Content area
Abstract
This study uses Michael Basseches's post-structural dialectical model, from adult developmental psychology, to read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Basseches provides a twenty-four-point strategy for handling complex operations. This approach moves readers beyond Sir Gawain's stage-theory development, which is demonstrated by his transformation from puer to juven following the medieval “Ages of Man” model described by J. A. Burrow. By emphasizing figure-ground correlation, Basseches's model moves contemporary readers' attention to the dialectical game being played between the author, his characters, and the audience of his time and place. Close-line text analysis is integrated with the historical context and understanding of the literary intertext of Gawain legends.
From this reading marriage emerges as a central metaphor that unifies the images of contracts, betrothals, exchanges of gifts, endless knots, armor, locks, and beheading. Georges Duby's discourse on medieval marriage provides the linguistic terms and doctrinal understandings of the sacrament. Basseches's emphasis on continuums of time and events in motion further focuses the readers' attention on politics, specifically, dynamic relationships between Wales and England in the late fourteenth century. The reading considers the geography, commerce, trade, and shifts of power particularly from the Lancastrian point of view. Basseches's method calls for grounding in specifies. Therefore, this reading specifies real settings of culture and influence, which situate the poem in central England between Chester and London at Warwickshire. The castles are owned by particular Lancastrians and involve specific events and relationships with Chester in the north, Wales in the west, and London to the east.
The complexity model is a tool for the development of the reader. It can be applied in many contexts where its post-structural, dialectical methods provide qualitatively better alternatives, that is, operations which are more inclusive, better differentiating, and easier to integrate with other systems, than those of modern formal methods, post-modern deconstruction, or the popular culture's post-structural carnivalesque. Basseches's model engages multiple dimensions: cognitive, affective, sensate, and spiritual. In learning to work with complexity models there is the possibility of finding more significance and better meaning-making in post-modern life as well as medieval literature.
