White primarily tackles the issue of violence. Arthur was
always trying to have the war to end all wars, a war to establish his
superiority and, thus, peace. Essentially, he does. With small exceptions, he
does become dominant over all the lands, and their leaders acquiesce to him.
However, White’s Arthur realizes that wars don’t only spring
from pure intentions, or from necessity, but from a unslakable feeling of
violence and aggression in all people. He wants to redirect these kinds of
violent energies, and so he comes up with the Round Table. I love how insightful he is when he says,
“We shall have to make it a great honor, you see, and make it fashionable and
all that.” It’s a very modern insight – people are more likely to do what is
good if it is cool to do so! Poor Arthur paints his own self always as a stupid
and simple man, but he is written as quite sensitive and wise.
Arthur is something of a Christ figure. He is filled with
many human strugglings, but still. He has little ego, strives for all his
people to be as good as they can be and never hurt each other, and puts the
needs of the greater good always before his own, and loves forever his wife and
his friend despite knowing the worst of them. He forgives their betrayal, not
nobly or in a big way, but from simple pure love. They don’t even know they are
being forgiven and he does not care for them to know.
Is it that something about Arthur must always be likeable
and good? He seems (though sometimes made simplified, as I believe Steinbeck
did, and perhaps Mallory too) to be always portrayed as kindly, intelligent,
and infinitely full of love for his subjects and friends. I have not yet finished
with The Mists of Avalon, but there is consistency in this image through those
books too, though Bradley goes much deeper with the characters than Steinbeck,
Mallory, or White.
In the original stories, Arthur does some horrific things.
He sleeps with his own sister, impregnates her, and then kills all the children
in his kingdom of the age that it is possible they are his own incest-born
bastard. White forgives Arthur both these sins, through Arthur’s ignorance of
committing them or guilt later. In Bradley, the massacre never even happens.
Why must Arthur be good? Why is it inherent to the success of the story that
Arthur be so Christlike?
Arthur is, in a way, the moral lynchpin of the stories.
Though the characters and society are very Christian, there is no Christian
sentiment in White’s writing. I don’t get the impression there is much in
Mallory’s either, though I have not read him yet. I am searching for a good
version and reading it last. The church, in The Once and Future King, is not
the moral compass. Arthur is. Because of his goals of creating a peaceful
kingdom he must be truly pure at heart.
He also must be good for the other characters to be forced
to explore their own morality and confront their own sins. Lancelot would never
feel so bad about his relationship with Guinevere if Arthur weren’t such a good
man, and if he didn’t, at heart, know that Arthur knew his sins and was
forgiving him. Guinevere, though less pious of a person here, feels something
of the same. She feels a fierce and guilty loyalty to Arthur. Because her
morals seem less serious than Lancelot’s, I doubt a mediocre or bad man could
inspire the same kind of guilt or introspection as Arthur does by treating her
well.
Lancelot’s character is essential and, I think, very brilliantly written by White. In a way, he is very
typical and also very ideal under Arthur. He has something dark inside him; he
is not inherently good, a quality Arthur recognizes about his people. “It is as if people were half horrible and
half nice. Perhaps they are even more than half horrible, and when they are
left to themselves they run wild.” My favorite quote about Lancelot I cannot
find, but it says how he felt such a need to strive so hard to be perfect
because inside his soul he was not good; he truly enjoyed hurting, and killing.
He was inherently violent. Maybe there is something of original sin in that, as
well. He is exactly as Arthur describes all people to be.
Under Arthur’s pure and Christlike influence, he channels
this violence into knightly exploits, and he hides his bloodthirsty joy, and he
tries to be pious. He becomes, in fact, known as the most benevolent knight and
does good and inspires admiration wherever he goes. But there is always
something in him which feels guilty. I think this goes beyond the affair with
Guinevere. He just knows that, somehow, whatever he does, he is simply not good
like Arthur. He will never be good, and it shows on his ugly face. This is the
only telling of Arthur that I know of that makes Lancelot ugly; I think
classically he is quite handsome.
Lancelot truly mourns his inherent sinfulness, but cannot
change himself. He is devastated when he is shown by God that God recognizes
him as a sinful man. Experiencing the pleasure again of being the best knight
when he knows he does not deserve it and knows God knows he does not deserve it
is even more tragic for him. Arthur, too, knows his sins and forgives him, and
Lancelot knows this. His greatest torture is knowing that he is Arthur’s first
and favored knight and best friend despite Arthur knowing the worst of him.
Arthur’s goodness, however, is the ruin of everything in the
end. If Arthur were not so good, Lancelot and Guinevere would likely have run
away at the start. Arthur could have married again and this time, probably,
borne a son too. The many knights of the Round Table would never, inspired to enormous
religious enthusiasm at Arthur’s behest and example, have scattered across the
countryside in search of the holy grail, many of them dying in the effort. Were
Arthur not kindly and full of love, he would never have allowed himself to be
fooled by Mordred, who he would have put down immediately upon discovering him.
And he would never have allowed himself to, out of a painful self-inflicted obligation
to be a compass of fair and equal justice for his people, be convinced to put
Guinevere to death, which resulted in the deaths of innocent Gareth and Gawaine,
and started an all-out war. His goodness is, eventually, his fatal flaw as a
character. It drives all the conflict in the narrative.
All this makes you wonder about Arthur’s optimism in the
first place. Can extreme goodness only arouse violence around oneself, like it
did for Christ as well? To his last moments he has hope that one just needs to
find the right thing, the thing that causes discord, and fix it, and humanity
will fall into peace. Whatever he said to Merlyn, he does not seem to believe
that humanity is truly bad. He wants to give himself to save them.
But if we look at Lancelot, we have to worry that Arthur’s
hopes are futile after all. Lancelot is the perfect knight, and he tries the
hardest and cares the most, but he never can conquer his innate evil and he is
miserable. He hates himself always for what he is incapable of fixing. If
Lancelot is hopeless, how can the rest not be?
Guinevere is curiously difficult in this retelling. White
never gets close enough to her to really pull her apart. She remains something
of a mystery. She is by turns mature and childish, wise and petty, charming and
obnoxious. Most frequently she is the latter of each of these pairs, or at
least the presence of Lancelot seems to turn her so. Their relationship is also
a strange beast. Though it is, as classically, described as very pure,
courtly-love type sentiment, it seems to make both of them, even in old age,
into children. Maybe this was the nature of so-called “courtly love;” it was
inherently childish. Maybe that childishness was what was supposed to be pure
about it. We are not treated to the blissful year they are supposed to have
spent together early on in their youth, but we are shown many of the petty
bickerings and jealousies that seem to make up the later years of their
relationship. She is irrationally jealous and he is irrationally guilty. They
do seem dearly invested in one another despite all.
No other women are fully realized like Lancelot and Arthur
are, either. Morgause is the only other one who is interesting at all. Though
approached distantly, she is quite
interesting. She is so cold and loves her children so little, and it is
interesting to see what men her kind of mothering raises them into. I did really
enjoy the overt Oedipism manifest in Agravaine,
who barely knew how to hide his sexual jealousy of his mother, who never paid
him any attention as a child except when she couldn’t get any from other men.
And there was maybe something, in retrospect, that was subtly homosexual the
triangle of brothers and Lancelot - how Mordred hated him to the point of
obsession and Gareth idolized him to obsession. Was there something of jealousy
in it? Who knows, but they were entertaining brothers. (Is it just me, though,
or is poor Gaheris left out of everything? Sometimes you didn’t even think he
was in a scene until all of the sudden he had a dialogue line, some weak
insertion of opinion, then he vanished again, never having had an impact on
anything. In Bradley, he leaves the story entirely halfway through and is never
mentioned again.)
White’s retelling seems aimed at a young audience, as
Steinbeck’s was, but it has more humor to it. White makes jokes. Some dull or
morally questionable characters – like Pellinore particularly – are made sweet
and ridiculous. Pellinore’s dragon becomes an amusing and harmless beast, and
his murder of Lot a regrettable accident. Jokes are made frequently about the impracticality
of giant sets of armor. However, some characters and scenes are still rendered
with solemnity. I think particularly of Elaine, who is in actuality somewhat ridiculous,
and also conniving and occasionally cruel. But White treats her only with
dignity, never a mean-spirited jab. There is an especially quiet and poetic
moment in one of the towers with Guinevere and Lancelot when they have grown
older. They are singing together, and White describes the country and its
people as he imagines it would have been, with some sense of nostalgia. This is
late in the narrative; the book seems to mature as its characters do.
For instance, the first book of The Once and Future King – The
Sword in the Stone – particularly seems written in a more lighthearted
style, clearly for young adults or older children. It is quite out of step with
the rest of the narrative, and is, as far as I can tell, almost wholly
fabricated by White. We know what this early schooling with Merlyn does for
Arthur – it teaches him about peace and gives him perspective on the human
situation. But why show it? Is it meant to force the reader to re-approach war
and human struggle from a point of pure ignorance, as Wart, a child with no
experience in the world, must? He must counteract his experience in the
everyday world where violence is glorified, just as we must.
For me, however, it was strange. It was disconcerting to
move so far away from Arthur for the last three quarters of the book, after
being so close to little Wart in The
Sword in the Stone, and to see him forget those experiences later. Just as
you are thinking, maybe, that you rather miss little Arthur and wish you could
know more of him in his adult life, he says he cannot remember the experiences
among the animals during his childhood, which as a reader we still have such
clear memory of. It creates an uneasy boundary between the reader and Arthur.
Perhaps it has to be that way as he is a king, and a king gets to be close to
no one.
Ah, but at the end, something returns. You cannot but love
him. There is hardly a more poignant scene than old Arthur, slumped in his
chair, asking Mordred weakly if it is truly necessary to burn Guinevere, still
his love, at the stake. watching him listen as Mordred narrates the scene below
the window, because Arthur cannot bear to watch. He is suddenly so small and
weak and sad. And we join him at the end of the novel, utterly defeated in
every way, having lost everything, and we experience his small moment of
clarity and triumph just before his death. His optimism is not naive but dogged
and deliberate, and he persists in it to his last moments. I think this is why,
despite his being unnaturally perfect and likable, we can still love him. He is
a good man, but no fool.
