Lancelot is a name that still reverberates for the modern public with the intensity discernable in his medieval reception from the moment Chrétien's romance launched him into Arthurian history in the provocative guise of the Knight of the Cart. Efforts to understand what makes him such a compelling figure lead inevitably to the question of desire, Lancelot's for Guenevere, of course, but also our desire for him, the desires of so many inside and outside the romance world, which Chrétien has crystallized around the hero himself. In Le Chevalier de la Charrette, Lancelot generates a magnetic field of erotic potential at once positive and negative, productive and disruptive, as singular and extraordinary as his heart and as paradoxical as the romancer's art. Indeed, story and romance mirror each other in a kind of infinite regress that traps readers in an open-ended quest for meaning, the san that Chrétien claims to receive from his patroness, that we can only seek to uncover in the arrangement of fiction produced by ‘sa painne et s’antancïon’ [his effort and creative intention]. Since Chrétien has crafted a romance as enigmatic as Lancelot's love story, we will have to follow the writer's ploys as much as the hero's exploits. A quick summary will set the stage.

Commanded by the Countess of Champagne, Chrétien has undertaken to write a romance entitled the Knight of the Cart. It begins on Ascension Day as an unknown knight erupts into court and challenges Arthur to send the Queen into the forest with a champion who will fight, double or nothing, for the release of the King's subjects held captive in the stranger's land. By the manipulations of a Rash Boon, Keu claims the role of defender and leads off the Queen. Gauvain and others belatedly follow: Keu's riderless horse reveals the unfortunate results. Gauvain next encounters a hard-riding knight who pursues the Queen with even greater haste. Catching up a second time, Gauvain sees the knight step, after a moment's hesitation, into a cart driven by a dwarf, who promises information on the Queen's whereabouts. The narrator explains the shame associated with carts, used in those days for felons and murderers. Gauvain follows them to a castle, where they spend the night. Although his hostess scorns him, the Knight of the Cart insists on sleeping in the Perilous Bed and survives the adventure of the flaming lance.