Rubbing and rewriting: Medievalism in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant recasts the Arthurian myth of British origins through what I deem a palimpsestic form of medievalism. This process of ‘rubbing and rewriting’ produces a layered chivalric romance in which Arthurian tradition and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight remain faintly legible as undertexts. Through the dragon Querig’s mist of forgetting, the wasteland containing the bones of slaughtered Saxons, and the demythologised portrayals of Arthur and Gawain, Ishiguro reveals how Arthur’s peace and Gawain’s chivalric loyalty become implicated in concealing the Britons’ massacre of the Saxons. The novel thereby challenges exclusionary nationalist notions of an ‘Arthurian Britishness’ that depend on enforced forgetting. Yet Edwin’s friendship with Axl and Beatrice, Gawain’s refusal to attack strangers on the grounds of rumour or foreign blood, and the moments of suspended boundaries that follow the return of memory all preserve the possibility of a more open Britishness. As the mist of forgetting dissipates, the return of painful memory brings neither stable reconciliation nor inevitable revenge. I ultimately argue that through the boatman’s test at the novel’s close, Ishiguro’s medievalism suggests that traumatic memory need not lead to retaliatory historical reckoning, opening instead a cautious yet affirmative vision of coexistence grounded in confronting historical trauma.