Reading Gawain and Making Manifest (A response to Kate and my last post for President Obama)

In her post “Amnesia and the Problem of ‘Invisible’ Institutions,” Kate asks:

How do conscious participation and endorsement play a role in the power of the institution? What would it mean for Big Criticism and its offshoots to forget the influence of institutions on their historical present?

In Kate’s formulation, this overlooking is “forgetting” and “an inability to see or remember one’s institutional indebtedness…causes a sort of pathological rupturing.” In my response to Kate’s post that week:  “I would argue that where your post states an ‘amnesia’ on Faraday’s part about the institutions in flux, I read a suspension of disbelief, a willing delusion that an older system to which one is complacent in, comfortable with and reverent to is actually thriving.” The question, in this formulation, is not “What would it mean for Big Criticism and its offshoots to forget the influence of institutions on their historical present?” but rather “what would it mean for Big Criticism and its offshoots to disbelieve the influence of institutions on their historical present?”

Yet in Sir Gawain, we find that the green girdle operates as a nexus of seeing, remembering and believing for Gawain and his supporting cast; even further, the green girdle is arguably where Gawain experiences his pathological rupture where discontinuity between escaping death and realizing defeat maps itself. When Gawain goes to meet the Green Knight, the latter points to the former’s girdle and says “that is my belt…I know well the tale…and it was all my scheme”  (2357-2360). In this manner, the Green Knight uses the girdle to first reveal himself and then to reveal that he cares less about Gawain and his wife and more “that [Gawain] loved [his] own life” (2367).

Just as Bertilak uses the girdle to reveal his values, so does Gawain; in these valuations we find rupture. By seeing the girdle initially as “a pearl for his plight” (1856), Gawain himself invests the girdle with his personal trepidations and the ability to solve them. Hence, when the Green Knight indicts Gawain, he reacts by grabbing his girdle and pronouncing:

Behold there my falsehood, ill hap behide it!

Your cut taught me cowardice, care for my life,

And coveting came after, contrary both

To largesse and loyalty belonging to knights. (2375-2378). 

This time, the girdle does not simply symbolize his “cowardice” and “care for [his own] life” but as proof of his “falsehood.” The change from magic to falsehood exposes Gawain’s rupture from a pre-girdle “loyalty belonging to knights” to a post-girdle greed for self-preservation. Even further, the transference of the girdle’s initial meaning as a magical object to now an object of falsehood exemplifies Gawain’s act and materials of reading. He moves from dealing with a magical/miracle tale to an object lesson. Or we could also say, more glibly, that Gawain first accepts the girdle perceptually but afterwards places faith in it didactically.

At stake in Gawain’s girdle holding two meanings is not simply what the object means but the activity of making an object mean something. In pronouncing different judgments on the girdle, Gawain engages not merely in drawing out a symbolic meaning hidden in the girdle, but in making a meaning: reifying it. The work of reifying is to believe in the abstract and to make this belief incarnate. We find that at first, Gawain values magic and his own safety. After realizing Bertliak has bested him, we find that Gawain values his fallen integrity and the desire to learn from his mistake.

What we find in moving away from the perceptual-didactic binary of belief, or even the question of whether one believes at all, is that belief permeates the very acts of making and reading significance. In order for Gawain, or the reader of Gawain, to gain access into what items, individuals or texts mean, both Gawain and we summon forth and place before us our beliefs and values. Reading, then, is always reification. But then—what does that mean for the question we started with: “what would it mean for Big Criticism and its offshoots to disbelieve the influence of institutions on their historical present?” To disbelieve our institutional indebtedness to Big Criticism and the like would be to not read it into our work as what we do. Or more simply, we will it out. In Steven Justice’s formulation: "the presence of [will as] voluntary determination distinguishes belief not only from knowledge, but also from other forms of incomplete cognitive security, like assumption and opinion. Absent evidence of the will’s operation, the discursive traces of belief will be simply indistinguishable from thought as such" (14). Believing, then, is not seeing. It is willing. And in our neat circle of terms, to will for something not to be there, is to reify its absence and to collude with our texts and our eyes to not read it into who we are.