Epilogus historiarum Britanniae

Reactions to the history of forceful domination in Britain have been varied, and continue to be so. I have argued that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a number of these reactions engaged Arthur and his sword. I have maintained, moreover, that these engagements emerged from border regions and that they interrogated relationships among boundaries, coercion, and legitimacy. My investigations have uncovered consistencies that demonstrate that groups on all sides of unequal power share concerns about settlement, reproduction, and historical memory. The different forms of these concerns, meanwhile, testify to unique matrices of regional, ethnic, and social identifications. All of these identifications are “post-colonial” in the sense that they take place after the Norman Conquest of 1066 and are born of the cultural realignments it forced across Europe. Yet the memory of colonial settlement works through historiography in multifarious ways, and its political repercussions were just as varied. Post-colonial Britain, then, sustains malleable and transient discourses of identity, much like more recent postcolonial discourses. This resemblance suggests that the idea of a stable, “precolonial” Middle Ages is as much a fallacy as, say, a precolonial Africa.

My analysis of each narrative began with the representation of topographic and architectural space. For Geoffrey of Monmouth, aestheticized descriptions of Britain and Brittany render them desirable and possessable dominions. Revisions to these descriptions crystallize divergent relations to new dominion. Those who view the island as already in their possession quantify the landscape as a colorless inventory of useful items (the Welsh, Wace, Laʒamon, the Breton poet, Robert of Gloucester). Those who view expansionism negatively moralize topography in order to condemn aggressive authorities (the prose cycle redactors, the Breton poet). Navigable seas surround the settled landscape, and navigable rivers traverse it. Both challenge the stability of boundaries and thus of Insular identity. When Geoffrey defines regional borders along the Severn and the Humber, he grounds dominion in instability. Most subsequent writers dismiss this troubling strategy as they imagine an integrated Insular realm for the benefit of their own regional group (the Welsh, Wace, Laʒamon, Robert). The prose cycle redactors and the Breton poet, however, moralize once again as they pursue critiques of coercive settlement. Once settled, the landscape sustains architectural innovations. In Geoffrey’s unstable topography, cities, walls, and monuments reconfigure boundaries and stabilize dominion, usually to the Britons’ disadvantage. When topography has been quantified or moralized, architecture signifies established dominion irrespective of boundaries and borders. Indeed, in every subsequent case, the built environment immures the general status of dominion: Hengist’s castle leaves the shore to survey Saxon territory (Wace, Laʒamon, the Breton poet, Robert); Stonehenge’s colonial histories are long forgotten (Wace, Laʒamon, the prose cycle redactors, the Breton poet, Robert).

Insular settlement extends to the most recent claims of ownership. Each narrative deploys a range of strategies designed to encompass the Britons within new ethnic histories. The universalizing values of strength, craft, and religion all facilitate the crossing of historical boundaries between peoples. Moralization, however, serves divergent ends: the prose cycle tries to dismiss imperial origins but returns to them nonetheless, the Gesta condemns them openly, and Robert defends an always already legitimate English dominion. The manipulation of genealogical discourse also patrols the boundaries of ethnic and family identity, constructing historical continuities in the wake of obvious disruptions. Etymology likewise traces ethnic and territorial histories. Geoffrey, equivocal as always, uses language to signify Briton sovereignty as well as its passing. The prose cycle redactors also signify ambivalence through etymology. Meanwhile, other writers emphasize the possessive powers of linguistic interventions (the Welsh, Wace, Laʒamon, the Breton poet, Robert). In each case, histories of Britain, London, and Welsh codify the dynamics of memory and amnesia in coercive settlement. Finally, translation in general challenges the boundaries of differences while assuming new ones.

The representation of time confronts the limits of memory directly. In Geoffrey’s case, the mingling of retrospective commentary with prospective revelations unsettles history’s linear progress. Some subsequent writers unravel these equivocations in order to measure progress toward future legitimacy (the Welsh, Wace, Laʒamon, Robert). Others embroil time in further circular confusion in order to critique past and present transgressions (the prose redactors, the Breton poet). Fortune addresses various possibilities—ratifying colonial ambition for Wace, equivocating on expansionist prestige in the prose cycle, and delegitimizing expansion in the Gesta. Relations to time address the practice of historiography itself as a boundary mechanism. By rewriting time, historians write their own relation to historical limits and the prospect of the future.

In each narrative, the Arthurian reign opens new historiographical terrain. And in each case, Arthur’s relation to his sword defines the nature of legitimate expansion. In Geoffrey’s hands, Caliburn signs the prestige of imperial success, in contrast to the story of Briton loss. For the Welsh and Wace, the sword also tracks expan°ionist values, but with the shadows of loss weakened. Laʒamon turns away from Caliburn’s military instrumentality, using the sword to draw Arthur into English dominion. The French prose cycle returns to Geoffrey’s ambivalence, while demonstrating how the sword crosses the border from legitimacy to transgression. In an anticolonial epic, the Gesta turns the sword against imperial value, using it as a sign of all that is wrong with expansionism. Finally, Robert knights the blade, integrating it into the calculation of historical value.

The lessons of comparative resemblance suggest that the various dynamics activated by coercive contact do not divide neatly along the lines of power. Geoffrey of Monmouth and the French prose cycle redactors, although not invested in the same political structures, manifest similar ambivalences toward prestigious authority; they all perform the itinerancy of border subjectivity. Meanwhile, the Welsh and Norman embrace of conquest demonstrates that the colonized and the colonizing often share more than either would want to admit. Conversely, the Bretons’ rejection of force (when compared with their Welsh cousins) reminds us that the colonized do not always share what one might think. Finally, the English assimilation of Briton history shows how confident repossession can erase historical memory, while leading to divergent judgments of force.

Each of these Arthurian histories performs periodic boundary maintenance for regionalist concepts. As a genealogical narrative of the Insular landscape, Arthurian historiography can redefine the cultural identity of topographic spaces and ethnic groups. Border writing does not merely reflect these processes; it shapes their limits. In this sense, the Arthurian histories’ engagements with conflicts over boundaries assimilate them to the narrative struggles that Homi Bhabha identifies as formative for group identity (143). Pierre Bourdieu refers to this same contest as the “struggle over representations,” whereby narrative has the power to define the mental images that constitute reality, to make and unmake groups (221). Border writing participates actively in this symbolic struggle, using the story of historical limits to imagine new dominions. Border historiography thus repositions the past in relation to both present and future, teaching the contours of boundaries as it defines them. The edge, or limit, however, is an ephemeral phenomenon, repeatedly written but never indelibly drawn. In another sense, border writing, like historiography in general, buries the past. The repetition of the burial translates into a perpetual resurrection. In Arthur’s case—“quondam rex futurus” (former and future king) (Malory 592)—resurrection in narrative occurs whenever the place or fact of burial becomes culturally significant. The contest over Arthur’s body, as well as over boundary formation in general, embeds violence in the border.

A postcolonialist approach to Arthurian history highlights these coercive encounters and relations between edges and centers in general. The variability of these dynamics demonstrates vividly that relations among unequal powers do not progress teleologically from freedom to subjection to liberation. Indeed, there is nothing inherently colonial, post-colonial, or anti-colonial about any particular identification strategy. Mimicry, for example, facilitates and resists domination; genealogy and translation perform resemblances and erect intransigent differences. The absence of a clear telos challenges even the notion that the pre-colonial precedes the colonial. Contemporary analysts of colonial discourse have in fact demonstrated the fallacy of the “pre-colonial” and of “progress” in modern history.¹ By demonstrating that coercive encounters touch and contaminate all parties and that the sacred wholeness of the “pre-colonial” is a nostalgic construct of the colonial era, postcolonial studies implicitly deconstruct the myth of a pre-colonial European Middle Ages.² When, for example, Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge suggest that “the postcolonial is really a splinter in the side of the colonial itself” (411), they open theory to any site of domination. Of course, the frequently political engagements of postcolonial criticism reasonably demand cultural, historical, and technological differentiation. Analogical comparisons run the risk of occluding vital contingencies and recolonizing historical subjects. Nevertheless, the long history of colonial representation contains numerous continuities that quantify and qualify differences.

One clear demonstration of how difference and resemblance confound colonial teleology comes from an image that rests literally on the edges of pre-colonial, colonial, post-colonial time—Amerigo Vespucci’s 1497 encounter with indigenes from the “other” side of the sea as produced by Jan van der Straet, Theodor Galle, and Philippe Galle in the 1580s (see figure 3). Since the engraving has become a visual trope of colonial discourse analysis over the past twenty-five years,³ it furnishes an appropriate site for conclusion. Viewing the image with border eyes, the dynamics of perennial contamination come into focus. Like Brutus, Amerigo stands at the shore, the sails of his ship still billowing with European winds. And like Brutus, he finds inhabited land—only instead of naked male giants, he confronts naked women. He arrives carrying a sword, an astrolabe, and a Christian pennant—which Michel de Certeau has called the “weapons of European meaning” (xxv); Anne McClintock, the “fetish instruments of imperial mastery” (26); and Rosemarie Bank, “metaphors for entering history” (41). These artifacts are meant to impose meaning on the female native and her virgin territory. Since de Certeau, critics have focused on the ambivalences and ambiguities of this erotic encounter: Peter Hulme identifies discovery as a ruse of concealment (1), McClintock exposes its mingling of fears and fantasies about boundary formation (26), Louis Montrose draws attention to the ideological implications of the visual oscillation between background and foreground (3–6), Bank speaks of disrupted binaries (42–43), and Margarita Zamora asks whether the woman rises to greet Amerigo or reclines to invite him onto the hammock (152). I think we can also ask whether she is so naked: her head covering is more elaborate than Amerigo’s, she wears some kind of skirt, and she is surrounded by her own instruments of meaning—the leg bracelet, the oar or spear (or scepter?) that rests against the tree, the finely braided hammock (which Tom Conley identifies as a trope of European cartography, squarely connected to Amerigo’s astrolabe [307–9]). As with Corineus and Goemagog, then, troubling resemblances weaken the differences between colonizer and colonized (Amerigo even looks a little pregnant).

The natives clearly have their own methods of mastery, as McClintock and Zamora demonstrate by bringing the cannibalistic scene to the fore. As with the giant of Mont Saint-Michel, cannibalism performs a corporeal confusion of differences, linked to colonial aggression. From the background, the newcomer looks more like a fat second course than a new lord. The scene’s drama escalates if we cast border eyes across the bounds of Renaissance perspectivalism. In the flat space of medieval perspective, where pointing fingers signify speech, the woman threatens Amerigo with sexual and bodily dismemberment: her gesturing hand points to the skewered thigh that lies on the hill. The severed thigh recalls Laʒamon’s giant of Mont Saint-Michel and the French prose cycle’s Maimed King—along with Geoffrey’s Brian, who offers Cadwallader the meat of his own thigh. Long a symbol of phallic sexuality, the thigh conjoins these encounters to both castration and reproduction. The woman’s gesture thus speaks the threat of exchange. What’s more, in the compressed temporality of medieval iconography, Amerigo replies already: with his phallic sword tucked backward between his legs, he submits.

To see the rest of Amerigo’s part in the dialogue, we must return to the drawing that van der Straet actually made (figure 4). Here, Amerigo names the land, the woman, and himself—America. Like Brutus’s Britannia, the feminine form identifies the stakes of exchange and possession. As Amerigo speaks the native, he simultaneously creates and effaces differences of several kinds (gendered, ethnic, corporeal, territorial). When Theodor Galle engraved the image for printing, he silenced this contaminated speech. Yet the preprint image survives, posing a dramatic challenge to postprint epistemology. For in order to produce a properly oriented print, an artist must draw an inverse image. Van der Straet had to imagine, and represent, improper relations (east for west, left for right) before Theodor Galle could engrave it (also improperly) and Philippe Galle could reproduce a proper orientation through printing. In this unsettling process of reversals, van der Straet authorizes himself as artist and Amerigo as historical actor (bottom of figure 4) while simultaneously deforming history. In the engraving process, then, the reversal of conquest precedes conquest itself. Printing—a technology resolutely identified with the progress of modernity—materializes here an intimate relationship with impropriety, illegible history, and unstable power relations.

At the scene of colonization, van der Straet deploys both medieval and modern perspectives; each appears already contaminated with the other. Theodor Galle attenuates some of the resultant ambivalences, successfully blinding most modern critics to the image’s “pre-modern” history.⁴ Moreover, Galle casts America into the same timeless border as Arthur (always already future) when he replaces the America that van der Straet centered on the shore between Amerigo and the native with a rubric at the edge: “Americen Americus retexit & semel vocauit inde semper excitam” (Amerigo repeats America, and once he spoke, henceforth was [it/she] always ready) (bottom of figure 3). With “inde semper” (henceforth always), Galle echoes Geoffrey’s conclusion about the timeless effects of settlement on the Insular landscape: “brevi tempore ab aevo inhabitatem censere” (after a brief time it seemed to have always been inhabited) (90). Most important, America is aroused (“excitam”) by repetition (“retexit”), a correction or retextualization that unravels difference: Amerigo originates a colonial refrain already in process. In the rubric, she/it does not even exist as a subject (in “Americen,” they are already objects), although her sexuality dominates the naming.

Galle’s other change, the addition of the southern cross on Amerigo’s banner, also obviates origins: Amerigo now arrives already bearing the sign of a knowlege not yet formed. In a subsequent printing as part of Theodor de Bry’s collection of European voyages, Galle’s rubic was itself removed;⁵ since most critics have analyzed this later print, the erasure of paradoxical origins repeatedly dominates colonial discourse analysis.

Comparisons between these images and similar encounter scenes on Britain’s shores identify van der Straet and Galle’s heteroerotic imagination of colonial contact as historically bounded. In the longue durée of colonial representation, this imagination fulfills only one of several colonial desires. Through these perspectives, the “Middle” Ages no longer appear as a subject successfully resisting the “Colonial” Ages that followed. In the “Postcolonial” Ages, colonial discourse analysis can unmoor historical criticism from that epistemological security, setting it adrift among the contentious iterations of history on the edge.