Gauvain / Gawain
Now,
Gawain (who does not appear in Wagner’s opera at all) is a very important
character in this
story. Gawain is a ladies’ knight; he is the counterpart to
Parzival. Parzival is
young; Gawain is an older, more sophisticated, gracious man – a man of the
world. And Gawain’s adventure is in balance with
Parzival’s which is that of the youth who
meets just the right girl at just the right moment. Gawain
has not yet done so.
In Parzival we have, in fact, two heroes: Parzival and Gawain. Gawain is a charming character in Wolfram’s work. In fact, he’s a delightful character wherever he appears. In the English medieval poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for example, he is a forthright, lovely person, graceful and sensitive, with a wonderful – how to put it? – responsiveness to feminine beauty. RG 63
The
lion that attacks Gauvain, as well as the magic arrows of passion that wound
him, can therefore be understood as a temptation to fall back into a
primitive
situation, in which the erotic problem appears to be solved on
the sexual level,
through polygamy, but at the price of sacrificing the possibility of psychic
relationship. TGL 233
A
ferryman is a well-known figure in myths and
fairy-tales.
Usually, he takes people to the other shore, whether it be to the land of the
dead (Charon), or to hell. As one who “leads across”, he is
connected with Mercurius, who also plays the part of psychopomp between one
world and another. TGL 236
“In
habentibus symbolum facilis est transitus”
(For those that have the symbol, the passage is easy”), as an
alchemical text says. The ferryman therefore appears to
personify the transcendent function which aspires towards
synthesis of the
psychic opposites. TGL 236
Cont’d …
The ferryman’s presence protects Gauvain from the malice of the man with
the wooden leg at the castle entrance, for his is the positive aspect of that
same wooden-legged man, that part of the dark spirit of nature which is not
one-sidedly opposed to
consciousness but which is capable of mediating
the
opposites and of assisting in the further development of consciousness.
TGL 236