The Headless and the Heedless :
The Binding and Unbinding of Gawain’s Truth
There is no psychological development
from one stage to the next without a new set of complications, resistances,
anxieties, ambivalences, defences, and compromise formations.[i]
When everything changes, everything does not change in itself, but only
as the individual parts realign themselves and begin to react off one another
with new tensions. Some of the new
formations and forces are denied, suppressed, treated as though they were
something else. The outsider, the Jew in
this instance, plays as though he were already assimilated and confirmed into
the Christian, and the poem that should confirm his right to be what he thinks
he is and wants others to believe, nevertheless betrays the tell-tale inconsistencies,
contradictions, gaps and pointless repetitions that mark the cuckoo in the
nest.
The Knight of the Green Chapel is at once the green giant wodwose of Christmas revels and the
masked figure of Bertilak de Hautdesert.
When his head is chopped off by Sir Gawain in the game played in
Camelot, the rider picks it up again, waves it about, the eyes glaring like a
lantern, and rides out into the wintery landscape. This is magic, prestidigitation, and a
delusion: no real human being could perform such a trick unless he were a
manipulator of appearances and only if he were not a real human being at all
but a creature from another realm where the normal rules of nature do not apply
or an image projected on to the screen of the Yuletide Festival through the use
of suggestion, artificial lights, and the suspension of disbelief.
Sir Gawain is Arthur’s youthful nephew imbued with a naïve faith in the
traditions and motifs of romantic chivalry, bold enough to step forward when
Arthur and his fellow Round Table knights hesitate to take-up the Green Man’s
challenge, to put his life on the line to save the honor of the royal couple,
the king and his wife Gwenor (Gwenevere).
But when the oath is taken and the conditions of the agreement repeated
to him, Gawain is not quite sure of what it all means, whereas his fellow
knights and the ladies at court are convinced that it a suicide mission and
begin to mourn for him as he sets forth later the next year. In other words, the rest of the court does
not take into account the carnivalesque world they live in, at least during the
seasonal celebrations of Christmas, and assume that the return blows Gawain is
to receive will be lethal. Gawain
himself also does not realize the full and ambiguous nature of the quest he
sets out upon. Certainly, on the third
night of visits by the Lady Bertilak into his bed chamber when she continuously
questions his credentials and identity as a knight errant worthy of the
reputation she knows will in due course be accorded to him by this adventure
she does more than confuse him into beginning to doubt his qualifications and
at last succeeds in compromising his vow to accept the blows of the green ax
without any physical or magical apotropaic.
The offered green girdle is promised to him as a way of surviving the
beheading game and the young knight accepts the gift because he does not trust
either in his personal valor, the ludic exercise of the Green Giant’s powers,
or even the lesson taught to him by the Lady, that he will survive in Arthurian
traditions to be known as the bravest and most amorously successful of all the
Round Table knights. If he were to be
heedless of the dangers ahead or perfectly assured of the efficacy of the
girdle’s ability to keep him alive, there would be no value in what he does
achieve. Like Abraham who performs the
Akeda (the binding) of his son Isaac in the biblical story, when God commands
the father to sacrifice his son as a test of the loyalty and faith of the
Hebrew patriarch, if he had no qualms and did not question his own strength of
will to carry out this outrageous enterprise—one that goes against all the
moral principles instilled in the new emergent faith that forbids murder and
human sacrifice—what would be the meaning of his obedience? To say that Abraham knows perfectly well that
by some means or other the knife will be stayed before it slays the young man
laid out on the altar misses the whole point in the testing. The rabbis saw this as the main point, and in
many midrashim on the Akeda they have the father trying to force the issue of
sacrifice despite the appearance of the angel who stops the procedure and the
substitution of a ram or goat for the human victim.
Like Abraham, Gawain has to assert his own
will against his fears, his questioning of the motives behind the testing, and
those reassurances from those commentators who provide a traditional matrix for
the stories that all will turn out for the best. But perhaps rather than comparing Gawain to
Abraham, we should look at him in terms of Isaac, the child who accepts
unquestioningly and with no demurer the statement by his father that the
sacrifice has been commanded by God and that therefore with no regard to
possible divine reasons Isaac acts out the required role. In Christian exegetical tradition, the young
boy who goes voluntarily to what seems to be an inevitable death figuratively
represents Jesus accepting his crucifixion without complaint, perhaps with some
eagerness to show his faith, since he knows—as he proclaims to his disciples
and other followers—that he will soon be in heaven to sit on the right hand of
his father. Because of this, examined
from outside of the mystical faith and knowledge operative in the Church
history of such readings and in the iconography of the Isaac-Jesus pairing, the
behaviour
r of Gawain takes on a more convincing and more noble cast. The Passion indicates the triumph of the
Jesus Christ character over death, displayed in his Resurrection, and confirmed
in the hieratic emergence of his full glory in heaven. Whereas Isaac has very few lines devoted to
his behavior
r on Mount Moriah, Jesus is the sustained centre of attention. Thoughout his ordeal Jesus suffers but does
not complain, he goes through the pangs of death on the cross and has only a
momentary and dramatic doubt as he chants the Aramaic words of despair. For Gawain, however, there is always a
struggle to carry through with the intention to receive the ax blows of the
Green Knight, a struggle marked by his shudders and flinches.
When the third fatal blow is offered to Gawain, it is transformed in
slow motion into a nick on the neck and the shedding of a single drop of
blood. Instead, then, of a highly tragic
moment, the mood and tone of the poem shifts to comedy. In one sense, the Green Man laughs heartily
and begins to show himself as Bertilak the host of Hautdesert. In another, when Gawain feels disappointed,
shamed and frustrated, rather than happily relieved not to be dead, the Green
Man explains that the young knight should not feel he is a coward or a failure:
he has done the best a mortal man can do under the circumstances. If he “lacked a little,” it is because, quite
simply, that is all that can be expected, in fact, much more, in that other
knights have already failed by refusing to step in for Arthur when they could
have salvaged the honor of the court.
Deep within his conscience, Gawain realizes that he has fudged even
further, because he has been wearing the green girdle, and when he wishes to
confess to that fault, there is a further relaxation of tension and lowering of
the serious tone by the Host putting off the return of this gift—and a sign,
too, of the suspicious nature of the bedroom conversations usually rendered in
courtly romances as occasions for seduction and rape—and telling Gawain to take
it home with him to show to Arthur and the court as an emblem of their restored
reputations for honor and bravery.
Nevertheless, Gawain cannot accept fully this designation, because he
knows that he has not lived up to reputation the poets will celebrate in his
supposed victory. Later, too, when the
Round Table knights each don for themselves a version of the girdle as a public
statement of their collective achievement of the quest, Gawain calls it his
“token of vntrawthe.” Against what the
Knight of the Green Chapel and his other self the Host of Hautdesert say to
him, and also opposite to the interpretation institutionalized by the Arthurian
court, Gawain sets himself always apart from reputation and renown, from the
kind of person everyone else accepts him as being, a man of trawth—truth in the sense of tried and
tested adherence to faith in his own and the traditional prowess of chivalric
dignity and Christian hope.
There are many aspects to the green girdle, the belt, the ceinture or banner that Gawain hides
under his garments to remind him of his own shame and identity that are similar
to discussions about the function, significance and implications of
circumcision—which is in itself a type of beheading. The decapitation means the loss of the head, rosh, first, head, principal, beginning
and similar terms in Hebrew. Removal of
the foreskin forms a central ritual of adherence to the covenant of the Law,
the bris or brit ha’ot, ot also meaning symbol, letter, and original spark of
creation. The Round Table Knights sport
their green girdle or belts as though they were foreskins, symbols of their
prowess and the fullfilment of the quest by proxy. Gawain remains for all eternity the secret
Jew wearing a token of untruth but only if one validates the extraneous,
superficial and confused discourses of Christian sacramentalism and faith in
the alliterative poem
[i] Eli Sagan, “How Dodd's The Greeks and the irrational Changed my Life,” Clio’s Psyche, 17:1-2 (2010) p. 6.
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