The Ends of Excitement in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Teleology, Ethics, and the Death Drive

Holding Still

In the fourth fitt of the fourteenth-century alliterative romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, when our hero has finally arrived at the Green Chapel to receive the promised blow from his giant adversary, the poet describes his stillness as he awaits the ax's descent upon his neck:

Gawayn grayþely hit bydez and glent with no membreBot stode stylle as þe ston oþer a stubbe auþerÞat raþeled is in roché grounde with rotez a hundreth.¹

(2292-94)

As the moment immediately preceding this one emphasizes, such stillness is by no means an easy thing for Gawain to manage. In that previous moment, as the Green Knight prepares to strike his blow, Gawain does something that later gets called "flinching":

Bot Gawayn on þat giserne glyfte hym bysyde,As hit com glydande adoun on glode hym to schende,And schranke a lytel with þe schulderes for þe scharp yrne.

(2265-67)

In the reading that both Gawain and the Green Knight will soon give of these moments, they stand in sharp contrast. In the earlier moment—that is, the one I cited second—Gawain succumbs to fear, and in so doing betrays nearly everything that constitutes his chivalric identity: "þou art not Gawayn" (2270), chides the Green Knight in a refrain we hear throughout the poem, and one that Gawain accepts. By this, both figures understand that what makes Gawain who he is are his courage and self-control in the face of danger and death, his commitment to his trawthe, and his commitment to Arthur to stand for him, and in so doing to stand for the virtue of Camelot. In the later moment, however, by holding still Gawain returns to himself, manifesting his inner integrity by holding himself to his word and by making good both on his sacrificial commitment to his lord and on the representational burden that has been placed on him—in short, by doing his duty.

Such an account is right enough as far as it goes, and it is the one most critics have followed in understanding the import of this scene for the poem and for the chivalric ethos it embodies. But the lines I have cited suggest that there is a lot more going on here than a straightforward contrast between betrayal and integrity. The notion of integrity at issue here is closely tied to a conception of autonomy as a special form of aliveness.² What makes Gawain an icon of knightly trawthe is that he refuses to be compelled by the most compelling forces at work in him—here, his natural desire for self-preservation; earlier in the poem, his equally natural desire for sexual pleasure. According to Paul, Augustine, and others working in the Christian moral tradition, to be compelled in such a way is to become passive, to become a victim of one's pathe or passions, of desire in the mode of what comes upon or befalls us; and to do that is to become subject to a living death.³ If Gawain flinches—if he allows his desire for the sheer continuance of life to control him—then he has lost the very thing that animates him, that makes his life rise above a condition of mere temporal extension. He is no longer "Gawain." Holding still is thus a way of resisting the pull of death-in-life; or, to put it another way, of resisting the fragmenting force of passion in the name of a unifying ideal, a self-conception that gives him form and purpose. The lines describing Gawain's stillness, however, tell a more complicated story. As he waits for the blade "grayþely," in the way that is due from him and appropriate to him, he stands "stylle as þe ston": his integrity is that of the hard, inanimate object. Or he is like a "stubbe," a dead thing that can only be identified by referring back to the life it once had—and if that...