Helicoidal Approach to Truth and Illusion
This approach
was somewhat too direct for my taste. I
find a pleasure in a helicoidal approach to my subject. I like to begin at a point remote from that
at which I am aiming, or on occasion, if I begin at a point near my ultimate
destination, I like to approach the actual point by a boomerang course, taking
me at first away from the final mark and thereby, I hope deceiving my auditor.[i]
You see, the way that the teller-of-tales narrates the adventures of Sir
Gawain his fourteenth-century poem is rather peculiar. It does not follow the system of ambages typical of other medieval
romances, where one tale twists in and out of another, where several knights
set forth on a collective quest, come to a fork in the road, and each severally
depart on a different route to come together somehow at the end, if the end is
ever reached, to share in the glory of their success or to context amongst
themselves for that final honor. Instead,
Gawain steps in to take the place of Arthur and the other Round Table knights,
who remain in Camelot while he rides out nine months after the visit by the
Knight of the Green Chapel, departing to their public tears and grief at what
they expect to be his fatal journey into a hopeless quest, but once he is gone
they carry on with their normal festivities and marry-making. The sudden eruption of the giant Green Man,
somewhat like a wodewose or salvage (savage creature) of the deep
dark forests still prevalent in England and the rest of Europe, is at once
unexpected by its strangeness and yet accepted as part of the Christmas gomes (games and masking) of the season,
an uncanny entertainment—and then too by its required oath of obedience to the
terms of the contract, a fearsome inevitability of death by decapitation. No
one knows where the Green Chapel is, but the way there is well demarcated in
legends of fairy-tale heroes: out of Camelot, through the wild places of Wales,
past Holyhead, and into the misty, wintery landscape beyond.
Wherever he goes, and he goes through geography as well as passing
through time, things are not just what they seem to be, but also when they are
expected, causes and consequences seeming to get mixed up. Even when all those characters in French or
Italian romances ride out and about, turning from one thematic tale to another,
criss-crossing the landscape of their adventures, they remain relatively in
control of their time, their experiences catching up with the knight whose tale
starts out earlier in another place; it is up to the narrator to keep
everything straight and thus to ensure that promises are kept, those fated to
engage in jousts arrive at the right place and at the right time, and all
receive their just deserts. But
something is out of whack in Sir Gawain
and the Knight of the Green Chapel.
As he moves through time and space, he seems to see and think of new
ways of seeing, coming at things, persons, events and ideas from odd
angles.
What is this like? It is a little
like the three-fold incremental repetitions to be found in a chanson de geste like the Chanson de Rolande, where in gradually,
overlapping and slowly progressing, the movement of plot unwind
themselves. Words, sentences, images,
comments repeat themselves, adding some new variation, substituting some new
detail, grasping after a completed picture.
And what kind of a turning of the kaleidoscope is this? It may already be seen in Virgil’s Aenead, when the hero and his few
surviving companions enter a place like Carthage, see the scenes of their past
heroic deeds displayed on the walls, looking at them one by one with tears in their
eyes as they recognize fallen comrades and lost scenery. Then out of the mist, Aeneas sees Dido and
her entourage, similar to the fading away shortly before of his mother in her
part-goddess part-huntress form. Such a
world is full of memories surfacing out of the darkness of oblivion and
forgetting, melding into the banalities of the existential moment, and
eventually seeping out of consciousness again.
It is also like those descriptions of metamorphosis in Ovid’s poem of
the same name. An episode, an emotion
becomes intense, overwhelming the mind and heart of the figure caught up in
such an untoward event, and then starting to experience the disintegration of
the external appearances of self, the integrity of the body being compromised
by the emergence from somewhere deep inside of another shape, another animating
essence, and finally being what was only long there in potential but now made
manifest. All these gradual shifts and
developments can only happen where normal chronological moments give way to
different modes of transition through time—no longer that of ontological growth
and efflorescence of the mature body always present in the curled up leaf of
what we would call genetics—and a different matrix of physical space, the
substantial and fructifying substances of the actual world that give birth to,
nurture and eventually bring to compromise and dissolution the integral body of
the living being.
So what do we see in this fourteenth-century alliterative poem, as it
weaves in and out of itself, in the incremental piecing together of mosaic-like
fragments of formulaic narration? It is
like what Auguste Rodin told his disciple Paul Gsell somewhere in the fin-de-siècle when the young man asked what made the
master’s statues—and other masterpieces of stone art—seem to be in
movement. The base of the work, the legs
of a man, for instance, seem rooted in the concrete moment prior to the action
starting, then in each movement upwards, at each stage in what would be
considered a passage through time, the figure shifts its weight, twists its
body, and reaches towards the accomplished action, with the final moment
suggested in the gesture of grasping, accomplishing its goal in time. Looking at Rodin’s Iron Age and St John the
Baptist, Gsell comments:
I noticed that in the first of
these works, the movement appears to mount… The legs of the youth, who is not
yet fully awake, are still lax and almost vacillating, but as your eye mounts
you see the pose become firmer—the ribs rise beneath the skin, the chest
expands, the face is lifted toward the sky, and the two arms stretch in an
endeavour to throw off their torpor.[ii]
This “passage from somnolence to the vigour of being erady for action”
by ”slow gesture[s] of awakening” are typical, Gsell comes to understand, and
Rodin indicates how it used in other great statues: the technique creates the
illusion of a rhythmic movement that ripples through the cold dead weight of
the material out of which the form has been carved. But then the disciple seems puzzled and asks
how this artificiality fits with the Rodin’s stated principle of following only
nature herself. At which point, the
master “suddenly” asks the pupil: “Have you ever attentively examined instantaneous
photographs of walking figures?”[iii] The discussion then turns on the relationship
of photography to depicting nature through faithful copying. It is the new technique of instantaneous
photography, such as was discovered by Muybridge, and the deployment of several
cameras to snap pictures in a rapid sequence along a marked path of movement,
each still slightly overlapping with the next—the very technique which will
next be mechanized into what we know as motion pictures or cinema—and the
illusion of motion constructed out of what are only instants in time. The discovery of how horses actually lift
their legs led to a controversy in the western world over what actually
happened in nature and what the painter or sculptor could and should do as a
consequence. Rodin tells Gsell that a
painter like Gericault is right when he depicts horses on his canvases in a ore
old-fashioned way with legs splayed, rather than attempting to follow the truth
made possible by the camera, as Meissonier tried to do after he had met with
Governor Stanford who brought an album of Muybridge’s prints to show him.[iv]
Gsell records what he remembers Rodin saying:
Now I believe it is Gericault
who is right, and not the camera, for his horses appear to run; this comes from
the fact that the spectator from right to left sees first the hind legs
accomplish the effort whence the general impetus results, then the body
starched out, then the forelegs which seek the ground ahead. This is false in reality, as the actions
could not be simultaneous; but it is true when the parts are observed
successively. And it is this truth alone that matters to us, because it is that
we see and which strikes us.[v]
Though by the twenty-first century almost all of us have grown up with
the illusions of cinematography and television i9and now probably video and a
variety of digital techniques) that it is hard to put ourselves in the place of
Rodin and Gsell. Imagine then how hard
it is to imagine the poet and the audience for the Gawain poem who imagine the
actions and ideas recounted in the poem in their mind’s eye.
A long lonesome journey, beset by monsters, savage creatures and
unimaginable conditions of cold and ice, it frightens but does not deter Gawain
from his quest. He follows a
labyrinthine knot, he wanders from the mysterious to the unknown, from the
improbable to the impossible, an ordeal of self-testing, to be sure, yet with
no clear-stated resolution in mind. His
self-confidence is nearly crushed. He
fears for his life. He makes gestures
and utters words that belong, not to a courtly knight, not to a Christian
gentleman, but to an inexperienced, ignorant and frightened child:
And therefore sykyng he sayde,
‘I beseche the, lorde,
And Mary, that is mildest
moder so dere,
Of sum herber ther highly I
might here masse,
And thy matynes to-morne,
mekely I ask,
And therto prestly I pray my
pater and aue
and crede.’
He rode in his
prayere.
And cryed for
his mysdede,
He sayned hym in
sythes sere,
And sayde, ‘Cros
Kryst me spede!’
Lines 752-762
Seemingly saturated with Christian appeals and gestures, as though a
humble and penitent petitioner for divine grace, Gawain is also too anxious,
frightened and naïve here to be proper devotee of the Virgin Mary.
How superficial and tenuous are his professions of faith comes out in
the next lines, as the verbal texture of liturgical certainties begin to fall
apart and the pagan otherness of the circumstances come through. Note how in each new stage of his approach
the allusive language reveals alternative ways of perception, remembering and
application of his knowledge. To begin
with, in a set of liens that are marked by an enlarged initial letter:
Nade he sayned himself, segge,
bot thrye,
Er he wats war in the wod of a
won in a mote,
Abof a launde, on a lawe loken
vnder boghes
Of mony borelych bole aboute
bi the diches:
Lines
763-766
Having made the sign of the cross three times, he suddenly realizes that
in this thick and dark forest there was “a won in a mote,” a construction in a
circle of water like a moat, and that ambiguous and vague dwelling is located
“Abof a launde”, above a field or plane, further distinguished as “on a lawe” on a mound or knoll, and the won is “loken vnder boghes,” locked
under boughs, which is composed “Of mony borelych bole”, many dark and massive
tree trunks. From this first
perspective, what Gawain seems to come upon is an ancient, crude and massive
fortification made of interlocking timber stumps under a twisted tangle of branches
and this above an area that in the darkness may be either land or water. But note already the ambiguity and richness
in words such as won, mote, launde, lawe
and borelych.
Then out of the wintery mists there appears something, a huge almost
formless castle rising out of the watery darkness, then a different vision
altogether. Yet it is important to note
that just as the alliterative lines weave together their interlinked phrases
and motifs, so the actual scene being described locks in the various points of
view of Gawain as he approaches the place he hopes will be the Green Chapel.
The second perspective in this same alliterative section of the stanza
transforms the primitive structure he first sees into something more familiar
and part of a real or probable world:
A castel the comlokest that
euer knight aghte,
Pyched on a prayere, a park al
aboute…
Lines
767-768
The rough dwelling in the deep woods turns now into a castle, the
handsomest a knight has ever seen, and it is “Pyched on a prayere,” raised on a
prairie or meadow, with park surrounding
it. The crude and menacing natural
environment begins to metamorphose into a cultured, constructed world of human
civilization. Where the word lawe served only as a descriptor of the
landscape, it now functions to set up a relationship with prayere, also a word that can mean a piece of cultivated ground, to
signal a contrast between law and prayer, the letter and the spirit, probably
meant to be heard by the causal listener or seen by the unwary reader as the
code of courtly love versus the prayers of the impassioned lovers, but more
subversively, as shall be shown anon, the Jewish world of Torah and Talmud and
the Christian adorations and sacraments of spiritual passion.
Then comes a third perspective, neither immediately related to the first
or the second, insofar as it shifts away from the ordinary to the
extraordinary, the real to the supernatural or at elast the marvellous and the
imaginary:
With a pyked palays pyned ful
thik,
That vmbeteghe mony tre mo
then two myle.
Lines
769-770
Here is a
polished or spiked palace enclosed for two miles thickly with many surrounding
trees. The sight is at once a
continuation of the primitive structure first seen and the elaboration into
something more fashionable, a well-constructed castle set in the midst of a
two-mile wide fence of trees.
That holde on that on syde the
hathel auysed,
As it shymered and schon
thurgh the shyre okes…
Lines 771-772
What was a won, then a castel, and finally, it seemed, a palays, now returns to being a holde, a fortress, that when seen from
one angle begins to shimmer and shine through the luminous oak trees. Rather than oppressive darkness, the
atmosphere becomes that of something bright and blinding, but also welcoming,
so that Gawain feel optimistic, takes off his helmet and thanks God for the
prospect of shelter and warmth over the Christmas week. His is disarmed, taken in by the latest of
appearances, not realizing here—as he will begin to see later—that what was the
first impression of pagan savagery will return with a vengeance and a new set
of meanings in the eventual encounter at the Green Chapel.
At the bridge over the double-moat, the Arthurian knight sees a guard
and, requesting entry, he is told to cross. Each step now from the outside to the inside
of the dwelling, however, seems to promise something wonderfully, even
outrageously gorgeous and festive, so that
the hero blinks, wonders if he is dreaming, and allows himself to be
overwhelmed by the hospitality and the warmth.
Rather than the strange and ominous chapel he has been searching for and
which he dreads because of the ordeal he must endure, this place becomes more
than a mirror image of Camelot itself.
It seems be so unreal that he wonders whether it is “piked out of
paper.” Delicate and elaborate, the
palace reminds him of the so-called suttelties
(subtleties) brought out during banquets—artificially decorated foods with
cut-out shapes of animals, ships, castles and other fabulous constructions,
each moreover accompanied by an explanatory song and dance by trained
performers.
And still we do not know what this is like—not in the rabbinical sense. For we have to unravel the seeming knot of
confusion between how a story is told and how an action is depicted.
[i] Bertrand Russell, Satan in the Suburbs and Other Stories (Harmondsworth :
Penguin Books, 1961 ; orig. 1953) « The
Corsican Ordeal of` Miss X, » p. 69
[ii] Auguste Rodin, Art, translated
from the French of Paul Gsell, trans. Romilly Fredden (London, New York and
Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1912) p. 72.
[iv] See my lengthy discussion of these conversations and the techniques they
refer to in Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus in
the Phantasmagoria (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2o13).
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