Texts and Attitudes, Part 2

Intesections and Concentric Circles

Another book, Sir Gawain and the Knight of the Green Chapel (more familiarly known under its nineteenth-century name Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) stands at the centre of my dreams and literary proclivities.  Because it is such a complicated alliterative poem that exists in only one manuscript from the mid-fourteenth century, it defies the usual categorizations as a local Christian poem in the Middle English canon: and it makes most sense to me as a cri du coeur of a secret Jew or Marrano just a generation or two from the great expulsions at the end of the thirteenth century.  This unnamed poet—for want of an alternative known as the Gawain-poet, usually to identify him with his poem, but as I take it, because of his self-creation and projection into the character of the young knight who sets off to prove himself on behalf of the Arthurian court of Camelot, but then in failing that quest, discovers himself in the failure as a Jew manqué.  Thus he is forever burdened with guilt and anxiety, aware of all that literary tradition wants to make of him as the standard-bearer of Christian courtly morality and his own rejection of those values in favour of another ethic, another morality, another spirituality in Jewish tradition.  Once the narrative poem is thought of in this way, then it fits with other Marrano texts, those that follow the devious paths of self-revelation, self-deception, and self-disillusionment, such as Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, and of course Cervantes’ Don Quixote. 

There are other books which because they are so long and take years to read they fill up great slabs of one’s life and consciousness just to complete—and, often enough, having been put aside for an extended period, have to be started again and again, each time gradually inching towards the end.  As you read them, you also read other books, you also grow older, have new experiences, come to see life in other ways than you did when you fgirst cracked open such texts: all the volumes of Proust’s A la recherché de temps perdu, for instance, of Romain Rolland’s Jean Christophe, Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers, Doctor Faustus, The Magic Mountain….  Or the life-long experience of reading, one at a time, out of order, searching for the missing volumes, Balzac’s whole Comédie Humaine or Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart, going back to novels read so long ago they need to be re-read so as to bring them into alignment with one another…

Still another way to read I discovered was by plunging into the vast autobiographies of great writers, such as Elias Canetti, and then attempting to follow through with all the authors and texts he mentions.  One thing leads to another—novels, plays, poetry, essays, science, histories, religion, and on it goes.  This a journey to Serendip.

From this exercise, I learned to start going through other autobiographies, biographies, memoirs, journals, letters and collected prefaces, allowing myself to go down a thousand paths it would never before have entered my consciousness to follow.  Here it is not a matter of following up on every second and third rate volume and purveyor of popular nonsense that we should track down, but to seek out the most articulate of those writers whose modes of expression have all but sunk into oblivion.

Sometimes, to be sure, I have found myself reading old essays and books of criticism, volumes printed before the middle of the twentieth century, as well as reminiscences by journalists, essayists and artists.  Not uncommonly, let me confess, these books have been filled not just with piffle and time-worn gossip, but with malicious, spiteful and hate-ridden prejudices.  Still, if taken in small enough doses from time to time, such for-the-most-part better to be forgotten do give a flavour of times past, the range of bigotry that was prevalent and even acceptable in ordinary discourse.  Such tastes, attitudes, and frames of reference, while not to be emulated by any means, can provide the matrix in which the books and authors I am most interested in to gain new valence.  One hears the voices they were hearing, answers the questions they felt they had to respond to, and the dying ideas they were helping to give the coup de grace.