Content area
Full Text
Balín and Balan," the "Cinderella of the Idylls," was the last of Tennyson's cycle of Arthurian poems to be published and is in some ways his most disillusioned.1 Whereas Malory's original story depicts Balin as a knight pursued by misfortune but largely lacking interiority, Tennyson turns him into a brooding figure tormented by feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and destructive impulses. Throughout the idyll, Balin displays an uncommon degree of selfknowledge. In this respect, he is a far more modern individual than the well-meaning but naive Arthur, who is blissfully ignorant of his wife's adultery and his best friend's betrayal. On the basis of Malory's original, Tennyson made significant changes to effect this transformation. The strategic inclusion into the idyll of subsidiary characters such as Lancelot, Guinevere, and Vivien allows him to depict Balin's struggle against himself in a way that Malory's twodimensional narrative simply cannot. Read as a final testament to Tennyson's long preoccupation with Arthurian romance, "Balin and Balan" offers a psychologically bleak portrait of an individual caught between society (culture and civilization) and individual satisfaction (nature and instinct) and raises troubling questions about humanity's "wolf-like" nature.
From antiquity to the modern age, thinkers have commented on the savage nature of humanity, pithily expressed in the Latin proverb homo homini lupus (man is wolf to man). Sigmund Freud made the saying the cornerstone of his understanding of the predicament of the human animal. Compelled to join a group for protection and cultural advancement, instinctual humanity chafes under the yoke of civilization's repression of sexuality and violence. Instead of taming humanity's savage nature, civilization itself awakens atavistic longings that are only imperfectly contained by the veneer of culture. "Balin and Balan" offers a disturbing illustration of this paradox. In what follows, I read the figure of Balin, the idyll's protagonist, through the Freudian lens of civilizational malaise. I argue that Balin is an individual suffering not primarily from personal "madness," as scholars like Clyde L. Ryals and John Rosenberg have suggested, but from the constraints of civilization.2
In the late, great book Civilization and Its Discontents, published in 1929, Freud offers a brilliant analysis of the conflicting principles that, in his view, drive humankind: Eros (love) and Thanatos (death). Written at a time when he...