Chivalric Lieux De Memoire

Wayne State University Wayne State University Dissertations 1-1-2015 Chivalric Lieux De Memoire: Nostalgia, Communal Memory, And The urB den Of Historical Consciousness In Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur Wilkie Collins Wayne State University, Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations Recommended Citation Collins, Wilkie, "Chivalric Lieux De Memoire: Nostalgia, Communal Memory, And The urB den Of Historical Consciousness In Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur" (2015). Wayne State University Dissertations. Paper 1121. This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@WayneState. It has been accepted for inclusion in Wayne State University Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@WayneState. CHIVALRIC LIEUX DE MEMOIRE: NOSTALGIA, COMMUNAL MEMORY, AND THE BURDEN OF HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN SIR THOMAS MALORY’S MORTE DARTHUR by WILKIE COLLINS DISSERTATION Submitted to the Graduate School of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 2015 MAJOR: ENGLISH APPROVED BY: _________________________________________ Advisor Date _________________________________________ _________________________________________ _________________________________________ TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction “Memory and History”……………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 1 “Context: Nostalgia in an Age of Anxiety”…………………………………………......12 Chapter 2 “A Community of Time: Remember the Past and We Remember Ourselves”…………58 Chapter 3 “Arthurian Memory and the Chivalric Community…………………………………….124 Chapter 4 “History, Responsibility, and the Quest for Individual Remembrance”.........................192 Chapter 5 “Sites of Memory in the Twilight of the King”………………………………………...272 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………325 Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………334 Autobiographical Statement…………………………………………………………………….335 ii 1 INTRODUCTION: MEMORY AND HISTORY In book seven of the Morte Darthur, “The Book of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guenevere,” following Eugène Vinaver’s edition, during the “Knight of the Cart” episode,1 Sir Thomas Malory establishes the setting for his rendering of the well-known tale by opening with a disquisition on the nature of love. In providing what looks, at first glance, to be simply a defense of Guenevere’s and Lancelot’s romance, Malory specifically correlates “trew love” to the act of remembering: Wherefore I liykken love nowadayes unto sommer and winter: for, lyke as the tone ys colde and the othir ys hote, so faryth love nowadayes. And therefore all ye that be lovers, calle unto youre remembraunce the monethe of May, lyke as ded quene Gwenyver, for whom I make here a lytyll mencion, that while she lyved she was a trew lover, and therefor she had a good ende. (649/30-35) I analyze this section extensively in chapter five, but here I want to point out two critical features that wind like threads throughout the Morte Darthur and, in numerous ways, both hold the narrative together and energize the text’s aspirations. These two issues underwrite not only Malory’s overall project, they ground my argument that this is a text driven by a need for memory. Malory’s critique of love reproduces, in small, his overarching concern with the opposition between instability and unity. When he observes “I liykken love nowadayes unto sommer and winter,” he tacitly acknowledges that the world has changed, that the past was something different; and he explicitly announces that the capacity to remain committed to one another is not on firm footing. The interest Malory expresses in the difficulties faced by human beings making their way through “this world unstable,”2 a phrase he uses repeatedly, is accepted as a given by Malorian critics; certainly Malory uses the phrase enough throughout the narrative to support the belief that it is a crucial concern. For the Morte Darthur, inconstancy is a danger 2 that emerges time and again in narratives of civil war and social strife, in tales on the failures of knights to live up to their obligations, in reflections on love and fellowship. Tied directly to this concern over stability is Malory’s desire for memory. As he makes clear in his comment on Guenevere, she is a “trew” lover, meaning she is at once constant, and she is committed to the act of remembering. Whatever else we might find ourselves saying about Guinevere, and throughout the ages people have said many things (mostly pejorative) about her, Malory locates in her that which will prove to be, for the Morte Darthur and for the society that Malory envisions as intimately bound to the narrative, a final redemptive value: for she is a site of memory. In remaining committed she fixes in place responsibility through devotion. Her “commemorative vigilance”3 serves to exemplify what is valuable, preventing the past from being swept away by a changeable and inconstant world. Thus she has “a good ende.” From this brief analysis, what should emerge is a glimpse of a struggle that takes on monumental status in the Morte. That struggle, we will come to see, is defined by a traumatic loss of the past, or at least what is conceived to be the past. The conflicts within the Morte Darthur arise from a lack of unity, or wholeness; but that lack is itself an expression of a crisis reverberating throughout the age. Any text that concerns itself with the past must also face the possibility that the past is something lost. Any act of remembrance, then, is fraught with an almost elegiac mournfulness. As an act of reconnecting with the past, the Morte Darthur finds its memory gripped by an awareness of that past as vanishing. Thus the assurances of continuity that memory indulges are rendered problematic by a perception of history as loss. The critical focus of my analysis is concerned with the appropriation of that act of remembering by historical consciousness. Animating my research is an inquiry into the ethical construction of the recollecting subject, the individual called upon to remember, and how that subject is created in 3 its encounter with the past. I argue that it is impossible to understand the extent of the thematic and semiotic codes operating in this work if we dismiss the fact that medieval culture is, as Mary Carruthers notes in her ground-breaking The Book of Memory, a “memory culture.”4 As the Middle Ages came to a close, the transformation taking shape in historical consciousness was one in which a living belief in the past’s unity was giving way to a perception of historical difference, thereby fracturing the sense of continuity once ordering the conservation of collective remembrance. In The Light in Troy, Thomas Greene points up a feature of early modern historical consciousness that was already emerging even in the Middle Ages: “A civilization discovered its cultural paths by the light behind it of a vast holocaust, and it used this mythical light as the principle of its own energy.”5 That feature is a function of history, emphasizing the past as an enigma, a “ghostly reverberation,” and stressing the impossibility of reconstituting it in any form other than that which is always-already lost. For myself, I see in this recollecting of the past a quality of mourning that is evident as a troubling concern for many medieval writers. In particular, my dissertation seeks to demonstrate the ways in which Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur brings to light within the psychological experience of the end of the Middle Ages the “vast holocaust” of a past that is at once utterly vanished and yet inescapably present. A growing sense of the “pastness” of the past, and a commensurate responsibility to resuscitate history, reveal a collapse in the cultural perception of historical continuity that had been a constitutive feature of medieval theories of memory. Malory exploits this breakdown in memorial continuity to consider, in the Morte, the profoundly personal and political topics of honor, love, and death as they inform his culture’s capacity for remembrance. This dissertation presupposes that texts are products of specific historical and cultural moments. In saying this, I do not mean to propose that my objectives herein are to simply 4 engage a positivist trajectory identifying historical traces emerging from or giving rise to the text. But I do believe that the Morte Darthur is fundamentally responding to both the ideological crises of its age, and its own troubled relationship with the past. The Morte is motivated, I argue, by a desire to locate itself within the warm embrace of collectively remembered values in order to overcome a fragmentation of identity inaugurated by the ideological crises besetting the dominant social classes of late-medieval England. Political turmoil brought on by a recurrent civil war; the tenuous shifting of allegiances as one group temporarily came to power only to be replaced by the other; the unprecedented mobilization of “new men” to replace a vanishing old guard (many of whom were executed for their perceived great-party affiliations); these are just some of the features defining the instability of fifteenth-century English political and cultural life and, most importantly, spelling out the challenges facing a text whose interests lie in an integration with tradition. This is a text that, as we will come to see, is aware of its complicated obligations, its indebtedness to what Malory takes to be the Arthurian narrative’s cultural inheritance. It works to remember, in order to resist forgetting. But in that very act of remembrance, the text reinforces the distance it wishes to efface. The Morte speaks with a voice that, initially confident in its priorities, sets out to restore the glorious contours of an Arthurian past – only to grow acutely conscious of the impossibility of recuperating that past.6 My purpose, moving forward, is to articulate the way in which Malory’s attempts to weave together a unified narrative from a collection of disparate texts situate the Morte Darthur at a crossroads between memory and history.

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