War, Women and Wilful Amnesia

Continuing our pursuit of a knight in modern guise

Greetings readers,

Today I want to follow our hero, Sir Gawain, and his nemesis, the Green Knight, in their recent manifestations, as presented by Ted Hughes, Iris Murdoch and Kazuo Ishiguro, with a glance too at David Lowery’s 2021 film. 

Ted Hughes dedicated his collection of stories, poems and a radio play, Wodwo (1967) to his parents. The works in the book sound the silence that he said hung over the Yorkshire valley of his childhood, a place that he described as being “in mourning for the First World War”. His father had fought at Gallipoli and in France but never spoke of his experience. His mother introduced him to folk tales and in the Gawain poem he heard echoes of the dialect that he associated with his childhood self.

The Wolds in Yorkshire

In his radio play, ‘The Wound’, the hero, Ripley, who has been shot through the head, talks of his memory being “dismantled”. He and his ghostly comrades stumble on an otherworldly castle full of women who order a banquet and entertainment. A girl tries to seduce Ripley and a dialogue, punctuated by silences, ensues, while he tries to rejoin his comrades. He stumbles through a landscape like that which Gawain travels in search of the Green Chapel:

Past the top-heavy oaks, the elms, the chestnuts, the towering trees at anchor in a misty harbour, by a still sea, waiting, moored by gossamers to the tips of the grass blades.

The imagery of battles, knights and blood colours the poems in the collection and the stories tell of men whose minds are disorientated by desire, the elements and brutality they witness. Gawains all, trying to understand their place in a world destroyed by violence.

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A castle, or suburban house, of women stands at the centre of Iris Murdoch’s The Green Knight (1993). Here, the widow, Louise Anderson, and her three daughters, hold court and host parties for a group of friends, mostly men. Into their midst comes a man, attired in green, who ultimately plays the role of nemesis, corrector of fates. The stranger, Peter Mir, had been thought dead, killed in self-defence by one of the Clifton ladies’ circle, Lucas. However, he has returned to life albeit with no memory of the events before the attack in which he was injured. He clings to this group of friends in order to restore his memory and to avenge the attack, setting up a re-enactment of the incident, echo of the Green Knight’s invitation to Gawain for retribution.

As ever, Murdoch assembles a group of arch characters whose intellectual affectations belie their emotional immaturity. Their web of connection is wrought with sexual desire and frustration, soul-searching and plain pig-headedness. Louise’s adolescent daughters, who have modified their names to Aleph, Sefton and Moy, hang out in a room called the Aviary and speculate about their future and their crushes. Two admire father figures, the brothers Graffe, Lucas and Clement, the third appears to be paired off with the brooding young Harvey.

Meanwhile, Louise entertains Clement in her bedroom but not her bed, and Harvey’s mother, Joan, tries to revive her brief tryst with Clement in Paris. Their mutual friend, Bellamy, has decided to become a monk and corresponds at length with a priest about his ‘calling’, notwithstanding that Fr. Damien tells him he doesn’t have a vocation. Bellamy’s dog, Anax, has been rehomed with Moy but yearns for his old master. In short they are all chasing the wrong dream. Even Peter Mir, who claims to be a psychoanalyst, deceives himself and his new friends. He is a butcher, which recalls the Gawain poet’s detailed accounts of the slaughter of wild game.

Although the novel is set in London, in peace time, the shadow of war is never far away. Sefton is obsessed with military history, particularly that of ancient Rome and Britain, and the what-ifs it provokes. Peter tells Lucas, who did not know his birth parents, that he is a Jew like him, and therefore scarred by the terrible events of the Second World War, although his adoptive name is German. Clement wants to stage a production of Hamlet, a revenge play set at a time of rivalry between Denmark and Norway. The play also reflects Murdoch’s story of Lucas’ attempt to kill the natural Graffe son, Clement. Until the truth of that incident is told the characters persist in their fog of confusion. When Mir dies they realign themselves in the proper order.    

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Interviewed about The Buried Giant (2015), Ishiguro said:

I was tempted to look at the actual contemporary events: The disintegration of Yugoslavia, the Rwanda genocide, France in the years after the Second World War . . . But I didn't really, in the end, want to set it down in any of those particular settings. I didn't want to write a book that looked like a piece of reportage . . . As a novelist, I wanted to retreat to something a little bit more metaphorical.

[Kazuo Ishiguro, Weekend Edition, NPR, 28 February 2015.]

Specifically, he was interested in how societies (choose not to) remember the dark moments of their past. He locates this fable in sixth century Britain, a place where ogres, pixies and dragons roam but where also the invading Saxons and King Arthur’s Britons are at loggerheads. A fog of forgetting afflicts the people in this quasi-mythical land so when an elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice, set off to find their son they travel more in hope than expectation because they are not sure where he is.

Along the way they encounter a Saxon knight, Wistan, and an elderly Sir Gawain (shades of the deluded Don Quixote), both of whom recognise but cannot place Axl. The knights claim to be pursuing the she-dragon, Querig, source of the amnesia. Following the directions of a healing woman they travel to a monastery where Beatrice hopes to be cured of a mysterious pain. Here too, however, there is division and dissension. Beatrice and Axl are a microcosm of the larger society, occasionally intuiting memories then wondering if it is not better to forget the bad times and so continue to love as they do now. If truth is the first casualty of war, forgetting can be a form of lying. The buried giant is war and, once fully exhumed, truth comes to light bringing with it sharper pain.

David Lowery’s film, The Green Knight, (2021) plays a little with the original story, emphasising the key role of Gawain’s aunt (here portrayed as his mother) Morgan Le Fay who engineered the confrontation with the Green Knight. He also includes the corpse-strewn battlefield, Bodon, where Arthur was reputed to have killed almost 1,000 Saxons, in order to show that he wasn’t the peace lover we revere today.

For Lowery the most exciting elements of the Arthurian legends he read as a kid were “the way in which human foibles intersect with honor and chivalry, and then the strange combination of Christianity and magic” . . .     

[Interview in Vanity Fair by Joanna Robinson, 16 July 2021]

In a flash-forward Dev Patel as Gawain sees the suffering that concealing the green girdle will cause and opts for truth. Lowery’s film includes several actors from Game of Thrones suggesting that his interest in the story stems from the popularity of that series, which in turn is inspired by a series of French novels, The Accursed Kings, by Maurice Druon, about fourteenth century French kings, bringing us full circle to the likely French origin of the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Holy Knights

There seems to be no end to our fascination with the medieval period as a source of fantasy and metaphor. The stories of that time retain their power I think because they encapsulate on a small scale (compared to modern warfare) the clash between high ideals, human vanity, sexual and political lust. Women have a central role as instigators and collaborators. The Green Knight tells Gawain that Morgan Le Fay, Merlin’s lover and pupil, wanted to put manners on the knights of Camelot and frighten Guinevere.

The “nutty women” in Hughes’ Wodwo are the source of life and order, his “Holy Warrior” in ‘Gog’ fares out of the “blood dark womb” to combat the Dragon of Revelations. Murdoch’s women are the lodestar for the conflicted and quarrelsome men, yet need the right men to make sense of their own lives. Ishiguro’s Beatrice, who shares her name with Dante’s beatific beloved, is the voice of honour and truth in his novel about the perils of vengeful secrecy and choosing to forget.

We hold the medieval mirror up to our own world in order to give us distance and perspective on the multiple battles physical and metaphysical being waged around us, to find clarity and truth in the welter of lies and false truths that surround us.       

Thank you for joining me on this medieval excursion. Please share your thoughts here