Is he dead? Was he ever alive? (A response to Bryan and a post for Mr. Obama)

In his post “Is he dead? Is she dead?”, Bryan reflected on Mbembe’s notion of “death-worlds”: “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead” (40). 

      After reading his post, I left a comment asking him to expound on the source of these conditions in the poem: who or what was exercising necropolitics. He responded by essentially telling me that my question was irrelevant: the source did not matter, only the experience.  Of course, I am only roughly paraphrasing what were in fact lengthy and complicated readings of Mbembe’s term. What Bryan’s reading of Mbembe, and Rankine through Mbembe, brings to light is the prospect that events of killing as well as perceived fear from events of killing do not exist outside of and distinct from the individual as concrete “facts.” The sensation of terror that the individual feels does not comes from a cause that bears out an effect; there is no cause of death—it is always-already present.  

In a footnote to my post on Mbembe that same week, I had emphasized that the event of killing was actually immaterial to Mbembe—a contention I took him to task for in my post. Yet Bryan’s post and response to my question about the source of necropolitics—the entity that decides who to kill—puts pressure on my pat reading of necropolitics and the question of sovereignty. Instead of a focus on the importance of the event of killing, and its tie to an individual’s sovereignty in the text, wouldn’t a true necropolitical reading also examine the creation of death-worlds? 

While the Sir Gawain is on the one hand about the event of killing Gawain, the narrative also represents Gawain’s fear of being killed. Gawain is marked early on as someone who will be killed and therefore, for the reader is both alive and dead. Even further, Gawain himself feels both alive and dead. The clearest illustration of this zombie-like consciousness is when the poem describes Gawain at the very moment he is tempted with the green girdle:

 Deep in his dreams he darkly mutters

As a man may that mourns, with many grim thoughts

Of that day when destiny shall deal him his doom

When he greets his grim host at the Green Chapel

And must bow to his buffet, bating all strife (1750-1754).

In sleep Gawain mutters as if awake. In sleep he is as if a man that mourns. In sleep, he is aware that he is dying, and pictures the moment when he dies. Sleep’s proximity to death, as well as death’s disturbance of sleep creates a death world: a feeling dead while being alive. For the logic of the text, it is at the very moment that a state of a death-world emerges that the opportunity to escape death arises. Starting from the very next line, Bertilak’s wife appears, and at the end of this scene, offers Gawain what he determines is “a pearl for his plight, the peril to come” (1859).  At the thought that “could he escape unscathed, the scheme were noble!” (1860) Gawain as a character seems to unravel. His rather simple obedience to the Green Knight’s quest is blurred by the possibility of meeting death to and escaping it. He knows he is dead, but feels alive. And while The Green Knight ultimately forgives him of his error, Gawain comes to Arthur’s court as a ghost-of-sorts: one who was expected dead, but returns.

After identifying the terror of Gawain’s death-world in Sir Gawain, it is tempting to then ask: how does it come about? I could, for instance, delve into the implications of The Green Knight’s forgiveness as an exercise of power and argue that ultimately The Green Knight does win by letting Gawain live. I could also rehash the slippery semiotics of the green girdle as an object that reifies and marks Gawain’s multiple deaths (death as courageous, death in being Bertilak’s ultimate conquest, death of his own sense of self, death as an individual and transmutation into a social spectacle). But do these questions about power and killing actually matter?

As Bryan posits at the end of his post: “Death-worlds, then, are powerful ideas or things only insofar as… they end up structuring private and public thinking to the extent that ‘lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom are blurred’ (40).” For us to think of death-worlds, we cannot simply say they exist and tie them to some structural outside. Death-worlds are, by definition, nebulas: they are zones where values (resistance, redemption, freedom) and desperation (suicide, sacrifice, martyrdom) are blurred. Recognizing this liminal space where an individual can feel dead while alive, and alive while dead, I would argue two things about Sir Gawain. First, given that the tipping point of the narrative unraveling happens when Gawain is in the state of the death-world, it would seem that affect is more central to the plot than an external cause; Gawain falls apart because of this sensation of feeling dead, not merely that he will be dead. Second, Gawain, from start to finish, is never fully alive or fully dead—from the moment he sees himself as sacrifice to the moment he is redeemed through Green Knight’s forgiveness and the court’s kindness, he is always dead, while still alive. And yet, while I acknowledge a reversal from challenging to now accepting Mbembe’s “Necropolitics” as a lens of literary analysis, I also wonder if the quest for the value of applicability and the impulse of applying his theory is not ultimately blurred by the conditions, constraints and questions we face in reading texts and theories the way we do.