Gawain and the Nick of Time: Fame, History, and the Untimely in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Abstract

'Pag I be not now he ^at ge of speken.'-Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, l. 1242But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.-Marcel Proust, Sodom and GomorrahWhen Gawain flinches before the first swing of the Green Knight's axe, Bertilak offers a harsh judgment, declaring 'Pou art not Gawayn' (1.227ο).1 In this climactic moment of the poem, Gawain's failures have become numerous. By not disclosing that he accepted the green girdle from Lady Bertilak, he violates the Exchange of Winnings game that he entered into with her husband. However, the rules of that game were devised in such a way that he could do nothing but fail: he must either reject the Lady's offer of the lace and fail to live up to his courtly reputation, or accept it under her terms (that he keep it to himself) and violate the oath he made to give his winnings to Bertilak in exchange for Bertilak's winnings during the day's hunt. Even more, in flinching before the swing of the ax, Gawain acts as a coward, a trait unbecoming a knight of his stature. He is neither the lauded Gawain of courtly romance, nor is he the virtuous Pentangle knight that the poem puts forth. The Green Knight's accusatory challenge to Gawain's identity is as biting as the nick that marks the third swing, for it claims that the young knight is a pretender to the name of Gawain and not the true Gawain of Arthur's court. This sort of taunt is common in medieval romance, but I argue here that it can be read in a more literal fashion, that Gawain is not, in fact, Gawain. The link between the proper name 'Gawain' and the fame attributed to him is in essence far more tenuous and slippery than it would, at first, appear. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight thus puts the category of fame under interrogation, revealing how it occupies and engenders heterogeneous temporalities which unsettle stable senses of personal identity and of history.Fame, so important to Arthurian texts, is already something polychronic in its very make up.2 Put simply, fame is the transmission of a name (and the narrative associated with it) over time. Its dissemination through the ages participates in a significant process of accretion; in a manner similar to Jonathan Gil Harris' discussion of the temporality of matter in the Early Modern period, fame 'collate[s] diverse moments in time.'3 The fame of Gawain gains new layers and narratives as time passes, while also maintaining earlier versions, amended ones, revised ones, and those that are nearly forgotten. Although fame is apprehended in the present, it originates in the past-or paradoxically, in the future. And, as something that bridges different moments in time, fame carries with it the traces of those other encounters, a palimpsest of narratives. The temporality of fame, therefore, is an untimely one; the untimely, as Derrida observes, is non-contemporaneous and out of joint with the present moment, a spectral presence that haunts and disturbs the now.4 Elizabeth Grosz further locates in the untimely 'that which is strong enough, active enough, to withstand the drive of the present to similarity, resemblance, or recognition, for the untimely brings with it the difference that portends the future.'5 These disruptive yet generative aspects of the untimely are most apparent in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight where the statements of non-identity that haunt Gawain throughout the poem gesture toward the non-simultaneity of his reputation with himself. Specifically, Gawain's virtuous presentation in the poem contradicts the worldlier version found in the French Arthurian romances and invoked by so many of the characters that he meets; the knight's presentation in this poem enacts a historical fantasy that attempts to conjure away the trauma of the inevitable downfall of the Arthurian order. In this essay, I argue that the untimeliness of Gawain's fame drags in its wake a future that the poem seeks to banish, yet cannot seem to forget. …