Many have noted the allegorical quality that yokes Kazuo Ishiguro’s foray into Arthurian literature, The Buried Giant (2015, hereafter TBG), to the modern world.Footnote 1 The novel explores the stakes of memory and repression at a number of levels; at the largest scale, its central dilemma hinges on the question of whether, for the sake of peace, the violence of the past should be forgotten or whether, for the sake of justice, it is worth remembering. In places like the United States,Footnote 2 the currency of this question has become only more obvious since The Buried Giant’s publication, as the contested nature of historical memory becomes ever more apparent.Footnote 3 In what follows, however, I suggest that although allegory may tie Ishiguro’s novel to the present, its exploration of the mnemonic processes that alchemize experience into history resonate deeply with those medieval sources in whose lineage The Buried Giant stands. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (ante 1139, hereafter HKB) represents one such source—and indeed perhaps the most important, since with only some distortion it can be described as the Urtext of Arthurian literature.Footnote 4 I will argue that, whether or not the HKB directly informed Ishiguro’s writing, the two speak to each other intricately, in a way that is at times complementary and at times deconstructive, and that in so doing they demonstrate the currency not simply of novelistic allegory but of much older sources.
It is not, however, immediately apparent that The Buried Giant stands so directly in the HKB’s shadow. This question ultimately hinges on that of genre, and at the beginning of this article it is thus worth noting that the question of genre has occupied no small place in discussion of The Buried Giant since its release in 2015. In part, this can be attributed to the work’s unique position in its author’s oeuvre.Footnote 5 Kazuo Ishiguro is no stranger to speculative fiction, but The Buried Giant’s fantastical elements—ogres, pixies, magic—and medieval setting mark it out even from the more tangible dystopia of his earlier foray into sci-fi, Never Let Me Go (2005). Shortly after The Buried Giant’s publication, moreover, Ishiguro expressed trepidation over the idea that the novel’s “surface elements” might lead readers to dismiss it as a work of “fantasy.” These comments led to a well-covered back-and-forth with novelist and critic Ursula Le Guin, who in a blog post took issue with the apparent denigration of fantasy as a literary genre. Speaking at an event hosted by The Guardian, Ishiguro then insisted that he did not mean to disparage, declaring himself firmly “on the side of ogres and pixies,” even while maintaining the insufficiency—if not the irrelevance—of generic rules.Footnote 6 Academics, meanwhile, have read The Buried Giant as a case-in-point of “the turn to genre” in high literature; for a medievalist, it has been even more exciting to see that the book has been placed into conversation with its most famous generic antecedents from the premodern world, works of Arthurian romance.Footnote 7
Ishiguro suggested the last of these approaches when, in an early 2015 interview with The Telegraph, he identified the role that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK)—at once a deconstruction of chivalric romance and perhaps the most well-known example—played in The Buried Giant’s composition.Footnote 8 He soon after qualified this connection, however, as in an interview in May of that year with the literary magazine Guernica:
Most of the poem—which I’ve known for a long, long time—was completely irrelevant to my book. There’s a little passage when the young Sir Gawain leaves Camelot and goes across Britain looking for this Green Knight’s castle… . What really sparked my imagination as far as The Buried Giant was concerned was that tiny little description of the country he was crossing.Footnote 9
Given, in addition, Gawain’s prominence in Ishiguro’s novel, and SGGK’s status as the canonical vehicle for the presentation of Gawain’s character, the larger poem serves as a rich intertext for The Buried Giant, regardless of its relevance to the latter’s composition. At the risk of foreclosing his ambiguity, the Gawain of SGGK is as flawless as one might be in a fallen world, despite his failures; he is seemingly the bravest of Arthur’s knights, known for his courtesy and his faithful devotion (trawþe); he is in the flower of his chivalry and the flower of his youth. In The Buried Giant, by contrast, Gawain is an old man. He is still brave but enfeebled, frequently lost in his own thoughts, and seemingly paranoid. Like Don Quixote, his chivalric inclinations are mocked (e.g., 225), but most damning in this respect is that trawþe registers in Ishiguro’s novel as something like blind loyalty: unwilling to speak out against his king’s dictates, Gawain facilitates the commission of genocide.Footnote 10 Courtesy, moreover, offers a paltry substitute for just action.Footnote 11 SGGK thus helps us key in on The Buried Giant’s subversive approach to canonical material frequently associated with standards of worthy and proper conduct, both in medieval romance and its more recent afterlife.Footnote 12 A romantic frame of reference therefore underscores The Buried Giant’s resonance with a work like Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1988), in which certain English cultural mores bleed destructively into history.Footnote 13
Medieval romance certainly offers The Buried Giant an instructive frame of reference. Still, it is noteworthy that Ishiguro himself points in a different direction:
To be honest, I don’t know very much about the Arthurian Legends. The Arthur in my book is a quasi-historical Arthur. It’s possible that there is a real historical figure upon which the King Arthur myth was based. And it’s that figure, a military leader, who was around in that time who perhaps—and I say perhaps because the history there was so murky—led the resistance fighting on the part of the Britons [the indigenous people] against the migrants who were in increasing numbers taking over parts of the island. These are the people who later became the English; they basically took over the whole country.Footnote 14
The distinction Ishiguro draws between the “Arthurian Legends”—what he calls “the Holy Grail and all that”—and the Arthur of quasi-history suggests a facet of The Buried Giant’s generic lineage that has received much less attention than the work’s situation in relation to more visible categories like fantasy and romance. In fact, Ishiguro’s separation of history and legend corresponds to a distinction that existed during the Middle Ages between “the Arthur of history” and “the Arthur of romance.”Footnote 15 The generic divide standing between these two Arthurs was typically medieval in that it was neither hard-and-fast, nor well-defined, nor consistently maintained across time and place (indeed, SGGK itself is a good example of the distinction’s porousness).Footnote 16 Still, the extent to which The Buried Giant constitutes an interrogation of the mnemonic processes that facilitate the construction of history suggests that there is something to be gained in reading the novel against this “historical” Arthur, beyond simply following Ishiguro where he leads.
The article that follows does some of this work by placing The Buried Giant into conversation with a text that Ishiguro may or may not know, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, including its afterlife in the tradition of Anglo-British historiography known in each manifestation as a version of “the Brut.” Geoffrey’s HKB was not the first piece of history-writing to mention Arthur by name; it is the earliest we have, however, that purports to offer a full narrative of his reign, which Geoffrey casts as the centerpiece to a comprehensive account of the British past. The dubious historicity of the resulting work was noted almost immediately by contemporary historians—and yet the History of the Kings of Britain’s success as history would be difficult to overstate.Footnote 17 Indeed, by the end of the Middle Ages, English historiographical taste would position Geoffrey’s history of the Britons as the standard prehistory of England, with England’s kings as Arthur’s heirs. Seemingly at work in Geoffrey’s creation of the HKB, and clearly at work in its historiographical legacy, are processes of confabulation, selective recollection, and erasure. These historiographical mechanisms reflect the mnemonic processes put into question throughout Ishiguro’s novel, set as it is in the transitional period between Briton and “Saxon” rule that brings Geoffrey’s history to a close.Footnote 18 The Buried Giant thus stands in the History of the Kings of Britain’s shadow while laying bare its methodology, and given this relationship, each work encourages us to read against the grain of the other: the former by drawing our attention to the histories that Geoffrey suppresses, the latter by providing the historical context that Ishiguro’s novel so purposefully avoids.Footnote 19 This reciprocal operation implicates the very figure of “the buried giant,” which emerges in each instance as the legacy of a violent past.
To illustrate this reading, what follows centers first on Geoffrey’s historiographical practice, his potential sources and motivations, and the afterlife of his great work in medieval English historiographical and political use. Given the creativity, elision, and appropriation that characterize these phenomena, I then turn to Ishiguro’s novel, and specifically to its uneasy treatment of the relationship—and the stakes—of perspective, history, and the memory of violence. The Buried Giant encourages us to consider the human cost, and the troubling benefits, of national histories (like those of the English Middle Ages) that memorialize the past selectively and from a dominant point of view. The final section brings such considerations more closely to bear upon Geoffrey’s text while, conversely, showing how knowledge of Galfridian history gives us a new way of reading Ishiguro’s titular metaphor. That the moral dilemmas of Ishiguro’s novel can be critically applied to Galfridian history-writing leads me to suggest, in closing, that recurrent strategies of history-making link modern and premodern uses of the past. I suggest, namely, that both medieval and more recent sources treat violence as a mechanism for the creation of historical form.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Prose Brut, and the Making of History
It is unlikely that we will ever be able to account in full for Geoffrey of Monmouth’s method of composing the History of the Kings of Britain. The work opens in many manuscripts with a dedication to one of King Henry I’s illegitimate sons, Robert, earl of Gloucester, in which Geoffrey suggests that the HKB is the translation of “a very old book written in the British language” (Britannici sermonis librum vetustissimum).Footnote 20 This book, he writes, had been presented to him serendipitously as he was pondering the lack of attention famous historians like Gildas and Bede had paid to Arthur and, more broadly, to the British kings that lived before the birth of Christ. Geoffrey’s suggestion of an “old British book” has occasionally been taken in earnest, but although it is impossible to prove that no such book existed, it seems more likely that his claim to have possessed an ancient source is a rhetorical device aimed at lending credence and a sense of authority to the work that follows.Footnote 21
It is certainly the case that, prior to the appearance of Geoffrey’s text in the second quarter of the twelfth century, only sparse historiographical references to Arthur have come down to us. If there ever was a British leader approximating the great king, and if the historical narratives of his career correspond at all to his life, he would have flourished sometime between roughly 500 and 540 AD, in the midst of the expansion of several Germanic peoples—most famously the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—across the southern and central portions of Great Britain. A roughly contemporaneous account of these events survives, a tripartite sermon, On the Ruin and Destruction of Britain, written by the Briton monk Gildas sometime before 550. The first part of On the Ruin comprises an account of British history from the Roman occupation to the author’s present. Gildas mentions phenomena that would later become associated with Arthuriana—a leader (duce) named Ambrosius Aurelianus and the Battle of Badon—but notably, as Geoffrey says, he makes no mention of any Arthur.Footnote 22 It is possible that Arthur had emerged as a generic hero by the year 600 or so in Welsh bardic literature, but it is not until the ninth century that he begins to appear in surviving historiographical sources.Footnote 23 Pseudo-Nennius’s History of the Britons (c. 829–30), perhaps written by a Welsh monk, casts Arthur as a “war leader” (dux bellorum) rather than a king and provides a list of twelve battles, culminating with Badon, in which Britain’s kings had chosen Arthur to lead their forces against the invading “Saxons,” a catch-all for the aforementioned peoples.Footnote 24 Another Latin text, the Annals of Wales (tenth century), briefly mentions Arthur at Badon, while noting too, under the year 537, “the Battle of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut died” (Gueith Camlann in qua Arthur et Medraut corruerunt).Footnote 25 In addition to these short notices, roughly ten years before Geoffrey wrote his History of the Kings of Britain, the eminent historian William of Malmesbury mentions Arthur twice, each time briefly, neither time as a king, and each time in connection with legendary material that was then in wide circulation. Arthur, writes William, was indeed a great man, who had assisted Aurelius Ambrosius in his fight against the “English” and (as Nennius wrote) had won a great battle at the siege of Mount Badon. Because he was so great, however, he deserved to be celebrated not by “deceptive fables” (fallaces fabulae)—such as the story that he was not dead and would one day return—but by “true historical accounts” (veraces historiae).Footnote 26
By the late 1130s, “true historical [i.e., Latin] accounts” of Arthur thus appear to have been scarce, and what has come down to us was hardly ambitious. William of Malmesbury had used pseudo-Nennius’s list of battles, and so too would another English historian, Henry of Huntingdon (c. 1129), just before Geoffrey began to write his own HKB. Footnote 27 In addition to this Latin historiographical tradition, the Welsh Arthurian romance Culhwch and Olwen possibly antedates the HKB, and like some saints’ lives from around the same time, it presents Arthur not simply as a military leader but as a great British king.Footnote 28 This no doubt reflects contemporary oral tradition, to which Geoffrey’s project was surely indebted. The History of the Kings of Britain also makes extensive use of non-Arthurian material from narrative historians such as Gildas and Bede, as well as sparser annals and lists of kings; classical and biblical material; nonhistoriographical Welsh sources; and perhaps also pieces of Welsh history-writing that no longer survive.Footnote 29
Geoffrey’s HKB synthesized extant material while filling in the gaps and fleshing out the historical record into a fully realized, unified narrative of British history, beginning with the island’s putative settlement under the leadership of Brutus—the great-grandson of Aeneas of Troy—and culminating with the Britons’ loss of rule to the “Saxons,” forerunners of the English. Lacking total knowledge of Geoffrey’s sources, it is difficult to measure the weight of each of his compositional activities; exactly how much of the History of the Kings of Britain came solely from his imagination, for example, is hard to say. Still, the consensus has long been that the work is largely fictive in nature, and for reasons that will become clear, the narrative framing of the sources is clearly Geoffrey’s own. Outside of this, it at least seems to be the case, as Ben Guy writes, that “at every stage … [Geoffrey] crafted the accounts that he found … so that they blended seamlessly with the majestic progression of his imagined history.”Footnote 30
Geoffrey could have set about this program for any number of reasons, and many have been suggested, from an earnest desire to fill in the historiographical gap left by Gildas and Bede to the suggestion that the work is a parody, albeit one that was widely read as history.Footnote 31 Regardless of his exact purpose, it is impossible to ignore the many resonances between the vision of history that Geoffrey lays out in the History of the Kings of Britain and the text’s relevance to the time of its composition. We find an example in the HKB’s focus on civil strife and internecine conflict, which maps onto the brewing civil war between partisans of England’s King Stephen and Empress Matilda, mother of the future King Henry II. The specifics of this dispute, later known as “The Anarchy,” are not worth detailing here.Footnote 32 It is pertinent, however, that Geoffrey frames British history as a cyclical process of rise and fall, catalyzed by what a later adaptation would call treson—treachery or betrayal; in essence, a disintegration of common bonds occasioned by envy, pride, or some other vice.Footnote 33 Gildas had mentioned civil wars (bellis civilibus) alongside a general decline in virtue that had led to British ruin.Footnote 34 For Geoffrey, betrayal structures the entire progression of British history, with Arthurian material providing the most prominent examples. Arthur’s fall demonstrates the stakes of such treachery. On the precipice of conquering Rome, the king receives word that his nephew Mordred (Medraut from the Annals), serving as regent back in Britain, had usurped his crown and married his queen.Footnote 35 In lieu of imperial glory, the resulting conflict leads to Arthur’s heirless death, opening the door once more to a Saxon threat that had been put down but will now, eventually, spell the end of British dominion. That Geoffrey dedicated the History of the Kings of Britain to one and perhaps multiple partisans on either side of the conflict between Stephen and Matilda suggests his perception of its relevance to individuals driving those events.Footnote 36 One line of interpretation has thus, as an example, suggested that Geoffrey wrote the HKB (in part) as a warning to England’s Anglo-Norman ruling class—still less than a century in power after the conquest of 1066—against their internal squabbles. This in light of contemporary uprisings by the Britons’ descendants, the Welsh, spurred on as they were by political prophecies, some of which the HKB itself memorializes, that forecasted the Britons’ return to power.Footnote 37
If we do not accept this proposal in every detail,Footnote 38 we can still say with confidence that Geoffrey’s History of the Kings of Britain uses an imagined past to address the needs of the present. We of course recognize today that every piece of history-writing does this to a certain extent, and indeed, in this connection medieval thought has more in common with our own than with the scientistic historicism of the modern period.Footnote 39 Medieval history-writing differs, however, in some key areas, the most germane of which are its straightforwardly didactic (rather than recuperative) orientation and its theological episteme. Put differently, medieval historians were committed to preserving the truth of the past, as they saw it, but this truth looks different from what we might expect in that it is grounded in the notion of providence and concerned with the historical manifestation of moral truth. History-writing was, moreover, not its own theoretical discipline but a branch of classical rhetoric, and so a certain amount of embellishment was to be expected—fabricated speeches, claims of unknowable psychological causality, even interruptions of wholesale fictions, often marked off in some way, all designed to provide some insight into the past’s true meaning.Footnote 40 Historians could—and did—take exception to Geoffrey’s work because it went too far in blending history and fiction, cloaking the latter in the authoritative guise (and language) of the former.Footnote 41 Still, in embellishing his sources and adding them to his own explanatory narrative framework, Geoffrey did not differ so much from the methods of his contemporaries that it precluded his work from being readily consumed as history.Footnote 42
Indeed, judging by surviving manuscripts, the History of the Kings of Britain was one of the most popular pieces of history-writing in medieval England, and its account of British history was soon after publication being translated, adapted into verse, and incorporated into wider-reaching historical compendia. In fact, in terms of numbers, the HKB comes second only to a work, known as the prose Brut, that was in large part its vernacular translation.Footnote 43 If the History of the Kings of Britain is the product not simply of rhetorical embellishment but of extended confabulation—the creative filling-in of historical gaps—its afterlife more clearly demonstrates the extent to which the editing and selective memorialization of history can render the past more usable. In essence, for example, the prose Brut represents an amalgamation of Galfridian British and English history, based on the foundational work of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (c. 731) and brought up to date through a synthesis of materials covering the years between the eighth and fourteenth centuries. As Julia Marvin has argued, the earliest recension of this text (post 1272) takes pains to obfuscate the distinction between Briton and Saxon that governs the final portions of Geoffrey’s HKB. In removing ethnic markers and in portraying the last few British kings as virtual kin to their English counterparts, the prose Brut reframes the violence of this transitional period to produce a history characterized by Anglo-British continuity.Footnote 44 This historiographical program coincides with real-world efforts to leverage British national history to English political ends: for instance, in a 1301 letter to Pope Boniface VIII, Edward I cites Scottish submission to King Arthur—among other Galfridian precedents—as a means of establishing the historical basis for his own claim, as Arthur’s heir, to pan-insular dominion.Footnote 45 Outside of England, rivals were keen to reassert the distinction between “British” and “English” history.Footnote 46 Within the kingdom, the idea of continuity or, at least, the idea of succession implied by composite histories like the prose Brut, formed an important part of the emergent nation’s imagined past.Footnote 47 If such accounts did not eliminate the violence of which the nation was born, they nevertheless sought to domesticate this violence and, as we will see later, to present it within the progressive framework of prophetic fulfillment.Footnote 48 As we turn, now, to The Buried Giant, a work of modern fiction that engages with the same material, it is striking to see that the manipulation of history to similar ends serves as a key line of reference.
Amnesia, Conjecture, and Fiction in The Buried Giant
Geoffrey of Monmouth and the author of the prose Brut each employ British history for their own purposes through processes of confabulation, distortion, and selective recollection, with the prose Brut doing so in a way that makes British history clearly useful to the English present.Footnote 49 By contrast, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novelistic engagement with Arthurian “history” offers a critical interrogation of these processes, specifically as they relate to the ways that individuals and groups remember the past. A rough overview of the book’s plot and form will help to clarify this suggestion. In very sparse terms, The Buried Giant follows an old Briton couple, Axl and Beatrice, living in some vague time a generation or so after the reign of King Arthur, at a point when Britons and Saxons coinhabit Great Britain. At the beginning of the book, Axl and Beatrice set out on a journey to find their grown son, who is said to live in a village some few days away. The nature of their journey, like everything else in the novel, is complicated by the fact that none of the characters can remember much of anything, owing to a mysterious mist that has overtaken the landscape. The narrative perspective shifts occasionally throughout the text, but from a functional standpoint it is always tied to the perspectives of the characters—that is, it is always in either first- or third-person limited—and because of this, details about the plot, the setting, and most importantly the histories of the characters and their world are revealed as if through a fog: with clarity appearing in momentary patches and a with good deal of what has happened and what is happening left obscure. Ishiguro does some other things, too, to exacerbate this sense of opacity. Axl, for example, cannot understand Saxon, so conversations held in that language remain outside of his comprehension, and by extension they remain outside of the reader’s direct access. Similarly, much of the plot unfolds in retrospect: Axl or some other character will lie in bed recalling the events of the previous few hours, limited by his individual perspective as well as the constraints that the mist—or perhaps old age, or the frailty of human memory in general—impose upon his recollection.Footnote 50
One of the most significant questions posed both by the Buried Giants’ amnesic form and by its characters’ lack of memory is this: How do people make sense of the past and how do they make sense of the present when what they know about the past is both limited and uncertain? The answer to this question is often shown to be that they create or grasp on to comforting narratives. The book sees this unfold at a personal level—in connection, for example, with what Axl and Beatrice tell themselves about their son—and at a broader societal level, most notably in connection with the memory of the British King Arthur. The great king, now dead for a generation or two, had supposedly instituted a glorious and lasting peace between Britons and Saxons, despite the war-torn character of his reign. The guarantor of Arthur’s memory is Sir Gawain, the king’s nephew, whom Axl and Beatrice stumble upon as an old man roaming the countryside on a quest to slay the she-dragon Querig. According to Gawain, King Arthur was “great and beloved” (113) even by the Saxons for the policy he instituted of sparing the innocents, and his righteousness and shining example are what has allowed the country to heal and for peace to spread in the wake of so much racial violence.Footnote 51 Indeed, from the vantage points of Axl and Gawain, two Britons, it seems that Saxons now live alongside their people in harmony, with all the country’s violence relegated safely to a bygone past.
In customary fashion, the book pokes holes in this rosy picture, but only bit by bit. Axl and Beatrice, early in their journey, fall into the company of a Saxon warrior, Wistan, who has come from the eastern fenlands and who from the outset has the air of being privy to a degree of historical insight lacking to the other characters. (Indeed, toward the end of the book, we find out that Wistan possesses a certain resistance to the mist that is robbing everyone else of their memories, a quality that—by implication—is to some degree shared by many of his countrymen back east.) Wistan tells us soon after his appearance that he has been sent by his king to investigate rumors that Saxons in the area are being mistreated under local British rule—this and racially disparaging remarks by certain Britons subtly call into question the idea of a peaceful coexistenceFootnote 52—and later, Wistan serves as a catalyst for the novel’s big reveal: Arthur is not universally beloved; rather “the hated Arthur” (318), as he calls him, had broken his promise to spare Saxon innocents and had engaged in the wholesale slaughter of children as a means of breaking what seemed to be an endless cycle of war. The amnesic mist, moreover, is Arthur’s doing and his way of covering up this atrocity. The great king had sent Merlin, accompanied by Gawain and four other knights, to enchant Querig, whose breath is the mist’s source, and rather than seeking to kill the she-dragon, Gawain in fact now serves as her protector; as the protector, that is, of the amnesic mist and of the skewed memory of the current peace that the mist has allowed to develop. For his part, Wistan had been sent not only to investigate claims of Saxon abuse, but to slay Querig in earnest. Presumably, this will cure the amnesia and awaken the people to history’s unrecompensed crimes; in a more troubling way, it is implied that this awakening will lead to a resumption of violence and to the Britons’ ultimate displacement in a new, Saxon England.
Ishiguro has resisted the suggestion that The Buried Giant is a straightforward allegory, but the connections it draws among race, perspective, and historical memory clearly resonate in situations like that of the modern United States.Footnote 53 Looking backward in time, it is notable that the novel inverts the hegemonic exploitation of Geoffrey’s history by having the British manipulate the reception of their own past deeds, thus bringing its story into closer alignment with contemporary cases of hegemonic whitewashing.Footnote 54 Still, the mnemonic processes involved—confabulation, selective recollection, erasure—resemble the historiographical processes underlying the creation and reception of Galfridian history, even if Ishiguro’s novel does not grapple with history-writing as such. Britons in The Buried Giant alchemize their atrocious historical conduct toward the Saxons by committing to historical memory Arthur’s great law of peace, a true promise that did hold for a time, and by erasing the genocidal violation of this law from the historical record. The original prose Brut, as we have seen, erases ethnicity itself as a means of smoothing over the fractures that characterize insular history. In doing this it amplifies what limited suggestion of racial confraternity had existed in Geoffrey’s imagined history and it produces a sense of common heritage capacious enough to include even the British—as subjects of England’s kings.Footnote 55 Nothing in The Buried Giant’s enigmatic world matches the scope of Geoffrey’s epic confabulation of the past, notwithstanding Gawain’s propagation of the myth that Arthur had acted with benevolence in his unification of the country (e.g., 121). Instead, smaller moments bear most of the weight in demonstrating the tendency for individuals to fill epistemic gaps with stories that are comforting or useful. The most frequent manifestation of this process, as mentioned, is the way that Beatrice and Axl speak of their son, who they insist (in a representative example) “is a respected figure” in his village, “practically an elder, in all but his years” (90) but whose life—it is frequently insinuated and finally confirmed—they are not truly remembering (e.g., 32–33, 339–40).
Ishiguro presents this tendency as a matter of privilege in a sequence in chapter 6 in which Axl, resting in a British monastery, recalls a conversation he had had earlier that day with the Saxon warrior Wistan. A contrast emerges during this exchange between the aged Briton’s superficial way of reading the world and the critical engagement of his Saxon counterpart. When they come upon a disturbing device, for instance, “festooned with chains and manacles, and at head height, what appeared to be a blackened iron mask,” Axl suggests, intuitively, that its purpose is “no doubt to aid” the resident monks in “some pious ritual.” When Wistan draws on experience to properly gloss the contraption as a sinister means of flagellation, Axl responds once more that “there may yet be some more gentle purpose” (159). The same type of contrast had characterized much of the preceding conversation, with Axl positing an “innocent” explanation for the insidiousness of the British monks and with Wistan actually looking to uncover its hidden meaning (152). The most poignant moment of this sequence comes when Wistan identifies the monastery itself as a repurposed Saxon hillfort, suggesting that women, children, young, and the old had once used the fort’s traps to enjoy the spectacle of Briton slaughter, an act of anticipatory vengeance for their own inevitable brutalization once its defenses had been breached. Wistan’s access to these insights are, on the one hand, a matter of possessing the will to look beyond the mollifying surface: as he suggests, though the monastery were “today a place of peace and prayer, [one] needn’t gaze so deep to find blood and terror” (154). Axl, by contrast, is happy to consign such talk to “a barbarous past, hopefully gone forever” (155). While Axl is thus, at this point in the story, eager to paper over historical unpleasantries that stand only to upset his comfortable view of the present, and to conjecture in a way that aligns with this view, Wistan is committed to reading the world for what it is. The difference between these two approaches corresponds to a difference in historical knowledge and a difference in race. Wistan, as mentioned, is less susceptible to the amnesic mist and, indeed, describes the Britons’ anticipatory vengeance in a way that suggests an understanding of what had taken place.Footnote 56 For Wistan, moreover, such violence is not part of the abstract past, a proposition that Axl seems to ignore but one that is clarified much later in the novel when the Saxon warrior reveals that his mother had been abducted and raped by British soldiers when he was a child (cf. 263–64). The scene at the monastery presents race itself as a vector of knowledge when Wistan suggests that Britons simply would not recognize many latent signs of his Saxon kin (153). It is typical of the novel, however, that no explicit link is drawn between Wistan’s race and his critical eye, Axl’s Britishness and his own willingness to create and to accept happy fictions.
Wistan’s many troubled glances at Axl here and throughout the novel suggest the unvoiced pain of those whose history has been supressed. Indeed, through its inclusion of Saxon and British points of view, The Buried Giant suggests the cost of historical manipulation as well as its benefit; however, though Britons like Axl and Gawain often cut pathetic, guilt-ridden figures in the novel, it holds these two considerations in a tension that it never fully resolves. Gawain provides justification for Arthur’s treacherous slaughter of Saxons in a flashback to the day of its occurrence roughly two-thirds of the way into book:
What was done in this Saxon towns today [i.e., the slaughter of Saxon innocents] my uncle [King Arthur] would have commanded only with a heavy heart, knowing of no other way for peace to prevail. Think, sir. Those small Saxon boys you lament would soon have become warriors burning to avenge their fathers fallen today. The small girls soon bearing more in their wombs, and this circle of slaughter would never be broken… . Yet with today’s great victory a rare chance comes. We may once and for all sever this evil circle, and a great king must act boldly on it. May this be a famous day… from which our land can be in peace for years to come.Footnote 57
True to this line of thought, there seems to be no war in the novel’s present day, and even a level of coexistence between the different peoples. The story ends, meanwhile, with a suggestion that Querig’s death, and the dissipation of the amnesic mist, will uncover a thirst for vengeance; that, exacerbated by the self-interest of “quick-tongued men,” this desire will lead to the displacement and slaughter of the Britons (322–25). Clearly balanced against this hypothetical is the actual lack of justice Saxons face in the present, including their apparent mistreatment at the hands of Briton leaders like the vile Lord Brennus. Subtler complications can be found in the competing suggestions that the myth of the pax Arthuriana was doomed to fail in precisely the way that it did—via the interference of foreign Saxons (233)—and that whatever grievance existed might have disappeared completely, were the historical fiction of Arthur’s benevolence allowed to hold just a while longer (311). Moral deliberation is left to the readers; the plot moves beyond it.Footnote 58 Wistan slays Querig, and at the end of the novel, as Axl suggests, “The giant, once well buried, now stirs. When soon he rises, as surely he will, the friendly bonds between us will prove as knots young girls make with the stems of small flowers” (324).
Buried Giants, British History, Nation Past and Present
In Ishiguro’s work as well as Geoffrey’s, giants represent the terror of violence embedded in history. Axl’s formulation, as we have seen, casts “the buried giant” of the novel’s title as a metaphor for the latent memory of a violent past, but the giants of his world are not only metaphorical. A number of fantastical creatures dwell in Ishiguro’s vision of post-Arthurian Britain: we encounter, for example, pixies, dragons, and ogres, among other monstrous beasts. We also get one—and only one—literal giant. Earlier in the novel, Axl and Beatrice had come upon a giant buried in “The Great Plain,” an arcane tract of land the elderly couple must cross near the outset of their journey. Toward the end of their passage, around midday, Beatrice says the following to her husband:
But there’s one place we need to be cautious… . It’s when the path goes over where the giant is buried. To one who doesn’t know it, it’s an ordinary hill, but I’ll signal to you and when you see me you’re to follow off the path and round the edge of the hill till we meet the same path on its way down. It’ll do us no good treading over such a grave, high noon or not.Footnote 59
This episode functions in at least two ways. First, with the benefit of hindsight, it operates much as the notion of a buried giant will later on: as an allegory for the issues of historical repression and recovery that go on to structure much of the novel’s tension. In particular, the idea that “it will do no good” to tread over the giant’s grave resonates with the question of whether the destruction of King Arthur’s imposed amnesia, with its promise of violence, would actually be a good thing. A second way that the buried giant functions at the beginning of the novel is as a case in point of the idea that a lack of historical wherewithal determines our interpretation of the world and can lead us away from fraught, disturbing truths. To someone who doesn’t know that it is the product of a death, the giant’s burial mound seems like just another hill. (This recalls Axl’s conjecture that a sinister piece of monastic property might simply be the innocuous aid to “some pious ritual” (159).) The informed, by contrast, know the hill for what it is and are sure to keep their distance.
Geoffrey of Monmouth encourages us to flesh out this second function of the buried giant’s early appearance—its status as a case in point—by priming us to think about the historical implications of a giant’s tomb in Arthurian Britain, and the fact that the history that would be involved in the process of untangling this image is left untold. To justify this reading, and to begin drawing out its implications, we might take a step back to note once more that Geoffrey’s imaginative approach to history and Ishiguro’s problematizing of historical repression are two sides of the same coin. Put differently, we might recall that, even while Ishiguro’s novel highlights the cost of Geoffrey’s methods, consciously or not it uses his material. By contrast with Ishiguro’s novel, however, Geoffrey’s history of early Britain is replete with giants. In his hands they are a historiographical fabrication, a creative treatment of the past that functions to provide history with a sense of form—cyclicality—mediated through prophecy and directed by providence.
The History of the Kings of Britain begins with an extended account of the travels of Brutus, the great-grandson of Aeneas of Troy. Brutus is exiled from Italy after he unwittingly commits patricide and soon after he arrives in Greece, where he comes upon the descendants of prisoners taken during the Trojan War, now enslaved under the Greek king Pandrasus. Brutus leads these Trojans in battle, and together they submit Pandrasus to their demands. Some say they should demand a free homeland in Greece; others, that they should request the means to leave, to find a free land of their own. Breaking the deadlock is a Trojan named Mempricius, who endorses the latter course in a speech to his assembled countrymen:
If you desire lasting peace for yourselves and your children, one thing should be sought: namely, leave to go. Indeed, if you grant Pandrasus his life with the understanding that, having gained part of Greece from him, you wish to remain among the Greeks, you will never enjoy lasting peace as long as the brothers and sons and cousins of those whom yesterday you slaughtered dwell among you or as your neighbors. For they will always remember the death of their kin, and so they will look upon you with everlasting hatred and, incited by whatever measly trifles, they will strive to take their revenge.Footnote 60
Mempricius’s reading of the Trojan’s situation, his invocation of memory (memores), strikingly resembles the aforementioned section of The Buried Giant in which Gawain had rationalized the slaughter of Saxon innocents. (Indeed, though Ishiguro has never publicly acknowledged a debt to Geoffrey of Monmouth, one wonders whether he had this speech in mind.) Whereas Ishiguro’s Britons respond to the prospect of cyclical violence by covering up the past, shrouding it in an amnesic mist, Geoffrey’s Trojans simply leave. In a pointed echo of the Aeneid, Brutus is soon thereafter visited by a vision from the goddess Diana, who prophesizes the Trojans’ arrival at a western island, situated beyond the coast of Gaul. This island, she says, once inhabited by giants, now lies deserted; it is fated to become a second Troy (altera Troja), an empire from which kings descended from Brutus will conquer the world.Footnote 61 Invigorated by this prophecy, the Trojans gradually make their way across the Mediterranean, Gaul, and finally to Albion, which Brutus calls “Britain” after his own name. Britain is not, however, completely deserted; the “Britons,” as they are now known, find the land inhabited still by a number of giants. At first, these giants flee to the mountains for shelter but finally—it seems—they are eradicated when Brutus’s commander, Corineus, throws the last of them off a cliff as gladiatorial spectacle.Footnote 62
The History of the Kings of Britain thus begins with the Britons displacing a monstrous race of giants, sending them in flight to dwell in caves and inhabiting Britain in their place, as Diana had foretold. The end of the HKB will see the Britons themselves turned “monstrous,” as it were: degenerated from the glory of their ancestors, ruined by infighting, and puffed up by pride; compelled by pestilence and famine—signs of God’s wrath—they abandon Britain, leaving behind only a few wretched stragglers in Wales who live in forest lairs like the giants in their caves. Displacing the Britons are, of course, the Saxons, who assume control of the island through prudence, peace, and unity. Nevertheless, the prophecies of Merlin—and Diana’s forecast of universal British dominion—suggest that the Britons will once more come to rule. Formally, Albion’s giants allow Geoffrey to recast the whole sweep of British history under the auspices of invasion: the Britons’ initial submission of the island prefigures the Saxon conquest, which is followed extra-textually by the Danish invasions and, quite recently, that of the Normans.Footnote 63 The case of the giants can thus be seen as a chilling example of one way to deal with the problem of cohabitation that this pattern of history continuously precipitates, a problem that Mempricius had identified and that contemporary Welsh uprisings—especially in a border region like Monmouth—could have rendered quite topical.
For Geoffrey, the past is something to be used, the giants serving as one tool in this operation. The Buried Giant, by contrast, encourages us to think about the fact that “useful” constructions of history operate on principles of displacement and erasure—Arthur (Gawain tells us) was an honorable, universally beloved king, and the violence that used to characterize Briton-Saxon relations no longer exists (or so Axl thinks). This encouragement gives us some license to risk overdetermining Ishiguro’s image of the giant’s burial mound by reading into its historical implications. It is certainly the case that the novel elsewhere alludes, with customary vagueness, to the fact that its world exists in a broader continuum of forgotten time: abandoned Roman villas scatter the landscape; the amnesia’s dissipation will open the door for Saxon conquest.Footnote 64 The buried giant at the beginning of the novel comes and goes over the course of the few lines previously quoted; it is quite easy to read the scene as a metaphor and to forget about it, as Axl and Beatrice quickly do. Nevertheless, broader familiarity with Galfridian history encourages us to identify this fleeting encounter as, itself, a moment when the opportunity to tell an untold history remains untapped. Why are there giants buried in Britain? Why, later on in the book, do we see a monolith—the “giant’s cairn” (291)—that suggests a degree of civilization, but we encounter no living giants? Geoffrey would tell us that the answer lies in a history of invasion and violence. Such questions, however, do not occur in The Buried Giant, a work of intentionally limited perspective: for Axl and Beatrice, for Gawain, and even for Wistan, that ground is left untread.
Conversely, The Buried Giant’s reinscription of the displaced suggests a way to read Geoffrey’s History of the Kings of Britain against the grain. Within the confines of its imagined universe, the HKB casts Britain’s race of giants as a momentary roadblock in the story of the Britons’ inexorable progress toward insular dominion. Conceptually, at least, there is another side to this narrative, an untold version of history we can imagine in which the Briton invasion serves as a violent interruption into the longer story of Albion’s giants.Footnote 65 This abstraction becomes less trivial when one keeps in mind the orthodoxy of Geoffrey’s project, if not in the breadth of its infidelity to events as they happened, then in its prioritization of a teleological, providential view of history. At a more tangible level, a focus on what is lost when we imagine the past reminds us that—whether the impulse behind the HKB was favorable toward the Britons, as some have suggested, or not—Geoffrey’s project effectively buried a faithful account of British history, or at least a good-faith acknowledgment of the unknown, under the weight of a pseudo-history that would soon become the most widely read history in England.
That The Buried Giant’s critique of imagined history can be applied to Geoffrey’s work and to related projects suggests, in closing, if not continuity then a certain recurrence linking the modern to the premodern.Footnote 66 In the United States, for example, calls today for “patriotic” historical education respond directly to the disinterment of histories long buried under national myth, of racist legacies that threaten to supplant the narratives that have provided comfort and cohesion to many at the expense of justice for all.Footnote 67 Academic historical inquiry is far removed from the generic parameters and worldview of works like Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain and the prose Brut; however, more broadly experienced, and more influential, modes of articulating the nation make similar use of historical form, teleology, and providence.Footnote 68 And though neither the HKB nor the Brut were “popular” texts in the modern sense of the term—their dissemination was limited by the media and literacy rates of the time—the massive footprints of these works suggest a large audience for compelling renditions of national history that obfuscate inconveniences, such as the distinction between Briton and Saxon, in a way that is not categorically different from the way that national myths operate today. Recurrences of this sort can lend insight into the social configurations that produce modern modes of thought, if only by contrast, and here the once-assumed impossible blend of national, racial, and religious modes of belonging we often find expressed in medieval sources warrants close scrutiny.Footnote 69 Reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel in conversation with its historiographical precedents, with those texts that gave birth to the idea of a “historical” Arthur, informs us not simply of the tradition into which the book’s author places his work, but of the possibilities that exist in this area of comparative study. It points us specifically to the fact that creators of history both past and present have approached violence flexibly as a means of establishing historical form: continuity through the distortion of its circumstances, periodization through its relative presence and lack, cyclicality through its fabrication.Footnote 70 As we continue to grapple with the challenges of exhumation, a broad view that incorporates the premodern world may prove to be similarly fruitful. It proves, at the very least, that the burying of giants is not new.
