DID LAWMAN NOD, OR IS IT WE THAT YAWN?

Abstract

These oft are Stratagems which Errors seem, Nor is it Homer Nods, but We that Dream}Until world financial crisis, British parents were spending nearly two billion pounds a year to keep their children amused during long summer break. Boredom apparently terrifies young, though child psychologists commend it as a stimulant towards filling empty hours with inventive play.2 But boredom not only inhabits void, it also inheres in overkill of ill-organized and unselected plenty. Before closures of high street stores re-inspired lost creativity, excess choice apparendy caused lassitude: having too much merchandise to select from, too much clutter in home, dulls minds and confuses responses. writer who fails to select his material so as to stimulate reader response dulls with excess; an oversupply of borrowed ideas heaped together without impress of originality or theme is tedious and confusing. Dulness, Daughter of Chaos and eternal Night, Pope claims, results from a mingling of genres, from overuse of inappropriate imagery and over-reliance on half-digested material from other writers. As pensive Poets painful vigils keep, / Sleepless themselves, to give their readers sleep they dredge out A past, vamp'd, future, old, reviv'd new piece.3 The threat is ever present, as Pope warns: Still her old Empire to restore she tries / For, born a Goddess, Dulness never dies.4Lawman himself produced an old/new piece about past, and even most dedicated students seem to find those bits in Lawman's Brut which, embarrassedly, we skip or explain as a temporary lapse on Lawman's part. Boredom is a humiliating response to admit to. But that there is a problem of reader response in Lawman's Brut seems to have been agreed long ago. C.S. Lewis observed in 1966:The Brut is well worth our attention in its own right. The dull passages are a legacy from its known sources; its vividness, fire, and grandeur, arenew.5Critics continue in this vein, noting extended sections of what can only be described as excruciatingly repetitious cycles of brief kingships ... unfortunately in earliest parts of Brut, which might dissuade a reader from proceeding to rest of text,6 and affirming unimaginative paraphrasing of Wace in first two thousand lines, where the tedious genealogies in Brut testify to Layamon's desire for completeness and accuracy.7 Is Lawman guilty of failure to select and over reliance on borrowed material? Is this material simply dull?The Brut is a text we all profess to admire, and like Arthur's breast, it even feeds many of us. If we do admit to finding some sections less than stimulating, it is important to examine why this might be, and whether blame lies with Lawman and his failure to handle his sources effectively, or with his modern readers. What modern reader likes or rejects should prompt us to ask whether those dull passages - if they indeed are dull - would have been boring to Lawman's contemporaries. Could modern tastes, and our inability to respond to life and art unless with excitement, be distorting our reading of text? We need to examine what Lawman offers his implied audience, and whether he is really as fallibly derivative as some critics seem to think.If some passages are less attractive, at least to modern readers, why are they there at all? Lawman, as we know well, did not just plod his way through a translation of Wace. He adds local information, points up his characters as rational and motivated people, and more than occasionally omits inappropriate material, such as complicated batde tactics or pagan cremation rites. No author has to reproduce his source simply because it is there: abbreviatio would have been an acceptable way of dealing with mere lists of kings.8 The good historiographer, and let us at least concede that most of time Lawman is indeed that, retells past in relation to contemporary audience and their own concerns. …