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King Arthur As Transcendent Rhetoric of Anxiety

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King Arthur As Transcendent Rhetoric of Anxiety KING ARTHUR AS TRANSCENDENT RHETORIC OF ANXIETY: EXAMINING ARTHURIAN LEGENDS AS SOCIOPOLITICAL PARATEXTS Thesis Submitted to The College of Arts and Sciences of the UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for The Degree of Master of Arts in English By Alexis Faith Ancona Dayton, Ohio May 2018 KING ARTHUR AS TRANSCENDENT RHETORIC OF ANXIETY: EXAMINING ARTHURIAN LEGENDS AS SOCIOPOLITICAL PARATEXTS Name: Ancona, Alexis Faith APPROVED BY: Miriamne A. Krummel, Ph.D. Faculty Advisor Elizabeth A. Mackay, Ph.D. Faculty Advisor Bobbi S. Sutherland, Ph.D. Faculty Advisor ii © Copyright by Alexis Faith Ancona All rights reserved 2018 iii ABSTRACT KING ARTHUR AS TRANSCENDENT RHETORIC OF ANXIETY: EXAMINING ARTHURIAN LEGENDS AS SOCIOPOLITICAL PARATEXTS Name: Ancona, Alexis Faith University of Dayton Advisor: Dr. Miramne A. Krummel As a recurring figure representative of the institution of kingship, King Arthur presents a unique rhetorical opportunity to examine sociopolitical anxieties of the Middle Ages. Because of his unique position, I propose Arthur himself is a text to be analyzed. With Arthur established as a text, specifically one of rhetorical significance, I analyze his subsequent iterations (historical and literary) as paratexts. Traditionally, paratextual analysis has involved an investigation of the literal and physical artifacts surrounding a text; however, by examining Arthur-the-figure as a text, I apply paratextual analysis theoretically. Rather than examining book bindings or author’s notes, I argue Arthur’s paratexts involved genre and the sociopolitical rhetoric of his authors. Through this method, I argue that Arthur is a transcendent text onto which sociopolitical anxieties are imposed, making him more than a literary figure but rather a rhetorical device of cultural memory and anxiety, particularly an anxiety of belonging. The works of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Geoffrey Chaucer, Marie de France, and Sir Thomas Malory afford both an illustration of Arthur’s transcendent temporality and insights into attempts at self- iv actualization. Reading Arthur-the-figure as a text provides not only significant opportunities to recover marginalized narratives of medieval England, but also insight into present sociopolitical anxieties. v Dedicated to Dad who took me to book sales and Mom who bought me tea and teapots to enhance the reading experience vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This piece would not exist without the guidance and encouragement afforded by Dr. Miriamne Krummel whose provision of books and cough drops have kept me thinking and speaking, ensuring that I exercise my mind and my voice. It also seems appropriate to proclaim my appreciation to the support system of the University of Dayton English Department teaching assistants and their director, Dr. Jennifer Haan. They never tell you about the friendship and cupcakes that go into writing a thesis. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………...……………………………………………………...iv DEDICATION………………………………………………………………………......vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………………….vii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………......1 CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK………………………………………..4 CHAPTER 3: ILLUSTRATIVE ANALYSIS………………………………………..….16 CHAPTER 4: CONCLUSION…………………………………………………….….…37 WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………………39 viii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Proposition: I’m a king, not a man. -Camelot, 1967 The rain trickled down the back of my neck as I bounced on my toes, waiting in the line of strangers united through their love of books. The annual summer sale at the Brunswick, Maine library promised the mildew smell of forgotten books and their intoxicating lure. I was thirteen and entirely oblivious that this day would mark the beginning of my professional career. Blindly excited, I smiled as the crowd started moving, clutching my bags that would soon be filled with stories of all shapes and sizes. While carefully scanning the spines, fully intending to judge every book by its cover, a red hardcover with gold lettering caught my eye: Le Morte d’Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory. Ignorant of French, I nevertheless recognized the name of that king that had filled my childhood imagination. Sword fights in my neighbor’s front yard flashed through my mind, and I reached almost desperately for the vibrant red tome. I held it reverently—I was not sure why—and marveled at the immaculate frontispiece, conveying romance and hope. As I flipped through the pages, something came loose into my hands: an old newspaper clipping left behind and undoubtedly long forgotten by the book’s previous reader. In bold newspaper print, the title enraptured me, King Arthur of the Round Table May Square with Reality. In discovering this article, it brought about memories of and 1 fascinations from early childhood: who was Arthur? What made him the paragon of chivalry and kings? The question of Arthur is not a new one; I certainly was not the first child to wonder at his existence marked by strength, romance, betrayal, drama, hope, and wonder. In pursuing the question of who he was, I encountered musicals, films, and novels surrounding this legendary figure. Eventually, this quest brought me to academia, encountering ideas that sometimes mirrored my own and others that left me unsettled. It was during a viewing of the 1967 musical film Camelot that I began to understand Arthur for the complex figure—not man—that he was. In the climax of Arthur’s (Richard Harris) downfall, he mourns the affair between Guinevere (Vanessa Redgrave) and Lancelot (Franco Nero), vowing to take revenge. He rages, proclaiming that he demands “a man’s vengeance,” but, he concludes, he is a king and not a man. It was this moment that I first began to interrogate the idea of Arthur as more than a character or figure; he is a representation of an institution. As I matured, so did my understanding of Arthur. He transformed from ideal to problem, symbol of righteousness to emblem of injustice. I ventured abroad to pour over books in the tower above Balliol College Library in Oxford, seeking out locations as romantic as Camelot to pursue Arthur’s identity, which grew in contradiction. I became disenchanted with his supposed moral character and knightly prowess, seeing his waning power in the words of Thomas Malory, a criminal-knight in the midst of one of the bloodiest wars England had known. Malory’s Arthur is a hero, king, criminal, nobleman, child, and so on seemingly ad infinitum. Arthur belonged to the romance of a nonexistent utopian past exhibited through the rhetoric of nostalgia 2 prevalent in the Middle Ages. Arthur persisted in cultural memory, hearkening to the past, but what did he offer for his present—the present of his numerous iterations? The question continued to burn in my consciousness, and I encountered Arthur everywhere. I attended conferences on Victorian fiction or feminist rhetoric, learning of paratexts and Hispanic legends, and the question of Arthur remained; I studied manuscripts, archives, language, and theory. The once and future king was truly persistent: his presence among illustrated manuscripts with rich histories of conquest and destruction preserved him in my memory. Arthur has thus haunted me from the moment I slipped that newspaper article out of the red binding. His salvific image floated in and out of my personal and academic life, punctuated with the promise of his return when England’s need—when my need—was greatest. Arthur was a mnemonic; he was the product of history blending myth and memory to shape a collective, and individual, truth.1 He haunts me, and now I am staring back at this specter of history, identifying him as character, institution, nexus: a text that promises insight into the history and literature that composes his paratext. 1 This particular idea of the rhetorical work of the collective mindset, while not first introduced, was made important to this project through the presentation of Miriam Fernandez’s “The Wailing of the Waters: Llorona Mythology and Collective Memory” presented at the 2017 Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference held at the University of Dayton. 3 CHAPTER 2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Rex quondam rexque futurus. -Thomas Malory (689), 1485 Introduction to Theory Arthur’s position as text requires a comprehensive understanding of first how he can be considered a text and then what the implications of his textuality are. Incorporating taxonomic, literary, rhetorical, and medieval political theory, reveals that Arthur truly is a dense focus of collective anxieties. Taxonomic analysis foreshadows the importance of how Arthur is portrayed in his position as text; borrowing from Foucault, literary theory begins the question of what a text is—something informed by outside parts; rhetorical theory connects the idea of text as something used by the collective and the individual; finally, medieval political theory cements Arthur’s position as a truly transcendent sociopolitical figure. By transcendent, I mean that Arthur ideologically exists outside of his temporality. He exists in a time outside of time—a “nowhere” as Karma Lochrie identifies it—where “the past functions in tandem with a ‘critique of the present’ that forms the necessary basis for imagining a future” (Lochrie 2).2 By proving he is text, Arthur is understood to be a figure representative of the coalescing thoughts— or as I argue later, memories—of the cultures in which he appears. In tapping into the 2 Lochrie specifically discuss utopia, which is an idea closely linked with Arthur’s idyllic Camelot and nostalgic rule. 4 Arthurian legend, authors, statesmen, and societies collectively reach for the salvific, “providing what Caxton calls ‘beneurte’ (‘blessedness’),” simultaneously displacing their fears onto that salvation (Fradenburg and Freccero xiii).3 Taxonomic Analysis and the Question of Text Taxonomic analysis provides an epistemological lens through which to view texts. I begin with this idea as it was the beginning of this project itself. Taxonomic analysis explores the implications of “the way information is presented,” which is “nearly as important as the information itself” (Steiner 1). Examining a text taxonomically affords insight not only into how the information is organized, but why it is organized that way.
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