Promises Kept and Broken--the Power of a Spoken Word in the Chivalric World of Le Morte D'arthur (Critical Essay‪)‬

ABSTRACT The article demonstrates the performative character of chivalric culture portrayed in Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur. I refrain, however, from the investigation of all explicit forms of theatricality, in favour of a closer and more detailed look at the socially constructive nature of knights' linguistic behaviour and its bearing upon character portrayal. My research is based on J. L. Austin's model of speech act theory centred upon illocutionary expressions invested with executive power by socio-historical dynamics of conventional interaction. There are some points of convergence between Austin's and medieval views on oaths. For Austin these declarative utterances generate communal reality, and in the Middle Ages an oath was regarded as a verbal act activating the reality of a moral commitment, existing independently of an individual. Austin's reasoning about social and conventional character of speech acts also seems to be close to St. Augustine's description of human language, in which the validity of a word's meaning was supposed to depend on common consent. Additionally, in Austin's model as much as in earlier Augustian delineation, the effect of public utterances depends upon felicity determined by a character's intention. The contemporary approach has been adopted in this study of Le Morte Darthur because it provides convenient analytical tools, which help to scrutinise the implications of perfomative language for which Malory's work reveals the predilection. The power of an oath to establish social reality is demonstrated in this article on the example of the Pentecostal oath, shown as a potent mechanism, which brings into existence the fellowship of the Round Table knights and determines their identity, channelling the knightly energy towards socially desirable ends. The ties consolidating Arthurian community are also engendered in Le Morte Darthur by more personal declarations that the individual knights make, such as pledges of loyalty, promises of help and friendship or the acts of yielding oneself t o a mightier opponent. At the same time the ability or inability of keeping one's word may also be indicative of a degree to which a knight adheres to the chivalric pattern. Consequently, speech acts produced by the knights of the Round Table not only construct Arthur's world but also help Malory to encode in his work the entire typology of chivalric behaviour.