Chaucer on Interpretation
Chaucer on Interpretation JUDITH FERSTER
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Chaucer on Interpretation
Chaucer on Interpretation JUDITH FERSTER
The right of the University of Cambridge to print and sell all manner of books was granted by Henry VIII in 1534. The University has printed and published continuously since 1584.
C A M B R I D G E U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS Cambridge London New York New Rochelle Melbourne Sydney
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www. Cambridge. org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521110938 © Cambridge University Press 1985 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1985 This digitally printed version 2009 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Ferster, Judith, 1947Chaucer on interpretation. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400 — Criticism and interpretation. 2. Hermeneutics. I. Title. PR1924.F47 1985 821'.1 84-23188 ISBN 978-0-521-26661-1 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-11093-8 paperback An earlier version of Chapter 3 appeared in Criticism (Wayne State University Press); it appears here in revised form by permission of the editors. An earlier version of Chapter 4 appeared in Medievalia (published by the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies); it appears here in revised form by permission of Bernard S. Levy, Editor, and Paul E. Szarmach, Director of CEMERS.
To Paul Ferster and Dorothy Coben Ferster . . .sources and analogues
CONTENTS
Preface 1. 2. 3. 4.
Introduction Interpretation in the Knight's Tale Reading Nature in the Parliament of Fowls The Lady White and the White Tablet: The Book of the Duchess 5. Reading Griselda: The Clerk's Tale 6. Reading the Self: The Wife of Bath 7. The Politics of Narration in the Frame of the Canterbury Tales Notes Index
page ix i 23 46 69 94 122 139 157 185
PREFACE
This book has roots in the first Chaucer course I took, in 1969 with Mary Carruthers at Smith College, and in my dissertation, directed by Elizabeth Kirk at Brown University. Since it has been "in the works" for such a long time, the list of those who have influenced it along the way is also long. It includes academics and nonacademics, Chaucerians and non-Chaucerians, and some institutions. The National Endowment for the Humanities supported me three times while I was working on this project: in 1 975-6 for a wonderful postdoctoral year at the University of Chicago, in the summer of 1978 at the School for Criticism and Theory at the University of California at Irvine, and in 1980-1 at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, where the community of fellows and the congenial and helpful staff provided an ideal context for writing. Brandeis University provided money for some of the typing and copying and access to a computer for word processing. Of the individuals who have given help of many kinds, even the list of those who have read the entire manuscript is substantial: David Aers, Mary Carruthers, Robert Hanning, Richard Lanham, H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., Ira Levine, Jonathan Loesberg, Charles Owen, Richard Allen Shoaf, Jay Schleusener, John Smith, and Winthrop Wetherbee saved me from error, pushed me toward clarity, made me account for more of the evidence, and encouraged me to keep going. The friendly skepticism and editorial wisdom of my two latest readers, Ira Levine and John Smith, made the argument tighter and the style smoother. John Smith's help made the editing and production of the final copy easier and more fun than I thought such a large task could be. For a Shakespearean, he knows a great deal about Middle English and computers. ix
Preface A finely tuned account of how each of these readers (and many others) contributed and of where I could and could not accept advice would make another chapter. I must substitute an assertion of the gratitude and pleasure with which I have reviewed the catalogue of helpers. I have experienced part of my subject-how discourse produces new meaning-firsthand.
1 INTRODUCTION
T
HE NARRATOR of Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls has stood pondering the inscriptions on the garden gate in his dream. Since the inscriptions are contradictory, one describing the garden as a paradise, the other describing it as a hellish desert, the narrator is unable to decide whether to risk entering. His guide, Africanus, explains that since the narrator has exempted himself from love, the inscriptions do not apply to him; they are addressed only to lovers. With that myn hand in his he tok anon, Of which I confort caughte, and wente in faste. But, Lord, so I was glad and wel begoon! For overal where that I myne eyen caste Were trees clad with leves that ay shal laste, Ech in his kynde, of colour fresh and greene As emeraude, that joye was to seene.1 (11. 169-75) Why is the narrator glad? Whether the garden turns out to be a paradise or a hellish desert should be merely a matter of scientific interest to the narrator. Perhaps his response is one of aesthetic pleasure. Perhaps there is a touch of relief in his gladness: If he does not completely believe that he is exempt from the gate's prediction, his pleasure at seeing the garden's beauty is not disinterested. Perhaps he is led to call the leaves evergreen by his desire that they conform to the inscription predicting a paradise where "grene and lusty May shal evere endure" (1. 130). He cannot know for sure that the leaves are evergreen; most of the trees listed in the next stanza (oak, ash, elm, etc., 11. 176-82) are decidu-
Chaucer on Interpretation ous. He hopes that the prediction of an evergreen paradise is correct, but he has just arrived and cannot know for himself. Evergreen is more a wish than a fact. The narrator's response to the garden generates this contrast between objectivity and subjectivity. On the one hand, the narrator may see and describe the garden as it really is; on the other, he may impose himself upon it, seeing it according to his desires. Both of these alternatives are dualistic: Subject and object are separate, and subject struggles, successfully or unsuccessfully, to understand object. But the passage raises another, more dialectical possibility. The narrator's experience of gardens, even if it is subjective, is not completely self-enclosed because the narrator is not only a dreamer, but a reader, too. He is not locked inside his mind because his mind has been influenced by the world. His response to the garden has been shaped by books: Cicero's Somnium Scipionis, Alain de Lille's De Planctu Naturae, Dante's Divina Commedia, Guillaume de Lorris's Roman de la Rose, and Boccaccio's Teseida. When he dreams and perceives, he shapes the garden. It is precisely the words about emotions that the narrator takes from his sources. His "confort" at having Africanus take his hand is very like Dante's comfort (he uses the cognate of Dante's word) as Virgil takes his hand and leads him through the inscribed gate of Canto 3 of the Inferno: E poi che la sua mano alia mia pose con lieto volto, ond'io mi confortai, mi mise dentro alle segrete cose. And when he had laid his hand on mine with cheerful looks that gave me comfort, he led me in to the things that are hidden there. 2 (3.19-21, pp. 46-7) The narrator of the Middle English translation of the Roman de la Rose is "glad" when he enters the garden, and glad specifically because he believes it to be paradise: And whan I was inne, iwys, Myn herte was ful glad of this,
Introduction For wel wende I ful sikerly Have ben in paradys erthly. So fair it was that, trusteth wel, It semede a place espirituel. (11. 645-50) The narrator of the Parliament may be glad that the garden is more like the garden of Love in the Roman de la Rose than it is like Dante's hell. His fear and joy are mediated by his reading. Chaucer explores these models of the relationship between self and other (by "other" I mean anything outside the mind that the mind defines itself against, including the natural world, other people, and literary texts): the dualistic models in which self and other are separate and the dialectical model in which self and other are part of a larger system in which they mutually shape each other. In both dualistic models, interpretation, whether it produces subjective or objective readings, bridges the gap between self and other. In the dialectical model, the separation is deemphasized in favor of a mutual relationship in which subject and object influence each other. The various models allow Chaucer to address the isolation and loneliness of the self, the difficulty of seeing and saying the truth, and the links, despite this isolation, between self and other.3 This paradox of independence and dependence has implications for Chaucer's view of personal identity, political power, and literary meaning. Its implications for the self have already begun to appear in my discussion of the passage from the Parliament. It has implications for political power because sometimes power is relatively unconstrained and acts freely in the world and sometimes power is more dependent on context. Sometimes rulers can do what they like, and sometimes they need the acquiescence of those they rule; their subjects' tacit or explicit interpretation of them as rulers is crucial to the rulers' actions and the maintenance of their positions. The paradox of the dependence and independence of mind and world also has implications for literary meaning. According to the dualistic view, the meaning of a literary work is in the work or in the mind of the author, and it is the job of the reader to find it. He can either know it objectively or, hopelessly cut off from it, project his own intentions upon it and use it as a mirror in which he 3
Chaucer on Interpretation sees only himself. In both cases, subject and object are irrevocably separate. In the dialectical view, there are elements of both subjectivity and objectivity in interpretation. The interpreter interprets according to his own identity because no interpreter can step out of his own situation in order to interpret the text on its own terms; his very definition of "its own terms" will be informed by his identity and his position in a particular culture in a particular time. The interpreter's identity and location therefore contribute to the meaning of the text. However, the process is not selfenclosed or solipsistic because the world and the text also shape the interpreter. Subject and object are not two separate entities but part of a hermeneutical process that is circular but not vicious because it frequently brings to consciousness those prejudgments that shape interpretation. This discussion has generated two basic models of the interaction between mind and world-the dualistic and the dialectical-and three areas in which Chaucer explores them-personal identity, political power, and literary meaning. My view of the dialectical model has been influenced, as my vocabulary indicates, by modern phenomenological hermeneutics. This is not the place for an exhaustive study of what Chaucer's intellectual context shares with modern hermeneutics. Such a study would wander from literary texts into rhetorics, commentaries, scholastic writings, and many other genres. For the present I shall sketch briefly some of the medieval ideas that provide a context for my interpretations of Chaucer's poems. Then, after sketching the modern theory, I shall outline the chapters that follow, using the hermeneutical vocabulary to suggest how Chaucer explores the dualistic and dialectical models of the relationship between mind and world. I shall end the chapter with two short examples of the critical approach I discuss here, comments on the House of Fame and on the Tale of Melibee. PERSONAL IDENTITY In fourteenth-century England, the status of the individual was changing. Conventional wisdom has it that members of traditional peasant societies see themselves more as part of a social whole than as individuals, taking their identities from their place in that whole rather than from any sense of their own unique qualities or experiences. They think of their place in society more
Introduction
in terms of obligations to the group than in terms of individual rights. If this generalization ever applied to England in the Middle Ages, it did not apply in any simple way to the fourteenth century. The important concepts of the body politic-the community to which the individual was subordinate-and the divinely ordered hierarchy tended to emphasize stasis and obedience: The individual was not expected to criticize or change the given order. Yet the history of the late Middle Ages is the history of the rise of individualism because of a number of interrelated economic, political, and cultural developments: the detachment of agricultural workers from ties to land and lord, the conversion of obligations of labor to obligations of money, the increase in wage labor, the growth of cities, the increasing importance of a merchant class, and, as a result of these changes, the increase in social and demographic mobility. All of these developments allowed individuals to change their financial, social, or geographic positions by their own efforts. They did not have to live and die in the positions in which they were born. Scholars have pointed to evidence that social and religious forms and consciousness evolved to express the change.4 Of course, the new forms did not immediately replace the old forms or the old theories that explained them. Early medieval ideas and incipient modern ones lived side by side. Chaucer's works present both dualistic and dialectical models of the relationship between self and other. The tellers on the Canterbury pilgrimage take many of their concerns from their occupations: The kind of work they do determines the subject matter of their tales and their relationships with other pilgrims. Yet many of Chaucer's characters do not fit neatly into their niches, and the critical impulse to call them realistic individuals registers their refusal to be contained by stereotypes. Some of them even voice the idea that individual experience is singular and inexpressible. The Wife of Bath articulates the ideology of experience as teacher. Her fourth husband and the Merchant's Justinus exclaim over their inability to communicate their marital pain (III[D].492-4; IV[E].i553). The individual mind is isolated from others. Yet the more dialectical view is also possible. Alison's fourth husband and Justinus share the lament over their inability to share pain. They use similar images and vocabulary because they both borrow from St. Jerome; in fact, their images are proverbial. The isolation is communally expressed.
Chaucer on Interpretation Jill Mann's study of the portraits in the General Prologue has shown that the pilgrims' individual traits have sources in estates satires; what appear to be unique traits are in fact conventions. But Mann also analyzes the paradoxical fact that despite the pilgrims' conventionality, we respond to many of them as if they were individuals. She believes that our response is caused by the characters' complexity, their vulnerability to time, and our knowledge of their points of view. Her comments on the Parson provide a good example of the dialectic between stereotype and individual because the Parson himself seems to be aware of the estates satires' criticisms of parsons. His "individuality" consists of his conscious relationship to stereotypes about parsons.5 The contradiction between unique self and stereotyped role is resolved by a more dialectical view in which the individual is aware of his or her relationship to a tradition. As we shall see later, such awareness is a frequent result of participation in the hermeneutical circle. Another way to consider individuals to be part of a larger system is to notice the ways they shape each other through interaction. A group forms a system in which each becomes different from what he or she would be alone. Such a dialectic also describes the relationship between writers and readers. As Evan Carton says in his apt article on the Troilus, "In recognizing the complex interdependency of authoring and reading, Chaucer denies autonomous control to the one and insular passivity to the other and suggests that complicity is the essence of linguistic exchange and of worldly experience."6 POLITICAL POWER The paradox of political power is visible in the fourteenth century. On the one hand, the hierarchical model of society means that some people have power over others who are below them. Their exercise of that power does not depend on the active consent of those they rule. On the other hand, in both theory and practice, the late Middle Ages produced more dialectical models. There were more and more ways for the populace to participate in legal and political processes. According to Walter Ullmann, "However much the theocratic-descending theory of government was loudly, officially and unofficially, proclaimed as the only form of government com-
Introduction patible with Christian beliefs, the lower regions of society . . . acted very much on the ascending principles of government . . ."7 Several theorists wrote that the populace is not only the object but the source of the prince's power. According to John of Paris, the king rules with the consent of the governed, who can withhold it and deprive him of his power and legitimacy.8 Marsiglio of Padua wrote that the government is the means of accomplishing the people's will, which can bestow and withdraw government office. Since common profit limits tyranny,9 rulers can be said to rule because they are allowed to: They present themselves as legitimately powerful and are accepted as such. They win power because their interpretations win acceptance.10 A power struggle is a clash of interpretations, and, conversely, a clash of interpretations is a power struggle. There is an interpretive aspect to politics and a political aspect to interpretation. Chaucer seems to have been aware of both views of power. On the one hand, he portrays leaders who have the power to impose their wills: Virginius kills Virginia, Almachius kills St. Cecilia, and the Trojans trade Criseyde to the Greeks, all because of real hierarchies of power. On the other hand, Chaucer portrays leaders who need or accept advice from their subjects: Theseus, Walter, and Melibeus all change their decisions because their subjects petition them or negotiate with them.11 This dynamic is especially apparent where there are ad hoc leaders like Harry Bailly, Nicholas, and the Pardoner, who attempt to control situations over which they have no authority. The relationships between these ad hoc leaders and their subjects are dialectical. LITERARY MEANING Medieval discussions of literature often include its effects; literary works and their authors can be praised or blamed according to how they are perceived to influence the behavior of their audiences.12 Either fiction leads audiences into falsehood and evil, and writers are liars, or fiction urges its audiences toward salvation, and writers are aligned with philosophers and saints. Macrobius, for instance, discards fables that have no effect other than pleasure and accepts those that "encourage the reader to good works."13 Hugh of St. Victor rejects the "songs of the poets" in favor of Scripture, which "teaches what it delights us to know
Chaucer on Interpretation and what it behooves us to imitate." Citing Gregory, he encourages readers to respond to all books not merely aesthetically, but with "a desire to imitate the virtues set forth."14 In the Genealogia Deorum, Boccaccio must defend fiction because its critics cry out that poets are seducers of the mind, prompters of crime, and, to make their foul charge, fouler, if possible, they say they are philosophers' apes, that it is a heinous crime to read or possess the books of poets; and then, without making any distinction, they prop themselves up, as they say, with Plato's authority to the effect that poets ought to be turned out-of-doors - nay, out of town, and that the Muses, their mumming mistresses, as Boethius says, being sweet with deadly sweetness, are detestable, and should be driven out with them and utterly rejected.15 These passages are interesting for their relative positions in medieval intellectual history. The late Middle Ages produced views on the usefulness of poetry other than Hugh's strict ban. During the humanistic renaissance of the twelfth century, the Chartrians valued pagan authors as sources of wisdom.l6 There may even have been some support for the idea that fiction is good precisely because it is not a source of wisdom, but rather an occasion for refreshing play.17 Yet despite these arguments against the traditional mistrust of fiction, in the fourteenth century Boccaccio must still engage it or at least pay it lip service.18 The passages from Hugh and Boccaccio are also interesting for the way they include the reader. Boccaccio cites allegations that reading may be criminal. Hugh says that readers have to learn how to use books properly. Emphasis on the use of literature leads naturally to a corollary emphasis on the users. If writers are responsible for not leading audiences astray, readers are responsible for not being led. The Middle Ages is full of stories about people telling stories as examples to imitate.19 Sometimes the results are beneficial, as when St. Augustine's conversion is mediated by the story of St. Antony. St. Antony is converted when he hears a portion of the Bible read in church and takes it "as a counsel addressed to himself."20 Augustine's awareness of Antony's conversion and of another man who was converted when he learned about St. An8
Introduction tony leads him to interpret the voice in the garden as a command and to choose a passage of Scripture on the basis of which he transforms his life. Thus, the story is doubly mediated by the imitation of stories: Augustine has the example of Antony and the example of how to use Antony by imitating him. Sometimes the mediation by stories is destructive. Dante's Paolo and Francesca lose their souls by imitating the adulterous passion of Lancelot and Guenevere. Francesca blames the book and its author for her damnation: Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse . . . A Galeotto [pander] was the book and he that wrote it . . . (Inferno, 5-137, PP- 78-9) Her accusation against the author is consonant with the orthodox demands on authors. But whatever the author's intentions, the couple short-circuits them by acting before they read the book's tragic end, which might have made them think twice before playing Lancelot and Guenevere: "That day we read in it no farther." Paolo and Francesca have made a mistake about how to read and how to use their reading; Francesca's accusation of the author is an attempt at self-justification.21 Francesca's blame of the author points to a conflict in the later Middle Ages between the orthodox demands on authors to produce good results in their audiences and the growing independence of those audiences. According to Janet Coleman, the conflict was heightened in the late fourteenth century because, on the one hand, there was more interest in the "morally responsible and individual author" and, on the other, there were more and more opportunities for solitary reading.22 Oral performance was still common, and although hearers at a reading or recitation can miss the point through inattention or misunderstanding, the performer can control certain aspects of the audience's experience. To the extent that the performer determines the selections, order, pace, tone, and accompanying gestures, he or she can also influence interpretation. When people take the book home and read for themselves, they are much more independent. As paper became cheaper and literacy spread, ownership of books increased, and more and more people could experience that freedom with literary works. The nominalist
Chaucer on Interpretation emphasis on God's freedom produced a congruent emphasis on the individual's moral responsibility.23 This train of thought might be relevant to Wyclif's idea that people (or at least some of them) should be able to read the Bible for themselves even if they do not know Latin. Church pronouncements accused Lollards of making books and discussing them. To have books in one's hands is to exercise some control over them. In The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes describes a reader's action on the text: "[W]hat I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again."24 This formulation sounds quite modern, but Christine de Pizan's description of her own reading at the beginning of The Book of the City of Ladies agrees with Barthes quite well. She says she picked up a book, "and after browsing here and there and reading the end, I put it down . . ."25 Furthermore, since the typical medieval mode of composition was the rewriting of old works, the power of readers to reshape a work while retelling it would have been clear to educated audiences that knew one or more of a work's ancestors. Writers themselves demonstrated the reader's power to transform a poem and thus showed that reading can be a kind of rewriting. In the Retraction of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer makes it clear that he understands the possible effects of stories on readers by worrying that some of the tales "sownen into synne" (X[I].io86). In the context of the pious and confessional tone of the Retraction, he acknowledges the potentially harmful effect of stories. In Troilus and Criseyde, he describes the results of literature when he notes Criseyde's reaction to the song her niece Antigone sings in the garden. After she hears the song, she is more willing to become the kind of lover the song describes: But every word which that she of hire herde, She gan to prenten in hire herte faste,
And ay gan love hire lasse for t'agaste Than it dide erst, and synken in hire herte, That she wex somwhat able to converte. (Book II, 11. 899-903; emphasis mine) Criseyde responds to the song by imitating it, even becoming an edition of it by printing it in her heart. 10
Introduction
Chaucer's works are full of descriptions of the audience's power to use literary works as it will. In his address to the reader in the prologue to the Miller's Tale -"Turne over the leef and chese another tale" (I[A].3i77)-he acknowledges just the sort of control over the experience of the work that Barthes describes. The reader also controls interpretation. Troilus is a prime example of a reader who imposes his will on a text. In Book II, he reads Criseyde's letter selectively, suppressing signs of her hesitation and emphasizing her willingness to love him (Book II, 11. 1324-30). Chaucer was a reader himself. As I mentioned earlier, he portrays himself several times as a reader, and all those who know the works he claims to summarize-Ovid's story of Ceyx and Alcyone from the Metamorphoses, Cicero's Somnium Scipionis, and Virgil's Aeneid —
know how actively he reshapes his sources as he retells them in the dream visions.26 Chaucer's emphasis on the reader's rewriting of texts may have been motivated by an anxiety about his influence on his audience's spiritual health. To minimize his own responsibility, he emphasizes the audience's responsibility for its use of stories. Various Chaucerian narrators acknowledge the audience's power: The Parson and the narrator of the Troilus claim to speak "under correction" of various members of their audiences, and the Knight and the Franklin open their tales out to their audiences by posing demandes d'amour. Each reader can supply his or her own answer. In fact, the conditions of reception of Chaucer's works almost guaranteed that readers had to read actively; the Canterbury Tales, for instance, circulated in fragments.27 This gave editors and readers the ability to assemble the work-even physically-in their own way. B. A. Windeatt's work on the manuscripts shows that scribes were Chaucer's "early critics," smoothing out difficult syntax and diction.28 "Meaning," then, is produced not merely by authors, but by a dialectical relationship between authors and audiences. The Pardoner even contemplates without anxiety (perhaps with satisfaction) the possibility that his works will have an effect on his listeners that is entirely different from the one that professedly motivates him to speak. He takes it for granted that his words will escape him and his intentions. The Manciple's mother also assumes that the speaker loses control of his words, but she desires silence. To speak is to become the hearer's "thral" (IX[H].357). The Pardoner and the Manciple give different evalII
Chaucer on Interpretation uations of the same phenomenon - the word's escape from the author.29 PHENOMENOLOGICAL
HERMENEUTICS
When I first encountered philosophical hermeneutics, I had for several years been studying how Chaucer uses narrative to explore the biases of perception. I was especially interested in his selfconscious treatment of his sources to show how what we read shapes our thought in ways that then influence our reading of other texts and the world. Hermeneutics seemed to me to address these issues and provide clarifying terms that are useful to modern readers of medieval texts. Since I am interested in hermeneutics because it promotes interpretive self-awareness, I should state briefly those ideas which I am aware of having influenced me. The following are some principles of modern hermeneutics that are useful for interpreting Chaucer: 1. All judgment is based on prejudgment-on assumptions, biases, and anticipations of what one will find. Prejudgment-prejudice-comes out of the interpreter's context, the place and time in which he stands to view the other. His location conditions what he will see. The distance between minds is thus personal and historical.30 What one sees depends on who one is, and where and when. This is not a correctible flaw in interpretive practice, but part of the human condition. This is the reason David Linge says that the "task of philosophical hermeneutics . . . is ontological rather than methodological."31 2. The dream of complete objectivity or disinterestedness, of knowing the other in a way that is free from the influence of the interpreter's own time and place, is futile. Nevertheless, to recognize the otherness of the other and to attempt to interpret the other as if it had its own intention (i.e., to interpret in good faith) is preferable to cynical imposition of one's own will. Trying to understand the other follows from a recognition of its otherness.32 3. The source of prejudgment is tradition; each age, each person, is shaped by what has gone before. But each age selects parts of the past to be shaped by. According to Gadamer, 12
Introduction tradition "is not simply a precondition into which we come, but we produce it ourselves, inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of tradition and hence further determine it ourselves."33 Thus, understanding is circular. When interpreting a piece of writing from the past, for instance, the interpreter sees it with and through his prejudices, but at the same time those prejudices have been created by the writings of the past, including the very text he is reading. This is true of all interpretation, not just interpretation of the past. The circle is unavoidable and unbreakable. 4. Because of this circle, the model of totally separate subject and object is inadequate. Subject and object are separate, but are also part of a dialectic in which they mutually influence each other. 5. The hermeneutical circle, although unavoidable, is not necessarily vicious. We are not trapped forever in a stalemate, locked away from knowledge of the world. Insofar as we attempt to know the world and insofar as it does not meet our expectations, we learn about ourselves-at the very least we learn about our prejudices. Encounter with the world brings bias to consciousness. Therefore, interpretation is not a sterile imposition of the interpreter's will upon the world; rather, it involves the interpreter in a process of self-discovery. Ricoeur says that good-faith interpretation gives to the subject a new capacity for knowing himself. . . Appropriation [making what is alien one's own], in this way, ceases to appear as a kind of possession, as a way of taking hold of things; instead it implies a moment of dispossession of the egoistic and narcissistic ego.34 The discomfort we feel in the confrontation with the other-a kind of culture shock-leads to discovery. Hermeneutics, the study of interpretation, follows naturally from the process of interpretation. 6. Since no interpretation is perfect or complete, interpretation is never finished.35 It should be no surprise that the pre-Cartesian Middle Ages has much in common with modern anti-Cartesian philosophy.36 In 13
Chaucer on Interpretation both, dialectic is in tension with dualism. Although Gadamer dates from the Reformation the "process of individualization" that "allowed the individual to become an ultimately indissoluble mystery to others,"37 we have already seen that it began much earlier. Chaucer, as well as the modern dialectical thinkers in the Heideggerian tradition, is working around and against undialectical models. One example of a premodern thinker whose ideas have hermeneutical relevance is worth pausing over because of his importance to Chaucer and to fourteenth-century philosophy. Chaucer used Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy as a major source in several of his works and translated it into Middle English. Fourteenthcentury nominalism paid special attention to Boethius because of his interest in the human will.38 Late in the course of Philosophy's visit to Boethius in the Consolation, she explains that alle the thingis in knowynge usen more of hir faculte or of hir power than thei don of the faculty or power of thingis that ben iknowe[.] Ne that nis nat wrong; for so as every jugement is the dede or the doyng of hym that demeth, it byhoveth that every wyght performe the werk and his entencioun, nat of foreyn power, but of his propre power.39 (Book V, prose 4, 212-19) This acknowledgment of the knower's contribution to knowledge is related to the first and second hermeneutical principles in my list. The "more" of the first line in the passage swings the balance toward the observer but does not exclude the object as a cause of knowledge. Nor does Philosophy refuse to call this process of interpretation "knowynge." Boethius's idea of this subjective element in knowledge is important to the Consolation because it provides the key to the final problem of the book, the need to resolve the apparent contradiction between human freedom and divine omniscience. The influence of the knower on knowledge is not a liability to be escaped. Because God's way of knowing is outside time, it is not bound by human notions of cause and effect. Only human epistemology demands such ideas. The conflict between free will and determinism, therefore, is a result of the failure to recognize the existence of a supranatural perspective and is solved by awareness of the difference between human and divine knowledge. In this sense the 14
Introduction Consolation is a double affirmation of the importance of human experience, acknowledging the difference between human perception and absolute knowledge while bestowing on the individual absolute freedom of action.
THE ORDER OF THE CHAPTERS OF THIS BOOK I hope the consonance between the medieval issues I have discussed (personal identity, political power, and literary meaning) and these modern hermeneutical principles will be apparent in my description of the chapters of this book. The chapters do not follow the chronology of Chaucer's works. My claim is not that Chaucer's hermeneutical thinking developed in a logical way from the beginning of his career to the end, but rather that along the -way he considered various sides of the various issues. I have therefore arranged the chapters according to my own scheme. Chapter 2, a reading of the Knight's Tale, introduces many of the themes that reappear later: the separation of minds, their mediation by interpretation, and the self-interestedness of all interpretation. I put the Knight's Tale first partly because it presents the problem of self-interest so fully. Each of the remaining chapters examines the role of will in interpretation by exploring a different aspect or consequence of the paradoxical relationship between mind and world. I argue in Chapter 3 that the Parliament of Fowls shows how interpretation mediates the distance between author and audience when the narrator confronts the double inscription on the gate. The inscription, an authorless text, imitates the condition of a work separated from authorial performance and subject to interpretation. The narrator's behavior before the unclaimed words of the gate and the ambiguous garden shows the necessity of will in interpretation. But willful interpretation is not solipsistic because the will has already been influenced by the world. The Book of the Duchess (Chapter 4) demonstrates the dangers of will in interpretation. Because the Lady White is dead and cannot respond to those who talk about her, she is a figure for the text. She can be treated in one of two ways: "written on" as if blank or "read" as if having experience and meaning of her own. The series of interlocutors who confront the narrator-Morpheus and the Black Knight-present similar problems: how best to treat the 15
Chaucer on Interpretation other, especially if one is unsure of its ontological status or its ability to answer. The poem shows that although will is necessary, it is better to treat the other with good will, that is, to treat it as if it both existed independently and had intentions of its own. The Clerk's Tale (Chapter 5) shows the dangers of treating the text as if it were completely independent of the reader. The good will advocated in the Book of the Duchess is perverted by Walter's insistence that Griselda is completely separate from him and unknown and by his obsessive attempts to learn her secrets. By overestimating her opacity and underestimating his own responsibility for her behavior, he fails to recognize his own power as an interpreter to influence the meaning of Griselda as text. Like the two dream visions, the Clerk's Tale advocates readers' awareness of their own contributions to meaning. Furthermore, the tale teaches us not to underestimate the power of the seemingly weak to shape their own destinies. Griselda has more to do with her predicament than many critics admit. In examining the relationship between masters and their subjects, the tale emphasizes the power of the subjects to shape their rulers. Unlike Walter, the Wife of Bath (Chapter 6) takes full account of the influence of misogynistic readers on the text, which is the Wife herself. Her argument, that women seen as monsters will become monsters, emphasizes the shaping power of interpretation. Yet as consonant as this idea is with the other poems I study here, in the Wife's case it is not entirely innocent because she uses it to dodge her own responsibility for her actions and nature, contradicting her affirmation of individual choice. The evasion of responsibility is also an issue in the narrative frame of the Canterbury Tales (Chapter 7), where it appears in the contrast between Harry Bailly and Geffrey the pilgrim. Harry claims more than his share of responsibility for the shape of the pilgrimage, and Geffrey claims less than his for the shape of the poem. In this last chapter, I show how the contrast between them reflects the relationship between authors and audiences, and between rulers and ruled. TWO EXAMPLES An excellent place to see Chaucer's version of the dialectic between the mind and old texts is the House of Fame. As the narrator 16
Introduction
is carried into the heavens by the eagle, he reports his perceptions and thoughts: Tho gan y loken under me And beheld the ayerissh bestes, Cloudes, mystes, and tempestes, Snowes, hayles, reynes, wyndes, And th'engendrynge in hir kyndes, All the wey thrugh which I cam. "O God!" quod y, "that made Adam, Moche ys thy myght and thy noblesse!" And thoo thoughte y upon Boece, That writ, "A thought may flee so hye, Wyth fetheres of Philosophye, To passen everych element; And whan he hath so fer ywent, Than may be seen, behynde hys bak, Cloude,"-and al that y of spak. Thoo gan y wexen in a were, And seyde, "Y wot wel y am here; But wher in body or in gost I not, ywys; but God, thou wost!" (11. 964-82) According to Russell Peck, the humor of the passage lies in the limitations of the narrator's mind. His perception of the sights he sees as the eagle takes him into the heavens is at first openminded. Then it is limited by Boethius, who serves as a kind of filter through which he tries to understand his experience. But because of the limits of his own mind, he cannot use Boethius well enough to avoid lapsing into a befuddled quandary: The amusing irony of his dilemma is that his power of concentration fails him at the precise moment in the Boethian passage when the philosopher celebrates the soul's arrival at the king of light's throne to enjoy 'the contre that thou requirest, of which thou ne haddest no mynde' (iv.m.1.35-36).40 17
Chaucer on Interpretation I agree with Peck's understanding of the use of Boethius here and would go even further in seeing the passage's humor on the subject of hermeneutical prejudice. Just after the passage in question, the narrator mentions Martianus Capella and Alain de Lille's Anticlaudianus: And than thoughte y on Marcian, And eke on Anteclaudian, That sooth was her descripsion Of alle the hevenes region, As fer as that y sey the preve; Therfore y kan hem now beleve. With that this egle gan to crye, "Lat be," quod he, "thy fantasye! Wilt thou lere of sterres aught?" "Nay, certeynly," quod y, "ryght naught." (11. 985-94) The humor of "than" in line 985 is that the narrator has already used the Anticlaudianus to perceive the various phenomena of the heavens. Peck says that his noticing the scenery is "spontaneous, and for once he finds himself engaged in the scene around him," 41 but I would argue that this reaction is already mediated by the Anticlaudianus, Chaucer's source for "ayerissh bestes," clouds, hail, showers, and winds. 42 The narrator's reading, which this trip is intended to interrupt to give him a slice of reality, mediates the entire experience. What adds even more to the humor in this scene is that it leads into a discussion of experience and belief in which the narrator refuses to learn about the stars because he is too old and, anyway, believes the books he has read without needing any further proof (11. 991-1017). When he persuades the eagle to assent to his narrow-mindedness just before they arrive at the House of Fame, prejudice wins the day. The issues in this discussion are similar to those in the gate scene of the Parliament of Fowls - t h e relationship between seeing and believing what one reads. The narrator in the House of Fame sounds like the narrator of the Parliament comparing what he has seen to what he has read. When the eagle asks the narrator what the rumbling at the House of Fame sounds like, the narrator answers with two similes - like the beating of the sea and like the 18
Introduction
thunder of Jove. The narrator, like all of us, is experiencing the world in terms of his past associations and old stories. The Melibee, especially important because it is one of the tales Geffrey the narrator tells on the Canterbury pilgrimage, shows how the dialectic between mind and world pertains to authors and audiences. It describes perfectly the author's dilemma: He may have some effect on his audience, but he cannot hope to control that effect. His book may intrude on readers' lives in ways that are very different from his intentions. Although on one level the tale is about the inappropriateness of revenge, on another level it is about advice. The person who requests and receives advice must decide what to do with the piece of the outside world he has let in: accept or reject it. A good deal of the Melibee is taken up with whom to ask, how to ask, and what to do with what one gets when one asks. Thus, it is also about the boundaries of the self and the author's influence on the reader. Paul Strohm implies that these two themes - revenge and advice - are related when he places the tale in the Christian debate about self-sufficiency: Should individuals look to their own defenses or trust in God?43 The theme of boundaries and the vulnerability of the self is established early in the tale, which begins with Melibee outside, playing in the fields, and his wife Prudence and daughter Sophie inside the house. Three of Melibee's "olde foes" climb through the windows, beat his wife, and wound his daughter. Prudence later allegorizes the attack, saying that Melibee has allowed the concern for the flesh, the devil, and the world to "entre in to thyn herte wilfully by the wyndowes of thy body" (VII[B2].i422). The rest of the tale concentrates on the choice between accepting advice from outside sources and maintaining one's own boundaries. The choice is reflected in two of the groups against which Prudence warns Melibee, the flatterers and the fools. The flatterers, especially common among the counselors of great lords, "enforcen hem alwey rather to speken plesante wordes, enclynynge to the lordes lust" (1. 1152). The fool, says Prudence? quoting Solomon, "ne kan noght conseille but after his owene lust and his affeccioun" (1. 1173). The flatterers adapt themselves to the desires of others; the fools cannot see beyond their own desires. One group does not maintain its own boundaries; the other maintains them too well. Rather than describing a balance between these two options, the 19
Chaucer on Interpretation tale produces a paradox. Much of the conversation between Melibee and Prudence is about whether he should take advice at all. She convinces him to accept advice from her (despite his initial objections to a female counselor), tells him whom to ask, whom not to ask, how to ask, and what to make of the opinions he has already heard. Her repeated theme is how he can protect himself from advice. When he says he will follow her advice "in alle thyng" (1. 1114), she counsels him to seek advice first from God and then from himself (11. n 16-37) a n d charges him to keep his decision to himself (to protect himself from others, including those who will betray him and the flatterers who want to reflect his own judgment back to him): "[M]en seyn that the riche man hath seeld good conseil, but if he have it of hymself" (1. 1153). Moreover, when he has received good advice from himself, he must keep it to himself: Whan ye han taken conseil in youreself, and han deemed by good deliberacion swich thyng as you semeth best, / thanne rede I yow that ye kepe it secree. / Biwrey nat youre conseil to no persone, but if so be that ye wenen sikerly that thurgh youre biwreyyng youre condicioun shal be to yow the moore profitable. / For Jhesus Syrak seith . . . (11. 1138-41) There follow citations of several authorities who warn against accepting advice. Thus the paradox: Prudence, having accepted the advice of authorities, advises Melibee not to take advice. Furthermore, the authorities do not stop Prudence from advising vigorously against Melibee's plan to attack his enemies. But Prudence's distrust of others shows, ironically, that like all those she warns Melibee about, she, too, gives advice that reflects her own opinions. Her comment, "Lo, lo, . . . how lightly is every man enclined to his owene desir and to his owene plesaunce!" (1. 1283), applies to herself as well.44 As Boethius says, knowledge fits the knower. Melibee's response to Prudence intensifies the paradox. He does not so much decide on mercy as decide to do whatever she advises: "I wol governe me by thy conseil in alle thyng" (1. 1114; see also 11. 1870-1). He follows her ideas about mercy toward one's enemies but ignores her advice about using advice. She has over20
Introduction
sold her own abilities, so that Melibee chooses counselor rather than counsel. She, too, abandons her principle when she switches from advising to mediating between him and his enemies. In the tale, her principle of maintaining the integrity of the self is authoritatively stated, and then violated. There is no way out of the paradox: If Melibee does not take Prudence's advice against advice and takes the advice of others, he lets down his defenses against others; if he does take her advice by not taking the advice of others, he has taken her advice and, once again, has let down his defenses. There is no way for Melibee to stay pristine and inviolate. This paradoxical puzzle comes appropriately from Geffrey the narrator. Ralph Elliott argues from stylistic evidence that the Melibee parodies didactic prose by exaggerating its repetitive, awkward pomposity.45 Stylistic playfulness fits the puzzlelike conundrum posed by Prudence's meta-advice; they both also fit the "elvyssh" narrator who produced Sir Thopas and who now slyly punishes the impatient Harry Bailly for his interruption of the rhymed romance with a demonstration of just how tedious morality can be, and how contradictory and frustrating. This playfulness also fits the poet. If Chaucer is concerned with the perils of discourse, as it is my major purpose to demonstrate in this book, then the Melibee is a good tale for his persona because it is about the paradoxes of individual identity and the meaning of texts. Morton Bloomfield has read the Merchant's Tale as a lesson about the improper violations of personal boundaries.46 The Melibee is a lesson in the impossibility of avoiding such violations. As the story unfolds its lesson about mercy, the right use of power, and the abjuring of vengeance, it also shows that it is impossible to avoid impinging on others. Melibee cannot be entirely separate from the world. His vulnerability to the world at the start of the tale is reenacted in his relationship with Prudence. Once he has let her in, there is no way he can be perfectly defended against others. Even if he were to exclude most others, he would be bending to the will of Prudence. Absolute independence is impossible. Prudence is a figure for the author and demonstrates the perils of narration. No matter how she tries to determine the meaning of her words, she cannot control Melibee's interpretation of them. Even when she tries to protect him from herself (by telling him 21
Chaucer on Interpretation how to handle all advice givers), she cannot do it. Her awareness of the self-interested nature of most advice does not prevent her from giving him advice saturated with her own point of view. She is thus in the contradictory position of imposing herself on her audience when she does not want to and still not being able to control his interpretation of her message. Chaucer's explorations of this dilemma of the too-powerful powerlessness of selves, and especially of authors, are my subject for the rest of this book.47
22
INTERPRETATION IN THE KNIGHT'S TALE
I
READ THE KNIGHT'S TALE as an exploration of some aspects of the paradox I stated at the end of Chapter i: Selves are isolated from each other and yet engaged in an interpretive process in which they define each other. I shall begin with the modern questions about the tale and then suggest my answers to them by discussing the tale's treatment of interpretation as it mediates between selves who are isolated and yet intertwined. The recent critical debate about the Knight's Tale focuses on the questions of the order of the universe and the place of human beings within it. Is the cosmos benignly ordered, and are death and destruction really part of a larger cycle and therefore ultimately good? When human beings try to make order, are they reflecting the harmonious grand scheme, or are they fooling themselves? If they are fooling themselves, is this ultimately good or bad? To recast these questions in terms more specific to the tale: Is Theseus's First Mover speech, in which he describes the ruling principle of the universe as a chain of love, an echo of the harmony of the larger scheme or a fiction he invents? If it is a fiction, is his aim to secure his people against despair or to secure his position as ruler of Athens? Is he making a leap of faith or trying to save his own skin? Some critics think that the cosmos depicted in the tale is ordered. Others can be divided into two groups. In one group are Charles Muscatine and Peter Elbow, to whom that cosmos is basically chaotic but who think that Theseus, in saying that it is not, is doing just what we want aristocrats to do: give us symbols
Chaucer on Interpretation of order and stability.1 The descriptions of temples and the parallel laments and prayers make the poem a "poetic pageant" in which symmetry is meaningful because "true nobility is faith in the ultimate order of all things."2 In the other group are Elizabeth Salter, David Aers, and Terry Jones, according to whom the tale indicts human order-making capacity on the grounds that order makers are usually aristocrats, who make the order that serves their own self-interest and who are sometimes willing to use violence to do it.3 My own reading, which agrees with Muscatine and Elbow at least in the belief that the tale raises the possibility of idealistic attempts to make order, supports Salter, Aers, and Jones on the tendency of such attempts to be self-interested. I see the tale as an exploration of a paradox: that each person is fundamentally alone and yet intricately linked to others. The links come about partly through interpretation, of which there are two kinds in the tale. In the first kind, one person attempts in good faith to understand the view of another. In the second, one person projects his own intentions and desires onto the other, perhaps out of ignorance, perhaps in order to control him. The difficulty of achieving sympathy and the prevalence of selfishness support the un-ideal reading. Yet both sides of the paradox remain. The possibility of sympathy is never eliminated. In fact, the two kinds of interpretation are related because of the paradox in the human condition. It is because people's fates are intertwined that people become self-enclosed and selfinterested interpreters. My distinction here is not between interpretation that succeeds in grasping the truth about the other and interpretation that does not, but rather between interpretation that tries to grasp the truth about the other and interpretation that does not. It is a commonplace that the title of Gadamer's Truth and Method is ironic: There is no method that will guarantee truth. Gadamer says repeatedly that his work is ontological and phenomenological rather than practical: "My real concern . . . is philosophic: not what we . . . ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing."4 Nevertheless, an occasional "ought" creeps into his writing because, although he denies the possibility of complete understanding of another, he implies that making the attempt is better than not (see Chapter i). Chaucer shares both the concern for "what is" and the concern for the ethical implications of describing "what is." 24
The Knight's Tale My method will be to examine the characters' interactions and their interpretations of each other and the world in several key scenes, some of the differences between the Knight's Tale and its main source, Boccaccio's Teseida, and some of the Knight's habits as narrator. The key scenes include the one in which Palamon and Arcite fall in love with Emily, the conversation between Theseus and the Theban women, Theseus's deliberations when he discovers the two knights fighting in the grove, Theseus's First Mover speech, the death of Arcite, and the very end of the tale. The General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales is the story of how a bunch of individuals who meet by chance at an inn in London make themselves into a group, a "felaweshipe" (11. 26; 32). The Knight's Tale, the first of the stories that are supposed to create and express this fellowship, relates how two men-cousins, twins, comrades in battle, who are "[b]othe in oon armes" (1. 1012)discover that each is fundamentally alone. For example, the narrator says that Arcite rides to meet Palamon in the grove "allone as he was born" (1. 1633), and Arcite himself laments that a man's death means being . . . in his colde grave Allone, withouten any compaignye. (I[A].2778-9) Human beings begin and end their lives alone, as the narrator reminds us several times. The Knight's alteration of the material he found in the Teseida emphasizes one's isolation during life, as well as at its beginning and end. In the Teseida, the characters are more involved in each other's lives and feelings: The Theban ladies' sufferings increase when they see Teseo's triumph, Palemone and Arcita each suffer more because of the other's suffering, and they mourn Arcita's departure together. 5 Teseo pities Palemone and Arcita when he first sees them (p. n o ) . Emilia hears Palemone's cry when he is first smitten by her beauty, knows she is being watched, and attempts to look more attractive in response (pp. 113-14). Palemone escapes from prison because he hears that Arcita has returned (p. 118), and the two of them are aware that the history of violence between brothers in their family may be a cause of their own conflict (pp. 119-20). When Arcita is dying, the narrator 25
Chaucer on Interpretation predicts that he will now go meet and "understand" other dead souls in the underworld (p. 143). The Knight omits all these indications of the intertwining of his characters' lives. His knights do not suffer over each other's suffering, they lament their fates alone, and Emily is unaware of being admired. Palamon's escape is independent of Arcite's, no mention is made of the familial violence among Thebans and the effect it might have on the cousins, and the Knight refuses to speculate on the destination of Arcite's soul. Boccaccio's characters are more closely tied to one another than Chaucer's, serving more often as causes of feelings and events in each other's lives.6 To say this, however, is not to say that the Knight's characters are self-enclosed monads. In fact, the conflict between the two knights comes about through the interaction between them. It is not merely that their love for Emily causes them to hate each other, but also that their interaction with each other mediates their love for Emily. In Boccaccio, Arcita invites Palemone to the window to see the beautiful sight of Emilia singing in the garden; they feast their eyes and ears together, and the same words refer to both of them: Mentre costoro, sospesi e attend, gli occhi e gli orecchi pur verso colei tenendo fissi facevan contend, forte maravigliandosi . . . (3.15, p. 332) As they both with rapt attention delighted their eyes and ears alike by keeping them fixed on her alone . . . (pp. 112-13) In the Knight's Tale, the conflict between the two knights over each one's right to love Emily begins much sooner, so that they are differentiated from each other much sooner. At the same time, however, they also influence each other's love for Emily. Palamon discovers Emily but treats her as a goddess. Arcite falls in love with her as a woman. Palamon teaches Arcite to love her, and Arcite teaches Palamon to love her as a woman. They imitate each other. Arcite uses the language of love when he says,
26
The Knight's Tale The fresshe beautee sleeth me sodeynly Of hire that rometh in the yonder place, And but I have hir mercy and hir grace, That I may seen hire atte leeste weye, I nam but deed . . . (11. 1118-22)
Palamon picks up this kind of vocabulary when he chastises Arcite for daring To love my lady, whom I love and serve, And evere shal til that myn herte sterve. (11. 1143-4) Mercy, grace, dying for love, love service, and the starving heart all belong to the conventions and vocabulary of courtly love, but Palamon does not understand that he has (rather conventionally) fallen in love until after Arcite has also been smitten. The Knight separates the knights more clearly than Boccaccio does and thus makes more striking the way in which they mediate each other's experience. The tale explores this tension between human solidarity and human solitariness. As Frederick Turner points out, it begins and ends with marriages and funerals.7 These rituals ofjoining and separating mark the movement in the tale between the two poles Arcite mentions in his farewell speech, from which I quoted earlier: What is this world? what asketh men to have? Now with his love, now in his colde grave Allone, withouten any compaignye. (11. 2777-9) The tale juxtaposes friendship and love, which transcend the individual, with death, which (at least in worldly terms) isolates the individual forever. Palamon and Arcite's friendship is a kind of marriage. Echoing the marriage ceremony, Palamon says that it should not be broken "[t]il that the deeth departe shal us tweyne . . ." (1. 1134).8 They are physically separated because of Arcite's friendship with Perotheus, the friend so dear to Theseus
Chaucer on Interpretation that when he died Theseus followed him to hell (11. 1198-1200).9 When Perotheus successfully pleads with Theseus for Arcite's freedom, the cousins are parted because of a friendship that was not limited in the usual way by death. Solidarity and separation are linked. Solidarity first overcomes and then causes separation. The separation between people in the tale makes interpretation necessary. Much of the time they do not know what others are feeling or thinking. Interpretation is often a description offered to another as a hypothesis, as if to say, "I guess this is your idea or intention or feeling."10 The other person may then, by words or actions, confirm or deny the description. In many cases, the hypothesis reflects the interpreter's personality or self-interest at least as much as it reflects the person being interpreted. Interpretation, the attempt to know the other, from whom the speaker is metaphysically isolated, may merely express and reinforce that isolation. Interpretation often functions not as a way of learning about but rather as a way of preempting the other. Through interpretation, a speaker paints a picture of his interlocutor to which he hopes the interlocutor will conform. Interpretation functions, then, not as a way of knowing an interlocutor, but as a way of creating one. Examples of both kinds of interpretation occur in the first interchange in the tale, that between Theseus and the Theban women. Even before the start of conversation, the women demand his attention in several ways: This due, of whom I make mencioun, Whan he was come almoost unto the toun, In al his wele and in his mooste pride, He was war, as he caste his eye aside, Where that ther kneled in the heighe weye A compaignye of ladyes, tweye and tweye, Ech after oother, clad in clothes blake; But swich a cry and swich a wo they make That in this world nys creature lyvynge That herde swich another waymentynge; And of this cry they nolde nevere stenten Til they the reynes of his brydel henten. (11. 893-904) 28
The Knight's Tale Theseus in his "mooste pride" becomes "war." The slight pause enforced by the line break emphasizes the difference between his self-absorbed pride and the turn of his attention to the odd sight of lamenting ladies kneeling two by two in the road.11 But the ladies catch his attention not only by being odd, but also by grabbing the reins of his bridle and stopping their cries. To control his horse is to control him (Palamon is captured in the tournament when he is dragged off his horse), and to stop crying is to attempt to force him to speak. His reply has several stages: "What folk been ye, that at myn homcomynge Perturben so my feste with criynge?" Quod Theseus. "Have ye so greet envye Of myn honour, that thus compleyne and crye? Or who hath yow mysboden or offended? And telleth me if it may been amended, And why that ye been clothed thus in blak." (11. 905-n) This complex reply accomplishes two things by including both descriptions of the ladies and questions: It vents Theseus's anger and it seeks information. The descriptions are hypotheses; the questions acknowledge that he has no basis for the hypotheses. When he becomes aware of the ladies in line 896, he is aware of them as ladies; yet he first addresses them less honorifically as "folk" (1. 905)I2 and describes them as interrupting his celebration. The first question (11. 905-6) asks their identity and criticizes them at the same time. The criticism almost undercuts the need for the question: They are the folk who disturb his celebration. The second question, which as good as calls them envious, is a kind of projection: Theseus himself is like a conventional icon of envy "as he caste his eye aside" (1. 896).I3 He accuses them of what he may himself be feeling. Only in the third and fourth questions does he seem to be straightforwardly asking for information, even hinting that he will help. Theseus seems to move from being self-enclosed to being more open to and interested in others.14 The lady who answers his questions requests that he have mercy on the ladies and bestow "[s]om drope of pitee, thurgh thy gentillesse" (1. 920). This is preemptive interpretation in that the 29
Chaucer on Interpretation lady is describing Theseus the way she would like him to be. His speech to her had several tones, some of them not at all gentle. Gentility can describe one's position in society or one's character. The lady is trying to encourage Theseus to show more of his gentle or genteel side by calling him gentle. She controls him not only by controlling his horse, but by interpreting him. In his response, Theseus shows himself a man of sentiment (he embraces and comforts the ladies) as well as a man of action (he charges off to destroy Thebes). He is also sensitive to social status: He responds to the ladies partly because of their high rank (11. 954-6). The ladies have been successful in calling forth his "gentillesse." The narrator, too, calls him "[t]his gentil due" (1. 952). Another example of preemptive interpretation occurs when Palamon cries out in pain upon seeing Emily for the first time. Arcite first asks him what is wrong and then, assuming that he knows what is wrong, comforts Palamon at some length: . . . Cosyn myn, what eyleth thee, That art so pale and deedly on to see? Why cridestow? Who hath thee doon offence? For Goddes love, taak al in pacience Oure prisoun, for it may noon oother be . . . (11. 1081-5) The speech goes on for another six lines, but Arcite is wrong about what is wrong with Palamon. These are the first words we hear from the cousins, and they indicate the distance between them.15 There is no automatic understanding. Their first words show their lack of rapport. Palamon calls Arcite's advice an "opinioun" and a product of "veyn ymaginacioun" (11. 1093-4).l6 Palamon is telling Arcite that Arcite does not see him. Arcite's words apply more to himself than to Palamon: His analysis of human life as determined is indeed very like what he later says to himself when Theseus has exiled him to Thebes (11. 1234-74). So the cousins, who are almost twins, who are united as if in marriage, who are even in some ways, according to some critics, two halves of the same person,17 really do not know each other's minds. Palamon can speak about his own feelings with authority ("for sothe," 1. 1093), but Arcite's hypothesis about them indicates more about Arcite than it does about Palamon. Palamon has 30
The Knight's Tale contracted the disease of the eye called love (11. 1096-7), but Arcite is also not seeing correctly. His view of Palamon is distorted by his own ideas and feelings. This kind of self-centered interpretation recurs when, after Arcite is released and exiled, each one describes, incorrectly, the victorious happiness the other must be feeling. These parallel speeches come one after the other (11. 1234-50; 1281-98) and demonstrate mutual incomprehension. Another important passage is Theseus's monologue about what to do with the two knights, whom he has just discovered fighting in the grove. At first he is angry, then he softens, forgives them, and invents the tournament. His change of mind is striking, especially in contrast to the scene in the Teseida; because Teseo is not as angry, his conversion is not as interesting. Peter Elbow and David Aers have given Theseus's change of mind mutually exclusive readings. Elbow considers the monologue "a rich sequence of mental processes" (p. 106) that leads Theseus "to full sympathyfeeling with-and thus finally to genuine, felt forgiveness" (p. 105). Elbow celebrates this process as a sign of Theseus's flexibility, which casts a negative light on the two lovers' rigidity in their argument over Emily (pp. 103-4). m contrast, Aers emphasizes that what allows Theseus his sympathy is really an insight into selfishness. More important than the compassion, he says, is Theseus's realization that "every man / Wol helpe hymself in love" (11. 1767-78). The supposed compassion is founded on recognition of the "anarchic egotism" of love (p. 181). These two opposing views must be juxtaposed because together they express the paradox that I see in the tale. The possibility of knowing or feeling with another is fragile and inextricably linked with selfishness. Theseus's willingness to pardon the two knights depends (at least in part) on selfishness. The process is not entirely self-enclosed in that Theseus chooses mercy partly for the sake of the women: And therfore, syn I knowe of loves peyne, And woot hou soore it kan a man distreyne, As he that hath ben caught ofte in his laas, I yow foryeve al hoolly this trespaas, At requeste of the queene, that kneleth heere, And eek of Emelye, my suster deere. (11. 1815-20) 31
Chaucer on Interpretation This kind of sentence about causation is typically Chaucerian. The independent clause is sandwiched between modifiers that name two separate causes. In this case, one cause is internal (it has to do with Theseus himself), and one is external (the ladies' request, 11. 1748-51). The sentence expresses the two sides of the paradox I am exploring, isolation and relatedness.18 Theseus can forgive the two followers of the god of love because "in my tyme a servant was I oon" (1. 1814). If he had not once been a lover himself, would he have killed them on the spot? Furthermore, the whole process by which he reaches his decision, although motivated initially by the ladies, is noninteractive. Half of it is silent. He is thinking "in his gentil herte" and talking "unto hymself" (11. 1772-3). There is a debate, but it is an internal one between "his ire" and "his resoun" (11. 1765-6). He argues by painting an unflattering mental picture of an unmerciful lord and urging himself not to conform to it (11. 1773-81). This process is similar to the preemptive interpretation he engages in with the ladies at the beginning of the tale because it involves inventing images of the other (in this case, himself). Theseus is attempting to call forth his "gentillesse," just as the ladies were. A clue to Theseus's selfishness in this process is his admiration for the god of love's power to create others in his own image: The god of love, a, benedicitel How myghty and how greet a lord is he! Ayeyns his myght ther gayneth none obstacles. He may be cleped a god for his myracles; For he kan maken, at his owene gyse, Of everich herte as that hym list divyse. (11. 1785-90) Theseus admires the god of love, in fact interprets him as a god, because the god can make others conform to his picture of them. The pun in "divyse," which means both devise and describe, indicates this process, which creates or influences by describing and interpreting. This has already happened in the grove scene when Palamon presented himself in terms consistent with Theseus's point of view. When he was in prison, Palamon complained bitterly about Theseus's tyranny (1. 1111). Now suddenly he adopts Theseus's values; he calls himself wicked (1. 1735) and 32
The Knight's Tale Theseus "a rightful lord and juge" (1. 1719). Despite the fact that when he had the opportunity to attack Theseus he did not, he calls himself Theseus's "mortal foo" (1. 1736). Theseus has treated him like a mortal foe by sentencing him to life in prison, and Palamon is adopting his jailer's definition of their respective roles.19 This is wise, as we learn later, because Theseus would apparently not shrink from using torture (1. 1746). It is not surprising that Theseus can agree so quickly with Palamon, because Palamon has created himself according to Theseus's image of him.20 It is also instructive to look at the results of Theseus's change of mind in his subsequent statements. He makes the knights swear never to attack Athens, and after he secures his self-interest in this way, he declares them worthy to marry Emily. He then announces his plan for a tournament in terms that allow no answer or discussion: My wyl is this, for plat conclusioun, Withouten any repplicacioun, If that you liketh, take it for the beste . . . (11. 1845-7) "If that yow liketh" seems to invite response but actually does not, because the tournament is a given. The knights can choose their attitude about it, but that is all they can choose. Theseus's legalistic language blocks any negotiation. He presents himself as someone who, like the god of love, can "devise" others. He tells the knights, "Lo heere youre ende of that I shal devyse" (1. 1844). Sympathy and compassion are facilitated and qualified by selfinterest. When Theseus says he will be "evene juge . . . and trewe" (1. 1864) of the tournament, we have every reason to doubt, in the context of the tale, that such a promise can be kept. Theseus's First Mover speech gives even less reason for optimism about the possibility of accurate judgment. Like his monologue in the grove, the speech is much analyzed by critics. There are three basic ways to interpret it. One is to consider it true: Theseus correctly says that a chain of love rules the universe. I have already mentioned the two other positions: Elbow and Muscatine admit that the cosmos is chaotic but admire Theseus's attempt to lie about it; Aers and Jones think that the lie is a kind of imperialism. 33
Chaucer on Interpretation Boccaccio's Teseo is like Theseus in issuing a mixture of commands and requests: "Be ready then, I beg you, to do as I wish without demur" (p. 149). The request carries much less force than the command. He also argues with Emilia, who defends her virginity, and orders her to "start raising your spirits and altering your appearance straight away" (p. 149). The Knight's Theseus is somewhat more subtle, in that he recognizes causes outside himself. However, he not only recognizes necessity, but continues to try to create it in his own interest. I take the speech as a fiction. Arcite's death may have been caused, ultimately, by a chain of love, but the narrator says that it was engineered by Saturn, who used it to resolve a squabble among competing gods. Since Boccaccio's gods settle their own quarrel, Saturn is the Knight's addition here, and his credentials are impressive: Disasters from drownings to plagues (11. 2454-69)-these are his tools for settling the argument when Jupiter fails (1. 2442).2I He is also a skilled misinterpreter. He takes advantage of a quirk in Arcite's wording of his prayer. Arcite's request for victory can be used as an excuse to kill him only if one divorces his literal meaning from his intention. The request for victory is not a sign that he loves Emily any less than Palamon does: . . . if that Palamon was wounded sore, Arcite is hurt as muche as he, or moore. (11. 1115-16) He wants a victory in order to win her. He invokes Mars as a lover and tells him that Emily must be won with a military victory. Saturn lacks insight into or sympathy with Arcite's intentions. Thus, although Emily claims that Diana knows her desires (11. 2304-10), in this tale there is no more guarantee that the gods know or care about human intentions than that humans know or care about each other's intentions. Theseus does not know all this, but that is just the point. His description of causation in the world is as willful as Saturn's description of Arcite's wishes. It merely expresses Theseus's selfinterest. Aers rightly emphasizes what happens before and after the speech (pp. 188-90). Immediately before the speech, the Athenian parliament agrees that it wants to ensure the subservience of Thebes to Athens. The marriage of Palamon and Emily will ac34
The Knight's Tale complish that. That the First Mover speech is a polemical fiction designed to make the reluctant Emily agree to the marriage is clear when Theseus turns to Palamon to say, I trowe ther nedeth litel sermonyng To make yow assente to this thyng. (11. 3091-2) Since Palamon has spent some years (by my count, at least twelve) being in love with Emily, presumably he does not need convincing. Theseus's use of the word "thyng" (contract) shows how he regards the marriage. The First Mover speech is a piece of rhetoric designed to persuade Emily to acquiesce in a scheme that defeats her personal aim (to remain a virgin) but accomplishes Theseus's political one. The coercive nature of the enterprise is clear from the way Theseus uses the language of agreement: "Suster," quod he, "this is my fulle assent, With al th'avys heere of my parlement, That gentil Palamon, youre owene knyght, That serveth yow with wille herte, and myght, And ever hath doon syn ye first hym knewe, That ye shul of youre grace upon hym rewe, And taken hym for housbonde and for lord. Lene me youre hond, for this is oure accord . . . " (11. 3075-82) The parliament is his, the assent is his, and the agreement must be his (and his parliament's), because he has not allowed Emily to speak.22 Thus, the First Mover speech is not an attempt to describe the design of the world but an indication of Theseus's design on the world. It may be a shrewd argument from a ruler whose aim is to secure his city against enemies, but it is not good-faith interpretation. Its aim is not truth but domination of Emily in order to dominate Thebes. Theseus is seeking not to describe or imitate reality, but to control it. The imperial self we see here is neither solipsistic nor fully engaged in knowing the world. Rather, it combines selfishness and interaction with the world. The intertwining of these two 35
Chaucer on Interpretation elements in the characters of the tale is highlighted by Arcite's death, which is, on the one hand, extremely self-enclosed and, on the other, extremely generous. This combination is significant. In death, Arcite becomes an icon of the isolated self: Swelleth the brest of Arcite, and the soore Encreesseth at his herte moore and moore. The clothered blood, for any lechecraft, Corrupteth, and is in his bouk ylaft, That neither veyne-blood, ne ventusynge, Ne drynke of herbes may ben his helpynge. The vertu expulsif, or animal, Fro thilke vertu cleped natural Ne may the venym voyden ne expelle. The pipes of his longes gonne to swelle, And every lacerte in his brest adoun Is shent with venym and corrupcioun. Hym gayneth neither, for to gete his life, Vomyt upward, ne dounward laxatif. (u. 2743-56) Nothing moves into or out of his body. He can no longer participate in exchange with the world. Arcite's final speech to Emily emphasizes not only this physical isolation, but also his increasing metaphysical isolation. Comparison with Boccaccio's Arcita is instructive. Early in his death scene, Arcita recommends Palemone to Emilia as a husband, but he continues to use terms that express his own connection with her: O bella Emilia, del mio cor disio, o bella Emilia, da me sola amata, o dolce Emilia, cuor del corpo mio, . . . per te sola m'e noia il mio morire . . . (10.104, p.
600)
O fair Emilia, my heart's desire-O fair Emilia, my only love-O sweet Emilia, my own dear heart [heart of my body] . . . it is because of you alone that death gives me pain . . . (P- H3) 36
The Knight's Tale In addressing her as the object of his desire, part of his body, and the sole cause of his anguish, he emphasizes their unity. Only his last words, "A Dio, Emilia!" (10.113), acknowledge the separation caused by his death. The Knight's Arcite is like Boccaccio's in that he addresses Emily as "myn hertes queene" and "[m]yn hertes lady" (11. 2775; 2776; not, however, as his heart). He is also different. He returns to the kind of philosophical question that has engaged him before: What is this world? what asketh men to have? Now with his love, now in his colde grave Allone, withouten any compaignye. (11. 2777-9) The second of these lines mentions both parts of the dialectic of union and aloneness and seems to help Arcite make something of a transition. He then says "Fare wel" and asks Emily to listen to his next words. The speculative questions and the "Fare wel" express a new position toward Emily and the world. The next passage, which he has emphasized by his request that Emily listen, contains a surprise: I have heer with my cosyn Palamon Had strif and rancour many a day agon For love of yow, and for my jalousye. And Juppiter so wys my soule gye, To speken of a servaunt proprely, With alle circumstances trewelyThat is to seyen, trouthe, honour, knyghthede, Wysdom, humblesse, estaat, and heigh kynrede, Fredom, and al that longeth to that artSo Juppiter have of my soule part, As in this world right now ne knowe I non So worthy to ben loved as Palamon, That serveth yow, and wol doon al his lyf. And if that evere ye shul ben a wyf, Foryet nat Palamon, the gentil man. (11. 2783-97) This passage accomplishes several things: It acknowledges Arcite's own part in the events that led to his death ("for my jalousye," 1. 37
Chaucer on Interpretation 2785) in a way that Boccaccio's Arcita never manages. The next sentence, which is long and complicated because it interrupts itself several times ("To speken," "That is to seven," "So Juppiter"), turns out, at the very end, to be recommending Palamon to Emily as a husband. The long list of knightly attributes repeats some of the words of the Knight's portrait in the General Prologue (11. 45-6) and could very well refer to Arcite himself. There is no hint that the subject is really Palamon until line 2794. Thus, having said "Fare wel" and having acknowledged his separation from others, Arcite performs the most generous action in the tale. He commends his friend's good qualities (11. 2789-90) and his love of Emily and tells her to "[fjoryet nat Palamon, the gentil man" (1. 2 797)-23 He is also sympathetic with Emily's wish to remain a virgin and does not try to coerce her into marriage, but only recommends his cousin conditionally, "if that evere ye shul ben a wyf" (1. 2796). Arcite can be sensitive to the needs of Palamon and Emily because he knows that he is dying (11. 2762; 2776) and therefore no longer has any self-interest. Isolation from the concerns of the world permits generosity in a way that full participation does not. The fact that death produces the isolation from which compassion is possible highlights the usual intertwining of these two states. Although Arcite dies shortly after this speech, it is unclear whether his altruism persists until the end. His final word is ambiguous. He is unlike Boccaccio's Arcita, who goes blind and murmurs to himself until he musters his "A Dio, Emilia!" Instead, Dusked his eyen two, and failled breeth, But on his lady yet caste he his ye; His laste word was, "Mercy, Emelye!" (11. 2806-8) Although his eyes are dimmed, Arcite is here acting out the ritual of courtly love once more, looking at his lady and begging for mercy. This is much the way he first fell in love (11. 1114-22), but now the meaning of the behavior is unclear. It is a moment for farewell, but Arcite asks for mercy, which in romances is often a request for recognition, acceptance, or a kiss or some other sexual favor. What can it mean here? Arcite is isolated by his failing senses but still involved in the world.24 38
The Knight's Tale We can see the usual mixture of self-interest and concern for the other in the Knight himself. As narrator, he engages in preemptive interpretation when he justifies his narrative practice by telling his audience what they do and do not want to hear. For instance, he interrupts the beginning of the story to say, And certes, if it nere to long to heere, I wolde have toold yow fully the manere How wonnen was the regne of Femenye . . . (ii. 875-7) At the beginning of the third part of the tale he pauses to describe his audience again: I trowe men wolde deme it necligence If I foryete to tellen the dispence Of Theseus . . . (U. 1881-3) Since the Knight does not really know what his audience expects or desires, this rhetoric is a sham. Unlike the demande d'amour, in which the Knight asks an open-ended question and leaves room for his hearers to judge for themselves (1. 1353), these transitional passages preempt the audience's own wishes. If they sound as though they were taking the audience into account, it is because the Knight's self-interest lies with his audience: As he acknowledges (1. 891), he is in a competition. It will be judged by one member of the audience - Harry Bailly. Since Harry Bailly is not only the judge of the game, but the inventor of the rules, who makes it clear that he cares about whether the rules are followed (I[A].805-6; 833-4), the Knight acknowledges the competition and shows his willingness to play by the rules. Thus, the Knight is inextricably linked with others and inevitably self-interested. The two states go together, despite the fact that they are sometimes in conflict. The social bonds create the possibility of knowledge of and sympathy with others, and yet they also create competition, which in turn creates self-interest, which blocks sympathy. Yet the self-interest would not exist in the first place if it were not for the links with others. Perhaps the connection between competition and self-interest 39
Chaucer on Interpretation allows us to go back and explain why Theseus can ask what seem to be good-faith questions of the lamenting Theban ladies but interpret the Theban knights more self-interestedly. Although he at first regards the ladies as a threat, people jealous of his success whom he must in turn be jealous of, they are not a threat, and he seems to realize this eventually. Palamon and Arcite are a threat, and his interpretation of them is more aggressively preemptive. When he grants them mercy, it is at the request, as I have noted, of his wife and his sister-in-law. Hippolyta and Emily are Amazons. They are warriors, but he has already conquered them. The knights are not so tamed. The tale's great irony is that the less self-interested relationship with the women of Thebes leads directly to the more self-interested relationship with the men of Thebes.25 Thus, the tale shows the link between sympathy and self-interest. Sympathy cannot seem to remain long without causing a relationship governed instead by self-interest. Given this analysis of the difficulty of acting in good faith with the universe and with other people, what we think of the end of the tale is crucial. Even if we say that Theseus is a tyrant who uses description to create a world in his own interest, perhaps his imperialism is a good response to the difficulty of knowing the truth. We must act even if we do not absolutely know what is true, and perhaps setting oneself up like a god on a throne as Theseus does (1. 2529) is better than languishing in passivity, as the knights do. If we could approve of Theseus's results, perhaps we could forgive him the tyranny. The Knight seems to be asking this of us in his description of the marriage of Palamon and Emily. He describes it as a marriage in which fellowship and selfinterest coincide perfectly: For now is Palamon in alle wele, Lyvynge in blisse, in richesse, and in heele, And Emelye hym loveth so tendrely, And he hire serveth al so gentilly, That nevere was ther no word hem bitwene Of jalousie or any oother teene. (11. 3101-6) This Utopian claim is not easy to judge. The Knight must mean something by it because he does not have to talk about the future; 40
The Knight's Tale the last we see of Boccaccio's couple, they are making love-seven times-on their wedding night. In fact, much of what the Knight does to the story makes the happiness between Palamon and Emily more plausible. The Teseida is really Arcita's story more than it is Palemone's: It does not include a speech of Palemone's for every one of Arcita's and thus does not have the Knight's Tale's famous symmetry. It allows Arcita to linger for a long time after he is wounded, and all the while Emilia, who liked him enough not to betray him while he was disguised in the court (she recognized him immediately upon his return) and who fell in love with him when he won the battle, nurses him. A marriage between Arcita and Emilia actually takes place, and Arcita, finally aware that he is dying, tells Palemone to marry Emilia and delicately informs him that he has robbed him of nothing but three kisses. The marriage between Palemone and Emilia then takes place very quickly, not after the delay of years in the Knightys Tale. Thus, the Knight has smoothed over the problem that is really quite awkward in Boccaccio: how Emilia can be convincingly happy with Palemone, whom she barely knows, so soon after being deprived of Arcita, whom she has come to love. So the Knight is, on the one hand, trying to make the happily-ever-after ending as plausible as he can. On the other hand, in the Teseida Palemone is not a betrayer in the grove scene: Arcita speaks first and refuses to identify his opponent. The Knight's Palamon exposes his opponent as Philostrate, Theseus's servant, and as Arcite, the illegally returned exile. The Knight has gone out of his way to make Palamon appear at least ungallant here. Not that Arcite is much better, of course, from the first moment of breaking the friendship to his unfair victory at the tournament (11. 2636-42).26 But Palamon's unchivalric behavior somewhat besmirches the fairy-tale ending.27 Then there is the tale's debunking of love, from Arcite's metaphor of two dogs fighting over a bone to the vastly depressing images in the Temple of Venus. Whereas Boccaccio's temple contains a garden with a fountain and singing birds, the Knight's is inhabited by many unsavory characters, including several that are peculiarly appropriate to his tale: Lies, Force, and, most importantly, Jealousy with a cuckoo sitting on her hand. Happy endings are conventional in romances, but this one jars against its context. We must wonder if love is even possible here, before we can 41
Chaucer on Interpretation wonder whether it can last a lifetime. It is not easy to decide the merit of Theseus's First Mover speech by its consequences.28 Another kind of evidence about the plausibility of the ending of the tale might come from the pilgrims, since we have their reactions to the tale. But here, too, there are arguments on both sides: Whan that the Knyght had thus his tale ytoold, In al the route nas ther yong ne oold That he ne seyde it was a noble storie, And worthy for to drawen to memorie; And namely the gentils everichon. (11. 3109-13) Interpretation of this passage depends on the puzzling "namely." If it merely means "especially" (see both Robinson and Davis), then line 3113 is simply specifying who, among all the hearers, enjoyed the tale most. If the word can have the sense of "at least, at any rate" (OED, 2; also see MED, 3.[a]), it undercuts the general claim of lines 3110-11. Or perhaps to think it a "noble storie" means merely to think it a good story by or about or for people of high rank. The Miller does not seem to approve of its values wholeheartedly, for his tale satirizes its heroes' attitudes toward love and its narrator's attitude toward epistemology. Absolon, the suitor who seems most like Palamon and Arcite, is less likely to succeed with Alison and less genuinely interested in doing so. Furthermore, the Miller's insistence that man should not need to know God's plans (11. 3163-4; 3453; the other evidence is what happens to John after he falls for Nicholas's claims to know God's intentions) implies that the Knight violated celestial "pryvetee" in portraying the argument in heaven. Since Theseus must make his decisions without knowing the gods' will, I think that the Miller's interpretation of the Knight's Tale is not very good, but it is an interpretation. Palamon, Arcite, and Emily are not indifferent to the gods' intentions but go to the temples more to influence them than to find out their wishes. Theseus interprets the cosmos according to his own wishes. He consults his parliament, not gods. But whether correct or not, the Miller's interpretation is certainly not complimentary and thus encourages us to notice the possibly critical aspects of "noble" and "worthy for to 42
The Knight's Tale drawen to memorie." Harry Bailly's positive response to the Knight's Tale is no help here: Oure Hooste lough and swoor, "So moot I gon, This gooth aright; unbokeled is the male. Lat se now who shal telle another tale; For trewely the game is wel bigonne . . . " (11. 31H-17) Harry's laugh has less to do with his evaluation of the Knight's Tale than with his pleasure that his scheme of a storytelling competition is working. Although the Miller will rebel just two lines later, Harry's laugh in line 3114 is self-satisfied and self-interested. The pilgrims' reactions to the Knight's Tale cannot settle any arguments about the significance of its Utopian resolution. The Knight's Tale is not the end of this discussion in the Canterbury Tales. The link between fellowship and competition appears in the General Prologue in the form of the companionable pilgrims who make group entertainment into a contest and in the form of Harry Bailly, host of the group and inventor of the contest. The theme runs throughout the Canterbury Tales. For instance, the Miller challenges the Knight in many ways; one of them is by picking up his line, "Allone, withouten any compaignye," to describe, not the human condition, but Nicholas's housing arrangements (1. 3204). The last tale ends with the most convincing version of the Utopia the Knight tries to paint in his own tale. The Parson's vision of heaven includes a "blisful compaignye that rejoysen hem everemo, everich of otheres joye . . . " (X[I]. 1077). This picture of a reciprocally joyful company is more convincing than the Knight's Utopian marriage because all the participants are in heaven, where, as the Parson tells us, their bodies have been purged of desire and their souls know God perfectly. This Utopia comes at a high cost, and it does not solve the problem of how to act while we are still alive. As we will see in Chapter 7, Chaucer's Retraction suggests that action in this world, such as reading aloud and circulating one's poems, must somehow be mediated by the self-consciousness of intention and interpretation that much of his work seems to promote. He ends with a plea for sympathetic interpretation: He wishes us to assume, with
43
Chaucer on Interpretation
good will toward him, that he wrote with good will. He admits that some of his works might encourage sin but does not specify which ones; he does not preempt us by listing them. He hopes that we will learn something but does not say what, and hopes that if we do not learn anything, we will at least give him credit for trying to present doctrine. The Retraction is full of "bisekinge" and "preying," as if Chaucer realized that asking us to believe in his good intentions is asking a great deal. It is about the distance between author and audience (11. 1081-7). Perhaps we can use the Retraction to identify Theseus's fault in the First Mover speech as not merely tyranny, but a failure to qualify his statements. He is not aware or does not show that he is aware of the provisional nature of his picture of the world. He speaks with astonishing certainty about the intentions of the First Mover: The Firste Moevere of the cause above, Whan he first made the faire cheyne of love, Greet was th'effect, and heigh was his entente. Wei wiste he why, and what thereof he mente . . . (11. 2987-90; emphasis mine) Boccaccio can be helpful one last time. Not only does his Teseo not use his picture of the world to convince anybody to marry anybody else, but he qualifies it with an awareness of the uncertainty of human knowledge in matters of this sort: My lords, / am not unacquainted with a belief that some people
hold true-namely that Divine Providence when it created the world clearly foresaw what would become of all the seeds of human and animal life that it held, and decreed everlastingly that what it had thus foreseen should remain so. / do not know whether this is true, but if so then we are ruled
by the will of the Fates . . . (p. 141; emphasis mine) Unlike Theseus, Chaucer is responsible to uncertainty. In the Retraction he acknowledges that he, too, is caught up in the interpretive tangles he spends so much time describing. Perhaps the acknowledgments are signs of good faith that will have to serve 44
The Knight's Tale for now. At the end of the Retraction he prays once more-not to the reader this time, but to God-that "I may be oon of hem at the day of doom that shulle be saved" (1. 1092). Authoritative interpretation and blessed fellowship must wait until the end of his life and the end of the world.
45
READING NATURE IN THE PARLIAMENT OF FOWLS
[L]anguage . . . promotes its own oblivion. MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY1
I
N CHAPTERS i AND 2, I discussed the paradoxical idea that selves are isolated and alone and yet also influence each other. The mutual influence does not guarantee the success of communication or interpretation. In Chapter 2, I emphasized the interpersonal version of the paradox. In this chapter, I shall emphasize the literary version-that is, the version pertaining to authors and audiences. Authors influence their audience (and are influenced by it) but have no way of controlling that influence. One of the causes of the author's powerlessness is the tendency of language and books to disappear. We perceive ideas, not words; meaning, not language. The right book in sympathetic hands seems at moments to provide actual rather than literary experience. Although this familiar phenomenon attests to the author's artistic power, it also deprives him of control over his readers. If what they experience seems real rather than imaginary, objective rather than subjective, the truth rather than a truth or someone's truth, then they may be less critical or self-conscious about how they accept and use it. When, as Poulet says, "the book is no longer a material reality,"2
46
The Parliament of Fowls the author cannot protect readers from himself. Like Prudence, he cannot keep them from doing with his message what they like and cannot keep them from being affected by it in a way he cannot predict or prevent. In a sense, all texts are authorless.3 Even if authors attempt to control readers' interpretation by using all the resources of language to make meaning, nothing they can do will absolutely prevent readers from seeing in the text their own intentions instead of the writer's. As I said in Chapter i, Chaucer may have been interested in the problem because he had not only a listening audience, but readers. It is likely that some of his works circulated in manuscript to readers beyond his reach. The narrators of the House of Fame, the Parliament of Fowls, and the Book of the Duchess are all readers who
have escaped the presence and the control of the author. I think of the Parliament as an attempt to bring to the surface, as the subject matter of the poem, the dynamics of interpretation. Read in this way, the poem demonstrates how readers and texts influence each other. In the common dream-vision pattern, the narrator reads before falling asleep and dreams in response to the book. The book is powerful in that it influences the dream, but the dream interprets the book. The author cannot control the reader's "dream" of the book. In fact, readers must have intentions about authorless texts, or there is no understanding. An important example in the Parliament is the scene at the garden gate, which I treat later, in the section on the necessity of will in interpretation. Elimination of the reader's intentions short-circuits interpretation and action. The Parliament seems to promote readers' awareness of the dialectic between readers and writers, as if to try to limit readers' tendencies to project their intentions onto literary works. It also seems to promote awareness of the text as text, as if to remind the audience of its otherness and the other's otherness. But even successfully reminding us that authors may have intentions of their own does not guarantee that we will discover them. Nor is my reading less likely to be self-interested than any other. That my subject matter happens to be interpretation does not place me outside the hermeneutical circle. Prejudice, like the Freudian id, is inexhaustible; the task of hermeneutics - bringing prejudice to light-is never finished. 47
Chaucer on Interpretation THE PROBLEM OF WILL The Necessity of Will in Interpretation The scene before the garden gate is a paradigm of the situation of reader, author, and text, because the author of the inscriptions is not present. Rather than hearing a performer-the author or someone else reading or reciting-the narrator faces an anonymous text that seems meant to be read: It addresses its reader directly ("thow redere," 1. 132). He must interpret it for himself. The scene shows what happens when will is absent. "Thorgh me men gon into that blysful place Of hertes hele and dedly woundes cure; Thorgh me men gon unto the welle of grace, There grene and lusty May shal evere endure. This is the wey to al good aventure. Be glad, thow redere, and thy sorwe of-caste; Al open am I-passe in, and sped thee faste!" "Thorgh me men gon," than spak that other side, "Unto the mortal strokes of the spere Of which Disdayn and Daunger is the gyde, Ther nevere tre shal fruyt ne leves bere. This strem yow ledeth to the sorweful were There as the fish in prysoun is al drye; Th'eschewing is only the remedye!" (11. 127-40) The narrator must choose whether to enter the garden, risking the unpleasant experience of the "sorweful were" that the second inscription promises. When his fear and desire deprive him of "wit . . . for to chese" (1. 146), Africanus assures him that there is no risk to him because he is not a lover: "[T]his writyng nys nothyng ment bi the, / Ne by non, but he Loves servaunt be" (11. 158-9). This brief scene shows the problems of writing, for authors and for their reading audiences. When authors let their works go, sending them forth into the world, or when they die (when Chaucer sends the Troilus off at the end of Book V, he also mentions his own death, 11. 1786-92), they can no longer speak for
The Parliament of Fowls them but can only speak through them. The inscriptions are analogues for Chaucer's text. The narrator is an analogue for Chaucer's audience. When, like him, we happen upon a text, we must decide not only what it means, but what it means to us. Readers choose a text and decide not only how to read it, but also how much energy to devote to it and how much to believe it. The gate raises questions all readers face as they read. The answers depend on the text and on an interaction between an interpretation of the author's intentions and the nature of the reader-according to Africanus, successful lovers will experience the garden differently from unsuccessful ones. But the gate scene raises the questions in a difficult form because no author appears and because the narrator is neither kind of intended reader. Hesitating before the gate, unable to decide whether to risk entering the garden (11. 141-53), the narrator shows what happens when author, text, and audience have no clear intentions. The stalemate is broken only by Africanus's shove. Africanus, who pushes before he explains, has no warrant to fix or interpret the intentions of either text or narrator. No textual signs in the inscriptions show that the formula "Thorgh me men gon" (11. 127; 134) and the address to "thow redere" (1. 132) apply only to lovers, and Africanus does not corroborate his assertion. He has the traditional authority of guides in dreams and the power that comes from being present and decisive, but we cannot know for sure that he knows. In fact, he is wrong about his charge: His guess that the narrator has lost his taste for love (1. 160) does not square with the narrator's own account of his interest in love at the start of the poem (11. 1-14). In contrast, Dante knows that his guide knows him because Virgil regularly responds to feelings that Dante has not expressed aloud, and he knows that Virgil knows the way because he has read Virgil's account of a trip through the underworld. Virgil also tells him that he has been there before. Africanus's shove is the decision, perhaps arbitrary, made for a reader unwilling to commit himself, and the world's inevitable, possibly rude, action upon someone who refuses to interpret or act upon absent authors. Africanus does what all readers do: He provides (perhaps by guessing or by fiat) a version of the author's intentions. Someone must provide the will necessary for interpretation, or paralysis will result. 49
Chaucer on Interpretation The Dangers of Will in Interpretation Too much will is as dangerous as too little. Readers may ignore guides and overwhelm texts by finding in them what they want. The Parliament explores in detail the powers and the place of will. It proceeds by seeming to divide the world into two realms: one where will is present, and one where it is not. The distinction then proves impossible to maintain. Will is ubiquitous. The distinction is implied by the location of the personified Wille in the garden, under a tree near a well (an important spot in an allegory descended from the Roman de la Rose) in Venus's part of the garden. Critics have interpreted variously the seeming division into two realms. Venus and Nature have been seen as representing, among other things, artificial romantic love versus natural love and allegorical poetry versus realistic poetry.4 But the poem sets up categories only to collapse them and destroy the distinction: Just as the gate seems to offer two choices but leads to only one garden, the poem seems to separate two realms that turn out to be inseparable. Will transcends the boundaries. The meanings of "will" include sexual appetite or more general desire. Since in the garden Wille is with Plesaunce, Lust, Delyt, and Desyr, all of whose names can have sexual connotations, and is Cupid's daughter and helper, Wille seems to be on the side of Venus and therefore on the side of disaster: Venus is associated with immorality and tragedy (11. 288-94) a n d perhaps with the "likerous folk" Africanus warns Scipio about (11. 78-84).5 In contrast, the narrator at times seems paralyzed by ambivalence, timid, and almost will-less. He is not a lover, and is even rendered helpless by the mere thought of Love's power: Al this mene I by Love, that my felynge Astonyeth with his wonderful werkynge So sore, iwis, that whan I on hym thynke, Nat wot I wel wher that I flete or synke . . . I dar nat seyn, his strokes been so sore, But "God save swich a lord!"-I can na moore. (11. 4-7; 13-H) 50
The Parliament of Fowls This helplessness fits with his helplessness before the gate. Yet will is present in Nature's part of the garden and in the narrator from the start of the poem. Nature is inextricably linked to will because she oversees the birds' choices of mates. All choice involves will, and the first tercel, Nature's own choice of mate for the formel, explicitly chooses her "with wil" (1. 417). Since he is the most courtly of the formel's suitors, the distinction between fin* amor and "natural" loving breaks down, as does that between will and nature. Will influences the narrator's experience, too. All the faculties of desire are present in him as he begins the poem. Although he claims to be numbed by the idea of love, in which he is inexperienced, he does know pleasure. Although at times he uses the impersonal formula it "happeth me" to read (11. 10; 18), at other times he admits he reads and even studies for pleasure. In line 15 he speaks as if pleasure and learning were different: He reads perhaps "for lust" and perhaps "for lore." Yet he twice connects the two. First, he says, . . . a certeyn thing to lerne, The longe day ful faste I redde and yerne. (11. 20-1) He connects learning and an eagerness that reveals desire. Then, he admits his pleasure in exegesis: To rede forth hit gan me so delite, That al that day me thoughte but a lyte. (u. 27-8)
Wille is the second figure the narrator sees and the most fully described of Cupid's company. The emphasis is appropriate because will is necessary to the other faculties; it is required for observation and action.6 Therefore, like pleasure, exegesis implies will, as the narrator acknowledges when he turns from his book with the cryptic Boethian couplet, For bothe I hadde thyng which that I nolde, And ek I nadde that thyng that I wolde. (11. 90-1) 51
Chaucer on Interpretation This passage shows that his reading and sleeping are both conditioned by the contrast of "nolde" and "wolde" and also links the Parliament to Boethius, who is in the grip of the same frustrating pair in the Consolation of Philosophy (Book III, prose 3, 33-6). Another sign of the narrator's will is his introduction to the two verses on the gate: And over the gate, with lettres large iwroughte, There were vers iwriten, as me thoughte, On eyther half, of ful gret difference, Of which I shal now seyn the pleyn sentence . . . (11. 123-6; emphasis mine) What does "as me thoughte" refer to-the size of the letters, their existence, their division into two parts, or the difference between them? Middle English syntax does not make this clear. It is clear, however, that all is as it seems to him. The most common meaning of "sentence" ("meaning")7 implies that he is not quoting verbatim but giving the sense, however "pleyn." The narrator's mind is mediating his experience of the garden. The names of Wille, Plesaunce, Lust, Delyt, and Desyr, some of Cupid's companions in the garden, can all mean either the part of the personality that seeks pleasure or the external cause of pleasure. The ambiguity suggests just the sort of confusion between self and world that results from self-interested interpretation. The interaction between the garden and the narrator's desires about it is an example. The narrator's will, paralyzed before the gate, revives as soon as he enters the garden. When he cries, "But, Lord, so I was glad and wel begoon!" (1. 171) and says that the garden "joye was to seene" (1. 175), he is not making detached aesthetic statements. We have to explain his happiness. Perhaps he doubts Africanus's claim that the gate's predictions are not meant for him. In that case, he may be relieved when the garden appears to be more like the first description than like the second. The care with which he examines the garden seems motivated by self-interest. He meticulously lists details that fulfill the promise of the first inscription and exclude the warning of the second. He notes the evergreen leaves, the streams full of fish, and the well. Although much of his account of the garden seems purely de52
The Parliament of Fowls scriptive, the narrator's language contains signs of his investment in what he describes. For instance, the dendrograpkia names the trees, not according to their own natures, but according to their uses ("The byldere ok . . . the saylynge fyr," etc., 11. 176-82). The narrator sees the natural objects through the perspective of human needs and cultural traditions that are all the more striking for their irrelevance in the garden: Ships, coffins, and instruments of war and torture should not be necessary there.8 His individual needs influence other perceptions. Unlike the narrator of the Roman de la Rose, he does not name the flowers he sees except by their color. He describes a garden that is sweet to him because of them: A gardyn saw I . . . There as swetnesse everemore inow is, With floures white, blewe, yelwe, and rede . . . (11. 183-6) The flowers are displaced into a prepositional phrase as causes of the narrator's sensation. Similarly, the fish in the streams are subordinated to the impression they make. The verb "swymmen" actually describes the activity of the streams: And colde welle-stremes, nothyng dede, That swymmen ful of smale fishes lighte . . . (11. 187-8) Because of the fish, the streams appear to be alive. Again, the narrator confuses the world and his perception of it. Furthermore, he is seeing the garden according to his desire that it match not only the first inscription but the heaven described in the Somnium Scipionis. The first inscription on the gate calls it a "blysful place" (1. 127), like the heaven Africanus had described to Scipio (1. 48). And, like heaven, the garden contains eternal life (narrator's dream, 1. 173; Scipio's dream, 11. 52-6) and celestial harmony (narrator's dream, 1. 191; Scipio's dream, 1L 60-3). In the description of the breezes in lines 201-3, there is even a hint of Dante's Eden in Purgatorio, 28. As I said at the start of Chapter 1, 53
Chaucer on Interpretation the narrator is not entirely self-enclosed, because the filters through which he views the garden are not idiosyncratic. But though the literary works that provide them are part of Western culture, they represent his personally selected version of the garden tradition. Throughout this section, the narrator's numerous references to himself as perceiver indicate the importance of the consciousness that frames the description. In the later parliament scene, where the birds speak for themselves, he uses impersonal formulas such as "There myghte men . . . fynde" (1. 330) and "There was" (1. 341), which contrast with these in the description of the garden: A gardyn saw I . . . a. 183) . . . herde I synge (1. 190)
. . . I gan aspye
(1• 194) Herde I . . (1. 198)
Tho was I war . . . a. 218) In this earlier garden scene, the narrator's "I" controls the poem. In fact, he does eventually note negative aspects of love in the garden-for instance, when he makes a point of not lying about Craft's being disfigured (which paradoxically raises the possibility of his lying, 1. 222). But his willful, emotional response is evident when he encounters the pictures of tragic lovers in Venus's temple. He leaves the temple and returns to the garden as an antidote to the pictures, which he has found unsettling; he seeks the comfort of the garden, saying that he walks there "myselven to solace" (1. 297). An uninvolved narrator could report on the existence of the garden without needing solace. For this narrator, the garden not only exists, but has personal meaning and emotional function. The hermeneutical process, in which the inscrip54
The Parliament of Fowls tions help the narrator interpret the garden and the garden helps him interpret the inscriptions, occurs in the context of his desire; he wants it to be pleasant rather than horrible. When he looks, he looks with a purpose. His knowing and his willing are connected. Knowing requires willing because, when giving attention to something, we also have intentions toward it. If attention and intention are linked, what the narrator sees is influenced by what he wants to see.9 This, then, is Chaucer's problem: If will does not operate, there can be no interpretation and in fact no participation in any experience. Yet if will does take part, experience may be prejudiced or even completely subjective, especially if one is without a guide. These extremes lead either to the destruction or to the isolation of the self. Individuals are either passive, unable even to perceive, or monadic, locked inside their own perceptions. Chaucer seems to try to find ways of encouraging readers to read while at the same time liberating them from self-enclosed readings, so that even those who read alone will not overwhelm the text with their interpretive willfulness. ADDRESSING THE PROBLEM OF WILL Chaucer attempts in several ways to keep readers from confusing the text with their interpretations of it. Since to define the problem is to make readers conscious of it and, therefore, to begin to solve it, the gate scene itself is part of the solution because it presents both a reader who will interpret the intentions of a text and a reader who will not. Chaucer also emphasizes both the textuality of the text and the activity of readers in order to remind us of the literary nature of our experience of the poem. We should be able to recognize our descriptions as opinions, like the narrator's, which may by selection, emphasis, or misperception depart from objective reality. Neither the text nor our activities as readers will then disappear. Our interpretations will not be mere wishful dreams. Chaucer promotes literary self-consciousness partly by making interpretation problematic. He makes our dilemma as readers more vivid by making the narrator a reader with whom we can compare ourselves. The narrator has a problem: Faced with the gate, he must make a potentially important decision - whether to 55
Chaucer on Interpretation enter the garden-on the basis oflittle information. Faced with the garden, he must interpret the consequences of having entered. He has help: He sees both the inscriptions and the garden, and he has a guide. Africanus is not much help; after all, he has no sympathy for the narrator and he does not stay long. But as Chaucer's readers, we have a more difficult problem and less aid. Like readers of any first-person narrative, we are interpreting an interpretation; we do not have direct access to what the narrator sees. When we confront the poem, we must make a series of decisions about its intentions and our own while accompanied only by the shadowy narrator; he cannot see us, as Africanus sees him, and he cannot answer our doubts. First-person narrative naturally raises problems of interpretation. Interpreting the garden is a problem for several other reasons. We cannot depend on the narrator's willfully rosy reading of it. The interpretation of gardens that appear to be paradise in medieval literature is notoriously difficult. As we have seen, this one has some temperate breezes in common with Eden as presented by Dante in the Purgatorio. But it also shares heavenly birds with the garden of the Roman de la Rose, a very ambiguous place containing birds that sing like angels one minute and sirens the next (in the Middle English version, 11. 672; 680-4). The comparison to angels suggests that the garden is a paradise; the comparison to sirens suggests that it is a hell designed to lead men astray. Since the garden poses the question of whether the language about paradise should be taken literally or ironically, either the first or second inscription on the gate could be true. The garden is a moral problem and an iconographical puzzle.10 The garden is also a puzzle because, as I said earlier, it seems to be divided into two halves representing different values, but the dichotomies collapse. Nature, for instance, although she may work toward the birds' pairing off in order to further the cause of procreation, does so by appealing to their drive not for good citizenship in the universe but for gratification: Plesaunce is in Cupid's part of the garden, but Nature tells the birds, "I prike yow with plesaunce" (1. 389). Moreover, her favored formel eagle partakes of Gentilesse, another member of Cupid's entourage. She favors as the formel's mate the suitor who most perfectly conforms to the rules of fin' amor. Moreover, she herself
The Parliament of Fowls appears "right as Aleyn, in the Pleynt of Kynde, / Devyseth Nature of aray and face" (11. 316-17). Since in the De Planctu Naturae Nature herself is beautiful and her clothes are rich and elaborate, Chaucer's goddess is a radiant example of Beute and Aray, both of whom belong to Cupid's meiny. Although she seems to represent altruistic, pastoral, and natural love, she is thoroughly implicated in the sensuality, courtliness, and artfulness represented by Cupid and Venus. Chaucer also keeps interpretation problematic by keeping the poem's naturalism in constant tension with its artificiality. The garden is both a reference to nature and a reference to a literary tradition about nature.11 Chaucer reminds the audience of the garden's literary origins by making it a version of the locus amoenus of the rhetorical handbooks, a showcase filled with natural objects artfully arranged. For instance, the dendrographia meant to convince us of the plenitude of the garden is conspicuously formal in style. It occupies a single stanza in which each line (except line 177) is broken into balanced halves, each half devoted to one kind of tree, and is full of intricate parallelism and chiasmus. Moreover, since the trees it contains-oaks, olives, cypresses, palmscoexist only in the climate of the topos of the mixed forest, they make the garden a highly literary "quotation."12 Similarly, the phrase "fresh and greene," which attests to the reality of the leaves in the garden, is set in a context that denies that reality. The trees are . . . clad with leves that ay shal laste, Ech in his kynde, of colour fresh and greene As emeraude . . . (ii-173-5) Claiming that the leaves "ay shal laste" transforms deciduous products of nature into evergreens that here are literally eternal. The unnaturalness of this transformation is reinforced by the word "clad," which personifies the trees. Making them live by applying human terms to them is art. Moreover, although the passage might seem to say that the leaves are green and fresh, it actually says that they are as green and fresh as emerald in color. Not only are they decorated with a simile drawn from the world of cut gems, but a 57
Chaucer on Interpretation leaf fresh in color is not the same as a fresh leaf. In the context of line 173, the restriction of the freshness of the leaves to their color emphasizes art's contribution to their natural appearance. I have already mentioned that the birds we meet in the garden are not merely natural celebrators of natural order, but stylized icons in a symbolic setting. The birds of the parliament scene are products of a similar tension between naturalism and artificiality. The debate scene has often been praised for its naturalism,13 and von Kreisler has argued that Chaucer used Frederick II of Hohenstaufen's compilation of lore about bird behavior because he wished his birds to be true to life.14 J. A. W. Bennett and Beryl Rowland even claim that some of the details about them are drawn not from literary and folk tradition, but from observation of birds in nature.15 Yet some of the details that contribute to their naturalism make the unnaturalness of their parliamentary conduct stand out by contrast. For example, as Bennett has mentioned, the list of species present includes information about the antisocial means of livelihood of the birds who prey on other birds.16 These biological and ecological data, which expose conflicts among different species, heighten our appreciation of the parliament, which is noisy but nonviolent; although they are argumentative, the birds come together "[b]enygnely to chese" their mates (1. 370). Along with their social organization, powers of speech, legal diction, interest in epistemology, and concern for various sorts of love ethics, their graciousness on this occasion is an indication of how the birds have been civilized by the poem. Although only the cuckoo is explicitly called "unkynde" (1. 358), all the birds are equally "unnatural" insofar as they are creations of art. They are realistic but literary birds. Making the creatures in the poem ambiguous focuses attention on the process of reading. Reading, which, like perception, sometimes "forgets itself,"17 does not disappear but becomes a subject of the poem. Africanus's nonchalant claim that the narrator's state of mind in the gate scene "stondeth writen in thy face" (1. 155) implies, as the modern idiom does, that reading a person like a book is easy because reading a book is easy. The poem contradicts him. Africanus disdains writing, too; he thinks that, like reading, it is inactive. He is therefore not a very good guide for a writer (Dante was more fortunate in Virgil). Africanus distinguishes between 58
The Parliament of Fowls those who can wrestle and those who can only observe, judge "wher he do bet or he" (1. 166), and then write. He is a judge of others' actions but has wrestled, too, as a politician and a conqueror. The Somnium Scipionis does not mention love and literature among his interests.18 For him, writing is compensation for those too weak to share in the active life. Africanus's distinction between doing and seeing does not stand. A good deal of the rest of the poem revises it by showing that reading well is not just jumping to conclusions and that good writing is not just giving a dull, passive person interesting "mater of to wryte" (1. 168). For the narrator and for the reader of his ambiguous poem, reading is "labour" (1. 112). Reading is interpretation; it is therefore work, an active process.19 The poem rejects Africanus's scorn in favor of the narrator's respect for reading. For him and for the poem, to read or to write is both to do and to see. Chaucer reveals that reading and writing are active by calling attention to his active authorial manipulation of the text. For instance, dream visions often contain theoretical assertions about dreams and a prayer to a deity for success in writing, sometimes placed inside and sometimes outside the dream. Chaucer emphasizes his authorial role by placing both these conventions of dream visions within the narrator's dream. According to the narrator's dream lore, people regularly dream about what they do during the day. That he is dreaming a theory of dreams implies that while awake he writes dream visions, which we, of course, know to be the case. The placement of the invocation to Venus shifts our attention from the past action he narrates (first I read a book, then I fell asleep, etc.) to his present task, the act of narration. When he asks Venus to "[b]e . . . myn helpe in this . . . So yif me myght to ryme and ek t'endyte!" (11. 116; 119), "this" is the writing of the poem. Chaucer also shows how writing is active by making his use of literary sources explicit. The poem opens with an account of the narrator's reading of a well-known text, calling attention from the beginning to its own literariness. Such "quotation" from literary sources emphasizes the narrator's status as reader. In this dream vision, which takes love as its subject and invokes Venus, the narrator does not know love "in dede" - not only is he not a lover, but he does not know lovers. Instead, he reads books. In 59
Chaucer on Interpretation the garden, he emphasizes his reading by suppressing the descriptio of Nature in favor of a reference to her literary source: The place to find Nature is not an actual garden, but a book. Alain's De Planctu is the lens through which he perceives her. Because the narrator's experience seems secondhand, he appears miscast as the hero of this kind of dream vision. According to Macrobius's definition of the oraculum, people with worldly positions are visited by authoritative figures, often relatives, who predict their futures and advise them about their activities. But the narrator is not destined for worldly greatness, and the advice he receives is not about what to do in his life, but about what to do inside the dream. And whereas in the Somnium Africanus says that the soul is godlike in that it is self-moved,20 the "advice" the narrator receives includes a shove. Since he is not a hero, he must put up with being pushed around by somebody else's grandfather from somebody else's dream. The vicariousness of his experience does not, however, mean that he is inactive in the way Africanus suggests when he denigrates reading and writing. Seeing an object is action because to see it may be to transform it through interpretation. This is clear if we treat Chaucer's explicit mention of his sources as invitations to recapitulate his process of composition, for the changes he has made are as striking as the ways his sources shape his perception. For instance, the narrator's account of Africanus's advice to Scipio neatly contracts the sphere of the action Africanus prescribes. The command in the Somnium to work to save or aid the commonwealth, or state, is reduced to loving the less explicit "commune profyt" (1. 47). The action is changed into an attitude, and politics is abandoned for a vaguer humanitarianism or even good manners. The impatient cuckoo reduces it further to "comune spede" a. 507).21 Nature, too, is reduced. Alain's eloquent dame was not at all concerned with the habits of birds, who seemed to do all right naturally.22 It was human behavior that demanded intervention. Furthermore, Alain's Nature is concerned with humanity in general, not with individuals. She is responsible for making sure that the species survive by creating individual members,23 but does not care much about individuality. Chaucer's Nature is much more involved with individual experience. She wants to make sure that the birds are paired off according to their wills, oversees the 60
The Parliament of Fowls procedure by which the three male eagles try to distinguish themselves from each other in order to attract the female, and allows herself to be manipulated into sanctioning the female's exemption from the conditions that apply to all other birds and the "unnatural" year-long unproductivity of four birds. Nature's concern for the behavior of individual birds is difficult to interpret in the light of her sources in the De Planctu and the Roman de la Rose. Alain's and Jean's Natures are upset that the human species is not living according to natural laws. As we have already seen, Chaucer's Nature cannot be separated from any of the candidates for "unnaturalness" in the poem (Alain's list of "perversions" is not mentioned; the closest Chaucer gets is Semyramis's incest in the paintings in Venus's temple, 1. 288). The contrast between humanity and the rest of the universe is lost. The allegory of the birds is unclear. Do the upper-class birds represent aristocrats? What is the meaning of the eagles' mateless year-that humans are rebellious, that aristocrats are rebellious, or that Nature herself is an inadequate leader?24 My purpose here is not to catalogue differences between Chaucer and his sources, but to point out the implications of such changes. Chaucer's claim to reproduce the "sentence" of Scipio's dream or the Nature of the De Planctu merely underlines the differences between his version and theirs. When he invites his audience to "fynde" Nature in the garden as Alain "[d]evyseth" her (11. 316-18), he is perhaps playing on the close relationship between discovering and creating: "Finden" can mean both "discover" and "invent," and "devysen" can mean both "describe" and "devise." To choose something from a source is to render it for oneself; to interpret it is to remake it. Chaucer may be interested in the ways readers use their reading because he knows their habits firsthand. He understands that reading is also rewriting. To reinvent through interpretation may also be to criticize; for example, Chaucer "interprets" Macrobius's simple schematization of dreams into large categories: the false, arising from internal causes (anxiety, indigestion, etc.), and the true, sent by some higher power to explain, advise, prophesy. In classifying Scipio's dream as an example of all three types of true dream, Macrobius ignores Scipio's own commonsense explanation: that he was tired from his journey and from staying awake longer than usual and that he had been talking about Africanus all day.25 If Macrobius 61
Chaucer on Interpretation had categorized the dream according to Scipio's explanation, he would have had to label it an insomnium, or nightmare, an internally caused dream that has no lasting or useful meaning. Chaucer clearly knows Macrobius, since the stanza of dream lore (11. 99-105) parallels Macrobius's list of the causes of insomnia. Furthermore, Chaucer recognizes the inconsistency when he includes contradictory explanations of the narrator's dream: Africanus calls it a reward for reading the Somnium, and the narrator both attributes it to Venus and gives a commonsense explanation to Scipio's. Of course, he does not commit himself about the cause of the dream: Can I not seyn if that the cause were For I hadde red of Affrican byforn, That made me to mete that he stod there . . . (11. 106-8) In including Scipio's explanation for the cause of the dream, however, he turns his own dream into an insomnium. The joke is on Macrobius, who seems willfully blind to the text he is explicating, and on the system itself, which cannot distinguish between true and false dreams on the basis of form or content, but only on the basis of causes.26 Since causes are matters of prior interpretation requiring choice and emphasis, they cannot be determined with certainty. As Chaucer shows in the Nun's Priest's Tale as well, the system of classification of dreams does not eliminate the need for interpretation. By reinterpreting the place of interpretation in Macrobius's system, Chaucer again affirms both the necessity and the dangers of interpretation. Shutting it out causes paralysis; letting it in invites anarchy. As I have been trying to show, teaching readers about the problematic nature of interpretation is an attempt to warn them about its liabilities. The narrator's experience of the garden, his idea that reading is work, his implied criticism of Africanus's attitudes toward reading and writing, Chaucer's transformation of his sources, his calling attention to his contribution as author and to the "literariness" of the work are all attempts to make readers aware of their own contributions to the meaning of the text. Chaucer's changes in his sources also teach another lesson about 62
The Parliament of Fowls the critical nature of interpretation: that it continues indefinitely. Because mind never wholly escapes the terms it imposes on experience, literary or otherwise, and therefore never captures experience whole, interpretation is a never-ending process. Since each interpretive act is itself subject to review, interpretation really requires a series of such acts. When Chaucer makes his creatures not only copies of the world but also copies of other art, he turns his work into part of this chain. To write an experience, whether of nature or a dream or a book, is essentially to give a reading of it. Not only writing, but all other actions as well, entail reading. In acting, we have assumptions about ourselves and our situation. In that these assumptions, which are images or versions of reality, shape our actions, action requires interpretation. For instance, the difference between the formel in the Parliament and Emily in the Knight's Tale is the difference between their self-definitions and world views. Emily believes that she may pray for, but not choose, her destiny. It does not occur to her that she could or should be given choices or that she could wrench a choice from her dictatorial brother-in-law by refusing to marry, demanding one or the other of the suitors, running away, or killing herself (or threatening to). The formel, however, sees an alternative to immediate acceptance of the role of courtly lady. Her picture of herself contradicts the picture of her entertained by Nature and the suitors, and she can act accordingly. She uses the rash boon to transform the choice Nature offers, the choice of one of the suitors, into her own choice-no choice at all for a year. Nature would probably have needed a picture of the formel that was different from the one she had in order to have predicted the formel's independence. She would also have needed a different picture of herself to retract her rash promise. The formel cleverly exploits Nature's self-definition (as a believer in free will, as an honorable monarch) and the discrepancy between her view of herself and Nature's view of her to impose her will on both nature and the suitors. Her action depends on her interpretation of herself and of her situation. To put the matter another way, since we have no direct access to others' mental pictures, any act involving others constitutes an interpretation of self, situation, and others. Once completed, it is part of a chain of interpretation because it needs interpreting, not only by others but by ourselves. 63
Chaucer on Interpretation The necessity of interpretation, inescapably self-interested as it is, raises questions: Are all interpretations misinterpretations? Are there any standards for choosing among different interpretations? If objective standards do not exist, on what basis can we communicate with each other, or act? To this last question the plot of the poem provides an unsettling answer. The different species of birds are locked into their different vocabularies about love, and there seems to be no way to select "by resoun" among different interpretations of the ambiguous force. The tercelet sums up the deadlock: "I can not se that argumentes avayle" (1. 538). Although he discards the conclusion that battle is necessary to settle the issue, the solution is ultimately arrived at by battle-not a battle among the suitors, but the battle of interpretations between Nature and the formel. In the absence of shared means of decision making, power-the power to win others to one's interpretation-rules.27 This depressing view of human life, which is developed in the Canterbury Tales, is not alleviated in this poem by any of the pictures of people mutually giving each other power that brighten the Tales and the Book ofthe Duchess. The formel has no mate, three eligible males will spend a progenyless year after which two of them will be disappointed and, perhaps having vowed faithfulness, will stay that way forever. Whether the narrator has learned anything from the dilemma is questionable. If he has, he does not say what it is. Nature's last words are a request that the suitors take the outcome for the best-to consider a year "nat so longe to endure" (1. 661) and "to do wel" (1. 663). In Theseus's words in the Knight's Tale, one must make "vertu of necessitee" (I[A].3O42). Since we are not told how the suitors respond, however, we have no simple model for how to respond to Nature's request or to the roundel that follows. The juxtaposition of the celebratory roundel with the dissatisfied suitors and the still-searching narrator makes the end of the poem puzzling as the end of the Knight's Tale is puzzling: The attempt at affirmation jars against the rest of the poem. Is Chaucer suggesting that the problems the poem raises can be solved, or at least understood in such a way that affirmation is possible, or that they are insoluble, so that all attempts at celebration are falsifications?28 The poem finds some causes for celebration. The roundel celebrates the fact that most of the time, with or without universal agreement on problems like love, the world goes 'round. Despite 64
The Parliament of Fowls the lack of objective standards, most of the birds are successfully paired with mates of the same species (and presumably the same interpretations of love). The procreation that Nature fosters among the birds can be seen as a metaphor for successful interaction between the mind and other minds. Amid potentially crippling epistemological uncertainty, life goes on; reproduction goes on, and social discourse goes on.29 The poem raises the possibility that knowledge of the world, communication, loving, and action are impossible. It celebrates the fact that they are not. It celebrates what is possible; that is, it celebrates nature. But there is also some cause to celebrate cases in which communication is endangered. It begins on Chaucer's basic ground, that of literature itself. The poem ends neither with the stubborn stalling tactics of the formel nor with the celebration for the satisfied majority, but with the narrator (here is a major difference between the Parliament and the Knight's Tale). He is not a lover, and not a lover of nature. He is a lover of literature. In the Parliament, the mind's relationship with the world is described through literary relationships - between the narrator and his books and between the author and his audience. The poem's affirmation comes partly in the narrator's promise to keep on reading, a choice of action over passivity. One choice of human beings faced with uncertainty is to suspend judgment out of lack of knowledge, as the narrator does at the beginning of the poem when he both blesses and one-ups the God of Love by saying "God save swich a lord!" and then retreats to "I can na moore" (1. 14). If "can" is a pun, its double meaning suggests that in order to know how to act we have to have knowledge. But if we suspend judgment every time we lack certainty and suspend action every time we suspend judgment, the result must be paralysis, as it is for the narrator when he stands before the ambiguous gate. A need to know with certainty is not functional in an uncertain world. At the end of the poem, however, the narrator is not paralyzed. Instead, knowing that he has not resolved his initial uncertainty, he goes back to his books: I hope, ywis, to rede so som day That I shall mete som thyng for to fare The bet, and thus to rede I nyl nat spare. (11. 697-9) 65
Chaucer on Interpretation What he hopes for is not only to learn more, but to do better: "fare / The bet." Reading and acting are linked by the dream, the interior version or interpretation of reality on which action depends. Through the series of interpretive acts-reading, dreaming, and faring - the narrator enters into an active relationship with the world. The poem views as a positive decision the narrator's willingness to engage with the world despite uncertainty. It is a sign of good faith and a form of loving. To engage with the world is to project the self onto it while interpreting it and to submit to being changed by it. In the process of risking ourselves to understand the world and of committing ourselves to act in it, we love it.30 Chaucer turns his literal subject matter-love-and his method of composition-loving other texts enough to rewrite them-into a model for the processes of reading a text, reading ourselves and the world, and acting. The creativity made possible by our loving the world in this way is represented in literary terms. First, creative dialectic between mind and world occurs not only in the narrator's response to old books through reading, rewriting, and dreaming, but also in his narrating the dream to produce a new poem. The dream is, after all, a reward for caring not a little about a book about which Macrobius, too, "roughte nat a lyte" (1. i n ) . This process of literary generation is embodied in the celebratory lyric. The birds usually sing a roundel on St. Valentine's day; this year, those selected to sing it choose one made in France. With its neatly crafted conventional structure and its echoes of poems that could have been familiar to Chaucer's audience,31 the roundel is an old form made new by a dramatic context that demonstrates wTith great immediacy the power of nature. Like the Parliament as a whole, it is new corn from old fields. Second, the poem chooses to demonstrate the possible creativity of loving discourse with the world through the part of the chain of discourse it occupies: the discourse between readers and writers. This discourse is the primary example in the Parliament of Chaucer's interest in endangered communication. The distance may be great between writers and readers, but real communication is not impossible.32 We understand writers because of the contexts we share: language, a common literary past that provides a store of genres and conventions, and the text itself. Through this 66
The Parliament of Fowls poem, we also share a heightened awareness of our self-interested roles in literary interaction. This heightened awareness is one key to the problem of endangered communication between writers and readers. Erving Goffman has said of the theater that the real subject of discussion between actor and audience is not the character the actor plays but the acting and the playgoing.33 The real subject of discussion between Chaucer and the audience of the Parliament is writing and reading. In particular, the poem suggests that individual will or self-interest stands in the way of much communication, and implies that becoming self-conscious about our own self-interest not only guards us from the error of thinking and acting as if we had certain knowledge, but provides a basis for communication. The very limitations on discourse between readers and writers can provide an initial common ground. Two things are necessary for communication between people. One is that each person genuinely attempt to understand the other's point of view, to experience as fully as possible the other's thoughts and feelings. The absence of such humility before the other's otherness and empathy with the other's perspective are what prevents the birds from arriving at a mutual decision. The narrator's openness to being changed by new understanding at the end of the poem contrasts with the birds' arrogance and stubborn closedness. Both human relationships and literary interpretation require that we commit ourselves to a study of intentions, even knowing that our versions of others' intentions are fictions. The second prerequisite for communication is understanding oneself. In that the poem attempts to create a structure in which readers discover both their own interests as readers and the writer's interests as writer, it outlines a model for human communication by examining literary communication. Thus, the Parliament consists of two allegories of love. One describes the destructive effects of love through the traditional figures of Venus, Cupid, and Wille. The other is a phenomenology of love and will that describes interpretation as the basis of all knowledge of and action in the world. The suggestion in the gate scene that readers must have intentions about written texts is elaborated in the garden, where the narrator interprets according to his desire and his reading of other texts. This could be the description of a self-enclosed perceiver: He imposes his desires on texts (such as the Somnium Scipionis, De 67
Chaucer on Interpretation Planctu Naturae, and Roman de la Rose) and then uses his versions
of them to impose his desires on the world. But the flaws inherent in knowledge and action do not lead to despair about the hopelessness of knowing the other; in this poem, attempting to interact with the world is better than paralysis. The poem encourages awareness of the danger of self-interest in interpretation in order to protect readers from it, not to discourage them from trying. In fact, in exploring self-interest, it creates and reveals the grounds for common interests between author and sources, between author and reader, and between reader and other readers. A hermeneutical theory in which meaning is constantly made by an open-ended series of interpretive acts is so congenial to the Parliament, which carefully calls attention to itself as discourse, that to write and speak about it-if writing and speaking are signs of good-faith attempts to understand it and to communicate our understandings - are surely appropriate responses. The necessity for good-faith engagement with people and poems is the subject of my interpretation of the Book of the Duchess in Chapter 4.
68
THE LADY WHITE AND THE WHITE TABLET: THE BOOK OF THE DUCHESS
T
IHE PRIMARY MODE of discourse in the Book of the Duchess is conversation; the poem takes conversation as its model for the relationship between author and reading audience. The poem comments on both terms in this hermeneutically rich analogy,1 showing that not only are relationships between authors and distant audiences problematic, but those between interlocutors who are face to face are problematic, too. In the Book of the Duchess, interlocutors are often alienated from one another. Every example of conversation emphasizes the difficulties of communication by casting doubts on the ability of the one who is addressed to respond correctly, or even to respond at all. The poem contains speech addressed to a woman who, in dying of a broken heart, seems to have willfully misinterpreted a truthful message, to a god who may not exist, to a knight who may be a projection of the speaker's imagination, and to Death, who does not answer. The woman, Alcyone, is a character in a tale in a book, a fixed form not responsive to its audience, and the mourned White, the topic of conversation between the narrator and the Black Knight, is one of the many medieval examples of women who are important because they are absent. In each case, communication seems to be stymied. The poem can be seen as a description of the insoluble problem of the isolation of the self, or of successful communication between the narrator and the Black Knight, or of the formation of a new relationship in which two selves mutually influence each other, forming a unit or system larger than either of them alone. Through the ambiguity of the poem, the ease with which it seems
Chaucer on Interpretation to shift back and forth among these readings, Chaucer explores ideas of communication based on the very condition that makes communication problematic: its dependence on interpretation. In the remainder of this chapter, I shall discuss the poem's ambiguity and then the way in which that ambiguity is the key to Chaucer's reading of reading. THE PROBLEMS OF DISCOURSE Conversation imperiled by self-enclosure is a metaphor for the danger besetting the relationship between a poem and a distant audience. What's more, the poem raises the possibility that the audience is always removed from the poem and that, indeed, speech is always removed, not only from the listener, but from the speaker. Knowledge of self and knowledge of other are both threatened. The dream vision is well suited to the portrayal of monadic selves. As we have seen in Chapter 3, the two basic kinds of dream in medieval dream theory are carefully distinguished by their sources. Truthful dreams are visitations by an external agent such as a god or an important relative capable of predicting the future; untruthful ones are caused by internal imbalance-for instance, from eating too much or worrying about one's job-and have no predictive value.2 The trouble with this system of identification is that it allows for classification of a dream only after what it predicts has or has not happened. Since there are no criteria that permit us to categorize a dream according to form or content, the dream vision is inherently ambiguous: It may reflect external reality or merely an internal condition. The beginning of the Book of the Duchess does nothing to reassure us about the nature of the dream or about the likelihood of the narrator's recounting it successfully. In fact, at the opening of the poem the narrator's inability to sleep has distorted his relationship to the world: I have so many an ydel thoght, Purely for defaute of slep, That, by my trouthe, I take no kep Of nothing, how hyt cometh or gooth, Ne me nys nothyng leef nor looth. 70
The Book of the Duchess Al is ylyche good to m e Joye or sorowe, wherso hyt beFor I have felynge in nothyng, But, as yt were, a mased thyng, Alway in poynt to falle a-doun . . . (11. 4-13) Since he tells us that he takes heed of nothing, we can assume that the "ydel" thoughts to which he refers in line 4 are not just idle or random, but empty thoughts, with no meaning at all. The phrase, almost an oxymoron, suggests that his disease disturbs his perception and locks him inside his own mind. The danger of self-enclosure is also reflected in the names for the mental phenomena that "fill" his empty mind: For sorwful ymagynacioun Ys alway hooly in my mynde. en. H-15) Suche fantasies ben in myn hede, So I not what is best to doo. (ii. 28-9) Although "fantasy" was one of the Middle English words commonly used to translate species, the image that mediates normal perception, the term had a negative connotation as well.3 The language does not distinguish between an image that mediates knowledge and a device that deceives. There is similar ambiguity in "imagination" (see Chapter 2, note 16). The narrator's dream may actually be a product of his diseased mind. The narrator's account is paradoxical: He presents us with both an insoluble problem and a solution. Language may either cure isolation from the world or intensify it. Language is a cure in that to speak to another, to make a request, to express a need are actions with which he breaks out of the self-enclosed state that threatens his identity. He defines himself as subject with the first word of the poem: "I." Writing implies that he is not (or is no longer) in the state he complains of. He is also capable of treating himself as an object, both of self-reflection ("I have gret wonder . . . / How that I lyve . . .,"11. 1-2; "So when I saw I might 71
Chaucer on Interpretation not slepe . . .," 1. 44) and of the attention of others ("But men myght axe me why soo . . .," 1. 30). Once he has begun to speak the poem, he is not suffering from the disease of apathy. Had he still been apathetic, he would not have been able to request a book, read it, sympathize with the main character, or start his poem. This discrepancy between the content of his complaint and the implication of his ability to complain may signal that he is already at least partially cured of his malady. The discrepancy, however, may also magnify the problem of loss or absence because it shows that he is absent from himself. The self he refers to when he claims to be apathetic is already past. The poem itself alienates him from his experience. As he reminds us at the very end of the poem (11. 1330-4), what we experience as we read is not his dream, but his poem, which is now predicated upon the existence of a lost original.4 The narrator's relationship to the story of Alcyone is ambiguous in a similar way. If his project, or the project of the poem, is to cure the narrator's malaise, the story of Alcyone both does and does not contribute to the cure. It does because the book is "other," but it does not because he absorbs Alcyone into his own mental state. On the one hand, his empathy with the bereaved queen is a response to another. On the other, the empathy merely gives him a new reason to remain unhappy. Empathy with another may be part of the cure, but if the other merely represents the self and if misery merely loves company, empathy is just projecting one's own emotion onto the world. The story of Alcyone demonstrates the dangers of assimilating others' words or actions into one's own mental set. The mourning queen, who is fasting for grief over her husband's disappearance, is visited by an apparition of her husband (Morpheus disguised in the king's body), which tells her that he is dead and that she should stop grieving. His exact words are "let be your sorwful lyf!" (1. 202). He then instructs her to bury his body, and leaves. With that, Alcyone falls into a coma and in three days dies. Her response to the apparition is an example of willful misinterpretation. Her previous promise to Juno-"Send me certain knowledge of my husband's fate and I will dedicate myself to you" implies an intention to live after hearing the news. The king's command-"Bury my body" (1. 207)-implies that "let be your sorwful lyf" means "give up your sorrow and get on with your 72
The Book of the Duchess life." When, instead, she gives up her life, she is simultaneously self-interested and self-destructive-suicide by misinterpretation. It is instructive to compare this version of the story with its source in Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book XI).5 Whereas Ovid's Alcyone prays for her husband's safe return, Chaucer's is almost hysterical because of her uncertainty about him and prays to Juno for information. Chaucer makes the important issue not safety, but knowledge, one of the important subjects of the poem. Furthermore, when Ovid's Alcyone walks on the beach and sees a drowned body that she does not recognize as that of Ceyx, she weeps in sympathy for both the "stranger" and his wife. Our sympathy for her is increased by her sympathy for someone she thinks she does not know. The self-enclosed death of Chaucer's Alcyone (she seems never to get out of bed after she learns the truth about her husband) allows no room for feelings for others. The issue of sympathy, suppressed in Chaucer's version of the story, informs the rest of his poem, starting with the narrator's response to Alcyone. In one way, she is the mirror image of the narrator-she sleeps too much, he too little. In another way they may be just alike in assimilating the messages of others to their own purposes. She misreads Morpheus; he misreads Ovid. One interpretation of the story is that one should not grieve too much. But rather than end his eight-year mourning, the narrator extends it at least one day on Alcyone's account (11. 99-100). Her story advances him on his self-destructive course rather than recalling him from it. Critics have speculated on whether the narrator "learns" anything from his dream. We may interpret his announcement of his extra day of sadness as positive if we think it healthy to sympathize with another or negative if we think it unhealthy to use another's pain as an excuse for prolonging one's own. Our interpretation of the fact that the book leads the narrator to sleep will depend on our assumptions about sleep and the dream. For Alcyone, sleep, which is metaphorical death ("the dede slep," 1. 127; "dedly slepynge soun," 1. 162; "This cave was also as derk / As helle-pit," 11. 170-1), leads to literal death. Is the narrator's sleep healing or a form of death? Is the dream an encounter with another person that reintegrates him into society or merely his reproduction of his own situation? 73
Chaucer on Interpretation Insofar as the poem is an elegy for Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, the Black Knight is clearly someone other than the narrator: John of Gaunt, Chaucer's patron. The interview with him marks the narrator's return to a healthy relationship with the outside world. But if the knight is John of Gaunt, what rules of decorum would allow the artist to portray his patron as an embarrassingly self-indulgent mourner who needed to be coaxed back to rationality?6 The knight is also a projection of the narrator.7 When we meet him, he is in a state very much like the narrator's at the start of the poem: He is apathetic and out of touch with the world. He cannot see the narrator or hear his greeting. He is also concerned with death but goes the narrator one better in not merely fearing it, but openly wishing for it: Alias, deth, what ayleth the, That thou noldest have taken me, Whan thou toke my lady swete . . . (ii. 481-3) Juxtaposing the Book of the Duchess with one of its sources, Machaut's Dit de la Fonteinne amoureuse, highlights the ambiguity of the Black Knight's identity. In Machaut's poem, the narrator meets the knight while still awake, so there is less question about his objective existence. Then the dream appears to be objectively caused when both men dream the same dream.8 Machaut disallows the confusion about the status of the knight and the dream that is inherent in Chaucer's poem. The Book of the Duchess oscillates between two opposing views: the existence and isolation of the self and the other, and their mutual intelligibility and influence. The self may be alone because it does not know whether the other exists, or it may partially determine and be determined by the other as they interact. The poem may describe either a replicating series of characters who are shadows of each other-the narrator, Alcyone, the narrator's dreamed self, the Black Knight, Chaucer-or powerful encounters between the narrator and his book and the two figures of his dream. There seems to be no easy way to decide. As in the Parliament, the solution lies partly in describing the problem. 74
The Book of the Duchess DISCOURSE AS SOLUTION As I have mentioned, the narrator has shown himself capable of being self-reflective (11. 1-2; 44) and of projecting his desires onto others. He has begun to acknowledge himself as object for others (1. 30) but has not considered others as subjects of their own experience. Both are necessary for communication, and both are functions of imagination. Since the narrator's present tense defines the time of writing, not the time of the experience itself, the other for whom he must become the object is not so much the "one" who reaches him a book at the start of the poem nor the Black Knight, as it is we, his readers. Self-awareness, then, will be his awareness of himself not as reader or dreamer, but as writer. His acknowledgments of the literary discourse taking place are therefore signs of his increasing self-possession and part of our education about how to respond to people and works of art. Self-conscious references to discourse function in both ways in the narrator's response to Alcyone as he reads Ovid. At the moment he tells us of his empathetic identification with the grieving queen, he also indicates that both his knowledge of her suffering and our knowledge of his empathy are mediated by the written word: Such sorowe this lady to her tok That trewly I, which made this book,
Had such pittee and such rowthe To rede hir sorwe, that, by my trowthe, I ferde the worse al the morwe Aftir, to thenken on hir sorwe. (11. 95-100; emphasis mine) All the stages of reading-reading, responding, remembering, and then writing one's own version-are contained in this one sentence, which nevertheless stays true to the human suffering that evokes it. It actually describes not only feelings, but the communication of feelings through language. The narrator's next response to his book takes up the problem of relating to others, especially when one is unsure of the ontological status of one's interlocutor, a problem that is important for understanding the etiquette of discourse in this poem. The narra75
Chaucer on Interpretation tor, who at the start could "take no kep / Of nothing" (11. 6-7), explains how crucial it was to have "red and take kep / Of this tale" (11. 224-5). The key to his survival is that he learns from his book about a god of sleep, a figure he never imagined because he is a Christian. He is delighted at the possibility, but even so, precisely because he is a Christian, he is dubious about whether such a god actually exists: "Me thoghte wonder yf hit were so" (1. 233). His delight is qualified by the subjunctive. The question that Chaucer is posing here is relevant to all discourse: What do you do if you are not sure that the being you are addressing really exists? The question pertains not only to new gods about whom you are skeptical, but to the beginning of all new dialogues. Exchanges between people often begin on an "as if" basis. I begin to speak to a stranger as if I were sure he knows English and is not really a robot. My first attempt at conversation gives him the benefit of the doubt. Since the narrator's response to Morpheus is also a response to Ovid, the "as if" of discourse with the god also applies to discourse with a book. "As if" is an appropriate response to language that is fixed on a page, and to an author who is dead. It suggests that we treat the book as if it could respond, to see what we get back. Although the narrator is reluctant to play, "game" is the only alternative to belief, which is impossible, and insomnia, which may prove fatal. Before he began reading, he thought of reading as play and play as amusement, a way of killing time, like chess or backgammon (11. 49-51). Now play becomes experiment (see Chapter 1, note 17). Reading a story inspires him to exercise his own imagination. From the book he gets an emotional experience and Morpheus, and from Morpheus he gets sleep, a dream, and a poem, all of which replace the suspended animation, the living death he suffered before he tried to reach out toward something outside himself. The importance of willingness to play in both personal and literary encounters is reinforced when we meet the Black Knight. According to his own story, what he has been deprived of when Fortune takes his queen is his ability to play at all: And whan I sawgh my fers awaye, Alias! I kouthe no lenger playe . . . (ii. 655-6) 76
The Book of the Duchess In his account of the game with Fortune, he also defines play as evil deceit and assigns it to Fortune: She ys pley of enchauntement, That semeth oon and ys not soo. (11. 648-9) Ful craftier to pley she was Than Athalus, that made the game First of the ches . . . (11. 662-4) When the narrator stumbles upon him in the dream, he is in the alienated state that comes from the refusal to play the game, the refusal to affirm the reality of the outside world. He has reason, of course-he feels cheated. But he is trying to achieve the impossible state of being a self without being in the world. To ignore the world is to deny one's nature,9 since people are partly defined by interaction with the world, and the knight bears many signs of his place in society-for instance, his emotion and the accoutrements of knighthood. Of course, while he is ignoring the world, the knight is also speaking: As he stands with lowered head, he is making "the dedly sorwful soun" of poems recited to no audience. Speaking courtly love lyrics is one more sign that he belongs in the world and is either denying his nature or indirectly asking to be heard. He experiences himself neither as object of his own reflections nor as object of another's attention. That this apathy should follow his wife's death is natural; one of the things we lose at the death of those we know is the sense of being seen by them. His only attention to someone outside himself is in the apostrophe to Death in his lyric. Unlike the narrator, who addresses Morpheus and gets dreams, the knight addresses Death, who does not answer. The knight is, after all, alive. He does not renounce language, but in addressing only an absent abstraction, he renounces discourse, language addressed to an audience capable of responding. The knight must learn what the narrator learns when, instead of taking heed of nothing, he takes heed of a tale and of his own audience (for example, "ye>" 1. 16): how to direct his attention to an attentive world. The knight is close to death because he is like a poem without 77
Chaucer on Interpretation an audience, an embodiment within the poem of the poem before it has found its audience and is "[w]ithoute noote, withoute song" (1. 472). When the narrator prods the knight into accepting him as an audience, he provides a model for us in our relationship to the poem. We are to rescue it from the limbo of not being read, becoming the audience it asks for by its very existence. By reading we are the attentive world that saves the poem from speaking to no one. For the knight and the narrator, as well as for readers, becoming an adequate audience means playing the game of "as if." The initial dialogue between the knight and the narrator is a version of the game of discourse. Since the knight knows that the narrator could be angry at being ignored and the narrator knows that the knight could be angry at being disturbed, they acknowledge and eliminate these possibilities with the series of apologies in which each indicates that he has the other's point of view in mind: He sayde, "I prey the, be not wroth. I herde the not, to seyn the soth, Ne I sawgh the not, syr, trewely." "A, goode sir, no fors," quod y, "I am ryght sory yif I have ought Destroubled yow out of your thought. Foryive me, yif I have mystake." "Yis, th'amendes is lyght to make," Quod he, "for ther lyeth noon therto; There ys nothyng myssayd nor do." (11. 519-28) After the knight assures the narrator that there is nothing to forgive (a gesture even more gracious than forgiveness), the narrator seems convinced that the two of them can communicate because the knight seems, despite his grief, "skylful and resonable" (1. 534). Since both of these words mean "rational" or "right" or "reasonable," the narrator seems to be affirming that the two have the same values or (as "skylful" implies) know the same rules. The Black Knight proves "tretable" (1. 533)-willing to be "treated" by another, open to discourse. However, the way is still not entirely smooth. A good deal of the following discussion is taken up with finding suitable subject
The Book of the Duchess matter. After the knight rejects the narrator's opening small talk about the hunt with an abrupt "Y do no fors therof. . . / My thought ys theron never a del" (11. 542-3), the narrator's reply seems to be an attempt to reassert his understanding of the Black Knight's perspective: "By oure Lord," quod I, "y trow yow wel; Ryght so me thinketh by youre chere. But, sir, 00 thyng wol ye here? Me thynketh in gret sorowe I yow see." (u. 544-7) He offers his "00 thyng" only after asking permission and then turns from impersonal chitchat about the hunt to a direct observation about the knight's state of mind. His offer to help the knight is full of subjunctives and humble qualifications: Me thynketh in gret sorowe I yow see. But certes, sire, yif that yee Wolde ought discure me youre woo, I wolde, as wys God helpe me soo, Amende hyt, yif I kan or may. Ye mowe preve hyt be assay . . . 01.547-52) The narrator, having been rebuffed once, seems apprehensive: With that he loked on me asyde, As who sayth, "Nay, that wol not be." (ii. 558-9) His interpretation of the knight's look reveals his fear of another curt refusal. His expectations are wrong; the knight responds in the narrator's elaborately courteous style: "Graunt mercy, goode frend," quod he, "I thanke thee that thow woldest soo, But hyt may never the rather be doo . . . " (11. 560-2)
79
Chaucer on Interpretation Although he denies that he can be helped, he fulfills the narrator's request by launching into a complaint that both expresses and explains his sorrow. At various points, the conversation is punctuated by the knight's requests for and the narrator's assurances of trust: By oure Lord . . . y trow yow wel . . . (1- 544) Trowest thou? (1. 651) "I telle the upon a condicioun That thou shalt hooly, with al thy wyt, Doo thyn entent to herkene hit." "Yis, syr." "Swere thy trouthe therto." "Gladly." "Do thanne holde hereto!" "I shal ryght blythely, so God me save, Hooly, with al the wit I have, Here yow, as wel as I kan." (ii. 750-7) By oure Lord . . . y trowe yow wel! (1. 1042)
"Nay, leve hyt wel!" "Sire, so do I . . ." (1. 1047) "For Goddes love, telle me al." "Before God," quod he, "and I shal." (11. 1143-4) The trust between the two is based partly on sympathy. The narrator says, And whan I herde hym tel thys tale Thus pitously, as I yow telle, Unnethe myght y lenger dwelle, Hyt dyde myn herte so moche woo. (11. 710-13) 80
The Book of the Duchess This sympathy is as difficult to judge as the narrator's grief over Alcyone. Is he feeling the knight's feelings or using the knight as a vehicle for his own? Since "pitously" can mean both "[i]n a manner that excites pity" and "compassionately" (OED, 2, 3), it may describe the knight's telling or the narrator's hearing. The boundary between self and world blurs. There is, however, a limit to the narrator's sympathy. Although moved by the knight, the narrator does not abandon his own standards of behavior. Not wanting the knight to do himself harm, he admonishes him to curb his grief. He first asks him to "[h]ave som pitee on your nature" (1. 715) and to contemplate Socrates's contempt for Fortune. When the knight says, "No . . . I kan not soo" (1. 720), the narrator insists: "Why so? syr, yis parde!" quod y; "Ne say noght soo, for trewely, Thogh ye had lost the ferses twelve, And ye for sorwe mordred yourselve, Ye sholde be dampned in this cas By as good ryght as Medea was . . . " (11. 721-6) Immediately after his question (he does not even pause for an answer in 1. 721), his rebuke hardens into contradiction ("yis parde!") and a strong condemnation of suicide. This treatment, although it does not break the knight's mood, is a sign of the narrator's resistance to being engulfed by the knight's feelings. Even if they are part of the same person, this moment of antagonism is an important element of the dynamic between them. After the knight's long description of White's virtue, the narrator tries to correct him again: "By oure Lord," quod I, "y trowe yow wel! Hardely, your love was wel beset; I not how ye myghte have do bet." "Bet? ne no wyght so wel," quod he. "Y trow hyt, sir," quod I, "parde!" "Nay, leve hyt wel!" "Sire, so do I; I leve yow wel, that trewely Yow thoghte that she was the beste, 81
Chaucer on Interpretation And to beholde the alderfayreste, Whoso had loked hir with your eyen." "With myn? nay, alle that hir seyen Seyde and sworen hyt was soo . . . " (11. 1042-53; emphasis mine) The subsequent string of comparisons shows he has not modified his position at all. In their exchanges the narrator is not only differentiating himself from the knight, but also trying to educate the knight, asking him to become aware of his own mental operations.10 The knight has previously been self-reflective, but in a way that led into a vicious circle that merely intensified his feelings: For whoso seeth me first on morwe May seyn he hath met with sorwe, For y am sorwe, and sorwe ys y. Alias! . . . (11. 595-8; emphasis mine) For whan that I avise me wel, And bethenke me every del, How that ther lyeth in rekenyng, In my sorwe, for nothyng; And how ther leveth no gladnesse May glade me of my distresse, And how I have lost suffisance, And therto I have no plesance, Than may I say I have ryght noght. And whan al this falleth in my thoght, Alias! than am I overcome! (11. 697-707; emphasis mine) When he thinks about his sadness, he only becomes sadder. He even refers, indirectly of course, to the radical subjectivity into which he is locked: . . . whoso wiste al, by my trouthe, My sorwe, but he hadde rowthe 82
The Book of the Duchess And pitee of my sorwes smerte, That man hath a fendly herte . . . (11. 591-4; emphasis mine) Anyone who knows only the knight's truth must, indeed, pity him. The "trouthe"-"rowthe" rhyme reinforces the logical connection between accepting his subjective view and sympathizing with him. But anyone who is not locked into his thoughts might criticize him. This is exactly the reason for the narrator's badgering: He wants the knight to view himself with another's eyes, or at least to admit that other perspectives exist. The narrator's project is to help the knight return to social discourse-to open him to the influence of others and to remind him that he influences others in return. The project has already begun, because near the beginning of their interview the narrator has said, Loo! how goodly spak thys knyght, As hit had be another wyght . . . (11. 529-30) Line 530 asserts the difference between the knight wallowing in self-indulgent grief and the knight relating to an interested audience who promises to "[h]ere yow, as wel as I kan" (1. 757). Telling it to someone makes so great a difference that two levels of experience are created: the level of subject matter, which might be as mournful as the knight's news about his lady, and the level of discourse, on which a new relationship is created and which may be the source of pleasure. When the narrator asks him to tell his mournful story, the knight answers, "Blythely" (1. 749). Whether he means that he is glad to oblige or that he will take pleasure in telling, he acknowledges a new level of experience. The telling takes place in a new time and with a new tone determined by the presence of the other. Like the narrator, the knight creates a new version of himself through discourse. The narration of the story of the knight's love for White is the art form that creates new versions of each participant and a new intersubjectivity, a new relationship. To participate in discourse, we create versions of ourselves, fictions that fit the social context.11 If the narrator sue-
Chaucer on Interpretation ceeds in his task, it may be because the story he hears is about a relationship in which mutual openness is mediated by art. The "cure" is not merely a release for the knight but also an exemplum from his own past about such openness. Although the knight seems unable to acknowledge or understand its significance, his story contains signs that courting White was a demonstration of how art can facilitate the creation of a social self. The knight admits that love and art are related. By his own definition, love is a "craft" (1. 791) that creates its subjects in just the way that painting creates portraits: Paraunter I was therto most able, As a whit wal or a table, For hit ys redy to cacche and take Al that men wil theryn make, Whethir so men wil portreye or peynte, Be the werkes never so queynte. (ii. 779-84) The self depends on art. In order to love, one must be created as a lover. Just as the narrator finds the knight "tretable," Love finds him impressionable, ready to become what he thinks the role of lover demands. When a relationship includes another person and not just an abstract force, the process is much more complex. The story of the courtship begins with an elaborate portrait of White, a disjointed account that moves back and forth between physical and psychological description (with metaphors of praise liberally added), repeatedly returning to the subject of her "mercy." Sometimes he says her look "granted mercy" and she would never hurt anyone. At other times, he says she did not hesitate to hurt others. The contradiction seems to depend not only on her attitude toward him-whether she was rewarding him or not-but on his acceptance of her otherness - whether he merely annexed her as a love object or perceived her as a separate person. Since this issue is so important in the poem's picture of interpersonal dynamics, the knight's account of their relationship is worth examining in some detail. He tells in a rather convoluted sentence how he fell in love: 84
The Book of the Duchess And Love, that had wel herd my boone, Had espyed me thus soone, That she ful sone, in my thoght, As helpe me God, so was ykaught So sodenly, that I ne tok No maner counseyl but at hir lok And at myn herte; for-why hir eyen So gladly, I trow, myn herte seyen, That purely tho myn owne thoght Seyde hit were beter serve hir for noght Than with another to be wel. (ii. 835-45) He fell in love, as many courtly lovers do, because the lady's beauty affected his heart. But his is not a case of simple "wounding through the eye." What affected him was not merely her good looks, but her looking. Falling in love involved guessing her feelings by interpreting her expression as desire for him and then closing himself off from all other interpretations. He caught her in his thought and rejected all counsel other than her look (which he must interpret) and his own heart. He was as self-enclosed a courtly lover as he is a grieving widower. This imperialistic loving leads to unhappiness. He elaborates on his lady's look in a long passage (11. 850-77) that ends with a comment on her mercy: Hir eyen semed anoon she wolde Have mercy; fooles wenden soo . . . But ever, me thoght, hir eyen seyde, 'Be God, my wrathe ys al foryive!' (11. 866-7; 876-7) Lines 866-7 perhaps reproduce the order of his experience: First he thought her eyes showed mercy; then he learned that only fools thought so. A fool in this case is someone who expects affection when there has been no verbal communication. But many oon with hire lok she herte, And that sat hyr ful lyte at herte, 85
Chaucer on Interpretation For she knew nothyng of her thoght; But whether she knew, or knew it nowght, Algate she ne roughte of hem a stree! (ii. 883-7) He may have been one of those fools, since he loved her for a long time before telling her. She knew nothing of his thought. Later, in telling of her rejection of him, the knight repeats the conventional comparison of the straw: God wot, she acounted nat a stree Of al my tale, so thoghte me. (ii. 1237-8) He learned about her harshness through experience. When "stree" is rhymed with "so thoghte me," we are reminded that he is locked into his own private perceptions, partly because we all are, but also partly because he hardly tries to be known by her. Her rejection of him is caused by his self-enclosure. White's ideas about relationships seem to be informed by traditional classical and medieval ideas about friendship, especially about the sharing of a common mind and about truth telling.12 She is generous to people who can take equal responsibility in a relationship: But goode folk, over al other, She loved as man may do hys brother; Of which love she was wonder large, In skilful places that here charge.
(11. 891-4; emphasis mine) When she does hurt people, it is in the name of honesty, since one of her goals seems to be to avoid teasing men. She refuses to flatter (11. 933-6) or lead men on (11. 1019-33). The repeated insistence that she did no harm (11. 930-1; 994-8; 1015-16) can be reconciled with his previous description of her harshness (11. 883-7) if w e s e e that the knight has really redefined harm. When he was a naive lover who merely wanted to declare his passion, refusal seemed like harm. The latter account emphasizes her point of view: 86
The Book of the Duchess Therwith she loved so wel ryght, She wrong do wolde to no wyght. No wyght myghte do hir noo shame, She loved so wel hir owne name. Hyr lust to holde no wyght in honde . . . (11. 1015-19) Because her sense of her own integrity leads her to be rigorously honest with her admirers, he says That Trouthe hymself, over al and al Had chose hys maner principal In hir, that was his restyng place. (11. 1003-5) The turning point in the courtship comes when they share the same intentions. Although he claimed in his first speech to her that he wished "hir worship for to save" (1. 1230), she seems to have taken his promises as mere campaign rhetoric. She accepts him only when he has opened himself to her: I thoughte ones I wolde fonde To do hir knowe and understonde My woo; and she wel understod
That I ne wilned thyng but god, And worship, and to kepe hir name Over alle thyng, and drede hir shame, And was so besy hyr to serve; And pitee were I shulde sterve, Syth that I wilned noon harm, ywis. (11. 1259-67; emphasis mine) When, rather than fantasize about her, he finally teaches her to know him, he wins her. The courtship converts their relationship from courtly love into an embodiment of the ideal of equality and sharing, a friendship that lasts throughout their marriage: Oure hertes wern so evene a payre, That never nas that oon contrayre To that other, for no woo. 87
Chaucer on Interpretation For sothe, ylyche they suffred thoo Oo blysse, and eke oo sorwe bothe; Ylyche they were bothe glad and wrothe; Al was us oon, withoute were. (11. 1289-95) Although in his tale he describes the maturing of his response to White when she was alive, he cannot recapture that response now that she is dead. He has reverted to the earlier solipsistic mode and can describe White's death only as something that has happened to him. He thinks of her as the occasion for his suffering, saying three times that she is what "I have lost" (11. 743-4; 1137-8; 1305-6). His reference to her death in his mourning lyric is stated wholly in terms of himself when he says that she "[i]s from me ded and ys agoon" (1. 479).I3 Since "agoon" means "gone away," he is phrasing her death as a departure from him. It is thus significant when the narrator finally gets him to describe her death less subjectively: "She ys ded!" (1. 1309). The formula that states the fact of White's death as his own loss also enforces his distance from the narrator by claiming that the narrator does not understand him. When the narrator objects to the knight's use of a game-playing metaphor, the knight replies with the formula Thou wost ful lytel what thou menest; I have lost more than thow wenest. (ii. 743-4) He repeats it after the narrator complains about the length of his story (11. 1137-8). The third time, however, the knight is not using it for its own sake but quoting himself. He simultaneously explains his previous comments and frees himself of the euphemism that has distanced him from the narrator and from the truth about White. The process is painful, and there are several stages in his response to the narrator's question "[W]here is she now?" "Now?" quod he, and stynte anoon. Therwith he wax as ded as stoon, And seyde, "Alias, that I was bore! That was the los that here-before
The Book of the Duchess I tolde the that I hadde lorn. Bethenke how I seyde here-beforn, 'Thow wost ful lytel what thow menest; I have lost more than thow wenest'God wot, alias! ryght that was she!" (11. 1299-1307) Still the narrator pushes him on: "Alias, sir, how? what may that be?" "She ys ded!" "Nay!" "Yis, be my trouthe!" "Is that youre los? Be God, hyt ys routhe!" (11. 1308-10) The moment of hesitation in which he becomes deathlike (1. 1300) is, not surprisingly, ambiguous. It may be a brief return to the solipsistic sorrow of the beginning of the encounter, but it may also be a final, educative imitation of White that allows him to understand fully, not merely his own grief, but the fact of her death. The imitation of her death is followed by the first noneuphemistic and unselfish statement about her death ("She ys ded!") and occasions the narrator's final expression of sympathy. The knight can now indeed swear by his "trouthe" (which means not only "truth" but "promise"), for his words do express truth and do acknowledge an external reality he has previously tried to avoid. In the couplet that again links "trouthe" and "routhe," the knight's allegiance to a more objective reality wins the narrator's sympathy. Thus, balance is restored for the knight, who all along has described White's death as something that happened to him, when the narrator leads him to state it as something that happened to her. The conditions of intersubjectivity between the knight and the lady are fulfilled in such a way that they can now also be fulfilled between the knight and the narrator. As the knight responds adequately to White's death, the narrator can respond fully to the knight's loss. Thus, the rules for responding to someone who is dead are the same as those for responding to a person who is present or to a work of art: One must submit to the discourse in order to exist in the form appropriate to the context and must treat the others, no matter how distant, as if they had worlds of 89
Chaucer on Interpretation their own. The search for intention, hedged in as it is by the impossibility of knowing whether one has found it, becomes a matter of ethics. As we have seen, at crucial moments the poem acknowledges the role of artifice in shaping the participants and creating a relationship. This occurs again when the narrator wakes up and describes his decision to write a poem about his dream: Thoghte I, "Thys ys so queynt a sweven That I wol, be processe of tyme, Fonde to put this sweven in ryme As I kan best, and that anoon." This was my sweven; now hit ys doon. (11. 1330-4) The dreaming of the dream and the writing and the reading of the poem merge; when he says "now hit ys doon," he calls our attention once more to the fact that we not only have been hearing about discourse, but have been participating in discourse. The different times of the poem converge. The exchange between author and audience may be more limited than that between two contemporaries talking, but it is less limited than that between the knight and the mourned White. This poem pays attention to its audience; we are aware of having our experience as readers taken into account.14 With the concluding lines, the narrator puts his work into a chain of discourse by referring to the book he read and the process of writing his own poem (11. 1326-34).I5 The narrator imitates Ovid by sympathizing with Ovid's heroine and by writing a poem. He commemorates and imitates White by speaking of her, and we both commemorate and imitate the poem by speaking about it with each other. To do so is to continue in an appropriate form the chain of discourse begun by Ovid. The distance between author and reader, then, is not different in kind from the distance between people who speak face to face or even that between the self and self-knowledge. Knowing the intentions of authors, knowing anyone's intention, is problematic for two reasons: the unavailability of the other's mind and our own tendencies to impose self-interested readings on the world. The religious consequences of misreading (reading improper 90
The Book of the Duchess works and reading proper works improperly) may have made medieval secular writers anxious about the effect of their writings on others and therefore on their own souls (see Chapter i). In the Book of the Duchess, Chaucer responds by showing that all language is subject to misreading. We are all capable of making not only dead authors but our closest friends into characters in our personal dramas, figures in our dreams. The conversation between narrator and knight is governed by the rules of courtesy that attempt to legislate mutual respect. But the narrator attempts not only to understand, but to change the knight, perhaps for the knight's good and perhaps for reasons of his own. In relationships, we are often both trying to know each other and making each other into white tablets (in line 780 the knight says he was like a white tablet) on which we write our own characters-our own signs and our own personalities. This ambiguity about whether the other is separate from the self or part of it is related to Gadamer's view of interpretation as conversation. Gadamer says that interpretation is like conversation in which the reader speaks (speaks for) the text: It is true that a text does not speak to us in the same way as does another person. We, who are attempting to understand, must ourselves make it speak. But we found that this kind of understanding, 'making the text speak', is not an arbitrary procedure that we undertake on our own initiative but that, as a question, it is related to the answer that is expected in the text. The anticipation of an answer itself presumes that the person asking is part of the tradition and regards himself as addressed by it. This is the truth of the effective-historical consciousness. It is the historically experienced consciousness that, by renouncing the chimera of perfect enlightenment, is open to the experience of history. We described its realisation as the fusion of the horizons of understanding, which is what mediates between the text and its interpreter . . . in the successful conversation [interlocutors] both come under the influence of the truth of the object and are thus bound to one another in a new community.16 The interpretive process Gadamer describes is similar to the curative conversation in the Book of the Duchess. The Black Knight 91
Chaucer on Interpretation initially does not speak to the narrator, and when he does speak, he speaks in euphemisms. The narrator asks questions and restates the Black Knight's point of view. The knight continually denies the narrator's version and refines his own. The narrator becomes a version of the knight in speaking the knight's ideas, and the knight becomes a new version of himself in responding to the narrator. Each has used the other for his own purposes, each has become a new self in confronting the other, and they are "bound to one another in a new community." The poem proposes a morally based etiquette of reading through which one tries to understand the author, just as the narrator tries to get the knight to understand White's death as her own. However, it also demonstrates that since selves are fictions fitted to specific contexts, a search for "otherness" may lead us not to essences, but to contingencies we have ourselves helped to create. It acknowledges its status as discourse, acknowledges that interpretation is a necessary part of discourse. The poem is a circle (since its end will always return us to the beginning of the writing process and the experience that prompted it) but is also part of a linear and never-ending chain of texts and interpretations created by rereading and rewriting. Here, as in the Parliament, Chaucer's solution is a description, a bringing to consciousness of the conditions that shape interactions. Like the dream, which simultaneously reveals, corrects, and forgives the narrator's self-destructive feelings, it does not repress the dangers of interaction; it includes and expresses them. It answers medieval anxiety about fiction by making its causes part of the poem. The liabilities of fiction are more dangerous when unacknowledged. If the poem is therapeutic, it may be so not just for the knight, but for the audience and for Chaucer himself, who was with this, his first long poem, embarking on a new relationship to fiction and to his audience. Just as the narrator's deference and humility toward the Black Knight might reflect Chaucer's relationship to his aristocratic patron, his emphasis on the other as subject and his implied emphasis on authorial intention might be addressed to his audience, especially his readers, but his hearers as well. He asks that we treat the other (other people, texts, Chaucer himself) with good will-as if they existed-without the assurance that they are anything other than the fictions of our imagination. In fact, even if they exist 92
The Book of the Duchess independently, they may be partly of our own making because they change in response to us, are new in relation to us. Whether or not they exist independently, we will not learn their intentions in a way that is unmediated by our own wishes and our own effects on them. But we must try. Chaucer's ethics of reading are a response to the unavoidable dangers of interpretation.
93
READING GRISELDA: THE CLERK'S TALE
T
HE BOOK OF THE DUCHESS delicately balances the idea that the other is independent of us against the idea that the other may be at least partly shaped by interaction with us. The poem suggests that the ethical response to this paradox is good will - treating the other as if it existed independently. The narrator benefits from treating his interlocutors of uncertain ontological status as if they really existed, and the Black Knight earns the narrator's sympathy when he shifts from speaking about White's death as his experience to speaking about it as hers. The Clerk's Tale also examines this paradox, but from a different angle. The Book of the Duchess emphasizes good will-assuming the independence of the other and trying to understand his subjectivity rather than imposing one's own on him. The Clerk's Tale shows the consequences of overemphasizing the independence of the other and being blind to the shaping power of social context. Walter treats Griselda with good will, in the special sense I have been using - conviction of her separateness from him. He believes that she is independent of him and unknown. His attempt to know her disrupts the family and causes both partners pain. The Clerk's Tale exaggerates the good will seen in the Book of the Duchess and shows that the acknowledgment of the other's otherness can be destructive unless it is accompanied by acknowledgment of our influence on the other. In his attempt to know the unknown Griselda, Walter forgets that she is the way she is because she is with him. The key to Griselda is partly, as Walter suspects, within Griselda herself (the tale repeatedly mentions the interiority of thoughts and feelings) and partly, though he does not know it, in Walter and in their relationship. 94
The Clerk's Tale These two views of self- dualistic and dialectical - have implications for both political and literary relations in the Clerk's Tale. Political power and literary meaning are analogous to personal identity in that they exist in themselves but also depend on context. Presumably Walter need not have married at his people's request. What power the people have derives from interpretation: They interpret themselves to Walter and Walter to himself in order to get him to comply with their request. Since their relationship is mediated by interpretation, power is determined partly by context. Ruler and ruled influence each other. Literary meaning is also paradoxical: It can be seen to exist absolutely, unalterably, in the text, as Griselda's inner self is separate from Walter. Yet meaning is also cooperative, created by writers' and readers' interpretation, as Griselda is shaped by her marriage. This chapter examines these three analogous areas - personal identity, political power, and literary relationships - in order to show how interpretation mediates the relationships between self and family, ruler and ruled, and authors and audience. THE SELF The self is made problematic in the Clerk's Tale by the sometimes contradictory ways it is presented. On the one hand, Griselda is sometimes spoken of as if she had no central core of identity that is consistent over time. On the other, the tale has a rich vocabulary implying the existence of an inner self for several of the characters, including Griselda. Since Walter's curiosity about whether Griselda can remain true to him and to her promises motivates his testing of her, this question of identity over time is the spring that moves the plot. If Griselda has changed to adjust to her role as marquise, is she the same woman that Walter chose and married? Does she have a consistent self?1 For instance, the people respond to Griselda, wife of Walter, as if she were a different person from Griselda, daughter ofJanicula. We learn that Unnethe the peple hir knew for hire fairnesse, Whan she translated was in swich richesse. (U. 384-5) 95
Chaucer on Interpretation And again, even those who had known her all her life . . . thoughte she was another creature. (1. 406)
When Walter is about to have their son taken away, supposedly to be killed, with rather grisly solicitude he notifies her in advance, so . . . that ye nat sodeynly Out of youreself for no wo sholde outreye . . . en. 642-3)
Walter implies that the self is a place2 and that she is not solidly or permanently "in" it. His fake concern voices his real fear: that she will lose her previous identity. When she survives apparently unchanged the disappearance of her son, the narrator says, . . . it semed thus, that of hem two There nas but o wyl; for, as Walter leste, The same lust was hire plesance also. (ii. 715-17) If Griselda's will is Walter's, perhaps there is no Griselda left. Perhaps, in the process of "[c]onformynge hire to that the markys lyked" (1. 546), she eradicates her own individuality. When she behaves, after being deprived of her place as Walter's wife and all the rights and accoutrements that go with it, as if "of hire heighe estaat no remembraunce / Ne hadde she" (11. 923-4), we might picture a zombielike creature. Identity depends on memory. Of course, these passages are exaggerations. Surely the people to whom Griselda seemed "another creature" really knew her for herself. But the striking locutions used to describe her do suggest (even if the suggestions are rejected) that Griselda has no separate, consistent identity-or seems not to have one. The tale, however, counterbalances the possibility of Griselda's lack of self with numerous references to inner experience and the faculties of an interior self. These ideas exist in Petrarch, but the Clerk emphasizes them by adding more references to thoughts, emotions, and their locations. Several terms appear and reappear: 96
The Clerk's Tale "herte," "corage," and the vocabulary of intention ("entente," "will," "purpose"), all opposed to deeds, words, countenance, and other external signs.3 The Clerk establishes the distinction between interior life and exterior behavior and more consistently raises the subject of feelings for other characters as well as for Griselda. When, in Petrarch, Valterius refuses to let his people choose his wife for him, he leaves the matter to God. In the Clerk's Tale, he insists on marrying "[t]her as myn herte is set" (1. 173). The change shows not only Walter's willfulness, but the Clerk's interest in internal experience. When Walter approaches Janicula to "ask" permission to marry Griselda, he says that he . . . neither may ne kan Lenger the plesance of myn herte hyde. (ii. 304-5) Again, feelings are located inside; they may be hidden or revealed. We have no direct experience or knowledge of others' feelings. After Valterius removes his son from the household, Petrarch says, [A]n ulla eius mutatio erga se fieret contemplabatur assidue. Walter watched continually for any change in her . . . toward him. 4 The Clerk includes terms for both behavior and internal states: He waiteth if by word or contenance That she to hym was changed of corage;5 But never koude he fynde variance. (11. 708-10) The Clerk is slightly more explicit than Petrarch about Walter's study of Griselda's speech and facial expression as signs of her inner feelings. Throughout the tale people make claims about their feelings and their intentions. The tale renders such statements problematic. The people do not trust Walter's promise to marry; Janicula (we learn later) does not trust Walter's promise to stay married to 97
Chaucer on Interpretation Griselda "unto hir lyves ende" (1. 308). Walter does not trust Griselda's very clear statements about the steadfastness of her feelings for him (11. 509-11; 971-3). Perhaps this is because he himself lies, as for instance when he does not allow his sympathy for her to show in his behavior toward her (11. 671-2, a passage not in Petrarch). He must also be aware that the difference in their status allows her little room for complaint (just as his proposal allowed her little room for refusal; see 11. 309-15 and 344-57). In this tale, no statements about feelings are clear enough. There is no certainty that anyone can understand the other's experiences or real meaning. The inner self of other people is always inaccessible. As David C. Steinmetz notes, the tale does offer some examples of intuition, which, according to the nominalists, perceives the individual not through a species, or image, but directly.6 The noblemen who see Griselda in her peasant dress directing the festivities at the mock wedding perceive her nobility despite her clothes: But ay they wondren what she myghte bee That in so povre array was for to see, And koude swich honour and reverence, And worthily they preisen hire prudence. (11. 1019-22)
They are worthy for seeing her worth and prudent in seeing her prudence, just as Walter was earlier called prudent for having discovered Griselda despite her poor surroundings (1. 427). Walter also seems to know that Griselda loves her children, even when her impassive reaction to their murder makes it appear that she does not (11. 687-95). But Walter is tortured by time, and over time his confidence in his intuition fades. The uncertainty about whether Griselda is or is not an integral self and, if she is, what she is really like, generates an elaborate guessing game about Griselda's feelings toward Walter. Not only Walter is uncertain of her. At times the Clerk also seems uncertain: Although he occasionally tells us just what she is thinking, sometimes he seems to have to guess himself. When Walter announces the removal of their daughter, Griselda
The Clerk's Tale . . . noght ameved Neither in word, or chiere, or contenaunce; For, as it semed, she was nat agreved. (11. 498-500) The purely external evidence is thrown into doubt by "as it semed." When Walter studies Griselda's "corage" for signs of change, the narrator adds a comment not in Petrarch: "She was ay oon in herte and in visage" (1. 711), which implies that the Clerk knows more than Walter can about Griselda's state of mind. From this certainty he backs off almost immediately, making the comment I quoted earlier: For which it semed thus, that of hem two Ther nas but o wyl; for, as Walter leste, The same lust was hire plesance also. (11. 715-17) The word "semed" places him and his audience outside Griselda's mind, as much in the dark about her "true feelings" as Walter.7 In another passage, when the rumors of divorce reach Griselda, the narrator says, "I deeme that hire herte was full wo" (1. 753). His having to deem throws doubt on whether even he knows the truth about Griselda.8 The Clerk's uses of and departures from Petrarch's information about characters' true feelings help to make Griselda a mystery. Petrarch tells us that when Griseldis asks for one shift to go home in, Valterius weeps (5.38, p. 280). When the people see her strip herself almost naked, they weep and blame fortune ("atque ita prosequentibus multis ac flentibus fortunamque culpantibus . . . remeavit," 5.40-3, p. 280). When her father sees her returning home, his suspicions of Valterius are confirmed (5.45, p. 280). Griseldis alone is dry-eyed and nobly silent ("siccis una oculis et honesto veneranda silencio," 5.41-2, p. 280). Then, Mansit ilia . . . equanimitate et humilitate mirabili, ita ut nullum in ea signum animi tristioris, nullum vestigium fortune prosperioris extaret, quippe cum in medijs opibus inops semper spiritu vixisset atque humilis. (5.50-4, pp. 280-2) 99
Chaucer on Interpretation She remained with her father . . . showing marvelous equanimity and [lowliness]; for she gave no sign [of a sadder mind] and showed no trace of her more favorable lot, since, forsooth, she had always dwelt amid riches with a lowly and humble spirit. (P- 149) The Clerk's changes in this account are subtle, but their effect is to make everyone's feelings except Griselda's clearer or stronger than in Petrarch's account. In the Clerk's Tale, Walter not merely weeps, but weeps "for routhe and for pitee" (1. 893). The people do not merely accuse fortune; they curse it (1. 898). Janicula does not merely have his expectations fulfilled; Job-like, he Curseth the day and tyme that Nature Shoop hym to been a lyves creature. (ii. 902-3) These feelings are more clearly delineated and, in the case of the people and Janicula, more intensely experienced in the Clerk's account. The Clerk's changes in the description of Griselda have a different effect. First, he omits the narrator's explicit value judgments ("honesto veneranda silencio," "humilitate mirabili"), thus leaving the judgment of her up to the reader. He also makes it less clear what it is we are judging. He tells us not that Griselda was dry-eyed, but that "she fro wepyng kepte hire eyen dreye" (1. 899). His wording raises a question that is not really present in Petrarch: Did Griselda not weep because she did not feel like weeping? Or did she feel like weeping but restrain herself? Similarly, the transformation of "honesto veneranda silencio" into "Ne in this tyme word ne spak she noon" (1. 900) may raise the question of what word she did not speak. The Clerk's version nudges the reader into thinking past Griselda's stoic countenance to her inner life: We are teased by the alternative views of her as passive to fate or heroically defeating her passions. When Petrarch describes Griseldis's demeanor at home, he is also ambiguous. His phrase "ut nullum in ea signum animi tristioris . . . extaret" may mean that Griseldis hid the sadness in her 100
The Clerk's Tale heart or that she had no sadness to hide. The Clerk's account plays even more fully on this ambiguity. He says That neither by hire wordes ne hire face, Biforn the folk, ne eek in hire absence, Ne shewed she that hire was doon offence; Ne of hire heighe estaat no remembraunce Ne hadde she, as by hire contenaunce. (11. 920-4) If her words and face are the signs by which we are to read Griselda, we may well wonder what lies behind them. The phrase "Biforn the folk" raises the possibility that her equanimity is just a pose. "Ne . . . in hire absence" answers that question. "Ne shewed she that hire was doon offence" leaves it unclear whether she thought she had been offended. "Ne of hire heighe estaat no remembraunce / Ne hadde she" finally offers some absolute knowledge of her consciousness, but the second half of line 924, "as by hire contenaunce," takes it away again by making it an appearance. The Clerk has made Petrarch's several ambiguities into an elaborate knot that teases the audience about the availability and even the existence of information about Griselda's state of mind. This game of hide and seek is generated by descriptions of Griselda. In her own speech we have many clues to the kind of self she is and how she operates in relationships with others. In fact, she is an example not of the dissolution of the self, but of self-consistency. Her selfless behavior comes from rigid self-control, and her denial of her own will is willed. This paradox of what Robert Longsworth calls her "relentless submissiveness"9 is especially visible during some of the negotiations between Walter and Griselda. Several times, Griselda promises more than Walter demands. On his proposal of marriage, his initial position is harsh enough. He asks if she will follow his desires And nevere ye to grucche it, nyght ne day? And eek whan I sey 'ye,' ne sey nat 'nay,' Neither by word ne frownyng contenance? Swere this, and heere I swere oure alliance. (u. 354-7) IOI
Chaucer on Interpretation In answer, she declares her unworthiness and says . . . heere I swere that never willyngly, In werk ne thoght, I nyl yow disobeye, For to be deed, though me were looth to deye. (11. 362-4) She adds the reference to death, which was nowhere in Walter's speech. She also adds the crucial word "thoght," which introduces the difference between feelings and behavior that motivates Walter's quest for her inner self. He asked only for outward compliance. She swears to control her mind as well.10 "Corage" is another example of her influence. As I noted earlier, the narrator tells us that Walter watches to see if Griselda's "corage" changes (1. 709). His curiosity follows up on Griselda's promise that she will never "chaunge my corage to another place" (1. 511). She sets the terms on which she will later be examined. She is also harder on herself than Walter is when he announces his intention of remarrying. He merely tells her to return to her father, adding with rather cruel irony that through his grace she may have her dowry back and admonishing her to bear the news stoically. She answers that she will return home "gladly" (once more showing that his will is her will; see MED, 1) and says that she has never considered herself worthy to be his wife or even his "chamberere" (1. 819) and that she regards herself more as servant than as wife (1. 824). When Walter later does ask her to be his servant and prepare his house for his new bride, he is taking her up on the terms she has introduced. She also redefines the terms of their separation: Til I be deed my lyf ther wol I lede, A wydwe clene in body, herte, and al. (ii. 835-6) And of youre newe wyf God of his grace So graunte yow wele and prosperitee! (11. 841-2) Again she makes the terms absolute, promising to be chaste until her death, not only in "body" but in "herte," and offers Walter 102
The Clerk's Tale best wishes in his new match, thus giving Walter much more than he demands. She surpasses him again when he asks her to return as a servant: "Nat oonly, lord, that I am glad," quod she, "To doon youre lust, but I desire also Yow for to serve and plese in my degree Withouten feyntyng, and shal everemo; Ne nevere, for no wele ne no wo, Ne shal the goost withinne myn herte stente To love yow best with al my trewe entente." (U. 967-73) The difference here is again the difference between behavior and intention. He asks her to do her "devoir." She corrects him by insisting on her "desire" to do so and on her continuing love. Griselda is not only Walter's victim, but her own. What looks like the oppression of one person by the other is in fact a collaboration. Far from being passive, Griselda is a full partner in the relationship that deprives her of full partnership. Some of the passages I have discussed, and others as well, show a strength in Griselda for something other than self-entrapment. When Walter commands her to step aside for his new wife, he tells her to "voyde anon hir place" (1. 806). Upon agreeing, she says, "I wol gladly yelden hire my place" (1. 843; emphasis mine). In giving up that "place," she insists that it is hers to give. In both Chaucer (1. 836) and Petrarch, Griselda calls herself a widow (in Petrarch, "vidua," 5.19, p. 278).M The Clerk adds an outburst of lament: O goode God! how gentil and how kynde Ye semed by youre speche and youre visage The day that maked was oure mariage! But sooth is seyd-algate I fynde it trewe, For in effect it preeved is on meLove is noght oold as whan that it is newe. (u. 852-7) 103
Chaucer on Interpretation Griselda now interprets Walter, referring to the very elements that prompted his strenuous interpretation of her, the dichotomies between old and new, appearance and reality. In both Petrarch (6.36-41, pp. 284-6) and the Clerk's Tale, when, at Walter's request, Griselda praises his new wife, she adds a statement critical of him. In the Clerk's version, she says, O thyng biseke I yow, and warne also, That ye ne prikke with no tormentynge This tendre mayden, as ye han doon mo; For she is fostred in hire norissynge Moore tendrely, and, to my supposynge, She koude na.t adversitee endure As koude a povre fostred creature. (11. 1037-43) She not only asks, she warns; and she calls his treatment of her "tormentynge" and "adversitee." As Walter has tested Griselda, Griselda has tested him. In both versions of the tale, Griselda bargains with Walter for clothes to wear home. In the Clerk's version she is more assertive. Petrarch's Griseldis reminds Valterius that she was stripped on her father's threshold and therefore claims to have brought no dowry but "fides et nuditas" (5.26, p. 280). She then says that it would be unworthy ("indignum," 5.30, p. 280) for the body that bore his children to be exposed to public view and asks for a shift in exchange for her maidenhead. She prefaces her request with the words "si tibi placet, et non aliter, oro atque obsecro . . . " ("if it please y o u - b u t not otherwise-I pray and beseech . . . , " p . 149). Her phrase "si tibi placet, et non aliter" is ambiguous. She may mean "Give me the dress if it pleases you," but she is also saying, "I will ask and beg only if it pleases you." She asks permission to ask. As we shall see, the Clerk's Griselda does not hedge her request in this way (11. 883-6). Furthermore, when she speaks of the possibility of leaving naked, she is much more explicit than Petrarch's Griseldis about the negative implications for Walter's character. Griseldis says, Nuda e domo paths egressa, nuda itidem revertar, nisi quod indignum reor ut hie uterus in quo filij fuerunt quos tu genuisti, populo nudus appareat. (5.29-31, p. 280) 104
The Clerk's Tale Naked I came from my father's house, and naked shall I return again, - save that I think it unseemly that this belly, in which the children you begot were shaped, should appear naked before the people. (P- H9) Griseldis is characterizing the event in a rather impersonal way: It would be "unworthy" or "undeserved." Griselda characterizes Walter: But yet I hope it be nat youre entente That I smoklees out of youre paleys wente. Ye koude nat doon so dishonest a thyng, That thilke wombe in which youre children leye Sholde biforn the peple, in my walkyng, Be seyn al bare; wherfore I yow preye, Lat me nat lyk a worm go by the weye. (11. 874-80) Griselda has used the power of interpretation before to get what she wanted: When the sergeant arrived to remove her daughter, she asked permission to hold and kiss the child "[s]o as he was a worthy gentil man" (1. 549; this exchange is the Clerk's addition). In the bargaining scene she describes Walter, "Ye koude nat doon so dishonest a thyng," interpreting him to himself in order to have her way. She then refers to her position as his wife and uses the imperative to ask forthrightly for a smock: Remembre yow, myn owene lord so deere, I was youre wyf, though I unworthy weere. Wherfore, in gerdon of my maydenhede, Which that I broghte, and noght agayn I bere, As voucheth sauf to yeve me, to my meede, But swich a smok as I was wont to were, That I therwith may wrye the wombe of here That was youre wyf. And heer take I my leeve Of yow, myn owene lord, lest I yow greve. (11. 881-9; emphasis mine) 105
Chaucer on Interpretation This Griselda does not ask to be ordered to keep a dress; she asks to be given one, because she deserves it. Then, in a surprising move, she announces the end of the interview. Her courteous reason ("I don't want to bother you") is self-effacing; nevertheless, rather than waiting to be dismissed, she has taken initiative and taken control. In shifting from the impersonal "here / That was youre wyf" to "And heer take I my leeve," she sheds her role and walks out the door a new "I." The Clerk changes the "recognition scene" at the end of the tale in ways that reflect his interest in the paradoxical view of the self I have just outlined. Petrarch's version (6.39-58) is short: Griseldis warns Valterius to treat his new wife better than he treated her; Valterius cries, "It is enough, my Grisildis," reveals his strategies for testing her, takes her back as his wife, and restores her children. She is "all overcome with stupor and, as if waking from a troubled sleep" (p. 151; "stupore perfusam et velut e somno turbido experrectam . . .," p. 286), then joyfully embraces and weeps over her children. In the Clerk's Tale, Griselda's warning about "tormentynge" the new wife, Walter's explanation, and her startled response are the same. Then, however, Walter adds that he did not wish to kill his children, but rather meant . . . to kepe hem pryvely and stille, Til I thy purpos knewe and al thy wille. (11. 1077-8) Griselda's response to this couplet occupies three and a half stanzas. She faints for joy, recovers, calls her children to her, praises Walter, begins to explain matters to her children-how she thought they were dead, how Walter kept them safe-and faints again, clutching them so tightly that they can be freed only with difficulty (11. 1079-1103). It seems reasonable that Griselda should faint for joy: She has known so little of it for so long that to feel so much so suddenly could easily be overwhelming. It is also significant that she faints just after Walter tells her that he was trying to know her purpose and her will. As Griselda has told him several times, she has given her will over to him. All the formidable power of her will has gone into conforming her will to his will. Walter has been staring into a mirror for twelve years. The first faint, a metaphor for that self-effacement, leaves him standing alone. 106
The Clerk's Tale The second faint is interesting because it occurs just as she mentions Walter to the children: " . . . youre benyngne fader tendrely Hath doon yow kept," - and in that same stounde Al sodeynly she swapte adoun to grounde. (11. 1097-9) As she tries to interpret Walter to his children, she describes him as purely benevolent. But she has outdone Walter once again, for he has admitted (at least to himself) the harm he has done ("Walter saugh . . . he so ofte had doon to hire offence," 11. 1044-6). The second loss of consciousness may be her deep resistance to this euphemistic interpretation of Walter: The faint enforces silence. The second faint is not merely self-censorship, but also self-assertion. Even unconscious, she acts out her great love for her children. If her maternal instincts were ever in doubt, her unconscious grip on her children erases that doubt: "[S]adly holdeth she / Hire children two" (11. 1100-1). The narrator uses the same word ("sad") to describe her steadfastness in response to her trials (1. 564). Her second faint reveals the two parts of her personality: both her will and her ability to suppress it. If I have shown that Griselda is capable of being assertive, I have raised two new questions: If at all, why not sooner? And why does Walter choose to relent, citing Griselda's great patience, at the moment when she is being most critical of him? Gregory Bateson's concept of a family system that is both selfreinforcing and self-limiting helps to answer these questions. Bateson describes several features of the schizogenic family. First, a family member is caught in a double bind; that is, the rules are set up so that no matter which of several behaviors one chooses, one will be punished. Second, the rules are not subject to discussion or amendment. Third, all parties are changed by the system.12 These features appear in Walter's family, which, if it is not quite schizogenic, is not perfectly healthy either. Griselda's double bind is that if she does not obey Walter, she will be punished, and if she does obey Walter, she will also be punished. Their marriage contract ensures that the rules cannot be discussed. Discussion would 107
Chaucer on Interpretation be "grucching." I have already mentioned several passages in which Griselda takes over Walter's desire, perhaps in order to keep him from appearing nasty. Griselda becomes alienated from her own feelings (such as the strong maternal feelings visible in her second faint) as she conforms to his will. Walter, too, is changed by the system. The promises he receives are different from the ones he asked for in his proposal, and Griselda's promise to submit to him in her thoughts makes his search for intentions more justifiable than if she had merely promised to refrain from arguing. Furthermore, according to the narrator, it is her patience itself that drives him on: O nedelees was she tempted in assay! But wedded men ne knowe no mesure, Whan that they fynde a pacient creature. (11. 621-3) In this comment, not in Petrarch, the narrator makes the family system explicit. Griselda may be patient before Walter's cruelty, but Walter is cruel because Griselda is patient. The change in each is determined by the presence of the other. Together they have created a social context that is not absolutely controlled by either of them. The body politic and the Parson's idea of marriage are medieval analogues for the family system because, in each, the individuals function as parts of a larger unit that defines and is defined by them. When the Parson says that adultery is like murder because it "kerveth atwo and breketh atwo" the single unit created by marriage and that man and wife are "o flessh" (X[I].888), he echoes the Clerk's assertion that between Walter and Griselda there was "but o wyl" (1. 716). The Clerk, however, is not correct in assigning that one will to Walter. His tale makes it clear that each one's will shapes their interaction. It is now not surprising that Griselda's strongest statement comes after Walter has announced the "divorce": She has been released from the double bind by Walter's defection. The threatened punishment has always been the withdrawal of his love. As she says when she hears that she must give up her daughter, Ther may no thyng, God so my soule save, Liken to yow that may displese me; 108
The Clerk's Tale Ne I desire no thyng for to have, Ne drede for to leese, save oonly yee. (ii. 505-8) The system is limited by the withdrawal of Walter's love. The testing could go on: Griselda still has a father and her life to give up. But she has no reason to give up anything since Walter has turned her out and decided to marry someone else. Further sacrifices would gain her nothing. Once she loses him, his power over her is undermined. When she has nothing to lose, she changes. When she changes, he changes. In the context of the family system, the faints also make new sense. Walter's confession changes the rules. Since Griselda has shaped herself according to Walter's rules, it is no wonder that the change of rules disorients her. The family system also shows once more the power of interpretation, because beliefs about it alter experience. Walter's search for Griselda's secret intentions has been misguided because he has failed to recognize how her identity has been influenced by her marriage to him. He has been alone, cut off from her intentions, only because he has believed himself to be so. He has believed that Griselda has a core self that he does not know, either faithful to him and her promises to him, or unfaithful. He tests her to learn if her identity is consistent or changeable. He has acknowledged (as the Book of the Duchess advises) the otherness of the other. But in assuming that she has an identity independent of him and of her interaction with him, he has ignored his own effects on the person he seeks to know. He is (as we will see in the third section of this chapter, on literary meaning) a reader who has neglected to account for his own contribution to the meaning of the text. POLITICS Since Walter and Griselda are not just husband and wife, but lord and subject, and since the plot of the Clerk's Tale includes Walter's people, it is not just about families, but about rulers and ruled. Insofar as Walter marries because of his people's request, and marries Griselda (and perhaps, as his subjects speculate, kills her children, 11. 724-5) because she is poor, the tale is about relationships between people with different amounts of power. In these 109
Chaucer on Interpretation political relationships, as in the marriage, interpretation mediates; the parties shape each other. Just as marriage partners form a larger system, so do the ruler and the ruled. Walter's people are spoken of collectively several times: They appear before him "flokmeele" (1. 86), and their spokesman tries to differentiate himself as little as possible from the group (11. 99-100). Later, rumors come to "the peples ere" (1. 727). This is not to say that there are not tensions among the parts of the body politic or that the groups are not arranged hierarchically. Walter's claim that the people resent having a peasant marquise and resent having her child as heir to the throne (11. 479-83; 625-30) is false but plausible. The people do in fact become resentful when they believe that Walter is killing his children because of his wife's poverty (11. 724-5). But these tensions are inherent in the conception of the body itself, which is sometimes thought of as a conglomeration of warring parts (see Romans 7.23). What is remarkable about the body politic of Walter's realm is not that there is hierarchy or tension and suspicion among the various groups, but that influence travels up as well as down the hierarchy. As far as we know, Walter could be an autocratic ruler, but he is not. Like Nature in the Parliament of Fowls, he listens to his people and even acts on their desires. When he takes Griselda's children away and then pretends to divorce her, he claims that he does so because of his people's wishes (11. 479-90; 625-30; 796-805). Of course these are all lies, but they would be improbable lies if his original decision to marry had not come at the people's request. In this body politic, the head is as dependent on the body as the body is on the head, an idea found elsewhere in medieval political thought. I3 Here, the exercise of power sometimes consists of interpretation. For instance, Walter manipulates Janicula, the poorest man in the village, by describing him to himself: Thou lovest me, I woot it wel certeyn, And art my feithful lige man ybore; And al that liketh me, I dar wel seyn It liketh thee . . . (11. 309-12)
no
The Clerk's Tale He presumes assent and makes it difficult for Janicula to refuse without impugning his own loyalty. But Walter is doing nothing here that his people have not already done to him. The spokesman's speech in defense of marriage is a clever demonstration of the power of the weak exercised in part through interpretation. He puts pressure on Walter from the start by describing him to himself, beginning, O noble markys, youre humanitee Asseureth us and yeveth us hardinesse, . . . Accepteth, lord, now of youre gentillesse . . . (11. 92-3; 96) He then claims that he speaks for everyone, that he is different from others only in his especially congenial relationship with Walter. Both things put pressure on Walter. Then he flatters Walter as a ruler and asks him to want to marry: . . . if it youre wille be, That for to been a wedded man yow leste\ Thanne were youre peple in sovereyn hertes reste. (11. 110-12; emphasis mine) The pun on "sovereyn" underlines the interdependence of ruler and people: Their leader's action will be their best comfort. The emphasis on Walter's will gracefully indicates that no one wants Walter to marry against his will. And yet when the spokesman brings Walter's will into the discussion and later mentions his own "trewe entente" (1. 127), he invades Walter's mind in something like the way Walter invades Griselda's later on. He asks Walter to engage in meta-willing, the willing to will at which Griselda becomes so adept. His next strategy is also daring. He reminds Walter of his own death. This warning risks Walter's displeasure not only because Walter might find it unpleasant to think of dying, but because the spokesman puts the certainty of death in "democratic," leveling terms. Death may come early or after a long life, but everyone marches toward it. Youth and high estate are no protection: For thogh we slepe, or wake, or rome, or ryde, Ay fleeth the tyme; it nyl no man abyde. ill
Chaucer on Interpretation And thogh youre grene youthe floure as yit, In crepeth age alwey, as stille as stoon, And deeth manaceth every age, and smyt In ech estaat, for ther escapeth noon; And al so certein as we knowe echoon That we shul deye, as uncerteyn we alle Been of that day whan deeth shal on us falle. (11. 118-26; emphasis mine) With his first-person plural, the spokesman includes Walter, himself, and all his people in the same category. Now Walter's "humanitee" (1. 92) consists not only of his kindness, but also of the morality that he shares with everyone else. The spokesman then asks Walter to believe that the people mean well, reminding him at the same time that they have always done what he asked (a form of pressure, 11. 127-8), offers to find Walter a highborn wife, and then makes his strongest, least apologetic appeal: Delivere us out of al this bisy drede, And taak a wyf, for hye Goddes sake! (11- 134-5) This is a command in the familiar singular (as opposed to the earlier, more polite "Accepteth," 1. 127). He next reminds Walter of his own death again and only then shifts to a more ingratiating style, offering the flattering thought that the people want Walter's issue, not a stranger, as his successor (11. 138-9)14 and concluding, Wherfore we pray you hastily to wyve. a. 140) To this carefully modulated statement Walter responds affirmatively, but with requests of his own. He turns his will toward his people's reasonable request, but relieves them of the supposed burden of finding the bride and extracts a promise in return: that they will accept whomever he chooses and not "grucche" (1. 170), the term he will use again in his proposal to Griselda (1. 354). The session ends, each side having won something. They do not begin as equals, but Walter does not misuse his power, and the people 112
The Clerk's Tale do not underestimate theirs. Each side compromises and both are partners in the decision. The spokesman's relatively weak position is bolstered by a varied repertoire of bargaining tactics, including interpretations of Walter and of the situation. Walter accedes to his interpretations of the people's plight and of Walter's own nature and responsibility. It is appropriate that Walter chooses a peasant bride. His marriage to Griselda reflects the fact that he is already married to his people, as his parallel admonitions against "grucchyng" suggest. If I am going to promote the people as worthy components of a "family system" with Walter, I have to account for a muchquoted passage, original with the Clerk, in which the people are called fickle for welcoming Griselda's supposed replacement:15 O stormy peple! unsad and evere untrewe! Ay undiscreet and chaungynge as a fane! Delitynge evere in rumbul that is newe, For lyk the moone ay wexe ye and wane! Ay ful of clappyng, deere ynogh a jane! Youre doom is fals, youre Constance yvele preeveth; A ful greet fool is he that on yow leeveth. (11. 995-1001) Although this is a serious accusation, it is not the Clerk who makes it, but a group of Griselda's supporters. They accuse the others of being inconstant. But this seeming fickleness is based on interpretation. As we have noted, the people believe that Walter is murdering Griselda's children because she is a peasant (11. 724-5). When they praise the new highborn wife, remarking on her youth and how the children she will produce will be "fairer" because of her high lineage (11. 988-91), they are only acting in accordance with their own previously stated interests: They want a child of Walter's to succeed him. If he is doing away with Griselda's children because of her low birth, a child of her highborn successor has a greater chance of surviving as heir. There is nothing fickle about their approval of the new wife and nothing hypocritical in their rejoicing at Griselda's restoration. They are pursuing the same interests they expressed at the start of the tale. The Clerk addresses the question of wives' obedience to husbands very directly, sometimes approving of it (11. 720-1) and 113
Chaucer on Interpretation sometimes attempting to head off those who would use his tale as propaganda for wifely submission by making it into an exemplum promoting human obedience to God (11. 1149-62). He does not address the issue of obedience to human rulers as directly, although the negotiations between the people and their leader certainly raise it.16 The Clerk is not describing or promoting absolute submission to any worldly power. In his view, wives and subjects have, at least in this tale, the power of interpretation. They are not merely passive objects of their husbands' or lord's actions, but partners who actively help to shape the relationship by interpreting it, by interpreting themselves, and by interpreting the husbands and lord. Political power, then, is not vested solely in the lord, but in the dialectical relationships through which lords and subjects mutually influence each other. LITERARY MEANING In the Clerk's Tale, literary meaning is like personal identity and political power in that in theory it may exist independently, but in practice it appears to arise out of relationships mediated by interpretation. Meaning is familial in the sense that it draws authors, audiences, texts, and literary sources into relationships in which all are parents (originators of meaning) and children (influenced by the others); meaning is political in the sense that it comes out of a power struggle among all the various sources. It is determined by the dynamic interaction of these competing parties. The model of interpretation proposed in the tale suggests that we ought to treat the text as if it meant something, just as Walter treats Griselda as if she had an independent identity. But we must not, like Walter, forget that we impose ourselves on whatever we "read." There are several features of the Clerk's Tale that promote readers' awareness of the contextuality of meaning, including puns, contre-rejet, and the highlighting of the narrator's relation to Chaucer and to his sources. The important puns in the Clerk's Tale are on words repeated in different contexts that bring out their different meanings. Meaning changes with place and time. One of the most striking puns is on the word "sad"; the range of meanings in Robinson's glossary 114
The Clerk's Tale includes both "stable, firm" and "sorrowful." It is first used to describe Griselda's virtue (1. 220) and Walter's virtuous response to her (1. 237). Since it applies to both, it shows the suitability of their unconventional match. In his campaign "hir sadnesse for to knowe" (1. 452), Walter turns his steadfastness into a vice and turns her steadfastness into the sadness (in the sense of "sorrow") with which she says farewell to her daughter (11. 552 and 564).I7 Another important pun is on "corage," which I discussed earlier. When Griselda offers to be steadfast of "corage" (1. 511) and Walter watches to see if she is "changed of corage" (1. 709), the word may have either spiritual or sexual meaning (see MED, 1 and 2). When Janicula sees the rejected Griselda returning home, he is not surprised, because from the first he suspected Walter of feeling only lust for Griselda. The word is here reduced to a single meaning: For evere he demed, sith that it bigan, That whan the lord fulfild hadde his corage, Hym wolde thynke it were a disparage To his estaat so lowe for t'alighte, And voyden hire as soone as ever he myghte. (11. 906-10) In the cases of both "sad" and "corage," meaning is contextual and therefore changes with time. The careful use of contre-rejet also demonstrates the evolution of meaning over time, since the meaning of a line is changed or revised by the line that follows.18 For instance, the people's spokesman says to Walter, Boweth youre nekke under that blisful yok Of soveraynetee, noght of servyse, Which that men clepe spousaille or wedlok . . . (11. 113-15) The spokesman seems to be referring to the commonplace image of the yoke of marriage (see, for example, the Merchant's Tale, 1. 1285) until "soveraynetee" (1. 114) makes us revise our expectations. Although he is actually referring to marriage, his wording emphasizes that Walter would be in a superior position in mar115
Chaucer on Interpretation riage. He seems to think that his request can be made more appealing if it is couched as a request that Walter rule. The surprise emphasizes "soveraynetee."19 There is another kind of contre-rejet in Griselda's first trial: We do not learn Walter's intentions, that is, his plan to send his daughter to his sister while he pretends to have her killed, until lines 582-95. We therefore experience Walter as a murderer, just as his people do, and must revise our opinion when we learn the truth. His meaning for readers changes through time as they learn new information about him. These devices highlight changes of place and time as themes in the Clerk's Tale. Griselda's move from her village to Walter's court and the passage of time threaten Walter's knowledge of her20 and produce his search for the "real" Griselda. The motivating question is, Is Griselda the same now as she used to be? In his repeated tests of her, Walter attempts to defeat time in several ways: by finding out whether she has changed, by doing the same thing as he did before, and by returning to his childless, wifeless state. Time, the very force that caused the people to ask Walter to marry in the first place, also causes him to disrupt (and dislocate) his family. Time functions in another way because the tale deals with literary "generations." The Clerk has more to say about his most important source than do most of the narrators in the Canterbury Tales and in fact claims to have known Petrarch personally. Most of the other tales have sources, but the narrators are not open about their literary relations. The Clerk starts out by naming, praising, and then criticizing and editing Petrarch. The elaborate praise (Petrarch's "rethorike sweete / Enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie," 11. 32-3) followed by the announcement of the excision of Petrarch's supposedly irrelevant geographical introduction indicates a complex attitude toward his predecessor. His emendation may be a joke: He repeats most of the details of the prologue, following Petrarch fairly closely, and he is not "original" in making the cut (his French source also left it out).21 Nevertheless, there may be some ambivalence about his predecessor's priority as he insists on his own sense of the time of narration and his own sense of the prologue's relevance. When he says that the prologue 116
The Clerk's Tale . . . a long thyng were to devyse[,] And trewely, as to my judgement, Me thynketh it a thyng impertinent . . . (11. 52-4; emphasis mine) he emphasizes his own activity as writer and as critic of his source. The Clerk also attempts to establish his rights over the story by emphasizing the fact of Petrarch's death, which he mentions twice in the course of his prologue: H e is n o w deed and nayled in his cheste,
I prey to God so yeve his soule reste! . . . But deeth, that wol nat suffre us dwellen heer, But as it were a twynklyng of an ye, Hem bothe [Petrarch and "Lynyan"] hath slayn, and alle shul we dye. (11. 29-30; 36-8; emphasis mine) Like the spokesman in the tale, the Clerk invokes the suddenness and inevitability of death, but his own purpose is different: He wants to remind us of the irrelevance of Petrarch. In contrast, he says that he himself has a "lusty herte, fressh and grene" (1. 1173). Although he knows that he will die, he is now vigorously alive and in control of the tale. The non-Petrarchan envoy, the half-ironic and half-serious endorsement of the Wife of Bath, begins Grisilde is deed, and eek hire pacience, And bothe atones buryed in Ytaille . . . en. 1177-8) These passages are mischievous declarations of independence, as if he were serving notice that he is now in charge of the story and its meaning. If the Clerk seems to be suffering from an "anxiety of influence," it should not be surprising that a medieval author, whose mode of composition was the rewriting of old books, might think about his relationships to his sources. The anxiety might not have
117
Chaucer on Interpretation been that there was nothing left to do, since "newness" was not an important value. But quality was, and the Clerk may be anxious about whether he can tell the story as well as Petrarch. There are several signs in the tale that the Clerk is concerned with the possibility of a decline in quality. First, there are several conversations within the tale about the relative worthiness of parents and children. Walter gives as his excuse in refusing a wife "[b]orn of the gentilleste and of the meeste / Of al this land" (11. 131-2) the chance that children of nobles may not live up to their genealogy: For God it woot, that children ofte been Unlyk hir worthy eldres hem bifore; Bountee comth al of God, nat of the streen Of which they been engendred and ybore. (11. 155-8; emphasis mine) Since the Clerk calls Petrarch "worthy" twice (11. 27; 39), he may be worrying that he does not live up to his own worthy parent. Griselda might then be a very satisfying subject for him because she is thought to be better than her origins: Unnethe trowed they,-but dorste han sworeThat to Janicle, of which I spak bifore, She doghter were . . . (ii. 403-5) This lack of continuity between generations is, of course, false. Griselda is Janicula's daughter, and the Clerk follows Petrarch very closely, even where he claims to be correcting him. Even the maligned geographical introduction, as I have already mentioned, surfaces in the Clerk's prologue, and if he shortens it at all, there is precedent in the French source. The tale is part of a series of texts with which it is inextricably intertwined. It is intertextually connected to its predecessors, and the Clerk invites us to read it in terms of those connections. The envoy also alludes to the decline of quality from generation to generation. It says that there are now no more Griseldas: Grisilda is deed, and eek hire pacience, And bothe atones buryed in Ytaille; 118
The Clerk's Tale For which I crie in open audience, No wedded man so hardy be t'assaille His wyves pacience in trust to fynde Grisildis, for in certein he shal faille. (ii. 1177-82) This is a version of the topos of the Golden Age: The past was better than the present.22 The envoy goes on to assume something like the Wife of Bath's attitude of triumphant inferiority: Let us glory in what we have left; the present, no matter what else it lacks, is better than the past in one respect-it is here now. Like the nobility of Griselda, this compensation, too, might have appealed to the Clerk as a follower (in both senses of the word) of Petrarch. Literary meaning thus depends on the placement not only of words, but also of authors and texts. The problem of the envoy's tone-is it serious? is it ironic?-is part of the larger problem of the narrator. What are his values? We must even ask what he knows. I have already, spoken of his uncertainty about Griselda's state of mind. The uncertainty about his state of mind is clear early in the tale when he describes the choice of a spokesman to present the people's case to Walter. Why do they choose this particular man? The Clerk speculates, giving three possible reasons: He is the wisest, he is most favored by Walter, or he is the best speaker (11. 87-90). The spokesman answers this question himself (11. 101-2). This passage suggests the paradox of selfhood. The Clerk, not acknowledging his role as creator, pretends that the character knows things even he does not know. It also makes the Clerk the object of interpretation, as we wonder just what he does and does not know about his characters. Our interpretation of the Clerk is made difficult by his contradictory statements about his tale. Despite his last-minute denial of Griselda's relevance for wives, earlier he explicitly approves of her wifely obedience: A wyf, as of hirself, nothing ne sholde Wille in effect, but as hir housbonde wolde. (11. 720-1) He says that it is evil to test a wife "whan that it is no nede" (1. 461) and that if wives were to be like Griselda, it would be un119
Chaucer on Interpretation bearable (11. 1142-4). He also reminds us that he, a clerk, is praising Griselda as a woman (11. 932-5; this remark is not in Petrarch), countering the Wife of Bath's stereotype of antifeminist clerks. The Clerk's opinion of wifely virtue is not at all clear. Furthermore, the Clerk seems to vacillate between presenting the story as an allegorical or exemplary tale and presenting it as a realistic human drama. There are hints throughout that Griselda is a type of Mary, Christ, and Job, and the Clerk reiterates Petrarch's allegorical interpretation of the tale.23 Yet the Clerk is said to have in general humanized Petrarch's version, increasing its pathos and encouraging sympathy for Griselda's plight.24 What does he intend? The same questions of identity and consistency through time that Walter asks about Griselda must be asked about the Clerk. They must also be asked about Chaucer. How does he feel about his mighty predecessors? It is difficult to say without going outside the poem (traditional medieval attitudes toward sources, other passages where the poet discusses his relationship to sources, such as the much-discussed stanza at the end of the Troilus, Book V, 11. 1786-92). Even this external evidence does not limit the various possibilities in the Clerk's Tale. It is more certain, however, that in raising this question about the author's relationship to his sources, Chaucer problematizes the author's identity and intentions.25 The mystery of Chaucer the poet replicates the mystery of persons in the tale itself. It is also congruent with the fundamental way in which the authors of written works are absent. People in face-to-face conversations and authors and their reading audiences are not accessible to each other. Interpreters must assume the other's existence, but not without acknowledging their own part in shaping the other. The tale makes us conscious of our own role as interpreters.26 By extrapolation, we are one of the concentric circles of interpretation. Walter interprets Griselda as a text, and the Clerk interprets his characters and the tale as a whole (11. 1142-62), giving us both the allegorical reading and the comic song praising the Wife of Bath. Harry Bailly finally copies the Clerk by echoing his vocabulary of "purpos" and "wille" and yet ignores the Clerk's warning that Griselda is not a model for wives. Chaucer's opinion is unclear. We must interpret them all. The Clerk's Tale portrays Walter as a version of someone who 120
The Clerk's Tale tries to treat the other as if she had an independent existence. Yet this is the ethics of reading formulated in the Book of the Duchess made grotesque. The distortion is caused by Walter's forgetfulness of his influence on her. Through the ways the characters in the tale interpret each other, Chaucer reminds us that when we interpret his poems, we should be mindful of our own influence on their meaning. That is, paradoxically, the only way we have a chance to see in them more than ourselves.
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READING THE SELF: THE WIFE OF BATH
I
N THE BOOK OF THE DUCHESS, White is silent, passive, and vulnerable to interpretation. She is dead. During most of the Clerk's Tale, Griselda cannot speak for herself because of her low social status and her acceptance of Walter's terms for their marriage. Yet through interpretation, she subtly shapes Walter, just as he shapes her. Both women, I have argued, suggest models for the text's interaction with authors and audiences. In the guise of the Wife of Bath, the text talks louder and longer than it does as White or Griselda. Her subject, ironically, is its silence-its passivity and openness to meanings imposed by readers. The Wife understands what Walter does not: Interpretation shapes meaning, on the literary level, and identity, on the interpersonal level. She explores both of these processes in her discussion of antifeminist texts. On the one hand, these texts distort their sources, and she reveals their self-interestedness. On the other hand, she claims that she has been influenced by being "read" according to these texts; who she is depends upon how she has been seen. The Wife's insight into these matters, however, does not preclude self-interested blindness about others. She is much more willing to see herself as the shaped text than as the shaping reader, and she uses her sophisticated but partial hermeneutics to escape responsibility for exactly what she claims to want: self-determination. She combines an individualistic, self-against-authority stance with a case for what we would now call socialization, the influence of culture on identity. Like the other poems I discuss in this book, her prologue and tale describe the simultaneous isolation of individuals and their 122
The Wife of Bath mutual influence on each other's lives. This chapter examines both her understanding and her evasions to reveal her version of the paradoxes of literary meaning and individual identity. HER UNDERSTANDING Modern critical application of patristic materials to the tale has produced readings of the Wife as an icon of cupidity, carnality, and wrong-headed literalism.1 At times she seems to be attempting to provoke just such a response, as when she relishes the thought of Solomon's sexual pleasure with his many wives and wishes that God allowed her "[t]o be refresshed half so ofte as he [Solomon]!" (III[D].38). Using Solomon as a symbol for sexual freedom is unwise, since Solomon is often interpreted allegorically as representing foolish heterodoxy. He is a man led astray by women. There is a kind of bravado, a flaunting of interest in sexuality, in citing him so early in her prologue. She is deliberately attacking no less an authority than Augustine, who says that Solomon is criticized in Scripture as a lover of women. His beginnings were redolent with the desire for wisdom; when he had obtained it through spiritual love, he lost it through carnal love.2 On some matters, however, the Wife is correct and responsible to Christian doctrine. For instance, the Wife cites God's wish for Adam and Eve to "wexe and multiplye" (1. 28) as justification for marriage and sexuality. It is true that this proclamation in Genesis 1.28 was often interpreted spiritually in the Middle Ages as a command to increase the number of good Christians and the number of virtues in the individual.3 Yet the literal sense of the passage was often cited in Christian teaching. Augustine accepts it when describing marriage in his City of God,4 and Chaucer's Parson lists it as the first justification for marital sex (X[I].883). Whatever one thinks of the Wife's intentions about children, she is justified in taking God's "blessing" literally. Furthermore, she is well aware that marriage is not the preferred state for Christians. She does not argue that it is recommended over virginity, but knows that virginity is only recommended and that "conseillyng is 123
Chaucer on Interpretation no comandement" (1. 67). Her explication of the levels of perfection is entirely consistent with St. Jerome's. 5 She knows that she is not perfect ("that am nat I," 1. 112). When he counsels virginity, St. Jerome assumes that few will choose it. Jerome addresses the question, also raised by the Wife (11. 71-2), of what would happen to the human race if no one procreated.6 Jerome answers that there is no need to worry because virginity is too difficult for most people and quotes Christ and St. Paul to the same effect. St. Jerome predicts and accepts responses like the Wife's. She is not only correct in her defense of marriage per se, but correct in her defense of marriage for widows. Although it may not be preferred, it is allowed. St. Jerome follows St. Paul in recognizing that not everyone can follow the saintly model of celibacy (1 Corinthians 7.7), and the Wife takes her stand firmly on the ground she correctly knows has been cleared for her by Paul and even her sometimes antagonist Jerome. The Wife attacks antifeminist stereotypes of women not merely because they generalize unfairly, but because they affect women directly. She is her own best witness. She is, as others have noted, the embodiment of clerical antifeminism. Everything they accuse women of being, she claims to be. She admits her delight in sex, her fantasy of never-ending sexual "refreshment" (11. 35-44), her love of wealth and power, her ability to lie and deceive men. But she claims to be not merely the antifeminists' nightmare, but their creation, and attacks their language because it demeans and limits women. 7 By describing women as monsters of sensuality, greed, and deceit, they produce monstrously sensual, greedy, and deceitful women. The Wife assaults the antifeminist tradition in her account of her husbands. Before the first three (whom she treats as a composite) can complain about her, she complains about them, accusing them of accusing her of conforming to antifeminist stereotypes. Her tactic turns upon them descriptions that have a sterling antifeminist pedigree. They come from the Jealous Husband's monologue in the Roman de la Rose, St. Jerome's Adversus Jovinianum, and Theophrastus's Golden Book on Marriage and offer a series of opposing descriptions that leave women no way to be without being blamed: If they are fair, they are wooed by lovers until they give in, and if they are foul, they eagerly woo every man they see (11. 258-72). Similarly, a rich wife's pride is hard to bear, a poor 124
The Wife of Bath one's bills hard to pay (11. 248-52). The choice offered in scholastic satire between women who are fair but fickle and those who are foul but faithful is not available here.8 No women are considered faithful. The Wife also complains about her husbands' proverbs on the evils of women: Thou seydest eek that ther been thynges thre, The whiche thynges troublen al this erthe, And that no wight may endure the ferthe. O leeve sire shrewe, Jhesu shorte thy lyf! Yet prechestow and seyst an hateful wyf Yrekened is for oon of thise meschances . . . Thou liknest eek wommenes love to helle, To bareyne lond, ther water may nat dwelle. Thou liknest it also to wilde fyr; The moore it brenneth, the moore it hath desir To consume every thyng that brent wole be. Thou seyest, right as wormes shende a tree, Right so a wyf destroyeth hire housbonde; This knowe they that been to wyves bonde. (11. 362-7; 371-8) Several texts flicker behind this passage, including the twentyfifth and thirtieth chapters of the biblical Proverbs and several paragraphs of the Adversus Jovinianum, in which Jerome quotes Proverbs to prove that virginity is better than marriage.9 Comparison of the two sources shows the choices St. Jerome makes. Proverbs contains both positive and negative advice; it tells what to do and what not to do. It depicts good men and bad men, good women and bad women; the bad ones include the following: There are three things that never are satisfied, and the fourth never saith: It is enough. Hell, and the mouth of the womb, and the earth which is not satisfied with water: and the fire never saith: It is enough. (30.15-16) 125
Chaucer on Interpretation By three things the earth is disturbed, and the fourth it cannot bear: By a slave when he reigneth: by a fool when he is filled with meat: By an odious woman when she is married: and by a bondwoman when she is heir to her mistress. (30.21-3)
Except for the comment on the insatiable womb (Proverbs 30.16), the bad women in Proverbs are bad because they are bad, not because they are women. In Proverbs 31, there is a long description of a good woman who is praised for being strong and productive. She is married, she owns property, and, also like Alice of Bath, she m'akes cloth. She does not appear in St. Jerome. He poses explicitly the question I teased out of Proverbs: Are all women to be avoided? He answers that women's love is always bad and advocates virginity by saying that it is better not to get mixed up with women at all. A shrewish wife will make a man's life miserable; a loving wife's insatiable appetite will sap his strength, or his sympathy for her troubles will distract his mind. He quotes from Proverbs to make vivid the disadvantages of living with women.10 The Wife knows that these descriptions represent choices. She herself mentions the good women in the Bible (1. 687), and she is well acquainted with the justifications of marriage in Corinthians 7. When quoting her husband's proverbial propaganda, she asks, Been ther none othere maner resemblances That ye may likne youre parables to, But if a sely wyf be oon of tho? (11. 368-70) Her question indicates that she is aware not only that these descriptions are selections from a larger range of alternatives, but that they have significance for women. Seeing women as symbols rather than as individuals ultimately damages women. When her fifth husband actually reads to her from a compilation of antifeminist texts, the Wife has a concrete object on which to 126
The Wife of Bath focus her anger, which manifests itself in two ways. First, she considers the source: men, and clerks to boot. Clerks, she says, invoking the principle of self-interested perception that we have seen elsewhere, do not wish to see wives in a good light (11. 688-710). She defends women with the principle of the relativity of knowledge: It depends on the nature of the knower.11 Then she attacks the book. When the Wife rips three pages from Jankin's book, she both fulfills a clerkly stereotype about the incompatibility of books and women and has some clerks on her side. Jerome quotes Theophrastus on the difficulty of studying when one has a wife: Wives need to be supported and like to talk all night (so the hag in the Wife's tale fulfills an antifeminist stereotype when she delivers a curtain lecture to her groom).12 But doctrine also supports the Wife in her assault on Jankin's book because his reading it "al nyght" (1. 789) constitutes a unilateral secession from their sexual relationship. St. Paul and St. Jerome disapprove of unilateral secession.13 Jankin has distanced himself from her by retreating behind his book. His choice of bedtime reading is not only unpleasant to her, but unfair: Jerome meant his book to convince the unmarried to remain unmarried. Jankin is already married and has duties (including sexual duties) to his wife, about which doctrinal authorities concur. The Wife rightly resents the book. Clerkly antifeminism is intruding upon her life in concrete and unjustifiable ways. By attacking Jankin's book, the Wife attacks the power of stereotypes and conventions to shape an individual's experience of the world and of herself. The images applied to a given group or person will not merely describe, but form them. She criticizes traditional negative descriptions of women and allegories in which women represent the material as opposed to the spiritual. She is saying, if you do not want carnal women, do not say that women are only carnal, and do not use them to represent carnality. This is an allegorical reading of the Wife's attack on the book, in which the book stands for its content. But the Wife is also attacking it literally because it deprives her of her husband's attention (and alienates his affection). After a difficult argument, which results in the book's landing in the fire14 and the Wife's regaining control of her property and Jankin, she reports, 127
Chaucer on Interpretation . . . I was to hym as kynde As any wyf from Denmark unto Ynde, And also trewe, and so was he to me. (ii. 823-5) Both adjectives in this passage carry multiple lexical senses. Although "kynde" may mean "generous," it may also mean "natural"; and although "trewe" may mean "free from deceit," it also carries the sense "real" or "of the right kind, fitting."15 Given the force of puns, these words claim that Jankin and the Wife really were generous and faithful by nature and that, after the demise of the book, they could relate to each other without the mediation of stereotypes. Intruding preconceptions fall away to leave a vision of an almost Edenic state, before individual minds are separated from one another. True self loves and is equally loved by true self, in what Britton J. Harwood might call the Wife's dream of
HER EVASIONS I have tried to state the Wife's analysis as sympathetically as I can to show how well it fits with my interpretations of Chaucer's ideas in the foregoing chapters, especially that of the self as, on the one hand, individual, integral, and self-contained and, on the other, defined in and by a social context. The Wife builds a case with which Chaucer would be inclined to sympathize. In his characteristic way, however, Chaucer explores the various aspects, including negative ones, of his own ideas. The Wife, for all her eloquence and the plausibility of her case, uses one of what I see as Chaucer's favorite themes-the contextuality of identity-as a cover and an evasion of responsibility. When she says that individuals are made by their contexts, she is ignoring the individual's (her own) part in making the context. Her comment on her horoscope exemplifies her evasions. She blames her sexual appetite on the influence of Venus and her combativeness on the influence of Mars: Venus me yaf my lust, my likerousnesse, And Mars yaf me my sturdy hardynesse . . . (11. 611-12) 128
The Wife of Bath As Chauncey Wood notes, the stars were thought to dispose one toward various traits, but not to determine one's destiny in an absolute way.17 For one thing, the horoscope must be read and interpreted, and this process, like all interpretation, may involve self-interest. The Wife also reads herself, noting and interpreting the marks on her body as signs of the influence of Mars and Venus (11. 619-20). She almost admits the part her own will plays when she says, I folwed ay myn inclinacioun By vertu of my constellacioun . . . (11. 615-16) The stars merely incline her in a direction that she can choose to follow or not, but the second line of the couplet undercuts her own action. As James W. Cook shows, the avoidance of responsibility here contrasts with the doctrine of the old hag in the Wife's tale.18 The old woman argues that gentilesse is not conferred by birth on a few but enacted by all who wish; it is not something that is inherited, but something that is done. The Wife's affirmation of free will in her tale provides a standard by which to judge her. Her implicit claim that she was made into a maistrye-hungry monster by an environment that steeped her in antifeminist stereotypes is unverifiable and possibly false. The passage in which the Wife quotes herself quoting her first three husbands back to themselves (11. 235-378) is so long that it may overshadow its frame. But the framing lines make it clear that her first three husbands were not guilty of preaching antifeminist doctrine to her. It is to shift attention from her own misdeeds that she accuses them of doing so: Lordynges, right thus, as ye have understonde, Baar I stifly myne olde housbondes on honde That thus they seyden in hir dronkenesse; And al was fals . . . 0 Lord! the peyne I dide hem and the wo, Ful giltelees, by Goddes sweete pyne! For as an hors I koude byte and whyne. 1 koude pleyne, and yit was in the gilt, Or elles often tyme hadde I been spilt. 129
Chaucer on Interpretation Whoso that first to mille comth, first grytit;
I pleyned first, so was oure werre ystynt. They were ful glade to excuse hem blyve Of thyng of which they nevere agilte hir ly ve. Of wenches wolde I beren hem on honde, Whan that for syk unnethes myghte they stonde. (11. 379-82; 384-94; emphasis mine) She says that she kept them so busy with her complaints about them (which they took seriously out of guilt or pleasure at her jealousy, 11. 391; 395-6) that they did not have time to complain about her. In other words, by her own account, she is the generator of the antifeminist rhetoric, the one who brings the Jealous Husband and Theophrastus into her marriages. With her fourth and fifth husbands, her false pictures of the first three come true: The fourth has a paramour, and the fifth is an antifeminist. Her responsibility for this outcome is difficult to gauge in the case of the fourth but easier in the case of the fifth. She herself says that her stubborn ways precipitate Jankin's forays into antifeminist texts: Stibourn I was as is a leonesse, And of my tonge a verray jangleresse, And walke I wolde, as I had doon biforn, From hous to hous, although he had it sworn; For which he often tymes wolde preche, And me of olde Romayn geestes teche . . . (11. 637-42; emphasis mine) Her willfulness comes first, by her own account. Furthermore, she dallies with Jankin before her fourth husband is dead (1. 548). Her motives may include paying her fourth husband back for his unfaithfulness (1. 484), providing herself in advance with a candidate for a fifth husband (1. 570), and following her desires (11. 596-9). Whatever her motives, there is a clear disadvantage to dallying with a prospective husband before the current one is dead: Jankin knows her as someone who disregards wifely decorum and flirts behind her husband's back. He knows her tactics for managing and flouting husbands. The change in his position from favored companion and confidant of a lively, mischievous, 130
The Wife of Bath and wealthy older woman to husband and potential victim of the same woman should help us to understand why he retreats to his books. When he reads to her from them, he is describing her as he knows her, now not from the perspective of a coconspirator, but from that of a husband possibly about to be victimized. Even the favorable marriage settlement may not have convinced him that at twenty he has enough strength by himself to survive the marriage with his dignity intact. If he summons Valerius, Theophrastus, and St. Jerome, it is poetic justice: The Wife has used them in her earlier marriages; she has herself summoned them into her fifth. This account raises two questions: Why does the Wife invoke the books that show women in such an unfavorable light, and why does she reveal her faults to a man she hopes one day to marry? My answer to the first question is speculative: She has read herself as particularly deceitful and lustful. Antifeminist tracts sometimes imply that all women are bad, but sometimes praise good women. The books as the Wife presents them (both in her accusations of her first three husbands and in her account of Jankin's readings) praise none. Indeed, Alison herself makes a number of statements about women in general that imply that all are like her: For half so boldely kan ther no man Swere and lyen, as a womman kan. (ii. 227-8) Deceite, wepyng, spynnyng God hath yive To wommen kyndely, whil that they may lyve. (11. 401-2) Although her citation of her horoscope implies that her traits are individual (or at least shared only by those born under her stars), she implies that she is like all women. Perhaps she is attempting to mitigate her guilt by blaming it not only on the stars, but on God's definition of female nature. Thus, the question of individual uniqueness versus commonalities among all members of a species is answered variously (and somewhat contradictorily) by the Wife's impulse for self-justification. She proclaims her special qualities and the validity of her experience even against authority (11. 1-3), favors the individual's right of self-determination (in her
Chaucer on Interpretation tale), and complains of antifeminist generalizations about women and yet uses them herself when it is in her interest to do so. She complains when women are taken as figures for deceitfulness and carnality, and yet she claims, in her own deceitfulness and carnality, to represent all women. Her need for self-justification outruns her self-interest when it drives her to reveal her faults to prospective husbands, including Jankin and the men on the pilgrimage. Her hopes for a sixth husband (1. 45) or, if Jankin is still alive, a prospective sixth husband to serve, as Jankin did, as "purveiance / Of mariage" (11. 570-1) make rather odd her willingness to "teche us yonge men of youre praktike" (1. 187), as the Pardoner requests. Especially in light of the difficulties Jankin's knowledge of her "praktike" seems to have caused in her fifth marriage. To explain what seems to be a violation of her own self-interest, we should look at the story of Midas in the Wife's tale, a paradigm for women who speak against their own interests. The Wife tells the story of Midas as she is narrating the adventures of the knight who must learn what "wommen moost desiren" (1. 905). She picks up Ovid's tale just after Midas has been given ass's ears, bypassing both the judgment of Pan's and Apollo's music and the preceding scene in which Midas is converted to the party of Pan by his traumatic experience with the golden touch. She changes the barber who betrays Midas's secret into Midas's wife because she wants the story to be proof that women cannot keep secrets (of course, for those who know Ovid it also proves the Wife's free hand with texts). Her added descriptions of the betrayer's feelings shed light on the phenomenon of self-betrayal. Ovid's barber simply has an urge to tell his secret but is afraid (of Midas's wrath? of losing his job? his life?) and so invents the solution of a hole in the ground. The Wife's wife has much more than fear as motivation for silence; loyalty to her husband (reinforced by an oath) and maintenance of her own reputation are at stake: He loved hire moost, and trusted hire also; He preyede hire that to no creature She sholde tellen of his disfigure. She swoor him, "Nay," for al this world to wynne, She nolde do that vileynye or synne, 132
The Wife of Bath To make hir housbonde han so foul a name. She nolde nat telle it for hir owene shame.
(11. 958-64; emphasis mine) In the context of a marriage (and perhaps even a good one, from what we know of his feelings) there is much more reason to keep his secret, and the wife in Ovid's tale wants and intends to keep it. She has other feelings, however, which overwhelm her resolve: But nathelees, hir thoughte that she dyde, That she so longe sholde a conseil hyde; Hir thoughte it swal so soore aboute hir herte
That nedely som word hire moste asterte . . . (11. 965-8; emphasis mine) The "conseil" seems to take on a physical aspect, swelling inside her so that it crowds her heart. Finally, heart "a-fyre" (1. 971), she tells it to the marsh water and instantly feels relieved: Now is myn herte al hool, now is it oute. I myghte no lenger kepe it, out of doute. (ii. 977-8) She seems to feel that words are physical entities taking up room inside her, squeezing out her own vital organs. Speaking is not merely a means of communication with others, but a form of self-expression motivated by internal causes, a kind of purgation. Speaking is an end in itself. This story may depict some of the voluble Wife's own feelings about speech. In her behavior and her descriptions of herself, she appears to be a great talker, but not in the same sense as Geffrey the pilgrim, who, not long after meeting the other pilgrims, had "spoken with hem everichon" (I[A].3i). He had probably done more listening than talking since he had learned a great deal about many of them and had even picked up some of their phrases and tones. The Wife is more garrulous than gregarious. She calls herself a "jangleresse" (1. 638) and says that one of her ways of controlling husbands is 133
Chaucer on Interpretation . . . by continueel murmur or grucchyng. (1. 406) Content matters to her less than fluency because communication is not really what she is interested in. She talks at more than she talks with.19 Although her combativeness may suggest that she is interested in the exchange of ideas, some of her feistiness is faked: She must invent the opponent in order to have the fight. The first opponent she mentions doubts that she was legally married "so ofte" (1. 7). That mysterious person has no image at all but is conjured up by the passive voice: But me was toold, certeyn, nat longe agoon is . . . (1-9) We do not know the age, sex, or estate of this accuser, or any of the details we learn about the pilgrims through the narrator's conversations with them. Although she hastens to assure us ("certeyn, nat longe agoon is") that the accusations are real and recent, her accuser may be a straw man. The argument that she could not have been married five times is not valid: Serial marriage may have been ill-advised, but it was not illegal. Another example of a phony feud is her exchange with the Pardoner, who presents himself after only 162 lines of her prologue as already converted to her point of view: "Now, dame," quod he, "by God and by seint John! Ye been a noble prechour in this cas. I was aboute to wedde a wyf; alias! What sholde I bye it on my flessh so deere? Yet hadde I lev eve wedde no wyfto-yeerel" (11. 164-8; emphasis mine) If everyone is as readily persuaded as the Pardoner, the Wife need not continue. If persuasion is her main goal. But her reaction to him suggests that persuasion is only an excuse to keep talking. She answers him as if she had not heard or understood his concession:
134
The Wife of Bath "Abyde!" quod she, "my tale is nat bigonne. Nay, thou shalt drynken of another tonne, Er that I go, shal savoure wors than ale . . . " (11. 169-71) She goes on for another twelve lines predicting her theme ("tribulacion in manage") and how she will demonstrate it (from her own experience and "ensamples mo than ten") and advising the Pardoner (with a quote from Ptolemy) to learn by her experience. All this is unnecessary. This obsessive introducing is also evident as she continues, especially with the story ofJankin. Her many references to the order of telling indicate her interest in the process of narration: Now of my fifthe housbonde wol I telle. a. 503) Now wol I tellen forth what happed me. I seye that in the feeldes walked we . . . (ii. 563-4) But now, sire, lat me se, what I shal seyn? A ha! by God, I have my tale ageyn. (ii. 585-6) What sholde I seye? (1. 627) Now wol I seye yow sooth, by seint Thomas, Why that I rente out of his book a leef, For which he smoot me so that I was deef. (11. 666-8) But now to purpos, why I tolde thee That I was beten for a book, pardee! (11. 711-12) Her concern with telling, and telling how she is telling, shows especially in her concern when she has lost her place. She wants
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Chaucer on Interpretation nothing to interfere with the course of the story, with the "telling forth." The tale of Midas - with its announced lesson that women cannot keep secrets-is against the Wife of Bath's own interest to tell, but it is part of her own purgative telling. In her prologue, she has already told how she would reveal her husbands' secrets to her best friend, another woman, and her niece (11. 531-42). It seems against her interest to have told tales that shamed her husbands, as it is against Midas's wife's, and it also seems against her interest to tell her present audience that she did tell her friends. But tell she does despite her wish to "been holden wise and clene of synne" (1. 944). Her self-accusation (and accusation of all women) is mitigated only by the change she makes in the story of Midas to suggest that speech (even the telling of important secrets) has no consequences. She cuts off her version of the story before the betrayer's message is repeated and shames Midas, but does let the wife admonish the water not to betray her (1. 974), thus implicitly reminding us that there are consequences. In her version, once the wife's internal discomfort is alleviated, the problem is solved and the tale ends. The "remenant" of the tale is dismissed with no reference to the effects of the betrayal. In the course of her curtain lecture, the old hag tells her young groom of a fire burning in isolation that may serve as an emblem of the Wife's idea of talk: Taak fyr, and ber it in the derkeste hous Betwix this and the mount of Kaukasous, And lat men shette the dores and go thenne; Yet wole the fyr as faire lye and brenne As twenty thousand men myghte it biholde; His office natureel ay wol it holde, Up peril of my lyf, til that it dye. (11. 1139-45) As we have seen from her explication of her horoscope, she thinks she is the way she is by nature, apart from the influence of others. It is as if her natural office were talking, as the fire's is burning, without reference to an audience. She implies that knowledge cannot be exchanged, for instance, when she reports of her fourth husband: 136
The Wife of Bath Ther was no wight, save God and he, that wiste, In many wise, how soore I hym twiste. He deyde whan I cam fro Jerusalem . . . (11. 493-5) When reporting her reaction to Jankin's nightly reading, she asks, Who wolde wene, or who wolde suppose, The wo that in myn herte was, and pyne? (ii. 786-7) Experience cannot be shared. The Wife talks by nature, as the fire burns "in his kynde" (1. 1149), but words do not further communication; they block it. She complains about others to keep others from complaining about her, as if her volume would stop them or wear them down. No wonder Jankin's nightly recitations annoy her. No wonder her prologue is so long. She and her confidante even have the same name, Alison (1. 530), so that when gossiping, the Wife is almost talking to herself. She is, indeed, at least half-deaf to the world. However, this isolation of the self is false, as her own stories show. The old woman in her tale literally saves the knight's life by giving him information, and she also succeeds, by her promise to amend what her husband thinks of as her faults (11. 1217-18) and by her curtain lecture, in changing his attitude toward her before she actually changes into a young beauty: The titles of address he has earlier denied to her ("wyf" and "love," 11. 1066-7) he uses before her transformation. In giving her control over the decision about her form, he calls her "[m]y lady and my love, and wyf so deere" (1. 1230). He earns his good fortune not only with his decision, but with his language. Furthermore, as we have already seen, the Wife's own life shows the consequences of speaking, for she talks to her first three husbands as if they were womanizers and antifeminists, and then gets one who is a womanizer and another who is an antifeminist. It appears that the way she talks to and about her first four husbands earns her Jankin's antifeminism. The image she projects onto the first four comes true in Jankin because of her talk. He has served an apprenticeship in antifeminism with the Wife herself. 137
Chaucer on Interpretation When Jankin kneels down to ask forgiveness for hitting her, he says, "That I have doon, it is thyself to wyte" (1. 806). He is absolutely right. In the Wife's performance, the two themes I have been tracingthe isolated self and the contextual self- come together in a new way. They are not delicately balanced against each other; one cancels the other out. The Wife is all for the acknowledgment of responsibility except when it comes to her own. She wishes to blame antifeminist texts for creating women who conform to antifeminist descriptions of them. But she does not take responsibility for the effects of her own speaking, either on her husbands or on her audience of pilgrims. It is as though she would prefer to be the fire that burns even when there is no one to see it, or Midas's wife, who can unburden herself in speech with no consequences. Walter, in the Clerk's Tale, does not acknowledge the influence of interlocutors on each other. The Wife understands the concept but applies it to others, not herself. She does not have good will in the sense that I have been using it because she refuses to listen. Being half-deaf has hermeneutical consequences. In a period of growing emphasis on authors' moral responsibility (as I have described the fourteenth century), speech without consequences might well be a writer's dream of innocence. The unresolved conflict between interpreters of the Wife who think that Chaucer sympathized with her and those who think that he merely judged her may reflect his own contradictory attitude toward her and toward the way she embodies the writer's dilemma.20 The issue of responsibility in narrative is the subject of the next chapter.
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7 THE POLITICS OF NARRATION IN THE FRAME OF THE CANTERBURY TALES
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iHE NARRATIVE FRAME of the Canterbury Tales is the tale about the tales. The relationships among Harry Bailly, the narrator, and the pilgrims demonstrate the themes of literary and political authority I have examined in the previous chapters. The political questions about who will lead and how decisions will be made bear upon the literary questions because at stake are the terms of the storytelling game and the order of the stories. All the negotiations and arguments concern the shape and meaning of the text (although only the narrator refers to the literary text explicitly). As Alan T. Gaylord has pointed out, when the Host becomes master of ceremonies of the pilgrimage, he tries to commission certain kinds of tales in a certain order, and judges and interprets some of them. He is part editor, part patron, part literary critic.* He is both a producer and a consumer of the text. As he stands before the pilgrims, nominating himself as leader and requesting election by acclamation, he stands for authors, especially those who perform their works orally. Like poet-performers, he must have the consent of the group in order to entertain them. But since he tells no tale of his own, he is also consumer as producer, representing the audience's power over the shape and meaning of the text. In contrast, the narrator is producer as consumer, or rather he pretends to be. He claims to be merely a reporter of the events and stories of the trip. Only at the beginning of Fragment II is "Chaucer" identified as a poet, more prolific than talented (by the Man of Law, 11. 45-76). It is significant that Chaucer lets one 139
Chaucer on Interpretation of his characters announce him as a poet. This is not merely a joke, although it has all the fun of Don Quixote's discovery of a book about his own adventures or Mozart's self-quotation in Don Giovanni. The issue is how much the author is willing to claim for himself. Both Harry Bailly and the narrator are wrong in how much they claim. The Host claims too much authority for himself, as the intransigence of his "material" shows; the narrator claims too little, as we can see by careful examination of what he says about his role. The narrative frame articulates the paradox that I earlier called the too-powerful powerlessness of the author. If we compare the two figures and "correct" their inaccurate statements about their roles, we can see another version of the paradoxes of interpretation: Identity, meaning, and political power are independent and yet are created in and for specific social contexts. I shall first discuss the Host, who embodies the paradox of combining partial self-revelation with selective imitation of the pilgrims as he becomes their leader. THE HOST Although there is no way to know Harry Bailly outside the context of the pilgrimage, we can watch the "felaweshipe" of the pilgrims draw out and exaggerate some of his personal characteristics. Others have noted that Harry Bailly is a tyrant.2 It is important for the purposes of my argument to see how he becomes one gradually through his interaction with the pilgrims. Like the tyranny of Walter, the rule of the Host is established partly by the ruled. After Geffrey has described all the pilgrims and explained his own procedures as recorder, he turns to the events of the evening. He says that the evening meal, like the inn itself, was of high quality, and that A semely man OURE HOOSTE was withalle For to han been a marchal in an halle. A large man he was with eyen stepeA fairer burgeys is ther noon in ChepeBoold of his speche, and wys, and wel ytaught, And of manhood hym lakkede right naught. 140
The Frame of the Canterbury Tales Boldness of speech is a necessary attribute of an innkeeper, especially of one about to make himself governor of the pilgrimage. The Host first displays his abilities as a leader by his ability to organize people and resources at the Tabard, just the sort of talent suggested by the narrator's comment that he could have been a "marchal in an halle" (1. 752; see OED, sb., 5). At the end of the General Prologue, he is more king than marshal. The conversation with the pilgrims accomplishes the transformation. The Host begins by praising the company as the merriest he has seen all year. He soon becomes not merely bold, but impulsive, proposing a plan to entertain the pilgrims before he has thought it out clearly; the plan changes as he speaks. When he says, "Fayn wolde I doon yow myrthe, wiste I how" (1. 766), he implies that he does not know how. In the very next line he is thinking out loud and putting forth a plan for entertainment: And of a myrthe I am right now bythoght, To doon yow ese, and it shal coste noght. (11. 767-8; emphasis mine) He then asks the pilgrims to consent immediately to his game and makes them a promise in return: "But ye be myrie, I wol yeve yow myn heed!" (1. 782).This promise hardly asserts his strength, as it should if he is going to prove his right to lead by willingness to take risks. He can suggest these terms not because he will take a real risk or because, like the Green Knight, he can afford to lose his head, but because the idiom does not literally apply; instead of proving that he is a leader, it proves that he is easily carried away by his own high spirits and has already lost his head. His terms change as he continues to think out loud. When he explains the rules, he changes the nature of the game, which now includes "sentence" as well as mirth; he changes its cost from nothing to the price of the winner's meal; and he adds a rather exorbitant penalty for anyone who breaks the rules-the cost of the whole journey. If Harry Bailly is rash in offering his plan, the pilgrims are just as rash in accepting it: Oure conseil was nat longe for to seche. Us thoughte it was noght worth to make it wys, And graunted hym withouten moore avys . . . (11. 784-6) 141
Chaucer on Interpretation Since "to make it wys" means to make it a matter for deliberation and thought, in neglecting to "make it wys" the pilgrims are abandoning caution. They are not only imitating Harry Bailly's impulsiveness, but also accepting his definition of the situation and playing a subservient role to complement his dominant one. According to the account given by the narrator, through whose eyes we see the interaction, the group's willingness to be subordinate goes even beyond Harry Bailly's initial demands: They exaggerate their subservience. In response, he exaggerates his dominance. His later speeches are more assertive than his early ones. In his first request, he promises to make them merry . . . if yow liketh alle by oon assent For to stonden at my juggement, And for to werken as I shal yow seye . . . (11. 777-9) Since the notion of a contest has not yet been introduced, it seems that the pilgrims are to accept Harry Bailly as judge of what will make them happy; accepting his judgment means following his plan for entertainment. When the pilgrims accept, they do not object to the lack of specificity of his request and in fact accept it in terms equally unspecified: They "graunted hym" (1. 786). Once having given him carte blanche, they adopt his judicial imagery in order to give him as much freedom as he requested; that is, they . . . bad him seye his voirdit as hym leste. (i. 787) When Harry Bailly asks for a reaffirmation of their commitment, they not only restate but strengthen it by heightening the difference between his power and theirs and broadening his jurisdiction over them.3 The narrator is so taken with the Host that he picks up his judicial terms and copies his "assent"-"juggement" rhyme: This thyng was graunted, and oure othes swore With ful glad herte, and preyden hym also That he wolde vouche sauf for to do so, And that he wolde been oure governour, 142
The Frame of the Canterbury Tales And of oure tales juge and reportour, And sette a soper at a certeyn pris, And we wol reuled been at his devys In heigh and lough; and thus by oon assent We been acorded to his juggement. (11. 810-18) He asks for consent, and they agree to a "thyng" or contract. He wants to be their guide, and they beg him to be their governor. He suggests a dinner as the prize, and they tell him to set the price. He selects sentence and solace as the criteria for judging the tales, and they ask him to be the judge and also the "reportour." Their greater specificity about the terms of the agreement gives Harry Bailly more power than he asks for. They have elevated him from a master of ceremonies to a ruler. When they agree to be ruled "at his devys," the pilgrims invoke not only the terms of government, but the terms of art. "Devys" can mean "will," but also means "plan," "arrangement," or "composition." The pilgrims are dependent on Harry Bailly partly because he is allowed to define them. They are ignoring for the moment the fact that his power over them is generated through interaction: They have created him as their creator and themselves as his creatures. When first proposing to amuse the pilgrims, Harry describes them as people predisposed to amusement: . . . wel I woot, as ye goon by the weye, Ye shapen yow to talen and to pleye . . .
(11. 771-2; emphasis mine) How he knows this is unclear, but the mention of stories makes it appear that when he proposes the storytelling competition he is merely responding to their already manifested tendency toward narrative. The notion that one must shape oneself to storytelling is extremely important in all of the poems I have discussed so far. It is interesting to see it used here as a clever bit of obfuscation, as if to say that the pilgrims bend themselves to a task, not to a person. They do just as surely shape themselves to Harry's will, but to Harry's will as it is shaped by and "to" them. Harry acknowledges this when he asks for assent and says H3
Chaucer on Interpretation . . . if ye vouche sauf that it be so, Tel me anon, withouten wordes mo, And I wol erly shape me therfore.
(11. 807-9; emphasis mine) In becoming their ruler, he is indeed shaping himself to their desires. In the morning the pilgrims begin to reap the rewards of their pact with the Host. Whereas the night before he referred to the possibility that someone would "withseye" his judgment (1. 805), now anyone who disagrees does not merely "seye" something, but mutinies, becoming "rebel to my juggement" (1. 833). The Host adopts language consonant with his new role. He addresses some people with the familiar form of the second-person pronoun, issues commands, and, in an authoritarian move that defies both logic and courtesy, orders the Knight to draw lots because "that is myn accord" (1. 838). The singular "accord" takes full responsibility for the supposed agreement and treats the Knight as a legal nonentity. Harry Bailly is acting the tyrant, a role that will prove dangerous. The tone of authority is not backed up by absolute power; his power is actually derived from the consent of the governed. When he ignores his dependence on them, he overreaches and makes himself vulnerable to rebellion, which is just what he hopes to avoid. The rest of Fragment A witnesses the erosion of his power. Bailly takes upon himself two tasks that were not in his original mandate: determining the order of the tellers and, at times, determining the kind of tales they will tell. He starts to set the order of the tales deviously, by having pilgrims draw lots, leaving the decision supposedly to chance. Shrewdly, he first approaches those who are likely to comply. He apparently guesses that the Knight will obey because of nobility, the Prioress because of courtesy, and the Clerk because he is used to obeying. After the Knight establishes the precedent of obedience to the Host, the Host drops the pretense of the draw and usurps fate as the orderer of the tales. Of course, his authority is challenged immediately, not by someone who refuses to tell-no one does that-but by the Miller, who refuses not to. His insistence on being second challenges the Host's 144
The Frame of the Canterbury Tales authority to punish insubordination. When he threatens to leave the pilgrimage unless he gets his way, Bailly's authority is completely undermined. He has no real sanctions to use against scofflaws. When he resorts to insulting the Miller, Bailly loses dignity and also sets the acrimonious tone that lasts for the rest of Fragment A.4 The argument among the various estate managers and food suppliers and preparers has begun, and by the time it is over, Harry Bailly himself has been drawn into it as a target for the Cook. Partly through his own acrimony, the supposed "governour" is involved in an undignified squabble motivated by professional jealousy. When he originally asks the Monk to "quite" the Knight's Tale, he must be asking for a gracious form of reciprocity: He wants the Monk to tell a worthwhile tale to repay and compliment the Knight, whose tale is noble and memorable. Instead, the Reeve and the Cook copy the worst aspect of Bailly's own manners and turn quiting into a kind of imitation that demeans them. The same kind of imitation that magnified Bailly's dignity and authority in the General Prologue now destroys it. The contentiousness of the pilgrimage is reflected in the Reeve's Tale, which not only constitutes his vengeance against the Miller, but also portrays vengeance. The tale and the pilgrimage mirror each other. In Fragment II(B1), Harry tries a new tactic in order to take account of the pilgrims' wills: He chooses terms he thinks will suit his hearers' professions or temperaments to manipulate his interactions with them. He turns to the Man of Law using the language of law and promise, an idiom in which he has already demonstrated his expertise in the General Prologue: Telle us a tale anon, as forward is. Ye been submytted, thurgh youre free assent, To stonden in this cas at my juggement. Acquiteth yow now of youre biheeste; Thanne have ye do youre devoir atte leeste. (11. 34-8; emphasis mine) By repeating the "assent"-"juggement" rhyme of the General Prologue, he simultaneously reminds all the pilgrims of their original agreement and addresses the Man of Law in terms he should understand. H5
Chaucer on Interpretation The rest of the poem contains many other examples of this technique of imitation. Although at times Harry continues his lordly ways (speaking to the Reeve he is "as lordly as a kyng," I[A].39Oo), in many conversations he tries to ingratiate himself by copying the pilgrim or the tale, shaping himself as speaker by shaping himself to his audience. This is not the only change in him. As David Pichaske and Laura Sweetland show, he swears less, makes peace several times (for instance, between the Friar and the Summoner), and hands over the leadership of the pilgrimage to the Parson when it is appropriate to do so. They claim that he becomes a better leader.5 If this is true, it is because he is learning to follow. His request to the Prioress is a good example of this. In order to speak to her, he so thoroughly transforms himself into an image of her that the narrator says he spoke "[a]s curteisly as it had been a mayde" (VII[B2].445). His courtesy is so elaborate that he even asks her permission to have the opinion that she should tell the next tale: My lady Prioresse, by youre leve, So that I wiste I sholde yow nat greve, I wolde demen that ye tellen sholde A tale next, if so were that ye wolde. Now wol ye vouche sauf, my lady deere? (11. 446-50) All these subordinate clauses and subjunctive verbs are his attempt to manipulate the forms of courtesy so that the Prioress will believe she can refuse. To get one's way by being deferential one must defer to people who know the rules, and the Prioress, who according to her portrait in the General Prologue is eager to show that she does, complies. Harry Bailly has imitated just that characteristic of the Prioress that will flatter her. This is a subtle tactic and is safer than trying to dominate drunken millers. He also uses it for comments after the tales, as for instance when, claiming to be ill because of the affecting Physician's Tale, he wishes for ale or a merry tale as a cure (VI[C].3ii-i7). As a way of soliciting the kinds of tales he desires from the pilgrims, this technique has its limits. Bailly cannot make himself into a flattering mirror for the pilgrims if he does not know what will flatter them. For instance, he tries to manipulate the Monk by 146
The Frame of the Canterbury Tales offering him a picture of himself as a powerful, highly sexual man who does not belong in the church: "Thou woldest han been a tredefowel aright" (VII[B2].i945). The Monk, however, is not flattered by this image, possibly because the fragment began with the Shipman's tale about a monk, Don John, who cuckolded his good friend. Harry Bailly, who moralized the Shipman's Tale by saying that it warns against inviting monks to one's house, now turns to the Monk and asks him if his name is Don John (1. 1929). The portrait of the Monk in the General Prologue is that of a vigorous, worldly man wearing an ambiguous love knot. He may be exactly what the Host says he is, but when the Host tries to tease the Monk with an image borrowed from a fabliau, he transforms him into the sullen narrator of a seemingly endless group of tragedies. The tragedies may be the Monk's revenge, since they record the fall of people, most of whom are rulers, from high places.6 He may be making his tale into a threat against Harry Bailly. Undaunted, Bailly then asks for a tale about hunting, which he knows the Monk enjoys. Unlike the narrator, who produces a second tale when his first is interrupted, the Monk ends whatever game the Host is playing by falling silent. Deprived of his victim, Bailly turns to the Nun's Priest. He contents himself with insulting the cleric's horse, but has the effrontery to follow that with a command about the sort of tale the Nun's Priest should tell. He wants a merry one. In a sense, the Nun's Priest confounds the Host by giving him just the sort of tale that would have been appropriate from the Mohk: Chauntecleer is literally a treader of fowls. Thus, the Nun's Priest indicates that the Host has not understood, much less controlled him. Bailly seems delighted with the sexual content of the tale of Chauntecleer, notwithstanding that Chauntecleer's wife's counsel and his sexual interest in her almost get him killed (at least according to one version of causation in the tale).7 Evidence of sexual prowess is all that matters to the Host. He applies to the Nun's Priest the terms he used to define the Monk, saying that, had he not been a cleric, the Priest would have been a "trede-foul aright" (1. 3451) and that his large physique must match his sexual appetite. For all we know, the Nun's Priest may be all this, but there is no description of him in the General Prologue. Harry Bailly is again trying to define a pilgrim by describing him, this time in response to the pilgrim's own tale. 147
Chaucer on Interpretation This is not to say that the Host is nothing but a chameleon, adapting himself to the environments of the pilgrims and their tales. The tales also lead him to reveal his own characteristics, sometimes in the form of confessional comments, sometimes in the form of interpretations of the tales. Just as he sometimes mirrors the tales, he sometimes makes them mirrors for himself. Both responses are evident in his brief reply to the Clerk's Tale: Me were levere than a barel ale My wyf at hoom had herd this legende ones! This is a gentil tale for the nones, As to my purpos, wiste ye my will . . . (IV[E].I2I2c"f) Because the Clerk has said very explicitly that his tale is not a mirror for wives, Harry Bailly must ignore the author's own commentary to make the tale a mirror for his own concerns. But he also echoes the tale in his use of the terms "purpos" and "wille" and his reference (unwitting?) to one of the important issues of the tale: whether one person's will can be known by another. Harry Bailly as audience both shapes himself to the tale's concerns and tries to force the tale to answer his concerns. In this instance, he is a perfect realization of Chaucer's worries over the poet's power. Harry Bailly has responded to the tale by becoming, at least momentarily, like it, thus attesting to its power without necessarily understanding it. This is analogous to (although not as consequential as) Paolo and Francesca's use of the story of Lancelot and Guenevere: imitation without comprehension that demonstrates the poet's power and his inability to control it.8 Another instance of this confused response to a tale occurs after the Melibee. The Host again wishes that his wife had been present to hear. The reason, it turns out, is that he would like her to learn to be merciful instead of urging him on when he beats his servants! In the process of criticizing Goodelief, he reveals himself to be a servant beater (in the tale, Melibee never does lay a hand on anyone, despite his threats). What's more, he reveals his fear that, urged on by his wife's drive to be avenged for her neighbors' insults, he will someday kill someone. He reveals not only his own violent streak, but his great fear of his wife (he implies that he must kill or be killed) and the cowardice involved in blaming 148
The Frame of the Canterbury Tales her, in advance, for the damage he will do (VII[B2].i897-i922). Although this is an appropriate response to the tale's concern with mercy, Harry Bailly does not seem aware of the issue of responsibility for oneself that the tale raises, albeit in a paradoxical way (see Chapter i). If Geffrey was miffed at having his Tale of Sir Thopas interrupted and insulted, and directed the Melibee at the Host to teach him how to rule without tyranny by being merciful and listening to wise counselors, then the poet has wasted his breath. The Host becomes the mirror of the Melibee, but only in the sense that the mirror reverses the image. Presented with a picture of tyranny, he identifies with the tyrannized and glosses over his own violence. The point is either that such a man cannot be taught with tales or (especially if Harry Bailly is a figure for Everyman) that tales cannot be guaranteed to teach what the teller intends. The power of interpretation is too great. The poet may attempt to create a didactic image, but he cannot make sure that the image is read correctly. When Harry Bailly is trying to solicit tales by making himself into a flattering image of a pilgrim, he represents the artist or even the artifact itself. When he produces his self-interested readings of the tales, he represents the audience. In both cases, he represents the limits of the author's control over what his work will do in the world. He stands for the formidable power of interpretation. The Host makes two comments, on the surface very practical messages about storytelling, which point to the larger issue of the audience's power. He warns the Manciple not to goad the Cook, who, although he seems helpless, could tell quite a damning tale about the Manciple. Even the audience that appears to be impotent may be all too powerful.9 Earlier in the work, the Host makes an even broader point about that power. When he tells the Monk that the litany of tragedies almost put him to sleep, he warns, Whereas a man may have noon audience, Noght helpeth it to tellen his sentence. (11. 2801-2) The rhyme makes the importance of readers' and listeners' intentions, no matter how self-interested, quite clear. Without an audience, there is no meaning. 149
Chaucer on Interpretation THE POET Whereas the Host claims too much power at the start of the pilgrimage, the narrator claims too little. He not only hides his role as inventor under the fiction that he merely reports real events, but also denigrates his abilities as a reporter. He is a slave to the facts but is unable to report them perfectly. Yet in these denials, there are clues that he is the active, controlling shaper of the poem. My purpose in this section is to read both the overt announcements of the narrator's impotence and the covert admissions of his power, in order to reveal Chaucer's ideas about the author's (rather than the reader's) contributions to the meaning of the work. The relationship between these two messages is also crucial to our experience of the author as an object to be interpreted. In the terms that have become familiar through Donaldson's influential "Chaucer the Pilgrim,"10 the denials of control belong to the persona, Geffrey the pilgrim, and the covert acknowledgments of power point to the author. The greater the difference between the persona and the implied author, the more we will tend to reify the pilgrim. Insofar as the pilgrim's modesty seems inappropriate to the poet, we will tend to see him as a dramatized character different from the poet.11 If his modesty does not seem exaggerated, we have less cause to separate the two. I have been arguing that Chaucer is concerned with the limits of authorial power imposed by the separation of authors from their reading audiences. In the context of Harry Bailly's (and all readers') power over the text, the narrator's disavowals do not seem ridiculous. Other critics reconsidering Donaldson's formulation of the pilgrim narrator have decreased the distance between narrator and author. Donald R. Howard says that we often do hear the poet's voice in the poem.12 Jay Schleusener urges us to interpret the works in the light of the man and the man in the light of the works, rather than to use the idea of the persona to detach the works from the life.13 Both see Chaucer as a "personal" poet in that his works point to the man in a personal way. Insofar as he is an ironic poet, understanding his works requires sharing his point of view, from which at least some of the characters are excluded. Because of this and the fact that the persona, reified or not, is a version of the poet, the works are always pointing beyond themselves to their author. 150
The Frame of the Canterbury Tales In his provocative article "The Art of Impersonation: A General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales," H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., turns this notion upside down. Leicester says that rather than search for the ways in which the poet creates the persona in the poem, we should study the ways in which the poem creates the poet. Chaucer impersonates himself in the text, creating the self appropriate to the task of narration; as Harry Bailly might say, he shapes himself for telling. The virtue of this formulation is that it takes into account the contextuality of identity, which I have been promoting throughout this book. Its difficulty is that, by saying that all we can know about the poet is in the poem, it denies the turn of the hermeneutical circle that encompasses the author and his life. I agree with Leicester insofar as he expresses the frustrations we experience if we try to identify Chaucer the man. But it is my position in this book that this is a frustration we are invited to feel: that we are constantly directed toward Chaucer the man, and constantly unable to find him, because of the distance imposed by death, writing, and the separation of minds. His work stimulates awareness of the necessity and the insufficiency of interpretation of people (including writers) as well as of texts. As Donald Howard points out, the question Harry asks the pilgrim narrator, "What man artow?" (VII[B2].695), is just what we need to know.14 It is also what we will never know definitively, both because he is an absent author and because the mind of the other is never fully available to us. Chaucer's double message about his control over the work appears in the General Prologue. His first reference to the act of narration contains the claim that he follows the facts. When he says that the pilgrims . . . made forward erly for to ryse, To take oure wey ther as I yow devyse[,] (I[A].33-4) the narrator implies the close correspondence between events and story. However, the correspondence is not exact, because his telling violates chronological order. On the pilgrimage, the pilgrims meet at the inn, have dinner, hear and agree to Harry Bailly's plan; at some point in the evening each pilgrim talks to the narrator, and they go to bed promising to get up for an early
Chaucer on Interpretation start. In the General Prologue, after the narrator's elaborate first sentence about spring, he describes the meeting of the pilgrims, announces that he interviewed all of them, and records the promise to rise early. He then goes back to sketch the portraits of all the pilgrims; he apologizes for his lack of wit and finally tells us about the dinner and the after-dinner discussion of the Host's suggestion of a storytelling competition. In other words, he rearranges the order. As he turns to the portraits of the pilgrims, he says, . . . whil I have tyme and space, Er that I ferther in this tale pace, Me thynketh it acordaunt to resoun To telle yow al the condicioun Of ech of hem, so as it semed me, And whiche they weren, and of what degree, And eek in what array that they were inne . . . (11. 35-41) This passage both claims objectivity and betrays its subjectivity. "[W]hil I have tyme and space" implies that objective considerations determine the shape of the narrative. In fact, he is giving himself the time and space because this moment is the one that he chooses as narrator. Everything that happens in this poem will happen no sooner, no later, and in no other way than "ther as I yow devyse." Since "devyse" means not only "describe," but also "devise, contrive," this phrase, which promises allegiance to external reality, also locates us firmly inside Chaucer's perspective, and his promise to "devyse" both commits him to report and acknowledges that he invents. "Resoun" is another term that floats somewhere between the claims that language is a copy of the truth and that it creates its own truth. "Resoun" can mean the right way to do something, a rhetorical method for ordering a text, or a personal opinion.15 Although part of the force of the word in this context comes from the first meaning, the rhetorical and personal meanings imply an order that is determined not by reality at all, but by arbitrary rules, preference, or whim. "Resoun," like the phrase "ther as I yow devyse," describes Chaucer's ambiguous commitment. He wishes to tell "al," but will tell it "so as it semed me." 152
The Frame of the Canterbury Tales After he finishes the portraits, he summarizes what he has accomplished: Now have I toold you soothly, in a clause, Th'estaat, th'array, the nombre, and eek the cause Why that asembled was this compaignye . . . (u. 715-17) Also I prey yow to foryeve it me, Al have I nat set folk in hir degree Heere in this tale, as that they sholde stonde. My wit is short, ye may wel understonde. (u. 743-6) His claim as he finishes is different from his promise as he began. He claims to have given us the estate, array, number, and cause of the gathering. When he began with the Knight, he had already told us the number and the cause. He then successfully delivered descriptions of estate and array. Now he apologizes for leaving out degree and suppresses the most ambitious of his promises: to tell "al the condicioun." Since "condicioun" means both "inner nature" and "external circumstances," telling all the "condicioun" is in fact impossible. Yet in a sense, he has told us all the condition of the pilgrim's, for they have only as much reality as he bestows upon them in the telling. He is right to claim success in matching words and reality, because the words constitute the reality: He has indeed told us how it was, "soothly, in a clause." Chaucer also mentions as an excuse for speaking plainly his allegiance to the autonomy of reality. Words must reflect deeds, and the narrator claims to have no control over deeds. But this excuse, too, contains signs of the narrator's control over the poem. He says that Whoso shal telle a tale after a man, He moot reherce as ny as evere he kan Everich a word, if it be in his charge, Al speke he never so rudeliche and large, Or ellis he moot telle his tale untrewe, Or feyne thyng, or fynde wordes newe. (ii. 731-6) 153
Chaucer on Interpretation The three alternatives to repeating an informant's story word for word are presented as if we should disapprove of them. But the narrator has great hopes for the portraits: He wants to tell not only the pilgrims' words, but their "cheere" (1. 728), which is nonverbal. To describe the nonverbal, the author simply must find new words. He will tell a tale "after" each pilgrim not only by repeating the tale each tells, but also by describing that pilgrim, the pilgrim's response to being asked to speak, and sometimes the audience's reaction and the rejoinder. Chaucer's poem will include not just a story, but the story of the story. In calling the prologue itself a "tale" (11. 36; 745), he acknowledges his own fiction making. 16
HOST AND POET, AUDIENCE AND AUTHOR As audience, we can take at face value neither Harry Bailly's nor the narrator's words about their own control over the text. Each is right, although not in the way he seems to mean, about his control or lack of it, and each is also wrong. Harry Bailly has less than the control he claims because his "coauthors" are not perfectly malleable, yet as interpreter he has a good deal of influence over the meaning of the tales for himself. Geffrey has more control than he claims, but in a way he is right that his control is limited. Harry Bailly as interpreter is a perfect demonstration of the limits. The struggle between them is made explicit when the Host interrupts the Tale of Sir Thopas because its "lewednesse" makes his ears ache (VII[B2].921-3). Chaucer does not just stop meekly, as the Squire seems to when he is interrupted, but his response is more plaintive than aggressive; it is in the form of a question, and it takes Harry's power and his own insufficiency for granted: "Why so?" quod I, "why wiltow lette me Moore of my tale than another man, Syn that it is the beste rym I kan?" (11. 926-8) Since Harry's answer to the question (11. 929-35) is more rude than his initial comment, Chaucer's acquiescence to the request for another tale, "Gladly . . . by Goddes sweete pyne!" (1. 936), may 154
The Frame of the Canterbury Tales have in it some glee at the thought of a new tale about a tyrant giving up his tyrannical behavior. As I said in Chapter i, the Melibee may be Chaucer's warning to Harry Bailly, and also his revenge. But Chaucer also attempts to control Harry Bailly's response to the new tale by interpreting the tale before he tells it and by interpreting Harry to himself. If Harry does not like it, he is too fussy: I wol yow telle a litel thyng in prose That oghte liken yow, as I suppose, Or elles, certes, ye been to daungerous. It is a moral tale vertuous,
Al be it told somtyme in sondry wyse Of sondry folk, as I shal yow devyse. (11. 937-42; emphasis mine) Thus, the author tries on his character a tactic that his characters have used on each other: interpretation as a form of control. Then, after a long defense of telling a version of the tale that is different from versions already known (a reversal of his promise in the General Prologue to copy reality exactly), he asks, in advance, to be allowed to finish this "murye tale" (11. 964-6). At least in this attempt to control his audience, he seems to have been successful. Chaucer's relation to his wider, nonfictional audience is the subject of his Retraction, where he sounds some of the same themes as in his exchange with the Host.17 He asks us to believe that what displeases us in the work is due "to the defaute of myn unkonnynge, and nat to my wyl, that wolde ful fayn have seyd bettre if I hadde had konnynge" (X[I].io82). Because human beings' knowledge of each other will always be incomplete, he cannot make us sure of his benevolence (after all, the fox in the Nun's Priest's Tale also has "no wikke entente," VII[B2].3423) or be sure himself of ours. He can only ask for benevolence in language that implies the necessity not only of interpretation, but also of faith: "I preye hem also that they arrette it to the defaute of myn unkonnynge . . . " The languages of religion and courtesy come appropriately together in the words "preye" and, later, "biseke," since neither God nor another person is entirely knowable. Augustine might say that we must have faith in order to understand another. 155
Chaucer on Interpretation The narrator's humility acknowledges the autonomy of the other: Chaucer cannot demand. After all, we cannot know whether he is sincere or is merely manipulating courtesy, as the Host does with the Knight and the Prioress or as the fox does with Chauntecleer. He does, however, try to teach by example. He asks us to pray for him by showing concern for our spiritual well-being: . . . I biseke yow mekely, for the mercy of God, that ye preye for me . . . (X[I].io84) He tries to affect our actions by creating an image for us. We can improve our own spiritual health by performing an act of charity toward him. Like many of the interactions in the Canterbury Tales, the Retraction depends on imitation. The narrator's deference makes the separation between minds one of the subjects of the work. At the same time, he unites his disparate audiences into a community. He addresses all those who are experiencing the work by different means ("alle that herkne this litel tretys or rede," 1. 1081) and refers to the Bible as "oure book" (1. 1083). What we have in common with each other and with him-what creates our social context-is a language, a cultural heritage, experience of the work, and the inability to be fully present to each other. In the Retraction, the refusal to demand authority, the dependence of interaction on our "will" toward each other, final reference to the audience as a community, and the prayers to God-all are appropriate to a poem in which interpretation is interactive and open-ended. The end of this poem turns us toward the end of individual life and the end of collective life. The narrator ceases to address his audience and prays to Christ that he may be a member of the last community, those "of hem at the day of doom that shulle be saved" (1. 1092). Since the process of interpretation is perpetual, the only end is arbitrary; the pilgrims have not completed their game or their journey. Interpretation can never be finished, only stopped. Whether or not Chaucer is literally near death, he might be thinking of it because the end of the poem is a kind of death, at least for the narrating self he creates in the poem. Chaucer submits himself and his poem to the only authoritative interpretation, God's judgment. 156
NOTES
I.
INTRODUCTION
1. This and subsequent quotations from Chaucer are taken from The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957). 2. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, ed. and trans. John D. Sinclair, Vol. 1: Inferno (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939). 3. Chaucer's explorations of these problems have been studied in several important books. David Aers's Chaucer, Langland and the Creative Imagination (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980) is a major contribution to our understanding of Chaucer's interest in the biases and limits of individual perspective. Aers calls this capacity to recognize our own biases "reflexive imagination," which grasps the way human beings actively constitute the world, the way they are agents in creating ideologies, dogmas and all that is known, not merely passive recipients of reality and impersonal verities. It subverts assumptions that human beings have access to an absolute viewpoint . . . Constantly showing us the relevance of our incarnate nature and historicity to the kinds of knowledge we can attain, the reflexive imagination discloses the processes by which authority is constructed, its grounds in individual and social consciousness and practice. (pp. 81-2)
According to Peter Elbow, Chaucer explores dialectics between various points of view. See his Oppositions in Chaucer (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1975). In The Key of Remembrance: A Study of Chaucer's Poetics ( N e w
Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), Robert O. Payne demonstrates that the very structure of the dream visions shows Chaucer's interest in the relationship between the tradition (represented by the books the narrator reads) and the individual mind (dreams and experience). Payne is helpful both in his articulation of the orthodox medieval aesthetic ambition to use poetry to make the wisdom of the past
157
Notes to pp. 3-7
4.
5.
6.
7.
8. 9.
10.
available in the present (this kind of appropriation is analogous to the relationship between past and present as seen in modern hermeneutics, an issue I discuss later in this chapter) and in his readings of individual poems, which show how Chaucer complicated the "orthodox line." Payne demonstrates how Chaucer uses structure and content to make the problematic relationship between tradition and the individual the subject matter of his poems. Payne has deeply influenced my thinking, especially about the dream visions. Aers, Elbow, and Payne help bridge the gap between hermeneutical theory and thematic interpretation of Chaucer. Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual: 1030-1200 (London: SPCK, 1972); Robert W. Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Francis Oakley, The Medieval Experience: Foundations of Western Cultural Singularity (New York: Scribner, 1974); Walter Ullmann, The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966). Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the "General Prologue" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 55-67. "Envisaging the Parson as someone who . . . is aware of the criticism of his class suggests to us his response to the world around him, and thus his actual existence" (p. 66). Evan Carton, "Complicity and Responsibility in Pandarus' Bed and Chaucer's Art," Publications of the Modern Language Association, 94 (!979)> 47-6i. The quotation is from the abstract printed on the page with the Table of Contents. Walter Ullmann, Medieval Political Thought (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1975), pp. 159-60. Also see Michael Wilks, "Chaucer and the Mystical Marriage in Medieval Political Thought," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 44 (1961-2), 489-530; Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); Walter Ullmann, The Individual and Society. Ullmann, Medieval Political Thought, p. 204. Ibid., p. 210. Also see John B. Morrall, Political Thought in Medieval Times (London: Hutchinson, 1958), p. 114; Marjorie Reeves, "Marsiglio of Padua and Dante Alighieri," in Trends in Medieval Political Thought, ed. Beryl Smalley (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1965), pp. 86-104; see p. 98. Compare Wilks, "Chaucer and the Mystical Marriage," pp. 528-9;
158
Notes to pp. j-8
11.
12.
Margaret Schlauch, "Chaucer's Doctrine of Kings and Tyrants," Speculum, 20 (1945), 133-56; David R. Pichaske and Laura Sweetland, "Chaucer on the Medieval Monarchy: Harry Bailly in the Canterbury Tales," Chaucer Review, 11 (1976-7), 179-200. For a modern formulation of this idea, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans, and ed. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 33-4. According to Paul Strohm, Chaucer's literary forms sometimes reflect his critique of hierarchy. See "Form and Social Statement in Confessio Amantis and The Canterbury Tales," Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 1 (1979), 17-40; especially pp. 30-40. Medieval acceptance or rejection of poetry is often derived from estimations of its capacity to help discover and convey Christian truth. In "Poetry and Philosophy in the Twelfth Century: The Renaissance of Rhetoric," Modern Philology, 43 (1945-6), 217-34, Richard McKeon says that in the twelfth century, [pjoetry as a form of opinion and belief is opposed to philosophy and is full of dangers to the truth which those other poets, the lawgiver and the dialectician, attain by means of knowledge; and yet it is possible for poetry to state right opinion and true belief, and, indeed, poetry and the interpretation of poetry may attain to truth by divine inspiration. (p. 221)
13. 14.
15.
If poetry sometimes speaks truth and sometimes does not, the poet may be held responsible for lying and misleading his audience. On poetry as an "epistemological mode" for Chaucer, see Robert B. Burlin, Chaucerian Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), especially the introductory chapter, in which Burlin discusses Chaucer's blurring of the dichotomy between experience and authority, and the concluding chapter, in which he discusses "the uses of fiction" in the Middle Ages. According to Paul Strohm, Chaucer's generic terms designate kinds of literature according to their capacity to reflect truth ("Some Generic Distinctions in the Canterbury Tales," Modern Philology, 68 [1971], 321-8). Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream ofScipio, 1.2.7, trans. William H. Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), p. 84. The "Didascalicon" of Hugh of St. Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 3.4, p. 88; 5.6, p. 127; 5.7, p. 128. Genealogia Deorum, 14.5, in Boccaccio on Poetry: Being the Preface and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boccaccio's "Genealogia Deorum Gentilium," trans. Charles G. Osgood (Indianapolis, Ind.: BobbsMerrill, 1956), pp. 35-6.
159
No to to pp. 8-g 16. Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century: The Literary Influence of the School of Chartres (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 4. For Wetherbee's juxtaposition of Hugh and the Chartrians, see pp. 49-66. 17. Glending Olsen explores this attitude toward fiction in Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982). For another important view of literary play, see Richard A. Lanham's chapter on Troilus and Criseyde ("Games and High Seriousness: Chaucer") in The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 65-81. According to Lanham, Chaucer sees play as the way human beings form selves: "[H]e saw society as a game and us as players" (p. 81). For another, similar view, see Stephen Manning, "Rhetoric, Game, Morality, and Geoffrey Chaucer," Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 1 (1979), 105-18. 18. Peter Haidu argues that there can be no distinction between serious and playful literature in the Middle Ages not only because play is ultimately serious (see Burlin, Lanham, and Manning, all cited earlier), but also because even fiction that intends to be serious can undermine its exemplary function. As my interpretation of the Melibee shows, I agree that an exemplary narrative can sometimes subvert its stated purpose. But Haidu also recognizes the strength of what he calls the "fundamentalist" position in the Middle Agescondemnation of any literature without religious value-and that tradition, against which Boccaccio must argue, is what I am highlighting here. See Haidu, "Repetition: Modern Reflections on Medieval Aesthetics," MLN (formerly Modern Language Notes), 92 (1977), 875-87. 19. Judson Allen, The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages: A Decorum of Convenient Distinction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), pp. 32-3. 20. Saint Augustine, Confessions, 8.12, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1961), p. 177. 21. For an elaboration of misinterpretation in Canto 5, see Susan Noakes, "The Double Misreading of Paolo and Francesca," Philological Quarterly, 62 (1983), 221-39. 22. Janet Coleman discusses authorial roles in Medieval Readers and Writers: 1350-1400 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 203. Also see Alastair J. Minnis's important and detailed book Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: Scolar Press, 1984), especially Chap. 3. Coleman, in Medieval Readers and Writers, examines components of late fourteenth-century English literacy, among them an educated 160
Notes to pp. 10-11
23. 24.
lay reading audience, an interest in learning outside the universities, and an increasing acceptance of private reading of the Bible and its commentaries. Coleman reminds us (p. 275) that in the Book of the Duchess, the Parliament of Fowls, and the House of Fame, Chaucer portrays himself as one of the solitary readers she describes. On the growing reading audience in the late Middle Ages, also see Marcel Thomas, "Manuscripts," in Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800, trans. David Gerard, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wootton (London: NLB, 1976), pp. 15-28; see especially pp. 22-4. For the importance of paper to this growth, see pp. 30-2. Coleman (Medieval Readers and Writers, pp. 241-7) cites Ockham and Holcot. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), pp. 11-12. In The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 65-6, Donald R. Howard describes the effect of relatively cheap paper on readers and reading: A man like Chaucer could possess his own books, pick and choose what to read, stay up late with a candle, skip, select, compare, turn back, and reread. He had more power over the book-could stop his reading to think, could write notes in the margin. But, too, he became a slave to books-even then, there were so many books to read . . . The book is within our reach, in part disposable or dispensable; we are its owners. There is a new kind of reading public and a new reason for the traditional humility of the author.
25. 26.
27.
28.
There is much evidence that Chaucer thought of his works as being read. He addresses both listening and reading audiences in the Retraction of the Canterbury Tales: "Now preye I to hem alle that herkne this litel tretys or rede . . . " (X[I].IO8I). Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea Books, 1982), p. 3. For a discussion of Chaucer's often subversive and parodic use of his own authorities, see Stewart Justman, "Medieval Monism and Abuse of Authority in Chaucer," Chaucer Review, 11 (1976-7), 95-111. Coleman, Medieval Readers and Writers, pp. 199-200. For a discussion of the order of the Canterbury Tales in modern editions, the order in the manuscripts, and Chaucer's developing plans, see Charles A. Owen, Jr., Pilgrimage and Storytelling in the Canterbury Tales: The Dialectic of "Ernest" and "Game" (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977), pp. 10-47. B. A. Windeatt, "The Scribes as Chaucer's Early Critics," Studies in
Notes to p. 12
29.
30. 31. 32.
the Age of Chaucer, i (1979), 119-41. In A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), D. W. Robertson, Jr., comments that "in the appreciation of medieval art the attitude of the observer is of primary importance" (p. 136). He is arguing in this passage that the reader must supply figural significance, but the work of Coleman, Owen, and Windeatt shows that the reader's contribution begins even before the interpretation of meaning, at the stage of deciding what the text says and in what order. Ho well Chickering discussed another aspect of the reader's contribution in "Unpunctuating Chaucer," a paper given at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, The Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University, May 10-13, 1984. He pointed out that the sparseness of punctuation in the early manuscripts forces readers to make decisions even about where sentences begin and end, how clauses are related to each other, where indirect discourse slides into direct discourse, and other matters. At a different session of the same conference ("Critical Perspectives on Medieval Literature: The Politics of Discourse," with papers entitled "'Glose / Bel Chose': The Wife of Bath and the Institution of Glossing" by Carolyn L. Dinshaw, and "Editing and Ideology: The Politics of Text-Production" by Robert S. Sturges), there was general agreement among speakers and audience that as textual scholars "deconstruct" modern editions of medieval texts, textual scholarship and literary theory are meeting on the subject of the role of the reader. Chauncey Wood discusses the reader's role in interpretation in "Affective Stylistics and the Study of Chaucer," Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 6 (1984), 21-40. For an interesting study of the consonance between Chaucer's emphasis on the reader and the ideas of a fourteenth-century biblical scholar, see David Lyle Jeffrey, "Chaucer and Wyclif: Biblical Hermeneutic and Literary Theory in the XlVth Century," in Chaucer and Scriptural Tradition, ed. David Lyle Jeffrey (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1984), pp. 371-402. Jeffrey says that "[o]n the primacy of the reader's will in achieving interpretation of a text there is no writer so forceful as Wyclif in the fourteenth century except Chaucer, whose whole approach to reader-centered hermeneutical difficulties in the Canterbury Tales offers a brilliantly imaginative outworking of Wyclif's synthetic literary theory . . ." (p. 402). Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, p. 95. Ibid., p. xi. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Seabury Press, 1975), P- 348. 162
Notes to p. 13 33. Ibid., p. 261. This issue bears on the subject of power. In the wellknown debate between Gadamer and Habermas, Habermas accuses Gadamer of leaving too little room in his concept of history for the critique of tradition. This is relevant to my study because I am interested in Chaucer's idea of where authority comes from: Is it an unquestionable given, imposed from above by a divine or human source, or is it constituted in the dialectic between subject and object, ruler and ruled? Neither Gadamer nor Ricoeur excludes the possibility of criticizing the tradition. As Suresh Raval notes in Metacriticism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981), p. 176, for Gadamer, tradition is not given but reevaluated and reselected by each new age. As I have said, each act of interpretation includes the choice of a proper context for the text being read. Such choices form and reform "tradition." Furthermore, as Ricoeur says in an essay that aims to show the relationship betwreen the two positions, there is a tradition of critique. See Paul Ricoeur: Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 99. Awareness of one's own activity in ascribing authority to others and texts can be seen as part of the self-awareness promoted by the hermeneutical circle. There is no need to leave philosophical hermeneutics in order to discuss the role of interpretation in power relations or the role of power in interpretation. Also see Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, p. 33. 34. Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), p. 94. The definition of "appropriation" is from p. 43. 35. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 265. There are several helpful accounts of phenomenological hermeneutics. Richard E. Palmer places Gadamer in the context of his predecessors in Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1969). David Couzens Hoy discusses Gadamer in the context of Habermas and literary theorists such as Hirsch, Jauss, and Fish in his lucid book The Critical Circle: Literature, History, and Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). Also see Raval, Metacriticism. It is interesting that Donald R. Howard begins The Idea of the Canterbury Tales by addressing the history of historicism in Chaucer studies, especially the views of D. W. Robertson, Jr. Howard describes his own approach as "humanism" and the "imaginative and responsive appropriation of the past" (p. 16). Although Howard does not name it, he is describing the hermeneutical circle. 36. On this affinity, see Allen, Ethical Poetic, p. 32.
163
Notes to pp. 37. 38. 39.
40. 41. 42. 43. 44.
45.
46.
14-24
Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, p. 98. Russell Peck, "Chaucer and the Nominalist Questions," Speculum, 53 (1978), 745-60; see p. 746, n. 7. I shall discuss will in Chapter 3. For a modern English translation, see Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard Green (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), p. i n . Peck, "Chaucer and the Nominalist Questions," p. 755. Ibid. See Robinson, Works, p. 784, note to lines 966ff. Paul Strohm, "The Allegory of the Tale of Melibee," Chaucer Review, 2 (1967-8), 32-42. In the Merchant's Tale, even Justinus, whose name implies fairness, equity, and exactness (in contrast to Placebo, who gives advice that matches his patron's desires), speaks out of his own experience: "For, God it woot, I have wept many a teere / Ful pryvely, syn I have had a wyf" (IV[E]. 1544-5). Ralph W. V. Elliott, Chaucer's English (London: Andre Deutsch, 1974), PP- 179-80. Also see Dolores Palomo, "What Chaucer Really Did to Le Livre de Mellibee," Philological Quarterly, 53 (1974), 304-20. Morton W. Bloomfield, "The Merchant's Tale: A Tragicomedy of the Neglect of Counsel-The Limits of Art," in Medieval and Renaissance Studies: Proceedings of the Southeastern Institute of Medieval and
Renaissance Studies, ed. Siegfried Wenzel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), pp. 37-50. 47. For another example of the treatment of hermeneutical issues as themes in literature, see Gerald L. Bruns, Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Understanding in Literary History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). For instance, Bruns describes his chapter on Jane Austen (Chapter 5) as an attempt "to read a portion of Pride and Prejudice as a hermeneutical allegory" (p. 112). He is concerned not merely with interpretation of Pride and Prejudice, but with interpretation in Pride and Prejudice. The title of my next chapter ("Interpretation in the Knight's Tale") reveals the similarity of our projects.
2.
INTERPRETATION IN THE KNIGHT S TALE
Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style and Meaning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), pp. !75-9°- The idealism in Peter Elbow's reading of the tale is qualified, but I include his article "How Chaucer Transcends Oppositions in the Knight's Tale," Chaucer Review, 7 (1972-3), 97-112; this article is incorporated into Elbow's book Oppositions in Chaucer (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1975), pp. 73-94.
164
Notes to pp. 24~2g 2. Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition, pp. 181, 190. 3. Elizabeth Salter, Chaucer: The Knight's Tale and The Clerk's Tale (London: Edward Arnold, 1962), pp. 9-36; David Aers, Chaucer, Langland and the Creative Imagination (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 174-95, 228-31; Kathleen Blake, "Order and the Noble Life in Chaucer's Knight's Tale?" Modern Language Quarterly, 34 (!973)> 3-19- I shall refer to Elbow's article and Aers's book by page numbers in the text. Some interpreters criticize the Knight or his characters for violating the rules of chivalry. Aers refers to a number of their articles in his notes. Also see Terry Jones, Chaucer's Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; Baton Rouge: Louisana State University Press, 1980). I believe that Jones jumps too quickly to the assumption that the Knight is the object and not the source of the tale's various ironies, but his analysis of the mistakes about chivalry in the tale is detailed and relevant. 4. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Seabury Press, 1975), p. xvi; emphasis mine. 5. Chaucer's Boccaccio: Sources of "Troilus" and the "Knight's" and "Franklin's Tales," ed. and trans. N. R. Havely (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer; Totowa, N. J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), pp. 108, 115. I shall hereafter cite page numbers in the text. When I quote the Italian, the text is from Teseida delle nozze d'Emilia, ed. Alberto Limentani, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca, I classici Mondadori (Verona: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1964), Vol. 2, pp. 229-664. 6. In Chaucer, Emily's wish to remain a virgin may be seen as another symbol of this isolation. 7. Frederick Turner, "A Structuralist Analysis of the Knight's Tale," Chaucer Review, 8 (1973-4), 279-96; see p. 285. 8. " I N . take thee N. to my wedded husband . . . till death us depart . . . " The Sarum Missal in English, trans. Frederick E. Warren (London: Alexander Moring, 1911), excerpted in Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds, ed. Robert P. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 375. 9. Chaucer's source here is probably the Roman de la Rose (11. 8118-24), which describes Theseus's affection for Perotheus, his grief at his death, and his decision to seek him in the underworld. 10. "In the beginning, understanding is a guess" (Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning [Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976], p. 74). 11. "Pride" could mean "magnificence" (Oxford English Dictionary, hereafter cited as OED, B.6) or "the prime; the flower" (B.9), either
165
Notes to pp. 29-30 of which applies here in Theseus's triumph. It also meant "inordinate self-esteem" (B.i) or "haughtiness" (B.2), which also fits here. 12. "Folk" originally meant just "people" or "nation," but in Middle English it could mean "retainers, followers; servants, workpeople" (OED, 2.b). 13. One of Chaucer's sources for this iconography was Guillaume de Lorris's part of the Roman de la Rose. Envy, as represented on the wall of the garden, never looks anyone in the eye; her glance is always sidelong: Lors vi qu'Envie en sa pointure avoit trop laide esgardeure; ele ne regardast neant fors en travers, em borneant . . . Now in that painting did I Envy note To have an ugly look, a sidewise glance, And never gaze direct . . .
The French text (11. 279-82) is Felix Lecoy's (Paris: Librairie Honore Champion, 1970), Vol. 1, pp. 9-10. The translation (11. 100-2) is from The Romance of the Rose, trans. Harry W. Robbins, ed. Charles W. Dunn (New York: Dutton, 1962), p. 8. 14. Elbow sees this as a pattern in Theseus's speeches that represents "sensitive, thoughtful flexibility" ("How Chaucer Transcends Oppositions," p. 104). I am presenting a different view of the relationship among Theseus's several speeches. I think of him as becoming more self-enclosed. 15. Chaucer does not show us any of their pre-Emily camaraderie and, as I have noted, eliminates all of the post-Emily camaraderie that Boccaccio includes. 16. "Imagination" can refer to the mental image or concept of something absent, an important part of memory and intellect. Trevisa uses it in this way (see OED, 3) and so does Chaucer, in the House of Fame, Book II, 1. 728, and in his translation of the Consolation of Philosophy, especially Book V, prose 4, 160. But the imagination can also mislead. Sometimes it refers to the illusions produced by cataracts, and "[m]en may dyen of ymaginacioun" (Miller's Tale, I[A].36i2). See the Middle English Dictionary, hereafter referred to as MED, 2.(b); see also the entries for "imaginacioun," "imaginatyf," and "imagine" in Norman Davis, Douglas Gray, Patricia Ingham, and Anne Wallace-Hadrill, A Chaucer Glossary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), hereafter referred to as Davis, Glossary. For a detailed study, see Murray Wright Bundy, The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Mediaeval Thought, University of Illinois Studies in Lan-
166
Notes to pp. 30-34 guage and Literature, Vol. 12, Nos. 2-3 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1927; reprint, Folcroft, Penn.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1970). 17. Christel van Boheemen, "Chaucer's Knight's Tale and the Structure of Myth," Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Letters, 9 (!979)> 176-90. The idea of the knights as two parts of a single person is quite controversial, and I do not mean to adopt it or Boheemen's allegorical use of it (pp. 188-90). For a related view of the knights, see Judith C. Perryman, "The 'False Arcite' of Chaucer's Knight's Tale," Neophilologus, 68 (1984), 121-33. 18. It is interesting that Theseus is acting on his relationship with the women, not with the knights. He does, after all, know Arciteas-Philostrate fairly well (11. 1426-32) and might be moved to mercy through his knowledge of his squire's character. In describing Theseus's pity for the women, the Knight uses a sentence repeated later by other pilgrims (e.g., IV[E].i986). The Knight, too, allows some irony to creep in: Til at the laste aslaked was his mood, For pitee renneth soone in gentil herte. (11. 1760-1)
"[A]t the laste" contradicts "soone" and undermines the piety of this proverblike sentiment. 19. I have already mentioned Arcite's stoic speech in lines 1081-91. He is passive when he is free (11. 1234-73) and when he is unable to do anything about his plight until he is instructed by a dream to return to Athens (11. 1384-92). It is interesting that in a tale that sometimes allows us to hear the gods speak, we are never told whether Arcite's dream is a true dream sent by the gods or a false one deriving from his own preoccupations. On dream analysis, see Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, 1.3, trans. William H. Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), pp. 87-92. The important point, no matter which kind of dream it is, is that Arcite does not act until he thinks that he has been instructed by a force outside himself. 20. Erving Goffman analyzes this kind of response to total institutions (including prisons) in Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York: Anchor Books, 1961); see pp. 63-4. This part of the scene is a psychological analogue of the hermeneutical circle: Palamon is interpreting Theseus by imposing his own biases on him, but at the same time he has been partly shaped by Theseus. 21. The hierarchical relationship among the gods is controversial among
167
Notes to pp. 34—41
22.
23.
24.
25.
critics. V. A. Kolve gives a helpful summary of the reasons why it is difficult to decide whether Jupiter or Saturn is in charge (Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales [Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1984], pp. 125-6). See also Alastair J. Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer; Totowa, N. J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982), pp. 135-43; his note 90, p. 182, gives a bibliography on the subject. Also see Blake, "Order and the Noble Life," cited in note 3, and Alan T. Gaylord, "The Role of Saturn in the Knight's Tale," Chaucer Review, 8 (1973-4), 171-90. See Aers, Creative Imagination, p. 193. Line 3082 is perhaps a sly dig at Harry Bailly, for it reproduces the preemptory rhetoric with which he addressed the Knight (citing "myn accord") in line 838 of the General Prologue. An accord usually takes at least two parties. The Knight pointedly puts Harry's words into the mouth of a tyrant who is being very obviously coercive. David Aers says that this "selfless generosity transcends the values we have seen him and others pursuing" (Creative Imagination, p. 185). Emily and Palamon are sometimes seen as comic in line 2817, but well they may shriek and howl for their loss. The next time the narrator refers to Arcite, he calls him a "corps" (1. 2819). Arcite is no longer a person. Emily faints, as if in imitation of his death, and Theseus takes her away from the unseeing corpse she cannot bear to see. Her feeling for him comes only after Arcite has lost his life. However we interpret Arcite's "mercy," it does not intrude on her self-interest; she can mourn for him because death makes him unable to demand anything from her. She can be his shrieking widow without ever having lost her virginity. The mediation occurs when Theseus converts the ladies' cause into his own. His sympathy for them leads to a war that will increase his fame. He . . . swoor his ooth, as he was trewe knyght, He wolde doon so ferforthly his myght Upon the tiraunt Creon hem to wreke, That al the peple ofGrece sholde speke
How Creon was of Theseus yserved As he that hadde his deeth ful wel deserved. (11. 959-64; emphasis mine) Despite making the women's cause his own, he neatly avoids responsibility by blaming Creon's death on Creon himself. This thought very cleverly and precisely reflects Theseus's self-interest. 26. Terry Jones discusses the unfairness of Palamon's defeat in Chaucer's 168
Notes to pp. 41-53 Knight, pp. 180-3. See also Perryman, "The 'False Arcite'," cited in note 17. 27. See Edward C. Schweitzer, "Fate and Freedom in The Knight's Tale," Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 3 (1981), 13-45; see p. 37. 28. Stewart Justman says that the speech, only one of the places in which Theseus contradicts himself, is part of the tale's undermining of authority ("'Auctoritee' and the Knight's Tale," Modem Language Quarterly, 39 [1978], 3-14; see pp. 8-11).
3.
READING NATURE IN THE PARLIAMENT OF FOWLS
1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 401. 2. Georges Poulet, "Phenomenology of Reading," New Literary History, 1 (1969), 53-68; see p. 54. Also see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans, and ed. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 64-5. 3. Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), pp. 142-8. 4. See, for example, Charles O. McDonald, "An Interpretation of Chaucer's Parlement of Foules," Speculum, 30 (1955), 444-57; D. W. Robertson, Jr., and Bernard F. Huppe, Fruyt and Chaf (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), Chap. 3. 5. As Kemp Malone notes, the figure in Wille's place in the Teseida (7.54) is Voluttade, sensual pleasure, of which "will" is "an excellent translation." He cites the OED (sb.1, 2), which shows that "will" as "carnal desire or appetite" was current from the tenth until the seventeenth centuries ("Chaucer's Daughter of Cupid," Modern Language Review, 45 [1950], 63). 6. Gordon Leff discusses the unity of will and intellect in William of Ockham: The Metamorphosis of Scholastic Discourse (Manchester: Manchester University Press; Totowa, N. J.: Rowman and Littlefield, !975)> P- 532. For a modern statement on knowing and will, see Remy C. Kwant, Phenomenology of Language (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1965), p. 62: "Man . . . is a meaning-giving existence. He makes meaning be. Meaning is conceivable only as meaning-for-us. All meaning exists therefore in an intentional field . . . " 7. See Davis, Glossary, 1. 8. On the dendrographia's "peculiar structure of irrelevance," see Loy D. Martin, "History and Form in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales," ELH, 45 (1978), 1-17, especially p. 3. J. A. W. Bennett notes that the trees are "identified by their uses" (The Humane Medievalist and Other Essays in English Literature and Learning, from 169
Notes to pp. 53-58
9.
10.
11. 12.
13.
Chaucer to Eliot, ed. Piero Boitani [Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1982], p. 39). See note 6. Fourteenth-century nominalism was quite interested in the ubiquity of will. The nominalist emphasis on God's free will led to a parallel emphasis on human free will: If God is theoretically free to do whatever He likes, then human beings also have independence and responsibility for themselves. Furthermore, Ockham held that the three parts that make the soul an image of the Trinity-memory, understanding, and will-are indistinguishable from each other. The soul's indivisibility means that "[w]hat are called intellect and will, in both God and man, are merely words or concepts for the same being . . . " (Gordon Leff, William of Ockham, p. 532). Thus, acts of cognition always involve will. Belief also involves will, and Ockham's emphasis on the primacy of faith is consistent not only with Augustine's "credo ut intelligam" (and Anselm's similar statement) but also with the hermeneutical idea of prejudgment (Russell Peck, "Chaucer and the Nominalist Questions," Speculum, 53 [1978], 745-60; see p. 747). One comes to doctrine with the prejudgment that it is correct and credible, which shapes one's understanding. Chaucer may not have known Ockham's work directly (although he knew, or knew of, some of those who were influenced by Ockham, such as Bradwardine and Strode), but his interest in translating Boethius and in using his work as a source indicates his participation in the intellectual trends of his own day. David Chamberlain discusses Chaucer's references to music as a possible solution to the puzzle ("The Music of the Spheres and The Parlement of Foules," Chaucer Review, 5 [1970-1], 32-56; see pp. 44-51). H. M. Leicester, Jr., "The Harmony of Chaucer's Parlement: A Dissonant Voice," Chaucer Review, 9 (1974-5), 15-34. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953), pp. J 93> X95> states that the topos of the mixed forest is separate from that of the locus amoenus. Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style and Meaning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), pp. 118-19.
14. Nicolai von Kreisler, "Bird Lore and the Valentine's Day Tradition in Chaucer's Parlement of Foules," Chaucer Review, 3 (1968-9), 60-4. 15. J. A. W. Bennett, The Parlement of Foules: An Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 152; Beryl Rowland, Blind Beasts: Chaucer's Animal World (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1971), PP. 57-9170
Notes to pp. 58-61 16. Bennett, Parlement ofFoules, p. 152. 17. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 19. 18. For "Scipio's Dream," see Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. William H. Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), pp. 69-77. 19. On the pleasure of working to interpret a difficult text, see Saint Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 2.6.8, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), p. 38. For an interpretation of writing as work in Piers Plowman, see Elizabeth D. Kirk, The Dream Thought of Piers Plowman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 141-5. 20. Macrobius, Commentary, 1.3.8, trans. Stahl, p. 90; "Scipio's Dream," 8.2-3, P- 76. 21. See "Scipio's Dream," 3.1, trans. Stahl, p. 71. Aers discusses the ways in which Chaucer highlights the fragmentation of common profit into different versions, all of which are marked by self-interest: "Delicately but consistently he unveils the very partial interests and perspectives informing talk about common welfare in a divided society" (p. 12) ("The Parliament of Fowls: Authority, the Knower and the Known," Chaucer Review, 16 [1981-2], 1-17). For a view of the connection between literary forms that emphasize faction and late fourteenth-century social reality, see Paul Strohm, "Form and Social Statement in Confessio Amantis and The Canterbury Tales," Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 1 (1979), 17-40. 22. Alain de Lille, De Planctu Naturae, ed. Nikolaus M. Haring, Studi Medievali, 3rd ser., 19, Fasc. 2 (1978), 787-879; Alan of Lille: The Plaint of Nature, trans. James J. Sheridan (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980). 23. Jane Chance Nitzsche, The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), p. 91. On the relationship between Alain's and Chaucer's Natures, also see George D. Economou, The Goddess Natura in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), Chap. 5. 24. For instance, in "The Parlement of Foules and the Body Politic," Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 74 (1975), 315-35, Bruce Kent Cowgill argues that the message of Nature's inadequacy is that temporal leaders ought not to be weak and that the message is aimed at Richard in the context of the Peasants' Revolt. However, Richard successfully dismantled the revolt, and the rebels in the Parliament are the aristocrats, not the peasants. 171
Notes to pp. 61-66 25.
26.
27.
28.
29. 30.
For Scipio's comment, see "Scipio's Dream," 1.4, trans. Stahl, p. 70. For JVlacrobius's interpretation, see Commentary, 1.3.12-13, trans. Stahl, pp. 90-1. Also see Aers's discussion of Chaucer's implicit criticism of the limitations of Africanus's ideas about the universe and human values ("The Parliament of Fowls," pp. 6-12). Erving Goffman describes this battle in detail in terms of dramatic performance in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1959). Critics differ greatly on the meaning of the end of the poem and the poem as a whole. For instance, McDonald (see note 4) and Muscatine (see note 13) consider the poem generally comic. In "Chaucer's Parlement of Foules: Aesthetic Order and Individual Experience," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 10 (1968-9), 349-58, Robert W. Uphaus argues that the affirmation of order in the roundel is convincing. Robert O. Payne, The Key of Remembrance: A Study of Chaucer's Poetics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 143, argues that the ordered form of the roundel cannot satisfactorily make order out of the conflicting points of view in the poem. This view of the roundel is similar to Leicester's (see note 11). Dante discusses the relationship between knowing and loving in Purgatorio, 18: L'animo, ch'e creato ad amar presto, ad ogni cosa e mobile che piace, tosto che dal piacere in atto e desto. Vostra apprensiva da esser verace tragge intenzione, e dentro a voi la spiega, si che l'animo ad essa volger face; e se, rivolto, inver di lei si piega, quel piegare e amor, quell'e natura che per piacer de novo in voi si lega. (11. 19-27) The mind, created quick to love, is readily moved towards everything that pleases, as soon as by the pleasure it is roused to action. Your perception takes from outward reality an impression and unfolds it within you, so that it makes the mind turn to it; and if the mind, so turned, inclines to it, that inclination is love, that is nature, which by pleasure is bound on you afresh. (P- 233)
The mind's inclination toward that which gives it pleasure is love, which in turn is pleasing. It is significant that this process is circular and that Virgil names pleasure (piacere) as the pilgrim's guide in 27.131 as he is about to leave him in Eden (The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, ed. and trans. John D. Sinclair, Vol. 2: Purgatorio 172
Notes to pp. 66-70 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1939]). The dialectical relationship between knowing and loving and the importance of pleasure are both important in the Parliament. For a similar view of love and knowledge in Dante, see Robert L. Montgomery, The Reader's Eye: Studies in Didactic Literary Theory from Dante to Tasso (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 61-2. 31. F. N. Robinson, ed., The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 796, notes to lines 675 and 677. 32. Some literary critics have argued that literary discourse is different from normal discourse in that there is no immediate shared context, so that fiction suspends the rules of normal discourse. For instance, see Richard Ohmann, "Speech Acts and the Definition of Literature," Philosophy and Rhetoric, 4(1971), 1-19; Barbara Herrnstein Smith, "Poetry as Fiction," New Literary History, 2 (1970-1), 259-81; "On the Margins of Discourse," Critical Inquiry, 1 (1974-5), 769-98. Stanley Fish argues against this separation of literary and ordinary discourse in "How Ordinary Is Ordinary Language?" New; Literary History, 5 (1973), 41-54, and "What Is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things about It?" in Approaches to Poetics: Selected Papersfrom the English Institute, ed. Seymour Chatman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), pp. 109-52. Fish's two essays are reprinted in Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 97-1 n and 68-96. 33. Goffman, Presentation, p. 254.
4.
THE LADY WHITE AND THE WHITE TABLET: THE BOOK OF THE DUCHESS
1. The comparison between conversation and interpretation is crucial to Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method (London: Seabury Press, 1975), especially pp. 325-41. Dialectic as the art of conducting a conversation is also the art of seeing things in the unity of an aspect (sunoran eis hen eidos) ie it is the art of the formation of concepts as the working out of the common meaning. Precisely this is what characterises a dialogue, in contrast with the rigid form of the statement that demands to be set down in writing: that here language, in the process of question and answer, giving and taking, talking at cross purposes and seeing each other's point, performs that communication of meaning which, with respect to the written tradition, is the task of hermeneutics. (P- 33i) The rest of this chapter is a commentary on the analogy. 2. Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, 1.3.4, trans. William H. Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), p. 88. 173
Notes to pp. 71-74 3. See MED, 1, 2.(a), 3.(a). 4. As J. Hillis Miller argues in "Ariadne's Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line," it is the supposed "copy" that is the source of the originality of the "original" (Critical Inquiry, 3 [1976], 55-77; see pp. 66-7). This is particularly true in the case of dreams, in which a later recounting provides the only access to the original. The distance between original and copy is also interesting to hermeneutics. Gadamer comments that translations are always somehow "more" than the original texts. Reproduction is never "mere" reproduction (see Truth and Method, pp. 346-51), and the narrator's poem includes more than just the dream. The separation of the individual from himself has received attention from both medieval and modern writers, for example, St. Augustine, Confessions, 10.32, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1961), pp. 237-8; Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 385. In "Limited Inc abc . . .," Glyph, 2 (1977), 162-254, Jacques Derrida explores the way in which one is alienated from the self by language (see pp. 185, 193, etc.). 5. I have used the Frank Justus Miller translation of Ovid: Metamorphoses (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1916), as it is excerpted in Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds, ed. Robert P. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 108-11. 6. D. W. Robertson, Jr. argues that the Black Knight is not to be identified with John of Gaunt ("The Historical Setting of Chaucer's Book of the Duchess," in his Essays in Medieval Culture [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980], pp. 235-56). Robertson cites other studies on p. 235. 7. This view is supported by Gadamer's comment (Truth and Method, p. 382) on understanding as dialogue: Because our understanding does not embrace what it knows in one single comprehensive glance, it must always produce out of itself what it thinks, and present it to itself as if in an inner dialogue with itself Among the critics for whom the Black Knight is a version of the narrator is Robert W. Hanning, who calls the narrator's meeting with the knight "a confrontation with his own sorrow . . . in the externalized and idealized form of a black knight." See "The Theme of Art and Life in Chaucer's Poetry," in Geoffrey Chaucer: A Collection of Original Articles, ed. George D. Economou (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975), pp. 15-36, especially p. 16. 8. For a summary of this passage of the poem, see B. A. Windeatt, Chaucer's Dream Poetry: Sources and Analogues (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer; Totowa, N. J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982), p. 40. 174
Notes to pp. 77-90 9. In line 512 Pan is referred to as "god of kynde." If there is a pun on "kynde" ("nature," "kindness"), then his anger may indicate the unnaturalness of the isolating subjectivity in which the knight is trapped. 10. The debate about the narrator's motives has not been resolved. Either the narrator, having heard the knight's lament earlier, knows the reason for his sorrow and presses him to talk in order to lessen his sorrow, or the narrator has not understood the lament's relevance to the knight and presses him to talk in order to understand his sorrow. There is good evidence on both sides. I assume in this chapter that the narrator knows the answer but asks the questions for the knight's sake. For a bibliography on the subject, see D. W. Robertson, Jr., "The Book of the Duchess," in Companion to Chaucer Studies, revised edition, ed. Beryl Rowland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 403-13. 11. According to R. A. Shoaf, the "new" knight emerges from the conversation because "the Knight's narrative is like the form of a sacramental confession" ("'Mutatio Amoris': 'Penitentia' and the Form of The Book of the Duchess," Genre, 14 [1981], 163-89; p. 175. Also see his "Stalking the Sorrowful H[e]art: Penitential Lore and the Hunt Scene in Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess," Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 78 [1979], 313-24). According to Hanning ("Art and Life," p. 17), the curative power is art: The narrator prods the knight to speak poems in several genresa lyric lament (475-86), the extended metaphor of a lost chess game with Fortune (617-86), and an account of meeting and wooing the ideal courtly lady (759f.)-to which he can respond as a sympathetic but detached, and even critical, audience, while the knight, as 'poet,' must in turn concentrate on problems of clear and accurate presentation. Acting out the roles prescribed by literary art provides the cure for both. 12. See Colin Morris on friendship in The Discovery of the Individual: 1030-1200 (London: SPCK, 1972), pp. 97-107. 13. Following this line Thynne inserts a line (usually considered spurious) that exaggerates this self-absorption: "And thus in sorowe lefte me alone." See F. N. Robinson, ed., The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 898. 14. Another way in which the reader's experience is taken into account is the introduction to the dream, in which the narrator speaks of the difficulty of interpreting the dream (11. 275-90). Shoaf comments that this passage-an example of what he calls the "uninterpretability topos" - serves, in effect, to democratize the interpretive process. 175
Notes to pp. 90-gg Everyone is equally qualified to divine the meaning of the dream (Shoaf, "'Mutatio Amoris'," p. 184). 15. He has already made the dream refer to itself in line 276, when he describes it as "y n lv swete," which can mean "wholly sweet" or "inwardly sweet," a description that is strikingly different from Macrobius's external criteria for judging dreams as predictions of the future. See also "queynt" (1. 1330). 16. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 340-1.
5.
READING GRISELDAI THE CLERK's TALE
1. Kristine Gilmartin Wallace, "Array as Motif in the Clerk's Tale," Rice University Studies, 62 (1976), 99-110; see p. 102. 2. There are spatial implications in the definition of "outreye": "To go beyond or exceed bounds; to stray; to break away from a certain place or order; to be or get out of array" (OED, 1). 3. For instance, see lines 89, 127, 173, 176, 186, 219-20, 239, and 305. Most of these passages are different from Petrarch (see note 4). In some, Chaucer has varied his source; in others, he has added to it. 4. Giovanni Petrarch, De Insigni Obedientia et Fide Uxoris (from Epistolae Seniles, 17.3), 4.48-9; i n j . Burke Severs, The Literary Relationships of Chaucer's "Clerkes Tale," Yale Studies in English, Vol. 96 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942; reprint, Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1972), p. 276. Severs gives the Latin and the anonymous French translation on facing pages (pp. 254-89). The English translation that I am using is from Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds, ed. Robert P. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 147. Miller's translation is on pp. 136-52. 5. "Corage" probably means here "heart as seat of emotions, affection, attitudes, and volition; heart, spirit" (MED, i.[a]). It can also mean "libido" (2.[b]). In either case, Walter is studying external behavior for signs of an internal change. 6. In denying it to the people, the Clerk calls this ability to see beyond externals "insight" (1. 242). This is Petrarch's intuitu (De Insigni Obedientia, 2.18, p. 260). For an interpretation of this ability, see David C. Steinmetz, "Late Medieval Nominalism and the Clerk's Tale," Chaucer Review, 12 (1977-8), 38-54; see p. 44. 7. These uses of "semed" could express uncertainty in characters in the tale but could as easily express the Clerk's uncertainty. Fourteenthcentury meanings of "seem" included "to be manifested, come to view" (OED, v.2, 6), which suggests less doubt than the modern sense that I think applies here. Davis, Glossary, which excludes words whose meaning is familiar to modern readers (see p. vii),
176
Notes to pp. gg-112 omits "seem." The OED lists as an example of the modern sense a passage from Chaucer's translation of Boethius. 8. From the MED ("demen"): "io.(a) To form a judgment or opinion . . . (b) . . . estimate, infer; 11. (a) To hold an opinion, assume, think; (b) think, believe . . . 14.(0) to interpret . . . determine (meaning); conclude . . .; (d) . . . imagine." 9. Robert Longsworth, "Chaucer's Clerk as Teacher," in The Learned and the hewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature, ed. Larry D. Benson, Harvard English Studies, Vol. 5 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 61-6. He uses the phrase on p. 63. 10. It is interesting that when she reaffirms her commitment to him on the verge of their separation, she varies the list: . . . it shal nat bee That evere in word or werk I shal repente That I yow yaf myn herte in hool entente. (11. 859-61)
11.
12.
13.
14.
She reserves her thoughts to herself this time, and in fact her thoughts have changed: She has just implied in lines 852-4 that Walter has not been as noble as he seemed at first, and she has said that love is unstable (1. 857). I would not argue that she is now going to become deceptive in a way she has not been before, but along with the possibilities of deception and the fragility of love, she has learned not to promise her thoughts. There might be a hint of hostility in "widow," but interpretation of tone depends on the meaning of the word. The earliest meaning is, of course, "[a] woman whose husband is dead . . . " (OED, 1), but the extended meaning, "[a] wife separated from or deserted by her husband . . . " (i.d), may have been in use in Chaucer's time, although the first instance cited by the OED is from 1461 in the Paston letters. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972). An article reprinted in this volume (pp. 201-27) describes a family in which a mother who cannot admit or express her ambivalent feelings about her child disguises her wish to be temporarily free of the child by expressions of concern: "You're tired, go to bed." The child, to support the fiction that his mother loves him, agrees to being tired whether he is or not. He substitutes the mother's wishes for his own in order to keep her love. For late medieval formulations of this idea, see Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 230-1. Also see my Chapter 1, notes 7-9. This request is based on a high regard for the particularity of indi177
Notes to pp. 113-120
15.
16.
17.
18.
19. 20. 21. 22.
23.
vidual identity. For further discussion of this idea see references in Chapter 1, note 4. For a use of this passage in an interpretation of the tale as a defense of "the hierarchic structure of society" (pp. 122-3), s e e Elliot Krieger, "Re-reading Allegory: The Clerk's Tale," Paunch, 40-1 (1974), 116-35. The Goodman of Paris addresses it more directly in the book he writes to instruct his young wife on righteousness. He draws the analogy between wives' obedience to husbands and subjects' obedience to the emperor (The Goodman of Paris [he Menagier de Paris]: A Treatise on Moral and Domestic Economy by a Citizen of Paris [c. 1393], trans. Eileen Power [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928], p. 112). Cf. "sturdy," which means both "firm" and "cruel." It is used in lines 698 and 700. Although "sad" is ambiguous, "sadness" does not seem to be. "Sadness" did not mean sorrowfulness until 1500 (OED, 5, and Davis, Glossary). I take the term from John Hollander, "'Sense Variously Drawn Out': Some Observations on English Enjambment," in Literary Theory and Structure: Essays in Honor of William K. Wimsatt, ed. Frank Brady, John Palmer, and Martin Price (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 201-25. Hollander is particularly interested in cases in which the contre-rejet ("the continuation of the enjambed unit," p. 204) forces the reader to return to the first line to reassess or annotate its meaning, or in which the second line is a surprise. Lines 920-4, which I have already discussed, are another example of this technique. Wallace, "Array as Motif in the Clerk's Tale," especially p. 101. Le Livre Griseldis, in Severs, Literary Relationships, p. 255. For an elaboration of the theme of the Golden Age see James Dean, "Time Past and Time Present in Chaucer's Clerk's Tale and Gower's Confessio Amantis," ELH, 44 (1977), 401-18. The passages with allegorical overtones include lines 206-7, 871-2, 901-2, and 932-8. For a judicious discussion of this topic, see Francis Lee Utley, "Five Genres in the Clerk's Tale," Chaucer Review, 6 (1971-2), 198-228.
24. Severs, Literary Relationships, pp. 229-48. 25. H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., "The Art of Impersonation: A General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales," PMLA, 95 (1980), 213-24; see p. 220.
26. For a discussion of the ways in which Boccaccio also brings into the foreground the role of readers in his version of the story of Griselda, see the last chapter of Millicent Joy Marcus, An Allegory of Form:
178
Notes to pp. 120-123 Literary Self-Consciousness in the "Decameron," Stanford French and Italian Studies, Vol. 18 (Saratoga, Calif.: Anma Libri, 1979). 6.
READING THE SELF: THE WIFE OF BATH
1. D. W. Robertson, Jr. A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspec-
tives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), p. 321. 2. St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 3.21.31, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), p. 98. It is also interesting, however, that the passage in 3 Kings 11.1-9 (Douay Version) actually blames Solomon not as a lover of women but as a lover of gentile women. His wives are not Jews, and God has warned him against marrying those who believe in other gods. When Augustine blames Solomon as "a lover of women," he treats all women as gentiles. This is just the sort of characterization of women that the Wife deplores, although whether one attributes this carefully literal interpretation of the Bible to her depends upon one's opinion of the state of literal interpretation of Scripture in the fourteenth century. According to Beryl Smalley, there was increasing interest in the literal level of Scripture in the Middle Ages {The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages [Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964], p. 371). Chaucer seems to have shown some care for the literal level, since the joke of Nicholas's scaring John the carpenter with warnings of a world-destroying flood in the Miller's Tale (I[A].3513-21) is that John is ignorant of the literal level. Anyone who knows Scripture knows that God promised not to send a second flood. There is another example in the Wife of Bath's Prologue itself. The Wife seems to be worried that it is not possible to marry five times because Christ attended only one wedding and cites Christ's statement to the Samaritan woman that "that ilke man that now hath thee / Is noght thyn housbonde" (11. 18-19). The encounter with the Samaritan woman in John 4.7-26, however, seems designed to show not the illegality of serial marriages, but Christ's power to see the truth. The statement that the man who is with the Samaritan now is not married to her (John 4.18) is not so much a rejection of the sanctity of what appears to be a legal marriage as a statement of fact: The Samaritan woman never married the man she is "with" now. The striking fact of the episode is that Christ can tell the woman about her situation without knowing her, thus demonstrating his power and winning her allegiance. The literal level of the text, to which the Wife does not refer, could come to her defense. Nevertheless, when mentioning Solomon, the Wife
179
Notes to pp. 123-127
3. 4.
5.
6. 7.
does not seem to be defending him against Augustine with analysis of the letter of the text. Her reference to him is something of a red flag. For a possible reason for her use of Solomon in this provocative way, see Hope Phyllis Weissman, "Antifeminism and Chaucer's Characterization of Women," in Geoffrey Chaucer: A Collection of Original Articles, ed. George D. Economou (New York: McGrawHill, 1975), pp. 93-no. Robertson, Preface, pp. 322-3. Translated by Marcus Dods, Vol. 2, pp. 38-9. Excerpted in Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds, ed. Robert P. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 371. St. Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum libri duo, 1.12-13, in Patrologiae Cursus Completus, ed. J.-P. Migne, Series Latina, Vol. 23 (Paris, 1865); The Epistle against Jovinian, trans. W. H. Fremantle, in The Principal Works of St. Jerome, Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 2nd ser. (New York: Christian Literature Co., 1893), pp. 355-8. St. Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum, 1.36; Fremantle, Epistle, p. 373. In "From Eva and Ave to Eglentyne and Alison: Chaucer's Insight into the Roles Women Play," Robert W. Hanning says (p. 599), Instead of attacking female behavior, Chaucer perceived it as a conscious and unconscious response to the situation in which women were placed by their world. Rather than praising or condemning them, Chaucer's art shapes our understanding of the interplay of character and social environment . . .
8.
9. 10.
11. 12.
This conclusion follows his analysis of the Prioress and the Wife of Bath (Signs, 2 [1977], 580-99)Margaret Schlauch discusses this puzzle and the Wife of Bath's situation in her tale ("The Marital Dilemma in the Wife of Bath's Tale," PMLA, 61 [1946], 416-30). St. Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum, 1.28; Fremantle, Epistle, pp. 367-8. St. Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum, 1.47; Fremantle, Epistle, pp. 383-4. For another view of the Wife's relationship to the mulier fords of Proverbs, see Weissman, "Antifeminism and Chaucer's Characterization of Women"; she calls the Wife "a parody of the Virtuous Woman" (p. 105). Also see James L. Boren, "Alysoun of Bath and the Vulgate 'Perfect Wife'," Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 76 (1975), 247-56; Theresa Coletti, "The Mulier Fortis and Chaucer's Shipman's Tale,1' Chaucer Review, 15 (1980-1), 236-49. See Boethius, The Consolation ofPhilosophy, Book V, prose 4, 212-19, trans. Richard Green (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), p. i n . St. Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum, 1.47; Fremantle, Epistle, p. 383: "Then come curtain-lectures the live-long night . . . " 180
Notes to pp. 13. 14.
15.
16. 17.
18.
19. 20.
i2j-i^g
1 Cor. 7.3-5. St. Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum, 1.7; Fremantle, Epistle, p. 350. See Mary Carruthers, "The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions," PMLA, 94 (1979), 209-22. Carruthers notes that the book's fate is appropriate, since Jerome's Adversus Jovinianum, one of its principal sources, was controversial in its own time; one friend of Jerome's destroyed all the copies he could find to protect the author, who approved of this tactic. "In taking on Jerome as she does, Alisoun is not engaging in new sport but is making a rich joke at the expense of a notoriously ill-tempered saint's most notoriously illtempered work" (p. 211). "Kind" as "generous" (OED, 1.5); as "natural" (OED, I.i; Davis, Glossary, 2). "Trewe" as "faithful" (OED, 1); as "real," "[o]f the right kind" (Davis, Glossary, 3; OED, 4-b). Britton J. Harwood, "The Wife of Bath and the Dream of Innocence," Modern Language Quarterly, 33 (1972), 257-73. Chauncey Wood, Chaucer and the Country of the Stars: Poetic Uses of Astrological Imagery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 172-80. Graham Caie points out that in one of the early fifteenth-century manuscripts the passage on the Wife's horoscope is glossed by a quotation from an astrological treatise pointing out the fallaciousness of her connection between horoscope and behavior ("The Significance of the Glosses in the Earliest Manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales," in Papers from the First Nordic Conference for English Studies, ed. Stig Johansson and Bjorn Tysdahl [Oslo: Institute of English Studies, University of Oslo, 1981], pp. 25-34; s e e P- 34)James W. Cook, "'That She Was Out of Alle Charitee': PointCounterpoint in the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale," Chaucer Review, 13 (1978-9), 51-65; see pp. 53, 60. She does say that she gads about to hear tales, as well as tell them (1. 547). For a different and provocative view of feminine speaking and the Wife as an embodiment of the complexities of Chaucer's role as author, see Lee Patterson, "'For the Wyves love of Bathe': Feminine Rhetoric and Poetic Resolution in the Roman de la Rose and the Canterbury Tales," Speculum, 58 (1983), 656-95. 7
THE POLITICS OF NARRATION IN THE FRAME OF THE TALES
CANTERBURY
Alan T. Gaylord, "Sentence and Solaas in Fragment VII of the Canterbury Tales: Harry Bailly as Horseback Editor," PMLA, 82 (1967), 226-35.
Notes to pp. 140-151 2. David R. Pichaske and Laura Sweetland, "Chaucer on the Medieval Monarchy: Harry Bailly in the Canterbury Tales," Chaucer Review, n (1976-7), 179-200. 3. Robert M. Lumiansky notes that "the Pilgrims voluntarily increase the Host's authority over them" (OfSondry Folk: The Dramatic Principle in the Canterbury Tales [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1955], p- 26). 4. It is well to remember how much the form of the Canterbury Tales as we read it today is a creation of fifteenth-century editors. I believe it is possible to argue that Harry Bailly's power erodes after the General Prologue even despite the difficulty of determining the exact order of the tales. For an account of the different views of the order, see Charles A. Owen, Jr., Pilgrimage and Storytelling in the Canterbury Tales: The Dialectic of "Ernest" and "Game" (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977), Chap. 2. 5. Pichaske and Sweetland, "Medieval Monarchy," pp. 179-200. 6. Lumiansky comments on the tedium of the Monk's stories as his revenge on the overfamiliar Host (OfSondry Folk, pp. 101-4). 7. In Lumiansky's view (OfSondry Folk, p. 112), Harry Bailly is mocking the Nun's Priest and thus missing the fact that, in his tale, the priest is defending husbands against the advice of wives and in so doing is defending Bailly. For Lumiansky, the exchange is one more example of Bailly's inadequacy as a literary interpreter. 8. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, ed. and trans. John D. Sinclair, Vol. 1: Inferno (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), Canto 5. We saw another example of Harry's self-absorbed reading in Chapter 2. 9. The idea of the threat posed by the audience also hovers over the Manciple's Tale. Apollo as audience takes revenge on the crow for his tale. Also see IX[H].352-62. 10. E. Talbot Donaldson, "Chaucer the Pilgrim," PMLA, 69 (1954), 928-36; reprinted in his Speaking of Chaucer (New York: Norton, 1970), pp. 1-12. 11. H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., "The Art of Impersonation: A General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales," PMLA, 95 (1980), 213-24. 12. Donald R. Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 230-1. 13. In papers given at 1976 meetings of the Philological Society of the University of Chicago and the Medieval Institute of Western Michigan University. For his general remarks on contextualism, see his "Convention and the Context of Reading," Critical Inquiry, 6 (1980), 669-80. 14. For Leicester's article, see note 11. Donald R. Howard, "Chaucer 182
Notes to pp. 131-155 the Man," PMLA, 80 (1965), 337-43. In his "Literary Theory at the Close of the Middle Ages: William Caxton and William Thynne," R. F. Yeager gives a practical case study of the hermeneutical point that I am making; he studies the way two early editors selected and shaped the corpus of Chaucer's work according to their ideas of the kind of man Chaucer was (Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 6 [1984], I35-64)15. See F. N. Robinson, ed., The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), glossary and p. 651, note to line 3716. In "Some Generic Distinctions in the Canterbury Tales," Modern Philology, 68 (1971), 321-8, Paul Strohm interprets this word as referring to the Canterbury Tales as a whole. 17. For the view that Chaucer did not intend the Retraction to be the ending of the Canterbury Tales, see Owen, Pilgrimage and Storytelling, pp. 29-31, 222 n. 14.
183
INDEX
The names of the authors of secondary works are indexed when they appear in the text and the notes. Because the titles of their books and articles are indexed only when they appear in the notes, the first page cited gives the full bibliographical reference. Although a distinction between Chaucer as poet and Chaucer as narrator is attempted here, it is somewhat artificial, and therefore not perfectly maintained. (See entry for "Geffrey the pilgrim and Chaucer the poet, indistinguishability of.") The distinction between other pilgrims as characters and as narrators is also imperfect; they are indexed under their titles (for example, Parson or Knight) or under the main heading "narrators."
Absolon, 42 Adam, 123 advice, 19-22, 60 Aers, David, 24, 31, 33-4 Chaucer, Language and the Creative Imagination, 157-8, 165, 168 "The Parliament of Fowls: Authority, the Knower and the Known," 171-2 Africanus. See Scipio Africanus "agoon," 88 Alain de Lille Anticlaudianus, 18 De Planctu Naturae (see Haring, Nikolaus M.; and Sheridan, James J.), 2, 57, 60-1, 67-8, 171 Alcyone in Chaucer, 69, 72-5, 81 in Ovid, 11, 73, 90 Alison. See Wife of Bath Alison (Miller's Tale), 42 Alison (the Wife of Bath's friend), 137 Allen, Judson, The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages: A Decorum of Convenient Distinction, 160, 163 Almachius, 7 Anselm, St., 170
antifeminism, 16, 122, 124-32 Antigone, 10 Antony, St., 8-9 Apollo, 132, 182 Aray, 57 Arcita, 25-6, 36-8, 41 Arcite, 25-8, 30-4, 36—8, 40-2, 166-8 Augustine, St., 9, 155, 170 City of God (see Dods, Marcus), 123 Confessions (see Pine-Coffin, R. S.), 8, 160, 174 On Christian Doctrine (see Robertson, D. W.,Jr.), 123, 171, 179-80 Austen, Jane, Pride and Prejudice, 164 authorial responsibility, 7, 9-10, 16, 19, 22, 44, 90-1, 138-40, 148, 150-6, 159 authors and audiences, relationships between, 9, 11, 15-16, 19, 21-2, 39, 46-50, 65-70, 90, 92, 95, 120-1, 139, 148-50, 154-6, 181-2 Bailly, Harry, 7, 16, 21, 39, 43, 120, 139-52, 154-6, 168, 182 Barthes, Roland, 10-11 "The Death of the Author," 169
185
Index Barthes, Roland (cont.)
Imagination in Classical and Mediaeval Thought, 166-7 Burlin, Robert B., Chaucerian Fiction,
Image-Music-Text, 169 The Pleasure of the Text, 161
159-60
Bateson, Gregory, 107 Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 177
Bennett, J. A. W., 58 The Humane Medievalist and Other Essays in English Literature and Learning, from Chaucer to Eliot,
169-70 The Parlement ofFoules: An Interpretation, 170-1
Benson, Larry D., ed., The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature, 177
Beute, 57 Bible, 7-10, n o , 123-6, 156, 179-81 Blake, Kathleen, "Order and the Noble Life in Chaucer's Knight's Tale," 165, 168 Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, 74 Bloomfield, Morton W., 21 "The Merchant's Tale: A Tragicom-
edy of the Neglect of Counsel The Limits of Art," 164 Boccaccio, Giovanni (see Branca, Vittore; Havely, N. R.; Limentani, Alberto; and Osgood, Charles), 160, 178 Genealogia Deorum, 8, 159
Teseida, 2, 25-7, 31, 34, 36-8, 41, 44, 165, 169 body politic, 108 Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy (see
Chaucer, Geoffrey; and Green, Richard), 8, 14-15, 17-18, 20, 52, 164, 170, 177, 180 Boheemen, Christel van, "Chaucer's Knight's Tale and the Structure of Myth," 167 Boren, James L., "Alysoun of Bath and the Vulgate 'Perfect Wife'," 180 Bradwardine, Thomas, 170 Brady, Frank et al., Literary Theory and
Caie, Graham, "The Significance of the Glosses in the Earliest Manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales" 181 "can," 65 Carruthers, Mary, "The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions," 181 Carton, Evan, 6 "Complicity and Responsibility in Pandarus' Bed and Chaucer's Art," 158 Cecilia, St., 7 Ceyx, 11, 72-3 Chamberlain, David, "The Music of The Spheres and The Parlement of Foules," 170 Chartrians, 8, 160 Chatman, Seymour, Approaches to Poetics: Selected Papersfromthe English Institute, 173 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 3-7, 10-12, 1416, 21-2, 24, 32, 43-5, 47-8, 5564, 66-7, 70, 73-4, 76, 91-3, 114, 120-1, 128, 138-9, 148, 150-63, 165-6, 170-2, 179, I"&I, 183 Book of the Duchess, 15-16, 47, 64, 68-94, !O9, 121-2, 161, 173-6 Canterbury Tales, 5, 1 0 - n , 16, 25, 43, 64, 116, 139, 156, 161, 183 Canterbury Tales (narrative frame), 16, 139-56, 181-3 Clerk's Prologue and Tale, 7, 16, 94122, 138-9, 148-9, 176-9
Structure: Essays in Honor of William K. Wimsatt, 178
Consolation of Philosophy, 14, 166 Franklin's Prologue and Tale, 11 General Prologue (Canterbury Tales),
6, 25, 38, 43, 133, 141, 145-7, 151-5, 168, 182 House of Fame, 4, 16-19, 47, J 6i, 166 Knight's Tale, 7, n , 15, 23-44, 6 3 5, 145, 164-9 Manciple's Prologue and Tale, 182 Melibee, Prologue and Tale of, 4, 7,
Branca, Vittore, ed., Tutte le opere di
19-22, 47, 148-9, 155, 160
Giovanni Boccaccio, 165 Bruns, Gerald L., Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Understanding in Literary History, 164
Bundy, Murray Wright, The Theory of
186
Merchant's Prologue and Tale, 5, 21, 115, 164 Miller's Prologue and Tale, 7, n , 4 2 3, 166, 179
Index Monk's Prologue and Tale, 147, 149 Nun's Priest's Prologue and Tale, 62, 147, 155 Parliament of Fowls, 1-3, 15, 18, 4 7 68, 74, 92, no, 161, 169-73 Parson's Prologue and Tale, 6, 11, 43, 108, 123, 158 Physician's Tale, 7, 146 Reeve's Prologue and Tale, 145 Retraction, 10, 43-5, 155-6, 161, 183 Second Nun's Prologue and Tale, 7 Shipman's Tale, 147 Thopas, Prologue and Tale of, 21,
Curtius, Ernst Robert, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 170
Dante Alighieri Divina Commedia, 2 Inferno, 2 - 3 , 9, 49, 58, 157, 160, 182 Purgatorio, 53, 56, 58, 172-3 Davis, Norman et al., 42 A Chaucer Glossary, 166, 169,176-8, 181 Dean, James, "Time Past and Time Present in Chaucer's Clerk's Tale and Gower's Confessio Amantis," 178 death, 23, 25-7, 33, 36-8, 48-9, 73, H9, 154 77-8, 88-9, 111-12, 117, 168 Troilus and Criseyde, 6-7, 10-n, 48, Death, 69, 77 120, 160 Delyt, 50, 52 Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale, 5, demandes d'amour, n , 39 16, 117, 119-20, 122-38, 179-81 "demen," 99, 177 Chauntecleer, 147, 156 Derrida, Jacques, "Limited Inc Chickering, Ho well, 162 Christ, 120, 124, 156, 179 abc . . . ," 174 Christine de Pizan, The Book of the desire. See "will" Desyr, 50, 52 City of Ladies (see Richards, Earl "devys," 143 Jeffrey), 10, 161 "devyse" ("divyse"), 32-3, 152 Cicero, Somnium Scipionis, 2, n , 53, "devysen," 61 59-62, 66-7, 171-2 Diana, 34 Clerk (see also "narrators"), 144 Coleman, Janet, 9 Dinshaw, Carolyn L., 162 Medieval Readers and Writers: 1350— discourse, 21, 66-80, 83-4, 86, 89-92, 1400, 160-2 143-4, 173 Colette, Theresa, "The Mulier Fords Dods, Marcus, trans., Augustine, St., and Chaucer's Shipman's Tale," City of God, 180 180 Don John, 147 communication, 5, 31, 46, 64-70, 75, Don Quixote, 140 Donaldson, E. Talbot, 150 78, 85, 133-4, 137, 173 "Chaucer the Pilgrim," 182 "condicioun," 153 Speaking of Chaucer, 182 contre-rejet, 114-16, 178 dreams, 47, 59-62, 66, 70-4, 90, 157— Cook, 145, 149 8, 167, 174-6 Cook, James W., 129
" 'That She Was Out of Alle Charitee': Point-Counterpoint in the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale," 181 "corage," 102, 115, 176 Cowgill, Bruce Kent, "The Parlement ofFoules and the Body Politic," 171 Craft, 54 Creon, 168 Criseyde, 7, 1 0 - n Crow, 182 Cuckoo, 58, 60 Cupid. See Love (Cupid)
Eagle, 17-18 Economou, George D. Geoffrey Chaucer: A Collection of Original Articles, 174, 180 The Goddess Natura in Medieval Literature, 171 Elbow, Peter, 23-4, 31, 33 "How Chaucer Transcends Oppositions in the Knight's Tale," 164, 166 Oppositions in Chaucer, 157—8, 164 Elliott, Ralph W. V., 21 Chaucer's English, 164
187
Index Emilia, 25-6, 34, 36, 41 Emily, 25-6, 30-8, 40-2, 63, 165, 167-8 Envy, 166 Eve, 123 family system, 107-9, 177 "fantasy," 71 Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800, 161 "finden," 61 Fish, Stanley, 163 "How Ordinary Is Ordinary Language?" 173 "What Is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things about It?" 173 /5 There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities, 173 "folk," 29, 166 Force, 41 Formel, 51, 56, 63-5 Fortune, 76-7, 81 Francesca da Rimini and Paolo, 9, 148 Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, 58 Fremantle, W. H., trans., The Principal Works of St. Jerome, 180-1 Freud, Sigmund, 47 Friar, 146 friendship, 27-8, 86-8 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 12—14, 24> 9 1 Philosophical Hermeneutics (see also Linge, David E.), 159, 162-4, 169 Truth and Method, 162-3, 165, 1734, 176 gardens in medieval literature, 2, 54, 56-7 Gaylord, Alan T., 139 "The Role of Saturn in the Knight's Tale," 168 "Sentence and Solaas in Fragment VII of the Canterbury Tales: Harry Bailly as Horseback Editor," 181 Geffrey the pilgrim and Chaucer the poet, indistihguishability of, 1501
Gentilesse, 56 "gladly," 102 Goffman, Erving, 67 Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation
of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, 167 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 172-3 good will, 16, 44, 92, 94, 138 Goodelief, 148-9 Goodman of Paris. See Power, Eileen Green, Richard, trans., Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, 164, 180 Gregory, St., 8 Griselda, 16, 94—122, 177 Griseldis, 99-100, 103-6 Guenevere, 9, 148 Guillaume de Lorris's part of Roman de la Rose, 2-3, 50, 53, 56, 68, 1656, 181 Habermas, Jurgen, 163 Haidu, Peter, "Repetition: Modern Reflections on Medieval Aesthetics," 160 Hanning, Robert W. "From Eva to Ave to Eglentyne and Alison: Chaucer's Insight into the Roles Women Play," 180 The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance, 158 "The Theme of Art and Life in Chaucer's Poetry," 174-5 Haring, Nikolaus M., ed., Alain de Lille, De Planctu Naturae, 171 Harwood, BrittonJ., 128 "The Wife of Bath and the Dream of Innocence," 181 Havely, N. R., ed. and trans., Chaucer's Boccaccio: Sources of"Troilus" and the "Knight's" and "Franklin's Tales," 165 Heidegger, Martin, 14 hermeneutical circle, 4, 6, 13, 47, 923, 151, 163, 167 hermeneutics, 3-4, 12-15, 18, 47, 6 8 9, 122, 138, 158, 163—4, !^7, 169-70, 173-4, 182-3 Hippolyta, 31-2, 40, 167 Hirsch, E. D., Jr., 163 Holcot, Robert, 161 Hollander, John, " 'Sense Variously Drawn Out': Some Observations on English Enjambment," 178 Host. See Bailly, Harry Howard, Donald R., 150-1 "Chaucer the Man," 182-3
188
Index The Idea of the Canterbury Tales, 163,
182 Hoy, David Couzens, The Critical Circle: Literature, History, and Philosophical Hermeneutics, 163
Hugh of St. Victor, 7-8 Didascalicon (see Taylor, Jerome),
159-60 Huppe, Bernard F. See Robertson, D.
W., Jr. identity. See "personal identity" "imagination," 71, 166 imitation, 8-9, 29-30, 32-3, 89, 1402, 145-8, 156, 168 individual in the late Middle Ages, 4 6, 14, 158, 177—8 intention, 9, 11-12, 16, 19, 24, 34, 43-5, 47, 49, 55-6, 67, 72-3, 87, 9°-3> 97, 103. 108-9, i n , 1201, 149, 169 interpretation, 1-4, 7, 9, 11-16, 21-5, 28, 30-3, 35, 39-40, 42-70, 72-3, 85, 91, 94-5, 104-5, 107, 109-10, 113—14, 120-2, 129, 148-9, 155— 7, 162-3, 167, 171, 175-6, 17980, 182 good-faith, 12-13, 16, 24, 35, 44-5, 68, 94 preemptive, 28—30, 32, 39-40, 44, 168 self-interested, 1-2, 15, 21-2, 24, 28, 31, 35, 39-40, 47, 52-5, 64, 67-8, 72-3, 90, 129, 148-9, 164, 168, 171, 182 intuition, 98, 176 Janicula, 95, 97, 100, 102, 109-11, 115, 118 Jankin, 127-8, 130-2, 135, 137-8 Jauss, Hans Robert, 163 Jealous Husband (Roman de la Rose),
124, 130 Jealousy, 41 Jean de Meun's part of Roman de la Rose, 2—3, 61, 68, 124, 130, 181 Jeffrey, David Lyle Chaucer and Scriptural Tradition, 162
"Chaucer and Wyclif: Biblical Hermeneutic and Literary Theory in the XlVth Century," 162 Jerome, St., Adversusjovinianumlibriduo (see Migne, J.-P.; and Fremantle, W. H.), 5, 124-7, 131, 180-1
Job, 100, 120 Johansson, Stig, and Bjorn Tysdahl, eds., Papers from the First Nordic Conference for English Studies, 181 John of Gaunt, 74, 92, 174 John of Paris, 7 John of Trevisa, 166 John the carpenter, 42, 179 Jones, Terry, 24, 33 Chaucer's Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary, 165, 168—9 Juno, 72-3 Jupiter, 34 Justinus, 5, 164 Justman, Stewart " 'Auctoritee' and the Knight's Tale," 169 "Medieval Monism and Abuse of Authority in Chaucer," 161 Kantorowicz, Ernst H., The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theory, 177 Kirk, Elizabeth D., The Dream Thought of Piers Plowman, 171 Knight (see also "narrators"), 38, 144, 153, 156, 168 Knight, Black, 15, 69, 74-92, 94, 1745 Kolve, V. A., Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales, 168 Kreisler, Nicolai von, 58 "Bird Lore and the Valentine's Day Tradition in Chaucer's Parlement ofFoules," 170 Krieger, Elliot, "Re-reading Allegory: The Clerk's Tale," 178 Kwant, Remy C , Phenomenology of Language, 169 "kynde," 128, 175, 181 Lancelot, 9, 148 Langland, William, Piers Plowman, 171 Lanham, Richard A., The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance, 160 Lecoy, Felix, ed., Roman de la Rose, 166 Leff, Gordon, William ofOckham: The Metamorphosis of Scholastic Discourse, 169—70
189
Index Leicester, H. M.,Jr., 151 "The Art of Impersonation: A General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales" 178, 182 "The Harmony of Chaucer's Parlement: A Dissonant Voice," 170, 172 Lies, 41 Limentani, Alberto, ed., Boccaccio, Teseida, 165 Linge, David E., 12 Ed. and trans., Gadamer, HansGeorg, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 159, 169 literary meaning, 3-4, 7-9, 11-12, 15, 46-7, 95, 1H-17, 119, 122-3, HO literature, 65 as moral instruction, 7-8, 44, 157, 159-60 as play, 8, 76, 160 Le Livre Griseldis (see Severs, J. Burke), 178 Lollards, 10 Longsworth, Robert, 101 "Chaucer's Clerk as Teacher," 177 love, 23, 26-7, 31-3, 38, 41-2, 50-1, 54, 57, 65-7, 84-7, 172-3, 177 Love (Cupid), 3, 32-3, 50-2, 56-7, 65, 67, 84 Lumiansky, Robert M., Of Sondry Folk: The Dramatic Principle in the Canterbury Tales, 182 Lust, 50, 52 McDonald, Charles O., "An Interpretation of Chaucer's Parlement of Foules," 169, 172 Macfarlane, Alan, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition, 158 Machaut, Guillaume de, Dit de la Fonteinne amoureuse, 74 McKeon, Richard, "Poetry and Philosophy in the Twelfth Century: The Renaissance of Rhetoric," 159 Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio (see Stahl, William H.), 7, 60-2, 66, 159, 167, 171-3, 176 Malone, Kemp, "Chaucer's Daughter of Cupid," 169 Man of Law, 139, 145 Manciple, 11, 149 Mann, Jill, 6
Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the "General Prologue," 158
Manning, Stephen, "Rhetoric, Game, Morality, and Geoffrey Chaucer," 160 "marchal," 141 Marcus, Millicent Joy, An Allegory of Form: Literary Self-Consciousness in the "Decameron," 178-9 marriage, 27-8, 34-5, 40-1, 87-8, 108-10, 123-4, 126-7, 130 Mars, 34, 128-9 Marsiglio of Padua, 7 Martianus Capella, 18 Martin, Henri-Jean. See Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin Martin, Loy D., "History and Form in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales," 169 Mary, 120 Melibee (Melibeus), 7, 19-21, 148 "mercy," 38, 84-5, 168 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 46 Phenomenology of Perception, 169 The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, 171 Midas, 132, 136 Midas's wife, 132-3, 136, 138 Middle English Dictionary, 42, 102, 166, 174, 176-7 Migne, J.-P., ed., Patrologia Latina, 180 Miller (see also "narrators"), 43, 144-5 Miller, Frank Justus, trans., Ovid, Metamorphoses, 174 Miller, J. Hillis, "Ariadne's Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line," 174 Miller, Robert P., ed., Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds, 165, 174, 176, 180 Minnis, AlastairJ. Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity, 168 Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, 160 misinterpretation, 34, 69, 72-3, 90-1 Monk (see also "narrators"), 146-7 Montgomery, Robert L., The Reader's Eye: Studies in Didactic Literary Theory from Dante to Tasso, 173
190
Index Morpheus, 15, 69, 72-3, 76-7 Morrall, John B., Political Thought in Medieval Times, 158 Morris, Colin, The Discovery of the Individual: 1050-1200, 158, 175, 178 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, Don Giovanni, 140 mulier fortis, 180 Muscatine, Charles, 23-4, 33 Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style and Meaning, 164-5, 170, 172 "namely," 42 narrators Book of the Duchess, 15, 47, 69-84, 88-92, 94, 174-5 Canterbury Tales, 5 Canterbury Tales (narrative frame), "Geffrey the pilgrim," 11, 16, 19, 21, 44, 133-4, 139-42, 147, H 9 56 Clerk, 96-108, 113-4, 116-20, 148 Franklin, 11 House of Fame, 16-19, 47 Knight, 11, 25-6, 30, 34, 37, 39-43, 145, 165, 167-8 Miller, 42-3, 145 Monk, 145, 149, 182 Nun's Priest, 147, 182 Parliament of Fowls, 1-3, 15, 18, 4756, 58-60, 62, 64-7, 157 Parson, 6, 11, 43, 108 Petrarch, 100 Prioress, 146, 180 Reeve, 145 Roman de la Rose, 2, 53 Squire, 154 Troilus and Criseyde, 11 Wife of Bath, 5, 16, 117, 119—20, 122-38, 179-81 Nature in Alain de Lille, 57, 60-1, 171 in Chaucer, 50-1, 56-7, 60-1, 63-5, n o , 171 in Roman de la Rose, 61 Nicholas, 7, 42-3, 179 Nitzsche, Jane Chance, The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 171 Noakes, Susan, "The Double Misreading of Paolo and Francesca," 160 nominalism, 9-10, 14, 98, 170
Oakley, Francis, The Medieval Experience: Foundations of Western Cultural Singularity, 158 Ohmann, Richard, "Speech Acts and the Definition of Literature," 173 Olsen, Glending, Literature as Recreation in the Middle Ages, 160 Osgood, Charles G., trans., Boccaccio on Poetry, 159 other. See "self and other, dualistic and dialectical relationships between" "outreye," 176 Ovid, Metamorphoses (see also Miller, Frank Justus), 11, 73, 75-6, 90, 132-3, 174 Owen, Charles A., Jr., Pilgrimage and Storytelling in the Canterbury Tales: The Dialectic of "Ernest" and "Game," 161, 182-3 Oxford English Dictionary, 42, 81, 141, 165-6, 169, 176-8, 181 Palamon, 25-7, 29-35, 37~8, 40-2, 166-8 Palemone, 25-6, 36, 41 Palmer, John. See Brady, Frank et al. Palmer, Richard E., Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heideggef, and Gadamer, 163 Palomo, Dolores, "What Chaucer Really Did to Le Livre de Mellibbee," 164 Pan, 132, 175 Paolo Malatesta. See Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Pardoner, 7, 11, 132, 134-5 Parson (see also "narrators"), 6, 123, 146, 158 Patterson, Lee, " 'For the WyvesLoveof Bathe': Feminine Rhetoric and Poetic Resolution in the Roman de la Rose and the Canterbury Tales," 181 Paul, St., 124, 127 Payne, Robert O., The Key of Remembrance: A Study of Chaucer's Poetics, 157-8, 172 Peasants' Revolt, 171 Peck, Russell, 17-18 "Chaucer and the Nominalist Questions," 164, 170 Perotheus, 27-8, 165
191
Index Perryman, Judith C , "The 'False Arcite' of Chaucer's Knight's Tale," 167, 169 personal identity, 3-6, 15, 21, 95-109, 114, 120, 122-3, I28 > H°» 151. J 7 8 Petrarch, Giovanni, 116-19 De Insigni Obedientia et Fide Uxoris (see Severs, J. Burke), 96-101, 103-4, 106, 108, 120, 176 phenomenological hermeneutics. See "hermeneutics" Philosophy, 14 Philostrate, 41, 167 Pichaske, David R., and Laura Sweetland, 146 "Chaucer on the Medieval Monarchy: Harry Bailly in the Canterbury Tales," 159, 182 Pine-Coffin, R. S., trans., St. Augustine, Confessions, 160, 174 "pitously," 81 Placebo, 164 Plesaunce, 50, 52, 56 political power, 3-4, 6-7, 15-16, 95, 109-14, 139-40, 163, 171 Poulet, Georges, 46 "Phenomenology of Reading," 169 Power, Eileen, trans., The Goodman of Paris [he Menagier de Paris]: A Treatise on Moral and Domestic Economy by a Citizen of Paris, 178 prejudgment (prejudice), 4, 12-15, 18, 47, 53, 55, 157, 167, 170 Price, Martin. See Brady, Frank et al. "pride," 165 Prioress (see also "narrators"), 144, 146, 156 Prudence, 19-21, 47 Ptolemy, 135 Raval, Suresh, Metacritkism, 163 reader as interpreter, 3-4, 8-12, 1516, 19, 22, 48-50, 66-7, 149, 155-6, 162, 178 reading, 10, 46-50, 55-6, 58, 63, 6 5 8, 75—6, 78, 90, 92-3, 120—1, 161, 171, 182-3 in the late Middle Ages, 7-9, 11-12, 47, 159-62 Reeve (see also "narrators"), 145—6 Reeves, Marjorie, "Marsiglio of Padua and Dante Alighieri," 158 "resonable," 78
resoun, 152 Richard II, 171 Richards, Earl Jeffrey, trans., Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, 161 Ricoeur, Paul, 13 Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 163 Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, 163, 165 Robbins, Harry W., trans., The Romance of the Rose, 166 Robertson, D. W., Jr., 163 Augustine, St., On Christian Doctrine (trans.), 171, 179 "The Book of the Duchess" (in Companion to Chaucer Studies), 175 Essays in Medieval Culture, 174 "The Historical Setting of Chaucer's Book of the Duchess," 174 A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives, 162, 179-80 Robertson, D. W., Jr., and Bernard F. Huppe, Fruyt and Chaf 169 Robinson, F. N., 42, 114 Ed., Chaucer, Works, 157, 164, 173, 175, 183 Roman de la Rose (see Chaucer, Geoffrey; Lecoy, Felix; and Robbins, Harry W.), 2-3, 50, 53, 56, 61, 68, 124, 130, 165-6, 181 Rowland, Beryl, 58 Blind Beasts: Chaucer's Animal World, 170 Companion to Chaucer Studies, 175 "sad," 107, 114-15, 178 "sadness," 178 Salter, Elizabeth, 124 Chaucer: The Knight's Tale and the Clerk's Tale, 165 Sarum Missal. See Warren, Frederick E. Saturn, 34 Schlauch, Margaret "Chaucer's Doctrine of Kings and Tyrants," 159 "The Marital Dilemma in the Wife of Bath's Tale," 180 Schleusener, Jay, 150 "Convention and the Context of Reading," 182 Schweitzer, Edward C , "Fate and Freedom in The Knight's Tale," 169
192
Index Scipio, 50, 53, 60-2 Scipio Africanus, 1, 48-50, 52-3, 56, 58-62, 172 "seem," 99, 176-7 self and other, dualistic and dialectical relationships between, 2-7, 1213, 15, 19, 21-8, 30-2, 35-40, 43, 46-7, 52, 55, 63, 66-7, 69-72, 74-5, 77, 82-3, 89-103, 107-10, 120-3, I 2 8 , 138, 140, 156, 163, 165-7, 174 selfishness, 24, 31—4, 40 Semyramis, 61 "sentence," 52, 141 Severs, J. Burke, The Literary Relationships of Chaucer's "Clerkes Tale," 176, 178 Sheridan, James J., trans., Alan of Lille: The Plaint of Nature, 171 Shoaf, R. A. 'Mutatio Amoris': 'Penitentia' and the Form of the Book of the Duchess," 175-6 "Stalking the Sorrowful H(e)art: Penitential Lore and the Hunt Scene in Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess," 175 Sinclair, John D., trans., Dante, Divina Commedia, 157, 172, 182 "skylful," 78 Smalley, Beryl The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 179 Trends in Medieval Political Thought, 158 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein "On the Margins of Discourse," 173 "Poetry as Fiction," 173 Socrates, 81 Solomon, 19, 123, 179-80 Sophie, 19 sources, use of, 2—3, 11, 13—14, 17— 19, 25-7, 31, 34, 37-8, 41, 44, 49-53, 56-8, 60-3, 65-8, 73-6, 96-101, 103-6, 108, 114, 116-20, 122-7, 132-3, 136, 157, 161, 176, 179-80 "sovereyn," i n speaking, 132—8, 181 Stahl, William H., trans., Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, 159, 167, 171-3
Steinmetz, David C , 98 "Late Medieval Nominalism and the Clerk's Tale," 176 Strode, Ralph, 170 Strohm, Paul, 19 "The Allegory of the Tale ofMelibee," 164-5 "Form and Social Statement in Confessio Amantis and The Canterbury Tales," 159, 171 "Some Generic Distinctions in the Canterbury Tales," 159, 183 "sturdy," 178 Sturges, Robert S., 162 Summoner, 146 Sweetland, Laura. See Pichaske, David R., and Laura Sweetland sympathy, 24, 31-4, 38-40, 43, 73, 80-1, 83, 89, 94, 120, 168 Taylor, Jerome, trans., Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon, 159 Tercel, First, 51 Tercelet, 64 Teseo, 25, 31, 34, 44 Theban ladies, 25, 28-30, 40, 168 Theophrastus, Golden Book on Marriage, 124, 127, 130-1 Theseus, 7, 23, 25, 27-35, 4°, 42, 44, 64, 165-9 Thomas, Marcel, "Manuscripts," 161 Thynne, William, 175 time, 6, 12, 14, 75, 83, 95, 98, 114-16, 120, 152 tradition, 6, 12-13, 53~4, 57~8, 91, 157-8, 163, 173 "tretable," 78 "trewe," 128, 181 Troilus, 11 Turner, Frederick, 27 "A Structuralist Analysis of the Knight's Tale," 165 tyranny, 7, 32, 35, 40, 44, 140, 144, 149, 155, 168 Tysdahl, Bjorn. See Johansson, Stig, and Bjorn Tysdahl, 181 Ullmann, Walter, 6 The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages, 158, 178 Medieval Political Thought, 158
193
Index Uphaus, Robert W., "Chaucer's Parlement ofFoules: Aesthetic Order and Individual Experience," 172 Utley, Francis Lee, "Five Genres in the Clerk's Tale," 178 Valerius, 131 Valterius, 97, 99, 104, 106 Venus, 41, 50, 54, 57, 59, 61-2, 67, 128-9 "vidua," 103 Virgil, Aeneid, n , 49 Virgil (Dante's guide), 2, 49, 58 Virginia, 7 virginity, 34-5, 38, 123-5, I( ^5, 168 Virginius, 7 Voluttade, 169 Wallace, Kristine Gilmartin, "Array as Motif in the Clerk's Tale," 176, 178 Walter, 7, 16, 94-116, 118-22, 138, 140, 176-7 Warren, Frederick E., trans., Sarum Missal in English, 165 Weissman, Hope Phyllis, "Antifeminism and Chaucer's Characterization of Women," 180 Wenzel, Siegfried, ed., Medieval and Renaissance Studies: Proceedings of the Southeastern Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 164 Wetherbee, Winthrop, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century: The Literary Influence of the School of Chartres, 160
White, Lady, 15, 69, 76-7, 81, 83-90, 92, 94, 122 "widow," 177 Wife of Bath (see also "narrators"), 120, 126, 133, 136 Wilks, Michael, "Chaucer and the Mystical Marriage in Medieval Political Thought," 158 will, 11, 14-16, 40, 47-52, 54-6, 63, 65, 67, 96, 101, 106, 108, 111-12, 129-30, 143, 145, 148, 164, 16970 "will," 50, 169 Wille, 50-2, 67, 169 William of Ockham, 161, 170 Windeatt, B. A., 11 "The Scribes as Chaucer's Early Critics," 162 Chaucer's Dream Poetry: Sources and Analogues, 174 Wood, Chauncey, 129 "Affective Stylistics and the Study of Chaucer," 162 Chaucer and the Country of the Stars: Poetic Uses of Astrological Imagery, 181 writing, 58-60, 63, 66-7, 71-2, 75, 90, 92, 120-1, 171 Wyclif, John, 10, 162 Yeager, R. F., "Literary Theory at the Close of the Middle Ages: William Caxton and William Thynne," 183
194