From Paradox to Paradise and Back
…the adjective paradoxos is regularly used by the
writers of the time to convey something positive even specifically miraculous…[i]
The usual definition of a paradox is
of a kind of truth that on first examination seems illogical, a contradiction
in terms, and yet from the perspective of faith the logic is dissolved and the
two elements that would other cancel one another out stand not only vindicated
as manifest truths in themselves but that the tensions between them are taken
as part of ther wondrous and miraculous nature of this higher reality beyond
logic. Thus in philosophical terms,
something can be and not be at the same time, in religious belief a god may die
and live again, and in romantic conceit a hero may love and hate in the same
moment of passion. In poetry, too,
something may be historical and at the very same moment it may be a constructed
fiction, in that historia can mean,
as we have pointed out many times before, much more and other than what we
normally consider to be historical, that is, belonging to the natural and
physical laws of time and space within a reality that everywhere and always the
same in substance and form. This is
because historia, which yields other
terms such as histrionics, considers historians to be actors, players, or
imitators, masters of a convincing and vivid rhetoric, or thus lawyers who in a
court of law speak a constructed truth so powerful that it replaces the
narrative with all its details expounded by an opposing lawyer or witness; it
is more than the energia, the energy
or intensity of the performance, but the enargia,
the overwhelming power of the light emitted, the blinding vividness of the
words and gestures, the allusiveness and the boundary-marking of the concepts
projected into the minds of the spectators and audience, that transforms and
replaces the previous memories of experience.
Hence, the paradoxa erga, the
wondrous works and wondrous deeds of heroes, saints and gods in epic tales and
tragic dramas; taken out of context, put back into ordinary discourses, spoken
in the cold light of day, thought about in ordinary common sense terms, these
legendary “acts,” “gestures” and “achievements” are impossible to believe. They are empty and exaggerated, tall stories,
fairy tales, or as is said of the so-called historical documents of the
Christian faith, they are “pious
frauds”. Earl Doherty expands on this
idea:
Considering early
Christianity’s known history of forgery, of pseudonymous letters that
misrepresent themselves, of interpolations and the doctoring of documents,
including canonical ones, the wholesale invention of fraudulent Acts of this or
that apostle, letters between Paul and Seneca, missives to the emperor on the
part of Pilate recounting the career and trial of Jesus, and so on in vast
measure, there is certainly no impediment to allowing such indulgences to
Eusibius in his construction of the history of his religion from scattered and
incomplete sources.[ii]
Out of this
kind of matrix of foundational confusion and the traditional dispersal of
critical thinking associated with it, the medieval poets inherited a rather lax
attitude towards truth, logic and historical coherency. Everything pointed to, as Doherty further
says, ‘the irrational mindset and utter unreliability of anything in the early
Christian record.”
The basic
dogma of their religion would not stand up to close scrutiny and the spill-over
into Arthurian history was similarly treated in a cavalier manner. It is also to be remembered that from the
very beginning of the emergence of an alternative religion which came to draw
on Hebrew customs, traditions, texts and modes of argumentation, but used them
to argue that they were a New Israel whose messianic founder had already
appeared—lived and died and thereafter was resurrected, and who waits in an
anticipated Second Coming at any moment to complete the task of annihilating
this fallen world—and who had fulfilled all the prophecies granted to the
Chosen People, triumphed over them so as to leave them as an abject remnant
doomed to serve as a constant reminder of their faithlessness and
pig-headedness in rejecting the words and crucifying the bearer of that krygma, and so to doomed to blindness,
ignorance and hopelessness. Jews, from
within their own civilization, based on their own concept of Law, and
experiencing history in a very different way, observed with a certain detachment
often crossing over into mingled disdain and dread, the self-deluded majority
around them. They could see otherwise
intelligent, imaginative and educated men and women confounding their own sense
of what is truthful, historical and natural with a litany of lies, errors and
insane pronouncements. As a beleaguered
tiny minority in this vast sea of stupidity and absurdity, they usually learned
to internalize their attitudes, treat the powerful forces with the scorn and
irony they deserved, and keep hoping against hope that the final days would
arrive when a true messiah would arrive to bring them home to their own land,
restore the Temple in the senses it had come to signify after so long a
Diaspora and Exile as a nation in exile—certainly not a palce for endless
sacrificing of little birds and the spilling of the blood of sheep and oxen on
the altar near the Holy of Holies, but a place of natural and rational justice,
of good governance, and of domestic peace.
Until then, alas, eironia was
the order of the day. If paradise was lost, then paradoxos would have to do...
Hence it is
that Sir Gawain, wearing the badge of shame that others call the emblem of trawth, the Green Girdle, observes with
increasing cynicism the development of his own legendary history and that of
Arthur and the Court at Camelot—the romance tradition whose values he had
believed he was a primary agent of when he was tested by the Lady Bertilak for
three days running, when she inquired if he
were truly the knight everyone spoke of, the man who could combine at
once the high ideals of chivalric love in all its fantastic and paradoxical
minutiae and the laws of chivalry with its strange combination of selfless
courage, ruthless strength, and fearless and suicidal valor. Could he be at once humble and proud, loyal
and ambitious, patient and spontaneous?
The Green Monster had made these irrational and contradictory terms part
of his initial challenge before the Round Table and then the Lady Bertilak had
wheedled and insinuated them into her inquisition of Gawain’s character. Rather than proving in combat, in the
receiving of the ax-blows of the Green Knight without flinching or rancor,
Gawain’s performance is a farce, a masquerade, a great joke, to which his own
humiliations and frustration are treated as a matter of laughter both by the
Lord Bertilak and by Arthur and his knights when the young man comes back to
report his failure.
Arthur’s
version of the quest and its accomplishment, his chanson de gestes, his Acts of the Knights Errant, is true because
Arthur is king, the leader of courtiers and warriors, rex bellorum, and Gawain’s version one of vntrawth because he is merely a young cousin, a man without
authority, thus without the author’s gift to inscribe his own adventures in
courtly romance. That tradition, as has been
said, already exists, which is why the Green Knight and the Lady Bertilak, can
challenge and test the denizens of Camelot to see if they actually fit the
roles they are purported to have played out on the stage of memory. As individuals, as historical persons, as
psychologically true men, they all fall below the required level of action;
they are hypocrites, histriones,
liars—and well could Hamlet ask what is Arthur or Gawain to the foolish player
mouthing those lines in the old play and awkwardly posturing the noble
gesture. The difference between Gawain
and Arthur is that the young knight knows he has failed and is unworthy of the
plaudits he receives, and he comes to go through all the motions with a
bittersweet pleasure in the awards. In
Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, Gawain is
the knight whose affairs and whisperings bring down the whole pack of Arthurian
cards, yet he lacks the sad self-awareness and struggle against fate that would
make him properly a figure of tragedy.
The Gawain-poet, the anonymous alliterative singer-of-tales, has deeper
understanding, that of the Crypto-Jewish outsider. How else to articulate his own paradoxical
plight than through the circumcised hero who is and is not the hero everyone recognizes
and wants him to be? As Doherty says in
another place, discussing the Slavonic version of Josephus:
One can see how
the overall tone of these insertions could be doubted as Christian. A general grounding in the Gospel seems
evident, yet there is also ignorance of some Gospel features, and perplexingly,
the crucifixion itself is assigned to the Jews with Pilate’s permission, a
responsibility which bears some similarity to the Talmudic tradition which
invariably present the Jews as carrying out Jesus’ execution with no involvement
by the Romans. If the formulator of
these passages was a fairly knowledgeable and friendly Jew, the motive of his
work and what readership it was intended to serve nevertheless remains murky.[iii]
Putting side the specifics of
what Doherty is analyzing, we can take the existence of several subversive
traditions running through ancient and medieval Christian literature as some
kind of justification for the reading we are giving to the Gawain poem. There is a suspicion that the primary,
canonical Gospel version of events may be inaccurate and deliberately
falsified, for whatever reasons hidden in history and psychology. Someone, the outsider, the suspicious
insider, may read the New Testament and know it well, but still deliberately or
inadvertently misread it so as to undercut the purported mysterious revelations
it contains, not because of ignorance or faulty transmission of facts, but in
order to destabilize the presentation with all its accumulated authority,
energy and vividness. If it shows some
knowledge of rabbinical traditions taking on responsibility for the killing of
Jesus—the historical man (the rebel and traitor, the blaspheming prophet) and
not the god—the context has been shifted: the sages of Israel who inscribed
these hyperbolic versions of history are making a joke or dreaming of wished
for vengeance, and unfortunately when such statements are put into the public
domain, which is one of hostility and hatred, they prove most dangerous.
Somehow for those few—they may
have been less than a hundred—Jews who remained in England after the formal
Expulsion in 1290, and some may have gone into the Domus Conversorum (the house of converts, where they would be given
some minimal comfort, and thus it was usually men and women who had otherwise remained
hidden who in their old age entered voluntarily as the only way to survive),
but more usually existed in very groups or as individuals, as musicians,
dancing teachers, hermits…they sought a way to speak out to relieve the great
frustration of painful silence without being recognized. They had to speak out indirectly, obliquely,
in falsified tones, in masks, setting their own complaints and cries for help
into the characters who were permitted to speak the truth in satire, farce, demonic
dances, idiotic and infantile babbling…
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