The Best Book of Romances: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

CLARE R. KINNEY The Best Book of Romance:Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is perhaps the most intricately textured, aesthetically pleasing, and inexhaustibly rereadable of all medieval romances. It offers the reader, to borrow the poet's own words, 'play ... passande vche prynce gomen':1 not only is its narrative action packed with games and entertainments, but the poem as a whole, as John Leyerle suggests, can be seen as an elaborate and remarkably serious 'form of play.'2 While acknowledging that the 'gomen' of Sir Gawain is a wonderful and many-faceted thing, I shall be examining a single aspect of it in this essay, namely, the way in which the poem plays with the rules of the game of reading and writing romance.3 Tony Hunt has argued that a distinguishing characteristic of romance is its abandonment of the world of 'familiar objects, tasks and values' to focus upon 'the quest for integrity and identity. Romance is not a celebration, liturgical in mode, of known and admired qualities ... Itis not affirmative but critical, not static but dynamic.'4 While agreeing that this is true of the most sophisticated and profoundly suggestive romances, I would maintain that there is a very broad spectrum of romance practice, at the lower end of which exist literary texts that are almost ritualistic - or 'liturgical' - reproductions of uninterrogated value systems on the one hand or of well-loved and conventional narrative themes and motifs on the other: mere entertainment. Even if they treat of 'otherness,' they do it in the most familiar way imaginable. It is not surprising, then, that the originality of the Gawain poet (an innovatory artist who is also acutely and richly aware ofthe particular tradition in which he is writing)5 derives from his willingness to 'defamiliarize' the conventional. He invites his readers to re-examine their assumptions about how certain commonplaces of romance should guide their understanding of his narrative and he makes both those conventions and our assumptions concerning their significance one of the subjects of his own work. My exploration of Sir Gawain as 'meta-romance' will follow a rather indirect path, beginning at the end of the poem with the multiple explanations of its hero's experiences offered by Bertilak de Hautdesert. When Sir Gawain has received his 'nirt in pe nek' from the axe of his mysterious adversary, he believes that the Beheading Game is over and all debts cleared. Any further blows, he announces, will be returned UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 59, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1990 458 CLARE R. KINNEY according to the usual rules of armed, single combat (2322-30). The hero's relieved sense of finally being in control of the situation does not last long: the Green Knight refuses the new challenge and with minimum preamble begins to relate why the apparently mortal Beheading Game ended with two abortive blows and a mere scratch: 'Fyrst I mansed pe muryly with a mynt one, And roue pe wyth no rof-sore, with rY3t I pe profered For pe forwarde pat we fest in pe fyrst nY3t, And pou trystyly pe trawpe and trwly me haldez, Al pe gayne pow me gef, as god mon schulde.' (2345-9) There is no formal explanation that the Green Knight and Gawain's host are the same man: the entire connection is subsumed in the 'we' of line 2347. But the very casualness of this preliminary clarification of the link between the Christmas games of Hautdesert and the outcome of the tryst at the Green Chapel quietly emphasizes the continuity between the various aventures which have complicated Gawain's journey to this meeting.6 Having learned that all the promises Gawain made and all the games he played were equally important and equally perilous, both hero and reader are obliged to reassess the nature of Gawain's experience and the measure of his success and failure. Explanation does not, however, stop here. After Gawain has made his confession to the Green Knight and vowed henceforth to wear the green girdle as a token of his 'surfet' (2433), he learns that the whole train of events was set...