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An Arthurian Empire of Magic, and Its Discontents: An Afterword

2021; Scriptoriun Press; Volume: 31; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/art.2021.0016

1934-1539

Geraldine Heng,

Linguistics and language evolution

An Arthurian Empire of Magic, and Its Discontents: An Afterword Geraldine Heng (bio) …has the post-Arthurian age finally arrived? —Wan-Chuan Kao, ‘The Fragile Giant’ …the Arthurian story has not yet exhausted its possibilities… —Amelia Rutledge, ‘Romans, Celts, and “Others”: Residual Colonial Models and Race in Contemporary Arthurian Novels’ I became a medievalist because of the King Arthur legend. Watching one filmic Arthurian production after another issued by Hollywood—from the nostalgic musical Camelot to the epic-minded Excalibur—and musing over the sci-fi comic-book series Camelot 3000 while seeing Marion Zimmer Bradley’s quasi-feminist The Mists of Avalon get turned into a television series, and Roger Zelazny’s ‘The Last Defender of Camelot’ become an episode of The Twilight Zone, I asked myself: why did this particular story—from the plethora of stories that are the legacy of premodernity—not only survive, but thrive, and get repeatedly recreated in various cultural media for 900 years?1 All my intellectual work has been driven by a search for answers to questions like this. Later, near the close of the 1990s, the big question would be: why can’t we name phenomena, institutions, and practices in the European Middle Ages as racial, just because they existed in premodernity, when they would certainly be considered racial were they to occur today?2 Medieval Arthurian literature, however, was a different sort of beast. For one, Arthurian romances, in whatever European languages—Old French or Middle High German, Old Norse or Irish, Middle English, Dutch, Latin, Hebrew—like their recreations in modern media, afford genuine pleasure. Their politics might be questionable, even execrable—and we note that Arthurian story willingly attests how the titular Arthur himself was birthed in betrayal, deception, and rape (a demonstration of that minus-in-the-origin so often seen in foundational mythologies)—yet audiences have derived a lively pleasure from the permutations of Arthurian story from the very beginning. Remember the anecdote about the medieval monks at supper who were [End Page 124] dozing off while being read their usual pious texts, till the reader galvanized everyone’s attention by suddenly switching to Arthur? Emma Goldman’s protest against grimly ascetic politics reminds us that even those who are wedded to revolutionary politics hunger to be able to dance at the revolution.3 Human beings want pleasure, not pain, even in their fiercest political commitments. Pleasure is a key feature in why centuries-old stories survive. But what about race, equity, and justice: the animating themes of this special issue of Arthuriana? How do we negotiate the politics of Arthurian courtly feudal romance, and the politics of Arthurian reception in postmedieval, contemporary time? Unlike Richard Sévère and Cord Whitaker—who have described how, as Black men, they felt excluded from, and alienated by, the European courtly literature they enjoyed reading—my earliest encounters with the Matter of Arthur were cinematic, and did not produce, as an immediate response, a cognitive dissonance requiring what Mariah Min calls ‘Judas hermeneutics’ for reception.4 Cinematic identifications are mobile and opaque, and can involve not just identification (or disidentification) with characters and plots, but can also involve surprisingly flexible identifications—with, say, even the syntax of a filmic diegesis. I seem to have identified with the affect of Arthurian romance.5 In the face of a plot that thematized treachery and terrible loss, abject human weakness, abysmal failure, and wrenching tragedy, an optimism that offered audiences sheltering and consolation yet remained. Arthurian film and medieval Arthurian romance seemed able to shelter and protect, even while plumbing the depths of human despair. Later, I decided this was a talent with which all romances were imbued. Another striking feature was the elasticity of romance—Pat Parker dubbed this an imperative toward dilation and delay, and a resistance to closure—conducing to a capaciousness that issued an invitational dynamic to accumulate ever more story.6 Thus the story of Uther Pendragon and Merlin (what we might call the Utheriad) became added to the story of Arthur (the Arthuriad); the story of Tristram and Isode too joined the corpus; as did Grail stories, and an ever-enlarging concatenation of stories...