The Lion and the Unicorn

The tendency in previously published work on T. H. White's Arthurian texts has been to consider either biography or educational aspects and to consider nationalism (if at all) in terms of White's pacifism. The Sword in the Stone (1938) represents the first installment of White's fictional series of works based on Arthurian mythology, specifically Sir Thomas Malory's fifteenth century romance Le Morte Darthur (1485) and this article will argue that it offers a paradigmatic example of Rosemary Marangoly George's assertion that "imagining a home is as political an act as imagining a nation. Establishing either is a display of hegemonic power" (George, 4) and betrays the cultural unease and uncertainty of the British interwar experience. The novel recounts the boyhood of King Arthur, also known as the illegitimate Wart, under the stewardship of his foster father Sir Ector in the Castle of the Forest Sauvage and details his education for kingship through a series of fantastical lessons under the tutelage of Merlyn the magician. This article will suggest that far from offering simplistic laudatory allegories of English identity or a return to the known as personified by place, White's narrative is a hybridized and metalinguistic construct that incarnates the fragmentation English identity underwent during the period of its composition. Noting that the text's evocation of medieval English pageantry, the pastoral and the fantastic turns on the question of legitimate and illegitimate identities, this article will argue that the narrative examines the late-imperial interwar difficulties of articulating national and individual models of identity. In this context, the text's representational strategies will be interrogated as being simultaneously contiguous to the traditions governing the recycling of Arthurian mythology and the reprocessing strategies employed by twentieth-century [End Page 44] modernism desire "make it new." Beginning with a reading of modernism's treatment of mythology and temporality, the article will investigate the text's mobilization of intertextual allusion, mythology, and problematized temporality as being at once integral to its questioning of the narratives of interwar identities and implicitly modernist.

M. H. Abrams defines myth as a "system of hereditary stories . . . which served to explain . . . why the world is as it is and things happen as they do" (Abrams, 170). Correspondingly, T. S. Eliot described modernism's "mythical method" as a way of "controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense paranoia of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history" (Eliot, 177). Myth is thus represented as a formula with which to impose order upon a reality where certainties have collapsed. Simply put, in both, when faced with the difficulty of realist renditions of chaotic existence, mythological narration offers a way of reasserting artistic authority over subject experience and time. This is a definition applicable both to the perpetual recycling of Arthurian mythology at moments of cultural crisis throughout English history and the literary modernism that emerged at the close of the First World War. The deployment of myth, which is "by definition both impersonal and ahistorical" (Emig, 181 +), imposes relevance and order, offering a way of endowing a text with external validity beyond cultural or historical specificity. Citing the authority of ancient myths by allusion or direct quotation results in an appropriation of the myth's explanatory unifying locus. As Michael Bell notes, myth "represents precisely the lost unity, real or imaginary, which preceded the modern division of realms" (Bell, 5), which is commensurate with what Rainer Emig describes as "the desire for wholeness and the claim for universality . . . inherent in all facets of modernism" (Emig, 192).

These desires are fundamental both to the Arthurian legend of origin, and myth of rebirth, and modernism. Both arise when moments of cultural crisis need to be negotiated. Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (c.1136), allegedly the "first definitive or coherent account" of the Arthur myth, was written to legitimize the Norman conquest of England, which it achieved by laying its emphasis "not on the race of Arthur, but upon the land he administered and defended" (Ackroyd, 108–09). Similarly, the...