But Bhabha links the “margins of the nation” with “modernity,” and he is interested in explaining how modern national discourses disavow conflicts by positioning such problems as temporally past, surmounted in a “modern” present. Through such temporal limits, according to Bhabha, modern narrations of the nation both deny and imply the antagonistic variety of people claimed by national rule. In this way national narratives mark the limits of community through rhetorical tropes of time and space. They encode what Edward Said has called the “overlapping territories” and “intertwined histories” of an intercultural past, but as the liminal spaces bounding the nation’s (present) identity.
In the twelfth century, before the consolidation of any singular nationalist British pedagogy, Geoffrey’s Historia performs a narrativization with pedagogical and performative pretensions. Yet it also differs in significant ways from the national narration that Bhabha describes. On one hand, the Historia crafts a British “people” as its object, and its diverse reception for various political uses contests the identity of which British subjects rightfully follow as Brutus’s heirs. The scholarly reception of Monmouth’s text seems, moreover, to make something like Bhabha’s point. In that tradition, Monmouth’s use of Welsh vaticination is read merely as a “colonization” of the Welsh, and Geoffrey’s text can thus be said to bound Britain’s identity by placing the oppositions of vaticination in the past. If this is the case, then the kinds of disavowals that Bhabha links with modernity emerge even in a premodern account of the past.
Yet Monmouth’s Historia does not, I would argue, offer any such easy chronology. His interest in the difficult, provocative futurism of the Merlin Prophecies, to my eyes, disrupts a progressivist confidence that the past is forever (or ever) surmounted. Monmouth’s ambiguous moments of futurism mean that his readers cannot move back to genealogy or chronology in any triumphant or untroubled way. Furthermore, Monmouth’s combination of prophecy with genealogy suggests that future imaginings (and not just disavowals in the present) drive fantasies of community, even as the restoration of insular unity or wholeness remains a sovereign dream. Monmouth’s history repetitiously invokes the past and future fiction of an entire kingdom ruled by a sovereign family; in this, as Tatlock and Ingledew both remind us, Geoffrey’s history enables annexation. But his history also, and at the same time, contests monolithic rule by disrupting chronological history. His inclusion of the Merlin Prophecies means that the category of ‘Britain’ gestures to (at least) two futures for the crown. Monmouth thus formally encodes differential futures for Britain while displaying not the march of time but repetition and loss as Britain’s fundamental story.
The oppositional “crisis literature” of an insular minority offers a trace history of the material power of those hopes for a different future. Geoffrey’s use of Welsh traditions in a history written in Latin seeks to imagine a future for Welsh as well as Norman by narrating a past repetitively fraught with conflict and filled with loss. This history ultimately encodes the losses wrought by conquest and migration and, in the complex rhetorical figure of “the Britons,” tentatively promises a future of wholeness and recovery. The popularity of Geoffrey’s Historia demonstrates the substantial pleasure of such fragile hopes. Geoffrey’s fragile “Britons” provide (to recall Žižek’s formulation from earlier in this chapter) a captivating “kernel of enjoyment” haunted by devastating losses.
Such a project may also, before certain of audiences, enable the disavowal of twelfth-century Welsh differences from the Anglo-Normans. Desire for a British totam insulam will of course be used to impel as well as to justify England’s efforts to annex Scotland and Wales. But it will also repeatedly be used in opposition to English hegemony. This flexibility has to do in part with the very term “Britain,” a name with a doubled medieval etymology. Traditional etymologies of the word “Britain,” trace its roots in two directions: from the classical figure of Brutus (the etymology listed in the OED), and from the common Welsh phrase “Ynys Prydein” (Island of Britain). Emphasis upon the first of these linguistic histories has traditionally eclipsed the second.47 In Monmouth’s Historia we find both: the story of Brutus and the Merlin’s prophecies linked to the Armes Prydein. Insofar as the eponymous name for the island came from Brutus and his classical conquering army, “Britain” designates a conquering people, a race of invaders adopting the island as their home. Thus is “Britain” a cultural import from Troy, a legacy of conquest displaced from the heart of the Roman world. With Welsh tradition in mind, the category of Britain also refers to hopes for particular geographic integrity—to wholeness and to a native insular geography. “Britain” signifies a geographic completion lost, a unity gone from a people (and an identity) once imperial in power.
This doubled Britain will prove pliable enough, richly ambivalent enough, to accommodate the desires not just of parvenu Anglo-Norman aristocrats anxious to take part in glorious sovereign fantasies, but of later English kings and conquerors. In the fifteenth century, Monmouth’s history, with its representation of a native, British glory, captivates the imagination of English kings who, in the wake of the Hundred Years War, wish to repudiate their dynastic ties to France (resisting their history as the heirs of Norman conquest). Through Arthur they claim an insular, native tradition, and a heritage more ancient than Norman invasion. For these English kings part of the useful doubleness of Geoffrey’s story is that it figures an insular wholeness, and a British identity, as both a loss to be mourned and as a rightful inheritance to be regained. Since the Britons “once occupied the land from sea to sea,” the category of “Britain” provides the imagination with a new insular hegemony as a very old heritage. Later sovereigns will deploy both native and classical traditions in imagining their sovereignty—English kings and aristocrats will wage war against Welsh, Scots, and Irish, building colonial outposts in the edges of the realm while encouraging court poets to tell of their classical roots. This doubleness will render insular hegemony a rightful legacy of a mystical Welsh past as well as domination forged through military, economic, and political policies.
The cultural doubleness legible in my reading of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia (and in the important work done by scholars of medieval Wales to whom my work is indebted) disappears from later notions of “Britain” and its empire. This disappearance means that William of Malmesbury’s denigration of Welsh “ravings” with which we began successfully located Welsh oppositional fantasies outside the realm of the “real.” The trivialization of these alternative versions of “Britain” suggests an interpretive history that favors one portion of Geoffrey’s readers. Alternative fantasies have nonetheless left their traces. Those traces remain legible today thanks in part to Monmouth’s careful ambiguity, and to his use of the traditions of a linguistic minority in the authoritative genre of a Latin history. In this instance, Latin becomes a vehicle for legitimizing (and rendering massively influential) a popular vernacular tradition.
These remarks again suggest some of the power medievalists can offer to postcolonial cultural studies. A consideration of the longue duree of British identity can offer readings of resistance that seem to have disappeared from later discussions of nation or Empire, perhaps precisely because Wales remains a colony of England today. This is not to suggest that the story of Welsh resistance told here replace (or displace) important contemporary efforts at analyzing the racist and imperialist aspects of contemporary British (or American) culture or politics. It does remind us, however, to watch for traces of a variety of resistances already obscured in authoritative accounts of history.
Furthermore, the condensation of resistance and conquering aggression told through Monmouth’s Historia, and repeated in the history of its reception and dissemination, might offer a useful qualification to recent debates within postcolonial cultural studies. Benita Parry critiques