tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post5522867348839693394..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Once More with StonehengeCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-80683310264356962582008-09-09T20:00:00.000-04:002008-09-09T20:00:00.000-04:00This observation belongs to my larger argument, re...<I>This observation belongs to my larger argument, recently formulated, about the relationship between wonder literature and the justifications of conquest </I><BR/><BR/>Recently formulated! Haha. Okay, anyway, in a passage I just read, here's someone else saying roughly the same thing, which suggests that everyone's probably saying much the same thing:<BR/><BR/>"I continue to aver not only that the Caribs, Aztecs, Pacific Islanders, and various African, Native American, and New Guinea 'tribes' have been exoticised, but also--and equally importantly--that Western culture has congratulated itself for putting a stop to this cultural excess through colonial 'pacificiation' and introducing Christianity to once-benighted natives" (Wm. Arens, 'Rethinking Anthropophagy,' in Cannibalism and the Colonial World, 41).Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-18428187130656092232008-09-09T17:05:00.000-04:002008-09-09T17:05:00.000-04:00Great comment on Geoffrey, Jeffrey. That's why you...Great comment on Geoffrey, Jeffrey. That's why you're El Jefe....oh, nevermind.<BR/><BR/>I've definitely been teaching Geoffrey as ambivalent, and perhaps leaning a bit too strongly on his peculiar (ethnic?) alliances with the Welsh while writing a history for (as best we know?) Robert of Gloucester. As we all know, the HRB simultaneously promotes and undercuts its colonial and imperial project. My students, may they be blessed, would have arrived at this point even without my prompting. Last Wednesday, when I just asked "What'd you think of the reading?,' they seized upon one of the counterarguments to paying the tribute to Rome: "nothing that is acquired by force and violence can ever be held legally by anyone." "But wait," they asked, "What about Arthur? Didn't he just conquer half of Europe for no good reason?" Yesterday, another student suggested that the two fighting dragons be understood, at least in part, as presenting violence from the perspective of conqueror and conquered (red for the violence suffered, white for the glory claimed). A hard reading to support, but not a bad one for that. I've pointed out that weird relationship the HRB has to Rome: they picked up on the Crusade bits (where Rome becomes 'Easternized'), but thought it was strange, given the Trojan/Roman ancestry of both Arthur and Guinevere: why slag on your family that way? They liked it when I asked "and what language did Geoffrey write in?" and liked when I pointed out the Britons praising Arthur for his 'Ciceronian' eloquence and Geoffrey's (apparent?) admiration of the 'Roman' architecture of Caerleon and what look to be echoes of classical epics (e.g., the death of Frollo).<BR/><BR/>So, yeah, I have a heard time imagining how it could be taught as anything <I>but</I> ambivalent, as contaminated with contradictions.<BR/><BR/>But I still want to lean on the names Wace gives Stonehenge: English, French, 'Briton,' but no name that preserves its (multiple) foreign origins, including a nonhuman origin from giants. And I have to disagree with you--oh sad day!--when you write: "there is no reason to believe that its giant-endearing ability to heal wounds has abated; the power in the rocks abides." Aurelius and Uther are both poisoned. Surely if the stones could heal, Aurelius and Uther would have been healed by them. My strong sense is that wonder has--largely but not entirely given the dancing stones!--gone out of the stones: again, Stonehenge is now a mortuary rather than a hospital. This observation belongs to my larger argument, recently formulated, about the relationship between wonder literature and the justifications of conquest (I wonder if I could find analogous discursive phenomenon with Egyptian relics, where, perhaps, they might have been thought more exotic, more prone to being cursed, <I>in situ</I> than at the British Museum?). Once Stonehenge has done its work of inspiring another swatting of the Irish, once it's been taken to Britain, it no longer needs to be a wonder. As the graveyard of kings, as a memorial to the desired ethnic purity of the Island, it starts to do an entirely different kind of work. <BR/><BR/>So: you would know better than I would: are there references outside the HRB to Stonehenge <I>in Britain</I> healing?<BR/><BR/>That said, I love your attention to the rocks in motion at Stonehenge, to Wace's preservation of this with 'carole as gaianz.' And, haha, I think your excellent reading supports where my argument ends up. In other words, despite the draining of wonder from Stonehenge, the <I>dance</I> of the stones undercuts any effort to keep the stones as <I>only</I> a memorial, as only Briton, French, and English. In that way, the stones function like Vortigern's Tower, and suffer the same heterogeneity. <BR/><BR/>And, Eileen, yes, exactly. I referred to Arthur yesterday as a "secular Messiah," then mentally kicked myself and added "by which I mean the <I>Christian</I> Messiah, in that he's coming <I>back.</I>" Although I'm meant tomorrow to start on Beroul, I plan on spending a fair amount of time comparing the HRB on Arthur's departure to Wace and Layamon. They're similar, but the differences are worth the noticing (as another opportunity to teach the hardest skill to learn: close reading).Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-54466161620281915792008-09-09T11:07:00.000-04:002008-09-09T11:07:00.000-04:00Arthur's corpse is conspicuously absent at Stonehe...Arthur's corpse is conspicuously absent at Stonehenge, as JJC notes, because, like Jesus, he has to disappear so he can reappear, right? Or, rather, so his absent body can act as a place-marker of messianic time, the eternal promise of the return of a glorious past in whatever present needs it/him? If literature and other forms of art are any indication, the absence of Arthur's death and burial in Monmouth's "Historia" certainly gave lease to a long life of such "returns."Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1086068626633800542008-09-09T08:40:00.000-04:002008-09-09T08:40:00.000-04:00Thanks for posting this Karl.I love your closing s...Thanks for posting this Karl.<BR/><BR/>I love your closing sentence, on the pit beneath Vortigern's intended tower:<BR/><EM>The colonizer's dream of homogeneity in the centerpoint of Empire can be only a dream, for wonder is at our feet, at the very site of our national myth, where we had thought there to be only bones.</EM><BR/>Keen analysis + eloquent phrasing = a quotable and succinct capture of what that whole episode is about.<BR/><BR/>But as to Stonehenge ... I don't know. I see Geoffrey rather differently: not so much a colonialist voice there (or anywhere) so much as an ambivalent, conflicted, land-mining artiste (ie, another Merlin). So if Stonehenge is a "carole as gaianz" or "chorea gigantum," then it is a circle/round/song/dance, and not mere hanging stones. By giving immobile Stonehenge an art-induced mobility (Merlin doesn't use magic to relocate the architecture, but art in the form of engineering), well, by allowing the memory of giants to cohabitate with memorializations of a race that started in Britain as giant slayers, Geoffrey is (I'd argue) transforming Stonehenge into an adaptive, historically impure, but nonetheless enduringly potent architecture (there is no reason to believe that its giant-endearing ability to heal wounds has abated; the power in the rocks abides). I'd argue that Stonehenge in the text doesn't overwrite a British history upon African and Irish ones so much as conjoin the three to Norman and English histories and make something new of the commingling. NOte too that Geoffrey allows many a famous Briton to be buried there (Aurelius, Uther, Constantine), but despite the fact that those who come before and after him are laid to rest at Stonehenge, Arthur's corpse is conspicuously absent.<BR/><BR/>More on this later, perhaps, when I'm not crazily prepping for Chaucer class!Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.com