Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - Rethinking Romance

  Introduction  1

1.  The Structure of Arthurian Romance  2

1.1  Romance - a Genre  2

1.2  The Structure of the Genre  3

2.  Sir Gawain as a Conventional Romance  7

2.1  Romance Framework  7

2.2  Romance motifs  10

3.  Exploring Romance Conventions  12

3.1  Refusal of Distractions  12

3.2  A Supposed Distraction  14

3.3  The Intertextual Hero  16

  Conclusion  19

  Bibliography  21

Introduction

In this paper, I will discuss how the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight uses, explores and sometimes undermines the conventions of the Arthurian romance genre. As a basis for my investigations I will, in the first chapter, sketch a definition of the genre, using a structuralist model along with a set of typical motifs found in many romances. Having established the essential genre elements I will then examine the way the Gawain-poet makes use of these in his text. After identifying the fundamentally generic structure of the poem I will concentrate on incidents where the poet plays ironically with the reader's genre expectations.

Every study of genre has to be comparative in nature. This is more than true for Arthurian romance , which was a truly European phenomenon.

Ideally, of course, all the romances of medieval Europe in French, German, English and other languages - and all tales, Celtic, Norse, Oriental, Greek and Roman, which were made into medieval romances - should be examined together comparatively, as well as each analytically. (Speirs 1977: 108)

Obviously, this kind of background reading is illusory for the scope of this paper. Yet my definition of Arthurian romance must be based on works other than Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, of course. Thus, on the one hand, my description of romance as a genre will be based on a reasonable critical agreement of the secondary sources mentioned in the bibliography. 1 These discuss mostly the French and English tradition being the most important ones for the Gawain-poet (Barron 1982: 71). Furthermore, I will refer to certain works in Middle High German. These are geographically as well as historically rather remote from the Middle English Gawain - they only share a common body of sources in the works of Chrétien de Troye. This distance, however, is an advantage for my purposes. If two texts that were written two hundred years and two thousand kilometres apart share certain elements, these are very likely to be essential to genre.

1 In this paper, the term 'romance' always refers to 'Arthurian Romance'. With the debatable exception of Gottfried von Strassburgs Tristan, no non-Arthurian text will be referred to.

1

1. The Structure of Arthurian Romance

1.1 Romance - a Genre?

When one is calling a certain text a romance, or a text is calling itself a romance, the implication is that it belongs to the romance genre - the idea being that it shares essential features with all the other texts of the genre.

Texts belong to one genre as opposed to another when they share a similar narrative structure which paradigmatically projects, for a reader, a horizon of expectation and intelligibility based on conventions learned from prior knowledge of the genre. A particular narrative genre can be identified by the kind of events it organizes in sequence, the principles of combination it follows, the functions that actors perform, and the traits it draws upon to delineate characters. (Cohan/Shires 1988: 77)

Thus romance can be called a genre if there is a body of texts which share some or all of the characteristics given in the definition above. However, since medieval romance is a rather protean phenomenon, Barron (1987: 2) prefers to call romance a 'mode' rather than a genre.

Critics are increasingly abandoning the concept of a romance genre as unhelpful, recognizing that it comprises as many types and sub- types as the modern novel. (Barron 1987: 57)

This critique, however, emerges from a definition of genre that emphasizes (metrical) form rather than content and narrative structure. Moreover, the problem that there are more and less typical texts is not one that is encountered only when comparing romances. This is a problem of definition per se - or prototype theory - rather than genre.

Actually, the fact that romance is a genre can be argued for on two different levels; historically as well as comparatively. Firstly, romance is a term found in the actual texts belonging to that genre and other medieval writing.

2

"[R]omance" is historically attested as a generic term, in the medieval vernaculars and for modern scholars. (Burlin 1995: 1)

In fact, the term even resurfaces in the last stanza of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where it is said that "fle best boke of romaunce" (l. 2521) relate the worth of those who wear the green girdle in remembrance of Gawain's failure. This may not be a direct self-reference, but the phrase certainly refers to a long tradition of romances on the same subject. This is a first piece of evidence that the Gawain-poet wanted his text to be identified as a romance.

Secondly, and more importantly, one can argue for the existence of a romance genre by simply comparing medieval texts. However protean these may be, there definitely is a body of texts that share essential features.

The same plot-patterns, the same situations, the same phrases, recur insistently from romance to romance, providing much of their popular strength. (Pearsall 1988: 11)

Before discussing typical romance situations or phrases, some overall structural patterns of the genre must be identified.

1.2 The Structure of the Genre

Following Burlin (1995), I shall use a structuralist model to describe the essential characteristics of the romance genre. This approach may be somewhat outmoded - yet it has proved to be very useful in this particular case. The model visualizes the structure of a narrative in the form of two axes: one paradigmatic, one syntagmatic. The former provides a sense of closure to the narrative by means of two conflicting overall themes or codes. The latter represents a framework for ordering events into a story line. In romances, says Burlin (1995: 7), the two dominant codes on the paradigmatic axis are the chivalric and the courtly code, whereas the two

3

most important narrative principles on the syntagmatic axis are the quest and the test.

The paradigmatic axis of romance features two of the genre's central themes; chivalry and courtliness - the emphasis of the latter being on courtly love. Often, a romance text exemplifies a hero's failure to correspond to the ideals of the courtly or chivalric code.

In the great age of the romance the interest usually lies in the failure of a particular knight to be perfect and in the struggle he makes to attain perfection. (Jackson 1960: 92)

Moreover, the two codes are regularly conflicting, the chivalric ideal demanding strength and aggression, while the courtly ideal asks for fine manners and high love. The central concern of all romances on Erec and Enide, for instance, is the failure of Erec to meet his duties as a knight, since he prefers to indulge in (more or less courtly) love after his marriage to Enide.

On the syntactic axis of the romance genre, two different types of narrative framework can be identified: the quest and the test. "The quest seems inextricably linked to the romance genre" (Burlin 1995: 5). It provides a narrative pattern that can be found in almost every romance.

An arrival at the royal court on holiday brings a mission, which one of the knights undertakes and fulfils (usually), then returns with at least his story of what happened, often with prisoners and occasionally a kingdom or a bride or both. (Burlin 1995: 5-6)

However, equally often, we find a different pattern of events either imbedded in, conflicting with, or even replacing the quest; namely the test. Such a test can consist of, for instance, the temptation of a knight, or just an extraordinarily difficult task.

Thus the structuralist model of the romance genre can be visualized in the following way.

4

CHIVALRY

QUEST

COURTLINESS

This model represents the 'smallest common denominator' of all Arthurian romances. As is the nature of a model, however, its argument remains rather general. In fact, we can easily add several typical, if not universal, characteristics of the texts belonging to the romance genre.

First of all, the narrative structure of the romance is teleological in nature, i.e. is has to be interpreted, as it were, from the end to the beginning.

Die Handlungen der Artusdichtungen sind final (nicht wie viele Heldendichtungen kausal) angelegt, d.h. die Teleologie beinhaltet die Wirkursächlichkeit, weil sie in ihrer Kausalität auf das Ziel gerichtet, folglich Zielursache ist. Der teleologischen Ausrichtung entspricht es in ontologischer Sicht, dass alles Geschehen auf das Ende eines Werkes hin bezogen werden muss. Durch den Schluss erhalten alle Begebenheiten der Erzählung ihren eigentlichen Sinn. (Gottzmann 1989: 3)

This is an important piece of evidence for the theological core of romance: the teleology of the genre is closely connected to the typology of the bible. This becomes even more clear in the two-part structure of many, mostly German, romances, which has been called 'doppelter Kursus'. In the first 'Kursus' of the romance, the hero makes a mistake, i.e. he breaks either the courtly or chivalric code, or both. Through his failure, he is forced, in the second part of the romance, to go through a series of adventures. These are

5