With Žižek’s analysis in mind we are ready to return to Malmesbury’s castigation of Welsh “ravings.” Malmesbury approaches the pleasures of Arthurian narrative through his displeasure over Welsh “delirium.” This structure of “pleasure in unpleasure” registers through Malmesbury’s anxious rhetoric of Welsh “ravings,” wherein he argues that the Welsh need the constraint of simple “truth.” Such paranoic fantasies, of course, embed material conflicts with material consequence. Malmesbury’s insistence on Arthurian “truth” mounts an effort to forbid the Welsh from stealing, through their “trifles” about Arthur, the powers and fascinations of Arthurian history. The pleasure available in stories of Arthurian rule apparently “belong” to “truthful histories” and to official historians—that is, to non-Welsh culture. At stake here is the desire to forbid the pleasures of Welsh creative makyng; at stake too may be the fear that enjoyment of Arthur might “kindle the broken spirits” of the Welsh “to war.”
Where Žižek’s work helps us see how pleasure inhabits the fantasmatic desires implicit in Malmesbury’s words, Fredric Jameson’s Marxist historiography suggests that one group’s pleasures frequently require another group’s pain. Jameson’s work also reminds us that texts are material in form as much as in content. And when he writes, “history is what hurts; it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis,” that statement applies as well to definitions of what counts as “real” (and the concomitant elimination of possible alternatives) which also “refuse desire and set inexorable limits.” Like cautionary tales and words in legal statutes, historical narratives can be employed to give pain; they can punish, prohibit, and constrain desire; they can circumscribe our vision of what might be possible. The generic classification of “history” naturalizes, as it does in Malmesbury’s repudiation of Welsh “trifles,” what can count as real. History can grant to the Real the air—inexorable, determined—of sober tragedy; it can render loss an act of “nature,” “fate,” or even the wages of “narcissism,” rather than a production of collective cultural desire.14 Once granted a privileged access to “what actually happened,” the genre of history can be used to discount, and to make us forget, alternative stories of the past. And it can lend events (like plague, war, or famine) the aura of unavoidable disaster, obscuring the extent to which such events were themselves culturally produced and, thus, could have been avoided.15
Divesting the pleasures of “fiction” from those of “history” has profound implications for an analysis of the contestations over Arthurian “truth” in medieval Britain. The opposition of “realism” to “fiction” can preclude us from seeing fiction making as an activity in which sovereign powers, committed as they are to the “realism” of statecraft, engage. The distinction between “fantasy” and the “real” implies, as it did in Plato’s account, that when governments do participate in fiction-making (efforts usually understood to constitute propaganda) such activity is an aberration, or a mark of “bad” government, rather than a fundamental aim of the powerful. When imagined as activities committed to “truth” and “reality”—in a famous phrase “the art of the possible”—politics and statecraft, perhaps even history, are seen to have only accidental relation to the production of fictions. This presupposition obscures how the powerful use fantasy for their ends whether in the medieval period or our own.16
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae—poised over the breach we have been examining—can elucidate the pleasures and dangers of popular belief for a national fantasy. Beginning with critical assessments of Geoffrey’s work, I argue below that his Arthurian account displays a “British” identity fantastically dependent upon Welsh pleasures, popular figures, and poetic forms. It is to Geoffrey’s fantasy that we turn.
Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Pleasures of History
The Historia regum Britanniae (c. 1135–38) narrates the story of early Britain from its founding by the Trojan Brutus, through Roman and Saxon rule, with special focus on King Arthur’s birth, rule, and death. The account offers fabulous tales of giants and monsters, dragons, sovereigns, and soothsayers. Despite the denigration of the imaginative excesses of these stories by historians like Malmesbury, Geoffrey’s history would be wildly popular, enormously increasing the renown and influence of King Arthur. Julia Crick counts over 200 extant manuscript redactions of Geoffrey’s text, whether complete or partial, in a variety of languages stretching over a significant period17; Geoffrey’s narrative would inspire chronicle accounts in Latin, English, French, and Welsh, as well as a genre of romances of the “Matter of Britain”; Geoffrey’s Merlin prophecies would fuel the dynastic prophecies and genealogies of fifteenth-century political propaganda. According to Crick’s now standard account of the dissemination and reception of Geoffrey’s text, its popularity continued, perhaps even increasing in England, into the later medieval centuries.18
For years the debate over the problems of Geoffrey’s historicist project focused attention on his claim to be translating an ancient British (Welsh) book, a claim that was, scholars believed, dubious. Geoffrey’s history was compromised by doubts about the existence and authority of this elusive vetustissimus liber (old book), and the value of the Historia as a historical text was delimited by a longstanding scholarly consensus concerning Geoffrey’s fraudulent “British” source. Even this consensus conveyed a cultural bias. Acton Griscom, the editor of what was for many years the standard vulgate text of the Historia, implied nearly seventy years ago that the preeminence of Latinists within the medieval scholarly community produced at least a premature rejection of the possibility of Geoffrey’s Welsh source.19 Geoffrey’s claims to the contrary were interpreted, moreover, in the most ungenerous terms, with scholars suggesting that his Welsh source was duplicitously invented “to cover the romantic creations of [his] own imaginative genius” (Griscom 102).
Admittedly Geoffrey may have had no written source. But his assertion of the vetustissimus liber amounts to his use of a standard rhetorical figure, the “old book” topos. Monmouth’s deployment of the “old book” topos locates him firmly within the established tradition of medieval historiography; it does not imply that he perpetrated “one of the best hoaxes of the Middle Ages” (Crick 226). As Julia Crick points out, Geoffrey’s use of the imagination in recounting his history is not at all unusual; like his competitors, Geoffrey amplified and elaborated a story within an already existing narrative tradition. Ruth Morse argues that invention and rhetorical embellishment were especial features of medieval and classical histories written about a very distant past. If an account could be demonstrated as authorized, as Morse puts it, “‘Truth’ might be secondary.… [The] inescapable but highly exploited interpretative circularity depends upon the variety of authority which authorities had” (102). Given these facts, what is striking about the Historia, is neither Geoffrey’s fondness for invention nor his use of the “old book” topos, but the fact that, despite a tradition of historical invention endorsed by medieval rhetorical theory, his is the only account of early Britain dismissed for its apparently extravagant inventions.20 When Bede peppers his famous ecclesiastical history with descriptions of miracle cures and visions of heaven and hell, his excursions into the fantastic fail to compromise his appeal for “scholars [who] respect his historical thoroughness and competence” (Gransden 17). Christian tradition and historiography remain legitimate and authoritative sources for fantasy and magic; other fantasy traditions do not. Thus Antonia Gransden declares Bede’s “grasp of historical method … unique in the middle ages,”