Template Criticism: "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"Author(s): John HalversonSource: Modern Philology, Vol. 67, No. 2 (Nov., 1969), pp. 133-139Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/436002 .Accessed: 17/10/2011 16:30

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TEMPLATE CRITICISM: SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT

JOHN HALVERSON

HE problems of interpretation to which this essay is addressed are common in the whole enterprise of

literary criticism, but are particularly out- standing in the case of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a difficult but splendid poem and one that has, therefore, quite naturally attracted a very considerable body of critical commentary. The poem is alto- gether extraordinary, especially in the brilliant architectonics of its composition and prosody so uncharacteristic of its genre. This complex and symmetrical struc- ture seems to urge the critical reader to look for an overall meaning or intention as coherent as the form. (For the converse reason, it hardly occurs to one to ask what Guy of Warwick or Beves of Hamtoun "means.") Nor is this search misconceived; it has often had fruitful results. Quite as often, however, a theme once posited, the most ordinary standards of criticism yield to zeal; when promotion takes over from argumentation, the critic can permit him- self remarkable lapses of logic, willful dis- tortion of the text, and a reluctance to check the theory against what is actually written. I should like to give one or two illustrations of this kind of critical deterior- ation, and later to suggest why it happens.

Charles Moorman 1 has found the theme of the poem in Morgan's attempt to reform an inchoately corrupt Arthurian court. Whether or not he is mistaken about the theme (he is), his anxiety to contrast the good behavior in Bertilak's castle with the bad behavior in Arthur's leads him to the following statements (p. 167):

Bercilak's court boasts the finer hospitality. Compare Arthur's welcoming of the Green Knight, who has said that he comes in peace (see 1. 266):

... "sir cortays kny3t, If pou craue batayl bare,

Here fayle3 pou not to fy3t." [11. 276-78]

with the Green Knight's welcoming of the armed Gawain:

"I-wysse, sir, quyl I leue, me worpe3 pe better pat Gawayn hat3 ben my gest at Godde3

awen fest." [11. 1035-36]

Arthur, we note, is almost rude and cer- tainly high-handed, since the unarmed Green Knight has said nothing about fighting and, in fact, carries the holly branch of peace [11. 206, 265]. On the other hand, Gawain, armed to the teeth, is accepted as a guest and the modest court is delighted to have him [11. 916-19].

There is so much inaccuracy and misread- ing compacted in this short passage that it has almost a perverse elegance. In the first place, neither quotation is a "welcoming" at all. Arthur has already greeted the Green Knight, and the latter has made his own very high-handed speech before Arthur utters these words. The words of Bertilak (as host, not as the Green Knight) occur on the second evening of Gawain's visit, and of course Gawain is not armed at all. But let us do Moorman's work for him and see what the text has to say about the actual welcomings. Arthur's first words to the Green Knight are:

"Wy3e, welcum iwys to pis place, pe hede of pis ostel Arthour I hat;

1 "Myth and Mediaeval Literature: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," Mediaeval Studies 18 (1956): 158-72.

[Modern Philology, November 1969] 133

134 JOHN HALVERSON

Li3t luflych adoun and lenge, I pe praye, And quat-so py wylle is we schal wyt after."

[252-55]2

Bertilak's first words to Gawain are:

"se are welcum to welde as yow lykez pat here is; al is yowre awen, to haue at

yowre wylle and welde." [835-37]

The first words of the Green Knight to Gawain are:

"Gawayn," quop pat grene gome, "God pe mot loke!

Iwysse pou art welcom, wy3e, to my place." [2240-41]

Obviously there is no striking contrast, and the type of hospitality shown corresponds simply to the manner of arrival of the persons welcomed. Gawain has asked for "herber"; no one knows what the Green Knight wants.

The situation concerning arms is precise- ly the reverse of what Moorman suggests. When Bertilak first greets his guest, Gawain has already been divested of "helme," "bronde," and "blasoun"; his horse has been stabled and, I suppose it is safe to say, his lance with it (822-28). In short, Gawain is still wearing body armor, but is quite weaponless. When the Green Knight bursts into Arthur's hall, he is not wearing armor, it is true, and he does indeed carry the holly branch of peace in one hand. But what he has in his other hand Moorman obviously finds much easier to overlook than do Arthur's courtiers. Not only is the Green Knight most formidably armed, he crashes into the hall on horseback without announcement and without salutation, rudely addresses the king as "thou," and generally comports himself in an obstrep- erous manner. Under the circumstances, Arthur's courtesy would appear to be nothing short of monumental. Nor is there

anything noticeably "high-handed" about his reply to the Green Knight's speech. The Green Knight says, to be sure, that he is not seeking a fight; if he were, he would have come in armor, of which he has plenty at home. But he is certainly talking about fighting, and when a gigantic, belligerent man with an ax proposes a

"game" that does not involve armor, surely Arthur may be excused for surmising that he may be proposing "batayl bare," that is, combat without armor.3 And in the event, his intuition proves close enough to the mark.

What an extraordinary shambles, then, Moorman's remarks prove to be. He seems to have gotten nothing straight but two names and the fact that the Green Knight carries a holly branch. And this is only a paragraph out of a fifteen-page essay generally notable for its textual insouciance. The subject of interpretation here has been garbled almost beyond recognition, so much so, in fact, that it can no longer be said to be the subject. Moorman is not writing about the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but about something else. I do not suppose for a moment that the distortion is deliberate. But how does it happen that a reputed scholar can fall into such a quagmire of inaccuracy and obtuse- ness? The distortions are not deliberate, but they are willful. Moorman's subject is not Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but the decadence of the Arthurian court; this subject he has treated handsomely, but that very point of view has led him to misapprehend the otherwise plain facts of the particular poem. It is a matter of per- ception in the service of will.

In his ambitious attempt to tell us "What Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Is About,"4 G. V. Smithers elicits a number

2 J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, eds., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 2d ed. by Norman Davis (Oxford, 1968). Numbers in brackets are line numbers.

3 The Green Knight uses the word bare in this sense only thirteen lines later, and it is probably Arthur's sense of the word here.

4 Medium Evum 32 (1963): 171-89.

TEMPLATE CRITICISM 135

of problems of interpretation that belong particularly, but not exclusively, to the study of medieval literature. Because it is a traditional literature, the proper use of sources and analogues is of special impor- tance. Because it is part of a culture of the distant past, the meaning of words and concepts is much more problematic than it is for more recent works. And for the same reason, I suppose, it is extremely easy to overgeneralize: so often we talk about "romance" or "courtly love" or "medieval symbolism" as if the terms referred to homogeneous entities enduring unchanged over great expanses of time and geography, though we really know better.

Smithers sums up his theory by saying that "the whole point of the story is to establish the primacy of Gawain among knights." If that were all, he would be saying no more than Alan Markman had said some years earlier.5 But what he means by "primacy" is something spiritual: "If there is such a thing as a 'principle of unity' in the poem, it is the character of Gawain as a knight committed to certain ideals substantially like those of chevalerie celestiel." Celestial chivalry, opposed to secular chivalry, is the subject of the thirteenth-century French romance La queste del Saint Graal, on which Smithers leans very heavily, though he says he has come to his conclusions about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight independently. He first sees the Queste as an analogue, the connection being based on the interpreta- tion of the word Hautdesert as a combina- tion of French and Celtic elements to mean "high hermitage." Smithers thinks this explanation of the name (Tolkien and Gordon's) to be "as certainly correct as such things can be." But of course it is most uncertain, and indeed rejected by the

latest editor, Norman Davis.6 The lin- guistic connection is extremely tenuous at best, but even were it better, the parallel in respect to hermitages would be scarcely more persuasive. Hermits abound in Arthurian stories from Chretien on, and there is nothing to point to the Queste except haut hermitage; and the Green Chapel is not a hermitage in the first place, and is situated at the bottom of a valley (line 2145) in the second. Even as a remote analogue, then, the Queste has very dubious credentials, but soon it is being treated as a likely source and finally as something like the inspiration of Sir Gawain and a deter- minant of its meaning. In discussing Gawain's pride, Smithers cites a passage from the Queste concerning an adventure of Melyans and comments as follows:

The important thing here is that Melyans' reliance on his own prowess, which consti- tuted pride and led him into mortal sin, is explicitly attributed to his preoccupation with secular instead of spiritual knighthood. Ga- wain's remark about his own prowess in arms as a cause of pride is therefore to be referred to the same moral framework: it is shown by the parallel in the Queste to be an implicit allusion to the two kinds of knight- hood.7

This seems to me an indelicate use of source-and-analogue material.

Let us go on to look at the concept of pride. Gawain keeps the green baldric so that

quen pryde schal me pryk for prowes of armes,

pe loke to pis luf-lace schal lepe my hert. [2437-38]

5 "The Meaning of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," PMLA 72 (1957): 574-86.

6 Davis, p. 128; also rejected by J. A. Burrow, A Reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (London, 1965), p. 125.

7 P. 185 (emphasis added). The spiritual theme seems to have an unhinging effect. The eccentricity of the logic of the above passage is matched by Moorman: "The beheading game is from the beginning no ordinary chivalric adventure. Since this is true, it is likewise clear that Gawain's search for the Green Chapel becomes a spiritual quest" (p. 166). On the same grounds, it must likewise be clear that Sir Thopas is a spiritual quest, since it, too, is no ordinary chivalric adven- ture.

136 JOHN HALVERSON

For Smithers, "it is in fact clear that Gawain, in referring to pride and covetous- ness, is speaking the language of a man dedicated to spiritual knighthood." It is not clear to me, for the context of pride seems to be altogether secular. What will Gawain be reminded of when he looks at the lace ? Not of God surely, or of the fact that he is but a humble worm before God's majesty or anything of that sort, which would imply a spiritual context, but that he once failed to keep his word and forsook his nature, which is "larges and lewt6 pat longez to kny3tez." It is difficult to see a spiritual dimension in the original contract or in anything that follows from it. Pride in itself is not an exclusively Christian concern; the Greeks after all had a word for it, and as desmesure and ofermod, it is firmly embedded in the secular feudal tradition of the Middle Ages.

So is the concept of loyalty (trawbe). But once again Smithers makes refer- ence to the Queste, rather oddly in this case in that he does not assert any con- nection, but leaves it to be inferred by the reader:

The very marked emphasis given to leute and treuke in the English poem (by contrast with the analogues) is something that one might suppose to pertain to the secular elements in the knightly ethos. Loial and desloial are indeed stock epithets of praise and blame for knights, even at the early stage represented in Chr6tien's works, when no Christian impli- cations are explicitly in question; and they are common in the prose romances. But the Queste also applies them frequently to the conduct of knights in Christian contexts, and sometimes in reference to a knight's duty or faithfulness to God. [P. 186]

However the Queste applies the words, one must ask whether Sir Gawain applies them in this way, and the answer is obvious. Both concepts of pride and loyalty are

given connotations that can be supported only by reference to an irrelevant text.

The influence of the putative theme is also evident in the treatment of words, particularly the unargued assumption that clannes means "chastity." Smithers does not believe that Bertilak's lady is engaged in a chastity test-or if she is, it is of minor significance. Nevertheless, he finds Gawain "deeply committed to the ideal of chastity," and this is an indication that the poet's concern "is with spiritual and Christian and ecclesiastical values, and therefore with the spiritual rather than the secular aspect of the knightly ethos as embodied in Gawain."8 The principal meaning of clannes is not sexual purity, but freedom from sin in general, uprightness. As Smithers himself says, the lady is not testing Gawain's chastity, but his loyalty. The corner that she gets him into is a conflict between his courtesy-"consider- ate behavior," responsiveness to others' needs and desires, in this case the lady's- and his loyalty.9

He cared for his cortaysye, lest crapayn he were,

And more for his meschef 3if he schulde make synne,

And be traytor to pat tolke pat telde a3t. [1773-75]

I believe, with Burrow,"o that the last line is in explanatory apposition to "synne." But even if the two clauses are parallel, it shows only that sin (adultery here) and treachery are both conceived at the ethical level. A deep commitment to chastity is proved neither by his keeping Bertilak's lady at her distance nor by the poet's attribution to him of the virtue of clannes. Yet, even granting such a commitment,

8 P. 183. Smithers actually says, "These things nevertheless add up to substantial indications that the poet's concern .... " etc. But chastity is the only antecedent for "these things" that I can find.

9 See Larry D. Benson, Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (New Brunswick, N.J., 1965), pp. 44-55.

10 P. 100.

TEMPLATE CRITICISM 137

need it imply a spiritual vocation ? Havelok the Dane is represented as perfectly chaste. Is he therefore dedicated to "spiritual knighthood" ?11

It is not altogether clear to me what Smithers is making of the word cortaysye. His essential point seems to be that the poet

has watered down Gawain's courtoisie to a mere code of external manners, an impeccable style of gracious conversation and considerate behaviour in which only the words and not the deeds of courtly love remain. The poten- tial clash between the courtly and the Chris- tian ethos is never realized, because the poet gives such a strong emphasis to Gawain's Christian and spiritual ideals. [P. 182]

This does indeed seem to be the poet's conception of courtesy. But "watered down" from what? It has been shown again and again that "the deeds of courtly love" were never a requirement of cour- toisie,12 especially not in the Anglo-Nor- man and English tradition. Even in the French grail romances, are not the Gala- hads as courteous as they are chaste ? The potential clash would seem to be not be- tween courtly and Christian ideals, which may be consonant, but simply between chastity and fornication in whatever ethos.

In summary, it seems to me that Smithers has, in the promotion of his spiritual theme, allowed it to usurp his judgment in respect to the use of literary analogues, literary traditions, and language. Both Smithers and Moorman are eminent medievalists writing in eminent journals. The moral is

that which Chaucer applied to his parson: if our shepherds are in this condition, what of the sheep ?

The greatest mischief seems to be caused by an insistence on the "spirituality" of the poem. No one doubts that Sir Gawain and the poet are Christian; they may even be better Christians, as Smithers suggests, than their French counterparts-that is perhaps only to be expected. The religion in the poem is unambiguously Christian and is taken for granted even by the Green Knight. Everyone goes to mass regularly, and Gawain shows a special devotion to Mary. None of this, however, can be taken as pointing to a veiled spiritual mean- ing, any more than can the same sort of ambience in Dickens. It is Christian piety that is assumed, and piety and spirituality are to be distinguished: the first is an observance of religious forms, devotion to such religious acts as prayer and church attendance; it belongs to this world. Spirituality implies some kind of profound experience of, or communication with, the other world of deity. La queste del Saint Graal is an unassailable example of a spiritual work: there deity appears and speaks to the best knights, and wise hermits expound the allegorical significance of events. The grail knights consciously undertake a spiritual quest, and few return to the Arthurian court-this world-and then not for long. Naturally not, for their progress is one of transcendence.

There is none of this atmosphere in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Hearing mass and praying to the Virgin Mary are Christian acts, but they belong to quite a different category of Christian experience from the vision of the grail. Gawain's journey has no supernatural motivation; it is undertaken to prove the loyalty to one's word that "belongs to knights." Having learned what he has to learn, Gawain returns to the worldly court

11 That poem, incidentally, illustrates amusingly the English conception of courtesy that is also evidently the Gawain poet's. Earl Godrich is sworn to care for the infant Goldeboru

Til pat she were tuelf winter old, And of speche were bold; And pat she coupe of curteysye Don, and speken of luue-drurye.

[192-95] 12 See, e.g., C. B. West, Courtoisie in Anglo-Norman

Literature (Oxford, 1938); Alexander J. Denomy, "Courtly Love and Courtliness," Speculum 28 (1953): 44-63; Jean Frappier, "Vues sur les conceptions courtoises dans les litt6ratures d'Oc et d'OTl au XIIe si~cle," Cahiers de civilisa- tion mddihvale 2 (1959): 135-56.

138 JOHN HALVERSON

whence he set out and is reunited to it. He will continue the proper activity of a knight, "prowes of armes." There is no question of withdrawal from the world or of dedication to deity.

True, this is an account of the surface, which may, of course, be only an allegorical cortex. Perhaps it is a sufficient comment on the method of reading medieval litera- ture out of scriptural exegetics to observe that of the two full-blown allegorical interpretations of Sir Gawain to appear,13 one finds the Green Knight a figure of God, the other finds him a figure of Satan. Such contradictions occur so easily-so inevit- ably, I am inclined to say-because there is nothing in the text to anchor the inter- pretation. It is "template criticism," a ready-made pattern superimposed on the text that allows only the design you wish to see appear and screens out the rest. And the medieval-symbol dictionaries are so capacious, as everyone knows, that anything can be interpreted in virtually any way one chooses. There are no checks.14

There are other forms of template criti- cism: the psychological, for instance, and the mythic. A recent Jungian interpreta- tion has been made 15 that equates Gawain with the ego, Bertilak with the archetypal figure of the Shadow, Morgan with the Terrible Mother, Lady Bertilak with the Anima, and Arthur's court with conscious- ness; the story is about consciousness coming to terms with the demands of the unconscious. I have not come across a Freudian reading of the poem, but the outlines of such an interpretation are obvious. Bertilak certainly qualifies as a

father figure, and his wife is therefore a mother surrogate; the events of the narra- tive illustrate the dynamics of the Oedipus complex: Gawain's beheading of the Green Knight reveals a wish to kill the father; being wooed by Bertilak's wife is a partly repressed incest fantasy; the final scene with the Green Knight demonstrates Gawain's guilt and its association (in the near beheading) with castration anxiety. It would not require great ingenuity to develop this outline into a detailed inter- pretation.

The psychological template has one practical advantage over the theological: it does not have to show any conscious purpose on the author's part, since the process is necessarily unconscious (which can hardly be said for theological allegory). But it shares both universal applicability and lack of checks; 16 that is, there can be no literary work to which the interpretation does not apply; it is all Oedipal and/or archetypal. This may, of course, be so. And a realization of it may be illuminating both for the theory of literature and for indi- vidual works. On the other hand, if the psychological stratum really is absolute, it may be of no more value than saying that all literature is written in words. The critical problem will remain; we shall merely have to say, "Granted the work is written in a language, and granted that it is archetypal and Oedipal, what else is there?" Every work of literature is the product of a human mind, but not neces- sarily of a Christian consciousness; a veridical universal psychology would neces- sarily be more relevant than Christian dogma, even for an "Age of Faith." But one is not persuaded that depth psychology has as yet approximated that ideal. A problem of the psychological template,

13 Hans Schnyder, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Bern, 1961); Bernard S. Levy, "Gawain's Spiritual Journey: Imitatio Christi in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," Annuale mediaevale 6 (1965): 65-106.

14 How easily this operation can be performed I once showed by applying the method to the works of Mark Twain: "Pat- ristic Exegesis: A Medieval Tom Sawyer," College English 27 (1965): 50-55. This is a parody, to be sure, but the method and references are perfectly authentic and reveal quite clearly that the eighth chapter of Tom Sawyer is an allegory of salva- tion.

15 Stephen Manning, "A Psychological Interpretation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," Criticism 6 (1964): 165-77.

16 I once asked a literary colleague with unshakable Freudian convictions whether it would be possible for a novelist to write of an umbrella, say, without phallic signifi- cance; he replied-with great credit to his honesty-no.

TEMPLATE CRITICISM 139

then, is whether the psychological theory is itself an accurate statement; that prob- lem does not, of course, arise in the theo- logical approach, simply because it is a matter of dogma, not theory.

The myth-and-ritual template shares the main characteristics of the others. Ever since the ritual basis of Greek drama was adduced by the Cambridge classicists, it has been relatively easy to interpret any agon-transformation sequence as "essen-

tially" the myth of death and rebirth. In the case of Sir Gawain, this approach has been given currency by John Speirs17 es- pecially, and is too well known to need summarizing.

The trouble with template criticism is not that it is necessarily wrong; on the contrary, it may have considerable, but still always limited, validity. Furthermore, it seems to me quite possible to reconcile

theological, psychological, and mytholog- ical readings, though it would have to be at a certain level of terminological neu- trality and at a certain level of conceptual abstraction; the figure of the Green Knight, for instance, does suggest the natural world, Jack in the Green, the Devil, the Shadow, and the Oedipal father. But one trouble with the template is that it stops with identification: the Green Knight suggests the Oedipal father; therefore he is the Oedipal father. And once the template is imposed, it becomes tyrannical. It not

only excludes other interpretations and clouds perception, but also sends the inter-

preter off into a multiplication of detailed identifications often so far-fetched that

they arouse the amusement or scorn of all except other believers. It demands that everything be reduced to a single set of terms. This demand should be resisted, unless literary interpretation-or indeed

any interpretation-is to be only the hand-

maid of theology, psychology, or mythog- raphy. For the reality of the Green Knight lies at a center toward which these are only directing vectors. They do not identify, but point. And there may, finally, be no accept- able name for that center but one, that is, in this example, the Green Knight. The same holds for the entire poem. However, to say that a poem is what it is does not

spell the end of hermeneutics by any means; it means only that the subject of interpreta- tion must be the poem and not something else.

The outlook for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in fact, is much brighter than this essay suggests, for two excellent book- length treatments of the poem, already referred to, have appeared lately: Larry D. Benson's Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and J. A. Burrow's A Reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. As the titles suggest, they are complementary approaches, Benson's being "vertical" and distinguished by its tactful use of sources and analogues, Burrow's being "horizontal" and partic- ularly discriminating at the semantic level. Both writers vigorously assert central themes in the poem-which are, inciden- tally, compatible-but, most important, neither allows himself to be tyrannized by the theme, which is, on the contrary, presented undogmatically and continually checked against the text of the poem as it is written. Both writers make considerable use of other literature, of course, but in order to come to an understanding of the meaning of Sir Gawain, not to determine its meaning. Neither writer pretends to have said the last word on the poem, but both studies are illu- minating and rewarding, chiefly because of the sensibility and perceptiveness of the writers, but also because they reject the template approach.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ

17 "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," Scrutiny 16 (1949): 274-300; and Medieval English Poetry: The Non-Chaucerian Tradition (London, 1957), pp. 215-51.