What follows is part
two of a working hypothesis. It’s a work in very slow progress. And since this
is a blog post and not an essay, I’ll skip to the conclusion. The full-length
version might appear on the website at some stage. I also want to follow up the last post and consider what
happens when one tries to imagine turning the story of Rowena into a film but
that’s for another post.
Background
In the
previous post I noted that Geoffrey, Wace and Laȝamon all seem to make the same mistake in allowing
Auerelius or Ambrosius to accuse Vortigern of having murdered A’s father.
If you have an obvious
contradiction in a story, then the writer might have overlooked something, was
doing something very clever, or was simply inept. When you have three writers
‘making the same mistake’ something different is happening.
So backtrack a bit and
begin with 2 well-known examples.
At the beginning of
Shakespeare’s Othello, Iago and
Roderigo move onto the stage. They are in the middle of an argument.
It’s a simple, effective
trick to make us imagine that the conversation started before the play did. And
that illusion is an essential part of modern, post-Shakespearian, assumptions
about how fiction works.
This illusion, that
characters are more than just words on a page and can be known as real people,
reached it critical apogee when A.C. Bradley asked ‘How Old is Macbeth’ or ‘Did
Lady Macbeth really faint?’ This, and similar
questions, have been the subject of subsequent critical derision: epitomised by
L. C. Knight’s famous ‘How many children has Lady Macbeth?’ but they are a testament
to the power of the illusion that Lady Macbeth is a ‘real’ person.
If they are no longer
considered ‘credible’ critical questions, both New Criticism and Post Modernism
having rendered them suspect, they are exactly the kind of ‘character
background’ modern writers are encouraged to develop while writing their
novels.
Pace the critics, we
remember Lady Macbeth because she does seem real. Literary conventions and
learnt reading practices combine to lead us to wonder why she does what does
and why she is the way she is. The illusion is that something happens between
the Banquet scene and the sleepwalking scene, to bring about such a radical
change in her state of mind. She has a
life off stage which we can somehow access and discuss. Or argue about.
As I’m rewriting the
story of Vortigern and Rowena, I feel obliged to treat her as a coherent
character, with a biography that stretches back before the story starts, and
comes to some kind of conclusion in her death. Childhood? Upbringing? Hengist
pitches her at Vortigern but how did she feel about that? What does she even think
of Vortigern? What did they talk about on their wedding night? How did they
talk, given that they don’t speak each other’s language? What is her
relationship with her father? Does she have any kind of relationship with
Vortigern beyond the contractual sex of their marriage? And if she does, how is it affected by her
murder of Vortimer?
What our Writers Did.
None of these
questions seems to have interested Wace or Laȝamon as
they revised Geoffrey. And I think that suggests something different about
their attitude towards the story.
Rowena is not a ‘fully rounded literary
character’ in the modern sense, whose biography we might expect to follow to its
conclusion as though she were a biological entity. She is a proper noun
accumulating verbs and nouns, adjectives, adverbs and prepositions. All that is
important is what she does, relevant to the downfall of Britain.
She has no life off-stage. She only exists in the words that describe her speech and actions.
Bright shards of incident and dialogue. This is strictly true of modern fictional
characters, but the illusion of modern fiction is that these are just the
visible parts of the life and a reader can fill in the gaps. Modern writers
work at making that illusion.
In the ‘Brut’ there are no ‘gaps’ for the
audience to fill. Asking ‘Why is Vortigern evil, what motivated his career
before he is first mentioned’ is an irrelevant question. He is his reported
actions and nothing more.
It follows from this that there is no
character development and no sense that characters are able to learn from their
‘experiences’.
Laȝamon's imagination sees Rowena in focus
in the scenes where she is important, but that’s all. She has no opinions, no
feelings, and no attitudes that can be explored. She is a noun, the subject, object, even
indirect object of sentences. It’s not
that her death happens ‘off stage’.
There is no ‘off-stage’. She doesn’t
die. She never lived. She is simply no longer part of the linguistic event.
And this, to return to the previous post,
explains the ‘inconsistency’. It’s not inconsistent because the process doesn’t
acknowledge let alone aspire to consistency. Constantine’s story exists only in the
words and phrases used about him at a particular stage of the text: not in the
past of the story. Not five pages back. There is no coherent ‘biography’ to
disrupt. The rhetorical and emotional possibilities of Aurelius’ anger take
precedent.
Which is very strange. And very different.
And has multiple implications for the way a story works.
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