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HUMANITIES 43' David Staines. Tennyson's Camelot: The Idylls of the King and Its Medieval Sources Wilfrid Laurier University Press 1982. xviii, 218. $15.95 Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Idylls of the King. Edited by j.M. Gray. Yale University Press. 371. $25.00 doth, $7.95 paper Tennyson's Camelot is the first book graduate students and specialists will want to consult before undertaking any systematic reappraisal of Tennyson 's medievalism in Idylls of the King. Though most of Tennyson's medieval sources are already familiar to Tennyson specialists, Professor Staines deserves our gratitude for consolidating them. He carefully examines Tennyson's adaptation of Malory and the Mabinogion, and makes skilfully unobtrusive use of manuscript materials and notebooks. Because Staines's book was completed and accepted for publication in '977, he has been unable to incorporate some valuable scholarship that has appeared since that date. Tennyson's Camelot should be read in conjunction withJ.M. Gray's study of source, evolution, and structure in Idylls ofthe King and with Robert Pattison's study of how Tennyson adapts and develops the Alexandrian idyll and epyllion. Staines shows that Tennyson departs most conSistently from his Arthurian sources when he is characterizing Guinevere. And he offers intriguingcommentaryon the necessary incompletenessof the poem: 'like his Camelot, the Arthurian legends are "never built at all, I and therefore built for ever." The power of Arthur's vision would prevent Tennyson from ever creatinga satisfactorycomplete work' (p 133). Is incompleteness necessarily 'unsatisfactory: however? And how can Tennyson's innovative treatment of Guinevere be shown to contribute to the indeterminacy of the poem? It seems to me that in her last interview with Arthur Guinevere allows fiction to take the place of desire: she says what she wants to feel about Arthur, not what she does feel. Such a scene is very moving, but, as Tennyson never lets us forget, very false. And it is moving, not despite its falsity, but because of it. It is as if Tennyson were writing a verse novel and romance which, in exploring the relation of desire to fiction, reaches a conclusion that it had not anticipated: life, after all, is not like a verse novel or romance. In testing the fictions of romance, the reader is made to feel as insecure as Arthur, the moral child who lacks the craft to rule. In a study of Tennyson's medieval sources one might expect to find some summarizing statement about what is distinctively Victorian in Tennyson's treatment. Staines's references to Tennyson's 'idealistic philosophy' (p 163) are disappointingly conventional, and fail to do justice to the inherent interest and daring of Tennyson's experiment. 432 LEITERS IN CANADA 1983 Unlike most medieval poems, Idylls of the King lacks the 'metaphysical comfort' ofany vantage pOintfrom which the reader can survey the action with confidence. As a result, most attempts to organize the poem generically resemble Balin's use of the holy relic as a pole-vault. They become grotesque or preposterous activities, attempts to join the incongruous or to sunder objects that ought to go together. There seems to be no hill of contemplation which the reader can climb like Bedivere, no Pisgah-peak on which to hammer into certainty Arthur's platitudes about prayer or Merlin's weird prophecies about dying to come again. Staines takes to task critics like Ryals and Kozicki for arguing that Arthur must bear the sins and pollutions ofa decaying society. Butif Ryals makes Idylls of the King more subversive than it is, surely Staines makes it more timid and conventional. The truth seems to lie somewhere in between: it is best explained, I think, by Hegel's paradoxes about 'World-Historical Individuals' like Caesar and Napoleon. J. Sibree's translation of Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History is the one work by Hegel that actually appears in Tennyson's library. As one of Hegel's 'World-Historical Individuals,' Arthur has 'no consciousness of the general Idea' he is 'unfolding.' In a profound sense, Arthur did not know what he was doing. When Arthur laments thathe makes war upon himself by fighting his own people, he seems to be recalling Hegel's...

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