For Sedgwick, positive feelings of interest-enjoyment and negative feelings of shame are two faces of our unified desire to commune with others: “Without positive affect, there can be no
shame: only a scene that offers you enjoyment or engages your interest can make you blush” (116). SGGK depicts three moments in which blood shoots to a character’s face for shame, all of which occur when the subject’s enjoyment and interest in communal belonging are threatened: after Arthur hears the Green Knight’s scornful assessment of his court (317–18), after Gawain finds out the Green Knight is aware of his chivalric transgression at Hautedesert (2371–72), and directly before Gawain launches into his tortured account of that transgres- sion to Arthur’s court (2503–04). For Valarie Allen, shame is always already social in
SGGK:
Each blush in SGGK [. . .] occurs before the gaze of another. Shame requires an audi- ence, occurring only once one sees that one is being looked at. It forms a crucial stage in the construction of self-awareness, an abysmal moment in which one sees oneself being seen being seen; reflections are reflected in the reflections of eyes. Shame con- structs subjective identity not as autonomous entity but as being-in-relation. (198)
SGGK certainly depicts shame as the traumatic, “abysmal moment” that Allen describes—
one in which society gets under our skin, making pure individuality impossible. Anticipating Sedgwick, however, the poem also depicts shame as social in the sense that its discomfort spreads to those who have witnessed another’s disgrace. Consequently, shame often solicits recuperative compassion from such onlookers, thereby re-establishing imperiled bonds of social communion. As Allen puts it, “a blush puts back together a body shamed by having lost its honorable integrity” (196). In SGGK, shame is traumatic and reparative, conditioning and communicative.
Prior to shame’s eruption into the poem, SGGK carefully attends to both the embod- ied nature of chivalric politics and the central role of wonder—an amalgam of interest and
enjoyment—therein. Indeed, the poem self-identifies as an “outtrage awenture of Arthurez wonderez” (129). Etymologically, both “outtrage” and “awenture” signify an encounter with otherness, a movement into the unknown.130 Likewise, “wonder” constitutes a psychosomatic enchantment with the unknown. Medieval philosophers considered wonder a profoundly generative awareness of unawareness that provides “a stimulus and incentive to investiga- tion” (Bynum 3).131 In addition to casting the story to come as a fount of wonder, SGGK’s narrator sets his scene in a Britain replete with “warre, wreke and wonder” since Brutus’ founding thereof, thereby marking wonder’s centrality to the arch-history of British politics after Troy.132
After alluding to the mythic originator of British rule, Brutus, SGGK’s narrator opens on Brutus’ most famous descendent, Arthur, in his “first age,”133 brimming with youthful en- ergy and wonder-lust:
He watz so joly of his joyfnes, and sumquat childgered. His lif liked hym lyȝt; he louied þe lasse
Auþer to longe lye or longe sitte,
So bisied him his ȝonge blod and his brayn wylde. (86–89)
[He was so merry in his mirth and somewhat childlike in his manner; his life pleased him well; he loved little either to lie long or to sit long, so busied him his young blood and wild brain.]134
130 MED, s.v. “outtrage,” Def. 1b; “aventure,” Defs. 4 and 5.
131 cf. Plato’s notion that wonder is “the beginning of philosophy” (155). 132 For an account of SGGK’s allusions to Troy, see Federico 34–47.
SGGK’s Arthur is certainly young and more than a bit hyperactive, but that does not neces-
sarily make him a bad sovereign. Refuting critics who read the narrator’s description of Ar- thur as pejorative, Aisling Byrne suggests “Arthur’s disinclination to ‘longe lye or to longe sitte’ may bespeak a refusal to rest easy in the comforts offered by the court and could point to the sort of vitality that is a necessary part of chivalric life” (69). In addition to indulging in displays of conspicuous consumption, SGGK’s Arthur solidifies his sovereignty by delaying hedonistic feasts and their soporific aftereffects until his boyish hunger for amazement has been satisfied. He therefore refuses, not only to eat until everyone has been served, but also to begin major feasts until he is informed of some “mayn maruayle” (94). A commonplace in Arthurian romance, this biopolitical power play forges a link between Arthur’s body and the body politic of which he is the head by rendering his own youthful hunger for wonder tanta- mount to the court’s mundane but altogether pressing hunger for food and drink. In SGGK, however, the enjoyment that stems from political belonging proves both fragile and danger- ous, and heads of political bodies and body politics are rarely as secure as they seem.
As L.O. Aranye Fradenburg points out, the Green Knight far exceeds Arthur’s modest desire to hear talk of the marvelous, leaving king and court firmly enrapt in wonder (23). In- deed, the Green Knight makes the court suddenly aware of their unawareness of the meaning behind his hue—“vch mon had meruayle quat hit mene myȝt such a hew lach” (233) [“eve- ryone marveled what it might mean that a knight and a horse could have such a color”]—and of the nature of his errand: “Al studied þat þer stod, and stalked hym nerre / Wyth al þe won- der of þe worlde what he worch schulde” (237–38) [“All were amazed who stood there, and stalked nearer to him with all the wonder in the world what he would do”]. After the Green
134 All Modern English translations of SGGK are my own, made with reference to the MED.
Knight asks to speak to Camelot’s governor, the court’s stunned amazement at his hue runs the risk of being reinterpreted as fear, which is antithetical to the courage for which the knights of Camelot are already famous. A deft affective politician, the Green Knight deprives the court of the luxury of continued, passive wonder by challenging its denizens to “the be- heading game,” which forces them to either live up to their reputation for pride (“sour- quydrye”), ferocity (“gryndellayk”) and resentment (“greme”) or suffer shame for failing to do so (311–12).