Into the Dark Forest
and Beyond
the Pale of Settlement
…once a certain
idea of landscape, a myth, a vision, establishes itself in an actual place, it
has a peculiar way of muddling categories, of making metaphors more real than
their referents, of becoming, in fact, part of the scenery. [i]
Simon Schama describes and meditates on the vast place of the forest in
the European imagination. These extensive wooded lands, independent, mostly
unknown, were trackless wildernesses in which lawless and outlawed men lived
out their strange careers, like Robin Hood and his Merry men in Sherwood Forest,
sometimes subversively attacking agents of the law, robbing the rich and
powerful, and yet at other times sharing their booty with the poor and the
helpless. But the woods were full of
trees, trees necessary for making fires and later charcoal, trees for the masts
and hulls of sailing vessels, trees to provide distance and protection from the
inroads of various invading, encroaching or rival armies. The fairy tale witches of the Grimm Brothers
lived in houses in the middle of clearings deep within the forests—wicked,
cannibalistic, shape-shifting creatures, allied to the wolves they could look
like; lost children sought their help and were made captives and slaves or
turned into dinner, unless saved by the helpful woodsman. Timber was also an industry which, so far from
the laws and powers of the state and the city, could tempt Jews to take part
in: to cut down the trees, to float them down river in the early spring, to
mill them into useful planks and sell to far away places.[ii]
Both Castle Hautdesert and the Green Chapel are set in the midst of great forested areas, so thick and massive that they constitute a very different kind of reality than the arable and cultivated lands where most communities are to be found. In a sense, as I have argued in my study of Sir Gawain and the Knight of the Green Chapel, each place is a variant on the other. The haut desert won may be taken as a sacred high rocky mountain, as much a primitive fortification as a well-built dwelling in the best style of fourteenth-century architecture, and also it is a fabulous, delicate, virtually unreal piece of festive decorations “piked out of pappur”. The strange setting for the beheading game is, to be sure, neither green nor a chapel. Led through the early morning winter tracks by a servant of the Castle, Gawain at first sees something dark and foreboding, a mass of rocks, surrounded by twisted and dead trees and branches; then, dismounting his horse Gringolet and approaching on foot, the hero thinks it looks like an ancient tumulus or grave mound, something out of folk legends, such as Keats described in “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” in which unwary young knights are lured and kept prisoner through an indeterminate cold season of dreamless sleep by a wicked fairy; and then, almost in a dismissive tone, Gawain says the place looks like a devil’s chapel, a site of death and oblivion.
By metonymy and synecdoche, taking the part for the whole, the producer
for the produced, and the consequence for the cause, the great forests of
Europe can be represented by one sacred tree,[iii]
the cross created by that wood, and the person who lives and dies under or on
it. The tree-man, wrapped in branches
and leaves or merely pieces of newspaper, is the wild salvage. Before there were intrepid travellers and
explorers coming back with stories of New Worlds and archaic places, there were
emblems, devices and carnival masks.
Before there were Orientalists and European colonists, there were
strange beings who lived apart in the forests, in caves, and in dreams. There were also those others, the perpetual
others of European nightmare, the Jews, who hid away in the forests, pretended
to be other than they were if ever confronted by the officers of Church or
State. They lived within and behind the
pale, the palisade, the heavy, thick and twisted walls of the living trees, and
each one was etz haim, the tree of
life, a Torah scroll, the embodiment of Law itself. With their long black beards, their swarthy
complexions, their strange languages, they were mysterious and dangerous forces,
to be met with.
But back to the forest itself, the dark labyrinthine woods. This is where, sings Dante in the opening of The Divine Comedy, he finds himself in
the middle of his life: the dark, overbearing trees, the savage place of
confusion and mystery. It is technically
and legally a wasteland, a desert, but an arable, cultivated land that belongs
to anyone. Yet in Middle English after
the Norman Conquest the forest was the tract of unenclosed land that belonged
to king and for his royal hunts. A king,
though, is not just a political apex in the triangle of feudal states; he is
also, as in legend and folk or fairy tale, a prince, a magic being, a spirit inside
and embodying the forest. Thus, on the
one hand, when poets in their romances speak of Charlemagne or King Arthur,
they mean a cultured, wise and heroic leader—imperator and dux bellorum;
while on the other hand, if not a mirror image, then a shadowy alter-ego, the crazy
creature iun the forest. The one could
precede the other, or follow him, or be both, depending on how you looked—or where
you looked out from. Schama says:
For much of the Middle Ages,
hairy, cannibalistic wild men and women had represented the antithesis of the civilized
Christian. But beginning in the later part of the fifteenth century…wild men
were made ovcr into exemplars of the virtuous and natural life.[iv]
Whether or not this chronology is correct, or covers the many sins of a
complex many-layered history, the Green Man belongs to western and north
European folklore and courtly ceremonial imagery: he is the salvage, the man of
the forest, a construction of leaves and branches, a primitive giant, a wodwose—and something like a faërie in the old sense, an untamed
creature of the woods and waste-places.
Found on emblems, shields and other formal devices displayed in the late
Middle Ages, the Wild Man and his club, sometimes accompanied by a Wild Woman
comes to represent the natural inhabitant of the land, the power and the heart
of the national territory. With the
inbuilt pun in Middle English, wherein wod
means both the forested wilderness and the state of uncivilized madness,
the Green Man is Poor Tom, the “unaccommodated man,” of Shakespeare’s King Lear, the type of Nebuchadnezzar in
the Hebrew Bible who is driven insane by the pressures and corruption of high
office, returns to the wastelands and scavenges like an animal, living on grass
and water. He also recalls the figure of
John the Baptist, the prophet wearing animal-skins and living alone in the
desert, the last voice proclaiming the imminent coming of the Messiah. But this creature remains fully human in
appearance and character, neither a werewolf nor a satyr, ambiguously placed
between the nomadic and wandering peoples of prehistoric times and the beings
of myth in Arcadia or Eden, like Cain forced to go from land to land, unable to
settle amongst formal tribes of hunters or shepherds, because he wears the mark
of the murderer on his brow. Odysseus
meets such a monster caught in the disputed zone of human and chthonic deity, Cyclops
the one-eyed Polyphemus, a primitive keeper of goats and sheep, a cave-dwelling
maker of cheese, but an anthropophage, a cannibal. Shakespeare also knows such an almost
anthropoid in Caliban, the foil to the spiritualized fairy Ariel in The Tempest.
In the Middle English alliterative poem, however, Bertilak de Hautdesert
does not quite fit the standard pattern.
For one thing, he is simultaneously, alternately and ambiguously the
Green Giant who rides into Arthur’s court on Christmas Eve to issue the
beheading challenge to the King and his Round Table knights, the robust and
raucous host who welcomes Gawain into his household for the twelve days of
celebration, and the more primitive creature and yet more festive reveler who
bounces down the rocky declivity of the Green Chapel to play his game with the
frightened young courtier. Like his
wife, the Lady Bertilak, who is a match for Gwenor in Camelot, a doublet with the
old crone who accompanies her in the mysterious winter castle and may or may not
be the legendary Morgan Le Fée, she is also a multiplex character whose
identity shifts with the turning of the poetic kaleidoscope.
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