Savage Economy

The Returns of Middle English Romance

Walter Wadiak

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780268101213
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

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, properly speaking, both chivalric and mercantile, medieval and emergently modern? By exploring the trajectory of English romance through time, this book suggests answers that are intended to shed new light on romance’s longevity. Where we have traditionally understood romance as a mode of chivalric fantasy whose claims grow increasingly obsolete and absurd with the passage of the centuries, we might instead conceive of a mode whose violence is always available to reinforce a given order, including ultimately our own. “Chivalry” on my reading becomes, like romance itself, a term with immense travelling power. Specifically, the desire for chivalry that romance expresses can be understood, in my account, as a desire for forms of violence capable of regulating an evolving political economy.

This study contributes to a growing body of scholarship on aristocratic giving as a hermeneutic for understanding medieval literature. Much of this work has been focused on high-medieval epic, saga, and the chanson de geste, and Andrew Cowell in particular offers a reading of the gift’s violence that has guided my own thinking.¹⁰ Yet while this scholarship has been immensely valuable for its insights into the ways in which the noble gift helps to forge aristocratic identity in the Middle Ages, such work has tended on the whole to neglect and even marginalize romance, particularly that of the later medieval period. D. Vance Smith’s Arts of Possession is a brilliant exception in its exploration of the “forms of surplus and exchange that continue to haunt us, forms whose persistence economic anthropology has not fully recognized.” This book takes up Smith’s invitation to trace that persistence more fully, especially in relation to Fredric Jameson’s notion of romance as the literary genre whose unlikely persistence is an essential feature of modernity.¹¹ Savage Economy is in many ways an attempt to elaborate on Smith’s analysis of an “ethics of possession” that continues to shape the economic logic of our own moment.

Smith’s work also suggests a model for how gifts shape and manage the violent forms of desire central to romance. In this respect I have been inspired as well by more explicitly psychoanalytic accounts of the genre, especially by L. O. Aranye Fradenburg’s Sacrifice Your Love, a meditation on sacrifice in the writing of Chaucer, and specifically by her understanding of how sacrifice structures “the militant European Christian subject.” Similarly, Britton J. Harwood, in important articles on both Chaucerian romance and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, has explored what it means for this subject to “submit to the demands of the gift.” What matters most in such accounts, I suggest, is the central function of lack—the ways in which gifts become signifiers of the relations among desiring subjects. Often, as will become clear, those relations are forged in violence, tinged with the dangerous interplay between desire and death that romance so often depends on for its power.

Here it will suffice to say that psychoanalysis, the central modern account of desire, was from its beginnings interested in the symbolic power of the gift as this was known to late medieval chivalry. Jacques Lacan in particular relied on the anthropological work of Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss in formulating his theory that the symbolic order is constituted by a never-ending circulation of desire that begins with a gift: “the constituting gift of primitive exchange.”¹² Bruce Holsinger provides a specifically medieval context for this theme in Lacan’s work—one mediated, as Holsinger points out, by the psychoanalytic thinker’s debt to his contemporary Georges Bataille’s ethics of expenditure. Lacan gives a concrete form to this intellectual debt in Seminar VII when he speaks of “the piece of paper” on which he had quickly recorded (before he lost it) an account of a feudal potlatch held “somewhere in the region of Narbonne” during the Middle Ages. Despite having lost his lecture notes, Lacan nevertheless goes on to describe for his audience a medieval “festival” of giving in which desire takes a devastating form: “everything occurred,” Lacan reports, “as if the foregrounding of the problematic of desire required as its necessary correlative the need for ostentatious forms of destruction, insofar as they are gratuitous.” Echoing Bataille, Lacan ends his vignette by painting a picture of the medieval aristocracy as a class who (like Mauss’s Kwakiutl chiefs) “rival each other in trying to destroy the most” through giving.¹³ The gift, in this formulation, is a site where desire and violence converge. The early Middle English romance of Floris and Blancheflour, to which I will turn in the final section of this chapter, offers a basic model of the convergence that Lacan describes.

Lacan’s reading of Mauss and Bataille perhaps begs the question, though, since the tradition from which he draws can by no means be characterized as uniform. The counterintuitive notion that the gift, particularly in its noble form, does perform violence has been broadly generative for contemporary cultural studies, beginning with Pierre Bourdieu’s work on gift-giving practices among the Kabyle in Algeria—the initial germ of the French sociologist’s grand theory of “symbolic violence” as what helps to ensure and reify social inequalities in all kinds of societies both premodern and modern.¹⁴ Yet actually defining “symbolic violence” has proven no less frustrating than pinning down “romance,” and this is one symptom of the ways in which the latter depends on the logic of the former. In laying the groundwork for a reading of romance in terms of the noble gift, I turn first to the question of what we mean when we speak of such gifts as symbolic violence, and how this meaning might be related in turn to the work of romance.

“A SORT OF SUBLIMATED WARFARE”

When the English king Richard II met Louis Duke of Orléans during a diplomatic visit to France in 1396, the two engaged in what one reader aptly calls a “duel of gifts”:

Richard gave the duke a gold ewer and a hanap (a kind of ornate goblet), upon which the duke gave him a more precious ewer and hanap. Richard than gave him an ouche, an ornamental clasp, which he countered with a more beautiful one. Finally Richard stripped off his ruby ring and gave it to the duke, at which point the duke gave him a more valuable one, and left “with his head held high.”¹⁵

The stakes of this metaphorical duel were real enough: a magnificent gift “could establish the recipient in a dependent relationship to the giver” by creating a bond of subservience based on obligation—an idea that extends back to Mauss’s pioneering work on gift exchange in precapitalist societies.¹⁶ The noble gift in this sense is “symbolic violence”—even, as we shall see, what Bourdieu dubs the “paradigm” of all such violence. The example of Richard’s encounter with the French duke is apt in this respect, too, for it occurred as part of the peace negotiations at the close of the second phase of the Hundred Years’ War. Read against this background, the duel takes on a specifically political character, as the central antagonists, standing in for their respective armies, trade gifts in place of blows. As in war, the logic of the encounter is one of steady escalation, from relatively cheap and commodified to more expensive and personal objects, culminating in Richard’s gift of his own ring, a symbol of his personal authority, and the duke’s aggressive reply.¹⁷ The duke, brother to the French king, not only proves his “rank” (as Mauss would say) but—we might suppose in this context—also specifically works to refute Richard’s claim of liege lordship over France and thus, by implication, over the duke’s own territorial holdings. To come out behind in the gift-giving competition, by contrast, would have been to admit precisely the relationship of dependence with respect to Richard that the French monarchy had entered the Hundred Years’ War to refute. By challenging Richard’s right to give the superior gifts, the duke might be understood as also challenging Richard’s right to give the all-important gift of France in exchange for vassalage.

But the story does not end there. Its continuation in Thomas Walsingham’s Chronica Maiora rescues the gift from violence, as we might after all expect in the context of a diplomatic encounter. The violence of this remarkable exchange is, after all, merely symbolic, part of an elaborate process of negotiation in which not just material objects but kisses of peace will be exchanged among all present, culminating in the French king’s gift of his daughter’s hand in marriage, which Richard acknowledged aptly—according to Walsingham’s account—as “an honourable and welcome gift” and “the good end and conclusion of a perpetual peace” between the warring kingdoms. The gift’s power to secure peace was even to be given architectural form in a presentation to the church, a “Chapel of Peace and Our Lady” to be built on the spot of the peace negotiations “at [the two kings’] joint expense as an everlasting memorial.”¹⁸ Yet the fragility of the work done by these gifts is legible in the compulsion that they enact to keep giving more and more—from small objects to, finally, people and whole buildings. The need to give nobly in this fraught encounter seems almost like a confession that the intention of such gifts will always be open to question. Indeed, the violent meaning of the medieval noble gift—its latent aggressivity—depends in this example on all the ways in which that meaning is cloaked in elaborate declarations of the peaceful intentions of all parties, so that violence is both recognized and not. Such aggressivity is what Bourdieu calls the “the best-kept and worst-kept secret” of the gift.¹⁹

Among the more startling aspects of this account is the way in which it demonstrates the continuing centrality of aristocratic giving to a late medieval English scene that is at the same time emergently modern, the birthplace of a “culture of capitalism.”²⁰ Against such a background, the picture of dueling gifts summoned by the English chronicler reminds us of what we might think of as the persistence of the medieval: here, the ways in which late medieval exchange continues to be fraught with all the violence and danger of Mauss’s classic vision of the “primitive” economy. In his Medieval Warrior Aristocracy (2007), Cowell calls for us to move beyond the “false alterity” between a medieval economy of the gift and modern capitalist exchange to an appreciation of “a deeper alterity centered on the status...