Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Over Christmas I decided to read some fiction. I haven't really read fiction in years. When young I consumed one novel after another until I quit at the age of twenty-five. I found them, Hardy, Maugham, Faulkner, Hemingway, Kafka, and many more, all so depressing. I encountered what Wylie Sypher analyzed in his book The Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art. Sypher's thesis is that 19th century romanticism began as a rebellion against God and kings. The rebellion succeeded and there developed a "void at the center of things." Without God, the self soon disappeared as well, leaving a self that was empty, alienated, and absurd. This is the hollow-man, the self as insect, anti-hero, functionary, cipher in a mass, a nobody, nowhere, nothing. In short, depressing.

But back to Christmas and the search for some fiction. I almost started Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, but the opening page was filled with the usual litany of death and decay. Then I stumbled across Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It was written in West Midland England in the 14th century by an unknown author. It is beautiful. It is powerful. Its setting is Christmas and tells a story of challenge and temptation that ends with the words, "Now may He that bore the crown of thorns bring us to his bliss."

One of Sir Gawain's most striking features is the sense of joy and beauty that pervades the whole. This is even more significant in that the main character is threatened with almost certain death from the beginning. But even so, he and all others rejoice at life. They feast, hunt, worship, and regale each other together throughout the yuletide season. And though the world in which they lived surely had its dreary side, the author renders all things -- the hills, trees, and skies, huts and castles, saddles, bridles, banners and clothes, as forever bright and beautiful.

How can this be? How can the sense of self, nature, and life be so strong and radiant and so much modern literature exactly the opposite? Surely life was no better then than now. A look at some commentaries on Sir Gawain gave the reason: it was written in a culture immersed in the biblical narrative.

The biblical narrative absorbed, judged, and transformed other stories, and Sir Gawain is a fusion of classical, Anglo- Saxon, and Christian culture. But above all, it is biblical. It is a Christmas story, and during Christmas 14th century England celebrated the traditional Christmas JOYS. Each of these JOYS was devoted to a biblical event -- the appearance of the angels, the exultant song of the heavenly host, the babe in the manger, the coming of the shepherds, the pondering of Mary, the mysterious wonderful coming of God into the world. And because God came into the world, and because this was a Christmas and not a Lenten story, and because the biblical narrative encompassed and transformed the world, all of life in spite of ugliness and sin was embraced and seen as beauty and joy.

We no longer live in a culture shaped and interpreted by the biblical narrative. Hans Frei, in his The Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative, locates the change in the 18th and 19th century. But it wasn't just the biblical narrative that was lost. Without that narrative, a beautiful shining world, the dignity of the self, God and all things are gone as well. (Plenteous Harvest, April, 1997)

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Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

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