legend. When we read that the valley of ashes is a Waste Land, or that Gatsby had committed himself to the following of a grail, it seems clear that Fitzgerald intended to intertextually layer his novel with Grail Quest imagery. This requires three particular tasks for the reader: identifying the Grail Knight, the Fisher King, and the Holy Grail.
According To Weston
In 1920, From Ritual To Romance by Jessie Weston broke new ground concerning Grail scholarship. Before Weston, academians took one of two positions: Grail lore should be considered strictly as Christian literature or pagan lore. Weston pointed out the strengths of both positions while further demonstrating the insufficiency of either standpoint alone. Her solution is to combine the two.[i]
In other words, the panoply of Grail literature is a combination of Christian and pagan sources. In this it is not much different from other medieval works like Beowulf. Weston relies heavily Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. It was published in two volumes in 1890, three in 1990, and a dozen between 1906-1915.
The Maimed King & The Fisher King
Weston explores the pagan roots to the Grail as manifestations of ancient fertility cult. In particular, Grail legends call upon the mysteries of Tammuz, Adonis, and Attis. According to Frazer and Weston, the notion of the king as divine comes from the idea that he represented god. And when god is good for nothing more than providing a bumper crop, fertility cults commonly held the sway of primitives. So with Tammuz, Adonis, and Attis, and as extension, the kings of people who worshipped these idols, their personal health reflected on their ability to provide for the worshippers.
If the king is wounded, then the land is laid waste. So in Grail literature, this becomes the Maimed King who presides over the Waste Land. Based upon the variation, there is also a Fisher King, who is sometimes also the Maimed King, or other times, related to the Maimed King. The image of the fish has often been a symbol of fertility. For example, within the fertility cult of Dagon, the chief deity was pictured as a fish. And thus, the term Fisher King refers to the king as divine who has the power to provide for the livestock and crops of his citizens.
Within Grail writings, the Fisher King and/or Maimed King are more central to the story than the Grail Knights. By obtaining the Grail, the waters are freed, the king is healed, and the land becomes fertile once more. Based upon the individual texts, the king or the knight vary in importance, with the older texts laying more of an emphasis on the king and the more recent stressing the story of the knight. Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur does not even mention a Fisher or Maimed King, although their fingerprints are all over the Sangraal section of the book.
