Back to the Green Chapel:
or, A Synagogue in the
Wilderness of History
Introduction
Is it time to revisit the mid-fourteenth-century Middle English
alliterative poem named by the great English philologist WWW Skeat in the
nineteenth century Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight[i]
but which is actually called through the terms made explicit inside the text Sir Gawain and the Knight of the Green
Chapel?[ii] When I first published my long study, using
the proper title of the poem, it was after a lifetime of meditation and research
and, as I said then, virtually obsessive dreaming about the adventures of the
brave young knight, nephew of King Arthur.
My conclusions then were surprising even to me: that this literary work,
though in many ways superficially like other poems in the so called
Alliterative Revival, was exceedingly peculiar in its conception, techniques
and thematic concerns. It was more than
unique in being in a small single manuscript book, associated with several
other romances and saints’ lives, from which it has always stood out by its
depth of meanings and puzzling turns of plot.
To me, having studied several other contemporary works, not least
Chaucer’s oeuvre, it seemed to me that it was not really either a courtly poem
extolling the virtues of aristocratic courtesy and chivalry or by extension fin’amor, the refined love known in
English after the French expression, courtly love; or, for that matter, a
Christian poem in spirit or function.
Instead, it became increasingly clear to me, as I read the poems with
closer and closer attention to its specifics of language, imagery and gesture,
an expression of secret Jewish angst and longing for freedom of expression and
action. That, of course, is a shocking
conclusion to reach. When the book was
published, I expected there to be howls of protest, mocking cries of outrage,
considerable debate and God knows what else.
In the event, however, the book was met, as all my other published work,
with a vast and overwhelming silence.[iii] The closest thing to a review was a single
sentence in some record of the year’s works in English to the effect that the
annotator could see nothing new or interesting in the book. After many decades
of receiving such lack of comment, you will be pleased to learn that I was not
surprised.
Almost a decade later, not waiting for the scholars to catch up with my
work, I do think there is more to be added to the discussion, not to retract
what I said then about Sir Gawain and the
Knight of the Green Chapel being by a small group of hidden Jews—a couple
of generations at best from the expulsions of the late thirteenth century and
possibly augmented by refugees from persecution in Spain; nor to backtrack on the method of discussion:
very rabbinical, if not kabbalistic, based on close philological description of
the text as we have it, intense recontextualization in the milieu of medieval
rabbinical exegesis, creative writing of midrash, and consideration of the ways
in which converted or unconverted Jews managed to survive in England after Judaism
was outlawed and identity as Jew the subject of severe punishment, examination
of the poem as a deliberate attempt to undermine the principle themes and
images of Arthurian romance and the similarities with the mythical and folkloric
traditions of other isolated and subversive populations on islands, in remote
valleys and other out of the way places in Europe (e.g., the Pyrenees near the
English-ruled zones of France, Majorca, Corsica, Sardinia, and even Sicily),
and playful manipulation letters, words and phrases considered too in a
multilingual way (English, Latin, Hebrew, and perhaps Ladino and Yiddish). Some recent studies of the poem have tried
very hard to localize the characters, scenes, and events of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to
specific areas and persons of north-eastern Wales, to regional memories of
festivals and political events. This
effort may account for the inclusion of the poem in the manuscript known as
Cotton.Nero A.v and perhaps explain some of the peculiar features in the
full-colour illustrations found in that codex.
But it does not help solve the most exciting aspects of the Gawain text
or over-ride the Crypto-Jewishness I have pointed out. On the other hand, ten more years of reading
and contemplation—as well as a series of books on Crypto-Jews and on the
Dreyfus Affair—convince me that there is more to say and much more to explore
about the poem.
Arthur holds Christmas Eve court in Camelot and receives an unexpected
visit from a Green Knight who challenges the royal host to a tit-for-tat game, but
the king and his courtiers’ hesitations lead to Gawain to step forward to offer
the three stipulated blows of his axe that will remove the monster’s head. That
accomplished, the visitor picks up his head, explains the conditions of the
challenge to be completed in a year and a day, and departs in a scattering of
sparks. Then the young hero’s journey begins
almost a year later to elusive the Green Chapel where the return blows are to
be given. All things in this poem come
in threes, but not in equal cycles: they weave, overlap and modify one another. Nothing is as it seems either once but
twice. Instead of the Green Chapel,
first Gawain finds a mysteriously archaic castle, yet one set out in the most
up-to-date architectural decorations rising out of the mist; instead of the
Green Knight a hearty and blustering older baron who owns this Castle of Haut
Desert; and instead of the challenge’s countermoves, the temptations of Lady
Haut Desert by night in the privacy of Gawain’s bed chamber. Then on New Year’s Day morning, prompted by
the Baron and led by a servant of the castle, Gawain rides out to find the
Green Chapel supposedly nearby. Instead of a chapel, it seems either a
fairy-tale illusion or merely an old sludge-ridden cave or tumulus. However,
having accepted the Lady Haut Desert’s green girdle as an apotropaic against
the logical outcome of a mortal man having his head chopped off, thus breaking
the conditions of the challenge to face the dangers with only bravery and
courtesy, Gawain sustains only a nick on the neck and the shedding of one drop
of blood on the cold white snow. He feels ashamed and frustrated. The Green Knight, identifying himself as the
host, Bertilak de Haut Desert and his wife, or rather his wife’s doubled image
in a wizened old crone, as Morgan le Fay, commends Gawain on his success, a man
who only lacked a little. Thus Gawain
returns to Camelot, still wearing the green girdle, now taken as his belt of
shame. But Arthur and the fellow Round
Table Knights congratulate him on fulfilling the magical quest which affirms
their collective identities and honour and so all don green girdles as markers
of this triumph, while Sir Gawain now sadly alone knows its true meaning as
significant of human failure, unfulfilled spiritual promises, and still open messianic
expectations of a just and purifying outcome.
NB This will be an essay that appears somewhat sporadically, rather than in a regular sequence. I beg my readers' indulgence.
[i] Before the book-length study came out, I had begun to
test the waters, as it were, with some essays, such as "Gawain's Jesting Quest for Self: Seeing and Hearing in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." Explorations (1980) 1-13.
[ii] Norman Simms, Sir Gawain and the Knight of
the Green Chapel. Waltham, MD: University Press
of America, 2002.
[iii] To be honest, there were
over the years since publication, a few private letters from readers, some
concerned scholars, some students, to give proverbial gentle praise, raise
irrelevant questions, and ask if I knew any other similar studies. In brief, no one got it.
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