Henry II’s policies and his role as patron of legendary histories has been noted by Patterson, who remarks that “much of the court literature of the period shows patterns of interest that are consistent with Henry’s political needs” (“Historiography,” 3).44
Geoffrey’s Historia, and later versions of its story, could encourage Henry II to appreciate the value of the Welsh as peers and allies rather than as conquered subjects. Representing the once glorious Welsh now debased by their own weaknesses and disgraced by aggressive Saxon conquerors implicitly identify the Saxons as the real Norman enemy. Joined by common enmity toward the Saxons, Norman and Briton become allies rather than rivals. Tatlock retorts that “those who profited most from Geoffrey’s work were the Britons; one of [Geoffrey’s] motives may well have been to heighten respect for them among his Norman superiors” (428). Modern histories of medieval Wales emphasize the Welsh, in contrast to the Saxons, as successful resisters of Norman invasion. In those accounts, Welsh resistance in the Anglo-Norman period produced Welsh independence from the English until Edwardian days.45 This image of a Welsh remnant resistant to conquest, maintaining an intact community amid loss, resonates with the image of the Britons from the end of the Historia, poised on the western edge of the island. The fantasy of a native British survival in Wales, as I will argue in Chapter 2, grants fifteenth-century sovereigns access to insular native roots resistant to continental aggressions, a resistance through which, by the second half of the fifteenth century, Edward IV will claim himself heir to a continuous native line of kings.
In the decades following Norman Conquest the meaning of such an image remains paradoxically ambiguous.46 Its popularity with the Anglo-Norman aristocracy and with Welsh resisters alike suggests both contestations over the identity of Brutus’s heirs, and the text’s ambivalent political uses in that debate. This ambivalence, moreover, links intercultural insular unity to what I am calling a national fantasy. Homi Bhabha’s account of “nation and narration” emphasizes both the fantasmatic nature of national narratives and the ways in which such texts always gesture, despite themselves, to the contestations and disunities they earnestly seek to avoid. Bhabha describes “the Janus-faced discourse of the nation,” one liable to “subordination, fracturing, diffusing, reproducing, as much as producing, creating, forcing, guiding” (Nation 3–4). Bhabha’s formulation seems uncannily pertinent to the twelfth century scene we have been examining—despite the fact that Bhabha, like many, identifies national narratives as modern inventions. Thus I turn finally to consider how we might understand this medieval oppositional history as, nonetheless, the history of a national fantasy.
Bhabha describes national narrations as ambivalent texts situated in crisis. This is because the definition of a national “people” evokes both a past (putatively shared) history and a present field of differences. The national “people” signify a crisis of representation and a contestation of meaning. Positioned amid this crisis, the “people” are both “pedagogical historical objects” learning who “they” are and “performative subjects” effecting the identity that “they” are thought to inhabit. In their pedagogical function, the people learn from the past; in their performative function, the people display an identity in the present. And the performative field may disrupt the apparent national “truths” registered in the pedagogical. Contemporary activities of the people may, in other words, trouble the stability of an identity that we have been taught to embrace as “ours.”
But Bhabha links the “margins of the nation” with “modernity,” and he is interested in explaining how modern national discourses disavow conflicts by positioning such problems as temporally past, surmounted in a “modern” present. Through such temporal limits, according to Bhabha, modern narrations of the nation both deny and imply the antagonistic variety of people claimed by national rule. In this way national narratives mark the limits of community through rhetorical tropes of time and space. They encode what Edward Said has called the “overlapping territories” and “intertwined histories” of an intercultural past, but as the liminal spaces bounding the nation’s (present) identity.
In the twelfth century, before the consolidation of any singular nationalist British pedagogy, Geoffrey’s Historia performs a narrativization with pedagogical and performative pretensions. Yet it also differs in significant ways from the national narration that Bhabha describes. On one hand, the Historia crafts a British “people” as its object, and its diverse reception for various political uses contests the identity of which British subjects rightfully follow as Brutus’s heirs. The scholarly reception of Monmouth’s text seems, moreover, to make something like Bhabha’s point. In that tradition, Monmouth’s use of Welsh vaticination is read merely as a “colonization” of the Welsh, and Geoffrey’s text can thus be said to bound Britain’s identity by placing the oppositions of vaticination in the past. If this is the case, then the kinds of disavowals that Bhabha links with modernity emerge even in a premodern account of the past.
Yet Monmouth’s Historia does not, I would argue, offer any such easy chronology. His interest in the difficult, provocative futurism of the Merlin Prophecies, to my eyes, disrupts a progressivist confidence that the past is forever (or ever) surmounted. Monmouth’s ambiguous moments of futurism mean that his readers cannot move back to genealogy or chronology in any triumphant or untroubled way. Furthermore, Monmouth’s combination of prophecy with genealogy suggests that future imaginings (and not just disavowals in the present) drive fantasies of community, even as the restoration of insular unity or wholeness remains a sovereign dream. Monmouth’s history repetitiously invokes the past and future fiction of an entire kingdom ruled by a sovereign family; in this, as Tatlock and Ingledew both remind us, Geoffrey’s history enables annexation. But his history also, and at the same time, contests monolithic rule by disrupting chronological history. His inclusion of the Merlin Prophecies means that the category of ‘Britain’ gestures to (at least) two futures for the crown. Monmouth thus formally encodes differential futures for Britain while displaying not the march of time but repetition and loss as Britain’s fundamental story.
The oppositional “crisis literature” of an insular minority offers a trace history of the material power of those hopes for a different future. Geoffrey’s use of Welsh traditions in a history written in Latin seeks to imagine a future for Welsh as well as Norman by narrating a past repetitively fraught with conflict and filled with loss. This history ultimately encodes the losses wrought by conquest and migration and, in the complex rhetorical figure of “the Britons,” tentatively promises a future of wholeness and recovery. The popularity of Geoffrey’s Historia demonstrates the substantial pleasure of such fragile hopes. Geoffrey’s fragile “Britons” provide (to recall Žižek’s formulation from earlier in this chapter) a captivating “kernel of enjoyment” haunted by devastating losses.
Such a project may also, before certain of audiences, enable the disavowal of twelfth-century Welsh differences from the Anglo-Normans. Desire for a British totam insulam will of course be used to impel as well as to justify England’s efforts to annex Scotland and Wales. But it will also repeatedly be used in opposition to English hegemony. This flexibility has to do in part with the very term “Britain,” a name with a doubled medieval etymology. Traditional etymologies of the word “Britain,” trace its roots in two directions: from the classical figure of Brutus (the etymology listed in the OED), and from the common Welsh phrase “Ynys Prydein” (Island of Britain). Emphasis upon the first of these linguistic histories has traditionally eclipsed the second.47 In Monmouth’s Historia we find both: the story of Brutus and the Merlin’s prophecies linked to the Armes Prydein. Insofar as the eponymous name for the island came from Brutus and his classical conquering army, “Britain” designates a conquering people, a race of invaders adopting the island as their home. Thus is “Britain” a cultural import from Troy, a legacy of conquest displaced from the heart of the Roman world. With Welsh tradition in mind, the category of Britain also refers to hopes for particular geographic integrity—to wholeness and to a native insular geography. “Britain” signifies a geographic completion lost, a
