There is no ‘Reel’ Mordred:

The Evil Child/Good Child Dyad in Excalibur, The Sixth Sense, and The Good Son

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 In the following blog post, I try to link the story of Arthur's bastard son Mordred, who in the Arthurian Legend, comes back to seize control of Camelot from his father, as an example of the "bad seed" trope in contemporary film and fiction.

        It is easy to see how much the Mordred story is edited, conflated, or even omitted in popular Arthurian retellings. Most film versions omit Mordred as in Disney’s The Sword and the Stone (1963) or Camelot (1967) or they conflate his story, like in Knightriders (1981), where he is Morgan, a bad-guy motorcycle nut, his name a mixture of Morgan Le Fay and Mordred. And of the Arthurian films that do include him, he is either: 1.) Arthur’s nephew or a knight "gone bad" as in First Knight (1995) or 2.) the incest taboo is breeched and Mordred is recognized as Arthur’s illegitimate son, as in Excalibur (1981) or the TV mini-series version of Mists of Avalon (2000) (Torregrossa 200-201). In films without mention of the incest plot, the incest taboo is sublimated into a villainous character who desires, at any price, to storm Camelot, to take Guinevere as either a wife or slave and to kill Arthur. Either Mordred is conflated into an evil nemesis that vies for Arthur’s throne, or he is seen as a son, but, universally as a bad seed. This bad seed element is what I am interested in here as an outcrop of a problematic good child/bad child dyad that popular tellings of the Arthurian tale have generated.

This illustrates at what length the story, even Malory, to some extent, avoids discussing the crux of the Mordred story, the “bad seed” part: which is basically a story of taboo desire between a brother, (Arthur) and a sister (Morgauswe) and the product of this desire, an evil child, (Mordred). The boundary is transgressed and the child born from the brother/sister pairing is marked as impure — hence, perhaps the name Mordred: a distortion of “morte,” the Romance derivative of the Latin word, “mortus,” in English, “death.”

     In most cultures, a child made impure by a violation of the incest taboo does not bode well for the tribe. It marks death. From a Structuralist point of view, all cultures, in some form or another, have an incest taboo, for it separates us from the animals and makes us uniquely human — our rage or our sex drive is not mere animalistic fecundity, but we tend to inscribe meaning to our actions which precipitates limitation (Bataille 83). Most cultures include a narrative to limit transgression and also to speak about possible violations of the boundary as a cautionary tale. In other words: Don’t sleep with your sister because it will bring a taint on your house. Stories like this are powerful and interwoven into cultural narratives because the taboo is so strong, we need stories of its transgression to release some of the pent-up energy generated by its suppression.

     But how we tell the story is what is of importance.

     The story of Arthur’s son, Mordred, fits into this basic narrative of incest, not only as a historical figure but as a raw narrative-type fitted into whichever form of the Arthurian strand the artist wishes to take, whether he casts Mordred as a nephew or a son, or an evil traitor, the simple ingredients of the primordial story are preserved. The raw form of Mordred as an evil son, an irreducibly evil son, apparently, has become fodder for a retelling of the Arthurian myth that chooses to emphasize the mythological structure of the story rather than the anthropological structure. From an anthropological standpoint, the Mordred narrative tells of a transgression of a culturally inscribed taboo that needs to be dealt with within the society.

      This anthropological, scientific viewpoint has been challenged by the mythopoetic, or Jungian view touted first by Joseph Campbell. In this view, Mordred or any character in the Arthurian narrative is a creation of mythic imagination, not necessarily rooted in historical reality. While, there may be cause to suggest that a person such as Arthur or Guinevere did, in fact, exist in some form of the distant past, the cause of their presence in history is not inherent in their facticity, per se, but in the raw mythological power that they exert on the human imagination.

Mordred, while the facts of his historical existence are in doubt, exerts a powerful influence on the popular imagination, especially in films that utilize the rhetoric of the Men’s Movement of the 1980s by such figures as Robert Bly and Sam Keen. The Men’s Movement addresses the so-called “crisis in masculinity” that was used as a counter-attack to second-wave feminism, that stated that there is something innate about woman and that womanhood ought to be celebrated and recognized, as inherently bound up with a woman’s own sense of self and power, represented in works like The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. Men, by their own, admission, deny women of this acceptance of their womanhood by disavowing their political rights and metaphysical dignity

       The Men’s Movement, or Mythopoesis, as it is sometimes called, countered this, especially in the works of Robert Bly, by saying that there is also something innate about men, but men have not been allowed to express their true feelings like women and are therefore just as much oppressed as women. Bly warned that men should not associate themselves too readily with women, lest they ally themselves with their interests, and only please their mothers and their wives (2). Writers like Bly argued that men should not only get in touch with their more sensitive, nurturing side, or their true selves, but their wild side, or their warrior side as an expression of authentic masculinity. This not only spawned a pate of men’s clubs and book tours celebrating men and men’s interests but also films have expropriated this mythopoetic rhetoric, often times to an inevitable disaster.

     In Films, like Excalibur,, First Knight, The Sixth Sense, The Good Son, and the Star Wars films, the Mordred myth has been expropriated into a mythopoesis that reduces the problem into a good child/evil child dyad. If there is something to be saved in men today, the men’s movement suggests, it is our boys who are in the direst need of help. This emphasis on boys in need of help, seen in books by Michael Gurian and James Pollack, with titles like, The Wonder of Boys or Raising Cain: Saving the Emotional Lives of Boys. This frenzy (or panic) to save our boys from the clutches of soft feminism creates, ineluctably, what I call the Mordred problem, spawned in part by this duality that our children are either good or evil, right or wrong, soft or hard, gay or straight, legitimate or illegitimate, with the emphasis that right, good, hard, straight, and legitimate are the privileged labels. Mordred is a type of the “bad seed,” the bad label, or the evil child and his inverse, the good child, or the virtuous child.

      Reinhard Kuhn, in his book Corruption in Paradise: The Child in Western Literature says that the evil child in literature stems from our fascination with innocence in the child and this innocence is corrupted by society (40-41). He says that evil children in books and films demonstrate “an insatiable appetite for even the most vulgar of such menacing children, and the viewing public has assured a similar success for the many films dealing with the same topic” (43-44). Kuhn remarks that the result of our fascination with corruption of childhood innocence has garnered a proliferation “of evil children on such a scale that one might fear it is they who will inherit the earth” (44).

      The Mordred-myth generates such evil children bent on destroying the father figure, the mother figure — in fact, the entire family. The incest theme is usually downplayed in these films and the villainy of the child is emphasized. These films tap into the archetype of the evil child that seems to fascinate modern audiences. It also presents us with a problematic binary. Especially when seen in context with the recent rhetoric of a “crisis of masculinity” that deems anything not of the moral norm as suspect and thus should be expunged.

Response to Ngugi wa Thiong’o speech at Southeastern Louisiana University

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A new book by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Wizard of the Crow, satirizes the West from an African perspective; Like Achebe, he brings old questions to the fore about Western colonialism and Christianity. 
The halls of Southeastern's Vonnie Borden theater was filled to hear the world's foremost East African writer. Having just completed a novel about a fictional despotic African leader, Ngugi also spearheads a program at Irvine, The International Center for Writing and Translation, to create and distribute indigenous African tongues apart from Western translations.

Whether or not the Colonial experiment in Africa tainted Christian missionary activity or whether Christian missionary activity is itself tainted is probably not the right approach to tackle Western Christianity’s attempt to proselytize non-Western peoples. It is not that the missionary activity is inherently tainted, but rather that the approach was marred, most significantly because of the imperial and univocal nature of Colonialism — the structure of Colonialism did not allow for, what we would call today, the recognition of the language of the subaltern. The Christian missionary movement was lead by many good-intentioned Christians. But, what many Christian missionaries failed to realize is that they were not only teaching Christian doctrine in their own Mother tongues, not the language of the people, but they assumed that the conquering language had a stake in knowledge that was not apparent in the indigenous languages. Although some missionaries attempted to learn the language of the conquered African colonies, for the most part, the idea of Colonialism was to teach them the history of the Conqueror, the language of the Conqueror, and the beliefs of the Conqueror. Get a few educated elites to learn English, for example, and to translate the ideologies and beliefs of the people into English. In this paradigm, there is no attempt to raise the native languages to the status of the elite — as if Jesus spoke English! Jesus did not speak English, as Ngugi playfully reminded us last week; Jesus spoke a rural form of Aramaic and spoke in simple terms using the imagery and language of the people he taught and lived among in Galilee, which is why it is sometimes very difficult to understand his parables and sayings. But his sayings were translated into the language of the educated elite, which is Greek in this case, and this is how the message of the New Testament writings was originally communicated. But perhaps the Jesus of Colonialism did not learn anything after 2000 years old and is still up to his old tricks, so the language of the elite is still the language of the Conqueror, in this case, English or French, or Dutch, or whatever the language of the conquering nation happens to be. But take this language and try to translate native Swahili to mirror it is obviously going to have problems. But of course, the Harvard educated professor cannot be told by a graduate from the University of Treetops that he speaks good English. “Of course I speak English. I went to Harvard!” Ngugi here is parodying how language is classed, like race or ethnicity. How can the Mother tongue of the Western Nations describe a God (or Gods) to a community of peoples who have their own language of God (or Gods)? It just doesn’t make sense. This has been parodied, as in the short story, "The Gospel According to Mark" when an unbeliever, Espinoza is crucified on a tree like Christ — the people believed him to be the Savior. But this view is terribly pejorative and simplistic. It is as if to say, people of a non-Western ideology or bound to mistake Western religion to the point of sheer, nonsensical violence. This does not make sense. Nor does the univocal injunction to impose one language, one faith, one way of thinking on a collection of people that do not fit into the hegemonic whole. Ngugi seems to be saying that Globalization is partly to blame for this branding of language and culture that seems to disavow the minority of a language for the sake of its own language, not needing to be mediated by a language like English or French to be understood or disseminated. But you may say, there is something innate about all human beings that no language, no matter how univocal its insistence to be the language of choice, can override the dignity and value of humanity, because any knowledge that is worth having is knowledge of a humanity that is universal. But the problem with this kind of thinking is that it ignores the nuances of languages and the inability to express in subtle language — say the texture of snow or the agronomy of the Kenyan plains — that cannot be translated. True, maybe translation from Nilotic to English actually enhances the Nilotic language — but for who? who benefits? Not the Nilotic speaker, but the English one. So, it seems this is what Ngugi is trying to do; he is not trying to disparage English or any other language, but simply insisting that the indigenous languages of a people, to be of value, to provide knowledge for its people, has to be kept within its own language families. Ngugi would say that a novel written in Swahili needs to be translated from Swahili to Nilotic as it is, not mediated by English or French. It would be like translating a letter written in English into another language and then using that language, not English, to translate it into another language. The more permutations of language the more diluted and lost the original becomes. I can see how this can become very problematic and detrimental the more it perpetuates itself. Although I, and millions of other people, know only Western Romance languages and have only read non-Western texts translated into Western languages, it still does not preclude the fact that my language, my Western Romantic language does not need to ipso facto the one language that swallows up the rest.

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Poem: "Crucifix"

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Book Review: "The Farming of Bones"

Edwidge Danticat's novel Farming of Bones

Edwidge Danticat’s novel Farming of Bones (1998) is set in the Dominican Republic in October 1937 during the Parsley Massacre, the systematic slaughter of Haitian illegal laborers. Danticat writes the novel as a memory. The protagonist, Amabelle Désir (It is no coincidence that her name is désir/desire) is a young Haitian woman who survives the mass killing ordered by General Trujillo; around 30,000 people died.
The novel is a study in trauma: using sensuous language Danticat writes the body in pain. Like a patient in therapy, when the story is retold, the subsequent retellings of the story, four things happen.

1. The body remembers.  This is why Amabelle says, “This past is more like flesh than air; our stories testimonials …” (281).
2. The story, as a testimonial, repeated and retold differently and with divergent perspectives, with an occasional interpretation by the therapist is revisited. 
3. The third consequence of this telling is a recognition that the story is held in tension with the official story — here the story told by the Dominican victors against that which is held in the heart of survivors or lost forever with the dead.
4. The language acts as a kind of counter-narrative to the anger and hatred against the black, coffee-colored, bodies of the Haitians. 

Book Review: The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist

In The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist by Emile Habiby, a Palestinian illegally gains re-entry into Israel after the deportation of Palestinian refugees in 1948. Saeed eventually gains an advantage, working for the Israelis and living in Israel; He falls in love with Yuaad, whose name means “it shall be repeated.” He loses her; apparently, she dies after been deported by the Israelis. Saeed’s life is one of inconsequence and random opportunism. As a contradistinct Candide, Saeed calls himself and his family pessoptimists. It’s his family’s way of thinking about the world, a little bit of optimism mixed with a touch of pessimism. Not quite as optimistic as Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide, “the best of all possible worlds” nor is it as gloomy as Schopenhauer’s philosophical pessimism. “Pessoptimism” is like Saeed’s mother’s declaration that her son who died in a crane accident, his body smashed on rocks at Haifa’s coast, tell her daughter-in-law, “It’s best it happened like this and not some other way!” Maybe a pessimist would have said, “What do you expect? I’ve always known he would die a horrible death!” Or an optimist: “Well at least we know he’s at peace!” As is obvious, Habiby’s novel is like Voltaire’s Candide. Both books set about poking fun at a certain world-view — in Voltaire’s case it is pathological optimism that states that the death of thousands of people in an earthquake in Lisbon is justified as God’s will. Voltaire makes fun of this absurd optimism by drawing it to its extremes. In a similar way, Habiby is taking this conglomerate philosophy of optimism/pessimism called pessoptimism and drawing it out to its extremes. Doing this, Habiby draws attention to the absurdity of the Palestinian/Israeli problem. Throughout the narrative, there are incidences of pessoptimism that make satirize the ambiguity between who claims a right of return and who doesn’t, who is a Palestinian citizen and who is Israeli and who is secretly working for the opposite side. Saeed’s family is from a long line of pessoptimists. “The Pessoptimist family is truly noble and long established in our land” (8). Saeed’s family had been scattered abroad, even before the Palestinian deportation, to Lebanon and Syria. His father even worked for the Iraqi government after the establishment of Israel; not because of allegiance to Israeli nationalism but rather because of the pessoptimist notion that it wasn’t as bad as having nothing. When Saeed’s father is killed on the road (I imagine, by stray bullets during the fighting of ‘48). Saeed marries Baqiyaa, whose name means, “she who has remained,” even though her village was destroyed by Israeli tankers. They bear a son, Walaa. Walaa is not a principal character in the novel, but I think his character typifies young, Palestinian masculinity — or any situation where a young man grows up in an environment where the definition of home is unstable one and where children are taught to whisper, not even to sing in the shower, lest they be heard and arrested.

Poem: "Oranges in my mailbox"

I am not a man of pleasure
— it has been denied me —
(save for an orange in my mailbox
and a shave of savon in my bath)
For when I go to touch pleasure I only find
a vaporous warmth, a verdant void,
thinned out ecstasy, lightly veined
things,

for those things, those real things
are forbidden to me —
for with a hair shirt for a mind
and a brazen wooden lenten bowl for desire,
I shall not have pleasure,
even with
an elevator to take me several floors,
air conditioning massaging my cell,
and an orange in my mailbox

Greig Roselli © 2007 PDF Copy for Printing

Poem: "Portraits"

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