Students of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight agitated by ...



Students of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight agitated by problems of Biblical exegesis, gender, and the status of Christian heroes may find an essay by Catherine S. Cox useful. In “Genesis and Gender in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,”[1] Cox attempts to enrich the debate about the poem’s relationship to Christian doctrine:

SGGK’s exegetical poetics...are based upon its intertextual and intercultural engagement with not only Christian but also Jewish exegetical modes. Specifically, the construction and articulation of gender apropos of the “temptation” sequence can be analyzed in relation to both the Vulgate and Hebrew Genesis/Bereshit creation and expulsion sequences, allowing for a deeper understanding of the Gawain-poet’s complex poetics, themselves part of SGGK’s larger interconnected concerns with gender, religion, and language. (378)

After flinching in his encounter with the Green Knight at the end of the poem, Gawain “expresses contrition for his apostasy and cowardice. These expressions of contrition are interrupted, however, by a brief and curious outburst, the so-called ‘antifeminist diatribe’”(378). Gawain associates himself with Adam, who was also brought to sorrow by the deceits of women.

The poem links the triangle Bertilak-Gawain-Bertilak’s Lady to the Edenic triangle God-Adam-Eve. Cox situates the poem’s allusion to the Old Testament in a medieval context:

In Christianity’s typological reconfigurations of Old Testament personae, Eve is never just Eve; rather, her depiction is always haunted by her implicit contrast to that icon of unattainable feminine virtue, the Virgin Mary, and her worth accordingly diminished. That the Lady is characterized by Gawain as irresistable superficially mitigates his accusation of seduction, and, as such, his commonplace gesture of conflated condemnation and praise overtly calls to mind this ubiquitous dichotomy of Eve and Mary, opposing representatives of woman’s duplicitous nature at the core of so many misogynistic treatises. In Jerome’s famous phrasing, “Mors per Evam, vita per Mariam,” the typological antithesis connecting “Eva,” seductress and sinner, with “Ave,” Gabriel’s greeting to Mary at the scene of the Annunciation comprising the reversed letters of Eva’s name. When Gawain describes himself as having been, like Adam, “with one bygyled,” he simultaneously reinstates, by way of implicit opposition, the Virgin Mary to her rightfully prominent place in the Christian knight’s code of values and conduct. It is perhaps fitting, then, that the Lady appears in response to Gawain’s prayer to the Virgin, and is contrasted with the “auncian”(948)—Morgan herself, or perhaps a doublet, the Lady herself being another—through images of color and texture that call to mind fruit in general and apples in particular (since a ubiquitous medieval misreading of Genesis identifies the forbidden fruit as an apple). Curiously, the Virgin Mary ultimately rescues her knight from the Lady’s sexual temptation...but offers no intervention to prevent Gawain’s succumbing to his desire for survival. The Virgin Mary’s own interests, it would seem, are confined to sexual chastity, a reflection perhaps of her own status in medieval Christianity as the embodiment of chaste female perfection and the mother of God’s son, wholly defined by her sexuality or perceived absence thereof. (379)

Cox claims that divided traditions (“Hebrew/Latin,” “Jewish/Christian,” “Old/New”) fissure the poem; the ending of the poem, which describes Camelot’s refusal to recognize Gawain’s shame, endeavors to overcome the divisive influence of the Green Knight:

The closing scene of SGGK replicates the medieval polemicists’ agenda: to bolster the credibility of Christian doctrine on behalf of the Christian faithful. Refusing to engage in the kind of critical scrutiny that might undermine tenuous faith or incite nascent doubts, the court and the poem instead seem to favor the strategy endorsed by Aquinas, “Quorum fides ex hoc est firmior quod nihil diversum audierunt ab eo quod credunt”[Wherefore the faith of the (ignorant) is firmer if they hear nothing that conflicts with what they believe]...Having eradicated the potential contagion of Gawain-as-Other, and with it the unwelcome implication that the court’s own self-defined subjectivity is vulnerable to critique, the court reclaims its place at the center of SGGK’s idyllic, homosocial, normative world. (385)

While I find her reading of the poem’s weird ending plausible, I wonder if a medieval audience would have perceived a divide between Christian doctrine and Jewish history; does every allusion to the story of Eden necessarily imply a serious engagement with Jewish thought or a subversive challenge to Christian ideology? Amid the flotsam and jetsam of Cox’s often abstruse verbiage, some excellent quotations of medieval writers await the industrious scavenger (or pilferer?).

In “The Cinematic Consciousness of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,”[2] Jeremy Lowe reexamines the work of the literary critic Alain Renoir. Renoir, son of the famous filmmaker, applied his hereditary understanding of movies to an analysis of the form of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in several essays published in the late fifties and early sixties. Lowe exploits developments in film theory during the decades since Renoir’s cinematic essays:

Recent scholarship on the poem points to the ways in which it resists closure, and classical film theory [which celebrated the work of auteurs like Renoir père], with its emphasis on structure and rigid composition, now seems poorly equipped to deal with the poem’s complexities. Similarly, recent psychoanalytic film theory, with its insistence that the cinema spectator is woven into the dominant narrative of the film, cannot adequately explain the contingencies, transitions, and constant renegotiations that make up Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Psychoanalysis also depends upon the intimate relationship established between the cinema audience and the central protagonist of a film, and it is one of the claims of this essay that no such relationship exists between the audience of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the character of Gawain. (68)

To classical and psychoanalytic film theory Lowe opposes the anti-Oedipal theory of Deleuze and Guattari:

According to Deleuzian film theory, the cinema audience is able to experience a film without necessarily identifying with one character; consequently the film becomes a play of surfaces, a system of interconnected perspectives that continually renegotiate meaning. The cinema spectator has access to this system, but occupies no stable point within it, so that the cinematic experience is both fluid and open-ended. The term “cinematic consciousness,” referring to the complex system of interconnected perspectives that involve the spectator, helps us to explain our own shifting and often inconsistent attitudes towards Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We, the audience of the poem, have access to this “cinematic consciousness” and contribute to it, generating an interpretive network which is the product of multiple perspectives, but which simultaneously extends beyond the control of any single point of view. (69)

Psychoanalytic film theorists often assert that the gaze of the moviegoer binds him to the protagonist of the film, but Lowe contends that

Psychoanalytic film theory, with its dependence upon the active mastery of the gaze, cannot really help us interpret the poem that so consistently undermines the very notion of mastery, and which certainly challenges, in the hapless figure of Sir Gawain, the notion that the male gaze is either active or dominant....We are his restless companions: one moment we see him through the eyes of the courtiers at Camelot who criticize his adventure (674-83), but at another we feel his cold as he sleeps in his irons on the bare hillside (729). Gawain’s very identity is always under review, and we cannot identify with him; if this were a film, the camera would not suture us into an intimate relationship with him, but would be roving around, freed from its moorings. With such perpetual shifts and relocations, Gawain can never truly emerge as a fully realized, Oedipal subject. (73)

The best example of the roving camera technique occurs near the end of the poem: after the Green Knight nicks him, Gawain “leaps forward to challenge his opponent on equal terms,” but the perspective of the poem then abruptly shifts to the Green Knight, who leans on his ax and laughs at Gawain (88). Lowe attests that

For Deleuze, “[i]t is always “a great moment...when the camera leaves a character, and even turns its back on him.” At such a moment the audience is reminded that the camera is not aligned completely with one character; instead, the film is composed of a network of components that map out a space beyond the scope of any one viewpoint. Cinematic consciousness is not the preserve of one character, or even the audience of the film, it is the camera itself, unchained from the restrictions of the localized gaze, and able to roam freely in this open space—the Whole. The Whole itself is a product—it establishes “aberrant paths of communication between noncommunicating vessels...[but] there is never a totality of what is seen nor a unity of points of view.” The schizophrenic who shatters the boundaries of social order and the camera that destabilizes the linear narrative both approach an understanding of the Whole. Crucially film, like the poem, allows an audience a chance to touch upon the Whole, because although the film/poem narrative is linear, there are a number of “privileged instants” that allow us to step outside the narrative boundaries and examine the mise-en-scène freed from the subjective perception of any one character. (89)

Not only does the style of the poem give the reader privileged moments in which he can recognize the Whole, the Green Knight, by revealing the details of the plot against Gawain and inviting him back to his castle, also grants the protagonist a glimpse at the whole; however, Gawain rejects this invitation; his asinine outburst of anti-feminism testifies to an egocentric concern with his own weakness that inhibits him from recognizing the Whole.

Lowe posits that

The poem closes with three verdicts on Gawain’s adventure—the Green Knight’s, Camelot’s, and Gawain’s own...Gawain’s “failure” to establish himself back at court allows all of these interpretive possibilities to co-exist; none of the interpretations is universally accepted, and none is categorically denied. In fact all are true within their own terms: Gawain does certainly commit a very slight transgression, as the Green Knight claims; his shame is great and bespeaks a certain cupidity, as he claims; and he is a hero at Camelot, as Arthur’s court claims. Only we, the audience, are able to see all of these points simultaneously and in relation to one another. (95)

This essay is one of the best I have read this semester, but I find it unsatisfying in some ways. Although I think Lowe does an excellent job of purging from the poem misguided psychoanalytic film theory, sometimes I wonder if the cure is worse than the disease: Lowe’s argument becomes most persuasive when he depends the least on the theoretical support of D&G. His argument might become more persuasive if he found some medieval analogues for tantalizing but opaque Deleuzian terms like “the Body without Organs” and “the celibate machine,” terms which Lowe employs too casually. D&G express an alarmingly sanguine attitude toward schizophrenia—an attitude which Lowe adopts without any sign of embarrassment. Although he insists on the fragmented structure and style of the poem, Lowe oddly presupposes a univocal audience, the often invoked “we,” when in fact the linguistic opacity of much of the poem stratifies its (modern) audience.

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[1] The Chaucer Review 35.4 (2001) 378-390.

[2] Exemplaria 13.1 (2001) 67-97.

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