A Legacy of Ashes: Being a Discussion of the Self

A book came out earlier this year entitled Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA. What does this have to do with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? Nothing, except that I was randomly reminded of the title of this book by SGGK's opening (and, by extension, closing) lines, and that applying the concept embedded in the CIA title to the medieval poem on this basis yields some illustrative results for the poem and its construction of the self and the other.

"Since the siege and the assault was ceased at Troy, / The walls breached and burnt down to brands and ashes..." (1-2). "Since" translates the Middle English "sithen," which (I am using the glossary in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Critical Edition, edited by Theodore Silverstein) is used elsewhere in the poem in a causal sense, that is, "since" as "because" as well as "after." In other words, we might add a secondary interpretation to these opening lines: the story recounted in this poem occurs not just after but because Troy was destroyed.

This introductory section contextualizes Gawain and his story as part of a legacy of ashes - the ashes of Troy. While providing a noble and justificatory lineage for Camelot, the beginning of the poem also grounds that lineage upon a primordial catastrophe, upon undoing and failure, and it only slightly minimizes this catastrophe and failure to learn that it occured because of one perfidious knight "that had knotted the nets of deceit" (3). Besides establishing the poet's recurrent obsession with knots and entanglements, this also foreshadows Gawain's personal lapse and failure at the hands of another sly and subtle (if not explicitly deceitful and perfidious) figure, the Green Knight/Bertilak. The "haughty race" (5) of Trojans that conquers far and wide is also a race of exiles (castaways, Others!) needing reaffirmation and rearticulation of its identity. The new kingdom which they found has always seen a combination of "war and wrack and wonder," "bliss" and "blunder" (16, 18). In short, by starting from the ashes of Troy and the legacy originating there, SGGK acquires its dominant theme of mutability and failure. The poet further highlights this theme in the gnomic aphorism at the beginning of Part II (to which I have already called attention in an earlier posting), warning us to "hold it no wonder" if "the end be harsher" than we had anticipated, because "[a] year passes apace, and proves ever new: / First things and final conform but seldom" (496, 498-499).

Specifically, the mutability and failure which will be demonstrated in the poem is that of Gawain. As J.J. Cohen makes clear in his discussion of SGGK in the excerpt from Of Giants, the poem describes Gawain's maturation, his acquisition of a new identity by exile (like the refugees from Troy) and confrontation with the Other - and this new identity will be rooted in a lapse and a sense of unworthiness. In fact (as I've also already noted) when Gawain first speaks in the poem, he is already espousing such sentiments about himself. We asked in class the other day whether Gawain really intends to be honestly self-deprecating, and I think the answer is quite clear that he doesn't, at least not entirely or primarily. He is attempting to demonstrate the elaborate courtesy upon which his identity, at this point, is in fact founded. The Green Knight takes pains, when accepting Gawain as his contestant, to establish this identity: "First I ask and adjure you, how you are called / That you tell me true, so that trust it I may" (379-380). Gawain obliges - "In good faith...Gawain am I" (381) - and, in response to Gawain's reciprocal request, the GK promises, "when I have taken your knock, / ...you shall hear straightway / Of my house and my home and my own name" (406-408). However, after the "knock" this promise is fulfilled, at best, partially: the GK discloses neither a proper name nor a real "home." Obviously, if the GK gave everything away right now we would have no story, but his incomplete and opaque revelation of who he is seems to match an incompleteness or a dishonesty in Gawain's own account of himself.

The poem proceeds to test this unstable and artificial sense of the selfhood of Gawain. Before he leaves Camelot, his squires arm and equip him in a detailed scene, and at the risk of sounding obsessive and repetitive in these blog posts, I want to underline again how wearing armor connects with the display and delineation of the self. "Closed," "enclosed" in his armor, Gawain is sealed up in a mission and an identity, and the external, physical rigidity of this identity seems to be directly proportional with its internal fragility. Most explicitly, Gawain carries his shield displaying the pentangle, "[t]hat was meet for the man, and matched him well" (622). This shield advertises the array of perfections which currently represent Gawain's sense of himself. But how well it really outlines and embodies his identity is an open question.

In the materialistic (and implicitly artificial) environment of Hautdesert, the denizens of the castle remove this self-advertising shell: "With light talk and laughter they loosed from him then / His war-dress of weight and his worthy clothes" (860-861). Finding that he "is Gawain himself" (906), they then publicize (or invent?) his reputation as "pattern and paragon, ... praised without end: / Of all knights on earth most honored" (913-914). An identity in accordance with the one represented by the pentangle is now fashioned and determined for Gawain, in a process prefigured by the elaborate rituals of dressing and accomodation described previously; Gawain is being "costumed" as a specific "Self" and must now fulfill it, act the part.

This requires more of Gawain than just hoisting a shield, and he knows it. Lying naked in bed in an unfamiliar castle rather than riding in full armor on a horse would make anyone feel less sure of herself, and Gawain evinces a more honest awareness of the fragility of his identity than was contained in his self-deprecatory declamations back at Camelot when he responds to the Lady's "as certain as I sit here, Sir Gawain you are" (1226) with, "I am not he of whom you have heard" (1242). Henceforth, the Lady repeatedly reaffirms that Gawain's self-definition is what really lies at stake in their encounters: "our guest is not Gawain" (1293); "if you be Gawain" (1481). The hunting excursions interlaced with the bedroom temptations, with what J.J. Cohen calls their "scenes of dismemberment and bodily disaggregation" (147), also underline the stakes of the testing at Hautdesert. Even the briefest and least gory of these episodes ends with the fox "Sir Reynard" (the fact that the third animal hunted is given a chivalric proper name connects him with Gawain even more directly) being skinned, his inner fragilities revealed to the world. Finally, this consciousness of physical fragility established by Bertilak's hunting, the awareness that identity consists not just of courteous reputation but of flesh and blood, sets up the terms of Gawain's ultimate lapse, in which he sacrifices some of his ideals for the sake of self-preservation because, as Bertilak puts it, "you loved your own life: the less, then, to blame" (2368).

Less, but still not no blame at all, particularly in Gawain's own mind. His final actions in Hautdesert repeatedly betray a self-consciousness of having violated both chivalric hospitality and his own self-definition. He initiates the gift exchange on the third evening, possibly to forestall any suspicion; he passes an evidently sleepless night; he elaborately praises Hautdesert, while leaving it, as "a household in hall that upholds the right" (2052); and as he rides off, "[h]is shield is shown forth" (2061), reminding all the world and himself of the values of which his identity has fallen short. Gawain repeats this self-affirming gesture during his final encounter with the GK, when, after enduring the third ax-blow (and falling short of knightly perfection one more time by flinching from the first strike), he "[s]eized his high helm, and set it on his head, / Shoved before his shoulders the shield at his back" (2317-2318). Upon learning that the GK is really Bertilak and that he is well aware of his lapse, Gawain's first reaction is to externalize his now-compromised sense of selfhood - "In you is villainy and vice, and virtue laid low" (2375) - but as Bertilak absolves him, he begins to come to terms with an identity rooted in weakness and imperfection and enacts this development by lowering his armor: "the doughty knight...doffed his high helm" (2407).

This encounter at the Green Chapel marks the culmination of what I have called SGGK's "legacy of ashes" stretching from the fall of Troy. In fact, the poet subtly reemphasizes the Trojan connection at the beginning of the episode by having Gawain's guide describe the GK as "bigger than the best four / That are in Arthur's house, Hector or any" (2102-2103). Just as the beginning of the poem linked the identity of Camelot to this history of destruction and exile, so Gawain now constructs a similar history for his own identity. His litany of biblical heroes betrayed by women is not just a misogynistic screed; in it, he formulates a lineage for his new sense of himself, identifying precedents for his awareness of mutability and moral compromise. Gawain follows this construction of a history with the construction of a new signifier for his identity: not the now-inappropriate pentangle, but the girdle itself: "a sign of excess it shall seem oftentimes / .... / A look at this love-lace will lower my pride" (2433, 2438). Lastly, he repeats his request from a year earlier, back at Arthur's court: "How runs your right name?" (2443) Previously, the GK withheld this in part because Gawain was subconsciously withholding his own real identity. Now that Gawain has fully articulated a new/alternate self, the GK can completely reveal his new/alternate identity in turn: "That shall I give you gladly... / Bertilak de Hautdesert, this barony I hold" (2444-2445).

In the final irony of the poem, Gawain, returning to Camelot, finds that his personal signifier, the marker of his new identity, cannot be interpreted in the same way by his chivalric peers. Instead, they appropriate it with a totally different meaning, once again vesting Gawain with an external and artificial definition of who he is, just as was done to him initially at Hautdesert. However, by returning us explicitly to Troy and its legacy of ashes, the poem intimates that this may not be all bad. "Many such, ere we were born, / Have befallen here, ere this" (2527-2528). "Sithen" Troy was burned to ashes, lots of things have gone wrong. To fail, to be mutable and imperfect, is to be human; Gawain is not at all unique in that regard. Therefore, maybe it's good that he cannot keep his singular, individual definition of private shame. Like Beowulf (who also habitually admitted his failures and personal dissatisfactions to a similarly oblivious audience), Gawain ends up, through confrontation with the Other, as a human being: himself.