A Fine and Terrible Mystery – Episode 18: Entrances

This is episode 18 of my investigation into the life and works of Sir Thomas Malory.  Episode 1 can be found here.
 

“Perhaps, if you happen not to have lived in the Old England of the twelfth century, or whenever it was, and in a remote castle on the borders of the Marches at that, you will find it difficult to imagine the wonders of their journey.”

This is T. H. White trying to help his reader engage imaginatively with his particular vision of Malory’s world, a quirky, archetypical place.  Whilst I’ve been investigating Malory’s life I’ve also been reading Le Morte d’Arthur, as I’ve stated before.  One of the things that strikes me is how much more pleasurable reading it this time is than when I first read it years ago.  Like many readers, I expect, I believe in the primacy of an imaginative reading by which I mean working to experience the narrative with as much imagined imagery, detail, perception, deduction and, yes, emotional engagement as possible.  Analysis, textual, linguistic  etc., come second, most often in a very different additional reading which, nevertheless, is directed in part by the experience of the first.  This time through, I’ve felt like my imagination is in high gear and hyperactive.  Even single words unravel into tapestries of detail and allusion.  (Oddly, I find myself thinking of how a single mathematical equation can blossom into a family of higher dimensional equations and the additional structure and information gained thereby.)  I think I know why.

It’s a consequence of studying his life.  I am literally schooling my imagination in unexpected ways with surprising results.  For example, even statistical information plays a role.  Correlating the data provided by Christine Carpenter and Stephen Broadbury (Episode 14), particularly the relative numbers of the commons, gentry and nobility and the scale of the population elaborates into a new perception of 15^th century English culture for me.  Even Carpenter’s discussion of Warwickshire geography causes me to see Malory’s landscapes in a new way.  Then there are the family histories and church window imagery in Dugdale (Episode 2) which have given me a new sense of the role of family and affinity in law, commerce and conflict.  Perhaps, most importantly, is the sense I have of the contemporary political landscape I’ve acquired from Hardyment (Episode 5) who makes the Wars of the Roses, (not to mention Malory’s life) immediate as few others have.  Then there’s my personal experience of England.  When I read Le Morte d’Arthur the first time I’d only visited Warwickshire once and hadn't yet seen Scotland, the Orkneys, the Borders, the Marches, or Wales.  

I didn’t read Malory at school or university; my academic preparation leapt from Chaucer to the Elizabethans and I was left to discover Malory on my own.  That may have been a very good thing.  We need entrances to literature, Malory particularly benefits from context, the study of his life is just one of many ways to develop it.  But my recommendation to anyone teaching Le Morte d’Arthur, particularly to undergraduates, would be to work hard and carefully to develop an imaginative context first.  Readers don’t need to know a lot stuff; they need to naturally imagine a lot of stuff.

For me, now, Le Morte d’Arthur doesn’t take place “in the twelfth century, or whenever it was,” as The Once and Future King does.  It takes place in a very specific and real early fifteenth century and is a kind of alternate history of that age.

When T. E. Lawrence was 21 and an undergraduate, he undertook a 1,000 mile walk alone through Syria and Palestine to visit the Crusader Castles to research his undergraduate thesis.  Malory was one of the few books he took with him.  Occasionally, I imagine him camped on a remote desert hill reading Malory by fire light or the sunset.  What an interesting context he must have brought to the labor of the 15^th century knight.

Episode 19 can be found here.