New Moon in Leo
nostalgia about strength, fantasies of weakness, featuring Lev Grossman's THE BRIGHT SWORD and a tarot reading for today's New Moon
The wheel of time has been broken, King Arthur is dead, England, after the peace of Camelot, is feverish again with war, bad blood, spoiled land and famine, vindictive fairies. The Bright Sword, Lev Grossman’s recently published retelling of the King Arthur stories starts with the apocalypse, how apropos, as it follows the journey of a scrappy kid whose hopes of joining the Round Table are only slightly dashed when he finds that vaunted brotherhood of chivalry and might populated by rejects and fools. Disabled Bedivere. Brown-skinned Palomides. Dagonet The Fool, who was only ever knighted, Grossman tells us, as a joke.
Collum, the protagonist, briefly grieves the grand Camelot of his dreams then quickly assumes his role amidst the broken and foolish as they pursue a goal only the broken and foolish could hope to accomplish: to bring Arthur or some king like him back to the throne and reestablish England’s peace and prosperity—”Camelot as the center of the world!” they proclaim—via adventure as a magical act and an unexamined commitment to nostalgia. Of course, even from the book’s beginning, it’s easy to guess that the failure of their quest probably lies in their inability to escape their own bodies. Their bad bones or bad brains or bad skin or bad desires have always been proof of the failures of Arthur’s utopia, which, in the past, the reader learns through flashback tales of knightly trauma, required them to stand to the side of the true heroes, the dark heart of a prosperity that only included them if they remained in the shadows.
What strength comes from the margins? When does weakness allow us to stand outside of history, to rid ourselves of nostalgia’s flat violence?
Grossman’s novel is somewhat unabashedly aligning itself with a cultural moment that finds such questions precious, but often without wanting to look too deeply at the uneasy pleasure taken in stories of brokenness and rejection, especially when those narratives reinforce the sense of alienation born of suffering as the true, right, or moral path to ascendency, celebrity, fame, or even simply being able to access the resources one needs to live.
Speaking of, lol: I’m finishing this novel from my sick bed after having surgery to cut away two lumps from the skin above my left breast implant. It’s true: I’ve always been taken with well-told stories of majestic, hurting fools. It’s fun to see myself that way, to pretend my very-bad pain and the sins of cruel rage and fear it inspires in me are what make me special, are what ensure that I, too, am one of the genius misfits who will save the world. And Grossman, of The Magicians trilogy fame, is nothing if not an engrossing (ha ha) writer. I’ve dog-eared plenty of pages and underlined several lines that gave me pause to stop, close my eyes, and savor the sensation of something other than the ice-pack across my chest, like this brief exchange between notorious fairy queen Morgan le Fay and the protagonist:
“ ‘Of all the animals,’ she said, ‘only man can feel a despair that is beyond his power to endure.’
‘God wouldn’t’ve sent him more than he could endure.’
‘I find your God is a great optimist to the question of how much people can endure. Can you read?”
Good dialogue. A little poignant, a bit funny. Still: that final, pithy question, “Can you read?” strikes a tone too modern for a novel ostensibly set in early sixth-century Britain. A few chapters later, le Fay will use the word “kink” to describe King Arthur’s evident masochistic tendencies, and, on the whole, Grossman seems to be unable to make up his mind whether he wants the Camelot mythology to act a faint screen for contemporary political and cultural concerns or if he wants the latter to somehow reach back in time and inform the former.
Grossman could have used the au courant notion that “heroism comes from the silenced margins”—even Odysseus and his heirs succeed because of a “secret and incessant dialogue” with Athena, goddess of wisdom, Roberto Calasso tells us—to craft a book that engages with the grand sweep of myth via authorial particularity. Sometimes, the dexterity of Grossman, the author who wrote the strange, slim, fantastically brutal Codex1, comes through. Much of the time, though, the knightly retellings within The Bright Sword’s 600-odd pages are put in service of a single, meme-able sentiment about who the true heroes are. I get it! We get it!2 So, I’m waffling about whether I’ll finish the book. I was hoping it would transport me into other realms, raising themes of collective life and individual heroism, sure, but through the aesthetic and ecstatic mysteries of a time and place that I don’t currently inhabit.