Disciplines of the king : Arthurianism, historiography, poetics and surveillance in Tennyson's Idylls of the king (1859)

Tennyson's Idylls of the King is a poem about knowledge and power, whose epistemological structure exploits the peculiarities of Arthurian discourse to subvert the forms and practices of disciplinary knowledge as described by Michel Foucault and instantiated in mid-Victorian historiography and poetics. In Tennyson's generation and that immediately previous. Arthurian discourse was understood as exhibiting a peculiar epistemological condition: it was simultaneously and undecideablv historiography and poetry. This epistemological duality pitted against one another two variations on a common construction of knowledge. Both historiography and poetry were theorised among Tennyson's generation as the foci of a double disciplinary practice. Each discourse aimed for an individualised and normalised knowledge of its object, and aimed to manipulate a human subjectivity which was one of the components of that object. (Historiography took the relationship between subjects and institutions in each geographical state and historical era as its object. Poetry took the atomised moment of consciousness as its object.) At the same time, both discourses were testing grounds which rendered visible the practices of the self of the authors of discourse. In both, forming the chaotic and unregulated raw material of knowledge into a disciplined shape which could change the reader was a mode of activity in which authorial subjects trained themselves and became the object of the normalising judgement of the very audience they aimed to change. Idylls of the King (1859) tackles both aspects of this disciplinary construction of knowledge. On the one hand, it investigates the Round Table as a society of surveillance in which the subject of surveillance is trained by becoming visible to his/her objects. The stories of the Arthurian cycle become examples of the travails of the subject and its practices of the self in this society. In this representation. Tennyson exposes the precarious epistemological, expressive and psychological conditions of success of surveillance. He suggests that surveillance turns on the specific epistemological dilemmas of historians and poets, and that it is an internally unstable mechanism whose epistemological structure leads to ethical uncertainty in its subjects. In the figure of Arthur he offers as his ideal (though not perfect) subjectivity one neither bound to disciplinary objectification nor committed to the form of knowledge of discipline. On the other hand. Tennyson makes the structure of his own poem repeat this critique. The poem offers and withdraws a multiplicity of historiographical and poetic normalisations of its own object (the corpus of Arthurian story). It leaves the reader as the subject of a structure of knowledge which repeats Arthur's -- one in which value is at once an inexhaustible potential of the object and in the eye of the reader, but in which the net of the subject's judgement of value cannot be cast over the object. As such. Tennyson's poem undermines the assumptions of epistemological and political technique which governed not only poetry and historiography in his day but which govern much of the practice of the post-enlightenment state structure of the West as a whole