English 83

Again, on the image of “Camelot” - the Kennedys, and Democratic politics - Mat Bai notes that comparisons between Barack Obama and Robert F. Kennedy are on the loose:

There’s something unhealthy about all this Baby-Boomer reminiscing, because it forces Democrats always to look backward, to serve some unrealized ideal of government rather than a more modern and relevant vision of what government might become. There is a faint line between nostalgia and delusion, and with each passing year, those liberals who long for the reincarnation of their heroes seem ever closer to obliterating it.

We may be at some kind of sea change, where the Camelot/Kennedy myth could be receding as so many post-boomers, who have no memories (real or manufactured) of the 1960s, vote. The Arthurian myth may recede a bit with it, or just become another vehicle for a different kind of political nostalgia.

Take care, everyone.

Notes

As our class draws to a close, I think it is appropriate for us to start considering the high level issues of Arthuriana.  In other words, I am going to focus on some large impressions that I have from the course about the general direction Arthurian Lit has taken since it was originally written, this post might be accused of BS, read at your own eternal peril.  Continue Reading »

I’m sure this will be torn up just as all the Mark Twain skepticism was, but I can’t help but feel there’s something decidedly Excaliburish about Mists of Avalon, at least the 530 pages I’ve read so far. My unorganized rambling appears within. Continue Reading »

I’m surprised that Mists of Avalon is the first book that has fate as a part of the story (that I can recall). I’m referring specifically to the first few pages where Igraine is destined to give birth to Arthur with Uther. I always imagined the Arthurian legend being a direct result of destiny or fate. These terms are typically interchangeable, but if there is a huge difference, let me know. There is always some sort of sense of fate that I feel goes along with any King Arthur story that involves Merlin. If Merlin is not in the story, then neither is the feeling that Arthur was destined to be a great king. Even in the movie Excalibur, I got the feeling that Merlin knew that Arthur needed to be king. But Merlin was also shocked when Arthur knelt down in front of his enemy and asked to be knighted. So what purpose does foresight really serve if it doesn’t see all possibilities? How was it that Uther and Igraine were the perfect match to create this king that would create a kind of Utopia? Also, if it was known that Arthur would be a great king, how was it not seen that his kingdom would end in such ruins? And if it was known that Arthur’s kingdom would end as it did, what purpose does this serve in the historical sense, and the literary sense?

Film buff here chiming in on the excellent double-feature. I feel like I just ate a communion wafer followed by an overstuffed jelly donut - you can guess which film I watched first.

Robert Bresson’s minimalist Lancelot du Lac strikes me as simultaneously the most thematically Christian and most stylistically modern Arthurian vision we’ve encountered. The bland realism reduces the romances to mere day-to-day life, forcing the viewer to search, like Arthur’s knights, for the transcendent. I would suggest that within Bresson’s audiovisual “economy,” the transcendent is anything unique, unrepeated. Repetitive montages of visors going down and horses being saddled or running to joust suggest the banal emptiness of battle, the horse legs in particular depersonalizing the combatants identified only by flags, and the kinetic pleasures of violence elided, only the grisly aftermath shown. More heavy-handed is the repetition of animal noises to signify lust - sex, like violence, is not shown. What is shown, but not so often as to become ubiquitous? What does Bresson value? Perhaps the foregrounded cross Lancelot prays to, or a horse’s soulful eye, shown in close-up towards the beginning, and at the tragic conclusion near-pierced by an arrow, like nature violated (how else to explain the arrows fired into the trees…?). The other Bresson film I’ve seen, Pickpocket, ends with the protagonist finding happiness after ascetic endurance, but the knights in Lancelot don’t pass that test, succumbing to sex and war in a way that the audience is not allowed to do. An interesting comparison piece might be George Romero’s more conventionally American film from a few years later, Knightriders, which I have not seen but which looks like some kind of anti-capitalist hippie fable. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Ed Harris. He’s not trying to be a hero; he’s fighting the dragon:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=mtY_hnP3Uvk

John Boorman’s Excalibur, on the other hand, has no problem skinning the proverbial rabbit, with enough neon lighting, shiny objects, Playboy nudity, and jelly donut gore to send the masses home blind and diabetic. The fetishistic visuals and pseudo-satirical porno-militarism struck me as typical of Reagan-era Hollywood spectacle, like Monty Python and the Holy Grail played “straight” with music by Wagner and costumes by Robocop. Nicol Williamson’s Merlin as chrome-dome drag queen was a personal favorite. Two facts proving the director is a bit odd - he cast his daughter as Igrayne in Excalibur, and he cast Sean Connery in this:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=kbGVIdA3dx0

Lancelot du Lac and Excalibur exemplify, for me, the peculiar sensual powers of cinema to frustrate and to stimulate, respectively. Which one you liked more might suggest both what you expect from a movie and what you expect from Arthurian myth.

This musing is neither substantive nor particularly well-thought out, but today’s presentation and the resulting discussion of modern day forms of chivalry made me wonder about the current state of chivalry. The consensus seemed to be that class-based chivalry was dead and buried. I’m not so sure, however.

Admittedly the Victorian sort of imperialist/colonialist idea of the enlightened and powerful bringing civilization and order to the underprivileged has largely disappeared, but the underlying notion of power and responsibility that underlay chivalry remains on both national and personal levels, for good and ill. The environmental movement assumes that those who are economically privileged have the obligation to protect the environment both in their own territories and to aid developing nations in doing so. If one considers receiving a diploma to be the new tapping with the sword, then we could analogize the Peace Corps and similar programs in which educated individuals serve depressed or struggling communities at home and abroad. Consider also the noblesse oblige of recent persons of the year Bill Gates and Bono (the latter explicitly knighted, if one wants a another connection) and others who believe that their financial success (the new societal power: the bank account rather than the lance) compel them to promote the welfare of the less privileged. Basically, I would posit that the notion of chivalry is alive and well, only it has been modified to take into account the modern redefinition of nobility as resulting from merit (measured either by education or wealth) rather than birth or piety.

Am I way out here?

I found The Coming of Arthur to be rather postmodern at points because of its use of multiple people’s views and opinions about King Arthur’s birth and conception, as well as the structure of placing the story of his conception and birth within another story. The reader is left to contemplate each telling and to form their own opinion if they are not familiar with other Arthurian tales. Continue Reading »

Honestly, I must say, I have not completed this book, but even so I have seen a ton of irony in it so far. The first thing that struck me as hilarious is the fact that Hank, a low-class worker of relatively-modern times can go back to Arthurian Britain and almost be the king.

Later, when Hank is almost the ultimate ruler of England and tries to civilize the nation by starting a school and everything, he still maintains some boorish ways even though he makes fun of the Arthurian people for being savages.

“So I did not talk blood and insurrection to that man there who sat munching black bread with that abused and mistaught herd of human sheep, but took his aside and talked matter of another sort to him. After I had finished, I got him to lend me a little ink from his veins; and with this and a sliver I wrote on a piece of bark - Put him in the Man-Factory…” (129)

This is a weird and funny passage. Hank is trying to be this noble benefactor who is letting this peasant go to his school. However, he has to use some of the peasant’s blood and a piece of bark to convey his message. This seems like a very savage way of doing things, which is exactly what Hank is trying to prevent. Also, this passage struck me as ironic:

“Take a jackass for instance: a jackass has that kind of strength, and puts it to a useful purpose, and is valuable to this world because he is a jackass; but a nobleman is not valuable because he is a jackass. It is a mixture that is always ineffectual, and should never have been attempted in the first place. And yet, once you start a mistake, the trouble is done and you never know what is going to come of it.” (141)

Since Hank is a nobleman in this time, he pretty much just called himself a jackass. Nice one. Also, like I said before, I haven’t managed to finish the book, but the last line about starting a mistake and having trouble come from it sounds like some kind of foreshadowing for something down the line.

My whole point of this entry is just to highlight some of the contradictions that are present in Hank’s character. Does anyone else have examples? Also, does anyone disagree with me and think that Hank is in complete control of his situation?

I am sure we have all read some of Twain’s other works, many of which are American classics.  In this semester, we have all experienced older Arthurian traditions.  I would have to say that I think Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is inferior to both of these sets of things.  It is stylistically and narratively uninspiring.  The characterizations are somewhat two dimensional, Hank Morgan is an enterprising capitalist and overhwhelmingly practical capitalist who displays little sense of wonder.  It is hard to see the book as anything other than an attempt to cash in on Twain’s literary celebrity, like the George Lucas using the Phantom Menace attempted to milk the Star Wars franchise for all it was worth.  Would anyone care to disagree?