This vision depends on the commercial vocabulary and, most heavily perhaps, on two words in particular, prys and costes. After the Green Knight has tested Gawain and found him wanting (though wanting less than any other man), he declares: "`As perle bi þe quite pese is of prys more, / So is Gawayn, in god fayth, bi oþer gay kny3tez'" (2364-65; emphasis added). As important as the content of this conclusion is its form--the form of an analogy of proper proportionality whose essential characteristic is similarity of relations.2 Gawain is compared, he is measured, he is related to other items: the Green Knight fixes the prys of Gawain even as he acknowledges the worth of Gawain; he establishes the costes of Gawain (see 2360). The standard, within the analogy, by which Gawain is measured is the pearl. Gawain is like a pearl, a pearl of great price. Once he has priced Gawain on the market of chivalric value; the Green Knight goes on to absolve {5/6} the man who cannot of his kind, even though he is like a pearl, be absolute: "`I halde þe polysed of þat ply3t, and pured as clene / As þou hadez neuer forfeted syþen þou watz fyrst borne'" (2393-94). As his words suggest, he absolves Gawain of the guilt of pride (surquidré, 311, 2457)--pride, which is the disdain of relativity--since the newborn, who is as yet without a history, is accordingly not subject to relativity, or that fundamental human experience of measurement and comparison in which pride (or humility) is forged: all newborns, even those deformed and doomed to die, are simply good. Moreover, in restoring Gawain to the innocence of infancy, the Green Knight absolves him of all forfeting where to forfet means not `to transgress' but `to pay the fine or the penalty for transgression' (see chap. 2 at n. 14). The Green Knight absolves Gawain of a fine or debt: he redeems him from the debt of original sin (Burrow 1965: 157; chap. 4 at n. 10).
Once absolved of the guilt of pride, Gawain must wear the sign of relativity and relationship--the syngne of surfet (2433), the token of vntrawþe (2509)--which, as a sign, is intrinsically relative to that which it is not, or, moderation and truth. Just as signification itself depends on the structure of difference and opposition--the phoneme p is similar to but different from the phoneme b with the result that `pit' and `bit' are intelligible lexemes within the English language (Saussure 1966: 111-22)--so, too, the green girdle, as sign, depends on the pentangle, Gawain's shield, which disappears from the poem after its lengthy introduction precisely because the green girdle, having been identified alongside of it, replaces it.3 The point needs some emphasis. Readers of Sir Gawain often note the poem's insistent doublings. Hautdesert doubles Camelot; Bertilak's court doubles Arthur's; the later Christmas feast doubles the earlier one; and so on (Allen 1971:145-49). Similarly, the green girdle doubles the pentangle. If the pentangle is ostentatiously Gawain's standard at the beginning of the adventure, the girdle is just as ostentatiously his standard at the end. Moreover, Gawain (and the poem) concentrates on the girdle at the end to the exclusion of any further mention of the pentangle. This doubling, therefore, appears to go further than the numerous others. These others serve to define and to distinguish shades of meaning and of value: there is, for instance, a more pristine simplicity and a greater felicity about Bertilak's court in comparison with and as opposed to Arthur's court. The opposition between the pentangle and the girdle, however, not only defines and distinguishes their relative values; it also fundamentally alters Gawain's--which is to say, the Arthurian--world. The green girdle returns to Camelot with Gawain: it is, as it were, part of the other world brought back to this world. As such, it is {6/7} the foundation of a new definition, one that transcends as it also incorporates the older definition represented by the pentangle. Once back at Camelot, Gawain may still bear the sign of perfection (the pentangle), although the poem is silent on this; but he wears the sign of imperfection a bende abelef hym aboute (2517), and it is the more visible sign. So visible, in fact, that it is probably truer to say that Gawain wears a sign--something relative, measured, and contingent--for the first time in full and chastened consciousness of the mysterious ubiquity of signs.
Henceforth, Gawain must live with relativity and relationships, the human experience of measurement and comparison, despite the constant temptation to succumb to pride. He must live with and know he lives with verbal, economic, and chivalric systems of value which, because they are systems of value, are intrinsically relative, comparative, and measured. As the fyne fader of nurture (919) Gawain mediates between nature and fortune, or, perhaps, one could say history. I think all readers of the poem would agree that at some level the Green Knight is a figure of nature; there is evidence, in addition, that Bertilak's Lady and Morgne la Faye figure the two faces of fortune.4 Gawain experiences his trials and tests, then, at the hands of the two great ministers of this sublunary sphere; they evaluate in him and through him the nurture of Arthurian civilization. Gawain, the fyne fader of nurture, is the ideal embodiment of the values of Arthurian civilization; he is the measure, the standard for all knights and ladies who would participate in that civilization, live in its world, draw on its store of meaning. But he is himself measured and tested at Hautdesert and the Green Chapel. Between fortune, or history, and nature, Gawain experiences the radical contingency of human institutions--be they castles or chivalric manners--upon the limitations to human striving.5 Chief among these limitations is the inevitable tumescence of pride. As the text has it:
`Weldez non so hy3e hawtesseGawain, we can say without fear of contradiction, is at least tame when he returns to Camelot; his pride has been chastened (see 2437-38). {7/8} And this because he has learned that he does not measure up. More. He has learned that he is subject to measuring (Davenport 1978 :18990). The measure is measured. This is the insight at the heart of the poem's insistence on doubling. Comparison or doubling is the elementary structure of value and meaning; and the poem is concerned with the way value and meaning are made, so much so, in fact, that Gawain's experience is the experience of meaning in a human world: he learns what it means to have a meaning.
þat ho [Morgne la Faye] ne con make ful tame--
`Ho wayned me vpon þis wyse to your wynne halle
For to assay þe surquidré, 3if hit soth were
þat rennes of þe grete renoun of þe Round Table.'(2454-58)
The process is manifold. First, Bertilak's Lady introduces Gawain into relativity as she seduces him into becoming a consumer. Next, Bertilak himself transforms Gawain into a merchant, or perhaps it would be better to say that he draws out of Gawain the merchant latent in every man. Gawain is both consumer and native merchant in a kind of rhythm, a basic human rhythm of exchange, that his testers control. Finally, the Green Knight prices Gawain, who can at last appreciate that he does have a price and that he is relative and involved in relationships, not absolute. Note well that the humbling of Gawain's pride is thus consistent and simultaneous with the determination of just how valuable he really is: negation (of pride) produces a positive (Gawain's prys). We will see similar structuring of meaning again in the poem.
As a result of the testing of Gawain, which is the testing of the nurture of Arthurian civilization, authentic exchange replaces prideful insistence on static absolutes. When Gawain returns, the court members are willing to exchange meanings with him. Gawain has brought back with him a new understanding of nurture. Henceforth, nurture will not presume to possess the ideal. On the contrary, because it is subject to nature and fortune, nurture must acknowledge the transcendence of the ideal. Acknowledging this transcendence, nurture accepts that it can only incarnate the ideal--that is to say, mediate the ideal to the individual who aspires to it, always allowing for the slack in the individual's humanity. "`þou art not Gawain'" (2270; emphasis added), cries the Green Knight after Arthur's finest knight flinches from the blow. The name Gawain represents an ideal, transcending nature and fortune, which no man can "possess," no matter how great his nurture (cf. Davenport 1978:190-91). He can only, on the contrary, through that nurture participate in the ideal, distorting it, however, even as he participates in it. To live with such a negative, which is also an opposition and a measurement, and thus to try to merit his name by means of the ideal that he is not, Gawain must sacrifice his pride and become a knight of the sign, the green girdle.6 {8/9}