7
Anglo-Celtic product - a development that has continued into the modem day with
the growth of the historical novel.
Third, this thesis also attempts to show how post-Tennysonian Arthurian
writing is fundamentally different from earlier traditions - at least in England, where
Arthurian literary production had always possessed a structure which separated it
from its Celtic and continental equivalents. This structure, this thesis contends, has
essentially been paradigmatic. Since the beginning o f the ‘English’ Arthur, the
tradition has been characterised by the production of culturally iconic texts which
have operated as archetypal versions of the myth: Geoffrey o f Monmouth’s Historia
Regum Britanniae (c. 1138), Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur (c. 1469) and, in the
nineteenth century, Tennyson’s Idylls o f the King. Not only did these texts prove to be
influential on subsequent literary productions of the legend, they also proved to be
models o f the legend which completely dominated their contemporaries’
understanding o f the stories o f Arthur. In their respective periods, the Historia, the
Morte and the Idylls were not only the most widely-consumed version o f the legend in
England, they also constituted almost the entire myth for their readers and audiences.
Thus, the Historia was not only the most popular version o f the myth in the twelfth
century, it simply was the myth for most English readers until the fifteenth century.
Likewise, when Malory translated and redacted the French romances o f the thirteenth
century into English prose o f the 1400s, his humanist retelling provided generations of
readers with the most authoritative version of the myth then existing. And in the
nineteenth century, such was the dominance o f the Idylls that when authors and critics
read the Morte Darthur their resulting poems, plays and scholarship were far more in
line with what Tennyson had written than that produced by Malory in the fifteenth
century.
To these three paradigmatic accounts o f the legend subsequent literary and
artistic interpretations have obediently deferred, tending to reproduce, with gradual
modification, the paradigmatic text’s narrative, cultural and ideological themes in a
variety o f forms and genres - thus extending the cultural potency of the paradigm
over a longer period than if the authoritative text had existed in isolation. Under such
a system, Arthurian cultural production was a dogmatic enterprise, enforced by the
ideological machinations o f elite social groups keen to regulate a political myth that
functioned as an effective means o f disseminating the ideals on which those societies
were based. Thus, for example, the largely historiographical Arthurian tradition of the
twelfth to fourteenth centuries is best known under the rubric ‘Galfridian’, and the
large body of poetic and lyrical manifestations o f the legend produced in the
nineteenth century are most accurately termed ‘Tennysonian’.
In the period since the First World War, however, this hegemonic pattern of
English literary production has greatly diminished and no paradigmatic text has
existed to enforce prescribed cultural signification of subsequent Arthurian literature.
This greater freedom from ideological regulation has been due to a range of
considerations, including the influence of medieval Welsh literature and the
prominence o f a number o f Anglo-Welsh writers who sought to locate their
contradictory national identities within the Arthurian story. Political factors were also
important, the most vital of which was the collapse of liberalism in the interwar period
and the altered demands made of literature as ideological vehicle in the post-war age.
Instead, since the 1920s, Arthurian literary production - far from operating in a
normative paradigm structure - has been characterised by a series of diverse and
sometimes contradictory trends. Some of these have been nationalist in orientation:
English, Welsh and Cornish, or Celtic and Anglo-Celtic. Other trends have developed
directly out o f scholarly approaches, for example: Christian, Pagan, Ritualist and
historical. Politically they have been informed by a range o f ideologies, from
conservatism to feminism and from anarchism to clerical fascism.
The following section expands on the paradigmatic form o f the Arthurian
legend in the medieval period; but before discussing this model in more detail it is
necessary to say something regarding the applicability the theory o f paradigms to the
legends o f Arthur. My discussion o f the paradigmatic account o f Arthurian literary
production is grounded in the philosophy of Thomas Kuhn, especially his seminal
study of the practice o f science, The Structure o f Scientific Revolutions (1962). The
terms used throughout this study - ‘paradigm’, ‘paradigmatic shift’, ‘normal literary
production’ and ‘crisis’ - are all taken from Kuhn’s analysis of the history of
scientific production. The advantage, I believe, of presenting Arthurian literature
through such a structuralist model is that it presents an alternative to the organic
lexicon which has resulted in scholars discussing the legend as a ‘seed-bed’ o f culture,
from which certain texts or sub-genres have ‘blossomed’ or ‘flowered’. As the
American critic Gordon Hall Gerould wrote of the French romances in 1927:
Scholars have too often treated this sudden florescence o f romance as if it
were a true and not a metaphorical flowering: something botanical,
uncontrolled by human actions, which is to lose sight o f the plain fact that
neither spurious history nor acknowledged fiction comes into being of itself.22
By applying Kuhn’s model to the production o f English Arthuriana, as elucidated in
the following section, I have attempted to present a methodological system of
comprehending a cultural tradition that has been ruled by the ideological needs of
social elites and which has been characterised by several major authoritative texts and
long periods of dogmatic literary stability, interrupted by briefer periods o f crisis in
Dostları ilə paylaş: |