Savage Economy

Walter Wadiak

Description

In Savage Economy: The Returns of Middle English Romance, Walter Wadiak traces the evolution of the medieval English romance from its thirteenth-century origins to 1500, and from a genre that affirmed aristocratic identity to one that appealed more broadly to an array of late medieval communities. Essential to this literary evolution is the concept and practice of “noble” gift-giving, which binds together knights and commoners in ways that both echo and displace the notorious violence of many of these stories. Wadiak 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. A traditional view is that the violence of romance stories is an expression of aristocratic privilege wielded by a military caste in its relations with one another as well as with those lower on the social scale. In this sense, violence is the aristocratic gift that underwrites and reaffirms the feudal power of a privileged group, with the noble gift performing the symbolic violence on which romance depends in order to present itself as both a coded threat and an expression of chivalric values. Well-known examples of romance in Middle English, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, are considered alongside more “popular” examples of the genre to demonstrate a surprising continuity of function across a range of social contexts. Wadiak 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. Ultimately, this is a book about the ways in which romance lives on as an idea, even as the genre itself begins to lose ground at the close of the Middle Ages.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Medieval
• Idioma inglés
• Sir Gawain y el Caballero Verde
• Idioma galés
• Edad Media
• The Knight's Tale
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• Middle Ages
• Irish
• English
• Sire Gauvain et le Chevalier vert
• European
• Welsh
• Scottish
• Geoffrey Chaucer
• Musique irlandaise
• Anglais

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 décembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780268101213
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

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 [e-mail] .
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 differenti