The memory of this slaughter would have prevented the peace that Arthur sought for Britain and so Merlin cast the spell that caused the dragon’s breath to erase memory. On the day of Arthur’s great victory, presumably the Battle of Mount Badon (though it is not named in the novel), Arthur broke that treaty and slaughtered Saxon ‘women, children and elderly’ (212). When he was in Arthur’s service, Axl had gained the title of the Knight of Peace because he had brokered a treaty between Britons and Saxons that forbade the slaughter of innocents. The memory of this event is obscured, as are the memories of much else, by a mist that hangs over the land-a mist that is actually the breath of the dragon Querig, enchanted by Merlin intentionally to repress memory. And yet it is revealed at the end of the book that there is something that haunts even their love. Some of the scenes showing their concern for each other are quite moving.
The quest is that of Axl and Beatrice, the central characters, to reach the village of their son the great love is that between the inseparable and devoted couple. The Buried Giant also involves a quest and a great love, but both of these are different from the quests and courtly love affairs of medieval Arthurian romance. Arthur’s establishing peace between Britons and Saxons is a key plot element, as is a rather impressive spell cast in the recent past by Merlin, who does not appear in the novel. Among the characters are an errant Gawain, who remains alive after Arthur’s passing, and a farmer named Axl, who was once a member of Arthur’s retinue, a fact that comes to light only gradually and piecemeal-which is the way the characters and the readers learn much of what is. Though set shortly after Arthur’s death, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant is rightly considered an Arthurian novel. One of the first sustained critical efforts on The Buried Giant, this article puts the novel firmly on the agenda of literary, cultural and memory studies respectively. By keeping his previous corpus in view throughout, it evaluates Ishiguro’s continued use of memory and nationality as themes, while demonstrating the new departures offered by the conjunction of an ancient setting and a contemporary reading audience. Interdisciplinary in scope, this article uses evidence from psychological studies of memory alongside detailed close readings of the text, allowing a more precise analysis of the role of the narrator and the effect of Ishiguro’s text on the reader.
There are four areas of enquiry linked by their emphasis on the interdependence of remembering and forgetting: ideas of memory in nationhood the depiction of the British landscape the cognitive process of recognition and the emotional aspects of remembering. This article considers how Ishiguro’s 2015 novel about mass forgetting in post-Arthurian Britain adds to debates about what it means to be a human living within a society. The study will also theoretically connect Foucault’s discontinuous history with magical realism, which may broaden our understanding of Ishiguro’s text. The study will focus on these discontinuities and present a Foucauldian reading of the text. Moreover, while the spell confines the people into a perpetual here and now, it grants Arthur absolute political power. Due to the spell, the Britons and the Saxons suffer memory loss which causes historical discontinuities. In his version, King Arthur makes Merlin perform a spell on a dragon.
In the novel, by benefiting from generic potentials of magical realism, and effectively exploiting the medieval romance, Ishiguro creates a quasi-mythological historical account of the Anglo-Saxon period. Within this context, this study aims to analyse historical discontinuities in Kazuo Ishiguro’s magical realist novel, The Buried Giant (2015). These historical transformations occur following a change in épistèmé which connotes to the available set of knowledge produced by discursive practices in a particular period. Each historical period has its own conditions of truth and between these periods, there are breaks, twists, ruptures and discontinuities determined by power relations in that society. For Foucault, history does not follow a linear, dialectical line within a cause-and-effect relationship. Michel Foucault’s archaeological approach to history contests Hegelian understanding of evolutionary and progressive history which presupposes an ultimate arrival at a perfect form of society.