“narcissism” Patterson wishes to critique.) Rather than dismiss one or the other of these as “excessive” in their pleasures, we can learn much more about the cultural function of Arthurian romance in late medieval Britain by analyzing the contested space of the pleasures themselves. Moreover, in light of Malmesbury’s influential castigation of the immodest excesses of Welsh traditions, we would do well to remember that rhetorics of excess have served to obscure precisely these contestations over meaning and pleasure. Charges of immodesty and excess prescribe limits; and they have long been used to sanction official desires while disallowing the alternatives.12
While medieval rhetorical theory emphasizes modest restraint and not pleasure, the preceding discussion suggests the importance of pleasure to medieval cultural negotiations over history and truth. The links between history and pleasure—the desire prompting those Welsh “ravings” Malmesbury wishes to dismiss from history’s “truth”—return us to psychoanalysis and to Lacan’s intermingling of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. These domains converge in the invocation of a certain kind of pleasure. According to Slavoj Žižek, these three intermingle in Lacan’s notion of le sinthome (the symptom), “a fragment of the signifier permeated with … enjoyment,” “the meaningless letter which immediately procures jouis-sense, ‘enjoyment in meaning,’ ‘enjoyment’” (Looking, 129).13 The fascinations available through historical narration can grant this kind of enjoyment. History, to return to Goldstein’s example, satisfies insofar as it produces a fascinating (glorious, tragic, or ignominious) image of the bodies on Flodden Field. Žižek helps us see that the politics and the ideology of claims to historical truth link with the pleasures encoded in tales of the past. Thus, it matters a great deal which fantasies—and whose pleasures—are recorded in officially sanctioned “true” accounts.
Žižek’s larger work, moreover, can help us see the pertinence of these structures to questions of group identity. Elsewhere he argues that communities organize their identities not simply around “a point of symbolic identification,” but around a bond which always implies pleasure, as he puts it, “enjoyment incarnated” (51). The jouissance gathering around such identities, again with debts to Lacanian psychoanalysis, Žižek calls the “Nation-Thing,” a “non-discursive kernel of enjoyment which must be present for the Nation qua discursive-entity-effect to achieve its ontological consistency” (“Republics of Gilead” 53). This organization of jouissance surfaces as pleasure in unpleasure, Žižek argues; this means that groups have access to pleasure through a paranoic account of its theft, a paranoid fantasy of the excessive and threatening pleasure of another group. A fantasmatic belief in the “excessive” pleasures of others thus provides a paranoiac index of how those “others” menace our nation, stealing our pleasure and threatening the possession of enjoyments distinctly claimed as “ours.”
With Žižek’s analysis in mind we are ready to return to Malmesbury’s castigation of Welsh “ravings.” Malmesbury approaches the pleasures of Arthurian narrative through his displeasure over Welsh “delirium.” This structure of “pleasure in unpleasure” registers through Malmesbury’s anxious rhetoric of Welsh “ravings,” wherein he argues that the Welsh need the constraint of simple “truth.” Such paranoic fantasies, of course, embed material conflicts with material consequence. Malmesbury’s insistence on Arthurian “truth” mounts an effort to forbid the Welsh from stealing, through their “trifles” about Arthur, the powers and fascinations of Arthurian history. The pleasure available in stories of Arthurian rule apparently “belong” to “truthful histories” and to official historians—that is, to non-Welsh culture. At stake here is the desire to forbid the pleasures of Welsh creative makyng; at stake too may be the fear that enjoyment of Arthur might “kindle the broken spirits” of the Welsh “to war.”
Where Žižek’s work helps us see how pleasure inhabits the fantasmatic desires implicit in Malmesbury’s words, Fredric Jameson’s Marxist historiography suggests that one group’s pleasures frequently require another group’s pain. Jameson’s work also reminds us that texts are material in form as much as in content. And when he writes, “history is what hurts; it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis,” that statement applies as well to definitions of what counts as “real” (and the concomitant elimination of possible alternatives) which also “refuse desire and set inexorable limits.” Like cautionary tales and words in legal statutes, historical narratives can be employed to give pain; they can punish, prohibit, and constrain desire; they can circumscribe our vision of what might be possible. The generic classification of “history” naturalizes, as it does in Malmesbury’s repudiation of Welsh “trifles,” what can count as real. History can grant to the Real the air—inexorable, determined—of sober tragedy; it can render loss an act of “nature,” “fate,” or even the wages of “narcissism,” rather than a production of collective cultural desire.14 Once granted a privileged access to “what actually happened,” the genre of history can be used to discount, and to make us forget, alternative stories of the past. And it can lend events (like plague, war, or famine) the aura of unavoidable disaster, obscuring the extent to which such events were themselves culturally produced and, thus, could have been avoided.15
Divesting the pleasures of “fiction” from those of “history” has profound implications for an analysis of the contestations over Arthurian “truth” in medieval Britain. The opposition of “realism” to “fiction” can preclude us from seeing fiction making as an activity in which sovereign powers, committed as they are to the “realism” of statecraft, engage. The distinction between “fantasy” and the “real” implies, as it did in Plato’s account, that when governments do participate in fiction-making (efforts usually understood to constitute propaganda) such activity is an aberration, or a mark of “bad” government, rather than a fundamental aim of the powerful. When imagined as activities committed to “truth” and “reality”—in a famous phrase “the art of the possible”—politics and statecraft, perhaps even history, are seen to have only accidental relation to the production of fictions. This presupposition obscures how the powerful use fantasy for their ends whether in the medieval period or our own.16
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae—poised over the breach we have been examining—can elucidate the pleasures and dangers of popular belief for a national fantasy. Beginning with critical assessments of Geoffrey’s work, I argue below that his Arthurian account displays a “British” identity fantastically dependent upon Welsh pleasures, popular figures, and poetic forms. It is to Geoffrey’s fantasy that we turn.
Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Pleasures of History
The Historia regum Britanniae (c. 1135–38) narrates the story of early Britain from its founding by the Trojan Brutus, through Roman and Saxon rule, with special focus on King Arthur’s birth, rule, and death. The account offers fabulous tales of giants and monsters, dragons, sovereigns, and soothsayers. Despite the denigration of the imaginative excesses of these stories by historians like Malmesbury, Geoffrey’s history would be wildly popular, enormously increasing the renown and influence of King Arthur. Julia Crick counts over 200 extant manuscript redactions of Geoffrey’s text, whether complete or partial, in a variety of languages stretching over a significant period17; Geoffrey’s narrative would inspire chronicle accounts in Latin, English, French, and Welsh, as well as a genre of romances of the “Matter of Britain”; Geoffrey’s Merlin prophecies would fuel the dynastic prophecies and genealogies of fifteenth-century political propaganda. According to Crick’s now standard account of the dissemination and reception of Geoffrey’s text, its popularity continued, perhaps even increasing in England, into the later medieval centuries.18
For years the debate over the problems of Geoffrey’s historicist project focused attention on his claim to be translating an ancient British (Welsh) book, a claim that was, scholars believed, dubious. Geoffrey’s history was compromised by doubts about the existence and authority of this elusive vetustissimus liber (old book),
