are contesting the ownership of British sovereignty through the fantasy of a salvific return of Welsh rule, although these are exactly the kind of Welsh “ravings” William of Malmesbury deplores as “false myths.”7 The evidence of, and the competition between, such sovereign fantasies require a further development of Strohm’s important insights. And this is especially the case since one side of this competition has, more persistently and insistently, been thought to be “raving,” luxuriating in “false myths,” and rejecting the apparently sober truths of history. We thus need a way to understand the power and the differences of official and unofficial fictions of the British Arthurian past as contestations of important material consequence.
R. James Goldstein has suggested the power of such disagreements about the past to materially affect a contested (and colonial) cultural politics. In The Matter of Scotland: Historical Narrative in Medieval Scotland, Goldstein analyzes the distinction between romance and history in the historiography of medieval Scotland’s engagements with an English crown, reading in this intercultural encounter a moment when the categories of “history” and “fiction” were divested from one another. Goldstein gestures, albeit briefly, toward the power of psychoanalysis to help us understand the material consequences of such disagreements. In an effort to keep the material consequence of military battles in full view, Goldstein briefly identifies the category of history with Jacques Lacan’s notion of the “Real.” While Goldstein does not take full advantage of the subtle account of the relation of fantasy to the material world that Lacan’s work might offer, the example he uses can prove informative for us. With reference to the Battle of Flodden Field, one of Scotland’s most famous (and failed) stands against English aggression, he writes:
The scene of transgression [read in the Battle of Flodden] takes place in the context of the real, Lacan’s problematical third term that lies beyond the dialectic of the imaginary and the symbolic: “The Real, or what is perceived as such, is what resists symbolization absolutely,” he says. By Fredric Jameson’s reckoning, “it is not terribly difficult to say what is meant by the Real in Lacan. It is simply History itself.” As Jameson writes elsewhere: “History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis.” This sense of setting inexorable limits to desire is precisely what the Scottish host led by James IV was to discover at Flodden Field. (283)8
Goldstein identifies the Lacanian “Real” with history as the materiality of war: the fact of dead bodies on a field of battle. He moves very quickly, from Lacan’s complicated notion of the “Real” to Fredric Jameson’s description of “History” to the Scottish host at Flodden Field. His conclusion emphasizes a soldier’s death as the ultimate determination, the irrefutable limit, a tragic constraint that can never be imagined away. Goldstein thus implies that the materiality of dead bodies can grant history its claim to the Real. To be sure, as Elaine Scarry argues, the bodily pain suffered by soldiers in war offers a touchstone for reality—in Scarry’s terms the lethal physicality of war substantiates a culture’s insubstantial “truths”; those abstract “truths” (“liberty,” or “democracy,” or “freedom”) are literally made to matter, to be material, because of the soldier’s body in pain. Abstract ideas, in other words, borrow materiality from the body of a soldier willing to suffer pain for belief in those abstractions.9 Yet in Goldstein’s understandable emphasis on the materiality of death in war, he forgets how pain and imagination together structure our belief in history’s truth; in the process, he implies that “history” has little to do with imagination. But “history,” I would argue, is as much about the meaning given for why those soldiers died as it is about the fact of their dead bodies.
Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of culture is more complicated than either Fredric Jameson’s words or Goldstein’s use of them implies, and a more detailed understanding of it can shed light on the interweaving of materiality with imaginary structures like belief or fantasy. While the Lacanian ‘Real’ certainly pertains to limitation, it pertains as much to the interior state of the subject (and the limitations prompted by the subject’s relation to individual prehistory and to culture) as it does to traumas, like war, that intrude from without. The sentence from Lacan which Goldstein cites, moreover, (“The Real, or what is perceived as such,” my emphasis) urges upon us the complexity of the relation between the Real and articulations of it. Elsewhere Lacan describes the interweaving of his three domains, the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real, with the mathematical figure of “the borromeanean knot” (Feminine Sexuality, 163), a grouping of “three or more interlocked rings which fall apart when one of the links is severed” (Fuss 10). These interlocking relations cannot be separated from one another so neatly as Goldstein implies. Jameson’s Lacanian gloss is, in fact, an imprecise rendering of the Lacanian Real, a category that cannot be easily coordinated with events. While Goldstein apparently reads Lacan’s predicate (“is what resists symbolization absolutely”) to figure the materiality of physical pain (Jameson’s “what hurts”), I would read Lacan’s phrase to imply that the Real stands not absolutely outside symbolization, but outside absolute symbolization. While the Real can never be symbolized once and for all, it remains bound to the Imaginary and the Symbolic, it exists “in relation both to the imaginary and to language” (Feminine Sexuality, 171).
It thus matters a great deal what imaginary structures and what languages are understood to grant special access to the Real and to the “truth” about it. It matters a good deal which languages and narratives are thought to be materially true. So long as some imaginary structures are disavowed as simple “lies” or, in another trope familiar to readers of medieval historical debates, dismissed as excessively immodest imaginings, we are unable to see the extent to which assessments of falsity or fiction can further tendentious definitions of what can count as “real.” Those definitions, and the imaginary possibilities they declare “narcissistic,” “extravagant,” or the mad ravings of an undisciplined people, point to how official cultures use history’s special claim to the “real,” to establish what postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha calls a “regime of truth” (“Other Question,” 19).
Before developing the implications of how this might help us to read the fantasies of Arthurian history, I turn to consider briefly the ways in which charges of “false myths” converge, in medieval rhetorical theory, with charges of an excessive and immodest imagination. Malmesbury’s rhetoric which identifies ‘false myths” with Welsh delirium is a case in point, but I would also like to note that this rhetoric continues to influence some scholars analyzing medieval historiography today. For example in Chaucer and the Subject of History, Lee Patterson insightfully stresses the importance of imagination for the historical subject, yet he nonetheless implies that some imaginings are excessive and need constraint. Describing imagination—in particular Chaucer’s creative makyng—as a means to display agency in the face of historical limitation, Patterson offers fiction and creative endeavor as a response to the necessities of Chaucer’s historical moment.10 In praise of this historical vision Patterson writes, “The classical poets, and especially Virgil and Statius, were essentially historians; and they provided [Chaucer] with a historical vision that allowed him to step outside the suffocating narcissism of court makyng and to recognize the mutual interdependence of subjectivity and history” (61). Patterson helpfully suggests that imagination can constitute a crucial response to limitation. And yet, in a formulation striking in both its forcefulness and in its use of the frequently gendered and ethically charged “narcissism,” imagination, specifically non-classicist imagination, liable to dangerous excesses, requires control.11 Patterson implies that Chaucer’s scholarly, classical proclivities protect him from the selfish imaginary fancies to which his aristocratic audience falls victim. One can certainly appreciate this reminder of the difficulties of life at court; and I sympathize with Patterson’s implication that poetic imagination offers a means to resist court politics. Nonetheless, charges of narcissism have long been used to castigate the desires and imaginations of the powerless.
Like Chaucer, Welsh writers of vaticinative (prophetic) poetry deployed imagination as a response to historical limitation, although the material they
