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History and Form in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales Author(S): Loy D

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History and Form in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales Author(S): Loy D History and Form in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales Author(s): Loy D. Martin Source: ELH, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Spring, 1978), pp. 1-17 Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2872448 Accessed: 07-01-2016 23:29 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to ELH. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 150.135.239.97 on Thu, 07 Jan 2016 23:29:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions etAh HISTORY AND FORM IN THE GENERAL PROLOGUE TO THE CANTERBURY TALES BY LOY D. MARTIN Is theform of the General Prologue to theCanterbury Tales new orold? Criticalsentiment seems on thewhole to favornewness; yet there has always remained a sense of craftsmanshipand conventionalityabout the poem which continually reinvigorates the searchfor a strongantecedent genre. In recentyears, a fewattempts have been persuasive, notablyJ. V. Cunningham'sstructural analysisof the Prologue as a dreamvision.1 Cunningham begins with theassumption that there must be an availablegeneric "tradition" whichfunctions intact to shape a poet'sexperience into poetry, but even his mostconvinced reader must wonder why Chaucer's use of thattradition escaped notice until the twentieth century. I think this suggeststhat Cunningham's ideal notionsof traditionand genre cause himto overstatehis case, butI also thinkthere are verygood reasons why he perceived such a strongaffinity between the Prologueand the formof the dreamvision. In orderto save his valuable intuition,then, while offeringan alternativeset of assumptionsabout genre formation, I should like to turn briefly to an idea offeredby AlastairFowler in an essay called "The Life and Death ofLiterary Forms."2 Fowlernotices that genres, after complex developments in time, oftendo notsimply disappear. Rather they break up intowhat he calls "modes,"methods of writing, like satiriclanguage, which are stillrecognizable but whichcan no longeraccount for the formal propertiesof entire works.This is a very simple and useful observation;it is undoubtedlytrue. The questionthat Fowler does notaddress is whethergenres can appearas well as disappearin this Loy D. Martin 1 ELH 45 (1978) 1-17 0013-8304/78/0451-0001$01.00 Copyright? 1978 by The JohnsHopkins University Press All rightsof reproductionin any formreserved. This content downloaded from 150.135.239.97 on Thu, 07 Jan 2016 23:29:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions way, whether new genres can sometimes be recognized as expansions of previous "modes" as modes can be recognized as diminutions of previous genres. This seems to me likely and provides a frameworkin which to identifyan historicalrelationship between the formof the General Prologue and a rhetoricaldevice which appears in, but does not generically constitute,the dream vision poems. The particularstylistic fragment I have in mind is the rhetorical catalogue of types, which appears frequentlyin Chaucer's earlier dream vision poems. It not only appears there,it develops, and my very simple argumenthere will be that it develops finallyinto the main organizingprinciple of the General Prologue. I would begin, therefore,by submittinga catalogue fromthe Parlement of Foules, one which seems merelyto list the species oftrees thatthe dreamer sees: The byldereok, and ek thehardy asshe; The pilerelm, the cofreunto carayne; The boxtrepipere, holm to whippeslashe; The saylyngefyr; the cipresse,deth to playne; The shetereew; the asp forshaftes pleyne; The olyveof pes, and eke the dronkevyne; The victorpalm, the laurerto devyne.3 Cataloguing, as Cunninghamimplies, is centralto the dream vision, and even in a simple case like this one, analysis will show us why. Each tree is named by a practical use or a practical problem it presents in the familiarworld; theyappear in a dream, and, what is most important,they appear in a garden which is immediately represented as timeless. Birds sing the eternal harmonyof angelic music, there are no fluctuationsof hot and cold, men may not "waxe sek ne old," and day never changes into night. Change, in other words, is explicitlyexcluded as a normal condition of existence in thisgarden. Therefore, the temporalfunctions of the treesare, forthe most part, inapplicable. They will not be cut down fortheir uses because those uses have meaning onlyin a world in which time rules with implicationsthat are irrelevanthere. In the garden,there is no need forshelter and no need to build, no need forcoffins because thereis no "carayne," no need forpipes because the perfectmusic of heaven emanates fromnature; birdsong and the wind in the living arboreal "instruments."There is no need to sail, no reason to cut and plane boards,and "the shetere ew; the asp forshaftes pleyne" are not useful because there is no war or strife.Thus, there is no need to 2 General Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales" This content downloaded from 150.135.239.97 on Thu, 07 Jan 2016 23:29:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions make peace or celebrate victory,and there is no need to "devyne" the future,because time does not imply change. What seems a simple list ofobserved trees,then, on second glance, displays a most peculiar structureof irrelevance. Why is this so? I would argue that,through the dreamvision, Chaucher is tryingto project a realm of experience or knowledge which transcendssome of the obvious limitations of life in time without aspiring to the perfect timelessness of eternity.The trees ornament a timeless realm, and yet their differentiationinto species and mundane uses links them irrevocablyto the sublunaryworld. We cannot dismiss the contradiction;we can only say thatChaucer has conceived ofhis garden as something ambiguously medium aeternitatem et tempus.4 The point of positing such a realm emerges as the poem unfolds and the garden's initial timelessness is revised. The birds abandon their heavenly music for the unregulated "noyse" of debate. Change, strife,and, by implication, death are introduced intowhat at firstappeared to be an eternalparadise. Then, just when the garden world seems indistinguishablefrom the self-consuming world of men, Nature imposes a solution to the debate and thus effectsa partialrecovery. The recoveryis partialbecause it restores only that intermediate realm which the catalogue of the trees suggested; it does not restorean ideal paradise. The birds can sing again, but theirrecovery is not complete: theydo not sing the music of the heavenly harmonybut a song that"imaked was in Fraunce." The birds' rondeau compromises between the chaos of ear- shatteringdiscord and the music of the spheres. And as the mating ritual resumes its pattern of recurrence "from yer to yeere" in Nature's garden, the concept of cyclic or repetitionaltime resolves the antithesisbetween linear time and timelessness, between fatal displacement and perfect stasis. This is, in part, why "commun profit"is invoked in the preservationof the ceremonythat enables procreation. Individual birds will die, but the species, through regeneration,will be deathless.5 The Parlement is a poem thatcelebrates the resolution of severe polarities,and the rhetoricalcatalogue is but one technique among many for imagining a mode of knowledge or experience which transcends the strictAugustinian dualism of time and eternity. Moreover, the need for such a projection is central throughout Chaucer's earlypoems. His ongoing meditationon cyclic repetition testifiesto that need, and so does his postulation of extraordinary human experiences which remove the individual brieflyfrom time Loy D. Martin 3 This content downloaded from 150.135.239.97 on Thu, 07 Jan 2016 23:29:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions and allow for a special learning experience. In its most graphic manifestations,this removal involves defininga special place which is neither heaven nor earth. Affrycantakes Scipio to such a place; looking one way, Scipio sees Carthage whole as he could not while earth-bound;looking the otherway, he is shown the "Galaxye" and the nine spheres. And he hears "the melodye ... That cometh of thilkesperes thryesthre." The eagle in the Hous of Fame plucks the dreamerto a place which is half way between heaven and earth (11. 713-15) and introduceshim to a goddess whose feetrest on earthand whose head is in heaven (11. 1372-76). Furthermore, these transportationsnormally occur in dreams,suggesting that the dream vision itselfis to be interpretedas a partialtranscendence of time. As early as the Book of the Duchess, sleep and dreaming functionas mediatorsbetween life and death, and thisnotion of an intermediate realm is carried over, without the actual dream, in Troilus' perplexing pause at the eighth sphere as he leaves this life. In the Parlement,the dream vision validates the idea of a garden which seems timeless in some details yet earth-boundin others. I wish to propose that the Canterburypilgrimage displays a similar ambiguityand thatChaucer, in the General Prologue, abandons the dream and expands
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