The Beast with the Broken Lance: Humanism and Posthumanism in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King

Abstract

In Epic, poem frames Tennyson's 1842 Morte d'Arthur, fictional poet Everard Hall justifies burning his twelve-book Arthurian epic by invoking another extinct, prehistoric creature: Why take style of heroic times? For nature brings not back Mastodon, Nor we times; and why should any Remodel models? (11. 35-38). (1) The poet is, of course, an avatar for Tennyson himself, and analogy he makes between those heroic times and the tells us a few important things about Idylls of King, twelve-book opus would evolve out of Morte d'Arthur over course of several decades. It tells us first Tennyson worried about genre, about anachronism of writing an Arthurian epic for a Victorian public--an anxiety still plagued him in 1858, when he wrote a letter urging his publishers to disabuse your own minds and of others, as far as you can, of fancy I am about an Epic of King Arthur. I should be crazed to attempt such a thing in heart of 19th cenmry. (2) But it also tells us, more compellingly, he worried about Mastodon, and what it represents metonymically--about potential futility of writing in a genre asserts an anthropocentric cosmology when paleontology, evolutionary theory, and other scientific discourses were busy revealing just how far universe extended beyond scope of human. Arthurian legend assumes a Christian time-scale, beginning with Creation and ending with Last Day; is always present, and prehistory--with which Idylls begins--is simply chaotic time before Arthur's reign. As John D. Rosenberg points out, however, Idylls was written during a period when ... geology and then evolution pushed back origins of things from imagined instant of Creation to unimaginably remote beginnings; and imminent Last Day opened out upon eonian cycles of days without end. (3) The reference suggests Tennyson less anxious about anachronism of poem's style than about obsolescence of its worldview. Why should he remodel an of universe when a new model looms so monstrously large? The interlineal juxtaposition between capital-M Mastodon and lower-case implies an even more pointed and destabilizing question: Why write in a form celebrates human achievement when discoveries like have rendered human so seemingly insignificant? And yet, Tennyson did not end up burning his twelve-book epic; he completed it, and completed it with a capstone, moreover, suggests this tension between cosmological models--and by extension, models of Man--was something dynamized his poetic project rather than endangering it. In 1891, half a dozen years after Idylls published in its final, twelve-book form, poet added one last line to epilogue recalls--without quite resolving--the vs. Mastodon conflict he expressed in 1842. Feeling, as his son reports, that perhaps he had not made humanity of King sufficiently clear, (4) Tennyson inserted a new formulation to describe Arthur once and for all: Ideal closed in man (To Queen, 1. 38). What is ideal manhood, what is real man, and how might relationship between two of them constitute a clear picture of King's humanity--or humanity in general? The rest of poem furnishes several possible answers: in a moral sense, Arthur is figure of ideal manhood because he is one of unyielding principle surrounded by so many figures--both within and outside Round Table--of criminality and corruption; in a more dualistic sense, poem suggests enclosure is happening within Arthur, with ideal manhood of his immortal soul trapped within real man of his body. And yet, appeal occurs right before Tennyson's final addition juxtaposes not with body, but with Sense: Accept this old imperfect tale, poet enjoins queen, New-old, and shadowing Sense at war with Soul (11. …