What Lies Beneath the Mists

An attempt to discern between the Art and the Artist based on Marion Zimmer Bradley’s “The Mists of Avalon”

Is it there, this longing desire for our heroes to be untouchable, to be ethereal and unreachable, only to be a fantasy, a shield to protect us for admitting they are human, just like us, too?
Straying away from these feelings will make us lost again, just like we were before meeting our masters and muses?

They say, “you should never meet your heroes”, as poignantly referred by Roman Polanksi in the 1994 movie from Giuseppe Tornatore, “Una pura formalità”.

“Non bisognerebbe mai incontrare i propri miti. Visti da vicino ti accorgi che hanno i foruncoli. Rischi di scoprire che le grandi opere che ti hanno fatto sognare tanto le hanno pensate stando seduti sul cesso, aspettando una scarica di diarrea!”

“Una pura formalità”, (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1994)

While maybe this is not an adage, it is certainly a modern realization of the human sphere we use a foundation to build up our current epics, the legends. Our modern myths are not Olympian gods or Valhalla heroes, but media characters, actors, content creators, influencers, politicians and writers. They stand now as the old stories of heroes defeating death for love or cutting heads of monsters stood – though the purpose of this narration is diverse and, to say the least, different in revenues.

A legend retold
Marion Zimmer Bradley rocked the narrative of fantasy when her book “The Mists of Avalon” was published in 1982. Suddenly, the male-centric world of fantasy was shaken by a fulgid representation of the feminine in a legend as old as our collective imaginary: the Matter of Britain.
We never related so much on the female counterparts of the much better-known protagonists of the saga, such as Viviane, Igraine, Guinevere (here addressed in her Welsh name, Gwenhwyfar), Morgause and above all of them, Morgaine. They were only colorful notes, side characters useful for the story to progress, sometimes the casus belli for tragedies, pointing out that women and betrayals are closely intertwined together and, often, the focal point of a bitter end.
Bradley takes this old and patriarchal tropes and twists them, at the point of breaking them. This is the story of the women of Avalon and the modern women, freed of the chains that imprisoned them in the niche of the background lore.
As the story of Avalon and the rise and fall of King Arthur is now narrated from the women’s perspective, we dig deep in legend, at the point to understand that war, plots, and the life at the court were only the limelight of a much deeper stage, often engulfed in the darkness of the appendix. The profound struggle between old, fading religion and a rising, aggressive new one is another important step in this dark voyage – often ignored for the sake of romanticism, exactly like the feminine sphere.

Though the novel plays too much in digressions and slows down way more than its length can justify, it covers a generational span that enthuses the reader. The women of Avalon are a strange, weird lot of normal and supernatural feminine beings, of grandmothers, mothers and daughters, all of them struggling to be independent in a world where they are considered lesser creatures and, sometimes, objectified possessions. 
As Michela Murgia once said, we lived the careless, fool quests and wars of the men through women’s eye among other things, while they messed up and struggle together. King Arthur is a slave of his beliefs and a tool of greater powers with no knowledge of his real influence in the world. Lancelot is an impossibly undecided hero, which prefers to fight dragons than his doubts. And so on.

“’All the tears women shed, they leave no mark on the world.’”

Bradley, Marion Zimmer. The Mists of Avalon (p. 259). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Narrating the losers’ stories
Through the eyes of Igraine first, we witness the sliding of the supernatural world in our reality of every day, when Viviane and the Merlin of Britain plunge her into a greater tapestry of power, religion and politics – most of these elements, dominated by the male presence. We lose the focus on the story from Igraine point of view when she merges with the story itself, being the wife of a uber-patriarch male such as Uther, a warlord a power-lust king and it is not a case at all: Igraine lose the connection with the spiritual world that put her in that place as the high-queen, becoming more and more a Christian wife – just as she loses the female gaze and starts to see the world more ordinarily for the times.
Enter Morgaine. She is the quintessential rebel girl, imbued with great powers, nurtured by the old religion of the forgotten tribal Britannic society. Not beautiful but charismatic, mysterious because nobody pays attention to what she has to say and give, and bold because she challenges authorities and questions things that everyone takes for granted. She follows the hard path of being an independent and smart woman in a world dominated by traditions and patriarchism. Morgaine was often depicted as a villain in the Matter of Britain (especially the latest adaptations in the modern media), so this take on her story is part unsettling, part extraordinary, but overall new and interesting. Everything is played on how Bradley twisted the classic turning points of the legends based on her new protagonist, Morgaine: how Arthur becomes king, how he is betrayed by Lancelot and Guinevere, how he is tricked into having a son with her sister and else.  

The whole concept of “The Mists of Avalon” is one and one only: you just know only a side of a story. And, what is the most interesting story of them all? The one that is narrated by the losers, which is never told in full. The losers in most of the stories we know, especially the classic legends, are the women. Ignored, mistreated, used as damsels in distress and scapegoats, violated and killed for more than one purpose. The story of Morgaine is one of the first steps to make this right and to do it starting from the legends, the bedrock of our society.

The female gaze
Another turning point of the story is freely given at the very beginning of the narrative when we realize that all of the events of the book happen because the real mastermind, the Lady of the Lake Viviane, puts everything in motion. Making a very still and distant character such as the Lady of the Lake, a powerful force that shaped the events throughout the whole story, was the catharsis of ancient power struggle. The old goddesses were overthrown by the male counterparts in classical mythology, as the women started to lose relevancy in the hierarchy (if we believe Robert Graves). This started a slow replacement of all the key female figures in mythology and the transformation of the myths themselves – something Bradley want to set right by giving Viviane a dignified personality and role. She is not merely a female Merlin, but a full-fledged and memorable character with the same importance.
What makes this book so powerful? Is it just the female point of view of a very well-known story? It is more than that… it is one of the basic feminist ideas, perfectly applied here: the female characters are strong, smart, powerful, but even silly, stupid, stubborn and blind too. They are just humans, they scream to be equals, to have our attention, to be alive and to exist.

“Lancelet said, ‘And I must believe that man has the power to know the right, to choose between good and evil and know that his choice has made a difference …’
‘Oh, aye,’ Morgaine said, ‘if he knows what good is. But does it not seem to you, cousin, that ever, in this world, evil wears the face of good?’”

Bradley, Marion Zimmer. The Mists of Avalon (p. 810). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Posthumous accusation
The great enchantment of “The Mists of Avalon” was broken in 2014, when Bradley’s daughter Moira Greyland claimed she was a sexual abuser and a child molester. The allegations could not be commented on by Bradley, as she died in 1999 unscathed, but they soon became a certainty in more than one way. All the people connected by Bradley’s iconic work suddenly faced the idea of her as a rapist and a molester. There are plenty of words written on this and more, of how Moira not only was molested and raped since being three but on the horrors endured by the hand of Bradley’s convicted rapist and child abuser husband too – Walter H. Breen. We will not talk in deep about this, but on the idea that sparkled by these and other similar events. Is the work of art the same as the artist who worked it?
Feminism is a very faceted movement, with very diverse degrees of ideas, all tied together by one purpose: to establish the equality of sexes in all the different aspects of society. This idea is often twisted in many ways and it is laughable to think that in modern days the movement still needs to be properly explained. But it is a tragedy too, maybe one of the worse in human history.
What happens if a great iconic work such as “The Mists of Avalon”, often defined as a great example of feminist narrative, turns out to be created by such a monster as Bradley was? We need to deal with a lot of things, starting with our perception of art.

An ancient conflict
Art is often discussed as that thing that pushes you to experience emotions, no matter what – and if there are such many definitions for art as the hair in our heads, maybe we can take this particular one because it is our feelings that stand in the way of accepting that we must separate the artist from the art.
Ideas and concepts are right even if expressed by the worst mouths and minds. The powerful message of “The Mists of Avalon” and the character of Morgaine, seems to stood out, even if some passages seem to justify the violence and rape culture that Bradley had in mind for her whole lifetime (the Beltane fires forced sex, the rape of Guinevere by Meleagrant, not judged enough, almost condoned and detailed in fascinating ways). What is important is maybe the great impact Morgaine and her story had in the modern literature and the feminist movement – even if the book itself was not conceived as a feminist one.
We are dealing with a lot more than a simplistic view of art and principles is allowing us here. Our struggle is a moral and a perception one. Our moral compass is spinning wildly when we admit that such people as Bradley can create such works as this. It is the same struggle that the #metoo movement put on the world attention not so long ago – we discovered something about our idols, our reference point in the entertainment world, sometimes on our masters too. Some of these cases were actually not so difficult to believe and we felt guilty for this too. We saw actors being erased by movies and series projects. But we still know that those projects, their performance and whatever art they created are still art. We cannot emotionally deal with this paradox, but we can do it logically. The history of art is full of examples in which the artist was lesser than the art he created in more than one way. The struggle is ancient. Caravaggio, to pick one, was a murderer and probably a pederast. Nonetheless, we can’t argue his mastery in lighting and depicting dramatic and powerful scenes in his oil painting masterpieces, which inspired whole generations of painters and pushed the boundaries of art to the next level. The list is long and we still find Woody Allen’s movie tragically funny, and we can’t help to notice how Roman Polanski’s movies are works of pure art, with no exaggeration. Polanski’s example is one of the most poignant ones, and it is tied to the idea we introduced ad the beginning of this discussion: we should never meet our heroes. Polanski was one of the main characters in “Una pura formalità”, the movie where he is a constable of a small town trying to nail a case of murder by cornering the other character, a famous writer he admires and who inspired him (played by Gerard Depardieu). The inner conflict is serious, but the constable chose to pursuit his sense of duty. The story of Polanski is full of tragedies and tied with one of the most gruesome crimes of our modern times: the murder of Sharon Tate by Charles Manson. Polanski is accused of abusing a minor years later and since then is wanted by US authorities to be arrested. He is a rapist, and there is little room to deny that without pushing a victim-blaming argument, as many did. His case is one of the most poignant ones in regard to our discussion. As a friend of mine said once, he kept changing lives with his work and created that kind of material that allows diving deeper into the media. His movies are the kind that gives a new perspective on the cinema as a whole. This cannot be undone and cannot be ignored. Many of the great masterpieces of Polanski, though, should never exist in the first place, had he been convicted as the crime he committed required to – another painful contradiction to deal with.
Perhaps, we should find a common ground between the two worlds, the two different logic and moral spheres that are operating and clashing together: the connection between the artist and the audience sometimes is just the art itself, and that’s all.

“‘Morgaine, was it all for nothing then, what we did, and all that we tried to do? Why did we fail?’

Bradley, Marion Zimmer. The Mists of Avalon (p. 868). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

The unknown territory beneath the mists
In 1967, Roland Barthes compose the philosophical critical approach to a text, called “Death of the author“, a controversial tool to deal with a controversial situation. While there is commonly little doubt about the paternity of a piece of art, this concept goes as far as remove the art from the hands of the author and goes in the opposite direction, giving it to the user of art. Who reads, then, is the real maker, as he elaborates on the story and the material, creating a new whole inside his mind, using his experience, his sensitivity, and his own knowledge. The interpretation becomes the “interpreted”. The old critic tool to examine the origins of the author, his background story, to justify the art and explain it, is outdated and considered as paratext, like everything else connected to the art which is not the art itself. The artist is thus removed from the scene and the art user takes his place. The meaning of the art is the one that is perceived and elaborated, there is no specific intention.
By removing the author and its background from this equation, many critics solve the problem to deal with despicable people creating wonderful art.

Other than this idea, there is something else beneath.
We, as humans, are an average successful mix of emotions and logic, bound together by our suspension of disbelief for life. We must deal with the contradictions of driving away by feelings in everything we do while struggling to keep our personal logic straight. When we measure ourselves with art we enter unknown territory, a different set of rules, a different way to feel. It is chaos, it is walking into a different logic, the one the artist wants us to experience – not unlikely the journey that the characters make while stepping into the mists and reaching out Avalon, a world between worlds. I believe that dealing with all the emotional conflicts and inner struggles such as admitting the beauty and the great meanings of “The Mists of Avalon” against the horrors of its creator, is a great part of accepting art in its whole. Condemning the creators for their crimes and despicable behaviour is nonetheless necessary and part of this process as well.
Sometimes, art is not what we like, but is about what we must face, either inside or outside us. Being an unpleasant journey is part of what makes art great, scary, fascinating, dark, and beautiful. A whole theory of contradictions, an overwhelming force, a fearful ecstasy as Stendhal described once. There is no way to solve this conflict, rather than to admit that art is born out of the conflict itself.

Suggested readings:
Michela Murgia: “L’inferno è una buona memoria”