Camelot: the Violence and the Ecstasy

Kaite BERKELEY* CAMELOT: THE VIOLENCE AND THE ECSTASY Abstract. “Camelot” is a term of containment. I discuss how it subsumes the epistemological wound created by the mysteries surrounding JFK’s death, anxiety around cold war tensions, a technological frontier, the embrace of a charismatic figure who in 1960 Norman Mailer called Superman, and the mystique of Jackie Kennedy, particularly stemming from her strategic silences. Key words: Arthurian legends, Cold War, charisma, nostalgia, Superman, Jacqueline Kennedy Even though the word wasn’t uttered during Kennedy’s presidency, “Camelot” is invoked seamlessly as the assumption of something that once was, and never will be again. Yet Camelot is a spongy and ill-defined cultural memory, summoned to suggest something imprecise but impossibly good; 863 it is an opaque cultural currency (it has exchange value but no use value) that begs to be explored. In looking at this phenomenon symptomatically I argue that what inaugurated Camelot is what isn’t known and can’t be said about the assassination. The 26-second Zapruder footage shows the side of JFK’s head explode in a livid spray of red blood, yet, so much is still sup- pressed in this graphic rendition of the assassination. We still don’t know who killed JFK nor why. Camelot is thus a term of containment and ripe for amplification. In this essay I try to open up the term and reveal its many con- notations, referents and repressed material. We know the Arthurian legends place great stock on narratives of fidelity, respect, deference and stories and characters which cohere around them. I want to contrast those mythical accounts with the Kennedy narratives whose defining feature is that they will not cohere: they point to a presidential body whose cultural autopsy at once reveals too much and too little. Camelot, a term that won’t go away, harnesses all that isn’t known and remains unspoken yet which spills out in disguised form. It appears to hinge on nostalgia, but in this paper I argue that Camelot is a metonym for cultural anxiety and a utopian space that never was, hence something that cannot be articulated. The truth of the assassination returns to a critical silence (Oswald’s death secured that), as conspiracy theories amply underscore. Camelot is thus dense with tension, * Berkeley Kaite, Associate Professor of English, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. TEORIJA IN PRAKSA let. 50, 5–6/2013 Kaite BERKELEY desire, impossibility, a future nostalgia: above all, what wants to, but can’t be, uttered. No accident that it is associated with Jacqueline Kennedy who notoriously remained silent on the assassination and her life with JFK. Camelot as a utopian space is characterized by containment in several senses. It contains (and exposes) the epistemological wound created by the mysteries surrounding JFK’s death, anxiety around cold war tensions, a technological frontier, the embrace of a charismatic figure who in 1960 Norman Mailer called Superman, and by the mystique of Jackie Kennedy, particularly stemming from her strategic silences. She still stands for the ineffable in Dallas in 1963. She was beside JFK in the car when he was assassinated but never spoke publically about that after the interview with Theodore White (1963) in which she coined the term.1 She rarely spoke, but her use of the word “Camelot” has resonated for 50 years. And she didn’t emit tears when JFK died, something for which is praised. This real and metaphoric embod- ied containment is underwritten by Camelot. How did it begin? Seven days after the assassination, on November 29th, 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy requested an interview with journalist and author Theodore White. In ‘An Epilogue,’ which accompanied White’s article on the President, Jackie spoke of many things only some of which were published. 864 The thrust of White’s narrative centers on Jackie’s distrust of official histori- ans who she saw as poised to cannibalize the President’s record and others’ personal memories of him. ‘History! … it’s what those bitter old men write,’ she said. White recounts that her telling of the story was a stream of con- sciousness, told without tears, a “recitative to herself.” He notes that Jackie had to “rid herself of the blood scene” (White, 1978: 676). She said, “I kept holding the top of his head down, trying to keep the brains in … his blood, his brains … all over me.” But what she also pressed upon White was a view of history that belongs to heroes who must not be forgotten. Claiming to be “ashamed” to say what she summoned White to hear, but also “obsessed,” Jackie continues with the anecdotal comments which have since that time subsumed the Kennedy presidency under one mythical word. She noted that Jack liked to listen to records before falling asleep and “the lines he loved to hear” were these two from the Lerner and Loewe musical: “Don’t let it be forgot/that once there was a spot/for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.” She continues in her own words, “There’ll never be another Camelot again” (White, 1963: 158–159). Jackie invokes in a ram- bling fashion the potent myth of the self-made man, coincident with the idea of the fallen martyr. She describes Jack as “simple” and yet “complex,” a “lonely, sick little boy … scarlet fever … this little boy sick so much of the time, reading in bed, reading history … reading the Knights of the Round Table 1 ‘An Epilogue,’ Life, December 6, 1963: 158–159. TEORIJA IN PRAKSA let. 50, 5–6/2013 Kaite BERKELEY … and he just liked that last song.” The President here is every little Ameri- can boy, who by force of will and emulation, crafts himself in the image of one who overcomes adversity to become a hero. Much attention had been paid to JFK’s back injury, surgery, his navy experiences which included his being shipwrecked for a few days, his survival unknown, and his chronic back pain until his death (Hamilton, 1992). This is an Oedipal narrative in which the youthful boy sets out to slay what is in his path, whether a real or imagined father figure, or something else in the way of his rightful destiny. This was the first reference to Camelot, made by any Kennedy, or anybody, and yet it retroactively stands for a presumed and yet indiscernible era and mood. Norman Mailer (1960/2001: 10) captures that mood in his 1960 report on the Democratic National Convention by situating Kennedy’s elusive yet ineluctable appeal within the tensions generated by America’s “double life.” For much of the twentieth century, he wrote, that life has … moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground: There has been the history of politics, which is concrete, factual, practical, and unbelievably dull … and there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely, and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and 865 violence which is the dream life of the nation. Untapped and ferocious desires: these are what seep into the cool veneer of the imagined Camelot. Camelot needs its subterranean infrastruc- ture, the dungeons which imperfectly contain its smouldering undercur- rents. It wouldn’t be Camelot without these. The reverence for metaphoric containment is at its heart and it settles on, among others, the fetishization of the boundary – call it a frontier – and thus what seeps through. When Mailer (1960/2001: 4) refers to the “madnesses of the country” in 1960 he is channelling the enduring mythical ethos of the Arthurian legends. Mailer’s perception of madness points to the tensions between the apparent real and the imperceptible and which attach to abstract cold war boundaries and a charismatic leader whose presence will syphon those tensions. Mailer’s prescience is in foreseeing the explosive centre that negotiates present, past and future. Note the emphasis on the necessary contradictions – ecstasy and violence – that sustain the Kennedy aura. The strange affinity between modern America and the narratives of Camelot centres on the frisson created when the surface calm spars with the clandestine movement beneath it and results in an inevitable rupture. The Arthurian legends and “Camelot,” though in their hackneyed form in a Broadway musical, provide the gram- mar for that explosion. Let us turn to them first. TEORIJA IN PRAKSA let. 50, 5–6/2013 Kaite BERKELEY Legendary “Camelot” pre-Camelot The Arthurian legends are narratives of tradition, the formal elements of style and appearance, and a fixed dominion of rank, responsibility and privilege: “the highest model for emulation” (Bulfinch, 1934: 304). A model perhaps, but Bulfinch is quick to point out that in practice the force of instrumentality prevails so that “justice administered” can as easily reveal its dialectical darker side, i.e., that dungeons were full of oppressed knights and ladies, waiting for some champion to appear to set them free, or to be ransomed with money; that hosts of idle retainers were ever at hand to enforce their lord’s behests, regardless of law and justice… There is also courtly love: honour, obedience and faithfulness, “service is its own reward and no joy is necessarily implied” (McCarthy, 1988: 56). Love, within this formal code, is characterized by impossibility and suffering: the exceptionally beautiful women are unavailable to their suitors. Lancelot, for example, is in love with Arthur’s wife Guenevere. Love, in any case, is virtu- 866 ous, a test, a trial existing outside the feudal union of marriage, a romance at odds with knightly endeavour. Love is a “fellowship at heart,” the quest for a grail, an ideal.

Load more