The Song of Silence / Queering the National Myth: Gender, Weirdness and Magical Realism in Le Roman de Silence and Retold Arthuriana

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The creative component of the proposed project (ca 90,000 words) will be a retelling of Le Roman de Silence, a 13th century French verse-romance which introduced a genderfluid knight to the Arthurian mythos. My retelling, The Song of Silence, will emulate Madeline Miller's Circe and other recent mythic retellings in rendering epic poetry as magical realist prose. Written in the style of oral history, the story will be recast and its conclusions subverted, posing questions about queer historiography. By queering the Arthurian mythos - Britain's legendary origin story - I hope to explore the intersections between gender and nationalism in Britain today.The critical component (ca 30,000 words) will argue that queer retellings of Arthuriana (and mythology/history more generally) can be couched within the traditions of magical realism, exploring the setting and world of Arthuriana as a space which is inherently queer and inherently a vehicle for retroactive political commentary. Delving into what Donald Hoffman has recently termed the 'Arthurian closet', I will review existing scholarship on queer medievalism and the queering of Arthuriana in popular culture, while performing a close queer reading of the Roman de Silence and of the wider Arthurian canon. Does Arthurian Britain, with its uncanny geography and status as 'folk history' in British cultural heritage, constitute a queer space through its sheer weirdness? What has been its function, in previous retellings, as an allegorical reflection of Britain? And can this queer space, despite its ahistoricity, be used by writers to legitimize the historicity of queer narratives?In 1990 Simon Gaunt wrote that 'Heldris de Cornouaille's Roman de Silence appears to deliberately engage with problems that interest modern theorists'. Arthuriana, the Journal of Arthurian Studies, has dedicated two special issues to Le Roman de Silence, once in 1997 and again in 2002. More recent scholarship on the queering of King Arthur has included queer readings of the Lancelot-Grail cycle and of contemporary retellings of the Arthurian mythos, including Donald L. Hoffman's queer analysis of Arthurian cinema, published in Arthuriana in 2019. Hoffman differentiates between 'queer (gay)' and 'queer (peculiar)', whilst arguing that the latter can still be read as signifying the former.In both The Song of Silence and in my critical thesis, I will propose that this dual understanding of queerness is specifically useful for writing queer retellings of Arthuriana. The inherently queer (peculiar) world of the Arthurian mythos, with its dragons and strange happenstances and dreamlike internal logic, provides a useful vehicle for grounding queer narratives and characters in an imagined past. King Arthur's Britain is ahistorical, but tales of King Arthur usually insist upon their own historicity, and enjoy a strange quasihistorical status within British cultural heritage: within this contrast there is significant room for the exploration of realism.