Savage Economy: The Returns of Middle English Romance

Savage Economy

Savage Economy

The Returns of Middle English Romance

WALTER WADIAK

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

www.undpress.nd.edu

Copyright © 2017 by the University of Notre Dame

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wadiak, Walter, 1977– author.

Title: Savage economy : the returns of Middle English romance / Walter Wadiak.

Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016039532 (print) | LCCN 2016043020 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268101183 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268101183 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780268101206 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268101213 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Romances, English—History and criticism. | English literature—Middle English, 1100–1500—History and criticism. | Violence in literature.

Classification: LCC PR327 .W33 2016 (print) | LCC PR327 (ebook) | DDC 821/.03309--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016039532

ISBN 9780268101213

∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at ebooks@nd.edu.

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER 1

The Persistence of Romance

CHAPTER 2

The Gift and Its Returns

CHAPTER 3

Chaucerian Capital

CHAPTER 4

Gawain’s Nirt and the Sign of Chivalry

CHAPTER 5

What Shall These Bowes Do?

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Preface

Romances, of course, should be read backwards. Only then does it become clear, for instance, what is wrong with Arthur’s untimely nap at the beginning of Chretien de Troyes’s Yvain or with the unfortunate Custom of the Stag in the same author’s Erec and Enide. Or we might notice, looking back, that there is something just a little too precious about the Camelot depicted in the opening scene of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—a complacency, we see in hindsight, that deserves a shock. Reading these stories retrospectively gives us access to the symbolic power of romance, the way in which this is like that, even as the genre resists the more strictly causal logic of a modern novel.¹ It might even be that a genre as disorganized and episodic as romance only makes sense in the ways that retrospective reading can reveal. The narrative structure of most romances consistently points us back to the beginning. The end is typically less an arrival someplace new than a confirmation of what the beginning already knows—less a resolution than a restatement of the initial problem.

This book asks what it would mean if the entire genre of romance could be understood in this way. What if, in other words, we thought about retrospection as ideological rather than simply narrative? It might turn out, in this case, that late romance could help us to read the genre’s origins anew—that such romances could tell us what kind of thing romance really was all along. This book is about a group of these belated romances: the romances in Middle English, especially those of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. While a classic view of romance is to regard it as an ideological imaginary and a structure of false consciousness through which a feudal elite justified its power and privilege, this book argues for a more complicated model in which chivalry becomes the organizing principle of broader forms of community.² We will see that these communities, while not imagined fully until about the middle of the fifteenth century, can nevertheless be glimpsed in much earlier texts. Ultimately, I argue for reading the reconstituted romances of the fifteenth century and later as a mirror of the ways in which romance is in fact always reconstituting itself, returning compulsively to previous ideological needs even as the genre adapts itself to every new circumstance.

Savage Economy begins with the assumption that romance names a particular kind of chivalric fantasy to which violence is central, just as violence was instrumental to the formation and identity of the medieval warrior aristocracy as a distinct class. Violence—who got to use it and who was on the receiving end of it—is therefore the central question of this book. A traditional way of thinking about the violence of romance is to regard it as an expression of aristocratic privilege, of the unique right to violence wielded by a military caste in its relations with one another as well as with those lower down the social scale. Violence in this sense is the gift or donum—the asymmetrical gesture—that underwrites and reaffirms the feudal power of a privileged group. The analogy with the gift is important to my argument, insofar as aristocratic giving can perform the symbolic violence that romance also depends on more broadly in order to present itself as both a coded threat and an expression of chivalric values—at once a covering over and a revelation of the truth of a chivalry based on coercion and self-interest.

Broadly, the book charts a trajectory from violence aimed directly at securing feudal domination to the subtler and more diffuse modes of coercion that later English romances explore. The violence of these texts becomes less personal and direct in some of the ways that critical theory of the past decades has illuminated. Yet this story is ultimately one of persistence as much as change. The persistence of romance, as I refer to it throughout the book, is the persistence of an archaic past within the rapidly changing world that these texts illuminate. Gifts speak to the modernity of romance—its desire to insert itself into a late medieval commercial economy of increasing sophistication and volume—and at the same time to nostalgia, the characteristic desire of romance to return to the past. If anthropology tells us that the gift is by its very nature an ambiguous sign, this ambiguity speaks to an essential tension in the romances I read here, texts formed by a late medieval world that wants to go back even as it is driven ineluctably forward. While my argument does not deny the potential for romance to activate what Aranye Fradenburg calls "the jouissance of the encounter with the new," I suggest that a continuity of ideology and social function can be observed in spite of changing historical circumstances.³

This approach obviously has its limits. This study does not try to chart historical changes fully, but it does strive to illuminate the reasons and the particular contexts in which the persistence of romance is important. Ultimately, it suggests that the violence of chivalry—and the desire for violence that chivalry celebrates—is the central commitment of the Middle English romances. In many respects bourgeois and even popular—as many of the genre’s readers have pointed out—English romances also dramatize how chivalric ideology persists as a residue in what might seem quite alien formations. In making this argument, I am keenly aware that I am all too often generalizing about texts whose precise social locations are remarkably diverse. This is probably unavoidable in a study that engages with multiple texts across a broad swath of time in making its claims.

A second limit of this approach—with resulting deficiencies that are somewhat harder to gauge—has to do with the kind of book this is not. For one could imagine a book that saw in the gift work of romance not an attempt at asymmetrical violence, but rather a way of imagining the gift as a truly radical gesture, along the lines of calls for us to think the gift as a means of going beyond our own restrictive economic and political regimes. Certainly many English romances do imagine gift giving as broadly constitutive of community. That should not be surprising: these texts have long been recognized to be speaking to a larger community than earlier Continental romances.⁴ The noble gift, on such a reading, might be understood to be destructive not of others, but of self—a realization of Georges Bataille’s arresting claim that human beings are only united with each other through rents or wounds.⁵ Such a reading is particularly intriguing as a way of accounting for those romances that could be said to subvert chivalric fantasies of possession, such as The Awntyrs off Arthur (discussed in chapter 2) and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (discussed in chapter 4). This book takes a different view, however. I propose an understanding of romance as primarily interested in the preservation of an existing order, often precisely through the assimilation of what might seem at first glance to be revolutionary or novel. In this more conservative estimation of the genre, medieval romances—even those that qualify as in some sense critical—work more often than not to defend and reinscribe chivalry as a strategy of violent taking.⁶ For me the interest of such texts lies partly in how they reveal the archaic roots of our own fantasies of ownership. This does not mean that there is nothing of ethical or human value in texts that so often conjure, in richly imaginative ways, alternatives to the world we inhabit, yet I do want to suggest that one undeniable function of romance is to perform a violence that continues to haunt us.

Chapter 1 begins by exploring how early English romance serves to affirm and express aristocratic identity and then shows how this basic purpose is tied to the classic function of the noble gift as described by modern anthropology. Floris and Blancheflour imagines the gift as a site of aristocratic distinction, sharply differentiating the gift from newer, commercial forms of exchange that this historically knowledgeable text also records. Yet the poem suggests that its gifts might activate a potentially universalizable desire for the objects of chivalry, a possibility that endangers the very distinction that Floris otherwise aims to secure. The second chapter shows that by the late fourteenth century, this threat was real enough to generate a response in the form of a group of spendthrift romances. The aggressivity of these heroes’ reckless giving is arguably directed at a rising bourgeoisie, but such stories dramatize aristocratic impotence in a world that no longer seems to have a clear use for actual knightly violence. Violence, displaced onto noble exchange, becomes a symbolic gesture rather than a sustainable means of ensuring aristocratic power.

Chapter 3 considers Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale as a text in which violence becomes not just displaced but radically decentered, beyond the control and intention of any one actor. Yet precisely for that reason, the profits of violence can be appropriated by the community at large and known, by analogy, as the cultural value of the tale itself. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (chapter 4) also suggests how violence becomes the sign of value that unites a community. Later romances of Gawain broaden their definition of the chivalric community to include non-nobles to the extent that they, too, can be seen to embody the potential for violence. The evolution of the Gawain story shows how romance, in becoming popular, can rework chivalric ideology to suit new social needs without essentially transforming that ideology.

The final chapter explores how this process of adapting romance to new circumstances provides an imaginative basis for the emergently modern forms of social and economic life that late medieval outlaw tales depict. Stories like A Gest of Robyn Hode demonstrate the persistence of romance in the context of a literary tradition usually thought of as expressing romance’s decline. If English romances have seemed to many readers to be marginally chivalric at best, outlaw tales are literally unchivalric in featuring heroes who are typically not knights. Yet stories like the Gest allow us to see in a new way the extent to which a nascent culture of capitalism remained at the same time a profoundly chivalric culture, invested in a violence that capitalism at once pretends to abjure and cannot do without.

Acknowledgments

This is a book about bad gifts—the kind that compel or seduce us into submission—but we know that life would be intolerable without real gifts: those that not only aid and nourish, but in doing so communicate some part of the giver’s essence. In acknowledging my debts for the good gifts I have received, I hope in a modest way to say something about the people who have given them to me.

This book could not have been written without the support and dedicated mentorship of my graduate advisor, Elizabeth Allen, who mentioned after class one day—as if proposing a walk—that I might think about becoming a medievalist. From the moment I showed up in her office a week or so later, she has been the best of teachers. She has read some version of everything in this book—usually more than once—and offered endless encouragement while also asking the tough questions that sometimes needed to be asked. Two of my other teachers at the University of California, Irvine, Linda Georgianna and Robert Folkenflik, have read chapters and offered helpful suggestions, and both continue to be mentors as well as kind and wise friends. For their advice and insights at various points in the coming together of this book, I am also grateful to George Edmondson, John Ganim, Noah Guynn, William Kuskin, Kathy Lavezzo, Robert Meyer-Lee, Kevin Riordan, Elizabeth Scala, Ronald Schleifer, and George Shuffelton, among many others.

The Donald A. Strauss Foundation provided support in the form of a dissertation fellowship that helped me begin this project, and UC Irvine gave additional support through its Summer Dissertation Fellowship program. Stephen Little at the University of Notre Dame Press was always quick in his replies and helped me negotiate a lengthy process. I am also most grateful to Andrew Galloway and the other anonymous reader of the manuscript, who suggested the inclusion of a coda and a preface, respectively, and were challenging in all the right ways. Beth Wright of Trio Bookworks provided excellent copyediting. Philological Quarterly and Exemplaria gave me permission to reprint material from previously published work that appears here in chapters 3 and 5, respectively. It was a stroke of luck for me that the anonymous readers and the editors at both journals were unusually helpful.

Some of my most profound debts are to the people who put up with me during the unnaturally long life of this project. My fellow graduate students at UC Irvine, especially R. Jacob McDonie, Megan Nowell, and Scott Eric Kaufman, were my close comrades as my ideas were first taking shape, and I am grateful for their conversation and friendship. Two of my colleagues in Singapore, Andrew Yerkes and Daniel Jernigan, alternately prodded and soothed until the thing was finally written, and both have since become cherished friends. Matthew Dudley was a source of loving support and companionship throughout the entirety of this book’s making. Our closeness means more to me than I can begin to acknowledge here. My first debt, like all first debts, is to my parents: Ellen, who read to each of her children in turn, and Tommaso, who was there when we needed him most.

CHAPTER 1

The Persistence of Romance

This is a book about the meaning of gift giving in medieval romances, but it is more broadly about the kind of thing a medieval romance is. Romance is notoriously the vaguest of the categories by which we claim to be able to reduce medieval literature to some kind of order, and it was a category loosely employed by medieval writers and readers themselves. It originally signified no more than a text’s vernacularity (anything written en romanz), only developing in time the associations with love, adventure, and courtliness that we think of as central to the form. Nor do all texts labeled as romances by medieval or modern readers fulfill even these basic criteria, leading one surveyist of the form to conclude that it is practically impossible to generalize about the romances because they have so little in common.¹ Yet it is just as clear that we cannot do without some attempt to define the contours of the dominant genre of secular literature in the Middle Ages. Romance conjures a set of problems for literary history that seem intractable yet unavoidable.

Middle English romance has long been a kind of limit case for this set of problems. Minimalist in style, devoid for the most part of courtly interest, and typically unconcerned to delineate a complex psychology of love, many English romances look like anything but romances—a problem crystallized by a tendency in critical literature to summon up the names of other genres when describing what a given English romance is actually like: chronicle, epic, exemplum, saint’s life, fabliau. In the readiness with which they blend into other genres, English romances dramatize with particular force the rule of thumb that medieval genres seem rarely to have very sharp edges. Attempts to define English romance have also had to contend with a critical tradition that regards these texts as impoverished in relation to Continental exemplars, so that what the English poems seem to lack—all the elements of chivalry and romance, in one reader’s remarkable phrase—has been taken to signify a more general illegibility of form. Yet romance is central to the course of literary history in English, even perhaps to the extent of providing the grounds for the English literature of later periods.² The problem of identifying with any certainty what the genre of English romance might amount to thus presents itself as a problem for the history of English literature in general. It is as if, having determined that virtually every post-Conquest literary text in English owes something to the legacy of romance, we have simultaneously decided that nothing really is one.

Such questions might initially seem remote from a book about gift giving, but in fact English romance imagines itself as a gift from its first lines. The very oldest of these texts in Middle English, King Horn (circa 1225), begins by promising us a gift in the form of a hero so exceptional and rare, so unlike anything or anyone else—Nas non his iliche (line 20)—that he quite literally lights up any room he enters, himself the bearer of charisma in the original sense of a divine gift. Just hearing the story of such a man, the narrator assures us, will make us blithe (1).³ If we are inclined to speak of the spirit of such texts—as the critical work on them has tended to do—this is in part because we recognize that, like the spirit or hau of the gift as first described by Marcel Mauss, the spirit of romance is what ensures that all the losses inflicted by the initial traumas of romance will be made good.⁴ It is this spirit that allows us to recognize the earliest romances produced in post-Conquest England as stories especially obsessed with the returns they promise, so that even if stories of departure and return are hardly unique to insular literature, there is still something highly symptomatic about the sheer number of such texts to appear in England from about 1200 to 1500—a fact that connects these romances to their time and place.⁵

Such stories promise us implicitly (and often explicitly) that they will recoup the losses driving their protagonist into the world of action, so we can read the path from loss to recovery traced out by these romances as a literary economy. And it is not just any economy, moreover, but specifically that of the noble gift, since however confidently such stories promise that all losses will be recovered, their narrative space is precisely the interim between loss and recovery that differentiates such giving from the mere exchange of commodities.⁶ Even when these romances seems in some broad sense popular, as opposed to aristocratic, they typically present themselves as authentic products of chivalric culture, despite and perhaps even because of so often being commodities in a growing late medieval marketplace for English writing.⁷

It is also characteristic of romance in medieval England that the informing spirit of these stories—grounded in the rude vigor that distinguishes them—is identifiable in their most characteristic excesses, even as this same spirit is also what ensures their knowability as romances. In this, too, romances of England perform the gift as an expression of what modern cultural studies, primarily through the work of gift theory itself, recognizes as symbolic violence. On the one hand, then, scholars have long celebrated or lamented (according to taste) the considerable gore of these pulp fictions—their propensity for the fierce and rough, bloodthirsty, and gruesome—in short, for everything that makes lethal chivalric violence … the genre’s earliest and longest-lasting concern.⁸ Yet most have accepted at the same time that romance might after all be the best word for a genre that also knows something about the symbolizing procedures through which brute force can be transformed into the value of chivalry. Scholarship implicitly recognizes, in other words, that even the so-called popular romances of medieval England are remarkably adept at the kinds of mystification that spirit names, just as the hau of the gift exerts its compelling force by virtue of its numinousness. We are beginning to recognize, in other words, that the romances of medieval England are remarkably chivalric in their concerns and values, precisely because they are also everything else: bourgeois-gentry, mercantile, popular, "entirely and essentially middle-class, and in a few cases perhaps even lower-class."⁹ This book reads the scenes of aristocratic giving performed in English romances as a central metaphor for this complexity of social meaning. It argues that the paradoxes of the noble gift offer us an important way of understanding texts whose own paradoxical social location is becoming increasingly apparent. I explore how these stories enact, through their insistence on the gift, the persistence of a chivalric culture that will prove highly adaptable to new contexts.

Central to my analysis of this complexity is the question of violence in the English romances. What does it mean to say that violence becomes a gift in many of these stories? How, indeed, can violence become a gift? And how does this violence sustain a range of contexts which are,