osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2022-06-30 07:04 am
osprey_archer) wrote2022-06-30 07:04 am
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Book Review: The Ill-Made Knight
After I read book 2 of The Once and Future King, I was certain that nothing could make me scream more than the feral Orkney children, but by God I was wrong. I spent roughly two-thirds of book 3, The Ill-Made Knight, howling alternately “LANCELOT,” “ELAINE,” and occasionally “ARTHUR,” although “GUENEVER” less often than you might expect.
White seems to have real trouble characterizing Guenever. It can’t be (just) because she’s a woman, because his Elaine is vivid and tragic (largely in a self-inflicted “ELAINE WHY ARE YOU LIKE THAT” way, but still); whereas with Guenever there are two different chapters where White tries to delve into her characterization and in the first one he wanders off into a tangent about how “knowledge of the world” is a corrupting force that destroys youthful idealism (unclear if this is actually related to Guenever in any way?) (also, I strongly suspect that White believed that he himself had been corrupted by “knowledge of the world,” even though if you asked any of his friends I’m 99% sure they’d say White was a deranged idealist with no knowledge of the world worth the name), and the second time he’s just like, well, Guenever was a real person. Real people are inconsistent. She must have been great if two great guys like Arthur and Lancelot love her. Probably she shares their generosity? I mean I GUESS but maybe you ought to be a little more certain about it, White.
However, the depiction of the way the court turns on Guenever is VERY vivid - it reminded me of for instance the media environment around Britney Spears, where a vicious circle develops, the media/court criticizes the central figure for her “madness” which drives her to ever wilder behavior which is criticized yet more viciously which truly does drive her almost to madness, which is used to justify the attacks that destroyed her… “We always knew she was like that,” they say, when really their cruelty made her like that.
Even after all of that, they haven’t destroyed all of Guenever’s generosity of heart: after Elaine’s suicide (White cheerfully squishes together two Arthurian Elaines, so this Elaine is both the mother of Galahad AND the lady of Shalott) Guenever, who up till now has been quite jealous of Elaine, is overcome by sympathy and demands to know why Lancelot didn’t do better by the poor girl.
(skygiants suggests that White struggles to write Guenever because she is not only beloved but accepts that she deserves to be loved, and White is much better at characters who are not loved - Elaine, the Orkney boys - or who believe they don’t deserve love, like Lancelot. Arthur doesn’t really fit into this dichotomy but his book is really about something quite different, anyway: What It Is Like to Be a Hawk and also the important question of right vs. might.)
troisoiseaux sent me a link to T. H. White’s character notes on Lancelot, which on their own are enough to induce a certain amount of shrieking. I think my favorites are “3. Probably sadistic or he would not have taken such frightful care to be gentle,” because that just says! so much! about White and how he understood the world! and “17. Homosexual? Can a person be ambi-sexual--bisexual or whatever?” because “homosexual” is definitely a reading I contemplate for a character who is most famous for being so in love with the Queen that it ultimately results in the fall of Camelot.
I strongly suspect “homosexual?” is a result of White projecting onto Lancelot like an Imax, and ambi-sexual, which is more or less the interpretation that he goes for in the book, is his compromise with the necessity of the Guenever plot. But he really really wants us to know that Lancelot ALSO loves Arthur, like, he’s SO in love with Arthur that he spends his entire teenage years training to be the Best Knight in the World so Arthur will be proud of him (Lancelot is so devoted to his training that he never learns how to climb trees!) and gets into a jealous snit when he hears that Arthur has gotten married AND NO ONE TOLD HIM never mind that Lancelot at this point has met Arthur like. One time.
White also carefully establishes that Guenever and Arthur love each other, and in fact that Arthur loves Guenever and Lancelot SO much that he basically refuses to acknowledge their affair to himself because in his own cultural context, knowing about it would mean that he would simply have to duel Lancelot or burn Guenever at the stake, and he doesn’t want to do that. In fact, near the end of the book there’s a bit where Lancelot and Arthur have a kind of accidental duel as part of a tournament and White muses that perhaps Arthur is trying to get Lancelot to kill him because, again, in their cultural context, the only way to resolve a love triangle is for one of the participants to die, and Arthur would rather die himself than kill Lancelot or Guenever because he loves them both! SO MUCH!!!!
In short, this is ABSOLUTELY a love triangle that could be resolved in an OT3, andskygiants and I agreed if only Merlin had set aside the whole “might vs. right” thing briefly and given Arthur an OT3 lesson, perhaps the entire tragedy of Camelot could have been avoided. Arthur just doesn’t have a thinking-out-of-the-box kind of mind, so he would never come up with it on his own, but as we see with Merlin’s might-vs-right lessons, if you DO start him thinking about a thing he will think and think and think trying to solve it… so OT3 lessons really might have helped. Guenever would certainly go for it.
The difficulty would be Lancelot, who believes to the depths of his soul that he doesn’t deserve nice things. One of the most face-clutching moments in the book is the bit where White muses “it is so easy to make children believe there is something wrong with them,” and Lancelot clearly does believe this, that there is something wrong with him right at the core of his being, and although he might make himself slightly more acceptable by being the Best Knight in the World, still in the end the Something Wrong remains… and then he goes on the Grail Quest and concludes that his pride in being the Best Knight in the World was, in itself, wrong. He’s just wrong all the way down.
Having reluctantly set aside the “homosexual?” interpretation for Lancelot, White goes HARD on that for Lancelot’s son Galahad. As a small child, we are told, Galahad prefers dolls to toy knights; as an adult, although (like his father before him) he is the Best Knight in the World and one of the few who succeeds in the Grail Quest, many of the other knights loathe him because he’s a virgin who doesn’t murder people and just seems sort of priggish and unmanly. Gawain describes Galahad as "yon lily laddie, without discussion, the utmost catamite which it had been my woe to smell the stink of through the world."
It occurs to me that criticizing Galahad is also a safe indirect way to criticize the Grail Quest, and with the Grail, Arthur’s entire ideal of knighthood. The knights criticizing Galahad tend to be uncouth, unimpeachably manly, murdery types who never got within a hundred leagues of the Grail; in rejecting Galahad as a milksop, they are perhaps also rejecting Arthur’s whole “might in the service of right” program as milksoppish. (After all, it leaves him unable to defend his queen when she’s accused of poisoning a knight!) Maybe Arthur is spoiling the thrills of manly knighthood with his killjoy insistence that “maybe we shouldn’t slaughter loads of peasants in wars” and “murder is wrong” and all that.
White seems to have real trouble characterizing Guenever. It can’t be (just) because she’s a woman, because his Elaine is vivid and tragic (largely in a self-inflicted “ELAINE WHY ARE YOU LIKE THAT” way, but still); whereas with Guenever there are two different chapters where White tries to delve into her characterization and in the first one he wanders off into a tangent about how “knowledge of the world” is a corrupting force that destroys youthful idealism (unclear if this is actually related to Guenever in any way?) (also, I strongly suspect that White believed that he himself had been corrupted by “knowledge of the world,” even though if you asked any of his friends I’m 99% sure they’d say White was a deranged idealist with no knowledge of the world worth the name), and the second time he’s just like, well, Guenever was a real person. Real people are inconsistent. She must have been great if two great guys like Arthur and Lancelot love her. Probably she shares their generosity? I mean I GUESS but maybe you ought to be a little more certain about it, White.
However, the depiction of the way the court turns on Guenever is VERY vivid - it reminded me of for instance the media environment around Britney Spears, where a vicious circle develops, the media/court criticizes the central figure for her “madness” which drives her to ever wilder behavior which is criticized yet more viciously which truly does drive her almost to madness, which is used to justify the attacks that destroyed her… “We always knew she was like that,” they say, when really their cruelty made her like that.
Even after all of that, they haven’t destroyed all of Guenever’s generosity of heart: after Elaine’s suicide (White cheerfully squishes together two Arthurian Elaines, so this Elaine is both the mother of Galahad AND the lady of Shalott) Guenever, who up till now has been quite jealous of Elaine, is overcome by sympathy and demands to know why Lancelot didn’t do better by the poor girl.
(
skygiants suggests that White struggles to write Guenever because she is not only beloved but accepts that she deserves to be loved, and White is much better at characters who are not loved - Elaine, the Orkney boys - or who believe they don’t deserve love, like Lancelot. Arthur doesn’t really fit into this dichotomy but his book is really about something quite different, anyway: What It Is Like to Be a Hawk and also the important question of right vs. might.) troisoiseaux sent me a link to T. H. White’s character notes on Lancelot, which on their own are enough to induce a certain amount of shrieking. I think my favorites are “3. Probably sadistic or he would not have taken such frightful care to be gentle,” because that just says! so much! about White and how he understood the world! and “17. Homosexual? Can a person be ambi-sexual--bisexual or whatever?” because “homosexual” is definitely a reading I contemplate for a character who is most famous for being so in love with the Queen that it ultimately results in the fall of Camelot. I strongly suspect “homosexual?” is a result of White projecting onto Lancelot like an Imax, and ambi-sexual, which is more or less the interpretation that he goes for in the book, is his compromise with the necessity of the Guenever plot. But he really really wants us to know that Lancelot ALSO loves Arthur, like, he’s SO in love with Arthur that he spends his entire teenage years training to be the Best Knight in the World so Arthur will be proud of him (Lancelot is so devoted to his training that he never learns how to climb trees!) and gets into a jealous snit when he hears that Arthur has gotten married AND NO ONE TOLD HIM never mind that Lancelot at this point has met Arthur like. One time.
White also carefully establishes that Guenever and Arthur love each other, and in fact that Arthur loves Guenever and Lancelot SO much that he basically refuses to acknowledge their affair to himself because in his own cultural context, knowing about it would mean that he would simply have to duel Lancelot or burn Guenever at the stake, and he doesn’t want to do that. In fact, near the end of the book there’s a bit where Lancelot and Arthur have a kind of accidental duel as part of a tournament and White muses that perhaps Arthur is trying to get Lancelot to kill him because, again, in their cultural context, the only way to resolve a love triangle is for one of the participants to die, and Arthur would rather die himself than kill Lancelot or Guenever because he loves them both! SO MUCH!!!!
In short, this is ABSOLUTELY a love triangle that could be resolved in an OT3, and
skygiants and I agreed if only Merlin had set aside the whole “might vs. right” thing briefly and given Arthur an OT3 lesson, perhaps the entire tragedy of Camelot could have been avoided. Arthur just doesn’t have a thinking-out-of-the-box kind of mind, so he would never come up with it on his own, but as we see with Merlin’s might-vs-right lessons, if you DO start him thinking about a thing he will think and think and think trying to solve it… so OT3 lessons really might have helped. Guenever would certainly go for it. The difficulty would be Lancelot, who believes to the depths of his soul that he doesn’t deserve nice things. One of the most face-clutching moments in the book is the bit where White muses “it is so easy to make children believe there is something wrong with them,” and Lancelot clearly does believe this, that there is something wrong with him right at the core of his being, and although he might make himself slightly more acceptable by being the Best Knight in the World, still in the end the Something Wrong remains… and then he goes on the Grail Quest and concludes that his pride in being the Best Knight in the World was, in itself, wrong. He’s just wrong all the way down.
Having reluctantly set aside the “homosexual?” interpretation for Lancelot, White goes HARD on that for Lancelot’s son Galahad. As a small child, we are told, Galahad prefers dolls to toy knights; as an adult, although (like his father before him) he is the Best Knight in the World and one of the few who succeeds in the Grail Quest, many of the other knights loathe him because he’s a virgin who doesn’t murder people and just seems sort of priggish and unmanly. Gawain describes Galahad as "yon lily laddie, without discussion, the utmost catamite which it had been my woe to smell the stink of through the world."
It occurs to me that criticizing Galahad is also a safe indirect way to criticize the Grail Quest, and with the Grail, Arthur’s entire ideal of knighthood. The knights criticizing Galahad tend to be uncouth, unimpeachably manly, murdery types who never got within a hundred leagues of the Grail; in rejecting Galahad as a milksop, they are perhaps also rejecting Arthur’s whole “might in the service of right” program as milksoppish. (After all, it leaves him unable to defend his queen when she’s accused of poisoning a knight!) Maybe Arthur is spoiling the thrills of manly knighthood with his killjoy insistence that “maybe we shouldn’t slaughter loads of peasants in wars” and “murder is wrong” and all that.
no subject
unimpeachably manly, murdery types --ALSO VERY GOOD.
(After all, it leaves him unable to defend his queen when she's accused of poisoning a knight!) --So I'm guessing the situation is that they're astonished that he just just sweep aside the charges by fiat and behead the accuser or something? So T.H. White is showing that Arthur has a sense of no-one-is-above-the-law? ... Or does Arthur go even further in nondefense of his queen? Because not playing favorites is one thing, but there's also innocent until proven guilty and sticking up for those you know as a matter of principle ... I feel a little like Merlin's plan to improve the world by getting Arthur trained up on might in the service of right is a little inflexible? Doesn't accommodate human feeling? Yes, stopping knightly consequence-free killing is an A-plus goal, but if the code is so rigid that a guy can't stick up for his wife when she's accused of something heinous, maybe *that* is why it's doomed (as much as that men just wanna have murder sprees).
no subject
In ye olden days, a king would simply execute anyone who accused the queen. Arthur is trying to install the idea that "no one is above the law," but unfortunately "the law" right now is trial by combat, and Arthur as king is not allowed to act as champion in trial by combat (I think because no one is allowed to kill the king?) so they have to find her another champion... and Guenever is very unpopular just at that moment, so no one steps up... and Lancelot is out of town... it's all very awkward.
This contributes later on to Arthur coming up with the idea of supplanting trial by combat with legal trials, so that if someone is accused of something they don't need to dig up a knight who is willing to risk death for their cause.
no subject
no subject