[1] One of the pervading threads in fandom studies is the metadiscursive tendency within fan works through which audience members engage with media in creative ways that frequently challenge the limited scope of available canon, sometimes leading to uncomfortable encounters between creators, members of fandom, and other parties interested in arbitrating legitimate use and interpretation of texts (note 1). However, the challenge presented by active audiences whose desire to interpret and transform texts to accommodate their own desires is a creation of neither the internet age nor of modern mass media, and the struggle over figurative ownership of genres, texts, and characters is a recurrent theme in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK; ca. fourteenth century), one that often takes turns that are strongly reminiscent of modern conversations about and within fandom studies. This romance explores the tensions arising from audience investment and participation in a still-developing canon that characters demand fulfill their social, political, and emotional ends. Throughout the text, the romance pits the character Gawain against his own canonical textual exploits, romances read and stories told in both the court he represents and the one to which he travels, and even the narrator's (and by extension, the audience's) own heroic and epic expectations. Moreover, the text metadiscursively emphasizes its own status within existing literary traditions and reliance upon audience familiarity with Arthurian canon for much of its humor and logic. Ultimately, SGGK highlights a familiar struggle over canonicity and legitimacy in which individuals and communities attempt to define and redefine who has authority over characters and narrative authenticity.
[2] The definition of fandom in general and fan fiction in particular is one that is complicated in fandom studies, and depending on how one defines either term, incredibly expansive or limited, with a tendency in the field toward increasingly restrictive definitions that privilege mass media fandoms of the past half century. As Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (2014, 6) suggest, the stakes for defining these terms are profound for determining what is included in the purview of fan studies:
[3] These inclusions or exclusions relate to how one thinks of fan fiction. If we think of it as a form of collective storytelling, then the Iliad and the Odyssey might be tagged as the earliest versions of fan fiction. If we think of fan fiction as a response to specific written texts, we can trace fan fiction back to the Middle Ages. If the term is understood to include a legal component, then fan fiction could not have existed before the development of authorial copyright, so the first fan fiction could, for example, be some of the rewrites of Jane Austen by her readers. If the term requires an actual community of fans who share an interest, then Sherlock Holmes would easily qualify as the first fandom, with fan-written Holmes pastiches serving as the beginnings of fan fiction. Finally, if we look at it as a (sometimes purposefully critical) rewriting of shared media, in particular TV texts, then media fan fiction, starting in the 1960s with its base in science fiction fandom and its consequent zine culture, would start fan fiction proper.
[4] Like many scholars in the field, Hellekson and Busse advocate for the delimitation of the term to transformative works that rewrite mass media texts of the past fifty years. Middleton (2016) focuses on the marginalization of fan fiction due to its nonmonetized status as constitutive for both creators and detractors. At the other end of the spectrum, in his foundational work, Textual Poachers (1992), Henry Jenkins posits a much more inclusive conception of fandom and fan works, suggesting that any form of community or collective storytelling or retelling falls under the aegis of fan fiction. More recently, Anna Wilson (2016) argues that the role of affect in the production of fan fiction and within the communities that produce, promote, and exchange fan fiction is crucial both to understanding and defining it as a form of transformative literature distinct from those that precede it.
[5] There are useful and significant reasons for acknowledging the profoundly different media, social, and legal contexts that give rise to fandom and fan fiction that distinguish them as social and literary acts from other forms of derivative or appropriative literary work, and in focusing a study, very strong methodological incentives for doing so. However, it is useful to think about how some of the approaches and tools of fandom studies might usefully be applied to texts that do not fully meet the criteria of a particular scholar for a text or corpus as belonging to a fandom, but that overtly invoke dynamics that are similar to those associated within fandom studies with modern fandom: an enthusiastic, informed yet critical audience who consume an existing textual corpus defined in some way as preexistent and authoritative yet reject the authority of canonicity. Indeed, in SGGK, we see the self-referential depiction of an Arthurian romance fan community, whose members not only critique the existing Arthurian texts and creators, but go further—inserting themselves within the corpus both as characters and creators, adding to and altering the character of the textual archive itself as an act of consumer, creative, and narrative power. The ways in which this poem delineates a textual and audience experience and behavior in many ways parallel the textual behaviors of modern media fans, suggesting the usefulness of framing an analysis of SGGK through some of the same interpretive tools.
[6] SGGK is a famously intertextual poem in both overt and implicit ways. It is part of an Arthurian tradition both continental and insular, and it playfully draws upon aspects of both major strands of the Arthurian corpus. Gawain is a prominent figure in Arthurian romance in both traditions as Arthur's nephew, and by the early twelfth century, he was "a familiar figure in European ecclesiastical and learned culture" (Hahn 2000, 218). As Cory J. Rushton notes, Gawain is in both English and French traditions consistently linked to "sexual opportunism," "eager for and often unable to resist sexual encounters," a tradition upon which SGGK leans heavily for its comedy as Gawain defies the expectations of its audience (2007, 37). Gawain's reputation for sexual exploits is typically treated differently on the continent and in England: in Middle English romances, around a dozen of which focus specifically on Gawain as protagonist, Gawain's sexual insatiability often leads to his famed many marriages and ultimately to Arthur's political benefit through his nephew's alliance. On the other hand, the French prose Arthurian tradition, as represented in the grail romances of the thirteenth-century French Vulgate Cycle, tends to point to Gawain's sexual misdeeds as sinful and the reason for his inability to achieve the grail. Proliferating Arthurian romances throughout the Middle Ages led to differing emphases and characterizations of the same characters and narratives, so that by the time SGGK was written, Gawain was a familiar character but one who had been given many different, and sometimes contradictory, treatments over time.
[7] SGGK is a complexly layered poem that both situates itself within multiple existing canons and repeatedly defines itself in tension with the audience expectations established by those intertexts and by its own invocation of them. In the opening lines of the poem, the narrator frames the romance within the context of the fall of Troy and the founding of Rome as related in the epic poems of the Iliad and the Aeneid and retold in the French prose romances of the Holy Grail. The poem then goes on to describe the larger postfall Trojan diaspora in a way that places the text within a larger literary tradition while setting clear narrative expectations for the audience. The first and last lines of the poem reference the siege and fall of Troy, the founding of Rome, and the establishment of various European nations by the descendants of the Trojan refugees, ending with the case of the founder of Britain, Felix Brutus:
[8] On mony bonkkes ful brode Bretayn he settez
Wyth wynne,
Where werre and wrake and wonder
Bi syþez hatz wont þerinne,
And oft boþe blysse and blunder
Ful skete hatz skyfted synne. (14–19)
[He founds Britain on the broad hillsides with pleasure, where war and woe and wonder have occurred in turn, and often both great joy and strife have alternated since.]
[9] The historical narrative outlined in this opening is cyclical—a series of catastrophes leading to exile, and then foundation, only to start the cycle, one of "blysse and blunder" (joy and strife) again. Britain itself then gains greater focus as a land noted especially for its men who love conflict and battle ("Bolde bredden þerinne, baret þat lofden"), but also as a land marked by the supernatural and marvels, a place where "Mo ferlyes on þis folde han fallen here oft / Þen in any oþer þat I wot" (More marvels have taken place in this land, than in any other I know of) (21, 23–24). Having introduced Britain as the site of the most warlike men and the most supernatural wonders, the text continues the train of superlatives in its description of Arthur, the "hendest," or most noble, of Britain's kings (26). The narrative of SGGK is described as "an outrrage awenture of Arthurez wonderez" (29) and as a narrative related both through the spoken and written word, one that is, the narrator notes, "a selly in siʒt summe men hit holden" (itself a marvel considered strange by some men) (28). This opening serves to evoke audience expectation on several levels. First, it introduces its own forthcoming narrative within a context framed by an epic narrative and genealogical background that also recalls the French Arthurian tradition with which, as Edward Donald Kennedy (2007) has noted, at least some of SGGK's audience would likely be familiar. As described above, the Arthurian tradition it invokes is rich, but by characterizing it specifically within the Trojan context, the narrator suggests a framing within a cyclical view of history characterized by periods of disaster and regrowth, implicitly invoking the apocalyptic end to the Arthurian court even as it tells a narrative set during the court's "first age" (54). As critics have noted, this opening operates on multiple levels to call upon the audience's familiarity with preexisting texts in the Arthurian corpus, working to both introduce this text as part of a venerable tradition and to establish itself as part of that tradition and thus subject to a horizon of expectations generated by past exemplars of the romance genre in general and of the Arthurian corpus in particular, and especially those invoked in the opening (note 2). What exact interpretation might be drawn, however, is subject to a particular audience member's individual familiarity with specific precursor texts, as Kennedy suggests (143–44). Furthermore, those expectations are also shaped by the narrator's own priming in the introduction, through his naming of the romance's precursor intertexts, and by the characteristics of the characters and texts that belong to the body of texts to which SGGK is about to be added. Thus, the audience knows to expect a Britain characterized by people who most love to fight and by the most supernatural marvels, an Arthur who is the most noble of its kings, and a tale that is, of all of the wonders associated with Arthur, one of the most extraordinary. Even if, by some chance, an audience member might lack any experience or knowledge of any of the branches of the Arthurian corpus, this introduction alone gives a strong implication of what one might expect from any Arthurian text in general and from this one in particular.
[10] In this opening, the audience is reminded of familiar intertexts and, through the poem's references to them, led to expect both battles and marvels from this narrative and, considering the epic context, battles and marvels with high stakes. Having done so, however, the romance proceeds to repeatedly frustrate those exact desires. This occurs perhaps most blithely in fitt 2, when, at the only point in the poem in which Gawain properly goes to battle, the text refuses to actually describe his defeats of dragons, wolves, woodwose (wild men), bulls, bears, boars and giants, remarking only that Gawain encounters so many marvels in the mountains that "Hit were to tore for to telle of þe tenþ dole"—(it would be too difficult to describe even a tenth of them) (719). Having promised battles, wonders, and adventures, the poem asserts that really, it's too much trouble to bother with such tedious details as fights with dragons. Instead, having promised an "outrrage awenture" (extraordinary adventure), the poem delivers a text in which Arthur's court, initially shocked into paralysis by the very wonders that are said to characterize their lands and their own court's renown, are galvanized not by a love of battle but rather a fear of shame into engaging with the adventures with which their court's reputation has already supposedly become synonymous. For Gawain's part, the romance essentially presents a narrative in which Arthur's preeminent champion beheads an unresisting man in a Christmas game and then must travel a year later to passively await the same fate, along the way avoiding the sexual advances of a seemingly determined seductress, in defiance of Gawain's literary and in-text reputation for insatiable sexual escapades. Similarly, at the end of the romance, the narrator disposes of Gawain's arduous return as a hassle to describe, breezily stating that "Ofte he herbered in house and ofte al þeroute, / And mony a venture in vale he venquyst ofte / Þat I ne tyʒt at þis tyme in tale to remene" (He slept in buildings and sometimes outside, and so many a dangers he overcame in the valleys, that I can't manage at this point in the tale to recall them) (2481–83). Having established that SGGK as a text operates metatextually within a textual tradition and horizon of expectations, even going so far as to outline those expectations in the opening of the romance, the text goes on to demonstrate how it and its protagonist fail to satisfy those expectations, both metatextually for the audience and within the narrative itself, as multiple characters literally inform Gawain that he falls short of what they have been led to expect and desire from previous oral and textual accounts of his exploits. Moreover, the poem is bookended by performative narrative refusals to tell those stories even when they appear to have happened (note 3). Not only does this romance refuse to perform to specifications; it does so aggressively.
[11] In their treatment of SGGK, literary scholars have focused extensively upon its intertextuality and its reliance upon and subversion of treatment of preexisting texts, but it is also useful to explore it specifically as an archontic text (note 4). In its repeated reference to a greater Arthurian canon or metatext, SGGK invites attention to its own status as a work of archontic literature, or literature that draws and builds upon previously existing textual worlds and that allows for unlimited expansions to the textual conglomeration or archive. Drawing upon Derrida's concept of the archive, Abigail Derecho (2006, 63, 64) coined the term "archontic" to address works previously described as derivative or appropriative, particularly works that draw upon intertextuality and an order in which some texts precede and create a basis for the existence but do not, as those terms might imply, require a sense of hierarchy between them. The lack of implicit hierarchy, a component of Derrida's archive, is necessitated by the way that the archive's open-ended accessibility to new additions means that the character of the archive in its totality is always under construction and always rife with the potential for change: the archive's neverending open-endedness, however comes at a cost: "in the same stroke it loses the absolute and meta-textual authority it may claim to have" (64). That very potential for destabilization or, as Derecho suggests, the futility of stability at the core of the archontic text, leaves it an uncomfortable site of authorization. This openness and lack of hierarchy, she argues, authorizes and invites new writers to enter the archontic text, picking and choosing what they find useful and inserting newly reconstituted works into the archontic text and thereby changing its overall shape and horizon of expectations. We see the self-conscious radical expression of this throughout SGGK—its metatextual recognition of its own place within a preexisting corpus; its anticipation of itself as becoming part of that existing canon; its refusal to conform to standards preexisting within that corpus or within an audience's delineated expectations; and its recognition of the proliferation of narrative throughout communities in resistant, contrary, and unexpected ways, as demonstrated through the way that tales of Arthur's knights and of Gawain echo throughout the text but are repeated and reflected in contradictory ways depending on the teller, none of which are arbitrated as more or less true. For example, as discussed above, the expectations set for the text by its opening lines do not resemble the narrative that follows, which in turn frustrates narrative expectations set by well-known precursor intertexts featuring Gawain that are implicitly referenced by the text itself, as when Lady Bertilak professes confusion when Gawain acts in ways out of character with what one might expect from those popular texts.
[12] Beyond this, however, characters in the texts invoke different textual authorities and focus upon different emphases creating their individual expectations. For example, while the narrator invokes the epic examples of the Trojan war and focuses on battles, marvels, and courtesy as the core elements of Arthurian narratives and the tale about to be told, in attempting to seduce Gawain, Lady Bertilak, the wife of Gawain's host, invokes a very different set of core elements to the tales that frame her understanding of the type of narrative she inhabits:
[13] For to telle of þis teuelyng of þis trwe knyʒtez,
Hit is þe tytelet token and tyxt of her werkkez
How ledez for her lele luf hor lyuez han auntered,
Endured for her drury dulful stoundez,
And after wenged with her walour and voyded her care
And broʒt blysse into boure with bountees hor awen. (1514–19)
[For to speak of the trials of these true knights, it is the heading and the title written of their works, how knights have risked their lives for loyal love, endured hard times for their lovesickness, and afterward with their valor avenged this pain and banished their care and brought bliss through their merits to their lovers.]
[14] The Lady's recitation of parameters that define acceptable tales of knights is both prescriptive and strikingly metatextual, referring to the texts, headings, and expected narrative contents she favors: knights' endeavors are not in fact about their love of battle, she suggests, nor the ubiquity of marvels that must be faced, but rather how knights fight and suffer for the love of their ladies—the cycle of care and bliss referring not to historical upheaval and foundation referenced in the opening lines of the poem, but to the rejection and acceptance by the beloved, notably in a "boure" (bower) much like the one in which Gawain is currently entrapped with Lady Bertilak.
[15] Structurally, Lady Bertilak's description of narratives involving knights shares some elements with the narrator's; she will read and evaluate Gawain. While Lady Bertilak's understanding of Arthurian romance bears little resemblance to the expectations set forth in the introduction of SGGK, it does in fact resemble those the text's audience would most likely be familiar with, so her accusation that the alleged Gawain she is encountering is not in fact Gawain would likely ring clear to its audience—this Gawain does not look like the assignation-eager Gawain they would be familiar with from previous romance iterations, nor is he the battle-ready warrior prepared to encounter marvels advertised in the introduction. Framed by two intertextual contexts through which to form expectations for what and who Gawain should be, this Gawain fails to conform to either set of parameters in any way.
[16] SGGK does not only position itself within multiple epic and romance textual traditions; it also references the act of archontic narrative proliferation while including itself metatextually as the potential subject of the stories its characters choose to tell, spread, and benefit from. For example, Arthur's court is introduced as both literally and figuratively dependent upon their marvelous deeds and, significantly, on the stories told about those deeds. These narratives are treated interchangeably with the adventures they are based on and they are associated closely with the court's maintenance through Arthur's vow not to eat until he is treated to either a story of chivalric adventure or to the sight of a chivalric feat itself:
[17] And also anoþer maner meued him eke,
Þat he þurʒ nobelay had nomen:he wode neuer ete
Vpon such a dere day, er hym deuised were
Of sum auenturus þyng, an vncouþe tale
Of sum mayn meruayle þat he myʒt trawe,
Of alderes, of armes, of oþer auenturus;
Oþer sum seff hym bisoʒt of sum siker knyʒt
To joyne wyth hym in justyng, in jopardé to lay,
Lede, lif for lyf, leue vchon oþer
…
Þis watz kynges countenaunce where he in court were,
At vch farand fest among his fre meny
In halle. (90–102)
[Another motivation moved him: he would never eat upon such a holy day before he had first heard of some adventurous story, a strange tale of some marvel that he might believe of princes or arms or other adventures, or that a man might seek a knight to join with him in jousting to risk life for life, each with the other…This was the king's custom when he was in court, at each feast among his noble household.]
[18] By making chivalric adventure or its recitation a precondition of his meal, Arthur signals his, and by extension, his court's dependence upon chivalric endeavor for their status and wealth. Moreover, Arthur's conflation of the narratives of adventure and their actual performance highlights how, for the court, the deeds and their social proliferation as narrative are largely interchangeable. After all, if a chivalric adventure happens in a forest and no one hears—or speaks—of it, can it be said to have happened in any significant way? The metaphor of consumption, it has been noted, suggests extinction or destruction of the resource being consumed, but in the case of the story, consumption suggests not only telling but also repetition and retelling. In fact, it is this dynamic upon which the reputation of Arthur's court relies, as their reputation clearly precedes Gawain's arrival at Hautdesert. Throughout the romance, it becomes increasingly clear that it is the proliferation of narratives that predetermine the metatextual identity and fate of Arthur's court.
[19] This identity is externally, socially, and collectively constructed through narrative in the poem and, as such, it is unstable and vulnerable to revision, critique, and rewriting from the community of those who engage in what we might reasonably call the text's internal Arthurian fandom. Arthur's court in this text are treated as celebrities whose qualities are known, discussed, and worshipped by complete strangers, and stories about them proliferate to places they have never even heard of. However, this very proliferation exposes the court to the ever-changing threat of audience desire, interpretation, and critique. In his speech to Arthur's court, the Green Knight mentions having heard of the courtesy of Arthur's court and their reputation for being the best knights at both fighting and courtliness, an assertion that resonates with the narrator's characterization both of the character of Britain in general and Arthur's court in particular:
[20] þe los of þe, lede, is lyft vp so hyʒe
And þy burʒ and þy burnes best ar holden,
Stifest vnder stel-gere on stedes to ryde,
Þe wyʒtest and þe worþyest of þe worldes kynde,
Preue for to play wyth in oþer pure laykez,
And here is kydde cortaysye, as I haf herd carp. (258–63)
[Your fame, sir, has risen to such a level, and your city and men held the best, strongest to bear armor and ride steeds, the most valiant and most courteous men in all the world, tested through their competitions in games and tournaments, and here is found courtesy, or so I have heard said.]
[21] The Green Knight's mention of their reputation aligns it with the narrator's earlier invocation of the Arthurian archive, referencing their superlative force in battle and the court's renowned courtesy. When the court's response to his appearance and offer of an exchange of blows does not live up to the Green Knight's expectations based on the stories he's heard, his response is tellingly not to question the authenticity of the narratives but rather that of his host:
[22] "What, is þis Arþures hous," quoþ þe haþel þenne,
"Þat al þe rous rennes of þurʒ ryalmes so mony?
Where is now your sourquydrye and your conquestes,
Your gryndellayk and your greme and your grete wordes?
Now is þe reuel and þe renoun of þe Rounde Table
Ouerwalt wyth a worde of on wyʒes speche." (309–14)
["What, is this Arthur's house," said the man then, "whose fame is spread through many realms? Where now is your pride and your conquests, your ferocity and your wrath and your great words? Now is the revelry and the renown of the Round Table overthrown with a word of one man's speech."]
[23] Significantly, the Green Knight frames his own triumph over the court as the defeat of his words over other words: the "renoun" of Arthur's court, he claims, is now overthrown or overwritten by his own words. As a result, Arthur and then Gawain work to ensure that their behavior conforms to the standards set by the Green Knight's expectations, which are themselves the product of the very narratives Arthur had earlier desired to experience and supplement. Effectively, the Green Knight's desires and expectations, presumably shaped by the narratives he's heard about them, become the framework for their behaviors. He becomes the author and evaluator of Gawain's next adventure.
[24] There is a sort of recursiveness to this and later exchanges in the poem wherein stories are told about Arthur's court that lead to desires to see those stories embodied and enacted by their main characters, in the same way that the description of the types of narratives apparently already told of Arthurian knights according to the introduction leads to the expectation that this narrative will conform to if not exceed those criteria. Those stories in effect become scripts to be followed lest Arthur's court fail to live up to their own reputation and thus fail to be authentic to the expectations of their audience or fans, a dynamic familiar within modern media fandoms. Authenticity, in this dynamic, is not located in individual actors or storylines but rather in the collectively created discursive construct formed by audience consensus and the desires to which that consensus gives rise. Thus, at Hautdesert, Gawain encounters a community already familiar with what to expect and desire from Gawain, the walking embodiment of a metatext: manners, noble speech, and "luf-talkyng:"
[25] Vch segge ful softly sayde to his fere,
"Now schal we semlych se sleʒtez of þewez
And þe tecceles termes of talking noble
Wich spede is in speche vnspurd may we lerne,
Syn we haf fonged þat fyn fader of nurture.
…
In menyng of manerez mere
Þis burne now schal vus bryng.
I hope þat may him here
Schal lerne of luf-talkyng." (915–27)
[Each man quietly said to his companion, "Now shall we see the seemliest of manners, and the utmost heights of noble speech. Without prompting we will learn the art of genteel conversation, since we have housed the pinnacle of breeding…This man shall bring us the knowledge of good manners. I believe that those who hear him shall learn the ways of courtly love."]
[26] It is notable that this particular iteration of Gawain involves a completely different script than the one invoked by the Green Knight or by the narrator in the poem's opening. The court at Hautdesert, Lady Bertilak, and the Green Knight all appear to pluck their desired version of Gawain from the metatextual stew in order to suit their particular desires and to shape his scripted performance accordingly. Thus, on the first day of their dalliance, Lady Bertilak asserts her familiarity with Gawain, saying "For I wene wel, iwysse, Sir Wowen ʒe are, / Þat alle þe worlde worchipez" (I know well you are Gawain, whom all the world worships), and then proceeds to tell him what she expects to experience in his company and to chastise him when he does not perform to code (1226–27). Notably in this exchange, Lady Bertilak says she will use her time well with tales and immediately offers Gawain access to her body, writing herself and, to some extent, Gawain himself into the types of narratives she's heard of Gawain the philanderer, conflating story with action, much like Arthur had at the feast (1508–34). Lady Bertilak's subsequent willingness to identify Gawain as Gawain is determined by his performance according to the expectations set by the stories circulating about him and through romances, and any deviation from the scripts set by these authorities on all things Gawain leads to an accusation that the man she is with cannot possibly be Gawain, as occurs on each of the three days of his stay at Hautdesert.
[27] This interplay between reputation, narrative, and socially constructed identity compels both Gawain and Arthur to live up to the stated expectations of their audiences. The question they're asked is not literally "Are you such-and-such a person or an imposter?" nor even "Do you live up to your reputation?" but rather "Do you live up to audience expectation/desire as created by the interplay of the texts a specific audience has encountered and the subjective interpretation that audience has subsequently produced of them?" Ultimately, this is a question that revolves around authenticity and legitimacy that has nothing to do with names and everything to do with narrative congruence and desire. To put it into fandom terms, the Green Knight and Lady Bertilak both complain that Arthur's knights are acting out of character and thus are illegitimate iterations of themselves. Then they proceed, through their demands, to script the right version of the story. For all intents and purposes, the Gawain with social force—the Gawain that matters—is not the embodied individual in front of them but the meta-Gawain whose fame goes before him, creates public expectation, enhances the Arthurian court's status, and who would be as familiar to the poem's audience as to Lady Bertilak.
[28] Indeed, much of the romance's humor comes from the audience's familiarity with previous iterations of Arthur's court and of Gawain's character, in which he is typically represented as a bombastic womanizing embodiment of all things swagger. On the surface, Lady Bertilak's accusation that Gawain is not in fact the real Gawain seems absurd, except that the Gawain she refers to is the Gawain of the archontic metatext. Literary critics have long pointed out that Lady Bertilak's dissatisfaction and confusion with Gawain's behavior would make sense to a fourteenth-century audience, used to seeing Gawain represented in Arthurian literature as a consummate and adventurous philanderer. Thomas Hahn (2000, 220) describes Gawain as exemplifying "a distinctive model of masculinity, founded on an unstinting appetite for energetic encounters…that allows Gawain's prowess to outshine that of all other men, and they render him a magnet for the desire of a long sequence of women." Similarly, Rushton (2007, 29) notes that this is a reputation that follows Gawain into the text of SGGK, as Lady Bertilak knows enough about Gawain to know what to expect as a beautiful lady alone in his company—it is unthinkable that "Gawain might let the opportunity pass him by." And of course, as a conglomerate creation, it is one that is at once cumulative and potentially individual—subject to idiosyncratic reading on the part of the audience. In fact, such an audience, familiar with Gawain's expansive exploits in French and English romance, their expectations freshly primed by the opening to SGGK, might reasonably be expected to agree with Lady Bertilak's disappointed and perplexed assertion that whoever this man is, the timid man working so very hard not to seduce her is not the character Gawain. Lady Bertilak's declarations of what romances say Gawain does and thus who he is allow her to effectively script who he decides he ought to be, largely because Gawain accepts her authority over him. Her stated horizon of expectations thus determines his field of acceptable behaviors. It also opens up the possibility for her to indirectly rewrite scenes between Gawain and her husband, increasingly narrowing the options for Gawain's acceptable behaviors to conform to both her expectations and the demands of chivalric performance.
[29] As a result of this dynamic, in spite of the messaging of the pentangle on his shield, Gawain's identity is increasingly represented as malleable and situational, the result of a sort of communal authorship of Gawain: his status is collectively created and archontic. As such, he is constantly subject to reassessment and revision by his audience/critics, who also are effectively the presumed authors of the next instantiation of Gawain in their anticipated retellings of his story. Simultaneously, they also act as supporting characters in the script as well as on-site evaluators of his performance, prompting him when he misses his expected line or behavior. As such, there is a collaborative effort between him and those he meets to make sure that he fulfills their expectations so that that installment is consistent with their desires and thus with his and his court's need for sustained and enhanced reputations. This is most clearly demonstrated in Gawain's interactions with Lady Bertilak in which her declarations of how Gawain acts and her willingness or refusal to concede whether or not Gawain makes the grade effectively allows her to script their interactions in order to conform with her framing of knights as driven primarily by courtly and amorous goals. Similarly, the Green Knight can invoke a version of "Arþures hous" or of Gawain represented in tales known or unknown to the principals and, in doing so, galvanize them into behaving according to his expectations lest they be found lacking, rather than by their customs or common chivalric courtesy. The romance demonstrates how an engaged, desiring, and critical audience is able to change/affect/modify the text to conform to their desires, regardless of whether or not those desires actually represent existing canon. That either character says such a story exists and thus has led to expectation is enough to motivate Arthur and Gawain to comply so as to not lose the cultural capital that sustains their public reputations and identities through complementary narrative and its spread.
[30] While both Arthur and Gawain cede the authority to determine their authenticity to their audience throughout much of the text, once the Green Knight's true identity is revealed and his exoneration of Gawain granted, Gawain attempts to redefine the discursive community granted authority to legitimate him in order to exclude women altogether, suggesting that as for women, "hit were a wynne huge / To luf hom wel and leve hem not, a leude þe;at couþe;e" (2420–21), or "It would be a great benefit if we could love them well and believe them not." It's a curious non sequitur in context because, as many have noted, Bertilak is as much if not more a party to Gawain's duping as his wife. However, unlike Lord Bertilak, Lady Bertilak's favorable interpretation of Gawain's story or, for that matter, Morgan le Fay's, is not so comfortingly secured as Bertilak's. After all, Bertilak has already given his kudos to Gawain as the best knight who has ever lived, but if Gawain has learned anything in this adventure, it is that he cannot count on the criteria for his evaluation staying stable; and by the criteria listed by Lady Bertilak so far, he has not measured up, and if those were merely a ruse, who knows what expectations there might be for Gawain now? Morgan likewise, as Gawain's aunt and as the putative true tester of Gawain all along, presents a challenge to Gawain's authenticity that potentially supersedes Bertilak's authority, seeing as she apparently sent him to test Gawain and she is Bertilak's liege. Within that context, Gawain's attempt to foreclose on the participation of women within the interpretive discursive community that grants his legitimacy can be understood to have a distinctly tactical flavor. Gawain's suggestion that men should love women but not believe them works in two ways to exclude women from the community of narrative legitimation: it serves to create an alliance based along gender lines between himself and Lord Bertilak and it suggests that such an alliance is based on a refusal to believe or to listen to what women say, redefining who has access to narrative authority, both as tellers of tales and as arbiters of what counts as an acceptable rendition of what we might call canon. Gawain's assertion that we shouldn't believe or listen to women is not merely about how he was personally tricked but an attempted closing off of women's access to the communal consensus that drives his social economy. In effect, he attempts to reframe women as illegitimate wielders of language whereas before they had been unchallenged fellow participatory consumer/critics. Significantly, Gawain attempts to do this by shifting the archive to which his narrative rightly belongs, claiming his narrative is not a romance or tale of chivalry at all but rather a narrative of the duped man brought low by feminine deceit.
[31] The sequence of revelations at the end of the text effectively sets off a series of potential reframings and reinterpretations of who is in charge of the story, who gets to tell the story, and thus who is eligible to be the antagonists and protagonists—the ladies, the men, or an interpretive free-for-all. At stake in Gawain's attempts to reframe his narrative is his desire to wrest interpretive control of his own story not only from Lady Bertilak but also from her husband. This attempt appears to meet with limited, if any, success. Bertilak's revelation that the entire episode was an attempt by Morgan le Fay to terrify Guinevere to death recasts the entire romance in such a way that the main figures are revealed to be women who never so much as speak within the text, and the entire action of the romance, for all its angst and trauma on Gawain's part, is merely a side effect of a larger conflict offstage. Alternatively, however, his assertion that Morgan desired to test the Arthurian court's reputation for pride (the text uses the term "surquidré," meaning pride as a sin), suggests that the stories proliferating about Arthur are not particularly complimentary (2456–58). It also upends the common romance narrative of the challenger testing himself against the reputation of the renowned in order to gain fame, instead suggesting a theme of deserved chastisement for overbearing pride. Such a revisionary understanding of the text places Gawain back at the center of the text as the court's representative but radically reimagines the status that Arthur's court holds within its larger community—and the criteria by which Gawain is being evaluated. Gawain's refusal to return to Hautdesert to make peace with Lady Bertilak and Morgan is consistent with his attempts to reframe his story as one entirely mediated between men—one that, in light of the bombshell he's just been dealt, is perhaps unsurprising. Similarly, upon Gawain's return to Arthur's court, he attempts to tell the court how to interpret his story—as the story of a fall from grace—only to find his authority as participant, witness, and storyteller soundly rebuffed as the court greets his sorrowful interpretation with laughter. Significantly, they then proceed to revise his story in ways that allow them to associate their own identities with Gawain's in ultimately advantageous ways that directly contradict his own understanding of his experience. While no women explicitly speak again and Lady Bertilak's rendition or reading of the narrative is notably absent, the ladies of Arthur's court partake in the wearing of the girdle and choose to be marked by its collectively determined meaning—one that ignores Gawain's interpretation, reframing the outcome of his adventure as the court's collective honor rather than Gawain's personal failing. Gawain effectively loses control of his story in order to serve the needs and desires of his community, and at the end of the romance, much like Green Knight or Lady Bertilak, when confronted with a Gawain who does not suit their needs, the court simply rewrites him into the story in such a way that he does. Similarly, the narrator's act of framing the text through the Trojan war, despite its apparent thematic incongruence, works to invoke a narrative model that does not represent the story told but that underscores both the distance between the story he does tell and the narrative tradition to which it belongs, and also the specter of Arthurian calamities. This conclusion to the romance and its famous refusal to impose an authoritative interpretation on Gawain's adventure and its outcome invokes the collective multivalent authority of the community both within and without the text to determine interpretive authenticity and legitimacy, refusing the impulse to locate that authority within the individual actor or storyteller while acknowledging the personal and collective stakes involved in that refusal. The unstable locus of this authority—as well as the desire to impose interpretive order or control—is poignantly demonstrated in the famous inscription at the end of the poem, "HONY SOYT QUI MAL PENCE" (Shame to him to thinks ill [of it]), a reference to the motto of the recently formed Order of the Garter, established by Edward III in 1348. While the inscription's status is controversial, appearing to have been written in a later hand than the rest of the poem, its liminal position with regard to the text recapitulates the text's larger destabilization of narrative authority. It both is part of the text and supplemental to it, turning inward and remarking on the poem while simultaneously reaching out to the audience of the poem and inviting them to participate in the fun house mirror of engagement. By attempting to demand a particular response on the part of others, the inscription draws attention to the possibility and even likelihood that others have and will continue to read the text wrong. In SGGK, archontic breakdown of closure and authority is evoked both at the level of text and narration through the proliferation of interpretations and frames at the end and the failure of narrative framing to accurately represent or contain the narrative. This ultimately places the audience of SGGK in a parallel position to Lady Bertilak, at once both inside and outside of the text, critiquing, interpreting, producing, inhabiting the open text/metatext in which the audience is also the critic, writer and, ultimately, character.
[32] SGGK reveals the ways in which late medieval romance and, in particular, Arthurian romance operate within an archontic framework that parallels in a striking fashion some key dynamics of modern fan engagement, including the destabilization and decentralization of canonical authority, the nonhierarchical proliferation of coexisting versions of the same characters and events, the revision of existing texts to suit individual needs and desires, and the implicit and explicit debates and interpretations of the text(s) invited by destabilization and proliferation. The poem's attention to its own metatextual environment and to the ways that romance audiences might engage with—and even insert themselves into—romance narratives shows the ways in which audiences' relationships with texts were recognized as complicated, idiosyncratic, and open in the late Middle Ages. It is perhaps unsurprising that a consistent response to this complication represented both within the romance (Gawain's attempts to limit who can speak authoritatively and to define the meaning of his adventure) and on the text (the inscription at the end of manuscript) is an attempt to shut down or foreclose on these complications by imposing a single authoritative reading, but as SGGK handily demonstrates, no story is singular, and the act of telling a story invites another, at once a love letter and a critique.
Acknowledgments
[33] A preliminary version of this argument was presented at a panel entitled "Fanfiction in Medieval Studies: What Do We Mean When We Say 'Fanfiction'?" at the 52nd International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan, on May 11, 2017. I am grateful to the members and audience of that panel for their generous feedback.