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Jul. 19th, 2022 07:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsFor the past several months, osprey_archer and I have been reading through The Once And Future King, a chapter a day. osprey_archer has been writing up the individual component as she goes (her posts on The Sword in the Stone, The Queen of Air and Darkness and The Ill-Made Knight are all thoughtful and interesting and encompass a lot of our conversations as we went) but I put it off, which now inevitably leaves me with the task of posting about the whole book at once.
And it's such a weird book! Last time I read it was apparently back in 2008, which wildly enough is almost fifteen years ago now -- I was sure I had reread again more recently but can find no documentation of this fact and without documentation I have to assume it never happened -- and at the time I was just sort of bowled over by the powerful sense of recognition; every chapter I'd hit a passage that reflected something I thought had always been there and that it turned out T.H. White had put there.
But reading this time I kept being struck again and again by how much the book sets itself up as an echo of Arthur's court itself, a failed project: White, channeling Merlin and Arthur in turn, desperately wants his book to be able to solve the Big Problems, to use the dream of Camelot to come up with a viable answer that will explain how to stop war and cruelty and suffering and the human tendency towards fascism, and he simply can't. The whole book is a chronicle of how one simply can't, White arguing back and forth with himself about all the ways that won't work.
What I remembered of Book Two (The Queen of Air and Darkness) is all about the sad, feral, wildly compelling Orkney children. I had forgotten entirely that the other half of that book is just Arthur and Kay sitting around spinning the dream of the Round Table: perhaps we can stop the bad kind of war with the just kind of war, or perhaps we can stop people doing murder if we simply make it trendy to be the kind of person who doesn't do murder, and then they get distracted and start enthusiastically designing tables and we know that having the right fancy table won't solve the problem, but it's so awfully endearing and so awfully sad that they think it might!
And then they go off and fight a battle which is entirely off-screen, because White hates the battles. He hates that they have to happen at all. He puts them in because he feels like he has to, because they happen in Malory -- there's so much that White puts in because it happens in Malory, it's far more in dialogue with that text than I remember and really makes me want to go back and read them side by side. Every so often he'll just quote a line of dialogue from Malory directly, either because it makes a point he finds interesting or because it's very funny, and throughout the whole book he is always right about what's funny; for example, the bit where Lancelot gets very glumly coerced into climbing a tree:
Lancelot looked at the gentlewoman and at the tree. Then he heaved a deep sigh and remarked, as Malory reports him: "Well, fair lady, since that ye know my name, and require me of my knighthood to help you, I will do what I may to get your hawk; and yet truly I am an ill climber, and the tree is passing high, and few boughs to help me withal."
-- anyway, he puts in the things that happen in Malory but he skips over everything he's not interested in and other times will go to great extremes to try and puzzle out for himself why something is happening. He spends chapters and chapters trying to understand Guenever and these chapters will go something like "well, Guenever must have been a real and three-dimensional person, and since Lancelot and Arthur loved her she must have been an interesting and compelling person, which I suppose is what makes her so difficult to write about." He's trying, though. He really wants all his people to be real people and sympathetic people even at their absolute worst, and (although he really is scratching his poor head over Guenever) he pretty much always succeeds at it, which I think is perhaps one of the things that gives the book its remarkable enduring power and mysterious popularity even though, as I have mentioned, at least 30% of it is him sadly arguing with himself and the entire twentieth century about various impossible ways to curb the human tendency towards violence.
Camelot doesn't fall because Lancelot and Guenever have an affair. It falls because of power struggles and nationalism and revenge tragedies and all the reasons that sent the world White knew into yet another World War.osprey_archer and I spent a lot of time joking about how if Arthur had ever gotten OT3 lessons from Merlin it would have headed off the whole tragedy at the pass, but no one has yet figured out how to avoid the greater tragedy of the book, which is the fact you simply can't force people to be good except by the use of force which is itself an evil.
But with OT3 lessons Arthur does clearly have a much better time leading up to the fall of Camelot and perhaps ends up more emotionally able to cope with everything else, and that does mean something. One part of the reason the book is so sad is because Arthur spends so much of it increasingly sad and we've spent so much of the beginning learning to love Arthur. I do think perhaps things would have improved if Merlin had introduced him to Thomas the bisexual goose.)
osprey_archer and I have been reading through The Once And Future King, a chapter a day. osprey_archer has been writing up the individual component as she goes (her posts on The Sword in the Stone, The Queen of Air and Darkness and The Ill-Made Knight are all thoughtful and interesting and encompass a lot of our conversations as we went) but I put it off, which now inevitably leaves me with the task of posting about the whole book at once.And it's such a weird book! Last time I read it was apparently back in 2008, which wildly enough is almost fifteen years ago now -- I was sure I had reread again more recently but can find no documentation of this fact and without documentation I have to assume it never happened -- and at the time I was just sort of bowled over by the powerful sense of recognition; every chapter I'd hit a passage that reflected something I thought had always been there and that it turned out T.H. White had put there.
But reading this time I kept being struck again and again by how much the book sets itself up as an echo of Arthur's court itself, a failed project: White, channeling Merlin and Arthur in turn, desperately wants his book to be able to solve the Big Problems, to use the dream of Camelot to come up with a viable answer that will explain how to stop war and cruelty and suffering and the human tendency towards fascism, and he simply can't. The whole book is a chronicle of how one simply can't, White arguing back and forth with himself about all the ways that won't work.
What I remembered of Book Two (The Queen of Air and Darkness) is all about the sad, feral, wildly compelling Orkney children. I had forgotten entirely that the other half of that book is just Arthur and Kay sitting around spinning the dream of the Round Table: perhaps we can stop the bad kind of war with the just kind of war, or perhaps we can stop people doing murder if we simply make it trendy to be the kind of person who doesn't do murder, and then they get distracted and start enthusiastically designing tables and we know that having the right fancy table won't solve the problem, but it's so awfully endearing and so awfully sad that they think it might!
And then they go off and fight a battle which is entirely off-screen, because White hates the battles. He hates that they have to happen at all. He puts them in because he feels like he has to, because they happen in Malory -- there's so much that White puts in because it happens in Malory, it's far more in dialogue with that text than I remember and really makes me want to go back and read them side by side. Every so often he'll just quote a line of dialogue from Malory directly, either because it makes a point he finds interesting or because it's very funny, and throughout the whole book he is always right about what's funny; for example, the bit where Lancelot gets very glumly coerced into climbing a tree:
Lancelot looked at the gentlewoman and at the tree. Then he heaved a deep sigh and remarked, as Malory reports him: "Well, fair lady, since that ye know my name, and require me of my knighthood to help you, I will do what I may to get your hawk; and yet truly I am an ill climber, and the tree is passing high, and few boughs to help me withal."
-- anyway, he puts in the things that happen in Malory but he skips over everything he's not interested in and other times will go to great extremes to try and puzzle out for himself why something is happening. He spends chapters and chapters trying to understand Guenever and these chapters will go something like "well, Guenever must have been a real and three-dimensional person, and since Lancelot and Arthur loved her she must have been an interesting and compelling person, which I suppose is what makes her so difficult to write about." He's trying, though. He really wants all his people to be real people and sympathetic people even at their absolute worst, and (although he really is scratching his poor head over Guenever) he pretty much always succeeds at it, which I think is perhaps one of the things that gives the book its remarkable enduring power and mysterious popularity even though, as I have mentioned, at least 30% of it is him sadly arguing with himself and the entire twentieth century about various impossible ways to curb the human tendency towards violence.
Camelot doesn't fall because Lancelot and Guenever have an affair. It falls because of power struggles and nationalism and revenge tragedies and all the reasons that sent the world White knew into yet another World War.
osprey_archer and I spent a lot of time joking about how if Arthur had ever gotten OT3 lessons from Merlin it would have headed off the whole tragedy at the pass, but no one has yet figured out how to avoid the greater tragedy of the book, which is the fact you simply can't force people to be good except by the use of force which is itself an evil. But with OT3 lessons Arthur does clearly have a much better time leading up to the fall of Camelot and perhaps ends up more emotionally able to cope with everything else, and that does mean something. One part of the reason the book is so sad is because Arthur spends so much of it increasingly sad and we've spent so much of the beginning learning to love Arthur. I do think perhaps things would have improved if Merlin had introduced him to Thomas the bisexual goose.)
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Date: 2022-07-20 01:14 am (UTC)> which I think is perhaps one of the things that gives the book its remarkable enduring power and mysterious popularity even though, as I have mentioned, at least 30% of it is him sadly arguing with himself and the entire twentieth century about various impossible ways to curb the human tendency towards violence.
this is what I love about the book, though! It's half the people, who are very good, and half the fact that the author is obviously in pain about this enormous problem and trying to think through it! It is so sad and so compelling. My reaction was, "wow, you tried to write about the thing that was THE problem for you." I was deeply touched.
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Date: 2022-07-22 09:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-07-20 01:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-07-22 09:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-07-20 01:27 am (UTC)It's true, if Mordred couldn't have used Lancelot and Guenever's affair as a lever, he would have just found something else. Possibly something less personally devastating to Arthur? The part where he's watching from the window as his wife is bound to the pyre to be burned alive... pacing back and forth, praying for his Lancelot to save his Guenever... because he can't, because he's bound by his own laws, that he hoped would be the thing that would save them all!
Actually given how emotionally bound up he is in the Round Table, any lever Mordred used would be devastating, but as you say with Lancelot and Guenever by his side he would at least have had some emotional support.
But yes, the true tragedy of the story is that neither White nor Arthur can think their way out of the Problem of War, and human evil, and the fact that we haven't found any way to make people be good, or even want to be good. The last few pages, where Arthur passes the story on to Thomas Malory, are also very much White passing on the problem to the reader, and hoping (as Arthur hopes) that the story will help someone else solve the problem that has proved too much for him.
Also THANK you for linking the bisexual goose article. I am now obsessed with the fact that swans and geese can interbreed and their baby is called a "swoose." Also, Thomas!!! Following around his former beloved and his beloved's new girlfriend and helping them raise their cygnets? Oh, Thomas.
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Date: 2022-07-20 04:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-07-22 10:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-07-22 10:02 pm (UTC)(It strikes me suddenly that this is what we've been leading up to with the holy grail and Galahad and Bors and Percival and all their apparently ethically correct but very unlikable decisions; Bors deciding not to rescue his brother and allowing the hermit to sacrifice himself on obscure points of ethics does bear some resemblance to Arthur feeling honor-bound to allow Mordred his chance at the people that Arthur actually loves best in the world. Guenever and Lancelot never actually blame Arthur for it, but you can see their bafflement in the bit that leads up to it, and their unwillingness to believe that he would sacrifice them for justice, and that makes it hurt even more.)
IT'S SOME REAL LANCELOT BEHAVIOR FROM THOMAS. Can you imagine if Arthur and Guenever had had children??
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Date: 2022-07-22 11:47 pm (UTC)And of course Mordred's cleverness in pointing out to Arthur that if he warned them of Mordred's specific plan, that would be a conspiracy to obstruct justice! So Arthur can't! And you can practically hear Arthur grinding his teeth as he's all "I guess I CAN'T but I hope Lancelot KILLS YOU except not you because you are my son."
If Arthur and Guenever had children Lancelot would be the MOST involved uncle, probably spends all his free time whittling adorable wooden toys, when he's not teaching the children Knight Skills and/or letting them ride his back like a horsie.
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Date: 2022-07-26 06:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-07-20 02:36 am (UTC)♥!! I hadn't seen that before. Thanks so much for linking to it. :D
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Date: 2022-07-22 10:03 pm (UTC)we know that having the right fancy table won't solve the problem
Date: 2022-07-20 03:45 am (UTC)Re: we know that having the right fancy table won't solve the problem
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Date: 2022-07-23 08:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-07-20 02:56 pm (UTC)PS I had not heard of Thomas the bisexual goose before and I'm verklempt now.
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Date: 2022-07-22 10:12 pm (UTC)(I think I found him on Twitter but I forget from whom! I immediately had a lot of feelings about him though.)
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Date: 2022-07-20 11:27 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2022-07-23 03:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-07-28 12:05 am (UTC)(My one TH White anecdote is that my grandmother tried unsuccessfully to seduce at a dinner party and was HAUNTED decades later by Why Her Charm Had Not Worked Upon Him)
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Date: 2022-08-02 04:25 pm (UTC)Oh, wow. Yeah. I haven't read it since high school, but I can see that. This is definitely one I want to revisit as an adult.
And then they go off and fight a battle which is entirely off-screen, because White hates the battles. He hates that they have to happen at all. He puts them in because he feels like he has to
This is so deeply relatable omg.
even though, as I have mentioned, at least 30% of it is him sadly arguing with himself and the entire twentieth century about various impossible ways to curb the human tendency towards violence.
Oh, I love him. (Is there a biography out there, do you think?)
but no one has yet figured out how to avoid the greater tragedy of the book, which is the fact you simply can't force people to be good except by the use of force which is itself an evil.
Yes. Yes, the central problem of human society.
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Date: 2022-08-10 04:20 am (UTC)https://night-kale.tumblr.com/post/186574527082/what-kind-of-person-was-lancelot-i-know-about