by J J Cohen
Below, my paper for the recent (and wonderful) Oecologies conference, "
Engaging the World, From Here." My deepest gratitude to
Vin Nardizzi and
Tiffany Werth for inviting me and for
pushing me to write beyond my comfort zone, and for all who attended and participated and made the event so memorable. From a joyous student staging of
Gallathea to being lost in Stanley Park to superb presentations and a round table, truly among the very best eco-gatherings I've attended.
Let me know what you think of this piece, since in time it becomes a published essay. The footnotes at this point are fairly nonexistent. Manuscript images taken from the
Cotton Nero A.x. Project' s
Digital Facsimile.
With its Green Knight, Green
Chapel, green garter, green holly, green horse, green axe, green everything, no wonder Carolyn Dinshaw
describes Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
as the “go-to text for ecocritical analysis of Middle English literature.”[1]
Most attention centers upon its three enthralling hunts and the Green Knight as
foliate intrusion, signaling that an eco-Sir
Gawain has something in common with the anthropological approaches of the
last century, when the traces of a pagan vegetation god were discerned in its
Green Man and critics used to quote from The
Golden Bough – but emphasis has moved from anthropocentric myths to human entanglement
in an active, inhuman world. This shift to plants and animals has also entailed
a quiet movement away from the groundbreaking, feminist reappraisals of the
poem of the early 1990s, with their lingering over occluded stories, desires,
lives. On the one hand, affiliating the ecological and the feminine risks
repeating a binaristic and essentializing logic that aligns women and nature, to
neither’s benefit. Yet environmental spaces medieval and modern too easily become
the domain of vigorous, affluent white men having adventures (an expanse that
queering or entangling into nature can paradoxically reinforce rather than
undermine).[2]
Can we shift the space of critical attention to a diversity and specificity of
lives by engaging the romance’s worlds from multiple “heres,” manifold and
thick? Can we displace the human from centrality without obliterating human
difference?
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an intricate
romance, traversing time and space so swiftly they blur. Desire (or love) and
vibrancy (or life) burgeon throughout, opening widest when we accept what the
text has always insisted upon: Sir Gawain is not its protagonist – and his
time, his history, are not always the poem’s. As the opening page of the
manuscript makes clear, cutting something off will not extract it from enmeshment,
will not flatten story into sequentiality, will not enable the solitary or the
still. Around a linear and all too human, all too masculine narrative of blunder
and supposed transcendence unfold tales of yearning and vitality: dormancy, season-change,
lives glimpsed but not grasped, nonhuman tempos and durations, knotted
structures of love and life to which a knight who thinks the world revolves
around his adventuring remains blind, acephalic. The poem’s love of life
entwines humans of all genders with nonhumans, creates a world not of static
verities but repetitions with lively differences, sediments an enduring here inextricable from body, climate,
atmosphere, season, plant, animal, stone.
The poem contrasts large environs swiftly
traversed with small spaces of lingering. The immensity of the wilderness traveled
and a plot unfolding over the course of more than a year contrast with the
feasting chamber of the Arthurian court, the bedroom of Sir Bertilak’s castle
and its surrounding hunting park (a space that can seem immense but amounts to
no more than two enclosed miles [Crane]), and the ruins of the Green Chapel,
not far distant. Building upon feminist re-readings of the poem that emphasize
its knots, absent narratives, contradictions, and temporal intricacies over a
masculine straightforwardness, I’m going to ask us to pause today within some
time-spaces that Sir Gawain barely beholds on his travels, so hellbent is he to
culminate a story he thinks his own. We won’t spend much time in the bedroom
with Gawain and the Lady, nor at the chapel with the Green Knight. I’m
interested in desire here, but desires that exceed the confines of Human
subjectivities without leaving particular humans behind.[3]
On the day she provides the green girdle that will supposedly keep Gawain safe,
the Lady’s first act in entering his bedchamber is to throw open the window
(1743), fresh air for the knight’s heavy, troubled sleep (dre3 droupyng of
dreme, 1750). Might we allow our eyes to tarry at the vista she opens, perhaps
feel the change in atmosphere an unlatched window enables? Can we gaze out towards
the nearby hills and forest without transcending the feminine agency through
which that portal opens? The Arthurian knight in restless sleep or atop his
relentless steed embodies only one narrative trajectory. The desires of the
poem’s four women entwine the poem with alternative stories, some of which
challenge the relegation of the feminine to private and domestic space while
men adventure outdoors.[4]
So does the vivacity and precarity of the poem’s nonhumans, and an abiding love
for their flourishing.
It’s easy to forget that SGGK exists in a single manuscript of
unknown authorship, unclear scribal history, and lost context.[5]
The history of this anonymous alliterative poem of the late 14th
century is discontinuous. We possess no evidence of medieval readers. Modern
canonicity came about only after Frederic Madden rescued the poem from
obscurity through his edition of 1839. Jesse L. Weston translated SGGK into comfortably modern English in
1898, enabling wide public access.[6]
Its female characters were ignored or disparaged into the 1990s, even though
the plot derives from their agency. In the long wake of its domestication into
the Brit Lit Survey syllabus, as well as its mediation through multiple translations
and remediation through new sites of representation (including film and blogs),
we’ve lost a sense of the romance’s strangeness, its desire to estrange. Much
remains dormant, awaiting its season, so close to home as to remain unseen.
How might turning to the past with
a full sense of inhabited ecologies, medieval and modern, renew our
acquaintance with a poem that has become too well known? How might love and
life bring together a world of humans and nonhumans in which particularities
(of gender, body, desire, ability, tempo, thriving) are not transcended or
surpassed? Plunging through the wilds of Wales atop his horse, Gawain’s
mammalian rapidity contrasts with the unhurried thriving of trees, the leisure
of stone, incessant cyclicality of weather and botanical yearning, the pulse of
climate and season. I use the term eco-temps to designate a HERE that is at
once a place, a temporality, and a climate – ephemeral expanses that through
repetition endure to bequeath across time a multisensory archive.
Few medieval texts are more alert
to climate change than SGGK, in the many senses of the word: location, atmosphere,
inclination, affect. Climat is
passion and psychology in place, feeling close to home. The poem is arranged
around recurring but not necessarily straightforward rotation, what in Middle
English is called “sesoun” [season]. The tempo of lived geography, sesoun is composed of cyclical “eco-temps”
or “time-spaces” “now-heres” “weather-worlds” that knot the disparate in shared liveliness,
that include but are not culminated by decay, violence, death. Season derives from sowing (Latin serere),
the casting of dormant seed on bare earth in uncertain hope, in the trust even
within long cold of some green futurity.
With its brief days darkly edged, its
affection for Christmas and New Years revels, SGGK is a winter-loving poem. Most of its action unfolds within two
iterations of that season of short days and chill nights, of frost and hearthbound
fire.
Unlike some Arthurian tales, this romance
opens with disaster rather than culminate in flames. The first stanza (to which
the last circles back) describes the burning of the city of Troy “to brondez
and askez” (2), detailing the transcontinental dispersal of its refugee
population. Because they founded so many futures it is easy to forget that the
Trojans were exiles and migrants, displaced from home by war. Burnt to brands and ashes: these dispersed
peoples possess no city to which to return.[7]
The smoldering of home must haunt what follows [Stephanie Trigg]. Camelot is a
refuge built against fire and ice.
The poem begins in wandering but
moves quickly to the construction of new habitations. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a story that its author tells us
he first “in toun herde” (31). “Toun” is usually glossed as “court,” but the
word primarily means a gathering of edifices into permanent settlement, as in
“London toun” (MED), the kind of fortified place reduced to embers at poem’s
opening. Toun also designates the
community such buildings enable. A toun
domesticates fire and banishes life-taking winter to its exterior. The
Arthurian court is a shelter after catastrophe. Like Troy, it won’t last.
Festive and snug, Camelot knows the
inevitability of intrusion. Expectation hangs heavy in the air. Although
Arthur’s court has gathered to celebrate the holiday, the king will not be
seated at the Yule repast until some wonder arrives. SGGK was composed when the mania for tales of Camelot was already
centuries old, but the eager knights and ladies depicted here are young: “For
al watz þis fayre folk in her first age” (54). This story is set in the early
days of Arthur’s flourishing, before the treachery and infidelity and sheer
viciousness that will someday rend its community, ruin everything achieved.
As readers and Arthur fans, we know
what is coming. Lancelot and Guenevere will betray their king. Agravain will
betray the two lovers. Mordred will betray everyone. Yet when we realize that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a
prequel we can suspend our knowledge, ignore the approach of that calamitous future
for a bit. The story is limned with darkness, harsh environments, and loss, but
its narrative also holds vibrancy, promise, and unexpected life, even within
what seems dead or forgotten. It’s a story of “boþe blysse and blunder” (18): beginning
anew, trading culmination for multiplicity, linear time for seasonal modes, inevitable
futures for the awakening of dormancies.
Camelot is built against a human world
that loves to incinerate and a natural world aligned with chill; against story
tellers who culminate their tales in devastation; against flame that will
gladly ally itself with human hands to consume structures (of dwelling, of
meaning, of remembrance); against an icy climate in which life is precarious
and pained. And yet the court knows it cannot keep these forces at its exterior.
The marvel is awaited. The outside must enter, or reveal itself as having
always been within.
Sometimes it is difficult to tell
the difference between an ally and an enemy, a host and a guest, protagonist
and prey, a parasite and a symbiont, the fecundity of decay and the silent
thriving of life, the death drive and cyclicality, between things which
contradict and things that are simply entwined.
“Þer hales in at þe halle dor an
aghlich mayster” (136). The awesome [“aue-lich”] Green Knight hurtles into the
hall. He is sudden, flamboyant, immense -- and so very green. We will learn
later in the poem that he is intimate to a story long unfolding at the heart of
Camelot-toun. An emissary from Morgan
la Fée, the Green Knight is sent to probe the court and frighten Guenevere
(2456-60). Morgan does not much like her half-brother Arthur, an animus that
tells a story close to home, lying dormant, springing to life only
retroactively next winter. Sir Gawain and
the Green Knight is a poem that demands to be read at least twice before it
is possible to know how full its story is with alternative narratives from the
very start, seeds lying dormant the first time through, awaiting a second
season.
A little history. When first
glimpsed in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita
Merlini (c. 1150) Morgan rules the Isle of Apples (Avalon), the enchanted
place to which Arthur is taken to have his mortal wounds tended. Geoffrey may
have taken this story, as he takes so many of the tales he tells, from a
combination of Welsh, Irish and Breton tales, underscoring the roiled British
archipelago that Arthur’s eventual translation into a placid English king
obscures. Geoffrey describes Morgan as wise in medicinal botany, astrology, and
shape changing (she can fly through the air like Daedelus, and so is an
intimate of birds).[8] In
time elaborate mythologies developed around Morgan and her relation to Arthur.
She studies with Merlin and masters much of his lore. She is married against
her will. She is called le Fay (the Fairy) in recognition of her learning and
power.[9]
Because she was disparaged by Thomas Malory, and because we too easily assume
that any medieval secular woman who exerts her own agency must have been
reviled by her contemporaries, Morgan is often described now as sinister, evil.
Yet she may also simply be an immensely learned woman whose stories and desires
are not fully knowable.[10]
Despite all the founding fathers,
stories of Troy depend upon women: Dido, Cassandra, Briseyde, Hecuba, Ignoge,
Lavinia, Helen.[11] Feminist
re-interpreters of SGGK taught us decades ago to take the words of the Green
Knight seriously when he reveals that he is Morgan’s subordinate and stop
making the poem about its male characters. Geraldine Heng pointed out in 1991
that Morgan tends to be noticed only to diminish her back into the masculine
story, a proclivity that remains true today.[12]
Heng, Gayle Margherita, and Elizabeth Scala (among many others) have demonstrated
cogently how the poem enacts and is enlivened by feminine desires, stories with
women as protagonists that have always been there, dormant until noticed by
readers not content to follow only Gawain through the text. While most of the
narrative is spent in that knight’s company, the ending of the romance makes us
wonder if it ought to have been.
The poem diverts us from its
intricacies then rebukes us for having been so distracted. “Oueral enker grene”
(150). The magnificent, utterly intense [enker]
greenness of the knight who intrudes on the Christmas court is overwhelming: verdancy
of coat, mantle, hose, trim, gems, flowing hair and beard; his horse’s bit, stirrups,
and saddle; even the horse itself. Yet the Green Knight is an ecotone of vegetal
and animal, leaf and silk, tendril and embroidery, the work of nature and
artisans. Viridescent glare can blind us to how much gold is woven into the
ornamentation, precious substance and entangling thread. The Green Knight bears
along with his tremendous axe a bob of holly “Þat is grattest in grene when
greuez ar bare” (207). This holly would presumably shimmer with red berries, a speckled
crimson that will return later when we behold Gawain’s blood on the Green
Chapel snow. As the green aura shimmers it is easy not to notice details like the
fierce Knight’s clothing embroidered “wyth bryddes and fly3es” (167), with birds
and butterflies, a sartorial ecosystem. Sir Gawain will dress in rather similar
clothing later in the poem, when he sets off in search of this stranger. The atmospheric
birds and butterflies on these clothes are the labor and narrative of women’s
hands.
The fierce guest challenges the
court to a beheading game (possibly the least fun game ever invented). Noble
Gawain volunteers to take the axe, sparing his king that perilous duty. Once
severed from its body the head remains alive, a survival beyond death that
declares green entanglement within a world exceeding and frustrating the human.
The severed head commands Gawain to receive his promised return blow at the mysterious
Green Chapel within a year. Unlike this uncanny visitor, Gawain has no reason
to suspect that he will survive the return stroke: twelve months as terminus,
not the restarting of a cycle. Can we blame him if he hesitates at Camelot
while the seasons change? And they change rapidly. Within three brisk but
beautiful stanzas winter will yield and return.
“And vche sesoun serlepes sued
after oþer, / After Crystenmasse com þe crabbed lentoun” (“And each season in
turn followed the other / After Christmas came difficult Lent” 501-2). We
expect winter to be hard, but more difficult still are the earliest arousals of
spring.
Lenten thoughts, for that austere
time of year when the first stirrings of plants yield little nourishment, when winter
is almost gone but the ground is brown and the trees stripped still of
ornament. “Crabbed” means angry, ill-tempered, backward-moving, sour, unconvivial.
A time of “fode more simple,” early spring tests the flesh in part for
religious reasons, in part because the growing season is just starting while
winter stores have neared depletion. You could starve to death at Lent.[13]
“Early spring is, famously, cruel,”
observes Holly Dugan. “The bite of winter is still sharp.”[14]
Spring’s ecological archive, she notes, is olfactory – and thereby fleeting.
But not irrecoverable. Poetry records well the vernal balance of promise with “an
indolic hint of decay and desolation.”[15]
Memory with desire. To call this liminal season “crabbed” is not an instance of
the Pathetic Fallacy so much as proof that the Pathetic Fallacy is true. The
human body is an environmental mesh. Subjectivity is a material, multiensory
extension into time, atmosphere and eco-temps. Affect is shared
macrocosmically. Climate is weather and mood together, the human as
meteorological interface, the ephemeral made flesh and feeling, the impress of
an environing.
The seasons pass swiftly as Gawain
lingers at Camelot. Lush thoughts intrude. Bot
þenne þe weder of þe worlde wyth wynter hit þrepez (“But then the weather
of the world contends with winter,” 504): cold sinks down, clouds uplift; rain
topples, flowers swell. “Softe somer” combines what are for us two separate
seasons, riotous spring and summer’s green fecundity.
Like that intruding knight at Christmas
court, the world wears green clothing (“boþe groundez and þe greuez grene ar
her wedez” [“both ground and groves are clothed green,” 508]). The soundtrack
to this glorious greening is birdsong, as these creatures build their houses
with industry (509). Later in the poem we will see and hear such birds in the
depths of winter, as Gawain moves through a tangled forest, half frozen, no
prospect of the Green Chapel at all. Let’s fast forward for a moment.
Into a forest ful dep, þat ferly
watz wylde,
Hi3e hillez on vche a halue, and
holtwodez vnder
Of hore okez ful hoge a hundreth
togeder;
Þe hasel and þe ha3þorne were
harled al samen,
With ro3e raged mosse rayled
aywhere,
With mony bryddez vnblyþe vpon bare
twyges,
Þat pitosly þer piped for pyne of
þe colde.
Wandering a wild forest of
entangled oak, hazel, hawthorn, Gawain beholds unhappy birds complaining
against the chill. Maybe they are just allegories for how he feels. But maybe
this is another moment when we might behold the human weather report, and
wonder why Gawain does not apprehend in these miserable creatures a shared
pain, a shared precarity.
Those lines create a microclimate,
a winter environing in which life and death intertwine, where misery is shared even
when that atmospheric interpenetration goes unrecognized. Trees are entangled,
oak with hazel, hung with moss. Unhappy birds perch in their bows, their
soundtrack a reduction to bare life, to creaturely misery. Pain of the cold. Sure, they’re just birds – and they will soon
give way to frosty earth lit by a beautifully ruddy rising sun when Gawain is
snug in the castle (1694-96) and to “wyldge wederer of þe worlde” that harasses
the exposed (“þe naked to tene”) once he departs in search of the Green Knight
(2000-2). Again, though, these are not instances of weather in the poem obeying
“psychological rather than natural laws” but assertions that the Pathetic
Fallacy is not so false.[16]
Lesley Kordecki finds in Chaucer’s speaking avians an “ecofeminist subjectivity”
that interrogates and undercuts the human.[17]
In this poem the birds, filled with bliss in summer, distress in winter, do not
speak. Yet they palpably communicate: create a feeling, an atmosphere, sorrow
in a bitter climate, joy in a warmer one. They are the animals that fly on the
embroidered garments of both Sir Gawain and the Green Knight he seeks. They are
the animals that share in the bounty of the butchered deer after the hunt, when
the ravens receive “þe corbeles fee” (1355). They are a story of nature, of
course, but a story conveyed also in clothing, the labor of women, birdsong
that is also art. And a protest against a world too cold.
Back to summer. Zephirus blows us,
softly and warmly, deep into the year (516). Time passes at such a clip that it
is easy not to see how animated this
world observed by no one in the poem has become. But let’s linger, and spin
some quick lines into longer intimacies.[18]
Blossumez
bolne to blowe (Blossoms bulge to bloom, 512), while the hedgerows are
“rych” and “ronke” (luxurious, libidinous 513). Leaf and stem are flourishing,
becoming overgrown. Isn’t that how the Green Chapel was swallowed into ruin,
reuse, rebirth?
Let’s pause in this vegetal profusion,
catch our breath, smell the evening’s fleeting perfume -- or at least note that
the poem is now green with inhuman desire. “Wela wynne is þe wort þat waxes”
(“very lovely is the plant that grows”), dripping dew from its leaves, eagerly
awaiting the joyful gleam of the sun (“To bide a blysful blusch of þe bry3t
sunne” 520).
Yes it’s just personification and
we should not take anthropomorphism too seriously. The growing plants and the
soundtrack of birdsong that accompany their yearning simply set the mood for
the human actors: expectancy, possibility, lushness, desire. Move on.
In its rapid season-change and
narrative hurtling forward, the poem offers what Rick Godden describes as a
beautiful yet unnerving time-lapse.[19]
We are inhabiting for a few months-as-minutes a vegetal temporality, a medieval
version of sLowLife, plants revealed as motile and desiring.[20]
Tim Morton describes the quickened apprehension that “speeding up the world”
yields as making “things that seem natural reveal something monstrous or artificial,
an uncanny, morphing flow” (The
Ecological Thought 43). We sense how every green thing lives, burgeons,
respires, maybe even feels. What a green climate in which to dwell, once
temporal flow is estranged from human time keeping, from anthropocentric pulse,
season over denouement, dormancy over death, climate over climax.
Yet vines and flowers are closer to
our own heartbeat than much of the world (even if we are probably too much like
hummingbirds as far as trees are concerned). When we inhabit a botanical tempo through
poetry and other methods of sustained observation, we behold how plants live,
witness what they love. We also realize their anxieties, those same intimations
of mortality the court felt at Lent. Autumn is coming in a rush (“Bot þen hy3es
heruest” 521). A changing climate signals nearing winter, with harsh weather,
desolation, and rot (“Warnez hym for þe wynter to wax ful rype” 522).
Time to provide against the nearing
devastation, or perish, or go dormant.
“And al grayes þe gres þat grene
watz ere” (527): and the grass turns all grey that had been green. Verdancy
recedes, and so does distributed liveliness. Chill returns. But here’s
something to glean before the cycle completes and we find ourselves in Gawain’s
company. Arthur had a half sister and we know at least in retrospect that she
sets the story in motion. Her life is difficult to excavate and filled with
contradictions, but one thing is clear: she wanted a world with more
possibility than was given to her. She wanted a future of her own
determination, a plot that did not terminate in someone else’s denouement. As
we’ve dallied in the change of seasons I have been trying to honor what she
loved in life, her intimacies and her knowledge. My hunch is that Morgan
likewise lingered among birds and plants and knew well their vibrancy. I am
also going to hazard that she had a deep regard for stones.
“Þenne al rypez and rotez þat ros
vpon first” (528): Then everything ripens and rots that in the beginning grew. Arthurian
literature has a way of obliterating the things it loves, just as the cycle of
seasons turns spring plants to compost and soil to mud. Let’s turn our thoughts
to the passing of swift things like blossoms, lost narratives, and flesh and
contemplate the abiding earth. But not as grave.
Green is vegetal, seasonal, rapid,
brief: a shade for plant life and botanic desire. A green sky may presage
tornado, or dance as distant aurora. Green may be the last flash of the setting
sun, le rayon vert, an opening of
possibility even when the world dims. But green is more than that, if we can
slow these rapidly turning seasons even more. Green is swift … but green also
opens the text to durations that far exceed the momentary or the seasonal.
Green is holly, springtime, leaf – but also gem, enamel, armor and pigment.
Think back to last winter, which
might now seem a long time ago (but it was only three stanzas). The Green
Knight’s hue at Camelot is “grene as þe gres” (235). Gift of chlorophyll and
sunshine, green is the color of nature, as ecological a shade as can be had, as
well as a promise of burgeoning, primavera
within snow. Green is the color here of the close at hand, the immediate, the
ephemeral: nearby trees and grass, the seasonal impress of holly and ivy. But
green constantly intermixes other shades, other things. The knight’s color is
also compared to “grene aumayl on golde glowande” (“green enamel glowing on
gold,” 236). Green hue is the work of nature and of human craft, a radiance
that arrives through alliance with earthbound and enduring substances, time
long passed and time about to emerge.
The illustrations in the Sir Gawain and the Green Knightmanuscript are a symphony of mineral verdancies. Here in close up Sir Gawain
faces the Green Knight at the Green Chapel. Sometimes the color was created by
painting i
ndigo over orpiment (blue over yellow). Malachite and verdigris were the
most popular minerals for creating verdant hues – and remember that next to Sir
Gawain in this picture is cave-like entrance to the Green Chapel, an entrance perhaps
to this mineral world of green. These earthy substances that dye the animal
skin on which the poem is inscribed resonate with the green gems said to
sparkle on the Green Knight’s clothing, accouterments, and horse. They convey a
materiality and a temporality that far outlasts the human – and yet to which
the human is intimately, materially bound.
The people of the Middle Ages did
not have quite the same sense of deep time that we are forever congratulating
ourselves for having developed. They did, however, understand temporal
immensity. Stone perpetually brought medieval writers and thinkers to such
unseasonal, geologic contemplation, the awakening from dormancy of dreams of a
world that holds a tempo nothing like that whirl of seasons preoccupying quick
humans and other biological life.
Plants and minerals are lively, but
their indigenous temporality renders human access to their thriving difficult
to maintain long. Stare at them too long, and you can even lose sight of how
specific human lives matter. The story can become too large. Or, as with Sir
Gawain, too small. He forgets so easily how capacious the world is through
which he moves, how full of creatures like the birds who like him love life and
want to endure against a cold clime.
I could never possess a mind of
winter. I can never not think of the misery in a cold wind. Here we are again. Perhaps
we’ve lingered too long before arriving: we have completed a rotation of the
seasons, and yet arrive only a few hundred lines into the poem, when a knight
is just about to start his adventure.
A swift story of winter, Lent,
summer, and harvest returns to winter and to Gawain. We lost of track of him,
didn’t we? We were so intent on the poem’s plants, climate, season, and stones.
We became stuck on what a medieval writer would call the “virtus” that these various
ecomaterialities hold: their vibrancy and power as described in medieval
botanical manuals, natural histories, encyclopedias and lapidaries, their
ability to interrupt human stories and trigger wonder. In this lingering I have
attempted to take seriously the presence of a woman “bi craftes wel lerned”
(2447) who acquired her “maystrés” (arts, 2448) from Merlin. Her “koyntyse of
clergye” (skill in scholarship) likely involved an intimacy with the herbs and
gems that through proper alliance produce desire, eventuation, and magic. I
hesitated in the seasonal stanzas in honor of Morgan la Fay – and it is worth
exploring what that strange honorific signifies. The prose
Lancelot (c. 1214-27) describes
les
fees as those women in the British histories who know “les forches des
paroles et des pieres et des erbes” (the powers of words and stones and
plants).
[21]
Magic is not the gift of demons, but of comprehension of natural law,
acquirable “by all who applied themselves to the right books, or who were
admitted to study with an acknowledged master, such as Merlin.”
[22]
Literacy is essential to magic and in many versions of the Morgan story her
title of fée is bestowed in recognition of her wide learning and achievements
in medicine and astronomy.
[23] The Green Knight
describes “Morgne la Faye” as a deeply learned women who once had “drwry”
(love-dealings) with Merlin, the very initiator of the Arthurian court (2446-48).
He says nothing negative about their relationship (their love was “dere”) and
stresses the depths of her knowledge – so much so that she is also “Morgne þe goddess.”
She earns her two titles not because she is somehow closer to plants and
animals than men (the familiar troping of the feminine as the natural). She is
goddess and fairy because she is an expert (“clergye”) in words, stones,
magnetism, stellar influence, herbs – in what the Middle Ages called “magik
natural,” a discipline today that we would call natural science.
[24]
SGGK is remarkably neutral towards
Morgan. Gawain overlooks her during his time in the castle because she is
advanced in age and thereby unattractive -- but the text never implies that her
elderly body offers a moral allegory. Although described in terms that are
physically unflattering when she is glimpsed from Gawain’s point of view (Bertilak
more objectively calls her “þe auncian lady,” 2463), in her home she is clearly
revered (“And he3ly honowred with haþelez aboute” 949). No negative adjectives
cluster around her in the text – though plenty are to be found in critical
discussion of her presence (including “evil” “dangerous” “aggressive” and
“lascivious”). She is praised by Bertilak, her liegeman, for being so learned, and
for her ability to tame the proud (“Weldez non so hy3e hawtesse / Þat ho ne con
make ful tame,” 2454-55) – a talent she was practicing against with the
Arthurian court. True, she also wanted to scare Guenevere to death, and that is
not very nice, but no textual rebuke is given for that attempt. The poem offers
only a story of a desire too quickly glimpsed.
[25]
As we have seen by tarrying in the change of seasons with Morgan’s interests in
mind, SGGK is a poem of such stories and desires swiftly witnessed. Bertilak
seems quite joyful to be under Morgan’s sovereignty. Bertilak’s castle, which
is Morgan’s castle, seems a place of eternal spring. Because of the bedroom
scenes and the tempting and the testing, critics typically describe it as a
perilous place – and maybe it is, from Gawain’s point of view.
Maybe. But after the business with the
head chopping concludes at the Green Chapel, His request that Gawain accompany
him back to the castle for a celebratory feast that includes his aunt appears to
be sincere (“Þerfore I eþe þe, haþel, to com to þyn aunt, / Make myry in my
hous” (2467-68). Once Morgan’s story awakens from dormancy, is important not to
enact that violence against her again, that her life as Morgan the Goddess –
who is also Morgan the Scientist -- be recorded, acknowledged, lingered over.
Patricia Ingham writes that the lines of forgiveness from the Green Knight that
free Gawain for his fault “reverberate with a compassionate understanding of a
knight’s desire to survive.”
[26]
The lines she is referencing are the ones from which I have taken my paper’s
title: “Bot for 3e lufed your lyf þe lasse I yow blame” (“But because you loved
your life, the less I blame you,” 2368). The Green Knight serves Morgan, so why
not see in these words a shared ethos of Hautdesert, one that reverberates with
a compassion for all things that want to survive and flourish, all things that love
life?
In the castle of
Bertilak Gawain encounters Morgan but fails to recognize her. She is just a
woman to him, all the more below attention because she is not young. Thus does
he look at learned scholar and his own aunt and behold a crone. Gawain is not
very attentive. We know this from the green girdle he will accept from
Bertilak’s wife and then attempt to hide. Yet without Morgan the poem would not
possess its plot. Scholars typically classify Morgan as either a supernatural
being (in Geoffrey of Monmouth and a few early sources; hypothesized in her
fairy or enchantress form as being a memory of a Celtic goddess) or as fully
human, a woman who uses her craft in the petty ways the medieval misogynist
imagination expects women to act. But a text cannot be a closed or total world.
Narratives are porous ecosystems, always disrupted by the foundations (full of
so many dormant things) on which they are built – dormancies that change the
climate when they spring to life, ephemeral perhaps in their thrivings but
through cyclicality and season more enduring than you might think.
The daily testing of Gawain in his
bed is eerily analogous to the hunting of deer, boar and fox. Peril limns life
and winter is difficult to tell from spring. The green of growth, eco-temps,
and inhuman tempos and the white of chill, pain, precarity and perishing flesh
are entangled. Circles entangle rather than flow. Dormancy and season give the
lie to death. If Lady Bertilak had narrated the poem’s plot, how different
would it be? We discover as the narrative moves towards its close that she
comes each morning to tempt Gawain to physical intimacy because her husband
asked her to do so: his game not hers. “I sende hir to asay þe” (2362) the
Green Knight tells Gawain, robbing the wooing scenes in retrospect of tension
and pleasure. We will never know her story, her desires, her pleasures. But
when Gawain narrates human history as a long chronicle of men betrayed by
women, from Adam onwards, it is hard not to wonder about Lady Bertilak’s ill
fit with the tale he tells. She was working with her husband, and the green
girdle she gave him seems to be a story about men from which she is excluded.
Though it is useful to pause and think about who wove the garment.
Something worth contemplating as
well, speaking of weaving or interweaving: when Gawain enters Bertilak’s
castle, he departs harsh winter for a verdant season, cold birds for greenery
and revel. But winter and summer end up being the same place, the same liminal
zone. Bertilak’s Castle is the Green Chapel, just as jovial Bertilak is the
fierce Green Knight. This forbidding monster excuses Gawain completely for
having take the green girdle from lady Bertilak to protect himself: “Bot for 3e
lufed your lyf; þe lasse I yow blame” (because you loved your life, the less I
blame you, 2368). The love of life engenders sympathetic inclination, and a
great deal of laughter (the Green Knight chortles his way through his last
scenes). Gawain is invited back to Bertilak’s house to make merry with him, to
make merry with his own aunt, “Morgne la Faye.”
Within the poem’s cycle of seasons
temporal ripples flow within the narrative’s geographical bubbles. In the
middle of the poem, in the middle of its recurrence of winter, Gawain discovers
the home of Bertilak le Hautdesert, a park-like enclosure where everything is
green as spring. For a while. The poem will return to white snow and biting
ice, but even here will be found a verdant figure who seems menacing but in the
end offers convivial invitations and sober lessons in how stories work. Invited
to celebration with his aunt Morgan, the fairy-goddess-scientist, Gawain will
refuse both offer and knowledge, will return to the Arthurian court where the
action started, changed but not really changed. He tells a sad, heroic story
about his nick in his neck and the green garter that it is the reader’s duty to
ignore. Intensely attentive to the creaturely affects of the animal, human and
vegetal denizens of its mixed ecologies, Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight displays a recurring interest in culture’s
becoming weather and climate’s linguistic and emotional impress. Identifications
against (the monstrous, the animal, the inhuman) are constantly tripped up by
recognitions and sympathy crossing ontological lines. Traditional readings of
the poem resolve such tensions by turning to the theological, but they do not take
seriously the Green Knight’s reason for excusing Gawain for his fault, based on
a principle of the love of life: “but for 3e lufed your lyf.” In this pardon
inheres a secular ethics of shared precariousness, an enlarging of the here of the poem that widens but refuses
to transcend sense of place.
My place is here, close to home.
I’ve been showing you some scenes of writing and thinking that form my own here
when I think about place and the medieval poem.
An archive of ten years’ duration,
the images I have used to retell the story of SGGK were taken in an urban park
near my house. The abandoned terminus of a streetcar system that once linked NW
and central DC, Willard Avenue Park (as it is unpoetically named) is a space I
pass through every day as I move from home to work and back. At some point long
before I lived in DC the area was landscaped into an urban park, but by the
time I knew it most of the area seemed abandoned: overgrown with kudzu and
bamboo, full of rotted and arsenic-cured wooden equipment, a place urban
wildlife loved and humans ignored. Last winter a new playground was installed,
a drainage system added, areas resurfaced and made accessible, and some
invasive species removed.
My path today was given by the poem
itself and this intimate space of writing and thinking bookended by a subway
station and my home. I followed a series of interwoven ecological strands in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to
emphasize a here that is temporally
thick, eco-temps traversed by rhythms swift and slow, that pulse within the
poem but require some attentive lingering over climate and season. I thought through much of my argument with Willard
Avenue Park.
The park is not nearly so lovely
nor so lively as my images suggest. One end terminates in high rise apartment
buildings that during times of heavy rain dump sewage into the stream that
flows through the woods.
A street traversed by buses, fire
engines, and trucks can be heard through the trees.But I know from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight there is
no such thing as a preserve of nature, a space where purities abide. Even a
subway is an ecosystem. Some of the stories that I have not dwelt upon enough
in this essay include the fact that this area was for a time part of a
plantation. When Little Falls Stream watered fields, they were worked by
enslaved humans who had been kidnapped from Africa and sold as if livestock.
Before that the land belonged to the Piscataway, Anacostank, Pamunkey,
Mattapanient, Nangemeick, and Tauxehent. Although it is known that an Indian
trading post was established near the park by the early colonists, and
suspected that the deer trails nearby may once have been hunting paths,
indigenous history has mainly been obliterated. These vanished traces open SGGK
to stories that arrive from prehistory (the Green Chapel is thought to be a
Neolithic site, but we do not know exactly where) and postcoloniality (the
Wales through which Gawain treks was being aggressively colonized at the time
the poem was written, Arthurian myth was snatched from the Welsh, who are the wodwos and etaynez Gawain fights against
in the wilderness, and might they not have a story of their own to speak?)
I took this picture coming home one
evening after a storm. I’d cut through Willard Avenue Park as I always do, and
paused in the darkness to listen to the birds quieting for the evening, the
purling of the stream, the steady rumble of cars. In the bamboo that has not
been cleared away yet I saw a deer, then a fox, urban wildlife well adapted to
constricted expanses.
I think I was a little drunk – I’d
met a friend for drinks in Foggy Bottom, and we lingered until the storm broke.
I crossed a busy road and was almost home, then looked down into a puddle. Time,
for a moment, slowed. Water became sky, the ground close to home disclosed a
deeper story. I knew at that moment that I had to take this picture to bring
this “here” to you.
[1]
Carolyn Dinshaw, “Ecology,” in A Handbook
of Middle English Studies, ed. Marion Turner (Oxford: John Wiley &
Sons, 2013) 347-62; quotation at 359. Dinshaw ascribes its ecocritical
popularity to “its vegetal villain, geographical realism, precise picture of
the seasons, and detailed account of the hunting animals” (359). In fact,
however, ecocritical readings of medieval literature remains thin on the
ground, and the “green” bibliography for SGGK is not extensive: see work by Gillian Rudd and Susan Crane.
[2]
Postcolonial readings of Sir Gawain and
the Green Knight have carefully built upon this feminist tradition in a way
that ecocritical readings so far have not. Such analyses tend to be attentive
to environmental justice in their probing of what happens when one people’s
land becomes someone else’s territory – but they typically have little to say
about nonhuman lives. See for example Patricia Ingham.
[3] For
an analysis that brings these expanses together well see Mark Miller’s recent,
illuminating examination of death drive, stillness and desire in the poem, “The
Ends of Excitement in Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight: Teleology, Ethics, and the Death Drive,” Studies in the Ages of Chaucer 32 (2010): 215-56. I am interested
in bringing this objectless desire into a realm that includes nonhumans as
participants in what Miller calls the “field of aliveness” rather than symbols
or displacements for human stories, and so focus not on death but decay,
dormancy, and tempos that are alien to human subjectivity.
[4] On the
gendering of the public and the private in the poem and its relation to a split
between nature and culture, see Margherita 140-41. Geraldine Heng writes: “Like
each constituent of the pentangle, the path of every woman in the poem is
articulated with that of every other, so that each approximately "vmbelappez
and loukez in oþer," "vchone ... in oþer, þat non ende hade"
(628, 657), a knitting together that reproduces the shadow of a different "endeles
knot"in the poem - a knot of the feminine and the figure of another desire
and its text” (“Feminine Knots and the Other Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” PMLA 106.3 [1991]: 500-514, at
503).
[5]
Elizabeth Scala gets at the precarity of the story’s survival well when she
writes that “its canonical position as a superlative late Middle English
romance and the gem of the so-called alliterative revival belies its chance
survival from an era before the introduction of the printing press. The
critical attention the poem has enjoyed in the last century often obscures the
fact that it was lost to readers of literature for centuries and had
practically no effect on the formation of the English poetic canon” (Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality,
and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England [New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2002]) 38.
[6] Good,
short histories of the manuscript’s coming to public attention maybe found in
the two handbooks dedicated to the poem’s author: Ad Putter, An Introduction to the Gawain-Poet (London: Longman, 1996), esp. 1-4
and John M. Bowers, An Introduction to
the Gawain Poet (Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2012).
[7] I’m
thinking here of Steve Mentz’s suggestion that “The poetics of exile and
migrancy overflow premodern literary culture. What are Odysseus and Aeneas but
violently displaced migrants who eventually make it to old or new homes?” See http://stevementz.com/notes-toward-a-migrancy-syllabus/
[8] See
Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vita Merlini, ed.
and trans. Basil Clark (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1973) ll.908-38.
[9] The
first time she is called Morgan la fee is in Chrétien de Troyes Erec et Enide (c. 1170). James Wade
explores her development in Fairies in
Medieval Romance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) 9-38. Carolyne
Larrington gives a thorough overview of the development of the Morgan legends,
stressing her role as learned enchantress rather than fairy, in King Arthur’s Enchantresses: Morgan and Her
Sisters in Arthurian Tradition (London: Taurus, 2006). See also Stephen
Knight, Merlin: Knowledge and Power
through the Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009) 39-40, 77-83.
[10] On
the inscrutability of fairy motivation see Wade. Even defenders of Morgan’s
point of view in SGGK describe her more negatively than the poem does:
Margherita for example calls her a “sinister maternal figure” (141).
[11] On
the relation of the Troy opening to the unfolding of the plot of SGGK – and
especially to the romance’s interest in Morgan, digression and delay, and the
active forgetting of alternative, feminine histories – see Gayle Margherita, The Romance of Origins: Language and Sexual
Difference in Middle English Literature (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1994) 129-51.
[12]
“Morgan's responsibility for the plot mechanism has been resurrected, debated,
minimized, multiplied, classified, and reimagined-only to be reappropriated
once again (albeit with difficulty) to serve the masculine narrative, whose
priority customarily goes unchallenged” (“Feminine Knots” 501). For two (of
many) examples of insisting that Morgan is not nearly so important as the Green
Knight declares her to be, see Larry D. Benson, Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1965) and 34 and Albert B. Friedman,
“Morgan la Fay in Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight,” Speculum 35 (1960):260-74.
Mark Miller writes that when Morgan’s agency is revealed, her intention is
something “no one cares about” and “ludicrous” (“The Ends of Excitement” 234;
see n.31 for his fullest argument). Margherita gets at the supposed danger of
dallying with Morgan well when she connects it to a fear of lingering with
(feminist) theory: “’theory’ itself is often spoken of in our field as a kind
of rhetorical dalliance, a fetishistic deferral of the medievalist’s linear and
epic journey back into the past … If we stay at Carthage with Dido, we’ll never
get to Italy and build a legacy for our sons. Worse, yet, we may realize that
what seemed a momentary dalliance was in fact the raison d’être for the whole narrative, and find ourselves, like
Gawain, hopelessly alienated from the community as a whole” (Romance of Origins 150).
[13] I am
grateful to Kathleen E. Kennedy (@TheMedievalDrK) for a twitter conversation on
this topic. See especially: “spring also a traditional famine season, as early
crops aren't ready and what is, isn't always enough to fill in dpltd stores”
(September 10, 2015).
[14] See
Holly Dugan, “Spring Smells of Lilacs,” JHU
Press Blog http://jhupressblog.com/2014/04/01/spring-smells-of-lilacs/
[15]
ibid. Dugan notes that indole is an aromatic compound that may be found in
flowers (such as lilacs) as well as feces.
[16] The
quote is from Ad Putter, An Introduction
to the Gawain-Poet, 53.
[17]
Lesley Kordecki, Ecofeminist
Subjectivities: Chaucer’s Talking Birds (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2011).
[18] I am
inspired here by Chris Piuma’s use of “intimacies” to describe how the works of
the Pearl poet spin into new texts or “dystranslations”: “The Task of the
Dystranslator: An introduction to a Dystranslation of the Works of the ‘Pearl’
Poet,“ postmedieval: a journal of
medieval cultural studies (2015) 6, 120–126.
[19] See
“Neighboring Wastelands in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” http://rickgodden.com/2015/05/26/neighboring-wastelands/
[20] http://plantsinmotion.bio.indiana.edu/usbg/toc.htm
[21] Lancelot: Roman en prose de XIII Siècle, ed.
Alexandre Micha, 9 vols. (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1978-83), 7.38; Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian
Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation, ed. Norris J. Lacy, 5 vols. (New
York: Garland, 1993-96), 2.11. The passage is speaking specifically about the
Lady of the Lake rather than Morgan, and speaks of how such enchantresses use
their powers to remain young and beautiful. SGGK departs from this tradition by
rendering Morgan an old woman, but I think that aging is part of the poet’s
strategy of calling attention to how Gawain does not see the powers that are
shaping his world and story. Wade examines the passage from the Lancelot as an instance of rationalizing
the Otherworldly figure of the fairy into a human in Fairies in Medieval Romance p. 11.
[22] Thus
Carolyne Larrington argues is the dominant mode of understanding magic from the
twelfth century onwards: King Arthur’s
Enchantress 10. Helen Cooper makes the good point that enchantment is a
learned skill available to both men and women, that witchcraft “was taken to be
an act, not a state” and did not necessarily convey opprobrium: The English Romance in Time: Transforming
Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004) 160; see also 184-85. Corinne Saunders makes
some similar observations in noting the negative depiction of Morgan in Malory;
see Magic and the Supernatural in
Medieval English Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010) 247.
[23] See
Larrington, King Arthur’s Enchantress
14-15.
[24] See
the entry for “magyk” in the Middle English Dictionary. Larrington compares the
study of natural magic to the university curriculum after the introduction of
Aristotle, and argues that magic is often a learnedness that seems marvelous
only to those who do not comprehend the natural laws behind its operation (King Arthur’s Enchantress 10).
[25]
While I agree with Larrington that the poem “deliberately gives us too little
information to decide about Morgan” (King
Arthur’s Enchantress 68), I do not find her resolving the Guenevere story
through the “Val sans retour” episode in the Lancelot convincing: the point of the story is in part its
incompletion.
[26]
Patricia Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies:
Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2001) 134. This sentence also seems profoundly true to me:
“We might, thus, view Gawain’s ‘failure’ with more sympathy than he does himself,
and remain attentive to the poignant resistances within it” (1350).
