parts of Stein's 'Reality Fiction'

Stein sees romance and historias as coming out of the same cultural needs and doing the same sorts of cultural work. They both work to create a mode of interpretation for a secular world, one that is concerned with secular as opposed to clerical power, and provides hermeneutical tools for people to interpret the new world order of the high medieval period. These new modes of writing are used primarily in Anglo-Norman and Capetian state-formation activities (Stein avoids using the term “nation” as he wishes to avoid the teleological connotations of that word). He agrees implicitly with Ingham that any and all activities of state formation are always an act of construction or a fictionalization of a community that isn’t necessarily there, but might be formed though the effective use of narrative rhetoric. This rhetoric can be used both in the creation of centers of power as well as in narratives of resistance – the point is to create a rallying point around which a movement can start or a group of people can cohere.

Stein sees many of these texts as operating on a fine line between history and hagiography: there seems always to be a major historical revelation about to come in the texts at hand, especially in the histories, but that revelation is always put off and never quite revealed – whatever revelation there might be is always somehow beyond the grasp of either the historian or the people for whom the historian is writing. This sort of writing gains its effectiveness through an audience assent to a belief in the mimetic truth of the story they’re being told, regardless of how improbable it may seem.
Stein sees in critiques of Geoffrey’s work as bad history the seeds of good fiction, and asserts that the fiction Geoffrey uses “returns to history the power to locate secular experience in the secular world and thus to make it knowable.” (107).

Stein points to the moment in Geoffrey when Arthur receives the letter from Emperor Lucius demanding tribute and accusing Arthur of having unfairly taken over Gaul as a rewriting of the triumph of the Arthurian story as seen from the position of those who aren’t the winners in history. This is a section where it allows the subaltern point of view of any historical story to be aired: viewed from one side as a heroic king, Arthur is now suddenly a tyrant unfairly controlling realms which rightfully belong to others. Eventually, the fight over Gaul becomes nothing but a contest of forces on either side, as every other normal mode of determining legitimate kingship is thrown out the window. Arthur’s side of the battle becomes a conglomeration of Anglo-Norman holdings in Geoffrey’s day, and Lucius becomes the ‘Other’ against which they must fight for their superiority. In a sense, then, because of the letter and the duality between Arthur and Lucius, the text undermines itself and power is revealed to be nothing beyond itself. Arthur’s eventual success in Gaul against Lucius is thus not a divinely-sanctioned victory, nor is it a victory which once and for all seals British greatness – it is merely an empty show of power, victorious in the secular sense but only because of secular means and power. It is what it is and nothing more.

In the Arthurian section of the Historia, romance makes a full showing only to be revealed as the processes of political performances of power. Arthur has his seat in Caerleon and gives his tournaments, doles out goods and celebrates his largess as a political tool, rather than as a demonstration of how a good and just king should rule – he does this because he can and because it demonstrates his power, nothing more.

My one disagreement with Stein is his claim that Geoffrey illustrates the loss of British sovereignty of Britain as being nothing other than what it is – he denies the role of the divine in the loss. I think that Geoffrey is pretty particular in linking British loss of Britain with fate and with God’s will – it states it clearly in the text, and this opens up the possibility of a British return as according to Merlin’s prophecies which in part is the political and imaginative power of the text, and why the text is so fascinating for the Welsh and so politically dangerous to people like Malmesbury and Newburgh.