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?

Click on the link for your group to access your colleague’s drafts (password required). Come to ITS as scheduled today to get the magic word. All shall be well.

• Group 1 - Josh, Mary, Cristina, Sean
• Group 2 – Nick, Kristen, Alistair, Mark
• Group 3 – Kory, Dan, Andrea, Tessa
• Group 4 – Mollie, James, Winston, Madison

Does anyone know if the groups for peer conferencing have been posted yet (and if so, where)? Thanks!

A lot of us agreed today on how Malory’s telling of stories we have previously read by French authors (The Knight of the Cart, The Death of King Arthur from Vulgate Cycle) were a bit distant and a little dry. I certainly felt that way at least. Even though the events of the narratives were the same in both stories, there was a big difference in the way the authors told them and these difference are very telling of the British and French cultures.

The French stories we read focused a lot on the character’s feelings and thoughts. The narrator either got inside the characters head or revealed enough of their thoughts through speech that the reader can understand and sympathize with them. Even though we know Lancelot and Guinevere are going behind Arthur’s back you still want things to work out for them because the author wants us to understand their love, and if we understand it we’ll most likely want it to triumph. Not just L&G though, readers are meant to explore the internal workings of all principle “good” characters in these stories. Eric, Enide, Perceval, Lunete, Gawain, Arthur, Yvain, etc. At some point in the story, we feel for these characters. Because, even if they are “misbehaving”, their thoughts and feelings are still exposed to us. So, the reader understands and sees a bit of themselves in them (once you get past the intense idealization of course).

These French qualities became more apparent after reading Malory. Malory’s characters are more distant and less dimensional. Mordred is 100% bad, and Arthur is 100% good. We get to know his characters by either his description of them or by what other characters are saying about them – never through their own thoughts. By doing this the characters actions and words become our only ways of judging them. When they do something bad we see them as bad, or if they speak and act like a hero then we believe they are a hero. Since we never know what is going on internally their appearance is all we can build an opinion with.

These differences in the way the British and French authors write implies a lot about the ideals they are endorsing. The French are concerned with the individual. They focus on why people behave the way they do, the qualities all humans have and the forces all humans succumb to (love, duty, jealousy, pride, etc.) They perpetuate the idea that humans are complex creatures and that nobody should be judged based simply on what they do because you never know what they may be thinking. Even though Enide disobeys her husband time after time, she is actually doing it because she is so madly in love with him. And even though Erec is so rude to his wife, he is actually battling a deep insecurity.

The British are more focused with the society and an individual’s image. They value society’s opinion so that an individual’s actions define who they are. Nobody knows your thoughts, feelings, or intentions so besides your actions and words how else can we judge you? They endorse the idea that one should really behave nobly in order to be respected. That society’s opinion of you is the only one.

I hope these generalizations about the British and French are taken with a grain of salt, I don’t mean to stereotype anyone. Just pointing out how by reading two versions of the same story we can now see some beliefs/attitudes/ideals about the cultures they came from. The French individualism in Chretien’s “The Knight of the Cart” would not have been as noticeable if we didn’t have Malory’s British-society-image-actions version to compare it with (and vice versa). Anyone else see this? or disagree?

That quote of course comes from what is perhaps the finest episode in Simpsons history, namely the golden age great “Homer the Heretic.” For any of you unfortunate enough not to know what I’m talking about, God appears to Homer to confront the yellow sloth about his newly formed religion, whose tenets largely consist of sleeping in front of a warm fire, reading copies of Playdude, and skipping work for the Feast of Maximum Occupancy. After a brief conversation, mostly focusing on the boring local Christian pastor, God gives Homer his imprimatur and disappears with the line above.

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There seems to be quite a divide between virginity expectations for women and men in the Arthurian tales. How many times have daughters of lords been offered to knights before being married to them? Virginal women or not virginal does not seem to be very important in Arthuriana, even adultry is questionably maybe OK within the context of courtly love. Yet Galahad is better than all the other knights because he is a virgin!!?? Continue Reading »

As the epitomy of what a knight should be Galahad is respected everywhere he goes. He completes adventures that no one else can manage just by simply being himself (i.e. the fiery tomb and the sword). Then, he achieves ultimate success by completing the quest for the grail. Once he is revered in Sarras as their king and has achieved everything that a knight strives for, he gives his life to God. This brings about the disappearance of the grail from the world, which seems to contradict the whole point of questing after it. This seems to me to be a rejection of the worldliness and prowess of the knightly order in favor of a more religious outlook because while the grail as an object is gone, it leaves a lasting impression that knights must strive for to achieve God’s favor. Are there any further ideas about this?

It’s been said that the idea of vernacular epic was first formalized by literary historians and philologists (i.e. early linguists and folklorists) in the nineteenth century, which is also traditionally the era of the rise of modern nationalism. This connection is not accidental, “epic” literature like the Chanson de Roland, and even Beowulf (which has been seen variously as Danish, German, and English) were first studied by nineteenth century scholars and editors as evidence of “national” identity (and military heroism) expressed through earlier forms of “national” languages. And when no “national” epic exists, they have to be invented, as in the 18th century example of the fraudulent works of “Ossian” – something of a literary fraud meant to buttress claims of Scots-Gaelic nationalism. Before the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these early vernacular texts were not studied at all, except as curiosities, and they were owned and collected by bibliophiles, not read as literature.

I think perhaps we can see the shared (though separate) projects of Malory and Caxton (as Malory’s editor and ideological interpreter) as something similar, though much earlier than these examples. It’s difficult to ascribe clear motives to Malory’s project, though one suspects that he must have shared Caxton’s proto-nationalistic feelings: the English deserve a vernacular “epic” (even if it is prose) that proves their ancient lineage and co-equality with the matters of Rome, and France. All of this of course, neatly elides the problem of Arthur’s British identity in Geoffrey of Monmouth, who defeated the Saxons, and sidesteps the connections between the British of Arthur’s time and the Breton French. Such inconvenient truths have little impact on national literatures.

I’m having trouble figuring out what exactly “une mout bele conjunture” is.  I know Sean said it means “a most perfectly ordered composition” and that it relates to Chretien somehow, but I don’t really understand.  Does it pertain more to “Arthurian Romances” as a whole or is it talking about the order within the individual stories?  Help?  Maybe?

Hey everybody. A couple of weeks ago in class I compared the vulgate Lancelot to King David of biblical tradition. At first glance the characters are very similar and share important dramatic themes, for instance Lancelot and David both commit adultery and play important roles in the demise or destruction of close friends (David with Uriah the Hittite and Jonathon the son of Saul, and Lancelot with Arthur and basically all the knights) while being otherwise exemplary heroic figures. In fact, David and Lancelot represent for their respective cultures the ideal king and knight, which is curious in the face of their incredible flaws. The tradition of a cultural hero who is both perfect and flawed hero is also present in Greek antiquity and the heroes of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Heroes like Odysseus and Achilles provided the important social function of showing the downfalls of their societies most grievous of flaws such as hubris and arrogance, very similar to how David displayed the dangers of lust, divorce, and ritual impropriety (the ritual in question being marriage).

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Attached here are notes for week 7. Don’t forget to take the midterm Knowledge Confidence Survey (see just below here).

week 7