Malory and Modernity: A Qualm about Paradigm Shifts

Thomas Kuhn is said to have found inspiration in the disciplines of cultural and art history for his idea that scientific progress is noncumulative.¹ Thus it is odd that, when repatriated (in its Kuhnian or post-Kuhnian form) into the humanities, the idea of paradigm shifts seems not to be especially useful or even applicable. The problem may be that Kuhn, for all he took from the toolbox of art and cultural historians, found no place in his theory of scientific development for notions like Renaissance or renascence, resistance or reaction. When a major shift in disciplinary criteria, working assumptions, and practices occurs in a scientific field, a scientist who does not make the shift, and make it well, may effectively cease to be, as a scientist. Moreover, a scientist who resists an ongoing shift in the name of a paradigm long since discarded is practically inconceivable. Could a Victorian biologist, for example, have resisted the emerging evolutionary paradigm in favor of a return (even at some new and higher level) to the principles of Aristotelian biology? In the history of the wider culture, however, returns or purported returns of this kind are not laughable, or even irregular, occurrences. A poet who goes with the flow of a shifting current in poetry or in the general culture may well sink out of cultural memory, while another poet, who resists in a memorable way, will be remembered, and often enough taken seriously, for hundreds of years to come.

In the context of this symposium, it may be worthwhile to examine a complex case of what I mean. Sir Thomas Malory (c. 1405–71) was the author of a work of fictional history that, though resistant to the vast changes in the politics and culture of his time, remains, nearly six centuries after its composition, on the required-reading lists of students of English literature and history. Furthermore, it is the paradigm shift–resistant qualities of the Morte Darthur that has made it seem to so many an exemplary modern work, indeed the transitional English text into modern literary culture. Concepts and structures pertaining to the history of science can make little sense of the situation to which I refer, but for a historian of literature and the arts, the concepts and structures are readymade. The historical designation "Renaissance" is not short on detractors, but no cultural historian doubts the role played in the making of early modern art and literature by the notion, current at the time, that classical values and practices were being reborn. Even those who want to speak of an "early modern" period rather than "the Renaissance" still speak of the "Middle Ages," though the medieval millennium is middling only in that it comes between two classical epochs—one ancient, the other modern. The ancient and modern milieus have in common, mostly or perhaps only, that they are not, by definition, of the Middle Age. The story that I propose to tell, however, concerns a writer whose landmark work set the terms for modern literature in English by holding fast to those, as he understood them, of the Middle Ages. In treating the notions about past, present, and future that informed this state of affairs, and that render it describable now, the idea of paradigm shifts is perhaps only a distraction.

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Peter Field writes that "some have said the Morte Darthur is in effect a roman à clef giving Malory's view of the politics of the times." Field disagrees.² Malory was no sort of contemporary historian, "since in his book his attention was so firmly on King Arthur and Sir Launcelot, rather than on King Henry or King Edward or Sir Thomas Malory, that is very likely what he wanted."³ Nonetheless, Malory does seem to have had in mind King Henry V, as numerous commentators have pointed out, for, in recounting the history of King Arthur, Malory has him unprecedentedly conquering Rome in a manner reminiscent of Henry V's conquest of France and occupation of Paris. But what Englishman of Malory's generation, and the one before it, did not...