Then and Now, the Big Picture and Economics
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. Alot of the presentations in the last week have focused on relating current popular culture with Arthurian literature. For example, we discovered both that Pulp Fiction parallels Chretien and that King Arthur baking flower makes nice bread. We also just finished watching the incredibly campy Excalibur and read the fantasy novel Mysts of Avalon.
These works might seem to be very different than the works we started the semester with. It seems that since Tennyson finished his Idylls, Arthurian Literature has descended into camp. Consider the methods of presentation, Mysts of Avalon is generally available at your local Barnes and Noble and Chretien had to be special ordered for the class by the book store. This is not to say that rarer books are better written, but I don’t think that anyone would argue with the statement that Chretien is of greater scholarly interest than Bradley. Look at the historical presentation of Geoffrey of Monmouth and compare it to the pseudo-analytical quasi-historical imagined goddess religion that Bradley makes up. If Geoffrey was no more accurate, at least he was trying harder.
Personally, I am inclined to believe that the democratization of media has tended to make the market friendlier to inferior work. In order for a work like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to survive, monks had to copy and recopy the tale by hand. This means that a number of people have to have independtly decided that Sir Gawain was worth the time and money to re-copy, indicating the tale was highly valued. By contrast, an additional copy of Excalibur can be created in moments by a machine, at virtually no cost. The change in the economics which undergird literary production, comparing today with the middle ages, allow for a greater profusion of work. However, much of todays output is inferior in quality because there is so little cost in reproducing it. Additionally, the more divorced society becomes from the Arthurian mold the harder it is to imagine realistic characters in the achetypes of the round table.Â
Basically, I am arguing that much of todays Arthurian literature is of inferior quality because it is cheaper to produce books and other forms of media than it was in the middle ages. I also believe it is increasingly difficult to imagine a ‘real’ Arthurian world, populated by real Arthurian characters. I realize that there is room for reasonable people to disagree with me entirely on this. You could argue that Bradley is just as good as Chretien. You could argue that Chretien is actually the medieval equivalent of pulp and he’s a hack. You could even contend that Wolfram von Eschenbach’s random rants against women are more disruptive and odd than Excalibur’s super shiny armour. What do you think?
BraveSirRobin wrote:
I’m not sure you could call Chretien medieval pulp considering his social audience, but perhaps in half a century what we consider pulp – Excalibur, Mists of Avalon – will be studied as closely as Chretien for its cultural connotations.
I think you’re right about the democratization of media, but I don’t think it’s as strictly economic as you suggest. Mists of Avalon in a way “democratizes” Arthurian literature thematically as much as it does so economically. And conversely, Excalibur may be cheaply reproducible, facile Hollywood pap, but it is a staging of Arthurian mythology initially produced with a lot of collective effort and money on behalf of people who may not have known or cared about any of that mythology. Capitalism at work yada yada.
Just as Chretien is not much harder to purchase today than Mists of Avalon, an ostensibly “headier” film like Lancelot du Lac is not much harder to find on DVD than Excalibur, so the media democratization you describe is something of a two-way street: it has increased access to pulp, but also to media once reserved for Marie de Champaigne and Cannes film festival audiences, expanding that access geographically, economically, and temporally. I guess my feeling is everything’s game, so democracy = good.
Posted 11 Dec 2007 at 1:54 pm ¶
Mary wrote:
While Chretien is, indeed, harder to find today than a copy of Mists of Avalon, I sometimes think we as a society decide that works have a “higher literary value” simply because they are older and more obscure.
In Chretien’s case, yes, it is a fine work of literature, but if you look at it from the perspective of the times, it was probably taken with about as much respect as Mists of Avalon is today. Who was Chretien writing for? A court of women who wanted to here romantic tales of knights and damsels. His target audience was not very broad, which causes one to wonder why his work carried on through the ages and became more timeless.
Then take Mists of Avalon. Bradley is also, in my opinion, targeting a very female audience with her tales of women taking a huge role in the Arthurian legend, a genre typically reserved for buff men. This is popular now for that reason, but it makes me wonder if Mists of Avalon will be studied in the future in the cultural context.
This brings me to my point: Why do we study Chretien so much? Is it simply because older Arthuriana is hard to come by, or are people fascinated with the culture of the times? Do think the culture of the ‘future’ is going to be different enough from our own to warrant the intense study of Mists of Avalon, or have we, in fact, reached a “cultural plateau?”
Wow, that comment got a lot more philosophical than I originally planned… Enjoy!
Posted 11 Dec 2007 at 3:10 pm ¶
sean wrote:
Mark, everyone,
I really appreciate the move toward closure, and recapitulation. I just have a factual caveat about SGGK: a unique MS, never, as far as we know, copied by anyone. It’s sheer luck that it survived at all. By contrast the inarguably aesthetically inferior Carl of Carlisle exists in twice as many mss (2!), but these mss are separated by about 100 years. So – while SGGK languished in obscurity until the 19th C.- the Carl was being recited, perhaps continuously, over the span of a century.
There’s the good, the influential, and the popular. Occasionally these three combine in one work – maybe Geoffrey of Monmouth is a case in point here. But there is room for all, and I think it’s important to look at the range of possibilities for this myth. The economics of culture play a great role in their production, reception and continuation, and each time we attempt a literary history of Arthuriana, we recreate and reify a narrative of its origins and evolution. But we leave out far more than we can include. We could start this class again at the beginning with Gildas, Culhwch and Olwen, Wace, Lawman, Marie de France, etc. etc. without repeating anything from this semester, and we still would miss far more material than we would read.
Posted 11 Dec 2007 at 6:23 pm ¶