Might be of interest to some.
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Subject: [JFRR] Merlin: Knowledge and Power through the Ages (Knight, Stephen)
Merlin: Knowledge and Power through the Ages. By Stephen Knight.
2009. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 296 pages. ISBN:
978-0-8014-4365-7 (hard cover).
Reviewed by Jeff Tolbert, Indiana University ([log in to unmask]).
[Word count: 1096 words]
The familiar image of Merlin, the wise, gray-bearded wizard of King
Arthur, is in fact a recent manifestation of the famous wizard --
indeed, his wizardly status is also relatively new -- and bears
little resemblance to his earlier incarnations. In a study that spans
centuries and encompasses a wide array of media, Stephen Knight
traces the development of the Merlin figure from the earliest
literary sources through the modern era, from echoes of a preliterate
Celtic tradition to Hollywood blockbusters.
Beginning with a nod to Foucault, Knight lays out his fundamental
proposition, that Merlin represents knowledge and its constant
ambivalent relationship to power. Regardless of the era in which he
appears or the form he takes, Merlin "[will use] knowledge on behalf
of those in power, and so in some way, and ultimately in an
unacceptable way, expose the limits of the power of the powerful"
(xii). Knight argues that the knowledge/power conflict is "inherent
to organized societies," and though Merlin's story changes in its
details over time and space, "the myth's essential dynamic of
knowledge versus power will not alter -- it will just be reconfigured
to be newly relevant in many varying contexts" (4).
Knight's survey takes him from the medieval manuscripts of the Black
Book of Carmarthen and Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum
Britanniae through the French and British romances of Chrétien de
Troyes and Mallory, and then through the Renaissance and all the way
to twentieth-century novels and film. With each source he considers
the role of the Merlin figure vis-ŕ-vis political authority,
analyzing Merlin's actions in detail and highlighting the varying
agendas of authors who use Merlin for specific political ends.
The book's four chapters explore what Knight sees as the primary
themes embodied by Merlin across the centuries: wisdom, advice,
cleverness, and education. Each theme corresponds broadly to a
different historical period and geographic distribution of the Merlin
literature, from ancient Britain through medieval Europe to early
modern England and finally the contemporary global scene. Knight's
facility in moving between eras and languages is impressive, and his
focus on Merlin's role as a font of knowledge never wavers: in every
context, Knight highlights the kinds of information at Merlin's
disposal and elucidates the significance of this information to the
rulers with whom Merlin interacts.
Knight's commentary emphasizes the historical contexts in which each
text was composed. In Geoffrey of Monmouth, Merlin is a prophet who
predicts an ultimate British victory against the invading Saxons.
According to Knight, Geoffrey, who is writing of the Celtic past in a
period of Norman domination, is both crafting a national epic for his
Norman patrons and "in a subtle way suggesting to the Norman lords
both the possibilities and limitations of their own authority" (31).
Later, Robert de Boron, employed by a Crusading nobleman, situates
Merlin squarely in a supernatural Christian context, connecting him
to the story of the Holy Grail (46-47). In Layamon's Brut Merlin is
again a prophet, and the political implications of his prophecies
again bubble to the surface. According to Knight, the poem reclaims
the Arthur/Merlin tradition for English culture and is characterized
by a "British Celtic nostalgic fantasy" which had "increasing
currency in the Middle Ages, as English kings struggled increasingly
with the influence of Rome" (84).
In the twentieth century, for T.H. White, the knowledge that Merlin
represented became "individual, in the sense that it is moral and
personal, so in modern terms credible, but also crucially weak in
practice because it has no general, supra-individual analytic power,
no sociopolitical plans or sanctions to resolve the problems it
identifies" (197).
Occasionally there is some confusion in Knight's terminology:
"power" and "knowledge," the central concepts of his study, are
not clearly defined and sometimes seem to overlap. Discussing
Merlin's abrupt departure from the narrative of Geoffrey's
Historia, Knight asks,
". . .how could power, which acknowledges its need of wisdom --
including by sponsoring texts like this -- accept the continued and
powerful presence of knowledge? Geoffrey. . . also encapsulates
dialectically the two key elements of the Merlin tradition, the power
of his knowledge and the difficulty of his engagement with power"
(30-31).
Knowledge and power are separate, but knowledge has power; does power
also have knowledge? Elsewhere the apparent conflict Knight
elaborates between these seems to collapse, as in the work of Robert
de Boron, of whom Knight observes: "The new Merlin, a super-cleric
who deploys his knowledge on behalf of the powerful, is a projection
of learning such as Robert's own into the courts of the highest
contemporary power" (57-58). In this scenario, as Knight himself
admits, there appears to be little conflict between political
authority and the knowledge that Merlin represents; indeed, Merlin
represents a bridge between scholarly learning and political
authority.
Throughout the book Knight argues for the subversive potential of
Merlin's knowledge, and in his conclusion he writes, "If knowledge
is of value it must bear danger to someone who will be discomforted
by it, or wants to profit by it secretly, and so would prefer it not
to remain in the hands of those who have developed it" (222). This
negative coding of knowledge is unnecessarily exclusive, and it does
not follow from Knight's own analysis, which elsewhere rightly
emphasizes the ambivalence of the power/knowledge relationship:
Merlin can be subversive, but he can also affirm the status quo. His
knowledge is not truly a tool of the "power" represented in the
texts, but of the writers who deploy it. These authors use Merlin's
knowledge in creative ways to suit specific political agenda. It is
knowledge that can generate power, which can be normative as easily
as it can be subversive.
Despite these semantic quibbles, Knight's study is a masterful and
exhaustive piece of scholarship relevant to scholars in a range of
disciplines, from literary criticism to cultural studies,
anthropology, and folklore. Merlin is an important epistemological
contribution in that it draws attention not to the construction of
specific ways of knowing, but to the construction of knowledge
itself, and more significantly, to the explicit uses of knowledge by
authors with highly unique political agendas. It is not an
examination of the production of knowledge as data within a
particular disciplinary or national context. Knight is not concerned
with the generation of information under the rubric of physics or
mathematics or biology, nor of a particular national history. Rather,
he explores the category of knowledge as a socially-contingent
phenomenon, imagined in each new context as transcendent, but always
very much the product of historical processes. Merlin embodies this
concept in every incarnation, and so provides an invaluable window
onto the construction of knowledge over time.
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