Medieval Sign Theory and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Medieval Sign Theory and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Ross G. Arthur an authorised republication of the 1987 University of Toronto Press edition In parentheses Publications Middle English Series Cambridge, Ontario 2002 Preface This work had its origins in an almost accidental combination of academic influences. At a time when I was attempting to convince a group of undergraduates that the Gawain-poet was intensely concerned with the productive possibilities of controlled ambiguity, and when I was searching through the works of modern semioticians to find a model for explaining the poet’s practice, I happened to find a short reference in Copleston’s History of Philosophy to Peter of Spain and his distinctions between significatio and suppositio. Further reading in medieval logic quickly convinced me of the utility of the analytic method implied by this insight: for all medieval literature, modes of interpretation need to be placed in historical context every bit as much as theological beliefs and social attitudes. In the years that followed, other investigators have followed similar paths of research, but usually making use of the more innovative and exceptional practitioners of medieval logic rather than the basic works that have informed my study. What follows is a description of my itinerary through this material as it relates to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I have selected, in addition to standard texts written in Latin, a variety of materials written in Middle English to show that the modes of thought in the school texts are congruent with the assumptions in more widely distributed vernacular works. In most cases translations have been appended to these quotations, not because they are in themselves linguistically complex or because I have anything new to say about their basic meaning but simply so that this book may be of use both to medievalists who study other national literatures and to beginning students in medieval English. If the modes of interpretation discussed here 2 Preface were as generally accepted as I believe, this study should be useful to scholars working on any medieval European literature, and if they were common knowledge among fourteenth-century undergraduates, there will be little here beyond the comprehension of their twentieth-century successors. Every author owes debts that cannot be properly acknowledged in notes. I would like here to express my gratitude to those people without whose intellectual, moral, and spiritual support this work could not have been done: David Arthur, Ruth Arthur, Frances Beer, Anne Burnett, Michael Cummings, Penelope Doob, Denton Fox, Roberta Frank, Joan Gibson, Maruja Jackman, D’Arcy O’Brien, Cindy Vitto, Rea Wilmshurst, and my colleagues and students at York University. Introduction A The Problem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is strongly resistant to any explanation that relies on decoding. Our sense of loss, as readers, is so great whenever a critic attempts to translate the Green Knight into a simple fiend, or a contemporary squire, or Merlin,1 when a particularly slippery word is replaced by a narrow gloss, or when the narrative as a whole is declared to be an allegory for this or that Christian mystery, that the rational response, “It is not only this,” yields quickly to the emotional assertion we see all too frequently in the scholarly literature, that “It is not this at all.” Yet the weight of historical evidence establishes that the poem invites such criticism. Each new monograph or article reveals another modern mind at work on the material, finding both pleasure and meaning in aspects of the poet’s work that we never suspected were there and that we might still be tempted to deny are there at all. This multivalence must by now be accepted as a fact of the text: no new method or approach will sweep away all previous interpretative work; no rigorous scepticism will succeed in convincing us that all the critical diversity is nothing but critical error. Much of the scholarly debate over some passages in the poem can be seen as the confrontation of complementary reductions, fought out by critics who consider them to be mutually exclusive. If one philologist glosses a troublesome form according to an Old Norse etymon and a colleague argues instead for a Vulgar Latin root, a literary critic needs little imagination to find an artistic justification for ambiguity in the passage, and so transcend 4 Introduction (or at least circumvent) the debate. Successful as such a procedure may be at the verbal level in providing the reader with a more meaningful text, it is less acceptable as a device for explicating the symbolism of the poem. Reconciling the readings that see the Green Knight as the Lord of Hades, Ralph Holmes, and Christ,2 for example, would lead the critic into an agnostic morass and suggest a degree of incompetence in the poet at variance with the experience of every reader. This type of criticism unfortunately prevents any possible co-operation. Unlike the philologists, who, true to their etymology, seem really to love the poet’s words, the “Green Knight is Christ” critic and the “Green Knight is John the Baptist” critic are constrained to do no more than joust when they meet. They must deny the open spirit of the poem and reject the work of their colleagues utterly instead of incorporating it and furthering the scholarly process. Even when taken singly, however, such readings are unsatisfactory. When the critic has completed his work, the poem often seems diminished or even trivialized, as the shimmering complexity of the surface of the text is replaced by schematic patterns that are not only less complex but also far less interesting. Fortunately, our reluctance to accept such reductionist criticism need not be left anchored in something as vague as the often-expressed feeling that “true literature” should not be so treated. We have ample evidence from the work of the Gawain-poet that the full detail of the text was important to him in a way that set him apart from many of his contemporaries. If we compare, for example, the poet’s presentations of Noah and Lot in Purity, with their interest in all the physical and social dimensions of the narrative, to the reductionist allegorizations of the Glossa Ordinaria, the extent of the gulf separating him from such attitudes becomes quite clear: “Noe vir justus.” Hic per actus suos significat Christum, qui ait Matth. xi: “Discite a me quia mitis sum et humilis corde.” Solus justus invenitur, cui propter justitiam suam septem homines donantur. Justus quoque Christus et perfectus, cui septem Ecclesiae septiformi Spiritu illuminatae in unam Ecclesia condonantur.3 “Noah, a just man.” This man, by his actions, signifies Christ, who says (Matt 11) “Learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart.” Noah alone was found to be just, and because of his justice seven men were given to him. Christ was also just and perfect, and to him seven churches 5 Introduction illuminated by the sevenfold Spirit were granted, gathered into one Church.4 Lot frater Abraham, justus et hospitalis in Sodomis, significat corpus Christi, quod in omnibus sanctis inter impios gemit, quorum factis non consentit, et a quorum permixtione liberabitur in fine saeculi, illis damnatis supplicio ignis aeterni.5 Lot the brother of Abraham, just and hospitable in Sodom, signifies the body of Christ, which is active in all the holy in the midst of the impious, and does not consent to their deeds, and will be liberated from mixture with them at the end of the age, when they are damned to the pain of eternal fire. Now while there is nothing in the text of Purity that would make it absolutely impossible for a reader to make such an interpretation, there is also nothing to support it against an alternate allegorization, such as the one offered in an Allegoriae in Vetus Testamentum once attributed to Hugh of St Victor: Lot ergo intelligitur fidelis anima; Sodoma, vita saecularis; Segor, vita conjugalis; mons, vita spiritualis; uxor Lot, carnales qui sunt in Ecclesia.6 Lot means the faithful soul; Sodom, earthly life; Segor, conjugal life; the mountain, spiritual life; the wife of Lot, the fleshly ones who are in the Church. All we can say about such readings is that, in the case of Purity, they would be extremely wasteful in that they ignore all the poet’s efforts to produce a striking naturalistic description of events important to his own world for more than abstract spiritual truths. The case with Patience is, if anything, much stronger, since a reader who insisted on approaching that poem according to the traditional “Jonas, id est Christus” view would have to skip more lines than he read. This attention to detail has not, of course, gone unnoticed, nor is there any lack of attempts to explain the depth of meaning of such surface material. Details of dress, physical appearance, colour, and flora and fauna have all been decoded, often on the basis of solid parallels in contemporary literature or, more frequently and more readily, handbooks of symbolism. 6 Introduction Since the poet was an educated man living in an age when every object and quality in the world, especially if it is mentioned in the Scriptures, was invested with a moral and spiritual significance, it is only natural that a modern reader should try to understand Sir Gawain and the Green Knight on the basis of medieval ideas about the meaning of foxes, holly, pentangles, and green things in general. To this end a thousand years of Latin literature has been scoured in hopes of finding authoritative glosses and explications for the stubborn details of the poem.

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