4 - “Understanding the thing as it is”: De Ortu Waluuanii and the challenge of interpretation

Summary

The texts in chapters 4 and 5 share certain important elements and strategies with both Geoffrey's history and the more overtly “Celtic” works in chapter 6. Like Geoffrey's Historia, a text upon which they draw, both of these romances make considerable efforts, albeit sometimes sporadic ones, to offer an appearance of verisimilitude, to suggest that theirs is the truth of historical accuracy. Yet these efforts are part of a narrative mode which is also often overtly romantic, and much of the content of each narrative supports Southern's notion of the particular appeal of the marvelous in twelfthcentury English writing. To be sure, one of the texts is more “historical,” and the other more “romantic” or marvelous, at least in terms of content. Yet each shares Geoffrey's tendency to signal all manner of literary exploration through the manipulation of the narrative process. There are occasional experiments with generic markers, frequent moments of irony, parody, and even on occasion burlesque, and what sometimes seems to be a general, facetious irreverence towards the traditions of romance storytelling. The result, as was the case with Geoffrey's Historia is that the audience is often left in doubt as to how to read the various signals, generic and otherwise, which the text is apparently sending. Indeed, concerns about perception, both within and beyond the world of the texts, are central to both these works, and dramatized on every level of their style and content.