John O’Donohue says near the end of chapter 2 in Eternal Echoes that “It is vital that one’s spiritual quest be accompanied by a sense of irony” because it “ensures humility” (129). With dramatic irony, the audience knows more than the main character does; irony in this instance is not recognizing your own situation and/or complicity in what happened in your life. O’Donohue is speaking of a recognition of limitation. Maybe to have a sense of irony means to go on your spiritual quest knowing you can’t ever know it all, and often when you come to know something it’s only in hindsight and the experience is over. It’s is a continual recognition (re-thinking) that, in your spiritual quest, “you do not know and can never know what it is that you are actually doing” (129-130). Questing with a sense of pride suggests you know exactly what you’re doing, suggests you’ll know precisely when you’ve reached it, and even that the quest has an attainable end at all.
Writing seems a bit like this. What if we approached writing with a sense of irony, as O’Donohue suggests we approach a spiritual quest? Robert Yagelski says in Writing as a Way of Being, that “to write is continually to confront the impossibility of control.” We can’t control others’ reception of our writing, we can’t control the first words that come from wherever words originate; we can’t control meaning. I say one thing to my students and each of them understands it just a little bit different, sometimes startlingly so.
Medieval knights lived this way, with a sort of embrasure of irony. They chose to go out on quests specifically to confront the impossibility of control. Chivalry emerged out of a changing perspective of honor; before chivalry, a warrior succeeded if he died in his endeavor. He was an epic hero when he fought bravely and sacrificed his life for the tribe. Beowulf is a perfect example: in the second part of the poem, he defends his land from the dragon and dies in the process. They give him a most memorable funeral. As politics in the British Isles changed with the Norman Conquest, it became more common to ransom warriors for money rather than kill them. It was honorable—chivalric—to not kill your foe, but make an exchange of goods with them. “Death is an end with no economic value,” says Laura Ashe in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Limits of Chivalry” (162). But this irony bit: along with ransoming your enemy instead of killing him came the idea that it was no longer honorable to die while on quest or in battle. It became heroic to return….alive.
So what tension holds a story together when we know the knight isn’t going to die? He needs some purpose to set out on his quests to prove he could return; hence the many stories of King Arthur and his knights we still have today, some of which are rather absurd for the fact that often the knight makes matters worse for his trying to better them.
Take the story recounted in Jill Mann’s chapter “Sir Gawain and the Romance Hero” from her book Life in Words, of the knight Calogrenant originally told in Chretien de Troye’s Yvain. Mann says it’s “a narrative that shows us no purposeful journeying, but a random wandering through the forest in search of unspecified adventures, whose direction is dictated not by his own will but by the path he is following” (222). (Sound like writing to you?) Calogrenant encounters a “Giant Herdsman” who describes “a mysterious ‘adventure’ at a nearby fountain, which can be initiated by throwing water from the spring onto an emerald slab” which will cause a storm, followed by the appearance of a flock of birds singing beautifully. Calogrenant throws water on the slab and gets just those things, but a third (!) unexpected event occurs: an angry knight also appears “who indignantly accuses Calogrenant of laying waste his woodland and insists on avenging the injury in combat.” Calogrenant kills the knight of the fountain, thus “turning [the knight of the fountain’s] wife into a widow.” Calogrenant is left with a devastated forest, a dead knight, and a widow….and he’s…..supposed to be happy he’s gone on an adventure?
Why, Mann asks, if the forest needs to be “‘defended’ to avoid the destruction to the forest created by the storm…not discourage the water-casting by removing the basin hanging above the slab? Or why not have the fountain constantly guarded?” and other logical suggestions to avoid this seemingly avoidable scenario. Why has the knight not righted a wrong but instead created a wrong that didn’t ever need righted in the first place? The adventure’s “relation to any comprehensible sequence of cause and effect, or to any realistic context, is as mysterious to the reader as to Calogrenant…he is denied understanding both of the mechanics of his adventure and of its meaning” (223).
The action the knight takes sounds a lot to me like writing. A question I keep pondering as I read through Yagelski’s Writing as a Way of Being, and continue to contemplate Alexandria Peary’s Prolific Moment, is how do we approach writing both as not a product-oriented endeavor, and yet still make effective writing that creates experiences for our readers? It seems paradoxical, to both write without an end-product in mind AND have the hope of an end-product.
But both Yagelksi and Peary would emphasize, as the knight would emphasize: it’s the experience itself that matters. Even if we’re left complexed with a devastated forest in our wake, we’ve had the experience itself of writing; of having an adventure. And I think writing from this perspective takes both humility as well as a sense of irony. Humility in that we cannot control meaning, irony in that no matter how hard we try to conform to genres and forms, we’ll never fully know what we’re doing.
(Check out the lovely Knight V. Snail blog post for the knights with snails found herein.)