One thing is certain: the greatest of the prose romances — for example, the so-called Vulgate Cycle-begin by dismissing, if they ever thought of it, the Aristotelian idea that a work must be perspicuous. Like the elaborate interlace work in medieval painting, manuscript illumination, and church ornamentation, they intentionally defy intellectual comprehension. They are freighted with symbols of obscure significance, with apparently meaningful but widely separated verbal repetitions, and with subtle relationships between plots and between characters. They were written backward, so to speak, beginning with a "given" of Arthurian romance — for instance the fact that a certain knight has a certain magical sword — and explaining how the hitherto unexplained detail came about. If the prose romance form has any significance in itself, it would seem to be this: like the universe as the Christian Middle Ages conceived it, the prose romance is complex beyond all intelligibility, yet secretly ordered just as the baffling world around us is subtly ordered by God's plan. Knights go on quests, suffer more distractions, diversions, and reversals than the mind can retain; yet trifling events produce, hundreds of pages later, their destinal effects. For some of these events, the motivation of characters is carefully plotted and thoroughly explained; and though events within any given plot may be isolated by the intrusion of events from other plots, no event is isolated in the total process of the cycle's flow of reality. The seemingly shapeless form of the romance, like the devious paths its knights ride down, celebrates the optimistic doctrine that nothing is wasted, nothing lost: God moves in strange ways.
Nothing remotely resembling this art form appears in English literature. But in simplifying the French prose romances, Malory did more than reduce an incredibly complex art to mere adventure. Suppressing the carefully worked out motivations he found in his sources, dismissing some of the religious mystery, introducing a seeming realism (either dropping the magic in his sources or presenting it in flat, plain statements of what must be taken for weird fact), Malory changed the premise of Arthurian legend and gave the legend new meaning.
