Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T12:47:14.009Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

I - Commemoration in La Mort le roi Artu

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2023

Get access

Summary

Commemoration – insofar as it is a conduit for private remembrance and public mourning – is situated between individual and communal fields of memory and marks their point of overlap. Commemoration is also situated at the intersection of individual and communal in another sense: it incorporates individual life – and death – into the public sphere and provides the means of celebrating it as exemplary. Yet, because of this peculiar status, commemoration poses the problem of what – or whom – one picks out as worthy of memory. As Judith Butler has pointed out, one of the primary functions of commemorative discourse is to designate individuals and behaviours that are considered worthy of public remembrance and thereby to identify what she terms ‘publicly grievable life’. It is precisely because it determines what kind of life qualifies for collective forms of remembrance that such discourse is instrumental in nation- or community-building. In this respect, what is excluded from the arena of public grief is at least as important as that which is included, this exclusion being a necessary condition for gestures of remembrance that help to constitute the public sphere.

One reason for re-examining commemoration in La Mort le roi Artu is that the representation of remembrance in that romance seems both to draw upon and to complicate the pattern just described in ways that comment on the text's own participation in the work of memory. Memory is represented as both an imperative and a problem in the Mort, a dynamic that manifests itself perhaps most clearly in the various monuments commemorating the dead. The romance seems repeatedly to highlight the interpretative, mutable nature of funerary text even as it asserts the relationship between historical events and the public discourse that guarantees their permanence. What is offered for commemoration within the text thus continually shifts, as what is included or excluded from memorial discourse is revisited or revised. As I shall argue, this depiction of commemoration is, in turn, connected to the Mort's awareness of its own investment in such a process, as a text that writes the final chapter of Arthurian history.

The Mort's complex attitude to memory is at least partially related to its position within a particular textual tradition.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×