Sovereign Fantasies. Patricia Clare Ingham
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the “interminable difficult middle” (“Midcolonial,” 5).23 I hope to contribute to the longstanding medievalist concern for oppositional histories of linguistic minorities; yet I will also, if obliquely, address this “‘difficult middle.” In the case of Wales, for example, we can mark no time after colonization (Wales remains a colony of England to the present), nor is it possible to recover a pure space before. I offer no claim about Welsh Arthurian origin, nor would I insist upon pure “Celtic” or “English” texts. I wish instead to take seriously the repetitive temporal returns to Arthur, as well as the oppositions, the heterogeneities, and the overlapping cultures legible in the difficult middle spaces, the shared Arthurian texts produced amidst conquest.
My interest in this approach has developed from a concern for the politics of “imagining community” during transitional times in Britain’s insular identity. Scholars increasingly argue that the nation emerges not prior to, but in relation with, the conquering impulse. Their insights gesture toward, but do not adequately develop, the poignant losses produced by unified national identities. By joining a sovereign “imagined community” with an attention to the oppositional imaginings of Britain in the later Middle Ages, I hope to provide a way of registering some of the losses that, in early modern England, silently serve formal discourses of nationhood.
Interested as I am in the multiple and conflictual elements that are (seemingly) surmounted by narrations of cultural unity, my study shows debts to Homi Bhabha’s analysis of the slips and misses of apparently unequivocal national discourses. Bhabha’s insights have been helpful, yet the medieval case also registers certain differences. Bhabha reads “the language of culture and community” as “poised on the fissures of the present becoming the rhetorical figures of a national past” (Location, 142). I wish to construct an account of early ruptures and contests frequently deemed inconsequential to later “British” cultural identity. Bhabha argues that national discourses stabilize a culture’s present instabilities by imagining those difficulties in the past, surmounted through modernity. My work suggests that those same discourses can, for all their interest in past antagonisms, obscure oppositional histories, trivializing the antagonisms and fissures on which they nonetheless depend. The medieval “middle spaces” of a longue durée of British identity, thus, encode losses of important material consequence.
A sustained attention to loss and mourning elucidates the dynamics of cultural identities in conquest, helping us to analyze who is served most by the gains and sacrifices of community. The losses produced by national centralization can be seen particularly clearly by scholars of periods before centralization was bureaucratically solidified. What has not often been noted about national imaginings is the extent to which fantasies of unification encode mournful things even as they try to disavow them. National fictions must imagine a coherent identity that crosses both time and space despite the passings that constitute history, or the aggressions that constitute community. They must, to recall Le Goff’s formulation with which I began, cope precisely with the mutilations and disembodiments produced by death. Coping which such facts can involve (as it does in the theory of the King’s Two Bodies) disavowing the threatening, physical facts of death, “old age and other natural defects and imbecilities,” removing these attributes of loss from the fiction of a transcendent, abstract, community outside particular bodies and beyond the reach of the grave. In this fantasy the community both requires particular bodies and can nonetheless outlast them; the sempiternal community apparently remains above the particular desires, disabilities, and lives on which it nonetheless depends.
Gender and sexuality have long been linked—in psychoanalytic, feminist, and anthropological theory—to the power to cope with the psychic and cultural problems of death, loss, and submission. Thus, the work of feminist, psychoanalytic, and anthropological theorists will also be important to my readings. Elisabeth Bronfen reads images of dead or deadly beauties for their ability to translate “an anxiety into a desire,” that is, to make the image of death appear desirously irresistible, rather than anxiously so. Julia Kristeva suggests that abject images and the “death-bearing woman” can help the male author cope with fears of individual annihilation. Klaus Theweleit has examined the psychoanalytic logics of such “male fantasies,” poignantly arguing that gendered imaginaries like these have material power with tragic consequences for women’s lives. Anthropologist Maurice Bloch describes the cultural assignment of physical decay and fragmentation to women. He argues that hierarchically structured “traditional societies” cope with the threats that bodily decay pose to belief in a community’s survival by splitting the morbid aspects of physical decay from the notion of death as a spiritual union, a life beyond the grave. Death as transcendent community, Bloch argues, remains linked to men and to brotherhoods. Triumph over “death (in its polluting and sad aspects),” Bloch argues, “is achieved by breaking through, vanquishing the world of women, of sorrow, of death and division” (217–18). Women’s cultural relation to the particularity of individual birth means that women come to stand for the individuality of particular dying bodies and particular fragmented lives, an image of division that threatens the fiction of the transcendent, unified clan or community. Fradenburg has noted the extent to which psychoanalytic analyses of loss work to install loss as the condition of individual subjectivity with disastrous consequences for women’s lives.24
The long-standing cultural identification of women with particularity and with particularly fractured losses can readily be seen in stories of Arthur’s death; these texts, moreover, frequently raise questions about women’s complicity in the destruction of fellowship. Putatively disordered, even destructive, female desires, rendered through figures like Guinevere, Morgan le Fey, or Bertilak’s Lady, prove powerful enough to threaten, if not entirely dismantle, sovereign community. As the previous discussion implies, I will be arguing that the national fantasy emerging in late Middle English Arthurian texts deploys a gendered structure of loss so as to define community as a brotherhood that can accommodate a certain amount of regional and ethnic difference. Women are powerful in these texts, and their desires are important. They constitute repetitive obstacles to communitarian wholeness, disruptions to communitarian desire. These are nonetheless stories of a certain kind of female power, and thus they hint at alternative desires for other kinds of groupings.
Given the sheer volume of late Middle English texts of Arthurian romance, I cannot hope to offer satisfying accounts of the entire Middle English corpus. The study that follows, therefore, makes no claims to be exhaustive. Part I, “The Matter of Britain,” makes the case for the subtle cultural relation between Arthurian history and Arthurian fantasy. Chapter 1 begins with the controversies over the historicity of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, and their pertinence to current debates on history and textuality. Emphasizing Geoffrey’s ambiguity, I argue that the popularity and cultural usefulness of Monmouth’s fantasy of the Britons involves its ability to accommodate diverse uses. The manuscript history of Geoffrey’s text suggests, moreover, that representations of insular loss can help consolidate competing claims on insular inheritance, serving both the pleasures of parvenu Anglo-Norman aristocrats and their Welsh resisters. Chapter 2 moves to the uses of Geoffrey’s text in the fifteenth century, focusing particularly upon the oppositional politics of the Merlin Prophecies. I examine what it means that such prophecies, based upon Welsh vaticinative poetry, came to fuel diametrically opposed political agendas, and how those contestations led to the increasing identification of certain versions of Britain’s past with interpretive “truth.” Imaginative ambiguity, as the Merlin Prophecies suggest, is deeply useful to fifteenth-century English sovereigns who wish to imagine themselves, in the wake of losses in France, as Arthur’s insular heirs. Yet that same ambiguity is deeply disturbing to those in power, since it can also be used to legitimate the claims of rebel royal pretenders.
Part II, “Romancing the Throne,” examines the romance’s structure of longing and loss for a cultural imagining. In Chapter 3, I read Arthur’s status as both European emperor and British sovereign in the Alliterative Morte Arthure