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University Microfilms Internationa) 300 N.Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Ml 40106

8318350

Fashbaugh, Elmer Jack

CHAUCER’S TROUBLED ENDINGS

The Ohio Slate University Ph.D. 1983

University Microfilms International 300 N. Zecb Road. Ann Arbor, M l 48106

Copyright 1983 by Fashbaugh, Elmer Jack All Rights Reserved

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University Microfilms international

CHAUCER’S TROUBLED ENDINGS

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By

E. Jack Fashbaugh, B.S., H.A.

• •It*

The Ohio State University

1983

Reading Committees Approved By Alan K. Brown

Lisa J. Kiser

Christian K. Zacher Adviser Department of English To Helen Paul Fashbaugh

for constant support

i i VITA

November 13, 19**6 .... Born - Bessemer, Michigan

1970...... B.S., St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, Minnesota

1970-1972 ...... Teaching Assistant, Department of English, St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, Minnesota

1972. ....■••••. M.A., St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, Minnesota

1977-1980 ••••••■• Teaching Assistant, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1980-1981...... Administrative Assistant, The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1981-1983 ...... Teaching Assistant, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: Medieval English Literature Studies in Middle English Literature. Professor Christian K. Zacher

Studies in Old English Literature. Professor Alan K. Brown

i i i TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page VITA...... iii

INTRODUCTION...... 1 Chapter

I. THE TROILPS AND THE KNIGHT’S TALE I: CONSEQUENTIAL

AND ANALYTICAL STRUCTURES ...... 6

II. THE TROILPS AND THE KNIGHT*3 TALE II: CONSTITUTIVE

AND CONSTRUCTIVE STRUCTURES...... k?

III. THE TROILPS AND THE KNIGHT’S TALE III: CLOSURAL

TRANSFORMATION...... 69

IV. DREAM-VISIONS I: ON AVOIDING THE COLLAPSE OF

ANALYTICAL CONSTITUTIVE STRUCTURES...... 87

V. DREAM-VISIONS II: ANTICIPATING THE CANTERBURY

TALES ...... 117

VI. CANTERBURY TALES I: THE APPEARANCE OF THE CANON

AND HIS YEOMAN...... 126

VII. CANTERBURY TALES II: PROPER TALES...... 139

VIII. CANTERBURY TALES III: PIOUS TALES AND

DIRTY J O K E S ...... 179 IX. CANTERBURY TALES IV: CONFESSIONS...... 199

LIST OF UORKS CONSULTED...... 209

iv INTRODUCTION

Key concepts upon which this dissertation is based were developed under the influence of critics writing with a general, historicist perspective, not (as might be suspected) under the influence of main-stream structuralism--though I have had to sample such criticism in the interest of refining my terminology. Of course, my interest in criticism which employs binary analysis may be seen as an anticipation of structuralist tendencies. An example of the sort of binary analysis which has prompted me to develop a theory of narrative along structuralist lines may be found in Pamela Qradon's Form and Style in Early English Literature.

Though this work is admirable for the range of material it covers, the difficulty the author has in UBing her mythic/mimetic dichotomy to understand the dynamic of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in its passages of crisis illustrates, I think, general imprecision:

Suppose . . . we take . . . the hunting and temptation scenes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, should we class them as mythic narrative or as mimetic narrative? I would suggest that they fall into the category of mimetic narrative, since, although their function may be partly as vectors of a theme, they also constitute a development of the description of the life at the Green Knight's castle.'*

Gradon's question about the passages of Sir Gawain under her review

*) Form and Style in Early English Literature (London: Methuen, 1971 )i P. 25T- 1 is somewhat difficult because it is framed by no recognition of the point that repetition, a salient feature of the narrative, is heightened through doubling, a stylistic feature which suggests that the writer wants to direct our attention to something unmimetic. A sense of mythic, not mimetic, import may seem to be implied, in fact. We need a model complex enough to account for the fact that in literature stylistic and organizational phenomena may or may not derive from the kinds of meaning we usually associate with them. James I. Wimsatt's allegory/mirror distinction, while it does not in the same way give us the difficulty of moving from method of signification to meaning that we find in using Gradon's division, does in fact give us the same basic problem:

Allegories (in the restricted sense I am using) are plots which meaningfully analyze generalized experiences, and mirrors are ordered collections of descriptive materials, characters, or actions which present compre­ hensive images of experience or knowledge.2

A critic wonders about the relationship between plot and the generalization of experience, about the relationship between descriptions and the presentation of "comprehensive images." How do images become comprehensive?

The idea of an analytical structure playing upon a consequen­ tial constitutive structure (Wimsatt's "allegory"?) and the idea of an opposite literary dynamic (Wimsatt's "mirror"?) occur to us.

2 Allegory and Mirror: Tradition and Structure in Middle English Literature (New York: Pegasus, 1970), p. 31. And certain connections encourage the full emergence of a theory.

Russell A. Peck's picture of personal language trying to "pierce the public myth" in Middle English literature^ connects with

J. A. Burrow's observation that in Chaucer's age exemplum and it single episode replace allegory and rambling romance. In Chaucer's age, interest in representing causality, interest in consequential structures (as I want to call them), appears to be ascendant, while interest in representing given modules of mental or physical being, after centuries of dominance, appears to be in decline.

Perhaps what is as interesting as any claim we might make about tendencies and the possibility of thematic implications is the observation that both of the structures I have suggested— consequential and analytical structures— will occur and "find" some sort of relationship in any given literary text.

Concepts developed by two critics of general interest who have devoted considerable attention to endings— Barbara Herrnstein

Smith and Frank Kermode— the paratactic/sequential structural dichotomy in the case of the former, the chronos/kairos distinction in the case of the latter, may be seen as analogues of the analytical/consequential structural difference upon which I build my Btudy of Chaucer's endingB, but the binary analysis I work with attempts to comprehend observations about style and observations

Perspective in Middle English

^Ricardian Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971)| pp. 68, 92. about meaning* Whereas Smith would find the solution to the problem of analytical structure's open-endedness in what she is content to leave as "another principle of thematic generation that does determine its own conclusion,"^ I want to find closure in a relationship between two distinctly different, yet omni­ present, generative principles. Parataxis, a term describing a

technique in style, is more likely to be found, in my model, not where, as Smith says, "repetition is the fundamental principle of . . . generation," but rather, where cause-attribution has created a constitutive consequential structure, the materials of which will have to be transformed if satisfactory closure is to be achieved. Whether or not Kermode wants to discuss actual endings

is not always clear, but his idea of what occurs as a story closes, perhaps because he has concerned himself directly--as Smith has not— >with narrative problems, seems to resemble my own more closely than Smith's does. However, with his pronouncement that g "myths call for absolute, fictions for conditional assent" and with his stress on the apocalyptic values in literature, he suggests a much less flexible idea (and matter-bound idea) than I wish to propose. My model achieves flexibility, I think, by virtue of the distinction between constitutive and constructive structures.

^Poetic Closure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 107. ^The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 39. However difficult it may be at first for a reader to keep separate the constitutive/constructive dichotomy and the analytical/ consequential dichotomy, there is much to be gained in recogniz­ ing the difference between a division based on attributes (the latter) and a division based on functions (the former). There is also much to be gained, if the object is flexibility, by recog­ nizing a distinction between the phenomenological and the semiologi- cal references in the management of structures. As I try to show, phenomenology--points of style, overt claims--that we associate with a structure (analytical or consequential) do not necessarily imply confirmed semiology. The literary artist can use elements we associate with a structure without delivering, in full, that structure. I make the distinction between phenomenology and semiology in order to explain how a narrator can move the reader's perceptions from a constitutive structure of one type (consequential or analytical) toward a structure of the other type (analytical or consequential). Because the delivery of a "message" arises as an ending prompts us to reflect on what has preceded it, and because the author works, presumably, toward that meaning, I have created the rather unbeautiful term "constructive structure." I hope that there is not a great deal more in this dissertation for which I must apologize. Chapter One

The Troilue and the Knights Tale Is

Consequential and Analytical Structures

There is value in making a distinction which is based on an analysis oft not just the material which Chaucer added and subtracted when he worked with his sources* but* also* of the formal arrangements which Chaucer perceived and developed as he took possession of those sources. A means of analysis which shows that it is not necessary for us to oppose* as though they were contrary positions* the reading Charles Muscatine advocates in

"Form* Texture, and Meaning in Chaucer's Knight's Tale" and the reading J. R. Hulbert advocates in "What Was Chaucer's Aim in the

Knight'a Tale?" is needed. Hulbert*s argument draws our attention to something like a moral issue: the fact is that one or the other 1 of the two noble kinsmen chooses a better way. It ought not seem to us that we need to reject Hulbert'a sense of what the work means when we accept Muscatine's sense of what the work means— an idea about the noetic value of the Knight'a Tale:

When the earthly designs suddenly crumble, true

1SP* 26 (1929), 381. 6 7

nobility is faith in the ultimate order of all things. Saturn, disorder, nothing more or less, is the agent of Arcite's death, and Theseus, noble in the highest sense, interprets it in the deepest perspective.^

The neo-structuralist approach taken in this study has been developed in part because distinctions made by critics often suggest, without sufficient ground, that we are to regard one kind of material in a work as though it is more important than another kind of material, which is also unquestionably in the work. Standing upon shifting critical ground, we may think it necessary, when we turn our attention to the text, to posit thematic ambivalence in Troilus and Criseyde. The Soethian meaning of the story is one which centers on the folly of a man who, as James Lyndon Shanley reminds us, could choose to invest his heart's blood in a transcendental, not a carnal, love.^

At odd6 with such a meaning, as Monica McAlpine points out, is a fatalist's idea of tragedy: what goes up inevitably comes down. I would like to establish a critical foundation of a sort which allows easy movement between moral and noetic meanings.

In fact, the theory of narrative offered in this study iB one which shows that, more often than not, we will have two rather

2PMLA, 65 (1950), 911-929; rpt. in Chaucer: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Edward Wagenknecht (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959)» p. 81. ^ELH, 6 (1939), 271-281; rpt. in Chaucer Criticism, II, ed. Richard J. Schoeck and Jerome Taylor (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame PresB, 1961), p. 137*

The Genre of "Troilus and Criseyde" (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 197#)> pp. 97-103. different ideas of vbat a story means* In this study I make a formal distinction between what may be called analytical and consequential structures. The moral meaning of the typical text develops out of its consequential structure*and its noetic meaning develops out of its analytical structure.

Of course, it could be pointed out that, if we regard the duality of texts from the standpoint of composition, it is possible to find an author who is not comfortable with divided purposes— that, while Boccaccio moves easily between noetic and moral meanings, Chaucer is troubled. Wo may regard Chaucer's difficult and sometimes non-existent endings as symptomatic of a fundamental problem in Chaucer's art. McAlpine's description of the ending of Troilus and Criseyde may well strike us as the last word:

Finally, in describing Troilus's exit, the narrator does not at last achieve the close he sought; rather, he merely, and inadvertently, placeB his hero beyond the reach of his art. Now he must, simply, stop; he can go no further.

But, despite the discomfort a narrator may signal to us in a closing passage, the theory of narrative upon which my study of

Chaucer's troubled endings is based expects to find tension and/or a certain arbitrariness in endings, even when the voice of the narrator is confident and the delivery of the ending is smooth. Analytical and consequential structures coexist in an

^NcAlpine, p. 2^1 artistic text, analytical structures producing noetic meanings, consequential structures producing moral, sometimes practical meanings. Against the basic structure of a text--what I call its constitutive structure— a constructive structure develops. We may be reminded of the commonplace distinction between story and plot. But the point I want to stress is that, structurally speaking, story and plot are rather difficult to separate. Thus it may be that a constitutive structure of one sort— in the

Teseida. a constitutive structure of the analytical sort— will come to us through the workings of a constructive structure so strongly developed that we will have difficulty perceiving the constitutive structure for what it is. In the Teseida. as we shall see, Boccaccio develops Arcites's struggle at such length and devotes so little space to Palaemon, that a reader may easily forget that at its foundation the work is analytical. Chaucer restores structural balance when he gives Palaemon as much attention as Arcite. But it might be observed that, in marking strongly the analytical structure of his story, he refuses the closural dynamic he might have taken from Boccaocio; and so, at the end of the Knight's Tale the reader wonders if he ought to think about man's receiving rewards according to what he has sown or about the fact of individual fates as a reality opposed to the reality of the Great Chain of Being. This confusion, a difficulty in negotiating one's way between tropology and eBchatology, may seem to evidence authenticity, however. And, just as we admire the ending of the TroiluB for the earnest striving which it 10 suggests, we may appreciate the difficulty Chaucer presents to us as we come to the end of the Knight *s Tale.

A more detailed treatment of several of the terms I have introduced is in order, and I would do well to begin with the problem of differentiating between analytical and consequential structures. In making my argument, I shall rely heavily upon the two examples of Troilus and Criseyde, a work which is most basically a consequential structure, and the Knight's Tale, a work which gives us a particularly strong example of the analytical structure. After I have used these examples in presenting what one might call attributive definitions, I will set down functional definitions for the terms "constitutive structure" and "constructive structure."

Inasmuch as analytical structures in a sense precede conse­ quential structures, it may seem that we cannot claim that the consequential structure is a radical one; and it may seem to us that the terminology usually employed by structuralists recognizes this fact. The Jakobsonian idea of metonymy suggests an axis which intersects an axis clearly related to the one I have termed

"analytical" through conceptual opposition which, as it turns out, is quite different from the conceptual opposition I work with. Where structuralism developed along Jakobsonian lines conceives of metonymy as a category which comprises relationships of simple contiguity, relationships of part-to-whole, and coincidental relationships, my idea which stands in conceptual opposition to the analytical structure, the idea of the consequential structure, develops from the observation of only caUBal relations* Generally, I refrain from using linguistic terminology, but one might say that the formal equivalent to the

Jakobsonian metonymy is, on my "syntagoatic" axis, the conse­ quential structure. And just as verbs are not things which we see, but summaries of traced motions, so it is that consequential structures trace motions. Naturally, things precede motions; and we might want to insist that the existence of Troilus, Pandarus, and Criseyde has to precede any motion in which they might become engaged. But the basic structure of Troilus and Criseyde is not an analytical structure, one which studies the characteristics of entities. Bather, it is a structure which studies an action.

Anticipating a move to functional definitions, it might be worth noting at this point, that inasmuch as the idea of the syntagm denotes the principle of progression in a text, I must reject anything but an analogical association between consequential structure and syntax. The principle of progression in a text may well manifest itself in ah analytical structure, a structure conceptually opposed to the consequential structure.

Uhen 1 speak of a structure J. am denoting a sign-signified relationship, not just the phenomenology of a set of signs. Of course, entities are always present when we study a motion; but we would not speak of an analytical structure as a structure which offers opposition to a consequential structure until the perceived entities seemed to manifest an idea. In fact, it may be Baid that sense impressions must always become perceptual content under the "sponsorship11 of one or the other of two radically different intellective principles* A change in the

"picture" nay be understood through the perception of an agent who has caused the change* Or— and now we respond under the influence of the radical intellective principle, comparison—

the "picture" nay be understood through the perception of sinilarity and difference* Whether we see that whereas the thing was on the left and is now on the right or that the society was once progressive and is now reactionary, the intellective principle is the sane one of conpariBon— the principle which gives rise to the JaXobsonian category of "netnphor." At its foundation, the Knight's Tale is an analytical structure— not nerely because one can find stylistic features that suggest the idea of conparison and contrast—

Now wol I stinte of Palanon a lite, And lete him in his prison stille dwelle, And of Arcita forth I wol yow telle* c (I, 133^-1356) but also because the conparison of the two knights is the informing idea; generally, motion in the poem amplifies ideas about opposed entities. I should underline the point here, however, that we must exercise care when we speak about ideas* The very perception of two beings in opposition is in a primitive way ideational.

This Jurij Lotman may be felt to imply when he writes of

"internal recoding," the derivation of meaning from relations

^All references to works by Chaucer are to the texts which appear in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer* 2nd ed., ed. F. N. Robinson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1937)* 13 7 between signs. Lotman has mathematical and musical systems in mind, but it must occur to us, when he undertakes a discussion of 8 "external recoding," that simple relations between characters in a story may develop a basic, pre-ideational structure. A boxing match, one might point out, seems to be an analytical structure without a signified, even in Olympic competition, where the contest­ ants are supposed to "represent" their countries. A boxing match expresses the idea of comparison itself. With the formality of bells and padded gloves, a boxing match forestalls consequential development, prolonging the comparison of two men of roughly equal weight. Elements in the boxing match which emphasize comparison accumulate to constitute a more elaborate idea, perhaps; but the constitutive structure of a boxing match is grounded on strong phenomenology.

One need not go so far as to assign Palamon and Arcite to philosophical schools— Palamon is the idealist and Arcite is the pragmatist— in crder to find the seed of an analytical structure in the Knight’s Tale. We observe, first of all, that at the center of the story is the opposition of two entities. Moreover, we notice that events occur in the story of the struggle between two knights, not because of a chain of predictable effects specifically assignable to causes, but because the characters in the story are who they are. Of course, the distinction I am

7 * The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans. Gail Lenhoff and Ronald Vroon (Ann ArEor: Michigan Slavic Contributions, 1977)» P» 36. o Lotman, pp. 36-37. trying to make here is a rather difficult one. But an examination

of critical points in the development of the narrative will show

that, just as it would take a special interest to turn a boxing

match into a structure conceived of under the primary intellective

principle of causal analysis, a reader would have to participate

in the consciousness of one of the knights in the Knight'a Tale

in a way which excludes participation in the consciousness of the

other in order to feel that the poem is primarily informed by a

consequential structure. To be sure, blow answers blow; but the presence of the thing before us is best explained, if we are

interested in what the thing is in the first place, in terms of the primary intellective principle of comparison. The force of causal

thinking, manifested as a consequential structure, is important in

the effort to achieve closure, as we shall see somewhat later in our examination of the Knight*a Tale. The task immediately before us, however, is that of using the basic structure of the poem in defining analytical structure. Later in my argument, I will show how Chaucer develops the analysis on the side of the signified, giving his signs in the structure reference to something much more than the simple idea of comparison, impressing upon us the fact that the analytical structure we examine is indeed a full one. But we should notice, at the outset, that in identifying the constitutive structure of the Knight *s Tale as an analytical structure, I am not relying upon "thematic" concerns, though the term "analytical" may suggest that sort of reliance and Chaucer 15

must finally inpreas us as a highly "philosophical" post.

Long before Theseus sets down rules which make it possible

to score a technical knockout in his massive and elaborately

decorated arena, there are events of a highly arbitrary nature in

the Knight’s Tale. For the time being, we will set aside the

question of the degree to which Chaucer added arbitrariness to a story borrowed from Boccaccio, though the relationship between

the Knight's Tale and the Teseida is a topic which demands the attention of anyone who is interested in Chaucer's endings. Our immediate concern is the text of Chaucer's poem, a text organized,

Merle Fifield argues in an article titled "The Knight's Tale:

Incident, Idea, Incorporation," as a series of cause-to-effect units which accumulate to create, finally, a meaningful structure:

Within each smaller narrative unit, woe forces attempts to achieve joy, attempts which fail only to require new action in the following section. But the woes and joys are not equal in intensity; rather they increase or decrease in accordance with the climaotic pattern. Once incorporation of incidents into such interrelated sections has been established, the causality in each section can be analyzed at a thematic level. The opening section demonstrates the irresistible force of Fortune; the duel illustrates the failure of individual action; the description of the theatre proveB the failure of all earthly order; the tournament illustrates the failure of corporate action; and the sermon offers the only solution to survival in a world governed by eternal change against which both man and society are powerless.9

I would like to argue that causality never generates the kind of

9ChauR. 3 (1968), 97. 16

thematic development Fifield sees, not because I deny the presence

of causal relations in the poem, but because I find that, with one

very important exception, causal relations are established rather

faintly, while the meanings assignable to characters and things

in the poem, outside of any causal relations, are developed

rather strongly, if, in places, arbitrarily. But Fifield's

analysis should be kept in mind when we move on to a discussion of

closural dynamics. Let us examine causal relations, or the lack

of them, within and between the narrative units in the poem.

In the "opening section" we get the information that Theseus

defeats the Amazons and wins Ypolita (I, 859-892); that the Theban women are tortured by Creon's refusal to bury their dead husbands and brothers, a fact which prompts Theseus to go again to war (I,

893 -100*0 ; that among the corpses on the field conquered by

Theseus are found the cousins Arcite and Palamon, who are sent to prison without hope of being ransomed (I, 1005-1052); that

Palamon and then Arcite fall in love with Emelye, this conflict quickly resulting in open conflict (1, 1053-1186); that one

Perotheus appears in Athens and persuades Theseus that he ought to release Arcite, who is promptly released by Theseus but under the provision that he must never return to Athens (I, 1187-127**); that Palamon languishes in prison (I, 1275-13**6). "Who hath the worse" (I, 13*+8), Chaucer's Knight asks, the one who languishes in prison or the one who languishes as an exile in his native

Thebes?

We might notice that the action which makes the Knight's question possible, release of Arcite from prison, is brought about 17

by the thinnest thread of causal connections one night imagine.

For reasons unstatedt Perotheua appears in Theseus's realm at a

time when the plot requires, Palamon and Arcite having been put

away and their lbve for Emelye having been established. Strangely,

Perotheus knows Arcite so well that he begs for his release, but

it seems that he knows Palamon, first cousin to Arcite, not at all.

Though Theseus had regarded Palamon and Arcite as serious threats

to peace, he now releases Arcite w.ithout ranBom (I, 1205). The entire progress of the first part of the Knight *s Tale is marked by the irrational, the arbitrary. Why, we wonder, does Theseus, who has felt grief to the point of heartbreak upon hearing of the plight of the Theban women and their dead husbandB (1, 95*0, allow

the pilours to go rooting into the piles of corpses of those he has brought down in battle?

Whan that this worthy due, this Theseus, Hath Creon slayn, and wonne Thebes thus, Stille in that feeld he took al nyght his re6te, And dide with al the contree as hym leste. To ransake in the taas of bodyes dede, Hem fop to strepe of harneys and of wede, The pilours diden bisynesse and cure After ihe bataille and disconfiture. (I, 1001-1008)

Between the fact of Theseus's having defeated the Amazons and

Creon's outrageous behavior there is no connection. Between

Theseus's victory over Creon's forces and the survival of two men who happen to be first cousins and blood brothers there is no connection. The reason for Arcite's release from prison is, at best, weakly founded. It iB true that one thing leads to another in the first part of the Knight's Tale, but it i6 only 18

with difficulty that one speaks of causality. Indeed, "the opening

section demonstrates the irresistible force of Fortune." Appeal to

the idea of Fortune becomes necessary if one is to understand the

progression of events. In view of the generalizing conclusion to the second part of

the narrative— Palamon and Arcite are made ecstatic by Theseus's

plan to expand a duel into a war— it is difficult to see how we

can say that the point proven by the second section is "the failure

of individual action." Individual action is in fact rewarded; and

one wonders why it was not undertaken sooner. After "a yeer or

two" (I, 1381) of living as an exile in his own land— since he

is enjoined against returning to the land where the woman he loves

lives— Arcite has a dream in which Mercury urges him to return; an end of his woe is being shaped (I, 138^-1392). But in resolving

to do as Mercury advises, Arcite says, "Ne for the drede of deeth

shal I nat spare/ To see my lady, that I love and serve" (I, 1396-

1397). It i6 as if Chaucer's Knight wants to use two contrary principles of action: on the one hand, the narrator wants to make

Fortune and celestial mechanisms responsible for events (after a year or two, the time iB right for Arcite's return to Athens); on the other hand, the narrator wants to make the bravery of a worthy knight the reason for the next change in the disposition of things

(but one wonders why the bravery of the knight was not sufficient before this time). Arcite's strategy, to take advantage of the changes grief has made in his appearance and present himself in

Athene as a man named Philostrate, reflects no great confidence in

Mercury's assurance, certainly. Ve notice that the strategy 19 Arcites pursues in Athens is one which yields a confused success.

Ve will pass quickly over the observation that it is inconsistent

for one who has experienced enfeebling grief (It 1261-1376) to give the appearance of an able-bodied laborer, one who could give

a good account of himself in the hewing of wood and the bearing of

water (I, 1422). The point about the pursuit of Arcite's strategy,

which, as it turns out, amounts to the pursuit of advancement in the courtly class, is that Arcite seemB to enjoy social success, his material rewards supplemented by secret drafts drawn on Theban banks, and is not pictured as a man anxious to reveal himself to

the woman he loves:

He was so gentil of condicioun That thurghout al the court was his renown. They seyden that it were a charitee That Theseus wolde enhauncen his degree, And putten hym in worshipful servyse, Ther as he myghte his vertu exercise. And thus withinne a while his name is spronge, Bothe of his dedes and his goode tonge, That Theseus hath taken hym so neer, That of his chambre he made hym a squier, And gaf hym gold to mayntene his degree. And eek men broghte hym out of his contree, From yeer to yeer, ful pryvely his rente; But honestly and slyly he it spente, That no man wondred how that he it hadde. And thre yeer in this wise his lif he ladde, And bar hym so, in pees and eek in werre, Ther was no man that Theseus hath derre. And in this blisse late 1 now Arcite, And speke I wole of Palamon a lite. (I, 1431-1450)

Working with similar materials, a poet might have emphasized the dramatic question here: will Arcite succeed in circumventing the authority figure and win the complete affections of the woman he loves? One can easily imagine scenes in which the young man 20 approaches cautiously, retreats, approaches boldly, retreats, enlists the aid of a squire, approaches. But Chaucer's Knight treats Arcite's pursuit of Emelye as a given, and he seems more interested in showing his success, relative to Palamon's continuing failure, than he is in showing that Arcite, too, is languishing.

Later, in the grove, Arcite will fall suddenly from the singing of a Haying Bong into melancholy ruminations (I, 1530); but when Arcite's life in court is presented to us as the result of his are incognita, it is presented as a success story, if it is a story. It is hardly a story at all (I produce the whole thing above). With Muscatine, we might observe that "the structure of 10 the poem . . . works against story interest." Closing the first episode in the second part of the poem is the presentation of a character whose comfort and affluence will contrast with the misery of another character. At a point in the work where we might expect the development of a consequential structure— tracing the motion of a knight's pursuit of a lady— we have a preoccupation with the status and intrinsic quality of an entity.

In Chaucer's version of the story, it Beems that Palamon is unaware of bis cousin's success in Athens; at least no mention of such knowledge is made in presenting Palamon's thoughts at the time of his escape from prison. The escape is an action taken after seven years in a dark and horrible prison (I, 1^51-1^52). Though the prison is strong as well as dark and horrible, it is not well

^®"Form, Texture, and Meaning in Chaucer's Knight's Tale." p. 69. 21

staffed* evidently, for Palamon makes his escape quite easily,

aided by a friend who suddenly appears and succeeds in getting the

gayler to take a draught "Of a clarree maad of a certeyn wyn,/

With nercotikes and opie of Thebes fyn" (I, 1471-1472). At least

for the time being, individual action yields success, and Palamon

must wonder— as he hides in the grove and prepares for hiB journey to Thebes, where he will gather forces and go to war against

Theseus, winning, with luck, Emelye in the end (I, 148o-1489)~

why he did not act sooner* It is not quite correct to say that,

as Fifield has argued, the futility of individual action is proven

in the second section of the Knight's Tale. My demur is grounded

on the observation that, as we have seen, individual actions, presented as truly individual actions— despite the introduction

of Mercury in the case of Arcite's decision and the invocation of Fortune ("Were it by aventure or destynee" £L% 146^7) in the case

of Palamon's decision— do produce desirable results. Indeed, one

would think, in view of- Palamon's martial determination on the day

of his escape from prison, that he would be very pleased by the

prospect which is presented at the end of the second part. He will

get, in effect, what is presented earlier as his desire— a chance

to fight for the possession of Emelye. But a second reason for

objecting to Fified's argument is a structural one. It is not as

if strategies are being tested in the Knight's Tale. As we have

seen, Arcite— a man who proves himself to be an able and courageous combatant in the field for Theseus— does little to bring his obviously promising plan to completion during his days ae a budding courtier. And yet, his presence in Theseus's court is 22 a function of his desire to win Emelye. Palamon's escape from prison is accomplished without what one would expect in a consequen­ tial structure— the presentation of a problem, the development of a plan, the actual test. In Chaucer's version of the story, cause/effect connections are faint or nonexistent. So it might be said that the second reason that I object to Fifield's conclusion about the second part of the poem is a very basic, structural one.

Oppositions within the parts of Chaucer's poem do produce effects, but it is not quite correct to argue that units of consequential structure produce meanings which develop out of cause-attribution.

I want to argue that within the parts of the Knight'a Tale the primary intellective principle is that of comparison, not cause- attribution; that analytical structures within the parts of the - narrative end in arbitrarily-developed "consequences"; and that the pattern of effects which develops in the poem anticipates closure only in a very unpointed way.

It must bo clear by now that while the idea of an analytical structure may be clear and separate from the idea of a consequential structure, in actual texts we will expect to find the two basic structures working in combination. We study two knights, their separate characteristics and their motions, in the Knight's Tale.

But, as wo shall see when we develop the necessary functional definitions for constitutive and constructive structures, we should not think of the combination of analytical and consequential structures in quantitative terms. The dynamic of a poem depends upon there being a functional difference between the two structures.

It is as if Chaucer's Knight wants us to see that the most basic 23

structure of his tale is an analytical structure, so faint is his attention to causal connections, the development of consequential

structure. We might consider the response of Palamon to Theseus when the latter interrupts the duel in the grove. Palamon, whose intent waB to raise an army against Theseus, delivers these lines:

Sire, what needeth wordes mo? We have the deeth disserved bothe two. Two woful wrecches been we, two oaytyves, That been encombred of oure owene lyves; And as thou art a rightful lord and juge, Ne yif us neither mercy ne refuge, But sle me first, for seinte charitee 1 But sle my felawe eek as wel as me; Or sle hym first, for though thou knowest it lite, This is thy mortal foo, this is Arcite, That fro thy lond is banysshed on his heed, For which he hath deserved to be deed. (I, 1715-1726)

Palamon's rather sudden despair is used to join the knights in a common condition, though they have had very different states of being before their meeting in the grove. With Palamon's rather legalistic idea of honor, manifested earlier w.hen he charged

Arcite with being a traitor for his having fallen in love with

Emelye (I, 11^6-1151), the speech presently under review is consistent. But we should notice that it iB consistent in terms of Palamon's character, or one aspect of it, not in terms of

Palamon's project. When we read Troilus and Criseyde we will see quite a different case, when we observe that in making a character consistent in completing a motion our sense of what the character is becomes uncertain. At any rate, Chaucer's Knight useB an element of Palamon's character to create a common status for the 2*t

rivals. Theseus responds to Palamon'b confession in a way which

must make us wonder about his practical purposes. At first, he

agrees with Palamont the two knights ought to die (I, 17^2-17^7);

but the women are so touched by what they hear that they beg for

clemency (1, 17^8-1761), and Theseus cannot help seeing the

virtue of meroy:

And softe unto hymself he seyde, "Fy Upon a lord that wol have no mercy, But been a leon, bothe in word and dede, To hem that been in repentaunce and drede, As wel as to a proud despitous man That wol mayntene that he first bigan." (I, 1773-1778)

And for some reason, the power of Love as a force which conditions

men's actions must be considered (I, 1785-1825). David C. Benson is right to point out that in the character of Theseus we find a

pagan whose idea of virtue is limited by the man's pre-Christian

place in history. 11 P it we notice that it is in distinctly heroic

terms, or in the terms of courtly love, and not in a manner which actually anticipates Christianity that Theseus tries to solve the

problem before him. Rather than offer counsel which would

encourage transcendence of the power of carnal love, Theseus acknowledges that power and forgives the two knights. He then

formalizes the contest between them, taking it two steps beyond what it would have been if Palamon had lept out of the bushes and grabbed Arcite by the throat on the day before. Theseus does not

11"The Knight's Tale aB History.'• ChauR, 3 (1968). 107. 122- 123. 25

"mayntene that he first began" and in fact answers a demand of an

entirely different order from the one to which he responded when

he imprisoned the two knights in the first place. As was the case

when consistency in characterisation allowed Chaucer's Knight to

make Palamon participate in an analytical move which gave common

status to Palamon and Arcite, consistency in characterization—

Theseus is one who always seeks a pagan, albeit virtuous, path—

allows Chaucer's Knight to establish a formalization of man's

dependence upon the will of the gods.

The relationship between the first two parts of the Knight's

Tale is progressive and comparative. It is progressive inasmuch

as it takes the characters of the story from a condition of vague

dependence upon the workings of Fortune to the point where dependence

upon the workings of Fortune can be viewed in formal, public terms.

The relationship is comparative inasmuch as whereas the first

part of the story presents the separation of two young men, the

second part of the story presents the association of the two young

men on a common ground.

In the third section of the work, the arena in which the

decisive battle between the forces of Palamon and the forces of

Arcite will occur is described. We have seen, in our reading of

the first two parts of the poem, that the key attributes of an analytical structure are arbitrary progression (not progression which develops through the workings of specific, predictable causation) and an interest in states of being rather than projects.

In the third part of the poem we see an example of the tendency of an analytical structure to become elaborated on the side of 26 the signified. To use Lotman's terminology, we might say that whereas consequential structures tend to become elaborated through

"internal recoding," the development of relations between signs-- the typical detective story comes to mind— analytical structures tend to become elaborated through "external recoding." Immediate agency often refers us to more distant agency— in a political or religious system, perhaps.

In the third part of the Knight's Tale a conflict between two men is generalized. This effect may be felt from the very beginning, when the huge arena is described:

The circuit a myle was aboute, Vailed of stoon, and dyched al withoute. Round waB the shap, in manere of compas, Ful of degrees, the heighte of sixty pas, That whan a man was set on o degree, He letted nat his felawe for to see. (I, 1887-1892)

The size and shape of the arena suggest the inclusiveness of Theseus's enterprize. Reaching up toward the heavens, the many degrees (tiers) of seats accommodate all degrees of men; and, while the arena is conceived of as a thing by means of which Fortune (which manifests itself in a general, "felt," way in the first part of the story) will answer a question for the satisfaction of society in general, individual perspectives are important. Every man will have a clear view. Fortune, by giving a particular court the answer to a particular question, will make itself more comprehensible to the individual man. Theseus' project is exploratory. The 27 whole kingdom is involved in this exploration:

For in the lond ther was no crafty man That geometric or ars-metrike han, lie portreyour, ne kervere of ymages. That Theseus ne yaf him mete and wages, The theatre for to maken and devyse. (I, 1897-1901)

We might notice thatt in generalizing the characters of the drama by providing them with oratories that relate them to dominant motives, Chaucer's Knight seems to ignore impressions which were probably created by their actions. Palamon, it is true, showed devotion to Venus when he first saw Emelye and mistook her for that goddess (I, 1101-1102); but he shows a martial spirit in his intention to make war on Theseus and in his conduct in the grove when he meets Arcite. Arcite, os we have noticed, must be prompted by Mercury in making his return to Athens, and in Athens, he does not seem especially agresBive in his pursuit of the woman to whom he is devoted. But we do not worry about characterization in the way that reading novels of the 1920s and 30a may have conditioned us to worry. As we read this medieval narrative of the sort which has an analytical structure as its constitutive struoture, we notice that the range of possibilities for the characters, as people, is made to serve in the amplification of a system of celestial powers. The rhetoric of this fiction, contrary to what

William Frost argues, 12 is not one which involves symbolism— so that in the pursuit of human projects we find the implication of

12,,An Interpretation of Chaucer's Knight's Tale,11 RES, 25 (19**9)» 290-30**; rpt. in Chaucer Criticism, I, ed. Richard Schoeck and Jerome Taylor (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 19&0), p. 110. 28 general ideas. Quite to the contrary, in the narrative before us, human motives are arbitrarily put into association with eternal identities. Arcite is no more of a mesomorph than Palamon;

Emelye's association with the eternal virgin is clearly affirmed in the oratory, but before Emelye goes there to pray the associa­ tion is implied by no dramatic means. TheseuB and his theatre force associations with eternal identities in order to bring about the discovery of what has to be. Being prepared is a public trial" by-corabat which is meant to discover the judgment, not of a god, but of several gods. And the whole world is curious.

Quite arbitrarily, Arcite and Palamon are associated with eternal identities, and, through them, with allegorical figures as well as characters from classical and biblical tradition.

I doubt that the narrator has in mind Palamon's inactivity in prison (when all he would have had to do to make good an escape was to overcome a single jailer) in listing the character of

Ydelnesse (I, I9*t0). The association is entirely arbitrary. The association of Palamon with the characters of Solomon (I, 19^2) and

Turnus (I, 19^5) is tenuous, grounded on nothing more than the common fact of difficulties in managing sexual motives amorous and proprietary. Perhaps to our surprise, we notice in the images and stories associated with Arcite, in his place in the oratory of Hars, pictures from the common life:

Yet saugh I brent the shippes hoppesteres; The hunte strangled with the wilde beres; The sowe freten the child right in the cradel; The cook yscalded, for al his longe ladel. (I, 2017-2020) War, the proper subject, is set aside in the progression of ideas,

the departure from the proper subject aided not so accidentally, perhaps, by Chaucer's "translating" Boccaccio's bollatrici in 13 "navi bellatrici" (Teseida, VII, 37) with the word hoppestereB. Though dancing ships do in fact appear in war and the boar is an

animal long associated with warfare, a mere hopster is probably not solemn enough for battle, and a sow eating a baby does not make

an especially good metaphor for the ravages of war. One might say, in studying the wallB of the oratory dedicated to Diana, that the

image of a woman crying out in child birth (I, 2083-2088), though it might provide an object lesson, does not impress upon us the

force of the goddess's power. The principle of composition we see

in the description of the three oratories is grounded, not on cause- attribution, but on comparison, and rather loose comparison at

that. Moreover, the fact that we would have difficulty deciding whether we should identify the particular kind of comparison as metaphorical or metonymic is significant, we might notice. An analytical structure develops out of the workings of an intellective principle which searches for things, be they parts of a primary thing or separate entities which may be brought into association.

The theatre implicates as much of life as might be implicated in the fight between Palamon and Arcite. Built in a manner which may remind us of symbolism but is not in fact symbolic, it draws in images of life as it is lived by common, as well as uncommon,

^Articles in the O.E.D. suggest that hopping is less dignified than dancing. men* What is more, it creates a formal means by which the great executors of Providence might resolve a very particular demands d'amour. But at this point we should recognize a mystery in the poem. From the human point of view, the theatre offers the gods a means by which they might make their will known, but from the point of view of the gods, the theatre, with the prayers that it encourages, is a thing which creates strife. The poem becomes incoherent, actually, when, after signB given the propitiators— a quaking statue, a voice, strange-behaving torches— the gods begin to argue (I, 2*08-24**2). It does not become incoherent simply because the gods argue; rather, it becomes incoherent because, in answering Palamon's prayer, the first one of the three prayers,

Venus has signed a delayed victory to him* Venus behaves in a way which suggests that, though she has presumably signed Palamon an accurate answer, she does not know that the victory Mars signs to Arcite will be, in effect, nullified:

And right anon swich strif ther is bigonne, For thilke grauntyng, in the heven above, Bitwixe Venus, the goddesse of love, And Mars, the stierne god armypotente, That Juppiter was bisy it to stente; Til that the pale Saturnus the colde, That knew so manye of aventures olde, Foond in his olde experience an art That he ful soone hath plesed every part. (I, 2*0 8 -2V*6 )

In generalizing the conflict between Palamon and Arcite, Theseus, through his theatre, creates conflict in the heavens; so we cannot quite agree with Fifield when he says that the third part of the poem "proves the failure of all earthly order.11 In fact, earthly order proves efficacious indeed, inasmuch as the device of the

theatre and the tournament which is to be held in it force the

gods to make a final decision. Saturn, as Dorothy Bethurum Loomis

tells us, is associated with wisdom by the mythographers who

instructed Chaucer. To the astrologers, Bethurum Loomis tellB us, 14 Saturn was a much less likeable character, a cruel god. But whether he is cruel or not, it is clear at the end of the third part of the Knight's Tale that the problem of a rivalry between two young men has been sent on to a higher court. The problem has been shifted from Theseus to Saturn, who has become, incidentally, sick of all the bickering between the goddess of love and the god of war:

Bitwixe yow ther moot be son tymc pees, Al be ye noght of o compleccioun, That causeth al day swich divisioun. (I, Zk?k-Zk7&)

Saturn may not be the Chief Justice, but he is clearly among the supreme, and when his decision is called for, he will move. He knows the precedents, and he is not nearly as sentimental as

Theseus iB. The intellective principle informing this narrative is the principle of comparison.

It might be argued that the prayers of Arcite and Palamon cause directly the outcome of the action. But there is the problem of prophecy. Venus, as we have noticed, signs Palamon's

ili "Saturn in Chaucer's Knight's Tale," in Chaucer und seine Zeit: Symposion fur Walter F. Schirmer, ed. Arno Esch (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 19^8), pp. 15^157. 32

victory to him in a manner which predicts events as they in fact

develop. In Diana's prophecy, we may notice, there is curious

equivocationt

Doghter, stynt thyn hevynesse. Among the goddes hye it is affermed, And by eterne word writen and confermed, Thou shalt ben wedded unto oon of tho That han for thee so muchel care and wo; But unto which of hem I may nat telle. (I, 23*f8-2353)

Diana does not have to explain why she may not tell; she does not

even have to tell us if it is a matter of her not being able or

of her being constrained by orders from above. In this analytical structure, the divine workings and human efforts are kept separate.

But, as we have seen, the third part of the poem closes with a problem: an effect has been created by human strategies (the

tournament begins when the young men go to their respective

temples, not on the next day, when they take up arms), and now

a knot, which the passages of prophecy would have us believe is non-existent, must be untied.

In the fourth part of the Knight's Tale the contrast between Theseus, who would formalize and soften the conflict, and the

eternal powers, who want to give final, untheatrical answers, is developed. Characteristically, Theseus, who married the woman against whom he fought a war, who let a man out of prison at the

urging of a friend, who capitulated when women cried and begged

him to abandon his intention of killing the young renegades, changes the rules of battle, making it possible for a defeated rival to survive the ordeal. According to the original rules 33 of the game, to survive the contest * Palamon or Arcite would have had to retreat. This seems to be the implication:

This is to seyn, that wheither he or thow May with his hundredt as I spak of now, Sleen his contrarie, or out of lystes dryve, Thanne shal I yeve Emelya to wyve To whom that Fortune yeveth so fair a grace. (I, 1857-1861)

Now, on the eve of the tournament, Theseus sends a herald to announce a change that will make it possible for the defeated but unretreating contestant to survive:

And he that is at meschief shal be take And noght slayn, but be broght unto the stake That shal hen ordeyned on either syde; But thider he shal by force, and there abyde. (I, 2551-255*0

Theseus, it might be observed, undermines the potential effectiveness of the device which he has designed to solve the problem of a demande d 1amour. To explain why his actions are inconsistent with his purposes, we must refer to his generalized quality— not to what he is trying to do, but to what he is. Consistently, it might be observed, Theseus is to be associated with the divinity near whose temple the women of Thebes waited when Theseus was due to come down the road from Scithia— Clemence (I, 928)--this, despite the fact that pictured on the banner that he carries is the image of Mars (I, 975)• He seems to obey a Martial impulse when he turns the duel between the two young men into a war, but then he softens his position, obeying an impulse of a very different order. Theseus is consistent precisely because he continually repeatB the same essential turn-about; and he does so without regard for any practical considerations.

The contrast between Theseus's desire to achieve a certain state of ideal knighthood and Saturn's desire to get things done and over with is figured in the Temple of Diana, when after the behavior of the torches has signed an answer to Eaelye's petition,

"at the brondes ende ran anon/ As it were blody dropos many oon" (I, 2339-23*10)* Though Theseus makeB an effort to formalize the conflict of Palamon and Arcite to the point where ceremony might replace the eventuation of material, final consequences, when side goes against side in the arena, one has the impression of battle-as-usual:

Ther is namoore to seyn, but west and est In goon the speres ful sadly in arrest; In gooth the sharps spore into the syde. Ther seen men who kan juste and who kan ryde; Ther shyveren shaftes upon sheeldes thikke; He feeleth thurgh the herte-spoon the prikke. Up spryngen speres twenty foot on highte; Out goon the swerdes as the silver brighte; The helmes they tohewen and toahrede; Out brest the blood with stierne stremes rede; With myghty maces the bones they tobreste. (I, 2601-2611)

Though Saturn has to employ the supernatural services of a furie to give the event in the arena a decisive conclusion, Chaucer describes in naturalistic detail the effects of the injury Arcite receives when his horse throws him. Theseus designs a means through which the gods will work out an answer to the problem. The problem is solved, then, without regard for Theseus's aesthetic and sentimental concerns, concerns which might threaten the 35 effectiveness of a humanly-conceived device meant to draw-from heaven a final answer.

Peter Elbow, it might be felt, suggests in his discussion of the "dialectical" structure of the Knight's Tale an idea of the structure which notices, but does not sufficiently emphasize, points of contrast:

How does Chaucer manage to satisfy the reader while failing to answer the demands d*amour on which the whole poem is built? How does he create a satisfactory sense of conclusion by the end of Part IV? The answer is that the poem builds— especially in Part IV— a bigger and richer world, one in which the conventionally posed love problem seems insufficient or unsatisfactory as a way of understanding life. The tactic, in short, is to face the reader with a problem— the demande d 1amour— and then to show, dialectically, that the problem is the problem. The way Chaucer enlarges the world and deepens the level of discourse is through Theseus, Saturn, and the final First-Mover spooch.^

I would emphasize pointB of contrast. I would keep in mind the notion Elbow expresses in his introduction to Oppositions in

Chaucer— that "dialectic" can be conceived of in an un-Hegelian sense, that synthesis is not the necessary product of thesis and antithesis. The two aspects of Theseus's personality compare, roughly, with two characters in the heavens who incessantly fight.

The perspective which looks forward to the future is radically opposed to the perspective which finds in time opportunity only for the repetition of the paBt. I think that it is only by means of the exercise of will that an ending is achieved in the

^Oppositions in Chaucer (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1975)» p« 79* 36

Knight's Tale. In Theseus's First-Mover speech ve find the

opposition of two very different categories of thought-one which determines what is and one which determines what ought to be

done;

Of man and womman seen we wel also That nedes, in oon of thise termes two, This is to seyn, in youthe or elles age, He moot be deed, the kyng as shal a page; Som in his bed, som in the depe see, Som in the large feeld, as men may see; The helpeth noght, al goth that ilke weye. Thanne may I seyn that al this thyng moot deye. What maketh this but Juppiter, the kyng, That is prince and cause of alle thyng, Convertynge al unto his propre voile From which it is dirryved, sooth to telle? And heer-agayns no creature on lyve, Of no degree, availleth for to stryve. Thanne is it vysdom, as it thynketh me, «To maken vertu of necessitee, And take it well that we may nat eschue. And namely that to us alle is due. (I, 3027-30MO

When we make a virtue of necessity, we are in fact making something.

Acceptance of change is necessitated by no logic, and, in fact, the idea of necessity itself remains a question. Marriage is always a choice. Of course, for health's sake, it is good to put death away and make a fresh start. But between the observation of what is and the determination of what ought to be done there is not even a shadow. Ve might move from one order of intellection to another, but we must realise that volition, not logic, makes the move possible. Like Jupiter himself, ve are free to convert givens

(from what they are derived is still a mystery) into ground for 37 moral judgment, or to let them remain as givens.

Quite arbitrarily, as we have seen, Chaucer's Knight identifies

demande d*amour figures with celestial entities. Without regard

for his practical motive, as we have seen, Theseus tries to impose

the sense of orderliness and justice we associate with ideal knighthood on a process that is completed by a god who responds

to legal, but not ethical, considerations. Finally, by bringing Palamon and Emelye together, Theseus creates a picture— a tableau which is meant to solve, but cannot solve, the problem implicit in the First Mover speech:

And thus with alle blisBe and melodye Hath Palamon ywedded Emelye. And Qod, that al this wyde world hath wroght, Sende hym his love that hath it deere aboght; 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 also gentilly, That nevere was ther no word hem bitwene Of jalousie or any oother teene. (x, 3097-3106)

A cause/ effect progression is, of course, very important in the development of an ending in the Knight's Tale— so important that it seems to offer a challenge to the fatalistic vision implicit in the signals given to the propitiators and in the discussion of

God's will we see in the First Mover speech— but the mostbasic structure of the story is an analytical structure. The attributes of an analytical structure, as we have seen are, most importantly, an interest directed by the intellective principle of comparison and, as am expected corollary, and interest in entities. As we read Troilua and Criseyde we will amplify an attributive definition of the consequential structure. In the case of a consequential structure* ve see an interest directed by the intellective principle of cause-attribution and, as an expected corollary, an interest in motions. We might notice that at the end of the

Knight’s Tale ve find Theseus urging an action, bis argument folloving the success, though it hardly seems a success to the child of Diana rather suddenly devoted to Arcite, of a strategy- following the completion of a motion. As ve have observed, consequential structures tend to produce moral meanings. Analytical structures, as ve have observed, tend to develop noetic meanings.

But the problem of meaning, given the fact that literary structures present us vith combinations of the attributes of consequential and analytical structures, must await full attention for a time.

The constitutive structure of Troilus and Criseyde is of the consequential type; there is a necessary chain of events. Since

Troilus is enamoured of a woman below his station, he must keep his affair secret; since Troilus keeps his affair secret, the arrangement of the exchange of Criseyde for Antenor is made without any consideration being paid to Troilus's interests. Because

Criseyde is alone and friendless in the Greek camp, she is receptive to Diomede's advances. Perhaps the best way of showing that these facts constitute the foundation of the story— that they manifest a fundamental informing interest or intellective principle and are not merely elements in the presentation— would be the somewhat paradoxical method of comparing Boccaccio's clear presentation of causality in Filostrato with Chaucer's rather muted presentation. This will prepare ub for a treatment 39 of the complexity of meaning in Troilus and Criseyde and it will

give us a good basis upon which to build when I develop functional

definitions of constitutive and constructive structures. After

those functional definitions have been developed with Troilus and

Criseyde as the example, we will consider the Knight *s Tale again, noticing, in the course of our second consideration of that poem,

two very different and yet basically similar ways in which Chaucer used the Filostrato and the Teseida. In a direct and untroubled way, it may seem, Boccaccio was able to move events in a story of Becret love, the Filostrato. along to the point where they suggested something which we would call social criticism. There is a relationship between Pandaro's declaration that he has failed in love because he has not been wise enough to keep it secret and the portion of Boccaccio's closing homily which deplores pride of social place:

And many women also, because they are descended from noble lineage and can count their ancestors, believe that they deserve advantage over others in loving, and think that civility is an outrage, and that they can turn up their noses and go about with a disdainful air. Shun all such and hold them base, for beasts they are and not noble ladies.

^E molte ancor perchfe d' alto lignaggio/ Discese Bono, e sanno annoverare/ Gli avoli lor, si credon che vantaggio/ Deggiano aver dall' altre nell* amare;/ E pensan che costume sia oltraggio,/ Torcere il naso, e dispettose andare;/ Queste schifate, ed abbiaiele a vili,/ Che bestie son, non son donne gentili^/

16 Filostrato. VIII, 31. Passages are identified by canto and stanza. The text referred to and quoted in this study, a parallel text, is the following: N. E. Griffin and A. B. Hyrick, edB. and trans,, The "Filostrato11 of Giovanni Boccaccio (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1929). 40

The connection between the two passages— the one in which Pandaro

urges Troilo to adopt a course of secrecy and the one in which

criticism of undemocratic social attitudes may be found— is

established at two points in the narrative. When Troilo, upon hearing of the arrangment his father has made with the Greeks to obtain Antenor in exchange for Criseida, explains why he has not revealed his love affair to his father, he includes the explanation which Chaucer's Troilus stresses— he does not want to do anything that would harm Criseyde's reputation— but he makes it clear that the ultimate reason that he cannot ask for his father's approval and protection in this affair is that the social structure does not permit such a thing:

Nor dare I hope even then that ^Priam^ would feel that he had any right to give her to me at the expense of a plighted troth, and because he would declare her beneath me, upon whom he desireth to bestow a lady of royal lineage.

^Ne spero ancora ch' el dovesse darla,/ Si per non romper le cose promesse,/ E perche la direbbe diseguole/ A me, al qual vuol dar donna reale.7 (IV, 69)

The other point at which Boccaccio is able to establish a link between the strategy of secrecy and the idea that class-consciousness is an anti-vital thing is, of course, the point at which Cassandra's remarks disdainful of Criseida prompt Troilo to deliver a 104-line tirade. "Would that thou wert enamored of a noble lady," Cassandra says, "instead of having brought thyself to wasting away on account of the daughter of a wicked priest, a man of evil life and of snail importance."

poichfe pur cosi doveva andare,/ Di nobil donna fost\i innamoratol/ Che condotto ti se' a consumare/ Per la figlia d' un nrete scellerato,/ E mal vissuto e di piccolo affare • . ._/ (VII, 8?)

"Nobility is to be found wherever virtue is," Troilo replies (&

gentilezza dovunque virtute . . . £VII, 9^7). At the moment

when the young man's secret is exploded, the ultimate reason why it

has been a secret is stressed. It is to the general reason, as much as it is to the exposure of particular facts, that Troilo so violently reacts.

Not only does Chaucer eschew the note of democracy which

Boccaccio sounds in his passages of crisis, denouement and epilogue, but in his establishment of the premise upon which the action of the story and Boccaccio's theme is based Chaucer is less emphatic.

Instead of the direct declaration of Pandarothat the reason he has failed in love is that he has failed to keep his infatuation a secret— -"I have loved unhappily and to my sorrow still love.

This happeneth because I have not, as thou, loved another secretly"

(Io ho amato sventuratamente,/ Ed amo ancora per lo mio peccato;/

E cio avvien, perch^ celatamente/ Non ho, slccome tu, altrui amato ll/)— there is in Chaucer's poem at the equivalent point in the exchange between the two men, nothing more than repetitive development of the argument that a man's failure can prepare him to be a worthy teacher. This block of argument puts forty-two lines between Troilua's demand, "How devel maistow brynge me to blisse?" (I, 623) and Pandarus's admission, "I love oon best, and kZ that me smerteth sore" (I, 667). What nay appear to be mere prolixity serves to establish the individuality of Pandarus.

Significantly, Chaucer's Pandarus, unlike Boccaccio's character, does not cone directly to the point. In sixteen lines presenting tvo briefly-stated examples which show that one who has failed cam be a teacher, Boccaccio takes us from Troilo's demand,

"Qo away, and leave me here to fight with my distress" (Vanne, e lascia/ Qui me combatter colla mia ambascia £11, 8/), to Pandaro's admission, "I have loved unhappily and to my sorrow still love." Pandaro then explains why he has failed. Chaucer shows a readiness to de-eraphasize what is the foundation of a consequential constitu­ tive structure through the use of a stylistic feature we may associate with analytical structure— an accumulation of eight analogous examples, one of which is developed at Borne length. In the space between our being told that Troilus falls into numbing despair and Pandarus's next block of argument (I, 778-826),

Chaucer uses indirect discourse to have Pandarus say that if he could have been more discreet in pursuing love he would have been more successfult

And namelich in hiB counseil tellynge That toucheth love that oughte ben secree; For of himself it wol ynough out sprynge, But if that it the bet governed be. (I, 7**3-71*6)

The need for secrecy, expressed with great emphasis by Boccaccio's

Pandaro, receives much less emphasis in Chaucer's presentation of

Pandarus. In Book II of Chaucer's poem Criseyde is given a long passage of rumination in which she struggles with the advantages and disadvantages of entering into a relationship with Troilus, the 1*t6 lines between her seeing Troilus pass by in the street— • a sight which has caused an interruption in the process begun immediately after Pandarus's departure from her house (first step r in his mission having been accomplished)— and her declaration that nothing is gained if nothing is ventured* Criseyde's consideration of alternative strategies obeys rules of practicality* She notices that it would be to her credit "with swich a lord to deele"--for her "estat" as well as for hiB’Wl e " (II, 706-707). And there is the fact that if she does not willingly give herself to this prince, he might simply take her, his social status being as great as it is (II, 708-71*0* If she capitulates, she can make sure that he will not turn boaster (fortunately, he doeB not have the reputation of a boaster) by withholding a certain measure of love ("He als I nyl him nevere so cherice/ That he may make avaunt, by juste cause" 726-7227)* If she is shrewd in conducting her secret affair, it will even be possible for people to know that Troilus suffers from his infatuation without the fact necessarily incriminating her; for many men love women who will have nothing to do with them (II, 729-755)* In trying to understand why Troilus, second only to Hector, would want her, she reminds herself that she is, after all, one of the fairest women in Troy; and she is one of the "goodlieste^ whoso taketh hede,/ And so men seyn, in al the town of Troie" (II, 7**7-7**8). She has managed to win a good reputation, in spite of the fact that she is her own woman and no man is running her life (II, 750-756). After following Criseyde through this list of considerations, we

wonder if there is actually redundancy in her line expressing the

supposition that she might love Troilus while retaining her honor

and her name. Thus far in her considerations, honor has proved

to be a function of reputation. She 1b anxious about how much

will be disclosed concerning her prospective affair with Troilus,

and the end for which loving Troilus would bo a means is nothing

like participation in Love, the Platonic form.

There remain for Criseyde the difficulties that love affairs

are always so stormy and complicated, that love necessarily entails a loss of libertyt

Alias) syn I am free, Sholde I now love, and put in jupartie My sikernesse, and thrallen libertee? AllasI how dorst 1 thenken that folie? May I naught wel in other folk aspie Hire dredful joys, hire constreinte, and hire peyne? Ther loveth noon, that she nath why to pleyne. For love is yet the mooste stormy lyf, Might of hymself, that evere was bigonne; For evere som mystruot or nice strif Ther is in love, som cloude is over that sonne. Therto we wrecched wommen nothing konne, Whan us is wo, but wepe and sitte and thinke; Oure wrecche is this, ouro owen wo to drynke. (II, 771-784)

But, like the true niece of her uncle, Criseyde is able to let a proverb resolve her difficulties: "He which that nothing undertaketh,/ No-thing ne acheveth" (II, 807-80 8).

We should notice that Chaucer's passage compares with a 120-line passage of Boccaccio's which precedes Criseida's seeing

Troilo in the street (II, 69-8 3 ), and that the defense which Chaucer's narrator offers when it occurs to him that some might think Criseyde*s love "Bodyn" would be much more appropriate in

the Filostrato. where, instead of intensifying the woman's

indecision, the sight of the young man ends it. Boccaccio makes

the appearance of Troilo in the street, an appearance which may

have been expected (II, 82), the reason that the woman decides to

enter into a relationship with the man:

And that indifference which was holding Creseida at cross-purposes with herself vanished, as she praised to herself his manner, his pleasing actions, and his courtesy, and so suddenly was she captivated that she desired him above every other good, and grieved much at the time lost when she had not known his love. /E quella trepidezza che intra due/ Criseida tenea, sen fuggl via,/ Seco lodando le maniere sue,/ 01i atti piacovoli e la cortesia;/ E b\ subitamente presa fue,/ Che sopra ogni altro bene lui disia,/ E duolle forte del tempo perduto,/ Che '1 suo amor non avea conosciuto.7 (II, 83)

Chaucer, though he takes from Boccaccio the idea of giving Criseyde a long passage in which she will consider the possibilities before her, blunts the consequentiality of events found in his source.

Not only the fact of Criseyde'a deciding to enter into a relationship with Troilus, but the form pursuit of the relationship must take, is given les6 firm basis in causal connections. Chaucer assumes the adoption of a course of secret love, if any course of love is to be adopted. But Boccaccio seems to make secret love the one of two alternatives which Criseida might employ as she tries to save herself from loneliness in old age. In reviewing

Criseyde's thoughts at the equivalent point in Chaucer's narrative, we do not find such a clear indication of the woman's purposefulness, nor do we find a clear contrast between the merits of married-life and the joys of having an affair, such as we find that contrast articulated in Boccaccio's poem. "Water acquired by stealth is sweeter far than wine had in abundance," Criseida declares (L'acqua furtiva, assai piu dolce cosa/ E che il vin con abbondanza avuto

£11, 7jf7). A strong consequential chain is established and emphasized, then, in Boccaccio: Crisoida knows that she will not be young forever, she is repelled by the idea of marriage, she has a strong sexual appetite, a secret love affair is her best course,

Troilo is an attractive man, she fallB in love. Chaucer blurs the necessity of these causal connections, though they are the elements of the constitutive structure with which he works. In his handling of the materials, Chaucer gives apparent arbitrariness, and sometimes actual arbitrariness, to the motion of events. He does not make the appearance of Troilus in the street an expected event.

He makes bis narrator claim that Criseyde has fallen in love, and then he Bets against this general idea the particular ruminations of the woman. He allows explicit declarations to be undercut by specific events, and he makes elements such as Criseyde's fear of growing old (obliquely suggested at the end of her "portrait" in

Book V?) and Pandarus's failure because he has not been sufficiently discreet less pointed. The idea that secret love is a strategy is blunted in Chaucer; and yet, the necessity of secrecy remains the central, informing given in the tale. Chapter Two

The Troilus and the Knight’s Tale II:

Constitutive and Constructive Structures

The constitutive structure of a narrative manifests one of two intellective principles, as does the constructive structure* The sort of structuralist theory I am developing here is to be distin­ guished from anthropologically-based theory such as we find in

Northrop Frye's work, and it is to be distinguished, as I have insisted, from linguistics-based theory such as we find in the work of main-stream formalists such as Roman Jakobson, Tsvetzan Todorov, and Roland Barthes. When Barthes says that either the paradigmatic or the syntagm&tic structure is dominant in a text, he follows the

Jakobsonian tradition which could find in the dominance of one structure or the other a kind of aphasia.^ According to the theory under development in this study, the strength of one structure of a text cannot be measured on the same scale as the strength of the other structure, and, in a senso, to speak of dominance iB inaccurate. If the constitutive structure of a text is of the analytical nature, the problem to be worked out in the text will be of an analytical sort, and no amount of energy will change the nature of the problem. The problem of the comparison of two knights may be "answered11 by a consequential structure, but the

Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967)» pp. 60-61.

**7 consequential structure will not actually replace the analytical

structure. What develops in the Knight1s Tale, as we have seen. Is an ending that "answers" the problem posed at the beginning, when two knights fall in love with the same woman. Now. if we imagine a story which poses this problem— *Knight #1 falls in love with a woman and he needs to find a way to eliminate Knight #2— ■ we are not imagining the same constitutive structure as we found when we first identified the problem out of which the Knight's

Tale develops. Literature imitates consciousness, and point of view is not an independent variable. In time, of course, the consciousness imitated in the study of a body of materials can be changed, so that the story of the struggle of two men can become the story of how one man beat another. But such a change is not merely a change in the perspective— -though "perspective" is a key term; it is a change in the story. The constitutive structure of some stories derives from a problem manifesting the intellective principle of comparison, and the constitutive structure of other storieB derives from a problem manifesting the intellective principle of cause-attribution. The primary informing function in narrative is performed by a constitutive structure.

The primary communicative function in narrative is performed by a constructive structure. As we have seen in our brief comparison of consequentiality in Troilus and Criseyde and in the Filoatrato. Chaucer communicates the problem established in

Boccaccio's poem in a way which isolates the perspective of

Pandarus, even while it retains the essential fact that Pandarus has learned from unhappy experience the necessity of secrecy. Pandarus becomes, in Chaucer's poem, a "character," and he contrasts

with the entity in Boccaccio's poem. Boccaccio's Pandaro merely

serves to advance the progress of a story which will trace the

motion of a clandestine love affair. In the action which Robert

P. apRoberts has identified as "the central episode of Troilus

and Criseyde--it occurs on the rainy night (III, 526-1hl*0-»we

might observe, along with apRoberts (though we may not agree

completely with his defense of Criseyde), that a distinction

between the perspectives of Pandarus and his niece is impressed 3 upon us. Probably influenced by the Filocolo. Chaucer lets the

pandar control matters. It is not for Criseyde to participate actively in the laying of a plot. In his handling of the materials

of the Fllostrato, Chaucer tends to isolate characters, hold them

up for comparison with other characters, and, in a rather complex

manner, suggest ideational implications. The constructive structure of Troilus and Criseyde may be characterized as strongly analytical, whereas the constructive structure of the Filostrato may be regarded as faintly analytical.

For C. S. Lewis, the phenomenon I have observed thus far in my treatment of Troilus and Criseyde may be recognized as an aspect of "medievalization." In the treatment Chaucer gave individual

2"The Central Episode in Chaucer's Troilus," PMLA, 77 (1962), p. 361. ^Karl Young, The Origin and Develonment of the Story of Troilus and Criseyde (1908; rpt* New York; Qordian Press, 1968), pp. 1^0- 50 elements and in the purpose he pursued, Chaucer was a more "serious"

(my term) poet than Boccaccio: "^Chaucer7 not only modified his story so as to make it a more accurate representation in action of the orthodox erotic code, but he also went out of his way to emphasize its didactic element." It may seem that Lewis's position-one which finds an effort to reintegrate didactic and narrative purposes as they had been integrated in Chre'tien— is diametrically opposed by Eugene Vance, whose summary implies that there is a great deal of tension between narrative and didactic purposes in the poem:

Trouthe, then, lies less in worldly things to be spoken or learned than in a movement, a progress, leading first from poetic fable to moral history, then to philosophy, and finally to prayer and illumination. The conclusion of the Troilus lies not in the completion of a narrative sequence, but rather in a sequence of distinct speech acts which break from narrative itself and lead the believing reader to an unmediated presence of the "uncir- cumscript" illuminating Word.**

LewiB and Vance do not find the same meaning in the work, but it may be safely said that their criticism builds on the same essential observation: Chaucer u s o b elaboration of the signified to alter significantly the character of a story in which the signs had had a heavily utilitarian presence— -that is, a story characterized by, drawing upon Lotman here, elaborated "internal"

C. S. Lewis, "What Chaucer Really Did to II Filostrato," E&S, 17 (1932), 56-75; rpt. in Chaucer Criticism. II, ed. Richard J. Schoeck and Jerome Taylor (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1961), p. 25. 5 "'Eugene Vance, "Mervelous Signals: Poetics, Sign Theory, and Poetics in Chaucer's Troilus," NLH, 10 (1979), 335* 51 meaning. The facts of causal connections, as we have seen, are impressed upon us in Boccaccio where they are suppressed in

Chaucer. But Chaucer's elaboration on the side of the signified in Troilus and Criseyde is quite complicated. After showing that the constructive structure of the poem does not develop an endorsement of the courtly-love ethic, we will have to ask, What, precisely, does the pattern of comparison and contrast "say"? Contemplative love, even when it seems to be firmly related to objects of the material world, consumes one in devotion to the unseen. The love of a lady might well purify a man, so that, as happens to Troilus, pride, envy, anger, and avarice will loosen their grip (III, 180O-I806); but such incipient participation in the perfection which dorives from God cannot be equated with perfection itself. The logic which fourteenth-century nan received from thirteenth-century Thomist philosophy, vulnerable as it was to Ockham's razor, would have found the term "love" as applied to wordly objects analogous to, not identical to, "love" as a term assigned to one of God's perfect attributes.^ It is true that all forms of love can demonstrate— the theme of Troilus's rendition of a Boethian song at the end of Book III— the unity of the universe:

A1 this doth Love, ay heried be his myghtes! That that the se, that gredy is to flowen, Constreyneth to a certeyn ende so

^Frederick Copleston, Mediaeval Philosophy, Part II of A History of Philosophy, Vol. II (Garden City, New York: Image Books, 1962), PP. 73-7^. 52

His flodes that so fiersly they ne growen To drenchen erthe and al for evere mo; And if that Love aught lete his bridel go, Al that now loveth asondre sholde lepe, And lost were al that Love halt now to-hepe. So wolde Sod, that auctour is of kynde, That with his bond Love of his vertu liste To eerclen bertes alle, and faste bynde, That from his bond no wight the wey out wiste. (Ill, 1756-1769)

But the insight Troilus derives from his experience in a particular love affair with a particular woman is as evanescent ao that woman's presence and affection. This is the significance of

Troilus's presentation of the free-will conundrum in Book IV.

As Troilus faces the loss of the woman's presence, he loses his belief that one great force emanating from Qod makes Qod accessible to us through our active participation as men who love. Thoughts about his particular fate replace ideas about the general design.

As Criseyde is being led away from Troy, Troilus struggles with his passions, asking himself why he does not act to prevent the loss of "she that was the sothfast crop and more/ Of al his lUBt or joies herebifore" (V, 25-26):

Vhi nil I make atones riche and pore To have inough to doone, er that Bhe go? Why nyl I brynge al Troie upon a roore? Whi nyl I slen this Diomede also? Why nyl I rather with a man or two Stele hire away? Whi wol I this endure? Whi nyl I helpen to myn owen cure? (V,

Chaucer answers his questions:

But why he nolde don so fel a dede. 53

That shal I seyn, and whi hym liate it apare: He hadde in herte alweyes a manere drede Lest that Criseydet in rumour of thiB fare, Sholde han ben slaynf Xo, this was al his care. (V, 50-5*0

Even his political virtue--an apparent interest in helping to

/ preserve the unity of his society in a time of crisis— is mentioned

only to be dismissed. The purifying effects of earthly love fade.

Envy and ire take possession of Troilus as his anxious anticipation

of Criseyde*a return from what was to be a short stay in the Greek

camps turns to gnawing suspicion, as dark suspicion rounding his

prophetic dreaming turns, upon discovery of the brooch, to berserk

hatred. Filled with hate, the knight fights unatintingly:

In many cruel batnille, out of drede, Of Troilus, this ilke noble knyght, As men may in thise olde bokes rede, Was seen his knyghthod and his grete myght. And dredeles, his ire, day and nyght, Ful cruwely the Grekis ay aboughte; And alwey moost this Diomede he soughte. (V, 1751-1757)

Troilus*s story is one of a man, who, entirely dependent upon contingencies, attains a certain level of virtue, loses most of

it, but is saved from damnation by the small measure of it which

accidents allow him to keep.

Troilus retains, 1 think it might be said, a small measure

of the lowest degree of virtue allowed in Macrobius's Commentary

on the "Dream of Scipio." Below exemplary virtue, a state of direct participation in the nous, below the virtue of the purified

mind, a state in which distracting passions have been forgotten,

even below the cleansing virtue, which puts passions away, there was the political virtue— -an ability to moderate the force of 7 passions for the sake of one's countrymen. In directing his

wrath toward the enemy, no matter the reason, Troilus serves his

city. Certainly, there is nothing very Christian about his

behavior; and even as an example of pagan virtue, Troilus*s case

is a dubious one. Out the right thing done for the wrong reason

is still the right thing. The corollary may be observed in Sir

Oawain and the Green Knight, when Gawain accepts the magic girdle

for the acceptable reason that he wishes to defeat the elvish man

he is bound to fight, and finds that for this right reason he has done the wrong thing. With its recognition that Do-Wel~

following the law— precedes the superior virtues of Do-Set and

Do-Sest (Piers Plowman), with its apparent endorsement of Livius

VirginiuB's sacrifice of his daughter (Confossio Amantis. the

Physician's Tale), fourteenth-century poetry exhibits interest

in the division between action and intent, means and ends. Troilus

acts for reasons that do not bespeak virtue; but war, the essential

cause of his fall, becomes the accident through which he is

stellified. We might explore the difficulty implicit in such a

divided view of human actions; but we must also recognise the fact that that divided view was, for Chaucer, a familiar piece of

intellectual furniture. In her treatment of Thomist ethics Germain G. Griaez offers

the valuable observation that,for the author she studies,practical

7 Commentary on the "Dream of ScipiOi" trano. William Harris Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), pp. 121-125* reason, with its statements of ought. had to be separated from g theoretical reason, with its statements of Is. In pursuing the

Good, man acknowledged the necessity of using available materials.

To pursue the Good was not the same as it would be to participate q in the Good. As Thomas said, we oust recognize the difference between "the good that is the ultimate end, and the good that is 10 the means to that end." The continuous hierarchical order Edmund

Reiss wants us to accept as we read Troilus and Criseyde— an order which makes the contemptus mundi theme basically irrelevant 1 1 is a concept that blurs what is a radical distinction; for the theological virtues of Thomas become a necessary addition if we are to understand how apparent pursuit of the intellectual and appetitive virtues can ever lead men astray. Man’s general pursuit of the Good may become specific attachment to a creature, but the blessed know that the proper object of their love, in the final analysis, is God. The kind of love which motivates Troilus limits him to a certain moral potential. The reality of a complete scheme— the hierarchy Reiss insists upon, a continuum— is suggested to us

g "The First Principle of Practical Reason," in Aquinas; A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Anthony Kenny (Notre Darae:~ University of Notre Dame Press, 1976), PP* 573-380.

9 Ibid.. p. 356.

10Robert P. Goodwin, trans., Selected Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, excerpt from Questiones Disputatae (Indianapolis; Bobbs- Merrill, 1965), p. 110.

^"Troilus and the Failure of Understanding," MLQ, 29 (1968), pp. 131*, 137. 56 when we hear Troilus sing the Boethian hymn. But his vision of

universal love, if he were thoroughly cleansed by it, would make

devotion to Criseyde alone impossible. Troilus does indeed undergo

a certain measure of purgation under the effect of love; but

Troilus1s love for Criseyde cannot lift him above what Thomas calls, 12 following Aristotle, the virtue of a citizen. Chaucer admits a reference to the democratic theme he found in Boccaccio when

Troilus's improvements are listed:

And though that he be come of blood roial, Hym liste of pride at no wight for to chace; Benigne he was to ech in general, For which he gat hym thank in every place. Thus wolde Love, yheried be his grace, That Pride, Envye, and Ire, and Avarice lie gan to fie, and everich other vice. (Ill, 1600-1806)

But the sort of citizenship suggested hero is not exhibited by

Troilus as he devotes himself to the killing of Greeks in

Book V. The gap between the love treated in the tale and the love advocated in the epilogue can be considered a structural feature which has its antecedence in the mental habit of relating experience to universals by means of something that may appear to be equivocation, unless we are convinced Thomists who have taken the principle of analogy so far as to argue for analogy of proportionality. As an object of our discovery, epistemologically

12 Goodwin, p. 9 6 . 57 speaking, an abstraction such as love has its reality guaranteed in conceptual discreteness; as a principle of causality, however- - ontologically speaking— the "same" abstraction has its reality guaranteed in the presence of God. As Alexander Denomy has pointed out, the hymn to love which Troilus sings can be made to harmonize with the courtly-love ethic; 13 ^ but if one considers the basic opposition which develops at the end of the poem, it may seem that the Boethian hymn is aligned with a perspective that studies love as a constitutive principle in the universe, not with a perspective that studies the narrow religion of elaborated sexual love, a complex of concepts. To be sure, the part of Boethius which Chaucer drew upon in writing Troilus*s hymn to love implicates use of the senses (I quote Chaucer's translation):

And yif this love slakede the bridelis, alle thynges that now loven hem togidres wolden make batayle contynuely, and stryven to fordo the faBBOun of this world, the which they now leden in accordable feith by fayre moevynges. This love halt togidres peples joyned with an holy boond, and knytteth sacrement of mariages of chaste loves; and love enditeth lawes to trewe felnwes. 0 weleful were mankynde, yif thilke love that governeth hevene governede yowr corages. (II, Met. viii)

But the poem contrasts the love that governs heaven and the love that governs men's hearts. Courtly love cannot raise man above the level of conception, up to the level of direct participa­ tion in divine love, though it can suggest that the possibility of

^"The Two Moralities of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde," PTRSC. 3rd Ser., kk, Section 2 (1950); rpt. in Chaucer Criticism. II, ed. Richard J. Schoeck and Jerome Taylor (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1961), pp. 1^8-150. 58 such a novo lies in another system. In naking Troilus recite

Boethius's praise of love'B universal power, though he took his cue from Boccaccio, Chaucer departed from the text of the

Filostrato. where at the equivalent point in the narrative we find more lyric declaration of thanks than philosophical reflection (III, 7^-79)* When Troilus faces the loss of Criseyde, Chaucer presents a fairly close translation of his source (V, 4-5)*

The realization that occurs to us as we consider the dualism implicit in the poem is that it is within the critic's power to prove contradictory positions. For Lewis and Reiss, what needs to be stressed is the continuity which characterizes the Nature/

God relationship. And yet, it is at this very juncture that

Thomas would draw our attention to a danger. The intellectual virtue of reason requires the corrective theological virtue of grace. To make sexual love something like direct participation in the form, Love, by means of which God holds his universe together is to court the corruption noticed in 12771 when tenets of courtly love were expressly condemned by Archbishop Stephen

Tempier.

Where Reiss finds coherence in Troilus and Criseyde because

Chaucer does not expressly condemn the sort of eaBy Neoplatonism characteristic of the eourtly-love ethic, on a similar ground

Joseph E. Gallagher finds the poem incoherent. What interests

Gallagher is that the actions of men are allowed to proceed without authorial judgment, while the scheme of static realities invoked

1**Ibid.. p. 153. at the end of the poem gives all of the preceding actions negative 15 moral value. Critics such as Gallagher, whoBe position in itB

essentials is most eloquently presented in Valter Clyde Curry's 16 famous essay, treat the poem as though it is most basically an analysis. Defenders of the poem who maintain that the logic at the

foundation of the work is solid, play into their hands. Perhaps the sort of criticism I offer in this study provides a way to show

Troilus and Criseyde, epilogue included, could have a kind of unity that does not depend on logical consistency.

It was entirely possible for Chaucer, tracing the fortunes of a character caught in an action, to move from an "old*'view of the continuity of things such as we see in the hymn of Book III, through a view which treats the events of life as radically contingent and each man's life as absolutely individual, to a view which embraces doctrine with redoubled energy. At once critical of the easy association of human activity and God's design found in the Romance of the Rose and determined to understand man's responsibility in light of the difficulty in knowing God's design, the dynamic point of view which informs Troilus and Criseyde may be seen as an illustration of the general tendency apprehended by Gordon Leff in hiB treatment of fourteenth-century thought—

"^"Theology and Intention in Chaucer's Troilus," Chau R , 7 (1972), 65- 66. 16 "Destiny in Chaucer's Troilus," PKLA, (1930), 129-168. 60

"a growing empiricism was giving rise to a growing fideism." 17 The motion of the constituitive structure of Troilus and Criseyde suggests, through the effects of Chaucer's rather complex construc­ tive structure, an intellectual motion.

Perhaps Stephen Knight is correct when he argues that the 18 end of the poem is of an "urgently ideological character." But it cannot escape our notice that the tale progresses directly and clearly toward a counterpoint which a cowardly Chaucer would have avoided. If Troilus and Criseyde becomes a bourgeois project, it becomes one because it detachedly views the courtly literature of the recent past, not because it defends the church. To describe the poem as a work of logic, wo ought to point out, first of all, that the drama, the action, suggests the very dichotomy between epistemology and ontology which characterized scholastic thought.

And we ought to relate the sharpness of the distinction between epistemology and ontology which we find in the poem, not just to the sort of struggle which romantic poets would undergo, but to a fourteenth-century conviction that, while tho gap between human activities and divine purposes was filled with mysterious darkness, a turning away from that darkness was not a legitimate option.

Chaucer is able to stop tracing the motions of men on earth when his man prostrated by love is suddenly transported to a vantage

17 Medieval Thought (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1958), P» 291* 18 "Chaucer and the Sociology of Literature," Studies in the Age of Chaucer. II (19BO), ed. R. J. Pearcy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press), p. 27. 61 point from which tragedy of the type found in Boccaccio's

De CasibuG Viroruni et Feminarum Illustrium can be seen— McAlpine underlines the distinction, not the progression— as tragedy of

the Boethian type* The Teseida and the sources to which it, in turn, is indebted for its tableau meant to close the story of a heroic character, provide Chaucer, it may be argued, with the action that he needs in order to effect the transformation of perspective required by the materials of the story. With Sanford

Heech, we may read the poem as a successfully closed work— *one which finally presents the logical complement to its most basic, 19 informing structure. Of course, one might wonder if moral meanings and noetic meanings can be readily made complementary.

The constructive structure of Troilus and Criseyde is an analytical structure. The meaning that it finally offers— a comparison of two perspectives, a noetic meaning— claims our attention with as much force as does the meaning offered by the constitutive structure— a moral meaning. Because of this fact, it is difficult for us to accept completely the interpretation given by D. W. Robertson, when he argueB that the poem comments upon man's vulnerability to the sin of cupidity— though the distinction between charity and cupidity is certainly relevant. Concerning

Troilus's laughter, Robertson has this to say:

The laughter is the ironic laughter with which Chaucer

19 Design in Chaucer's "Troilus" (Syracuse: Syracuse University PresB, 195977 pp. 129-138. 62

depicts Troilus* "wo" from the beginning, a laughter which he, and Troilus from his celestial vantage point, would bestow on all those who take a sentimental attitude toward such love as that between TroilUB and Criseyde. If, in the course of the poem, the plight of Troilus has moved us to compassion, we too can laugh, partly at ourselves.

Robertson's reading of the poem treats it as though it were a simple exemplum— a problem is presented, a strategy is tested, the yield is clear— but, as we have seen, a complex constructive structure in the poem, beyond presenting pregnant imageB and significant asides reflecting a critical perspective on the action, compares world views. The constructive structure developed by

Boccaccio does little more than generalize Troilo's problem, so that the poem can become an argument on the subject of natural nobility (albeit a confused one). The commentary is rather loosely associated with the particular characters, and the particular characters themselves are hardly more them functions in an action.

*n Troilus and Criseyde. the characters stand apart from one another and from the actions in which they are engaged. A fascination with perspective is as important as any effort to moralize.

Horal preoccupations are unquestionably present. The constitutive structure of Chaucer's poem is a consequential structure; and the progress of events raises a question about the validity of the courtly-love idea, a sort of easy Platonism which makes the love of a woman participation in the nous. The reader must see that in

^Preface to Chaucer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), p. 501. the course of life Troilus is limited, the capability of his mind

included, by physical law, and that that limitation itself must

be set against a rare moment in which ultimate realities became

clear.

We may notice that Criseyde's perception of love, while

it moves toward something like idealism when she becomes Troilus*b

lover— she declares her lovo to be immutable, after all (III, 1^92-

1498)— remains fundamentally pragmatic. In fact, it could be

argued that it becomes radically pragmatic. In the scene in which Criseyde's despair produces statements of self-characterization,

identifying her b b one who epitomizes faithlessness—

Allas] for now is clene ago My name of trouthe in love, for everemo! For I have falsed oon the gentileste That evere was, and oon the worthiestel (V, 105^-1057) we find that she goes on to express herself in a way which confirms our judgment. Always resourceful, Criseyde can suggest that being true to Diomede will in some sense redeem her (V, 1069-1071); but ■ this resolution of the difficulty refers us to the domain of ethical identity, a reference which is inherently incoherent.

In her secret ruminations, Criseyde has decided to take the practical course, just as Bhe did when she brought her private thoughts to a conclusion in Book II. Though he is not an ideal man, Diomede has impressed her:

Retornyng in hire soule ay up and down The wordes of this sodeyn Diomede, His grete estat, and perel of the town, 64 And that she was allone and hadde nede Of frendes help; and thus bygan to brede The cause whi, the sothe for to telle, That she took fully purpos for to dwelle. (v, 1023-1029)

When she says that "no bettre way" than being true to Diomede presents ItGelf to her (V, 1069), she aligns berBelf with the

inductive, pragmatic approach to life which she has always taken.

Whereas Criseyde is able to imagine a nearly satisfactory conclusion to her problem in the analysis which would substitute Diomede for Troilus in the’’paradigm," lovers, Troilus is unable to imagine a satisfactory conclusion— there can be no question of a nearly satisfactory conclusion— in the consequential structure of conquering one of the women to whom Pandarus refers in his effort to comfort his young friend (IV, 4*06-41*0. Troilus is radically analytical.

His project is the on-going one of being true to an idea, even when circumstances make such fixity appear foolish. For Criseyde, radically pragmatic, any question of what she is quickly dissipates as she tries to predict what the judicious management of givens is likely to yield.

The artfully-created ineptitude of the narrator becomes especially apparent when he tries to defend Criseyde:

Hire name, alias! is punysshed so wide, That for hire gilt it oughto ynough suffice. And if I myghte excuse hire any wise, For she so sory waB for hire untrouthe, I wis, I wolde excuse hire yet for routhe. (V, 1095-1099)

As Troilus and Criseyde have shown themselves to represent decidedly different perspectives, the intelluctuality of the poem has deepened. The narrator*8 remarks in which he offers to excuse

CriBeyde seem painfully inadequate. We know that pragmatism, as a principlet does not tend toward fixed result— however much its language may pretend to such a tendency— the best way, the only choice. Troilus's language, while it refers us to the domain of knowledge, carries actual moral weight: against transcendental realities resident in the mind of God, human actions will finally be judged. Criseyde's language, while it refers to the domain of ethics and the inductive means by which relative worth and disvalue are usually assessed, carries no real ethical force. No extra-mental reality guarantees its categories.

When Criseyde becomes Troilus*s lover, she professes immutable love. It may occur to us, though, that the context in which

Crisoyde's declaration appears causes us to find in ostensible identification with an eternal principle another instance of the particular effect brought about through specific, physical agency.

As we read Criseyde's declaration of undying love, we are expected to notice, I think, that Criseyde's conception of love is fundamentally different from Troilus'a conception. Because she assumes that her uncle's story is true, that Troilus has confused jealousy and love, she feels it incumbent upon herself to point out the distinction, a distinction which rapidly becomes blurred as she extends her discourse beyond simple generalisation:

Ek al my wo is this, that folk now usen To seyn right thus, "Ye, jalousie is love I" And wolde a busahel venym al excusen, For that o greyn of love is on it shove. But that woot heighe God that sit above, If it be likkere love, or hate, or grarae; 66

And after that, it oughte bere his name*

But certeyn is, son manere jalousie Is excusable nore than son, ivys; As whan cause is, and son swich fantasia With piete so wel repressed is That it unnethe doth or seyth anys, But goodly drynketh up al his distreBse; And that excuse I, for the gentilesse.

And som so ful of furie is and despit That it sournounteth his repressiousn. But, herte myn, ye be nat in that plit, That thonke I God; for which youre passioun I wol nought calle it but illusioun, Of habundaunce of love and besy cure, That doth youre herte this disese endure. (Ill, 1023-10^3)

Quite arbitrarily, Criseyde Bets aside the potential confusion

of cupidity and charity. She will call the apparent case of jealousy

before her a case of superabundant love. Ironically, Troilus

cannot take advantage of the opportunity which Pandarus's use of a

confused idea of love has created. Troilus, always the static

figure, must be picked up and thrown into bed. In Book III,

Criseyde appears as the innocent, whose confident-sounding

distinction between cupidity and charity stands in ironic contrast

to the dramatic fact that Pandarus is able to use the confusion of

the two forms of love in effecting what for him is the successful

culmination of the story. But the reader is expected to see that

so far is Criseyde from any fixed principle of living that even

her uncle's unifying principle— that romantic satisfaction is to be sought without regard for social conventions or any petty

concern for honesty— is beyond her. Chaucer decides not to make

Criseyde say, when she sizes up prospects in Book II, that secret love is sweeter than open love. In Book III, Chaucer distinguishes between the secrecy which Pandarus involves himself in— strategems, arrangements— and the secrecy of Criseyde— the determination to use whatever circumstances present themselves, no matter what the conventions of popular sentiment may demand. In fact, the distinction between jealousy and love, cupidity and charity, is introduced by Criseyde, one feels, only so that she can dispose of it. She is radically pragmatic.

In Troilus and Criseyde. an effort to ’’medievalize" through the workings of an analytical constructive structure the materials of a consequential constitutive structure is challenged by what we might call a covert narrator— the Chaucer who arranges events and selects elements but leaves pronouncements to the narrator in the 21 foreground, the overt narrator. The overt narrator attempts to state what characters are, but the covert narrator redirects our attention toward motions. In the Knight1a Tale, a rather different sort of narration is to be observed. In that poem, as we have seen, Chaucer's Knight emphasizes the constitutive structure of the material, isolating the characters, separating the characters, in fact, through obviously arbitrary means. In the Knight's Tale

Chaucer is probably in his natural domain, where there are comparisons to be made rather than motions to be traced. Paradoxically, a consequential constitutive structure such as Chaucer received from the Pilostrato gives him greater opportunity. In building his

21An illuminating treatment of the distinction between narrator and author may be found in Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 19?8), pp. 19o-262. 68

constructive structure, he has more to do. The constructive

structure of the Knight*s Tale is to be a consequential structure.

In that poem, it Day be felt, Chaucer builds the constructive "complement" to the constitutive without full enthusiasm.

In reaching for a general perspective, we might see a dilemma:

If Chaucer begins with an analysis in the constitutive structure

of a work, his job is that of working toward closure which implies

an understanding of how the world works, since consequential

closure, to be full, employs the natural powers of entities present

in the informing analysis and tends to be faithful to natural law.

But it is the analysis that interests Chaucer. If he begins with

a consequential structure, Chaucer must work toward an analytical

transformation of his materials, hiB constructive structure working in opposition to a foundation which, ao I have suggested, a usually presents life in phenomenologically strong terms. In this

second of two alternatives, the "message" Chaucer wishes to deliver is an analysis, it seems; but in building a constructive structure which communicates that message, he must first of all affirm the

force of a consequential structure which offers to become, in itself, a complete explanation— a self-sufficient structure. In spite of himself, Chaucer may create the impreBBion that he is basically an empiricist. Chapter Three

The Troilus and the Knight*s Tale Ills

Closural Transformation

In Troilus and Criseyde we see a struggle to achieve meaning characteristic of most serious artistic texts, but there is an important difference. Let u b consider the dynamics of the following, a ballad in which the materials of a consequential constitutive structure are subjected to the workings of an analytical constructive structure:

It wes upon a Shere Thorsday that ure Louerd aros. Full milde were the wordes he spec to JudaB: "Judas, thou most to Jurselem, oure mete for to bugge; Thritty platen of selver thou bere upon thy rugge. Thou comest fer i* the brode stret, fer i' the brode strete; Summe of thine cunesmen ther thou meist imete."

Imette wid his soster, the swikele wimon: "Judas, thou were wurthe r.ie stende thee wid ston. Judas, thou wurthe me stende thee wid ston, For the false prophete that thou bilevest upon."

"Be stille, leve soster; thine herte thee tobreke! * Wiste min Louerd Crist, full well he wolde be wreke."

"Judas, go thou on the roc, heye upon the ston; Ley thine heved i 1 my barm; slep thou thee anon."

Sone so JudaB of slope was awake, Thritty platen of selver from him weren itake. He drow him solve by the top that all it lavede ablode; The Jewes out of Jurselem awenden he were wode.

Foret him com the riche Jew that heiste Pilatus: "Volte sulle thy Louerd that heite Jesus?"

"I nul sulle my Louerd for nones cunnes eiste, Bote it be for the thritty platen that he me bitaiste."

"Volte Bulle thy Lord Crist for ones cunnes golde?"

"Nay, bote it be for the platen that he habben wolde." 70 In him com ur Lord gon as his postles setten at mete: "How sitte ye, postles, and why nule ye ate? How sitte ye, postles, and why nule ye ete? Ic am aboust and isold today for oure mete*"

Up stod him Judas: "Lord, am I that free? I nas never o' the stude ther me thee evel spec." Up him stod Peter and spec wid all his miste: "Thau Pilatus him come wid ten hundred cnistes, Thau Pilatus him come wid ten hundred cnistes, Yet ic wolde, Louerd, for thy love fiste*"

"Stille thou be, PeterI Well I thee iknowe; ^ Thou wolt fursake me thrien ar the cok him crowe."

We may notice rather obvious efforts at elaborating the signified in this poem. The deceitful woman Judas meets in the street is his sister; to a class of people our attention is being directed*

It may seem that plausibility becomes questionable when Judas is lured to a place which is "heye upon a ston"; but the task of making

Judas's betrayal— the consequence of his stupidity as much as anything— an example of what fell men are capable of doing is advanced.

When we come to the end of the poem and Peter makes his boast, we recall the confidence with which Judas answered the deceitful woman when she said that he ought to be stoned for following Jesus.

We notice, too, that the violent behavior of which Judas says

Jesus is capable is promised by Peter, not by Jesus,at the end of the poem. At the end of the poem, we recall that Judas went up on a rock, and we make the connection with Peter* Instances at which consequentiality seemed dubious are explained in a manner which finds symbolic value. The handling of images in the poem

Maxwell S. Luria and Richard L* Hoffman, eds., Middle English Lyrics (New York: W. W. Norton, 197*0, pp* 196-197* 71 offers, finally, a complement to the moral meaning of the poem— a condemnation of sloth. Summarizing the analytical meaning of

the poem, I agree with Donald Q. Schuler:

Judas seems no worse than most of us, just as, at the end, Peter seems no better. We sympathize with these two, with the bleeding head and the fear of the one, the well-meant boast of the other, and, in our sympathy, we are implicated in the death of Christ.2

Judas gives us good ground upon which to build a treatment of the meaning of Troilus and Criseyde and a theory of narrative closure in general. As we have seen in our comparison of

Chaucer's poem and the Filostrato, Chaucer elaborates the signifi­ cation of his materials in a negative way and in a positive way.

On the one hand, he de-emphasizes consequentially; and on the other hand, ho adds elements which may be associated with the courtly-love ethic. It would seem, then, that a dynamic similar to the one we find in Judas occurs in Troilus and Criseyde. But there is the important difference that, while the Judas-poet introduces imagery which in a positive way suggests meaning,

Chaucer introduces imagery in a way which suggests meaninglessness.

Critics of the ending of the poem such as Gallagher will point out that in the body of the poem the narrator seems to endorse the project of courtly love. Cupids decorate the early episodes, the idea of secrecy seems to be defended, Antigone's song and the

Boethian hymn Troilus sings give voice to the highest claims of

2,'The Middle English Judas: An Interpretation," PMLA, 91 (1976), 8 ^3. courtly love. Moreover, Trollua really does become a nobler man under the influence of love. As I have suggested, however, the events of the story itself and Chaucer's ironic juxtaposition of declaration and concrete image undercut the overt narrator's effort to work a transformation of the materials of the constitutive structure. To be sure, the covert narrator, Chaucer himself, does deliver a complete constructive structure, but one that compares perspectives, not states of being capable of being viewed on a single scale— as is the case in Judas.

As Donaldson and others have observed, the narrator— -the overt narrator--seems to weaken in the fifth book of Troilus and

Criseyde. It is as if even the literary project has become too much for him, this being no more apparent than it is when the action is stopped and we are given the portraits. The idea of the portraits, perhaps borrowed from the beginning of Sainte-Maure's telling of Troilus's story, perhaps suggested to Chaucer by a similar passage in the Teseida, reminds us of the summarizing style of characterization suggested by Matthew of Vendome. But the ultimate effect of the portraits is one which suggests the ambiguity presented by the characters involved in this particular drama.

A balanced presentation of hearsay and fact in the closing couplet of Diomede's portrait suggests an inability to achieve a final assessment of his character: "And som men seyn, he was of tunge large;/ And heir he was of Calidoine and Arge" (V, 80*t-805). The portrait of Criseyde, with its closing confusion, shows a pronounced inability to fix her character on a moral scale: tender-heartedness dissolves in a sort of slanting pun— one who is sliding of heart/ purpose offers a charity which cannot be relied upon. The narrator ends the portrait by introducing an apparent irrelevancy—

"But trewely, I can not telle hir age" (V, 826)— which nay in fact suggest a fragment of the consequential constitutive structure found in Boccaccio. In ending his description of Troilus, the narrator makes the observation that the knight had heart enough to do what he wanted to do (V, 8^0), a perfectly ambiguous statement when one considers the point that Troilus had difficulty determining, first, the efficacy of choice, and second, the legitimacy of following his heart in making his choices. He is praised for an ability to act; but we know that the events of the story have repeatedly paralyzed him, and they have paralyzed him precisely because he has had a great heart. Tatlock’s objection to the portraits is understandable: they do stop the natural flow of the action, and they are exceedingly awkward.^ But it is their very awkwardness in interrupting the action that establishes their significance. They refer us only vaguely to classes— even the appropriateness of placing the heavy-browed Criseyde in the class

"beautiful women" seems questionable now— and they do not suggest metaphysical realities. The portraits, suggesting the phenomenology of an analytical structure as they interrupt the development of the consequential constitutive structure, may seem to be anti-closural; for they seem painfully inadequate as anticipators of analytical

^J. S. P. Tatlock, The Hind and Art of Chaucer (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1950), pp. 46-^7. semiology.

But the discrepancy between stylistic feature and meaning

introduces a paradox. The portraits in Book V of Troilus and

Criseyde prepare us for a closing analytical structure— for what

I call "closural transformation"— 'precisely because they protect

the integrity of the consequential constitutive structure. They

remind us that all of the characters are alone, isolated by their

pursuit of their individual interests, even when those interests find expression in general, universal language. It is against

this inductively-derived view, which must be fully developed if

we are to regard it as authentic, that a deductively-derived view

must be placed. The difficulty in maintaining that deductively-

dorived, idealistic view in this life, no matter how true claims

developed through it may be, is a significant fact which must be allowed to speak for itself. This necessity has been honored even in the treatment of Boethius.

Borrowing from the Teseida a phenomenology which facilitates the emergence of the analytical semiology required— a comparison of two radically different perspectives (one which derives knowledge from the making of particular choices and the observation of particular beings ^an empirical epistemolog^, one which determines the relative worth of actions and people by comparing them to fixed ideal realities ^a Neoplatonic ontology/)— Chaucer has Troilus ascend to the heavenB. As we have seen in our study of the logic of the poem, the separation of the two perspectives could have been suggested to Chaucer by scholastic tradition.

Troilus's political virtue, as we have observed, is just 75 enough to allow him a vantage point from which particular goings-on below may be compared with eternal verities above. But there is the difficulty that, though Troilus*s final state may be attributed to a scale of fixed values, his virtue has developed in an arena where it is impossible for him to maintain his grasp on those fixed, transcendental facts. The phenomenology and semiology of Troilus's post mortem perspective allow us, through

Troilus, to "possess" the phenomenology of worldly activities. We understand how they relate to the transcendental entities. But the semiology of worldly activities— the semiology of a consequential constitutive structure which traces the development of effects brought about by war, sexual desire, and social class— remains fugitive. This problem Chaucer tries to correct by means of a homiletic epilogue, what a reader might regard as the epilogue of the epilogue— the invocation of specifically Christian, as opposed to merely stoical, ethics and cosmology:

Thow oon, and two, and thre, eterne on lyve, That regnest ay in thre, and two, and oon, Uncircumscript, and al maist circumscrive, Us from visible and invisible foon Defende, and to thy mercy, everichon, So make us, Jesus, for thi mercy digne, For love of mayde and moder thyn benigne. (v, 1863-1869)

Pagan times well behind us, we may be expected to recognize the difference between cupidity and charity and to maintain our grasp of eternal realities. Moreover, the events of this life have a transcendental semiology after all; the concluding analysis offers a complete transformation of the materials. But that positive transformation has not been anticipated in a negative

constructive structure— one in which the courtly-love ethic, as

a system through which events and people night be understood, is

put into doubt or made irrelevant. The functions of constitutive and constructive structures,

as I may have implied, require the concept of closural transformation

if they are to be understood fully. In the case of Troilus and

Criseyde. we find a somewhat unusual relationship between the

constitutive structure and the constructive structure, but an

essential literary dynamic is to be observed: constructive structure

works upon constitutive structure— in the case of Troilus and Criseyde. an analytical constructive structure works upon a

consequential constitutive structure— in the development of meaning.

This dynamic may be observed in literary texts of any age, but

the “seams" in the "gothic" literature of the high Middle Ages are

especially apparent. Perhaps the gaps in Chaucer are as obvious

as they are because, as I have suggested, the analytical operations of scholastic logic separated and yet made interdependent ideas of

epistemology and ideas of ontology. This is not to say that the

philosophical tradition in the light of which Chaucer worked was

inherently illogical, of course. But it is to say that the literary artist of Chaucer's era was faced with the difficulty of reconciling inductively-derived ideas about the categories into which observable realities fit and deductively-derived ideas about transcendentals manifested in observable realities. If the strength of a literary text depends upon the completion of transformation— ideas about entities complement observations about motions (or the 77

reverse) in final passages anticipated throughout the development of a narrative— then we may see why Chaucer faced especially difficult conditions. The ending of Troilus and Criseyde is a troubled ending neither because of logical incoherence nor because of a failure to anticipate closural transformation. Rather, it is a troubled ending because it maintains the integrity of two separate orders of perception. The world suggests a definition of love on its own; but then it also .confirms an idea of what love must bo. Even if we assume that noetic and moral meanings are capable of achieving complementary status, it must strike us as significant when the moral meaning of a work implies a kind of knowledge which contrasts with the kind of knowledge finally invoked.

When in his closural effort Boccaccio tries to reinforce the

"democratic1' idea Troilo expresses in bis tirade leveled at Cassandra, it may seem that he falters:

And many women also, because they are descended from noble lineage and can count their ancestors, believe that they deserve advantage over others in loving, and think that civility is an outrage, and that they can turn up their noses and go about with a disdainful air. Shun all such and hold them base, for beasts they are and not noble ladies.

The perfect lady hath a stronger desire to be loved and taketh delight in loving; she discerneth and seeth what is to be eschewed; she avoideth and chooseth; foresight she hath and looketh to the fulfilment of her engagements. All such ladies are to be followed, but choice should not be made in haste, for they are not all wise, because they may be older and age lesseneth worth.

Therefore be advised and have compassion upon Troilus and upon yourself at the same time and all shall be well. And piously make prayer for him to Love that 78 Troilus nay rest in peace in that region where Love dwelleth and that Love may kindly grant you the boon of loving so wisely that ye shall not die in the end for an evil woman.

/E molte ancor perche d' alto lignaggio/ Discese sono, e sanno annoverare/ Gli avoli lor, si credon che vantaggio/ Deggiano aver dall' altre nell' amare;/ E pensan che costume sia oltraggio,/ Torcere il naso e dispettose andare;/ Oueste schifate, ed abbiatele a vili,/ Chd- bestie son, non son donne gentili.

Perfetta donna ha piU fermo disire/ D' essere amata, e d' amar si diletta;/ Discerne e verde cio ch' b da fuggire,/ Lascia ed elegge, provvede ed aspetta/ Le promission: queste son da seguiro:/ Ma non si vuol perb scogliero in fretta,/ Che" non son tutte saggie, perchb sieno/ Piu attempate, e quelle vaglion meno.

Dunque siate avveduti, e compassione/ Di Troilo e di voi insiememente/ Abbiate, e fia ben fatto: ed orazione/ Per lui fate ad amor pietosamente,/ Ch' el posi in pace in quella regione/ Dov' eldlmora, ed a voi dolcemente/ Concoda grazia si d* amare accorti,/ Che per ria donna alfin non siate morti./ (VIII, 31-5 2 )

The opposition of natural nobility/ social standing fails to

become the comprehending "theme" that an earlier passage may have

suggested it would become. Its irrelevance is, in fact, underscored

by the passage under review. Criseida, the socially inferior

woman, has behaved in a morally inferior way. Finally, all that

Boccaccio can do to secure any claim of noetic value in his poem

is to contrast evil women and good women. The sort of "transforma­

tion" typical of exemplura writing is given: Troilo belongs to the

class of those who have not loved wisely, and Criseida belongs to

the class of bad women. We find at the end of Boccaccio's poem a kind of transformation which contrasts sharply with the kind of

transformation we find in Judas, though in both the Filostrato and

Judas a consequential structure yields a closural transformation of the analytical, noetic sort. It might be said that the

closural transformation in Judas is developed heavily on the side

of the signified; it has a certain "figural" or "allegorical"

feel to it. The closural transformation at the end of the

Filostrato. it might be said,is weighted on the side of the sign-

weighted so heavily, in fact, that the effort of generalization

seems faulty, weak. Chaucer, as Steadman has remarked,^replaces a

comparison of fickle lovers/ true lovers with a comparison of world views. Chaucer attempts to give us both kinds of transforma­

tion, I am inclined to say. He retains a hold on the individual natures of his characters, giving them greater weight, in fact,

than Boccaccio did (or could); but he also gives his characters perspectives which, as I think I have shown, refer us to basic, radical perspectives.

In writing the Knight's Tale. Chaucer "deconstructed" what was a much stronger effort of transformation in the source than was found in the source of Troilus and Criseyde. In the Teseida,

Boccaccio, though he does present an analytical constitutive structure, makes a strong effort to execute a closural transforma­ tion of the consequential type. The release of Arcites and not

Palaemon from prison is as arbitrarily caused in Boccaccio's tale as it is in Chaucer's. The idea of the tournament is equally impractical in the two tales. Arcites, disguised as Pentheus, is no more martial than Palaemon. But Boccaccio gives much greater

Ji John M. Steadman, Disembodied Laughter; "Troilus" and the Apotheosis Tradition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 8o attention to causal relations, where there is a possibility of developing thee, in his tale. Hippolyta's sister makes an effort to allure the two young knights in the Italian poem Chaucer read; when Bhe knows that she iB being watched, she adorns herself C with special care (III, 19). The character of Pamphilus informs

Palaemon that Arcites has returned, presenting himself as Pentheus, from Thebes; and it is this information which prompts Palaemon to attempt an escape. In order to make his escape, Palaemon has to work the scheme of disguising himself as the doctor, Alimatos; more than the drunkenness of the guards is required (V, 5-32).

To prepare us for the grief of Emilia, Boccaccio has her feel stirrings of love for Arcites when it appears that he has won the battle (VIII, 12*0. In presenting the spirit that frightens Arcites' horse, Boccaccio draws a picture which is frightening indeed:

Erinys came forth with her long serpent-tresses, and her ornaments were green hydras whose lives she had restored in the Elisos, and the sulphurous flames that they flashed forth from their mouths made them more foul-smelling as they made her more fearsome. And this Goddess carried a whip of snakes in her hand.

Her arrival into the theater caused such horror in everyone who saw her, that each man trembled in his heart,

References are made to book and stanza. For a translation of the Teseida. I rely upon The Book of Theseus: Teseida delle Mozze d 1 Emilia, trans. Bernadette Marie McCoy (New York: Medieval Text Association, 197*0. Passages of Italian are taken from McCoy's source, _I Classici Mondadori: Tutte Le Opere di Giovanni Boccaccio. II, ed. Vittore Branca (Verona, 196*07 81

and yet no one was able to explain why. The winds made a strange noise and the sky began to seen blacker. The theater shook and every gate writhed and rattled on its hinges.

^Venne costei di ceraste crinita,/ e di verdi idro li suoi ornamenti/ erano a cui in Elisso la vita/ riconfor- tata avea, le quai latnbenti/ lo sulfuree fiarame, che uscita/ di bocca le facevan puzzolenti,/ piu fiera la faccano; e quests Dea/ di serpi scuriata in man tenea.

La cui venuta die tanto d'orrore/ a chi nel teatro stava a vedere,/ ch'ognuno stava con tremante core,/ ne il perche nessun potea sapere./ Li venti dier non usato romore,/ e '1 ciel piu ner comincio a parere;/ il teatro tromo, e ogni porta/ cigolo forte ne' cardini storta.7 (IX, 5-6)

The horse spooks. It may seem that Boccaccio creates the impression of ambiguity. Those who were in the theatre to sec, could see, presumably, the monster. But men are afflicted with a nameless fear; no one was able to explain ("ne il perche' nessun potea sapere"). It is as if the monster cannot be seen. My tentative conclusion is that Boccaccio wants both to suggest the arbitrary appearance of the workings of Destiny and to establish in convincing, dramatic terms the reason for Arcites* fall. This moment of ambiguity may have its origin, ultimately, in Boccaccio's general ambivalonae in handling the constitutive structure. The consequential structure is developed in such a determined way that it may seem to threaten the terms of an analysis which has opposed the mysterious workings of fate and man's particular efforts. When Emilia attributes the death of Arcites to her sin of intend­ ing to marry, a breach of the bond Bhe has made with the gods (XI, 68), the idea would tend to revise our conception of the basic problem which generates the constitutive structure. The story may seem to concern Emilia’s efforts to circumvent the power of the gods and secure

for herself a mate. But, as Theseus points out in urging Emilia

to marry Palaemon, if the gods were really interested in punishing her for trying to marry, they would hurt her, not her hapless suitors (XII, The primary effort of consequential transforma­ tion in the poem is that which consists in giving greater attention to Arcites than to Palaemon. Arcites prays to see Emilio one more time before he leaves Athens, and his prayer is answered (III, 82-83). When he returns, Emilia recognizes him immediately (IV,

37). He is given a speech to Love which is matched by no equally lyric lines in the language of Palaemon (IV, 67-71). Just before the battle, Palaemon makes a speech to Emilia which she cannot hear, because he makes it "silently under his helmet" (VII, 128); this speech is not given to us, not because giving it to us would violate a dramatic mode of presentation, but because Palaemon's speech is "almost the same" as the speech Arcites has made, also under his helmet, in the preceding five stanzas (VII, 123-127). Arcites' address to his troups occupies eleven stanzas (VII, 133-1*43); but, in presenting Palaemon's address, Boccaccio gives us a summary:

"Palaemon also invited his men to great honors with noble words, and encouraged them to perform well as earnestly ae he could, and he besought them fervently" (Palemone ancora/ con alte voci li suoi invitava/ a grand! onori, e a ben far l'incora/ quanto poteva, e mol to glien pregava /VII, 1*+^7). In the penultimate book of Boccaccio's epic, we travel with Arcites' spirit toward the eighth heaven (XI, 1). This glorification of Arcites may seem to fulfill the promise the poet makes at the beginning of the Teseida; he will show how joy follows pain for those who devote themselves to love (I* *0. Significantly, Z think, we find what appears to be the analytical closural structure to a consequential constitutive structure (though the poem has not actually been built upon a consequential constitutive structure) in the presentation of

ArciteB* temple, upon which are painted scenes from the story we have been reading, beginning with the return of Theseus from

Scythia (XI, 71) and ending with the burning of the young hero's body on its funeral pyre. Curiously, "Only his fall from the horse was overlooked and was not depicted" (Sola la sua caduta da cavallo/ gli uscl di mente ne' vi fu segnata ^XI, 88^). Boccaccio explains that the fates did not want that fall to be remembered, but he says that the people remembered it anyway. It is as if uncertainty about structure 1b being expressed in these lines. The temple, freezing characters mid-motion forever, is clearly an analytical constructive structure, but it is as if Boccaccio, to be certain of its analytical charactor, has to eliminate the one incident which is the result direct and simple of what is, in itself, an analytical structure. It might be said that Boccaccio, in eliminating the consequence which has brought the main part of an analytical constitutive structure to a conclusion, tries to suggest that the dynamic has been the opposite of what it has been. In fact, an analytical constitutive structure, as in the later poem by

Chaucer, is brought to a close because the prayers produce the result of the activity in the great arena. The general idea of

09stiny is invoked, as if to emphasize the analytical character of the temple depictions; but the people, Boccaccio says, remember the 8k

fall of Arcites from his horse, implying, perhaps, a doublenecs of

vision which opposes the perception of arbitrarily-occurring moments and the perception of causal connections.

Perhaps we can see, in Chaucer's poem as well as in the Teseida. a comic meaning: After a period of sterility, it is time for procreation. Bright new things must get on with it, now that the blockage figured in the Amazons' rebellion against Nature is over.

Arbitrarily, events move forward, the focuB being on two young men and an amorous young woman (in 3occaccio, at any rate). The rivalry must be resolved. A story is created which summarizes the problem in analytical terms as lover fights lover in anticipation of a shift from martial dominance to erotic dominance. The conflict ends when the one lover receives the rewards of his prayer. Thus, in a consequence, the problem which generated an analytical structure is resolved. Palomon and Emily can fulfill the social need. But

3occaccio Beems ambivalent in facing this dynamic. For him, the tragic story of Arcites obscures perception of the essentially comic nature of his tale. The flight to the heavens seems to reward a warrior, more than it does a lover, in this poem.

Chaucer takes over into his poem some of the ambivalence, in so far as he does create a description of the funeral which freezes the progress of events for a time. But in Chaucer's use of the rather thread-bare device of occupatio ("But how the fyr was maked upon highte,/ Ke eek the names that the trees highte . . . Ne how the ground agast was of the light . . . / No what jeweles men in the fyre caste . . . / ne how the Grekes pleye/ The wake-pleyeB, ne kepe I nat to seye . . . / But shortly to the point thanne wol 85

I vende" ^1, 2919-296J?/) we find more than a somewhat ironical

playing with rhetoric. In point of fact, the ceremony is to be

gotten out of the way summarily, now that the process that life and society require oust be completed. Chaucer's Knight moves

through the funeral and wake in forty-six lines (Boccaccio's handling of the event is a passage of kkO lines) and he decides to give Arcite's temple no treatment at all. Chaucer seems to see that the critical problem in the poem— the reconciliation of

OeBtiny and human agency— requires almost immediate attention.

His handling of the material has laid bare the problem, and we move quickly through the necessary consequences in which a solution is to be sought. Chaucer eschews elements which distort perception of the constitutive structures of the Teseida and Filoatrato. The flight of Arcites' spirit into the heavens, an episode perfectly suited to an analytical closural transformation, finds a more fitting place when it is turned into Troilus*s flight; for in the story of Troilus we have a consequential constitutive structure, and consequential constitutive structures require analytical constructive and closural structures. My theory of narrative closure will not be easily proven, of course, but thus far in my treatment of Chaucer I have managed to suggest how plausibility might eventually be established. Constitutive structures of the consequential type seem to require analytical constructive structures as poets work toward closure, and constitutive structures of the analytical type seem to require consequential constructive structures.

Chaucer seems loath, however, to do anything which invalidates 86 what is to be perceived as the constitutive structure of a work.

In this study I want to argue that Chaucer's capacity to see radical metaphysical and perceptual differences and hiB love of a good story were the jaws of a pincer that held him tightly. If it seems that my treatment of Chaucer implies that narrative and narrative closure are bound to frustrate the truly intellectual writer, that is because I mean to imply just that idea. But I want to emphasize the point, eventually, that out of one particularly analytical story-teller's mind could come tales that transcended mere narrative and became, precisely because of this story-teller's difficulty, instances of epiphanic vision. Chapter Four

Dream-Visions I:

On Avoiding the Collapse of Analytical

Constitutive Structures

The author of an artistic text is involved in a paradox.

Materials of a constitutive structure must be seen in a revised

way under the "sponsorship11 of a constructive structure derived

from the intellective principle "opposite to" the intellective

principle which has informed the constitutive structure; and yett

this does not mean that the reader is to experience the sense

that the original vision of the material is being corrected as the

narrative comes to an end. It means, rather, that the reader is

to have a sense that everything is being held in suspense, that

he is some place between entity and motion, motion and entity.

The author of the literary text, then, must not invalidate his

constitutive structure, but at the same time, he must complete his constructive structure.

As informative as it may be to name the constitutive structure—

identified by many structuralists as the dominant mode, or, perhaps, as the secondary mode— the work of appreciating an artist's effort— his struggle— is not complete until we have felt the "contrary" operations of constitutive and constructive structures. Let us consider, briefly, the following passage from Bernard Beckerman's

Dynamics of Drama in which a distinction between the "intensive mode" (consequential structure) and the "extensive mode" (analytical

87 88 structure) is being defended:

Naturally, accumulation and juxtaposition are not exclusive to one mode or the other. Tesman is certainly juxtaposed with Lovborg, and King Lear does contain a progressive sequence of events. Nevertheless, the inclination toward one or the other manner of relating parts is strong enough to dominate each mode.'1

Imprecision results because a distinction is not made between the

physical evidence suggesting one or the other of the two structures

and the meaning, or semiology, generated by these structures.

Moreover, Beckerman's analysis suggests the possibility of a "perfect"

text, the elements so well mixed in it that it challenges the

distinction being defended. What we want to understand is how a

text obviously of one type in its constitutive structure develops

meaning through the workings of phenomenology we associate with

the "other" structure. Troilus and Criseyde, as we have seen,

finally delivers a noetic meaning— -though Chaucer's homily in the last six stanzas suggests some anxiety about the fact. The Knight's

Tale, as we have seen, finally delivers a moral meaning— though the delivery of the message requires a rather illogical turn of thought. What complicates matters is that constitutive structures generate a sense of meaning as well as constructive structures, with the result that we will often have the feeling that the meaning the end of a work develops is out of harmony with the meaning that it was originally intended to deliver. It is no

1 Dynamics of Drama (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1979), p. 195. wonder that writers are notoriously close-mouthed when it cotneB

to talking about the meanings of their worksi they, know that if

their work is to be successful, they must create a moment at which

the idea of meaning itself is part of the earth from which they

have kicked themselves loose.

In the Knight1s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde we see the

mature Chaucer doing his best to bring his works to conclusions

which do not invalidate their constitutive structures. It might

be observed that, in using Boccaccio for his tutor, fallible b b

that author was, Chaucer was encouraged to develop consequential

structures— both in the form of the constitutive structure, in

Troilus and Crisevdef and in the form of the constructive structure,

in the Knight *s Tale. But what does it suggest, that, in the case

of Troilus and Criseyde— where the task of building a constructive

structure was that of developing an analytical structure— Chaucer lengthens the story by about forty-five percent and that, in

the case of the Knight *s Tale— where the task of building a constructive structure was that of developing a consequential structure— Chaucer shortened the story by about seventy-five percent? As we have seen, there are difficulties in the Filostrato and in the Teseida, and these difficulties Chaucer tried to overcome, in part by keeping a firmer hold on the constitutive structures. Boccaccio's poems may seem, at first reading, smooth— because the artist wants to conceal problems of meaning which are addressed directly by Chaucer. But more than an effort to correct artistic deficiencies accounts for the difference between the length of Troilus and Criseyde and the Knight's Tale, I think. 90

It BeeoiB to me that in comparing these two works we see emerge a tendency in the poet which is manifested throughout his career.

Chaucer is an anayzer. Where the assignment is that of writing an analytical constructive structure, he will write at greater length. Moreover, he keenly feels structural differences, their implications, at any rate; and if we will keep this in mind, and the idea of closual transformation as I have presented it thus far, we will understand why in the three dream-visions under review in this chapter— poems written before the poet's maturity—

Chaucer gives us what are, for me at least, troubled endings.

Dream-visions, I might observe at the outset, can be thought of as structures with characteristically elaborated development on the side of the signified. The physical presence of figures in an analytical structure might be described in some detail, but the tendency is to generalize the appearance, so that we have the sort of descriptions one finds in the Roman de la Rose. Personification allegory is distinctly analytical. We might notice that the signification of a figure can be so distinct that we will not accept his involvement in a motion which takes him away from that signification— the difficulty with Langland's handling of the

Seven Deadly Sins. While it is true that dream-visions usually present us with some form of consequential structure, in some works, the Parliament of the Three Ages, for example, the physical presence of the characters is absolutely minimal and the meanings offered by the characters have little bearing on on-going action. But whether the ideationally-based introduction of a character described in terms larger than life serves to develop part of a meaning or the introduction of a character who wants to deliver

a complete meaning serves to advance a debate, in a poem which

aay be characterized in either of these ways we find the analytical

constitutive structure. From ay perspective, the opposition

James I. Vimsatt sets up in Allegory and Mirror, while it say

suffice in discussing much of the literature of the Middle Ages, is of limited utility when one is trying to understand tensions, particularly tensions in Chaucer, Chaucer mirrored society and letters in the Book of the Duchess, the Parliament of Fowls, and the House of Fame, but we would do well to understand allegorical touches, not as representative of the artist's need to move a

"plot" forward (an implication of the opposition as Wimsatt p describes it) but as further elaboration of an analytical structure.

Early in his life as poet Chaucer was influenced by the Roman de la Hose and the Consolatio Philosophi. works which encouraged an interest in analytical structures. The debat mode in French literature and, perhaps, the idea of the anthology, particularly

Ovid's Metamorphoses, also encouraged an interest in analytical structure. Now, it might be pointed out that the analytical constitutive structures in the poems Chaucer read were often answered by consequential structures in closural transformations. The lover succeeds, finally, in taking the rose. But Chaucer shows a certain reluctance to invent endings which will arbitrarily close his dream-visions; and it may well seem that he avoids "natural," obvious endings. Analytical to the point where he will refuse to

o Allegory and Mirror (New Tork: PegaBUs, 1970), p. 31. 92

suggest a revised idea of the material of his constitutive

structures, Chaucer leaves us "hanging."

To Wimsatt's allegory/mirror dichotomy, I prefer J. A. Burrow's

allegory/example dichotomy— where the idea of elaboration on the

side of the signified is implied by the first term and the idea of

elaboration on the side of the sign is implied by the second.

When Burrow claims that Ricardian poety shows much greater interest

in literalness than is evidenced in the work of the thirteenth

century, he is suggesting, from my point of view, that fourteenth-

century poets and their audiences were more interested in consequential

structures than were their predecessor.^ We see an Italian version

of the trend oporating when we compare Dante and Boccaccio, certainly;

but Chaucer was an English poet, and we have found a way to describe,

in structural terms, what this English poet wanted to do to the latest thing in continental fiction. However much we may agree with Burrow's general assessment, particularly when we consider Chaucer's realism, we must observe that there was something old- fashioned about the poet's constructive tendencies. It becomes important that we make a distinction between the phenomenology of the sign and the semiology in the signified as we try to understand what that old-fashioned something is in Chaucer.

As we have seen, it is difficult to view Troilus and Criseyde as an effort of medievalisation pure and simple, though one feels that the poet is interjecting elements we might associate with the

3 Bicardian Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), pp. ?8 -d2 . medieval manner— the elaboration of signifieds. But it is possible

for an author to give us phenomenology we associate with elaborated

signfieds— •broken organization, isolated blocks of characterization

and episode--without in fact delivering the semiologically

completed structure. Burrow's division is useful because it

introduces us to lines of inquiry which enable us to understand

how a stylistic division such as the one Barbara Herrnstein

Smith stresses, parataxis/sequence, can be related to a "thematic" 5 division such as Frank Kermode's kairos/chronos. If a writer

works toward closure by intimating the full development of a structure which is opposite to the constitutive structure of his

narrative, he also works toward an ending by completing his

constitutive structure, ensuring its integrity by making it

semiologically full. A story with a consequential constitutive structure conveyed through paratactic style suggests the eventual development of an elaborated signified, and an opposite dynamic

is often observed. In Piers Plowman we find the anticipation of a consequential ending as allegorical figures, however awkwardly, . are made to move and affect one another.

In the Parliament of Fowls. Chaucer suggests the possibility of a consequential closural structure as he presents beings eager

L Poetic Closurei A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19687, pp. 99-110.

^The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford tlniversity Press,'196b/,' pp. 4b'-50. to got on with the business of procreation. To avoid closure which would cause a collapse of his analysis, Chaucer simply stops the action. We may say that by meanB of strong phenomenology— the birds talk in markedly different ways— Chaucer tries to protect the integrity of his analysis, even though the speech of one class of birds might suggest an especially strong desire to act. If we say that the general project of the birds is that of manifesting the general power of Nature's, and therefore of God's, creative will, how the goose's suggestion, that if one is not loved by a particular being one should simply choose another (566-567), can strike us as both very wrong and very right becomes clear. Like

Pandarus's suggestion to Troilus in Book IV of Troilus and Criseyde

(^05-^06), the goose's suggestion would advance the general tendency of nature; but in doing so, it would separate this particular lover from any sense that he, himself, is manifesting an eternal principle. The goose's suggestion offers to destroy in particularizing motions a generalizing metaphor which makes the lover's love correspond to the Creator's.

With Charles Muscatine, we might notice that Chaucer took fron his French sources a voice which implies the readiness to act.^ But the bourgeois voice was capable of being "mixed" with the courtly; and, as we have seen, the readiness to act is an aspect of the courtly-love ethic. Pandarus performs the very necessary business of throwing Troilus into bed, and then he prepares himself

^Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957)1 PP- 6^-65. to enjoy a scene from an old romance. However high the claims of worldly love may rise, worldly love always implies the need to exercise practical reason. The very project to which the language of courtly love referb , though courtly language tends to isolate entities— objects, places, and static states of mind— offers to upset that language. This fact wbg dramatically illustrated for us as we moved from Book III to Book IV of

Troilus and Crisevde. Inasmuch as it shows the inability of the bourgeoise and courtly styles to be fixedly associated with completely distinct world-views, the Parliament of Fowls anticipates Troilus and Crioeyde. The goose's voice, it might be argued, serves to advance, ontologically speaking, love in the moGt profound senso of the word; for tho goose recognizes the need forinvolvement in Nature's way. On the other hand, the tercel's voice, it might be argued, attempts to reduco love to a merely verbal phenomenon— something which we cannot have unless we maintain it as a clear concept, distinct from cupidity or other concepts suggesting what seems substandard. But the birds of higher class are most definitely involved in love, ontologically speaking; they are associated with Alan de Lille's vision of continuous creation (316-318), and their involvement is not distinguishable, practioally speaking, from that of the water fowls. Since a verbal distinction fails to support a real distinction, Chaucer makes verbal distinction itself an opposable category. Against the plurality of voices, all of them implying a knowledge of love based on experience and class differences,

Chaucer has placed the fact of love. Ve find, then, love in an eplstemological sens#— -a tarn which conveniently summarizes a

certain range of experience--separated, from love in an ontological sense. This oppoaition informs the analytical constitutive structure of the poem.

The paradox that catches Chaucer in the early dream visions is that the dynamic of narrative suggests the need for transforma­ tion of the materials of analytical constitutive structures, while the recognition of this very fact implies an inability to blur the structural distinction. In Troilus and Criseyde. as we have seen, Chaucer is able to work, however complicatedly, toward the fulfillment of his moat basio tendency. In three short poems under review in this part of our study Chaucer could indulge his most basic proelivity, but the closural dynamics which were demanded of him by this analysis threatened to destroy the analysis itself.

Rather than argue, as Larry Sklute has argued, that in the

Parliament of Fowls "the inoonclusiveness of its form derives from n the nature of its content (its subject matter)," I contend that inconclusivenesB is a function of form in the poem. When we move on to a discussion of the Canterbury Tales, we will find that Chaucer, on a much larger soale and in a poem dealing with a plurality of subjects, contends with a similar, though not identical, difficulty late in his career. In this early poem, and in that later, much larger work, Chaucer has an opportunity to achieve a clear and dramatically interesting resolution. Between the recess of the

^"The Inconclusive Form of the Parliament of Fowls," ChauR, 16 (1981), 120. parlianent and the singing of the roundelay, he could have recounted in, say, twenty-five stanzas the events of a year in which the three rivals contended for the "hand" of the forael

eagle, awarding victory, finally, to the best one. At the next annual parlianent, the formel eagle would choose and Nature would produce likely nates for the two nonentarily disappointed suitors.

Then the roundelay would be sung, Nature having solved, in the workings of her processes, a difficulty which was, in the long run, a snail difficulty indeed. To speculate along these lines * nay seem as dangerous as it is for Charles Owen to imagine a 8 concluding scene at the Tabard which had only to be written; but I speculate here for the purpose of showing that the material offered an opportunity to create a closing structure of the consequential type, not for the purpose of revealing what Chaucer actually thought he night do. If Chaucer had taken the opportunity resident in his material, he would have caused the analysis itself to collapse. All the birds, no matter what their social dialects were, would be absorbed in the great force of general procreation. To resist the pull of the narrative in this direction, Chaucer uses differences in ways of speaking to create satiric effects. But the parliament itself is, finally, the subject of satire, and Chaucer withholds the final stroke, reflecting sympathy, perhaps, with individual creatures who must do their beBt to understand what the forces of the universe demand

o Pilgrimage and Story-Telling in the "Canterbury Tales" (Normanx University of Oklahoma Press, 1977)» p* 210. 98 of them. In the Parliament of Fowls, we see a poem in which the analytical structure is characterised, not by elaboration on the aide of the signfied— as is often the case in analytical structures--! but by elaboration on the side of the sign.

The Parliament of Fowls Impresses upon us Chaucer's reluctance to finish a poem in a way which would invalidate the constitutive structure. At this point I might reiterate the point that the structuralism being developed in this study is quite different from the structuralism which opposes "metaphor" and "metonymy."

One needs to noticef I think, a structure which always offers to revise metaphor and metonymy both, together, as though they are aspects of the same structure (they are). In his use of the distinction between "metaphor" and "metonymy" James A. Boon has resorted to language which begins to anticipate, I think, the sort of analysis being developed in this study:

Culture itself, as opposed to natural order, is a function of these two functions. For culture or "society" subsumes a sensed identity or solidarity (metaphoric function) with others, together with a notion of differentiation but necessary interrelatableness (metonymic function)— both of which are contained in the essential cultural fact, namely reciprocity as manifested in positive exchange.9

In my view, the analytical and the consequential structures are not functions. They are forms consisting of signs and signifieds, either of which are oapable of elaboration. Constitutive and

^From Symbolism to Structuralism: Levi-Strauss in a Literary Tradition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972), p. 77• ” 99

constructive structures are functions* One is primaryt and the

other responds to it; and they are both real, even though they have a provisional sort of existence* In the Parliament of Fowls* what is occurring, what problem is being worked out, is quite clear* Ve know that the story could be completed if the author chose to complete it. The function of closure will be accomplished

through the workings of a consequential constructive structure next year--in life* But this is a work of literature, and for its life it depends upon an ending that holds things in artificial suspense. The consequential cloBural structure which Chaucer avoids in the Parliament of Fowls has individual marriages as its phenomenology, with the general marraige of female and male potentialities (we recall the Boethian hymn Troilus sings) as its semiology* Because the relationship between the phenomenology of the closural structure which we might expect and its semiology is as clear as it is, we might notice that Chaucer emphasizes the phenomenology of difference as he develops his story* To emphasize the semiology of difference would be to anticipate in a rather open manner a conclusion that never comes: it would be apparent that class differences easily dissolve under the force of the procreative necessity. Had Chaucer opposed, in the development of bis tale, birds who simply referred to their general classes and did not claim their own little space in the crowd, a collapse into the consequential structure, semiologically as well as phenomenologically, would have been anticipated. In the Book of the Duchess. Chaucer anticipates a consequential closural structure in which there is a considerable 100

distance between phenomenology and semiology. In order to avoid

a close which would cause the analysis of his constitutive

structure in this poem to oollapse, Chaucer emphasises the

semiology of the analysis. Whereas the diverse concepts of love

related in the Parliament of Fowls are given expression in strongly-

marked dialects— in palpable, phenomenological terms— diverse

visions of life and literature are communicated to the reader of

the Book of the Duchess by meanB of images and verbal phenomena

which imply complexity beyond the reach of any particular verbal

style. Chaucer uses vaguely-defined opposition in this poem to

suggest varying perspectives which follow quite naturally to a

point just short of suggesting a kind of consequential close.

It is true, as Clemen argues, that—

In the Book of the Duchess . . . we see Chaucer drawing away from alTegorical dialogue, which often amounted to the arbitrary opposition of two logioally expounded doctrines, and moving in the direction of conversation between real people."0

But we should notice that progress in the poem does not develop on a level of psychological realism. There is psychological realism in the poem, and there is progress; but the one does not develop out of the other. The perspective of the dreamer, who would act if he could, who is analytical almost in spite of himself, is a frozen perspective— one which is inoapable of offering something of value to the grieving knight. Certainly,

^Wolfgang Clemen, Chaucer*s Early Poetry, trans. C. A. H. Sym (London: Methuen, 1963)1 P« 53* 101

the exchanges between the dreamer and the knight in the Book of the

Duchess sound realistic, more realistic than those of the' rather

stilted dialogue between, for example, the dreamer and the maiden

in Pearl: but inasmuch as the perspectives out of which speeches

issue are fixed in Chaucer's poem, we have more of the structural

rigidity we associate with allegory in the Book of the Duchess

than in Pearl. What I have pointed out about the difficulty in Wimsatt's

allegory/mirror division is observable in Wimsatt's own treatment

of the Book of the Duchess, in which the critic says that to

Kachaut's depiction of a lady "the English poet adds an allegorical

dimension"— an allusive, symbolic comparison of Blanche to Mary. 11

If Wimsatt is right, it might be said that in his handling of

Blanche Chaucer causes whatever narrative value there is in the poem to be dropped, fixing our attention on a settled entity as he

does. Blanche, a creature to be admired according to the conventions of amour courtois, mirrors a certain social ideal; but as a figure of Mary she passes over into even greater fixedness. This point

Wimsatt suggests to us with particular clarity when he argues

that the phrase "resting place of Trouthe" is distinctly Marian.

From an array of images and verbal signs which mirror preoccupation

1 1"The Apotheosis of Blanche in the Book of the Duchess," JEGP. 66 (196?), 29-32.

12Ibid., pp. k0-k2. 102 with romance, Chaucer moves, finally, to the evocation of absolute,

transcendental fact* The movement is certainly not to be thought of as a swing from fascination with beings to an interest in motion. It might be argued that, as a character who mirrors the world of courtly love, Blanche conveys the idea of motion and that as a character who figures in an allegorical manner the gentle intercessor, Blanche conveys the idea of a fixed entity. Something like this would be anticipated, perhaps by Paul Zumthor, who says, concerning types, "Le type, en effet, renvoie simultenement a sa reference traditionnelle (systtfmatique) et au sens contextuel 13 (syntagmatique)." But inasmuch as Blanche is entirely a type— a type of literary character, a type of Mary— she does not Beem to be material out of which a necessary action in a unique context can be built. Seen only through the highly artificial language of the knight in black, she refers us to the system of courtly love.

The "syntagra" of the story of the knight and Blanche is governed by a system. On either side of the analysis--the side which refers to courtly love, the side which refers to Christian cosmology— we have what is sytematic. Ve find in Chaucer's constructive structure, after the conventional character of the knight's lady has been introduced, not the dynamic which we might expect— individuation suggesting uniquely-generated necessities of motion and the development, then, of a consequential structure—

^Essai de poetique medievale (Paris: Seuil, 1972), p. 95 103 but, rather, a dynamic which takes us in the "opposite" direction— a reinforcement of the constitutive structure through elaboration of the signified. Even if one does not go so far as to say that the treatment of Blanche evokes memory of Mary, something like this dynamic seems to be operating. The problem of the work— a comparison of joy in courtly loving with grief in loss— cannot introduce a satisfying, phenomenologically-developed consequential closural transformation— not even of the sophisticated sort that might be realized at the end of an hour in a psychiatrist's office. The dreamer, I am convinced, does not take on the role of a physician; he does not pursue a wise strategy.And "the interlocutory roles of the dreamer," as Robert Jordan argues,

"rather than cohero into a unified sensibility, are shaped by the separate contexts in which they occur and remain incompletely resolved, leaving unfilled gaps in the characterization of the 1 if dreamer." The end of the hert-huntyng may be rich with association, but it doeB not signify the completion of a purposeful program of action. Contrasting with the method of protecting the integrity of the analytical conptitutive structure in the Parliament of Fowls, the method here is that of elaboration on the side of the signified, so that if the beginning of the main part of the vision— the description of the park-like forest— suggests something like a return to the Golden Age, the end of the sequence BUggestB, as Kemp Malone remarks, something as final and total as hell, a

1**- "The Compositional structure of the 5ook of the Duchess," ChauR. 9 (197*0, 10J. 10*f a solitude that answers the bright sounds of the hunt. 15 But in a very subtle way, it might be argued, a consequential closural transformation is anticipated in the constructive structure of the work. And it is because that transformation cannot be fully realised that the ending of the Book of the Duchess is a troubled ending.

The poem progresses by means of transitions which build on superficial similarity only to develop meaningful contrast. At the beginning of the poem, the narrator is unable to sleep, so heart-sick that his continued life is something of a miracle:

For nature wolde nat suffyse To noon erthly creature Nat longe tyme to endure Vithoute alep and be in sorwe. And I ne may, ne nyght ne morwe, Slepe; and thus melancolye And drede I have for to dye. 08-2*0

There is the suggestion that he suffers from the melancholy which results from unrequited love— there is but one physician who could cure him (39-**0). Juxtaposed with this complaint is the problem Alcyone must face. Like the narrator, she bears the symptoms of melancholy, and she wants to sleep:

Send me grace to slepe, and mete In my alep some certeyn sweven Vherthourgh that I may knowen even Whether my lord be quyk or ded. (118-121)

^Chapters on Chaucer (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1951). P- 31- 105 The specificity of Alcyone's purpose, however, contrasts with the narrator's desire to find respite from an anxiety that has developed ovor eight long years and probably will continue to develop in years to cone. Alcyone's vision, a revelation of brutal truth, kills her (213-21*0 in three day's time. Treating the tale he has read as though its meaning lay in practical advice— a prescription for insomniacs— the narrator prays to Juno and goes to sleep. Unlike the dream Alcyone dreams— a vision concerned directly with her problem— our narrator's dream is a mystery, a wonderful thing which challenges efforts of interpretation:

No, not Joseph, withoute drede, Of Sgipte, he that redde so The kynges metynge Pharao, No more than koude the lest of us; Ne nat skarsly Macrobeus, (He that wrot al th'avysyoun That he mette, kyng Scipioun, The noble man, the Affrikan,— ouche marvayles fortuned than) I trowe, arede my dremeB even. (280-289)

It is true that the idea of sweetness— the dream which will be reported to us is "ynly swete" (2?6)— is evoked as the dream begins to develop, as the dreamer, in his dream, is "awakened" by the choir of birds. And in the particularising language through which the choir of birds is presented to us there is a certain strangeness. What Gervase Mathew has observed about English arts in the court of Richard II may be observed in the opening of the dreamer's vision (though Richard is not yet on the throne): fascination with detail, delicacy, and brightness*^ Rut what follows this fresh beginning is a surrey of romance iconography, of the figures from the Rowan de la Rose, aost notably* The nix of classical and romance figures in the windows of the dreamer's chamber might be new, but the images out of which that composite is made are old indeed. Moreover, the idea of viewing significant figures presented in frozen forms is, itself, an old idea; and it begins to seem that, for all the superficial strangeness of this dream, it is basically familiar. The suggestion that a unifying

Interpretation— this dream is "ynly swete"— could in some direct way "answer" the singleness of meaning we found in Alcyone's dream seems questionable as we survey the chamber* Multiplicity of meaning is suggested, and the sweetness we find seems to be the work of style. A principle of random selection seems to be operative as the dreamer finds that he has an opportunity to join in Octavian's hunt* A historical figure whose presence would have had a

"literary" nature to readers of Ovid joins the array of romance and classical characters. But as John M* Fyler has shown, the presence of Octavian serves to summarize the possibilities of the 17 Golden Age. ' What is for H. R. Patch "an entirely unnecessary

^The Court of Richard II (New York: Norton, 1968), pp. ^9-52.

^"Irony and the Age of Gold in the Book of the Duchess," Speculum. 52 (1977), 321. 107 18 borrowing from Octavian Imperator," becomes, for Fyler, a unifying influence. It in in the context of a world where ideals may be realized that the story of the knight will be told. But the ideal setting predicts in only a superficial way what is to come. The dreamer, now a verbal epicurean, seems to be a step behind us in seeing this as he settles into an appreciation of the knight in black:

Loo! how goodly spak thys knyght, As hit had be another wyght; He made hyt nouther towgh ne queynte. And I saw that, and gan me aqueynte With hym, and fond hym so tretable, Ryght wonder skylful and resonable, As me thoghte, for al hys bale. Anoon ryght I gan fynde a tale To hym, to loke wher I myght ought Have more knowynge of hys thought. (529-538)

The transition into the knight's presentation turns on the superficiality of style, apprehended as "thought" by the dreamer.

The knight in black, who identifies himself as sorrow itself (597), may befelt to represent the Orphic spirit. This is the sort of

"thought" he finally offers. Alice Miskimin has summarized the idea of Orpheus one receives from a reading of Boethius's treatment (III, Met. 12, 62-70) in this manner:

The myth of the love of Orpheus, like the myth of Narcissus which becomes the myth of Eve at the pool in Milton's eden, seeks to reconcile the explicable love

On Rereading Chaucer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939), pp. 197-198. 108

that binds, makes symmetry and cosmic harmony, creates and renews, with its antithetical necessity, the devouring passion and self-destroying power latent in creation itself* ^

The idea that the vivifying power of love can also destroy us is the link between the story of Alcyone and the story of the knight in black. But whereas the spirit of Ceyx is allowed to appear before Alcyone, the character of the dreamer appears before the knight in black, inviting the young courtier to recreate the spirit of his lady through words.

As I may have suggested, within the story the knight tellB we find progreBB from the conventional language of courtly love to language which evokes associations of a higher order. Stophen

Manning shows us that the Book of the Duchess might well remind us of the tradition of the plank, inasmuch as the knight treats Blanche as the embodiment of virtue, and we are made to feel 20 that the loss of her represents universal loss; but it seems reasonable to suppose that Chaucer, whose lyric for Mary (An

A. B. C.) was probably made at the request of Blanche herself, 21 would have been aware of possible Marian associations as he wrote these lines:

Trewly she was, to myn ye,

^The Renaissance Chaucer (New Haven: Tale University Press, 1975), p. 153. ^"Chaucer's Good Fair White," CL, 10 (1958), 10*f. 21 F. N. Robinson, "Short Poems," in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, p. 320. 109 The soleyn fenix of Arabye; For ther livyth never botoon, Ne swich as she ne knowe I noon* (981-98^)

Viosatt's examination of the sources from which Chaucer borrowed in his treatment of Blanche— Lo Jugement dou Roy de Behaigne and

Remede de Fortune— leads him to conclude that allegorical touches are original with Chaucer* Furthermore, Wimsatt points out, the idea that Mary is the resting place of Wisdom (Cf. BD, 1002- 22 1009) is standard in medieval biblical interpretation. I would * not go as far as Hupp£ and Robertson go in making an argument for

Christian morality the theme of the work: Lady White embodies the virtues lacking in a knight who has indulged himself in the 23 cupiditous love of a mere creature; these are the wages of misapplied love. But I do suggest that a consequential closural structure is finally implicated in a progression that has taken us from the elaborated sensibilities of literary epicureanism, to the frozen grief of a medieval Orpheus, to the Neoplatonic associations which appear in the descriptions of a lady (she does embody all the ideals), to the idea of Christian redemption.

Octavian, if he is not a type of Christ, might be viewed as, not only the one who presides over a renewal of the Golden Age in

^"The Apotheosis of Blanche," pp. ^0-41.

^Bernard F. Hupptf* and D. W. Robertson, Jr., Fruyt and Chaf; Studies in Chaucer's Allegories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1^3), p. ^£>. 110 zk the pagan senae— an idea we find in Virgil's Fourth Eclogue —

but as one who presides over a renewal of the world in the Christian

sense. This revision was, as Jean Sesnec suggests, part of the 25 regular furniture in the nedieval imagination. On the side of the

signified we nay find, then, a movement toward a moral meaning in

the poem. If this is the reading we find reasonable, we find the

interesting situation in which the semiology of a structure anticipates its phenomenology— an odd state of affairs whioh

finally explains why the argument of Hupp£ and Robertson is*

if dubious, on some level plausible. The progress of the Book of the Duchess brings us toward, but not into, a consequential structure which would, in effect,

"rewrite" the entire poem. The grief of the knight would have to be seen as a pitiful instance of despair, not as justifiable grief. Romance, mythic, and Platonic perspectives would have to be seen as ill-conceived, not merely alternative, perspectives. Unlike the consequential close which is suggested by the material of the Parliament of Fowls, one whioh would bring together quite naturally the diverse phenomena of the analytical constitutive structure, the consequential close suggested by the material of the Book of the Duchesa would bring together diverse perspectives, whioh have been implied by references and stylistic features,

^Harold Mattingly, "Virgil's Fourth Eclogue," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 10 (19^7),

*^The Survival of the Pagan Gods, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 16-17- 111

under a sense of Christian history, but leave the phenomenology

of the poem entirely behind* The consequential closural structure

would be so strong, that is to say, on the semiological side

that it would replace the history recalled in the poem with another,

entirely different history. All particular tales which opposed

life and death— the many Orphic tales— can be absorbed in the

unseen effect of one man's death. But Chaucer refuses to execute

transformation. It is possible to say that whereas Chaucer

avoids a close which would obliterate his analytical constitutive

structure in the Parliament of Fowls by emphasizing the fixity of

phenomenology which in fact did not guarantee the integrity o f the

analytical structure— diverse ways of speaking— Chaucer avoids a

close which would obliterate his analytical constitutive structure

in the Book of the Duchess by emphasizing the fixity of semiology

which in fact does not guarantee the integrity of the analytical

structure. Somewhat vaguely, in a manner which haB suggested allegorical possibilities to Huppe" and Robertson, Chaucer lets the

phenomenologically-weak but semiologically-strong analytical constitutive structure stand without complement.

In the House of Fame, too, Chaucer preserves an analytical

constitutive structure, leaving it uncomplemented, it may seem.

The analytical constitutive structure is manifested, as in the Parliament of Fowls, in the use of two setting. But whereas

the settings of the Parliament of Fowls refer to thematic "comple­ ments"— Venus making erotic demands while Nature makes general

procreative demands— the settings in the House of Fame do not refer 112 to thematic principles— at least at first— -which are clearly complementary— "paradigmatic." In Venus's temple of glass the story of Aeneas is depicted, and we receive the impression that we are looking at the actual events, without the medium of a poet's craft. This piece of Chaucer's handiwork suggests a fasci­ nation with the difference between story and discourse that becomes so very pronounced in Troilus and Crlseyde. It suggests a naivete, in fact, which we associate with the overt narrator of that later poem, who seems ready to give his subject, a body of received facts, the most "poetical" treatment he can imagine, even while he admits, in albeit conventional-sounding ways, that the story is, after all, beyond him. He describes Dido's death in a way which may well recall passages of Book V from

Troilus and Criseyde to ust

And when she wiste sothly he Vas forth unto his shippes goon, She into his chambre wente anoon, And called on hir suster Anne, And gan hir to compleyne thanne; And seyde, that she cause was That she first loved him, alias! And thuB counseylled hir thertoo. But what I when this was seyd and doo, She rof hirselve to the herte, And deyde thorgh the wounde smerte. And al the manor how she deyde, And alle the wordes that she seyde, Vhoso to knowe hit hath purpos, Bede Virgile in Eneydos Or the Epistle of Ovyde, Vhat that she wrot or that she dydef And nere hyt to long to endyte, Be God, I wolde hyt here write. But wel-awayl the harm, the routhe, That hath betyd for such untrouthe, As men may ofte in bokes rede, 113 And al day sen hyt yet in dede, That for to thynken hyt. a ten# is. (36M87)

Contrasting with the courtly, romance interest of the first book of the poem, the remainder of the poem shows an interest in meohanios. Geoffrey adopts a wait-and-see attitude toward the eagle's theory of sound, but it impresses us as ingenious.

There is some irony in the offer of Jove and the eagle to give the narrator new tidings as a reward for his having devoted himself to love in his reading and writing; for the thing that is offered to Geoffrey radically overturns the perspective of the first part of the poem, where events could be regarded with some confidence and the only work which the poet had to do was that of assembling appropriately conventional language. When the narrator finally sees the inside of the House of Rumor, where the world 1b duplicated through the marvelous mechanism which gives visible bodies to the voices that have drifted upward, he is faced with circumstances opposite to the familiar ones he enjoyed in the temple of glass. Now actual events are hopelessly obscured, and the narrator is subject to the confused progress of a "tale11 which seems to promise no crisis, denouement, and end. The House of Fame may be seen as a place where the illusion of clarity is effected. But it is interesting thatChaucer begins with a description of the House of Fame as he takes up the subject of celestial machinery. The process, the traced conse­ quential structure, is reversed, so that we find, first, the arbitrary manner in which Fame, a being, disposes the fates of other 111* beings, some of whom take up final residence on pedestals supplied by the styles of poets, and, second, the confused process, rumor, which submits facts mixed with falsehoods to the judgment of

Fame. In reversing the natural order of things, Chaucer renders analytically what is in fact a consequential closural structure. The second part of the poem, which offers a consequential closural structure, is moored, then, to the analytical constitutive structure, which opposes a demand of narrative— -that the poot learn to elaborate the signified— -and the facts of life, which challenge one to find relationships between the signs. In reversing the natural order of the process, Chaucer directs our attention to the opposition, but the opposition itoolf yields a satisfyingly absurd consequential structure:

And somtyme saugh I thoo at ones A lesyng and a sad soth sawe, That gonne of avonture drawe Out at a wyndowe for to pace; And, when they metten in that place, They were achekked bothe two, And neyther of hem mostc out goo For other, so they gonne crowde, Til ech of hem gan crion lowde, "Lat me go first!" "Nay, but let me! And here I wol ensuren the Wyth the nones that thou wolt do so, That I shal never fro the go, But be thyn owne sworen brother!" (2088-2101)

Slapstick conflict is resolved as courtesy disguises what amounts to a pragmatic indiffernence to truth. Indifference to truth, which had the innocent appearance of attention to style in the first part of the poem, may be seen now for what it is. 115 Chaucer, having found a way to precerve his analytical structure and at the same time represent the consequential structure which "explains" the prosence of that analytical structure, seems restless, however. Analysis having been achieved, he turns to the representation of action again, as though discontented with the patness of what has developed:

I herdc a gret noyse withalle In a corner of the hallo, Ther men of love-tydynges tolde, And I gan thiderward beholdo (2141-2145)

The confusion and clamor offor to upset the sense of closure which we found upon our realization that men are essentially indifferent to the truth— a cause with multiple effects. FactB and "literary" treatments of them seem to have been related too clearly. Now the poet strives again for a consequential structure— a sequence of events, a physical description; but even as he does so, he introduces the idea of further analysis, with love, hiB well-worn subject, as the concern. An analysis alternative to the one just completed seems to be developing. A figure of authority is introduced, and the poem breaks off, giving us the sense— which may or may not have been intended— that an endlea6 opposition of analysis and confusing facts is possible. It may seem that in the House of Fame, pluralism— a variety of claims about truth, a readiness to accept lies as well as truth— is indeed a part of the problem of the poem, much more than a means of holding everything in suspense. The work seems markedly different from the Parliament of Fowls. But it might be observed that| whereas pluralism in the Parliament of Fowls is the half of the analysis which refers to something that might easily be absorbed in what is referred to in the other half— the force of nature— t pluralism in the House of Fame refers to something that might easily absorb the thing referred to in the other half of the analysis— a thing which might be summarized in the word "books." To avoid a collapse in his structure which would imply a condition in the world which Chaucer, the man, probably would not have countenanced, the poet suggests that within the

House of Rumor a process of ordering, of supplying authority, is possible. Unfortunately, we do not know what kind of ordering authority Chaucer imagined in the House of Rumor, but the mission of that character must remind us of the mission Chaucer himself was to undertake when he joined the pilgrims at the Tabard. Chapter Five

Dream-Visions II:

Anticipating the Canterbury Tales

The tern "closural transformation" poseB a difficulty, inasmuch as it may seem to imply a radical revision of perception* As I hope

to show in my treatment of the Canterbury Tales* Chaucer saw that a story-teller could in fact disguise the fundamental nature of hiB story. The "closural transformation" I have in mind— and I think Chaucer had a form of it in mind, too— implies a position fraught with difficulty. Jonathan Culler's idea of closural transformation, though it certainly sounds a good deal like mine, differs insofar as it does not suggest the kind or degree of tension

Implied by my theory:

The reader must organize the plot as a passage from one Btate to another and this passage or movement must be Buch that it serves as a representation of theme. The end must be made a transformation of the beginning so that meaning can be drawn from the perception of resemblance and difference. And this imposes constraints on the way in which one names beginning and end. One ean attempt to establish a coherent causal series, in which disparate incidents are read as stages towards a goal, or a dialectical movement in which incidents are related as contraries whose opposition carries the problem that must be resolved. And these same constraints apply at lower levels of structure. In composing an initial and a final state the reader will draw on a series of actions which he can organise in a causal sequence, so that what is named as the state which the larger thematic structure requires is itself a logical development, or he may read a series of

117 118

incidents as illustrations of a common condition which serves as initial or final state in the overall structure.'

What most distinguishes my idea of closure from Culler's— setting

aside the fact that Culler wants to identify what I call analytical

structure with dialectical structure* one of a number of possible

analytical structures, to my way of thinking— is that I want to make transformation more than a function of reading. A reader

"must" organize a plot according to a design which develops out

of one of the two primary intellective principles because the

author, in his constructive structure, has created the necessity.

And since the constitutive structure is co-existent with that

constructive structure, giving us something to "transform," trans­

formation becomes an activity of composition. Tension is the most

important attribute of the literary text, and the sense of sublimity we enjoy as we read a well-closed, structurally-full text arises because we discover a free state of mind; consciousness moves with electric speed between two complete cognitive poles. Thus it is difficult to say that the meaning of a well-wrought exemplum is entirely moral— though a moral meaning is clear— or that the meaning of a well-wrought allegory is entirely noetic— though an increase in our knowledge, clearly, has occurred.

The moral meaning which develops at the end of Sir Oawain and the Green Knight does not somehow replace the map of knowledge

Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975). p. 22a. to which the story has referred us, though there is tension

between the domain of putative knowledge and the domain of morality

in the work. In Troilus and Criseyde. as we have seen, moral

meanings seem to contend with noetic meanings for the reader's

attention, and a similar, though less weighty, tension is to be

observed in the Knight's Tale. Chaucer seems to recognize the

"dialectical" possibilities in narrative, but in neither the

Knight's Tale nor Troilus and Criseyde does the poet achieve the

structural smoothness of Sir Qawain and the Green Knight. Unlike

the Gawain-poet, Chaucer shows thorough-going fascination with

perspectives. At the end of Sir Qawain and the Green Knight

there are two opinions about the moral meaning of Gawain's actions,

and the test to which Gawain is subjected may alternatingly seem

to be the Devil's work and the ministration of God, but morality

does not develop out of a perspective which offers to correct

an idea about how the world is put together. At the end of Sir

Gawain and the Green Knight we find ourselves contemplating now

the moral significance of Gawain's behavior and then the vision

of an ambiguous world; but the two ways of thinking about the poem are complementary, finally. The deeply analytical Chaucer seems

to understand the ambiguity of the world in terms of the radical division upon which this study 1b built. For Chaucer, the problem

is not merely that we do not know what signs mean; the point is that signification changes, depending upon whether we view things relative to ideas of being or relative to utility in the progress of an action. Consequential thinking opposes analytical thinking.

In Pearl, the poet delivers an analysis which produces a 120 predictable consequence. As he receives his instruction, the dreamer's longing deepens and he attempts to cross the river, only to be turned back. But the dreamer returns to the waking world with a determination to maintain the equanimity Christ wants men to exhibit. As we have seen, such a moral meaning would quite violently overturn the analysis of the constitutive structure in the Book of the Duchess. And yet, the art of Chaucer is very different from that of Gower, who can present us with the sort of untransformcd analysis we find in Confessio Amantis. In this anthology the poet presents us with loosely associated stories and encyclopaedic matter, and then we have an entirely arbitrary ending: the narrator realizes that though mermaids may have sung to him once, they will not sing to him now. Somewhat loss arbitrarily, the taking of the rose in the Roman de la Rose closes what has been a long and rambling analysis. In the dream-visions reviewed in the last chapter, we see in Chaucer a much greater appreciation of the dialectical possibilities of literary art than we find in Gower, or in Jean de Meun. But we do not see the capacity to effect a resolution that we find in the Gawain-poet.

When Chaucer turned to the consequential constitutive structure which Boccaccio had treated so "lightly"— that is, without very much effort of transformational anticipation— Chaucer chose material that, in providing a definite ending, encouraged development of the sort of structure which was most natural to him— an analytical structure. Even the physicality of the poem had natural appeal, inasmuch as the category of physicality interested him. Profoundly dialectical, Chaucer, far from being devoted to pluralism, saw pluralism itself as a "correctable" category. He turned from

the analytical constitutive structures of his youth to a consequential

constitutive structure in his maturity, when he wrote Troilus

and Criseyde. perhaps because the dynamic his new project required, as I have suggested, was one which allowed him to work out a

binary analysis of materials that provided a strong armature, whereas the dynamic his dream-visions seemed to require had him working toward the presentation of a single, summarizing motion.

The three dream-visions reviewed in the last chapter have troubled

endings because those endings threaten to invalidate the opposition of fact and idea which Chaucer wished to preserve. The ending of Troilus and Criseyde is not one in which the author has had to preserve artificially a binary analysis, as we have seen. Father, it is one which confronts the reader with an analysis that seems necessary, and necessarily troubling. The ending of Troilus and Criseyde is a troubled ending which is very different from the troubled endings of the dream-visions; for the trouble at the end of the dream-visions is primarily literary— Chaucer has to find a way to avoid letting a literary dynamic undercut what he understands to be true— whereaB the trouble at the end of Troilus and Criseyde is philosophical— what Chaucer understands to be true is itself troubling.

If we turn to the Legend of Good Women, we find the poet attempting to relax the tension between the demands of practical knowledge and ideal wisdom; closural transformation is not anticipated. We find a relationship between narrator and vision vaguely like the relationship we find in Pearl> the poet has some spiritual work to do. As is not the case in Pearl. however,

in the Legend of Good Women the poet receives his assignment within

the dream; it does not present itself to him in waking hours.

Moreover, the work cannot be accomplished in sleep: the god of love wants Chaucer to write about good women, not to dream about

them. It might be argued that, though the usual dream-vision progression is in a sense reversed, the dynamic suggested by the introduction to the Legend of Good Women iB a typical dream-vision dynamic: in the introduction, a deficiency of knowledge is introduced; a series of events or sights visits the deficient dreamer as he pursues what becomes the passive strategy of dreaming; at the end of the poem, the Bpeaker, his work having been accomplished, views life from a different, albeit a sometimes subtly different, perspective. Chaucer receives his assignment: obviously, he has not appreciated the plight of the many honest women who have been betrayed or in other ways victimized by men, and he must then, like a schoolboy who has written something offensive on his desk, copy pages out of the encyclo. The cumulative effect of a parade of images will presumably work a change in the boy. His status will change because he will show that he has applied bimBelf in acquiring the proper kind of knowledge. But, like the schoolboy who knows that the mind is its own place,

Chaucer sets about his mechanical recitation of the liveB of martyred females. There is no sense of progression. The poet willfully works in the House of Fame, though he knows that the truth of matters is to be located in a great celestial whirl. 125 His work is waking, self-conscious work, and no certainty supplied by a transcendent authority presents itself. Like the House of

Fame, the Legend of Good Voaen is not ended. But there is the important difference between them that whereas in the House of

Fame there is the presentation of life beyond mere conceiving- real education, in the Legend of Good Women there is no such sense. Chaucer ends his dream, a conversation with a mythical figure, and then he moves on to recall in his book what other books have taught him. The structure of the Legend of Good

Women is perfectly analytical. Certainly, there is no chance of the sort of collapse which seemed potential in the materials of the Book of the Duchess and the Parliament of Fowls. Here is

Chaucer, whose mission is, here, "The naked text in English to declare/ Of many a story, or elles of many a geste,/ As autours seyn" (G, 86-88); there is Cupid, who demands that Chaucer represent the reality summarized in the figure of Alceste, a "calandier • • •/

Of goodnesse" (G, 533-53*0 • Like a shoemaker determined to give the gods their brass buckleB, if brass buckles is what they want, he recites the stories Cupid and Alceste will approve. Within the stories, we find consequential structures, but the pattern of presenting one story after another is itself an analytical structure. Consequentially within the stories does not anticipate consequentiality in the superstructure. We are reminded of Gower.

We should not suppose that Chaucer discovered the solution to the problem of reconciling ideal wisdom and practical knowledge

just by virtue of his having discovered the Gtory frame. Recon­

ciliation must be accomplished through the development of tension, not through avoidance. The way that the Host states his reaction

to the Honk ' s Tale may, perhaps, suggest Chaucer's estimation of the artistic worth of art which achieves its effect, not through the opposition of radically opposed structures, but

through tho analytical repetition of parallel cases: though he

"clappeth lowde" (VII, 3971), the Honk is no more interesting than the ringing of peals unchanged would be. The purely analytical structure bores us, especially when there has been tho promise of narrative— a tale. In writing the Legend of Good Women, Chaucer, who has had difficulty in bringing narrative closure to the materials of his dream-visions, creates a work that may well

Btrike us as a kind of protest against the difficulty of his situation. He retreats, after the difficulty he encounters at the end of Troilus and Criseyde, not to the old sort of dream-vision, which challenged him to find a literary presentation of an analysis which reflected a confident sense of the continuity of material and spiritual life, but to a variant of the dream-vision, in which there could be no question of a literary problem such as he dealt with earlier. Between the consequential structure (such as it is) — a man working off his debt to Cupid— and the analytical structure— case after case proving that women have been wronged by men— there can be no connection. A definition of love is not attempted. The epi3temology/ontology dichotomy is not a vexation.

The literary problem that troubled Chaucer in his early work is one to which he returns. The pilgrims may well remind us

of so many birds, or of the busy crowd in the House of Rumor.

But in the background is knowledge of man's separation from Ood,

from what is good and eternal; and it is as if the grief of the

knight in black, on a highly philosophical level, has been

internalized. Pluralism becomes an opposable category in the

Canterbury Tales, not just because it threatens to invalidate

authority— though that threat may be felt wherever an anthology

presents a variety of authorities, but also because it needs

to be maintained in order to keep the work from collapsing into

a single idea. Paradoxically, the reality of the great cosmic

process finds itb most eloquent support in a presentation of

diverse beings, who make the spiritual in various ways palpable.

The analytical Chaucer, at home with tho idea of an analytical

constitutive structure, though he has not been at his best working on this foundation, must discover a way to anticipate an ending, and, perhaps, to end. If consequential constitutive structures have tended to separate perspectives, suggesting, finally, the

inviolability of pluralism, analytical constitutive structures have tended to suggest trivializing, or merely literary, resolutions. Chapter Six

Canterbury Tales I:

The Appearance of the Canon and His Yeoman

Any attempt to read the Canterbury Tales as a single poem

must be made with caution. Varying styles and a wide range of

story types characterize this anthology, a collection which does not hare the stylistic homogeneity of Confessio Amantis nor the

thematic unity of De Casibus Virorum Illustrium. It is of some

interest that Chaucer places one kind of collection, represented

in the Monk *s Tale, within another kind of collection— almost as if to draw attention to the pluralism of the surrounding text.

It would seem that in his following the examples of Sercambi and,

possibly, Boccaccio, Chaucer finds a way to increase the appeal

of diversity characteristic of hiB sources. Where the burden of

telling most of the stories of the Novelle (and, probably, of the

Novelliero) 1 falls on a single official narrator, Sercambi himself, 2

in the Canterbury Tales various characters, like so many birds

gathered together on St. Valentine's Day, are eager to exercise

their particular voices. If, as one student has argued, Chaucer let "memorial" borrowing from the Decameron shape some of his stories,

it must be pointed out that to the tales Chaucer may have been

1 Robert A. Pratt and Karl- Young, "The Literary Framework of the Canterbury Tales," in Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canter­ bury Tales, ed. W. F..Bryan and Germaine Dempster (Chicago: Univer- sity of Chicago Press, 19^1)» P* 30. 2Ibid.. p. Zk.

126 127 influenced by,^ Chaucer shows a tendency to add differences, Baking a body of bourgeois material adjust to peasant and noble settings.

Chaucer*s characters represent a ouch wider range them do Boccaccio's.

It night well seem that Chaucer continues the early practice in the Middle Ages of putting works as different as Juliana, the

Seafarer. Deor. and assorted riddles together in a single volume which appeals to a large number of diverse readers. But efforts to read the Canterbury Tales as a Single work continue to have their appeal. The idea that the theme of penitence informs the entire work is presented eloquently in Ralph Baldwin's

The Unity of the Canterbury Tales. "Even the conventional opening metaphor* the spring-time," Baldwin writes, "has fostered one con­ spicuous, symbolic tree, the tree of Penitence, whose roots thrust through and whose branches overspread the world of the Canterbury if pilgrims." To negotiate his way between the demand of a pluralistic phenomenology and a single, allegorical meaning, Bernard F. Huppe describes the Canterbury Talas as a work which presents "the human

* Richard S. Guerin, "The Canterbury Tales and Decameron" (Biss. University of Colorado, 19bb). Guerin finds the following parallels: Miller's Tale/Fourth Tale, Third Day; Reeve's Tale/ Sixth Tale, Ninth Day; Man of Law's Tale/ Second Tale, Fifth Day; Wife's Tale/Seventh Tale, Sixth Day; Clerk's Tale/Tenth Tale, Tenth Day: Franklin's Tale/Fifth Tale, Tenth Day and II Filocolo, III and IV: Shipman's Tale/First Tale, Eighth Day and Second Tale, Eighth Day. ^The Unity of the "Canterbury Tales" (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 195577 p. 110. 128 comedy of man*s tragic pilgrimage."*5 In a similar but somewhat

more sophisticated way Donald Howard distinguishes between

"storial" and allegorical meaning in the work: "Look at it one

way and you see a world of story; look at it another and you see g the Way." The fact is that the Canterbury Tales is the story

of a journey, and place names in the text suggest the rightness

of our taking the work as having a beginning, middle, and end.

Moreover, as C. K. Zacher has shown, the idea of pilgrimage is 7 pregnant with meaning, and it should be seen as the informing

fact which, more than anything else, distinguishes the Canterbury

Tales from collections by Sercambi and Boccaccio.

In the Canterbury Tales, taken as a whole, Chaucer returns

to the difficulty he encountered in his early years; he opposes

experientially-derived ideas of virtue and the awareness of a

cosmology in which all true virtue must have its source and works

toward a consequential closural structure by means of which the

materials of his analytical constitutive structure can be trans­

formed. It can be argued that tho Canterbury Tales is more like

a dream-vision than the Legend of Good Women is, though the Chaucer

5 h Reading of the "Canterbury Tales" (Albany: State University of New~York, 196^*7, p. 2*M. g The Idea of the "Canterbury TaleB11 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), p. 386. 7 Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1976). who raeets fellow pilgrims at the Tabard is not sleeping. Ao

J. V. Cunningham has shown, the array of pilgrims described in the

General Prologue corresponds in form to the array of allegorical

figures depicted on the garden wall in the Homan de la Rose.^ More

formal and full, in point of fact, than the beginnings Chaucer

gave to any of his dream-vision introductions, the introduction

to the Canterbury Tales sets up a pattern of oppositions— oppositions seen in realistic termB but, nevertheless, more obviously related to general ideaB of life than were the specific, myth- bound oppositions at the beginning of the Book of the Duchess and fuller than was the simple Venus/Nature opposition at the beginning of the Parliament of Fowls. In accounting for the types of opposition in the Canterbury Tales. Judson Allen and Theresa Anne

Moritz havo related its various ethical viewpoints to those which informed, according to medieval commentators, Ovid's Metamorphoses— viewpoints which brought about or resulted from natural, moral, q magical, and spiritual changes. Whether one wants to accept the idea of pluralism in the Canterbury Tales proposed by Allen and

Horitz or not, the fact about the poem to which we need to draw attention is that ethical oppositions are so fully worked out in the Canterbury Tales that a writer would be challenged to develop a satisfying, comprehensive close. It may seem that,as is the

g "The Literary Form of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales." MP, ^9 (1952), 175. Distinction of Stories: The Medieval Unity of Chaucer's Fair cKaln of Narratives for Canterbury (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 19^1), pp. 20-23. 130 case in the Legend of Good Women, individual stories are blocks which can be arranged in a pattern (a ouch more complicated pattern)t but not materials which can be possessed by a consequen­ tial closural structure; but we should notice that the tension between conflicting implied claims to explain reality in the poem requires what the monotonous repetition of De CaBibus tragedies in the Legend of Good Women does not require— a close the semiology of which disposes the ideas implied by the stories according to a per­ ception which reconciles experience and doctrine. The idea of "diversity" raises more interesting questions than it supplies interesting answers.

One might be inclined to argue that the story contest which the pilgrims enter into is an effort of consequential closural transformation. And yet, Chaucer recognizes that, while the device of the promised dinner can account for the phenomenology of diverse tales, it cannot provide a semiology, for each teller must be rewarded in some way— actually or by implication— according to the moral status he represents if the diverse semiology of the analytical structure upon which the work is built is to be possessed by a closing consequential structure. To be sure, the festive ending which Charles Owen imagines has a "Chaucerian" flavor: 2 The literary interest, so marked a feature of the B fragment, would find a comic fulfillment in the Host's choice for the prise and the critical issues that such a choice would raise. The "soper" shared, as well as the prize "soper at oure alle cost," would epitomize 131 the drama and the community of the pilgrimage; the celebration would give final expression to the living voices of a variety of characters, to the sense of a world in which value is experienced, to the "ernest and game" of a mind sharp, gentle and generous, sophisticated and humorous, "Of his corage as any oentre stable."1°

But that the great variety of voices among the pilgrims could find final expression through the devioe of a party back at the

Tabard may seem doubtful— •especially as one reflects upon the grounds for conflict implicit in the differences between groups of story-tellers. Moreover, the fact has to be recognised that a finalising consequential structure would have to build upon the differences of moral worth reflected (in some cases, quite subtly) in the telling of the tales. In a sense, Owen begs the question, for he gives Chaucer an infinite capacity to acoept man in all his charming and sometimes murderous diversity. Similarly, Allen and

Morits would let the poem hold in suspended animation a wide range of human experience!

In its pleasing wholeness, which defies the mundane fact of Chaucer's death, the Canterbury Tales holds the whole of the human condition, which may be failed by some of its participants, but which in itself offers hope for everyman.H

The reference to Chaucer's death, a referenoe to the Detraction,

10Pilgrimage and Story Telling in the "Canterbury Tales" (Normant University of Oklahoma Press, 197?)» p. 210.

11 Allen and Morits, p. 21H. 132 nay well remind us that the Troilus, for all the Christianity at its end, was, in Chaucer's last thoughts, condennable.

In writing the Troilus, Chaucer found that the inability of his narrator to engage directly with events, a problen which impeded progress toward consequential closural structures in the writing of the dream-visions, could be turned to pointed use:

the narrator could be relied upon to misinterpret in a direct and rather clear way. This drew attention to the organization of material as an attempt of transformation, and it made the emergence of closural comment, if not complete transformation, possible. Now, in the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer lets himself engage with the material and, again, in an obviously inappropriate way. He allows himself to accept tho obviously unacceptable~the practices of the

Honk, for example. And while he is, of all the pilgrims, the one who should be confident in the telling of a good story, his stories are much less interesting than those told by some of the other pilgrims. Chaucer begins a simple, phenomenologically- strong consequential structure (Thopas), fails. He does complete a tale built upon a semiologically-strong analytical structure

(Melibee)— here, after all, is a representation of his moBt basic tendency--but Helibee is not much of a story. Chaucer's obvious failure in a world where stories closed with phenomenologically- strong structures (stories such as the Miller's Tale) will always win the day, prepares us, in a way which is subtly analogous to the manner in which the overt narrator obviously failed in the

Troilus, for an effort of closural transformation which involves the 133 shifting of attention away from the dominant surface idea of the

story contest toward another consequential structure--one which has a much greater chance of owning the materials of the analytical constitutive structure.

The appearance of the Canon and his Yeoman at a point in the story ("At Boghtoun under Blee'1) after a full array of characters has been introduced and, to a great extent, developed through the - telling of tales, suggests something like a climax, a moment when a critical question is to be answered. The Canon's Yeoman does not appear, of course, to answer tho question of who will win the story contest. But he does appear to roplace the question of literary skill— -a question toward which Chaucer's faulty performances may suggest ultimate indifference— with a question of moral worth.

Studies by Zacher and Howard which show the significance of the institution of the pilgrimage in the Middle Ages lay before us the essential tension Chaucer must have felt. As Zacher points out, the telling of an interesting array of tales manifested curiosity— a potentially soul-destroying phenomenon of the mind. 12 As we have seen, Chaucer undercuts the literary game by making of himself a character who does not play well. There are other indications of dissatisfaction with narrative in general, as we shall see, but the point immediately before us is that Chaucer replaces a concern with the possibilities of the sort of trivializing ending which Owen imagines with a concern for the effects of a

12Curiosity and Pilgrimage, p. 93. pilgrimage— a trip which will end in Canterbury, not back at the

Tabard. As Howard points out, pilgrimage in the fifteenth century begins to be reported in books which make something out of the return trip. Before that, reports of pilgrimage had little to say about return trips. In fact, to die at one's outward-bound destination, to have no tales of the return to tell, would be 13 regarded as a sign of blessedness. In the Canterbury Tales,

Chaucer uses a failure in the narrator's story-telling ability to weaken the project of the original constructive structure and suggests the possibility of a much stronger consequential structure.

That much stronger consequential constructive structure is indicated as the Canon's Yeoman, bearing the sign of his confessed sins on his skin, tellB a tale which explains why a prospective pilgrim has tried to join the group. The telling of the truth has produced actual consequences— beyond the sort of bitter charges and counter-charges we have heard thus far on the journey.

The Canon oannot join the pilgrimage; and his Yeoman, now out of a job, has nothing to return to.

Hy appreciation of the closural dynamic I have outlined puts me in opposition to those critics who would make of Chaucer a poet who could be content to present what is merely a mirror of humanity in all its diversity. Chaucer's readiness to make a moral judgment is, I think, manifested quite clearly in the constructive

1 ^Donald R. Howard, VfriterB and Pilgrims: Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives and Their Posterity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 19^0), pp. **5-51 • structure through which he presents a satire of the three estates.

With the introduction of the Canon's Yeoman, who tells a story out of real life, Chaucer introduces a non-literary perspective, a perspective which counters the ordering, analytical principle of the constitutive structure. Beyond delight in life's diversity and plenitude, beyond a multi-faceted analysis in terms of ethical value and disvalue, there is an effort to find a specifically

Christian way to transform those materials into those of the consequential ending. As our study of dream-visions suggested, such a move was expocted. Poetry, in fact, finds its reason for being, not only in the maintenance of the constitutive structures, but in the struggle toward transformation. But the struggle for transformation does entail preservation of the constitutive structure as well os the completion of a con­ trasting constructive structure. Considering the phenomenology of the Canterbury Tales, we find a constitutive structure rich in linguistic and psychological diversity. Meanings of the lives presented to us in the poem are quite fully elaborated, from the motto the Prioress wears to the idea of literary excellence voiced by the Man of Law. The characters stand for distinct perspectives.

The Pardoner's cynicism contrasts with the easy-going insousciance of the Monk. The Prioress's nice attention to propriety contrasts with the Wife's open bawdiness. The Miller's ruddy delight in con­ flict contrasts with the Reeve's brooding malignance. Moreover, the overt narrator seemB to approve of all that he sees in his com­ panions. The Knight, of course, is "worthy"; but the Monk, too, is an excellent creature, "a nanly man, to been an abbot able"

(I, 167). Naive endorsement helps to "set" the perspectives of the pilgrims, helps to establish ideas which are to be accepted as part of the great texture of possible perspectives. Even the

Heeve, whose virtue lies in the fact that "noon auditour koude on him wynne" (I, 59*0» occupies a protected niche in the edifice.

Something very close to allegory is operative in this art that gives characters epitome-status. The Wife is lasciviousness, the

Reeve is wrath, it may seem. But Chaucer's characters show at times a reluctance to take a firm position in their nicheB. Chaucer

"softens" the signification of some of his characters, anticipat­ ing, I think, closural transformation.

The constructive structure of the poem, a method of working which softenB the signification of compared entities, moves the action along, explaining with varying degrees of clarity why one story follows another, introducing, in the characters of the Canon and his Yeoman, a pilgrim whose presence is explained in clear terms: the Canon races to catch up with the others because he wants to bilk them out of gold. Finally, of course, Chaucer must create a homily which addresses judgment in abstract terms. The approach to Canterbury cannot, in itself, represent judgment. Such an association has to be supplied. A homilectic close is not necessarily a weakness, but the great length of the Parson1s Tale suggests a need to "correct" insufficient implication in the body of the poem. In the Parson1a Tale we see an example of the kind of transformational attempt which is to be predicted at the end of work that has been strong in the phenomenology of its analytical constitutive structure. The appearance of the Canon and his

Yeoman heightens our readiness to accept this development; a character with a dubious past shows a desire to move toward a distinctly good orientation. The sense of ethical possibilities and ultimate meanings which has hung over the heads of the pilgrims like a cloud darkens the scene perceptibly, now, as the essential solemnity of the pilgrimage is impressed upon us. In the Yeoman's expression of a desire to change there is also an exhortation to others. The heat of the alchemist's crucible becomes a clear metaphor for the heat of hell, I think, when we hear the Yeoman say—

Allas I kan they nat flee the fires heete? Ye that it use, I rede ye it leete, Lest ye lese al; for bet than nevere is late. (VIII, 1*f08-1*H0)

The Yeoman's movement within the analysis of the constitutive structure is an actual consequence, a strong sign in the constructive structure, and it anticipates a semiological completion which we receive in the Parson's Tale— a treatise that tells us how we might work toward our salvation.

There is a paradox. Chaucer exercises his tendency to emphasise differences, an analytical impulse, as he handles the materials and ideas of the framed tale which came down to him; but by making the

Yeoman a character who is markedly different from the other pilgrims,

Chaucer builds toward a unifying theme. It may well be that Chaucer 138 remembered the interruption Boccaccio uses in order to lend interest it to procedings in his poem— Guerin's suggestion — but we find that

Chaucer uses his interruption in a pointedly different way— not for the purpose of interjecting a bit of life and low comedy (the

Miller and the Cook have provided plenty of that already), but for the purpose of turning a multitude of stories into aspects of a single story.

To a great extent, the effectiveness of the Yeoman's confession depends upon the preparation we have received from the experience of reading the preceding tales and the experience we will have as we read the following tales. Tho occasion of this pilgrimage is not suddenly solemn; rather, moot of the pilgrims tell stories which suggest edification and sober reflection upon certain well-worn truths. The mixture of earnest and game we find in tales told by the Knight, Man of Law, Physician, Franklin, Manciple, Clerk,

Squiro, Nun's Priest, and by Chaucer himself suggests a sense of the occasion, a ride the duration of tdiich probably makes sustained piety impossible, but the communal purpose of which necessitates an effort of individual self-improvement. After we have examined the proper tales, we will turn to a consideration of tales that provide a sense of the fixed background against which ethical movement implied by the proper tales and the confession of the

Canon's Yeoman occurs.

1*The 1f Canterbury Tales and II Decamerone." p. 26j. Chapter Seven

Canterbury Tales H i Proper Tales

Several tales built on analytical constitutive structures have endings which, while they do not falsify their constitutive natures, fall short of comprehending them. At the end of the Knight’s Tale, as we have seen, there is the dubious proposition that, since the world changes according to the requirements of God, man is obligated to make changes too. Emelye's turning away from the past and join­ ing with Palamon illustrates the idea. This ending does not force a re-reading of the tale— we do not have what I would call "exces­ sive transformation"— but neither does it help us understand the relationship between deBtiny and human volition, contrarieties which have been studied as alternative perspectives.

Perhaps clearer examples of what I call inadequate transforma­ tion may be found in the Man of Law's Tale, the Physician's Tale, and the Tale of Melibee. However much we sympathise with the kernel themes of these pieces, we must admit, I think, that they represent a quality Muscatine finds in reading the Knight's Tale when he says that it lacks "story interest." Concerning the Man of Law's Tale and the Physician's Tale. Bloomfield has remarked, classing them with other "pathetic tales," a failure to "fully engage our sympathies or even sometimes our interest."^ To put the matter simply, we might say that in the Han of Law's Tale

1Morton W. Bloomfield, "The Man of Law'B Tale: A Tragedy of Victimisation and a Christian Comedy,7r_PMLA, 87 11972), 381*.

139 140 and the PhysicIan's Tale, a sens contextuel is supplied but faintly;

Custance and Virginia epitomize good in a life segmented by evil events which may be connected to what they are, but are in no way connected to what they are trying to do. Furthermore, even where there is considerable elaboration, as in the Han of Law's Tale, the narrator pays only highly selective attention to physical detail. Even a decapitation must strike u b as bloodless. After we have examined difficulties which develop at the ends of the

Han of Law's Tale and the Physician's Tale. saints' lives, as Payne 2 classes them, we will look at the Tale of Melibee, a tale which ends in a manner somewhat analogous to the way that the Knight * a

Tale ends.

Out of no particular motive, Custance's father accepts the suit of the Sowdan. The Sowdan's mother, one of two wicked mothers-in-law in the story, is motivated by evil itself, it seems.

To be sure, the marriage of her son to a Christian and her son's conversion affront her religion, but this fact is not put into terms which particularize the motive. Rather, the rage of the

Sowdan's mother, to whom are applied the epithets, "welle of vices"

(II, 323)* "roote of iniquitee" (II, 358)* "nest of every vice"

(II, 36*0, is generalized, aligning her character with all that is evil. The murder of the Christians, including the Sowdan himself, is presented in the barest language, without the murderers, chief among them, the Sowdan's mother, giving explicit expression of

2 Robert 0. Payne, The Key of Remembrance: A Study of Chaucer's Poetics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 19637, pp. 157-158. 1 V | religious meal, or of any sort of emotion, for that natter:

The Sowdan and the Cristen everichone Been al tohewe and atiked at the bord, But it were oonly dame Custance allone. Thia olde Sowdanesse, ouraed krone, Hath with hir freendea doon this curaed dede, For she hirself wolde al the oontree lede. (II, kZ9- W )

It aeena that the narrator wants to block any effort to find a

psychological reason for the fact that the Sowdan's mother does

not kill Custance at the wedding feast:

Men myghten asken why she was nat alayn Eek at the feeste? Who myghte hir body save? And I answers to that demande agayn, Who saved Danyel in the horrible cave Ther every wight save he, naiBter and knave, V s b with the leon frete er he asterte? No wight but God, that he bar in his herte. (II, ^70-^76)

The biblical reference is, here, the opposite of the sort which Auerbach identifies in Mimesis^ for where figuralism is a mode of

art in whioh the eternal realities of the Bible are grounded in literal truth about events in time, the sort of rational comparison

we Bee in the passage under review rejects any attempt to make events manifesting eternal realities answer demands of natural law.

In choosing a male proto-type and in making his comparison of two beings explicit, the narrator treats analytical material (the prinoiple of devotion to the living God opposes pure evil) analytically.

^Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953)* pp* 195-196* 1^2

Having suppressed a suggestion as to the Soudanese's motive and

information about the source of "a certain tresor," information

supplied in Chaucer's source, the narrator goes on to make Custance

apostrophise the oross, something not found in the equivalent point

in the Trivet narrative, and then adds, what is also not in the L source, a passage which confronts directly the problem of plausibility.

Unlike Cower, who simplifies the narrative at this point, intensi­

fying the phenomenological value of the analytical structure

(ConfeBsio Amantis, II, 70**-713)i Chaucer's Kan of Law elaborates the signification, intensifying the semiological value of the analytical structure.

Bloomfield notices that the sort of elaboration we see above puts distance between the reader and the material, and that a vaguely humorous impression results. Custance is the perennial victim, not active enough to be a tragic character. But, Bloomfield argues, profundity is implicit in the smile we smile as we observe a hapless Custanoe bobbing on the sea, first, after the wedding- dinner massacre, and then, after the cruel efforts of Alla's mothers "The tragedy of the world is the comedy of Cod in the 5 contemptus mundi tradition."' The emphasis, in this view, is on the constitutive structure, a contest which is finally won when, as luck would have it, Alla visits Borne and notices a boy who looks

"Trivet's Life of Constance," ed. Hargaret Sehlauch, in Sources and Analogues of Chauoer'a.Canterbury Tales, pp. 167-168.

^Bloomfield, p. 388. 143 remarkably like a long-lost wife. For Robert E. Finnegan, it should interest us, the Man of Law’s Tale does not end happily.

Finnegan notices the many authorial intrusions, the rational manner of expansion which I have characterised as analytical and

Bloomfield has argued contributes to a humorous effect. But,

Finnegan argues, the intrusions become less frequent after the trial scene (II, 610-686), indicating that the Man of Law loses control as he identifies more closely with Custance than he did in the earlier passages.^ Certainly, the presentation of

Custance's second departure from land as an exile contrasts with the first:

Therwith she looked bakward to the londe, And seyde, "Farewel, housbonde routheleesl" And up she rist, and walketh down the stronde Toward the ship,--hir folweth al the press,— And taketh hir leve, and with an hooly entente She bliBseth hire, and into ship she wente.

Vitailled was the ship, it is no drede, Habundantly for hire ful longe space, And others necessaries that sholde node She hadde ynogh, heryed be Qoddes grace I For wynd and weder almyghty God purchace, And brynge hire hooml I kan no bettre seye, But in the see she dryveth forth hir weye. (II, 862-875)

To say that the Man of Law loses control is an exaggeration, however. The fact is that the materials of the story become more

"self-sufficient" once the idea of Custance's holiness haB been solidly established and a practical means of working out some

6"The Man of Law, His Tale, and the Pilgrims," NM, 77 (1976), 235. 144 sort of consequential closural move has become available. The reasoning Alla performs— an example of cause-attribution— however artificially circumstances requiring it are arranged, creates the impression of closure. Alla can be made to put two and two together. There is not much point in delaying the event.

Finnegan's criticism, concentrating on the constructive struc­ ture, emphasizes supposed unhappiness in a narrator who is trying to manage the materials of his story. Bloomfield's approach con­ centrates on the nature of those materials— the contrasting states of being, the contrasting perspectives represented. Finnegan's criticism, though it goes too far, notices the point that once

Custance haB been restored to Alla, another episode in the life of a aortal woman has been concluded, but the life itself has not been closed and rewardedt

For deeth, that taketh of heigh and logh his rente, Whan passed was a yeer, evene as I gesso, Out of this world this kyng Alla he hente, For whom Custance hath ful greet hevynesse. Now lat us prayen God his soule blessel And dame Custance, finally to seye, Toward the toun of Borne goth hir weye.

To Rome is come this hooly creature, And fyndeth hire freendes hoole and sounde; Now is she scaped al hire aventure. And whan that she hir fader hath yfounde, Doun on hir knees falleth she to grounde; Vepynge for tendrenesse in herte blithe, She heryeth God an hundred thousand sithe. (II, 1142-1155)

We aust accept the narrator's report that "al hire aventure" is ended, though no basis for the conclusion has developed. Indeed, death continues to be the decidedly cruel presence here. Following the happy reuniont Alla and Custance have but one year* We can

imagine two kinds of truly strong endings based on similar materials.

The Han of Law1a Tale ends with Custhnce and her father leading a

holy life in Home until death parts them. One kind of truly

strong ending would see Custance takft her place in the Celestial

City, the logical result effected by constant devotion to Christ.

The elaborated signification which attaches to Custance's character

may seem, in fact, to predict such a conclusion. However, if we

imagine a tale in which the character of Custance is consistently

the figure we see when Custance comforts her crying baby and sets out on her second exile, a character as endowed with psychological

realism as, say, Esther Summers, we Can imagine an ending which develops out of elaboration on the side of the sign--that is, out of the natural progress of life— so that redemption consists in the quiet sense that suffering enriches our souls.

Neither of the ideal endings I imagine can develop for the Han of Law’s Tale, however. Custance is too much the allegorical figure to enjoy a sentimental swing on the porch of a house the many rooms of which could speak volumes; on the other hand, she is too much the mortal human being to take immediate possession of a room in the mansion beyond. It seems that Finnegan wants to argue that the

Han of Law himself manifests the sort of betwixt-and-between status I would maintain in my conception of Custance as a literary phenome­ non but not in my conception of the narrator's conscious mind. About the narrator's final state of Qind, Finnegan arguoB—

He is in an equilibrium at the end of the Tale, having 146

lost, surely, the comfortable and self-satisfied foundation for the life he led before the Tale, but not aB yet having found a substitute for it or made a decision to return to it.?

The "equilibrium1' I find in the tale is brought about through the

opposition of two very different literary ideas, those suggested

by P. M. Kean whon she characterizes the tale as a "hagiographic Q romance." The Han of Law’s Tale is a saint's life in its constitutive structure, but the consequential constructive structure which brings it to a close is of a different order. The scene which

Finnegan feels to be fulcral, in which a voice from Heaven interrupts legal procedings of human invention, may be read as the conclusion to the saint's life portion of the tale. At the end of the tale we do not have an ending which comprehends the g;— .\t issue which presents itself as we contemplate God's interest in us as against the presence of death in the world. Nothing miraculous occurs, nothing that would confirm Bloomfield's sense of divine comedy. But, on the other haild, nothing happens at the end of the story that would confirm Finnegan's sense of confusion. The Han of Law utters a conventional prayer, and it seems that he does not know that there is something remarkable about the tale he has told.

The Physician's Tale, a much simpler production, is told by a man of roughly the same class as the Man of Law. Like the Han of Law's Tale, it expresses piety and moral rectitude. But it is a leaB-developed, less affecting work, despite the similarities.

7 Ibid., p. 240. Q Chaucer and the Making of English Poetry, II (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 70. Kean finds a certain ambiguity in the poem:

Chaucer, in fact, seems poised in this tale between the medieval schematic allegory of the vices and virtues, with its partial illustration in human terms, and the later type of allegory, exemplified by the Fairie Queene. in which the content is fully and imaginatively fused with the story.9

In the Physician * s Tale there is far less interest in action than

one might find in allegories which have been informed, not only

by an analytical principle, but also by a consequential principle. This is not to say, however, that the constitutive structure of the

tale is somehow more allegorical than the constitutive structure of,

for example, the Han of Law'B Tale. It is a static form with much

more diversity in its signification than we find as we read the

story of Custance. "Nature hath with sovereyn diligence/ Yformed

/Virginia/ in so greet excellence" (VI, 9-10) that she seems to be a depository of all physical and moral virtues:

As wel in goost as body chast was she; For which she floured in virginitee With alle humylitee and abstinence, With all attemperaunce and pacience, With measure eek of beryng and array. Discreet she was in answeryng alway; Though she were wis as Pallas, dar I seyn, Hir facound eek ful wommanly and pleyn, No countrefeted termes haddo she To some wys; but after hir degree She spak, and alle hire wordes, moore and lease, Sownynge in vertu and in gentillesse. (VI, ^3-5*0

Virginia's characterisation strikes u b as having been quite realistic 148

when the figure of Envye is suddenly introduced (VIt 114) and

then, as suddenly, taken away. Virginia, a very good child possessing spiritual and physical beauty, becomes the object of an

exceedingly evil man's lust. The problem which is studied in the

work is the observation of the human potential for good as it is

set against the human potential for evil. Having observed an anal­

ytical constitutive structure, we anticipate a consequential

closural transformation. 10 11 As Anne Middleton and Thomas B. Hanson point out, the

Physician's Tale is very different from the story Chaucer read in

the Roman de la Rose, the matter and manner of which derive from

Livy. Middleton neatly summarizes the difference:

The purely subordinate value of father and daughter to Reason's point is obvious from the fact that they are introduced into the plot only after Appiuo's scheme against them has been set forth, and neither speaks at all. Reason's point concerns injustice, not its victims.

The story Chaucer read in the Roman de la Rose was a simple, straight-forward exemplum. A man's evil scheme seems at first to be working, but then bis adversary finds a way to defeat him (Roman de la Rose, 5589-5658)* The story is a little tragedy, its primary character, Appius, a little less worthy of our sympathy than is

^"The Physician's Tale and Love's Martyrs: 'Ensamples mo than ten' as a Method in the Canterbury Tales," ChauR, 8 (1975)* 11-12.

11"Chaucer's Physician as Storyteller and Moralizer." ChauR, 7 (1972), 134-135* 1^Middleton, p. 12. Macbeth. For the story that Chaucer read, Middleton notes, the

moral voiced by the Physician would be appropriate:

Heere may men seen how synne hath his merite. Beth war, for no man woot whom Qod wol smyte In no degree, ne in which manere wyse The worp of conscience may agryse Of wikked lyf, though it so pryvee be That no man woot therof but Qod and he. For be he lowed man, or ellis lered, He noot how soone that he shal been afered. Therefore I rede you this conseil take: Forsaketh synne, er synne you forsake. (VI, 277-286)

Either through implication or explicit statement (we may recall the

example of the Filostrato) a story built upon a consequential con­

stitutive structure will relate its characters, who have fulfilled

roles that have a sens contextual, to a system of some sort. Through his actions Appius classes himself among the very bad and

justly punished. In the Physician’s Tale, as in the Man of Law's Tale, we seem

to be reading the reading of a tale. But whereas in the Man of

Law'B Tale the reading of the tale we read is one which sharpens

the difference found in the relationship between the constitutive

and constructive structures of the original, in the Physician's

Tale the reading of the tale we read is one which has radically

altered the structure, changing the nature of the problem, changing

the very constitutive structure of the tale. To appreciate this phe­ nomenon, we might imagine the first half of the Man of Law's Tale told

with the Sowdanesse's scheme as the primary informing interest. 150 A result of the structural revision that the Physician performs is that the epilogic moral, as critics have pointed out, seems decided­ ly inappropriate* In its overall design and effect, Middleton says, the Physician's Tale is a flawed work, if it is to be regard- 13 ed as an exemplum of justice. It does not reflect knowledge of the advice, found in medieval rhetorics, that one u b o the "arti- 1lf ficial" order in writing exemplums. It shows, rather, what we have noticed before, Chaucer's penchant for the analytical structure— to use a relateable term from medieval rhetoric, the natural struc­ ture.

Given the fact that Chaucer has shown an analytical tendency, sometimes to the point of artistic peril, I am not eager to imagine, along with Hanson, an ironic Chaucer using structural difficulties 15 as a means of creating a satiric effect. ^ The Physician's moral epilogue clearly does not comprehend the entire content of the tale. It cannot be regarded as a transformation. But it does reflect a conventional reading of the story as it was generally received from Livy and Jean de Meun, and it does not preclude accep­ tance of the more inclusive view developed by Harry Sailly in his reading of what has been another reading of an often-read tale:

This was a fals cherl and a fals justiBe. As shameful deeth as herte may devyse

^Middleton, p. 12.

1**Ibid.. p. Zk. 15 ’'Hanson, p. 152. 151

Come to thise juges and hire advocatz! Algate this sely mayde is slayn, aliasI Allas, to deere boughte she beauteel Wherefore I seye al' day that men may see That yiftes of Fortune and of Nature Been cause of deeth to many a creature. Hire beautee was hire deth, 1 dar wel sayn. (vi, 289-297)

Bailly perceives the causal relationship that the constitutive structure generates. But the temptation to overstate the signifi­ cance of the Physician's not saying that he shares Bailly's percep­ tion must be avoided. I would go b o far as to say that the inade­ quacy of the Physician's epilogue is one of a number of touches which suggest that the pilgrims are surrounding themselves with meanings of which they are not fully aware as they progress toward

Canterbury. As ideas suggest alternative ideas, a cloud of the unstated builds. Readings of tales are recalled, and one can imagine

Chaucer making discoveries about the stories as he recalls them for pilgrims or as he shapes pilgrims according to ideas of what was commonly thought about stories. Chaucer was fascinated by closural problems, and he used inadequacy of understanding and failure of * understanding to point up what needed to be understood. It would take a synthesizing and probably a modern brain to create an Appius whose twisted love of beauty was the cause of his death. One could easily Imagine all the psychological realism a performance in a modern film would imply. For the analytical, quite allegorical

Chaucer, there is the character of Envye, whose entrance and exit are not at all impressive.

The epilogic ending of the Physician's Tale, like the First-Mover 152 speech in the Knight's Tale (a passage which has the function of an epilogic ending), does not falsify the material of the tale, though it comes close, inasmuch as it suggests the sort of ending we associate with workB built on consequential constitutive struc­ tures. Inasmuch as Theseus urges action directly related to the specific terms of the analysis, his argument is more appropriate than is the epilogic speech which closes the Physician’s Tale. The actual end of the Knight’s Tale, a tableau, is somewhat similar to the ending of the Man of Law's Tale in that characters are fixed in a stable state for as long as the future matters and the ongoing process of an opposition which could generate an endlesB string of consequences is Btopped. But the FirBt-Mover Bpeech creates the impression that the march of events, one state of affairs following another, is to be interpreted in moral terms; and inasmuch s b there

1b difficulty in reconciling a general view and a particular action in the Knight's Tale, there may be seen, then, a relationship between that courtly romance and Chaucer's allegory written in the psychomachia tradition, the Tale of Helibee.

Ve may recall, when we come to the scene in which Dame Prudence instructs her husband's adversaries, the passus of Piers Plowman in which the Deadly Sins confess themselves and receive instructions.

The allegory does more than "creak a bit," Paul Strohm's phrase, 16 when the world, the flesh and the devil are reconciled with the

1^"The Allegory of the Tale of Melibee." ChauR. 2 (1967)• 37 • 153 character of Melibee; it falls apart. The question is very basic.

Given the problem of the story as it is defined by Same Prudence—

Thou hast ydronke so muchel hony of sweete temporeel richesses, and delices and honours of this world/ that thou art dronken, and hast forgeten Jhesu Crist thy crea- tour./ . . . Thou hast doon Bynne agayn oure Lord Crist;/ for certes, the three enemys of mankynde, that iB to seyn, the flessht the feend, and the world,/ thou hast suffred hem entre in to thyn herte wilfully by the wyndowes of thy body . . . (VII, 1*109-10, 1*f20-2l) how can resolution be achieved by having Melibee make peace with his mortal enemies? The answer, of course, is that when Melibee makes peace with his former adversaries they have been changed into beings of a sort quite different from the sort they were initially. The constitutive structure of the tale is analytical, and the adver­ saries of Melibee have an ideational, much more than a mimetic, reality. The meaning of the constitutive structure is noetic. It is the analysis of a typical human condition as it is represented

?£ ^ivre de Mellibee et Prudence, translated quite faithfully into English terms by Chaucer, and shown to be a piece of ready reference in Langland:

The man that muche hony eteth his mawe it engleymeth, And the moore that a man of good matere hereth, But he do therafter it dooth hym double scathe. (B. XV, 58-60)

The wisdom of the analysis introduces quite naturally, it seems, a moral imperative. Action is called for. And the fact that the demand for action introduces a structural difficulty seems to escape general notice. Perhaps it does not completely escape the notice of Harry

Bailly, however, who takes the story as an exemplum, putting the

emphasis— his reading contrasts with his reading of the Physician's

Tale— on the constructive structure:

I hadde levere than a barel ale That Goodelief, my wyf, hadde herd this talet For she nys no thyng of swich pacience As was this Melibeus wyf Prudence. By Goddes bonesl whan I bete my knaves, She bryngeth me forth the grete clobbed staves And crieth, "Slee the dogges everichoon, And brek hem, bothe bak and every boonl" (vix, 1893-1900)

As in the Knight’s Tale, the moral does not seem to be created by the informing initial analysis, and Bailly*s rather violent misreading indirectly points up the discontinuity. But Chaucer's effort of closure does not misrepresent the material of the tale, and it would not be correct to assume that Bailly's reaction is a true reaction to something basically false. Melibee's speech of forgiveness signals to us, as Strohm argues, the restoration of 17 health in the man's soul. The allegory is a dream which segments the world, not by categories clearly observable in the world, but by categories which reflect a broken perspective. The process of the poem might be viewed as a long awakening during which Christ's insistence upon love unifies the world, flesh, and devil under the primary sin of Pride. But such a reading may seem to obscure the 155

narrative problem.

Hy critical position mediates between positions of the sort

taken by Bloomfield, Middleton, and Strohm and positions of the sort

taken by Finnegan and Hanson. Criticism such as that offered by Finnegan and Hanson, while it often indulges in an overly imagina­

tive emphasis on the dramatic value of the Canterbury Tales, recog­ nizes the point that constructive structures usually involve some difficulty and always reflect upon the story-teller. Criticism that emphasizes the intellectual foundations of constitutive struc­ tures, while it directs our attention toward important foundational material, risks, I think, overlooking the drive toward resolution.

The cupiditaB/caritas division may, in the final analysis, explain everything in Chaucer, but it does not account for important motions.

In arguing that Chaucer uses story-telling to "soften" our sense of the moral statuses of the pilgrims, I did not mean to suggest that as we read the tales we experience radical revision of the ideas we get from reading the General Prologue, but I did mean to suggest a widening sense of implication. The Knight, presented to us in the General Prologue as one who loves "Trouthe and honour, freedom and curteiaie" (I, 46), tells a tale that separates the virtues in strophie segments, finishing, finally, on a note that emphasizes the last of the virtues named. And the decorous tableau at the end of his tale, as I have suggested, does not quite "answer" the oppositions which develop in the narrative. The Knight remains a "parfit gentil knyght" (I, 72)» but a vague sense that the actions 156

of the gods are not always answerable to our demand for perfect

order may be felt to hang in the air, prompting our more churlish companions to say that everything is, after all, in complete dis­

order* We are not willing to say that everything is in complete

disorder, but we must admit that a perfect knight can tell a slight­

ly imperfect tale.

In tales told by the Knight, the Nan of Law, and the Physician,

Chaucer shows a tendency we have observed in reading his dream-

visions— a tendency to elaborate the signification. A certain alle­

gorical impulse may be observed in him, as C. S. Lewis notices, even

when his story is rather worldly. If we are looking for self-

reflexiveness in Chaucer, it may well be as obvious as the finger *18 Geoffrey pointB at the Tale of Melibee in the Ellesmere Manuscript. Chaucer assigns himself a tale that shows a certain indifference

to the demands of particular creatures. The desire represented, a desire to view the world in terms of distinct moral intentions, is challenged by Bailly's view, which insists upon the physicality of experience. Chaucer recognizes the legitimacy of this demand. (He recognized it when he wrote the Parliament of Fowls and the House of Fame.) But, at the moment under review, Chaucer makes the particu­ lar reminder of materialism so obviously inappropriate and inaccu­ rate that he succeeds in affirming the rightnesB of a view which is imperfectly expressed through literary means.

18 Martin Stevens, in "The Ellesmere Ninatures as Illustrations of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales" (Studies in Iconography. 7*8 ^981- 82 7, 116), argues that the decorator of the Ellesmere MS, in direct­ ing our attention to Melibee rather than Thopas, favored author over narrator. With the Physician, whose appreciation of the self-destructive power of sin is not quite predicted by the General Prologue ("Ful

redy hadde he his apothecaries/ To sende hyra drogges and his lethau- aries,/ For ech of hem made oother for to wynne" ^T, ^26-^28^) and

the Han of Law, whose complacency in the General Prologue ("Discreet he was and of greet reverence— / He seemed swich, his wordes weren so wise" /i, 312-31^7 ) does not quite predict the level of emotion which develops in his tale, there is Chaucer, an introverted man who seems to accept whatever his companions tell him but exercises, * in the telling of his second tale, an intense desire to put life into moral perspective*

In two obviously proper tales— those told by the Clerk and the Nun's Priest, it may seem that the epilogic ending is intended to conceal confusion. At the end of the Clerk's Tale, Griselda's patience is rewarded when her children and her title are restored to her. It would seem that Walter's experiment is completed even as Griselda receives the rewards of patience; but no amount of testing would satisfy an experimenter of such skepticism. Moreover, we may well think that Walter is not a prise worth having once

Griselda seems to have won him. A reading which identifies Walter with God encourages us to forget our confusion. Concerning the reading which the Nun's Priest offers after he has told his tale, we might say that in a similar, but not identical, way, it encourages a revision sufficiently great in our thinking about the work to consitute another example of what I have called the excessive transformation. Huppe and Robertson refer to the Nun 's Priest's Tale in the title of their book in which they present exegetical readings of 19 Chaucer. 9 One critic haB argued that the poem allegorizes courtly 20 controversy. Generally speaking, critics tend to reject the inter­ pretation offered by the Nun's Priest himself: yielding to flattery produces disastrous consequences. This effort of interpretaion, reasonable as it may seem, does not say enough. Of course, as

Burrow points out, exempla are at least s b interesting to fourteenth- century audiences as allegories are, 21 and we really should not be too eager to reject a way of reading which follows the tradition of reading animal fables. Consequential structures, studying motion, as I have argued, seem to produce moral meanings; and, certainly, in the case of the Nun's Priest's Tale, we have an interest in motion. If Chauntecleer, prompted by flattery, stretches out his neck to crow, the fox will grab it. But there is some uneasiness about adopting such a simple reading.

An early poem in which Chaucer avoided excessive transformation by means of a suspended ending showed us birds debating, and the idea of dressing human controversy in feathers is notably exaopled in the

Owl and the Nightingale, a poem which ends, like the Parliament of

FqwIb . aB an untransformed analytical structure. If the debate between Chauntecleer and Pertelote on the subject of dreams may be

19Fruyt and Chaf.

20J. Leslie Hotson, "Colfax vs. Chauntecleer," PMLA, 39 (192*0, 762-781.

21Ricardian Poetry, pp. 82-89. 159 seen as the core( we should not be surprised to find that the issue is left up in the air. But the issue, though not resolved through a process of debate, is resolved when the fox appears. Chauntecleer is proven right: dream of a menacing fox, and one will come along. The narrative difficulty is that we have a potentially untransform- able structure. When the fox appears, Chauntecleer is proven right, Pertelote wrong. There is no causal relationship between the fact of the debate— the structure— and the appearance of the fox, so it cannot be said that we have a transformation. Rather, we have but one more case to be added to the repetitive list offered by Chauntecleer.

We may detect literary sleight-of-hand in the ending of the

Nun's Priest's Tale. On two occasions, the narrator tries to estab­ lish a causal relationship between the debate and the attack by the fox. After rejecting Pertelote*s ideas— that dreams don't mean anything and a good laxative is a panacea— Chauntecleer, the son of

Venus, engages in love talking with his wife. Lust and uxorious­ ness become the ground for the narrator's lines,

Hy tale is of a cok, as ye may heere, That tok his conseil of his wyf, with sorwe. To walken in the yerd upon that morwe That he hadde met that dream that I yow tolde. (VII, 3252-3255)

Whatever the dubious overt narrator may claim, the fact 1b that Chauntecleer does not yield to Pertelote's philosophy. When Chaunte­ cleer 's pride is his temporary undoing, the narrator reminds us that the ultimate cause of Chauntecleer's trouble may be sought in two 160

places— in conveniently general destiny and in the wife:

0 distinee, that nayst nat been eschewedt Allas, that Chauntecleer fleigh fro the bemesl Allas, his wyf ne roghte nat of drenest And on a Friday fil al this meschaunce. (VII, 3338-33^1)

If Chauntecleer's lasciviousness is Bade the cause of his undoing,

it is as if a fourth tera has been brought into asyllogism: (1) If

one does not believe that the unseen workings of the universe (pre­ paring a future for us) are accessible to us through dreaming, then

one is doomed to find himself in the clutches of the seen workings of the universe* (2) Chauntecleer is lustful (an observation that

does not iaply disbelief in the revelatory value of dreams.)

(3) Chauntecleer is doomed to find himself in the clutches of the

seen workings of the universe. Does Chauntecleer's lasciviousness

exclude the possbility of his believing the argument that he him­

self develops at some length? Rejection of that argument is not

implicated in the presentation of Chauntecleer's decision to leave his perch on the fateful day:

"For whan I feele a-nyght your softe syde, Al be it that I may nat on you ryde. For that oure perche is maad so narwe, alias! I am so ful of joye and of solas, That I diffye bothe sweven and dreem." (vii, 3167-3170)

He simply defies the wisdom which his dream has offered.

As we did in reading TroiluB and Criseyde. we find ourselves contemplating the distance between the ultimate forces shaping the universe and the individual, particular activities of created beings. The very real, physical fact that Chauntecleer's perch does not allow him to do what he can do twenty times before second breakfast amuses us: for such a thin reason a life can be lost. But just as we found a radical difference between the perspective of the epilogue and the perspective of the story proper in TroilUB and

Criseyde. we find a radical difference between the perspective of the constitutive structure of the Nun's Priest's Tale and its closing structure. The debate contrasting a point of view which makes the unseen workings of the universe accessible and a point of view which reduces all thoughts about the unseen to physiology cannot produce, in itself, the victory of the latter point of view. Conse­ quence must come from without. It may appear that a single princi­ ple of psychology governs the cock when such is not in fact the case. Between the scientific Chauntecleer who is able to gauge the position of the sun exactly and understand the true value of dreams and the proud Chauntecleer who presents himself to the world there is as wide a gap as there is between analytical structures and practical strategies. When the cock comes down from his perch, vanity is not involved. Vanity may be evidenced down on the ground, but the movment itself is a movement from one plane of existence to another, insofar as it represents Chauntecleer's leaving a state of mind in which he is capable of prophetic dreaming and a state of mind which enables the cock to join others in a life of simple materialism. When the narrator has Chauntecleer make a nearly fatal mistake in employing hiB voice down on the ground, and then has 162

him reflect upon his vanity when he ascends to the limb of a

tree—

"Thou shalt namoore, thurgh thy flaterye, Do me to synge and wynke with myn ye; For he that wynketh, whan he sholde see, Al wilfully, Qod lat him nevere thee!" (VII, 3**29-3'02) he makes it seem that with an analysis applied to a consequential structure— the closural dynamic we associate with exemplum— we can comprehend the material of the story.

The ending of the Nun1s Priest's Tale tends toward what I have called excessive transformation, but the attempted transformation is not altogether successful. Critical controversy suggests the need to re-read the poem and uncover the analytical structure at its core. Because the exemplum voice at the end does not begin to comprehend the scientific, structurally-full treatment of dreams which is the germinal beginning of the work, we may have difficulty understanding the narrative dynamic we find here. But the place to start is where two sharply-contrasting points of view are explicitly articulated. The imperfection in the handling of Chauntecleer's motives refers us to the treatment of Chauntecleer's nature* The readiness of the narrator to make the debate betweon Chauntecleer and Pertelote incidental to the point of morality he wants to expound shows a tendency toward excessive transformation— that 1b , toward transformation which offers to radically change our percep­ tion of what the poem is about.

In his extensive, highly-informed treatment of the poem,

Robert A. Pratt shows us, though be does not use the terms I am UBing, that Chaucer took elements suggesting possibilities for

elaboration on the side of signification from the Boman de Renart

and the Renart le Contrefait, while he took the basic fable form

from Del cok e del gupil. By taking from the Renart le Contrefait a cock with a tendency to believe in his dream, not the skeptical

cock of the Roman de Renart, Chaucer took a step toward creating a 22 unified point of view. The scold Pinte becomes, under the influ- 23 ence of Renart le Contrefait, a skeptic. ^ Pratt shows that among

Chaucer's most significant innovations in writing the tale was the addition of learnedness: the cock's fatalism in Renart le Contre­ fait becomes a thorough-going conviction that knowledge about the unseen forces of the universe is available to us; the hen's skepti­ cism in Renart le Contrefait takes on a certain theoretical cast; Zk even Daun Russell is given philosophical moments. Chaucer sharpens focus on the perspectives of the cock and the hen, moreover, by beginning his story with a presentation of these characters, not with the appearance of the fox, as is the case in both the Roman and 25 Renart le Contrefait. By beginning his tale with emphasis on the perspectives of the cock and the hen, it is also to be observed,

Chaucer departed radically from what he found in Marie de France's Del cok e del gupll; for in that fable there are no hens, as Pratt

22 "Three Old French Sources of the Nonnes Preestes Tale (Part I)." Speculum. ^7 (1972)* **28.

23Ibid., p. *t29. pji "Three Old French Sources of the Nonnes Preestes Tale (Part II)," Speculum, h? (1972), 656.

25Part I, p. points out, and the protagonist/antagonist relationship between 27 the cock and the fox is simple. Chaucer's use of his sources produces a combination of potentially incompatible interests:

there is an analytical interest-different perspectives are to be expanded and elaborated to the point where absolutely different perspectives develop; but there is also a moral interest— a causal relationship between chosen attitudes and actions will bring about predictable consequences. If the Nun's Priest tells a somewhat incoherent tale, we may excuse him, nevertheless, inasmuch as his tale shows an effort to let the occasion-one which requires a mix of earnest and game--shape the discourse.

The sort of elaboration which the Clerk uses to reflect a larger, more intellectual viow than his material communicated in its sources is the sort which serves earnest, not playful, purposes.

Moreover, it is a kind of elaboration which implies development on the side of the sign as well as on the side of signification.

Whereas in the Nun's Priest'a Tale the ideas referred to were abstract— belief versus skepticism— the ideas referred to in the

Clerk's Tale carry the implications of "internal decoding," of on-going process. Utley, a critic who is generally cautious about exegetical efforts, points to a pattern of reference which identifies

Griselda with Mary in at least three critical scenes; Griselde by the oxes stalls (IV, 288-29*0 recalls the Annunciation; Griselde 165

giving up a child (IV, 55^-556) recalls the crucifixion; Qriselde

receiving the children when they are returned to her (IV, 1093** 28 1099) recalls the eternal joy. But tJtley wants to emphasize the point that there are difficulties in reading the Clerk*a Tale as an allegory pure and simple:

The theodicy is questionable if we push it to extremes; God's seeming cruelty cannot equal the Marquis's cruelty, even when that is tempered . . . by our humanizing authors. There is a mystery of enforced suffering in the poem of Griselda which no more man could engineer and no man can explain.

Allegorical touches in the Clerk's Tale suggest the process of selection, agony, death-to-life, and restoration; but when we reprocess the material of the poem in order to understand events from the perspective of God-in-Walter, the analysis begins to fall apart. Valter, the active agent who gives us a plot, acts in a way which we cannot understand. He seems inextricably connect­ ed with the world of the fairy tale or, what Utley suggeBtB in his examination of the basic materials of the poem, the world of

Baltic folk tale.^ The envoy which is appended to the Clerk's Tale, a passage in which, according to Middleton, Chaucer "has the Clerk playfully

28 Francis L. Utley, "Five Genres in the Clerk's Tale." ChauR. 6 (1972), 225.

29Ibid.. p. 226.

3°Utley, p. 206. 166

set aside the whole question of the u b o b of a narrative *serious 31 entertainment,’ with a purely nugatory lyric," seems to undercut

the moral meaning; I assume, apparently contradicting Hiddleton,

that the envoy leaves intact the noetic, "visionary" value of the allegory. In the dynamic of exemplum we typically have the

efforts of a character find association with those of other

characters and, finally, with a general idea of behavior. The

comic envoy blocks such assocation, isolating Qriselde's patient

behavior in the past:

0 noble wyves, ful of heigh prudence, Lat noon humylitee youre tonge naille, Ne lat no clerk have cause or diligence To write of yow a storie of swich mervaille As of Grisildis pacient and kynde, Lest Chichevaohe yow swelwe in hire entraille! (iv, 1183-1188)

The envoy is meant to direct our attention away from one problem

and the structure it gives rise to. But in blocking our idea

of morality derived from the work— one is obliged to endure any

amount of injustice no matter how terrible it seems— the envoy

directs our attention toward Valter, the active agent in the story whose experiment, a consequential structure, needs to be closed

through the operations of a constructive analytical structure. Now, as we have seen, the constructive analytical structureof the poem is one that develops itB semiology, not out of thematerial of the story directly, but indirectly, comparing the story of

^Anne Hiddleton, "The Clerk and His Talet Some Literary Contexts," in Studies in the Age of Chaucer. II, ed. Roy J. Pearcy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980), p. 1^7. Griselde to the story of Hary. Griselde proves herself to have,

not merely extraordinary patience— one of the noble virtues

Valter hopes to find in a peasant— but the transcendent patience

of the Blessed Virgin. This truth is not impressed upon Valter,

however. For Valter, there is simply the observation of extra­ ordinary patience. Griselde's patience does not mean to him what

it means to us. Vhon Valter rewards Griselde*s patience by

restoring the woman to her former status, thereby ending the tale,

it is as if the consequential structure of Valter's experiment is

being insisted upon as the constitutive structure of the tale.

The noetic meaning which is generated by the closural dynamic,

then, is something like this: Even a peasant girl can demonstrate

the very highest level of virtue, since virtue is a function of nature and not social standing. (Ve may notice that the story of

Griselda is given a prominent place in the Decameron and we may recall the democratic note struck in Filostrato.) But this meaning is undercut by the envoy, which advises women to assert themselves, implying that humility is not the great virtue it is often said to be. In directing our attention away from the idea of humility, the envoy suggests a general devaluation of the principal link between the actions of the story and the semiology of the transforma­ tion. The imitation of Hary, though Nary is worshiped in the poem, is not recommended.

The Clerk's Tale. Hiddleton argues, is "rivalled only by the

^tale of the Nun's Priest^ as the most 'literary' offering in the 168 pilgrimage, the most thoroughly infused with play upon the very terms of literary value by which it may be enjoyed."^2 In the structuralist language of this study, I would say that in these two tales we find what we do not find in tales told by the Knight, Han of Law, Physician, and in the Tale of Helibee. a tendency to alter our perception of the fundamental nature of the narrative.

There is no implication of deception here, however. The Hun's

Priest attempts to tie his tale to genre expectations, and the Clerk attempts to direct our attention to what is in thought, if not in structure, essential in hiB tale. Both story tellers try to give us a proper mix of earnest and game.

The pattern I have been studying thus far in this chapter may be summarized as follows: A constitutive structure of a rather elaborated sort— semiologically strong— is closed through the operations of a structure which is not quite capable of comprehending the implicated ideas. In two tales, a readiness to change our perception of structure is suggested in epilogic language. Ve may be reminded of D. A. Hiller's argument in

Narrative and Its Discontents— that the enterprize of communicating ideaB through fiction is inherently faulty. 33 Ve might notice, however, that part of the difficulty in the Canterbury Tales (ulti­ mately, it may not be a difficulty) arises because of the nature of

32Ibid., p. 122.

•^Narrative and Its Discontents (Princeton: Princeton University Press, T 9BI), p. xi. 169 Chaucer himself, who shows a tendency to widen the terns of what night be called the super-analysis: conparisons are deepened, and causality is represented as fully ub the material and attendant genre associations will allow. And between phenomenology and semiology within a structure, Chaucer may widen a gap. Attention to an analytical constitutive structure is not necessarily character­ ized by an emphasis on signification, a fact which need not confuse us if we will keep in mind the distinction between semiology and phenomenology. In the constructive structure of Chaucer's truncated romance, the Tale of Sir Thopas. we find analytical phenomenology without apparent semiology.

If we consider the source with which Chaucer worked in writing the Tale of Sir Thopas. we may notice that Chaucer seems to have provided a causal link which was not supplied in that source. In an essay which compares Sir Thopas to Libeaus Desconus. Francis P.

Magoun shows that Chaucer adds the knight's dream and the promised reward of marriage to the elf-queen. 3*+ But after giving his story a foundation in a well-buried consequential structure, Chaucer parodies a style which creates the impression (quite often, at any rate) that any content at all is possible, depending upon the combined demands of rhyme and free association:

Sire Thopas eek so wery was For prikyng on the softe gras. So fiers was his corage, That doun he leyde him in that plas To make his steede som solas, And yaf hym good forage. (vii, 778-783)

^"The Source of Chaucer's Rime of Sir Thopas," PMLA, kZ (1927), 835. J. A. Burrow nay be right when he argues that the poem has been constructed according to a "principle of progressive diminution," an organisation of three (not two) fits having, respectively, •35 eighteen, nine, and four-and-one-half stanzas. ^ But the Impression created by the internal construction of the stanzas is that the poem is going nowhere, a fact which Harry Bailley notices, failing to see, probably, that the narrator, obeying his rather subtle principle of construction, will soon fade into silence.

Hagoun contrasts the Tale of Sir Thopas with Anelida and Arcite and the Squire'a Tale— two works which seem to show Chaucer's difficulty in inventing plots. If Chaucer, though be gave the work firmer foundation than was found in the source, made Sir Thopas in such a way that it would self-destruct, it is by no means obvious that his idea in the writing of the Squire's Tale was the same. The

Squire's Tale is incomplete, K. H. Goller argues, because it is built upon an opposition which is fundamentally alien to Chaucer's perspective— an opposition which compares the trueness of women to 37 the falseness of men. Goller does not seem to be interested in pursuing the possibility that the "knotte why that every tale is toold" (V, 401) is a basic structural feature.^ Ultimately, of course, a lack of sympathy between author and fictive narrator could explain the unfinished state of the poem. It seems rather effete.

*^'"Sir Thopas': An Agony in Three FitB," RES, 22 (1971)* 5^-58. ^Magoun, p. 8Mf. 37 Karl Heinz Goller, "Chaucers 'Squire's Tale': 'The knotte of the tale,"' in Chaucer und seine Zeit, pp. 187-188. 171 Stanley Kahrl aees criticism of a social class implicit in the

interruption of a tale which amounts to "an example of formlessness where form in life no longer follows function.""^3 9 Joyce E*

Peterson finds the Squire to be quite a depraved oreature, one whose "misuse of the fable has underlined the carnality he was liQ attempting to deny." Perhaps we would do well to think of the story, however, not as an argument about life, but as a lesson in composition. Chaucer shows a tendency to write overly long introductions throughout his career-most notably in the House of

Fame and in Anelida and Arcite, a work which never develops beyond an introduction. If the Franklin interrupts the Squire, his lines might be taken as ironic indeed, but gently Ironic, I think:

"I preiBe wel thy wit," Quod the Frankeleyn, "considerynge thy yowthe, So feelyngly thou spekest, sire, I allow the! As to my doom, ther is noon that is heere Of eloquence that shal be thy peers, If that thou lyve; Qod yeve thee good chaunce, And in vertu sende thee continuauncel For of thy speohe I have greet deyntee. I have a sone, and by the Trinitee, I hadde levers than twenty pound worth lond, Though it right now were fallen in myn hond, He were a man of„swich discrecioun As that ye been! (y< 67^.686)

Reading between the lines, if I may, I find something like this:

^"Chaucer's Squire's Tale and the Decline of Chivalry," ChauR, 7 (197?)i 2 0 7 . ho "The Finished Fragment: A Reassessment of the Squire's Tale." ChauR. 5 (1970), 7**. 172

"Enough* If style alone is going to win this contest, you've won.

Let's hope you live long enough to understand what really makes people tick. But, for all your superficiality, you're a good boy, and I wish my son were as willing to play the game." The Franklin,

I think, would not become as moralistic as some commentators have become, even if he could express himself fully. Neither the Squire's Tale, nor the interruption, are there to disturb the game.

Like the Tale of Sir Thopas. the Squire's Tale strikes the reader as a barrage of images. But images in the latter are not incoherent.

In the case of the Squire's Tale. Chaucer say have at ono time seriously hoped to bring the diverse pieces of the tale— 'highly exotic pieces here— together in the structural dynamic of closural anticipation and final transformation.

The Franklin tells cm obviously proper tale, one that tends more toward earnest than game, but, with its sexual interest and its magic, a piece that is nevertheless well-suited to the occasion. It shares a certain idea of appropriateness with the tales I have discussed thus far in this chapter— the two tales offered by Chaucer, the tales told by the Knight, the Han of Law, the Physician, the Nun's Priest, the Clerk, and the Squire. And, although we must continue to notice differences, and the structural reasons for those differences, the Franklin's Tale, by virtue of the sense of appropriateness which seems to be implied by it, may be classed with the offerings of the Honk and the Manciple.

The Franklin's Tale illustrates as well as any tale I can think of the principle Bussell A. Peck articulates in his essay, 173

"Public Dreams and Private Myths: Perspective in Middle English Literature":

/The7 notion of the unsolvable riddle is orucial to understanding medieval literature as well as cosmology. Art is man's chief means of playing with the larger riddle; thus the prominence of esthetics in medieval cosmology* Nature expresses the mystery of Eternal Art through its forms: man* like Daedalus, can answer riddles with riddles.*1

As we watch Dorigen walk along the strand, we are reminded, perhaps,

of Alcyone, whose expression of the Orphic spirit introduced Chaucer's early meditation upon the danger in loving, in doing

what Nature wants ub to do* The rocks symbolize the impenetrable mystery which, as V. Bryant Bachman points out, is the Boethian

impetus to inquiry: how can a caring, just God place man in his 42 condition of mortality? The question is perennial because mere

arguments do not satisfy our need for the certainty that only direct

experience can provide. Dorigen must start at the very primitive

beginning:

"I woot wel clerkes wol seyn as hem leste, By arguments, that al is for the beBte, Though I ne kan the causes nat yknowe." (V, 885-887)

But she can pray that she will be spared the necessity of descent

^PMLA. 90 (1975), 465. 42 '"To Maken Illusioun': The Philosophy of Magic and the Magic of Philosophy in the Franklin's Tale," ChauR* 12 (1977), 36. 17** into some form of hell: "But thilke God that made wynd to blowe/

As kepe my lordl this my conclusion./ To clerkes lete I al disputison" (V, 888-890). Dorigen becomes so convinced of the impenetrability of the mystery, of the severity of the limitations surrounding our capacity to know, that she can with confidence make her pledge to

Aurelius. To be sure, for Aurelius to find hope in her pledge would be irrational; for if the rockB are removed, her lord will be safe and she will have protection against the advances of this young squire, this son of Venus. Dorigen is using her best observation about the way the world is put together in order to express her steadfastness. Against the advances of Aurelius, she is s b impenetrable as the universe has proven itslef to be when she has examined it. The implicit metaphor expressive of Dorigen's status relative to the universe is the analytical structure upon which the tale is built. It is also the thing which separates her tale from the tales of Virginia, Griselde, and Custance; for unlike those suffering women, Dorigen has something like a strategy. A well-defined consequential constructive structure is in the making.

For Aurelius, Dorigen's metaphor presents a practical problem.

But we might notice that, like Troilus, Aurelius requires the efforts of an accomplice-instigator if he is to become an active agent, one whose strategy, building upon the terms laid down by Dorigen, can contribute to the consequential constructive structure through which resolution and closural transformation can be achieved. The analytical constitutive structure is elaborated, moreover, when, by enlisting the aid of the magician, Aurelius draws into the intrigue a utilitarian concept of wisdom, a concept of wisdom which contrasts sharply with 175 Dorigen's wise recognition of human limitations.

In the d/noueraent, a moral contrast develops, as Arelius, whose constancy has been of the sort usually found in a romance hero ("Madame, reweth upon my peynes smerte;/ For with a word ye may me sleen or save" ^V, 97^-9757) is replaced by a deeper, a principled constancy:

"My trouthe I plighte, I shal yow never repreve Of no biheste, and heere I take my leve, As of the treweste and the beste wyf That evere yet I knew in al my lyf." (V, 1537-15lfO)

The summarizing speech of the Franklin presents a meaning to us in the form of a very common, "literary" (and analytical) riddle:

Lordynges, this question, thanne, wol I aske now, Which was the mooste fre, as thynketb yow? Now telleth me, er that ye ferther wende. I kan namoore; my tale is at an endo. (V, 1621-1624)

Perhaps, as Guerin has suggested, Chaucer had in mind the end of a roughly-analogous tale in the Decameron or the Filocolo when he gave the Franklin his closural device— epilogic material, actually.

Perhaps, too, Chaucer wished to write a debate between the pilgrims.

But I would like to suggest that the riddle presented by the

Franklin is a riddle precisely because it is misleading: inasmuch as all four of the principals in this drama express a readiness to be true to a bond— Dorigen to her word, Averagus to his idea of what one's word means, the philosopher to philosophy, and Aurelius to love (properly understood)— they are equal in the statement they make against the background of a large, "Boethian" riddle. The Franklin's Tale makes a moral statement, finally, when we see that the moral capacity of man is considerably expanded by the influence of a woman who has faced the darkness and attempted an authentic response. Though the Franklin's analytical closural device is inappropriate, though the Franklin has tried to suggest that the materials he has presented may be dealt with in a playful manner answering the demand for "game," we have here a story which contributes, to the cloud of meaning that builds above the pilgrims, something especially vital. What it contributes contrasts with the sense of man's potential implied by the Physician's Tale, the story which follows it in the Ellesmere Manuscript; here is a story that illustrates, not man's ability to be constant, but man's ability to become fixated. It contrasts, too, with another proper tale- one that, like the Franklin's Tale, the Physician's Tale, and the other stories under review in this chapter, reflects a desire to mix earnest and game. As a study of the relationship between man's ability to see the truth and man's capacity for moral advancement, the Franklin's Tale contrasts most markedly with the Manciple's

Tale.

The Manciple*b Tale is the story of how one crow's actions in response to a difficult situation has caused the physical appearance of all crows; and just as all crows have become ugly because of devotion to truth, so all beings become ugly under the influence of devotion to truth:

Daun Salomon, as wise clerkes seyn, Techeth a man to kepen his tonge weel. But, as I seyde, I am noght textueel. 177 But nathelees, thus taughte me my dame; "My sone, thenk on the crowe, a Goddis name I My sone, deep wel thy tonge, and keep thy freend." (ix, 31*1-319)

The Manciple's wisdom was taught him at his mother's knee, a fact which might explain why the Manciple is not, as his portrait

in the General Prologue suggests, altogether honest in his work 1

A gentil Maunciple was ther of a temple, Of which achatours myghte take example for to be wise in byynge of vitaille; For wheither that he payde or took by taille, Algate he wayted so in his achaat That he was ay biforn and in good staat. Now is nat that of God a ful fair grace That swich a lewed mannes wit shal pace The wisdom of an heep of lerned man? (I, 567-575)

The Manciple's summary of his tale does not in fact summarize all that is in his tale, however; and it is unfortunate if the

Manciple has developed a philosophy of life on the basis of one highly fictional example.

As William Cadbury has shown, it would be possible to argue that the Manciple's Tale is in faot Phoebus's story, the story of a man whose hatred of the truth, given Phoebus's affection for k% the bird, leads to self-mutilation. According to this reading, an idea of the story which squares with the fact that the opening focuses on the character of Phoebus, the epilogic remarks of the

Nanoiple suggest an inability to graBp the material, creating a sense that more is meant by the author than by the narrator.

^"Manipulation of Sources and the Meaning of the Manciple's Tale." P£, *»3 (196*0, 5^6. 178

Quite innocently, the Manciple closes his tale in language which does not fully comprehend its meaning.

The nature of the Monk's collection of tales contrasts with

the nature of the collection of tales called the Canterbury Tales.

Like the Legend of Good Women, in its overall design the Monk's

Tale is an analytical structure which promises no transformation.

The collection in which the Monk's Tale appears iB one which con­ veys a sense of developing meaning, not an idea which is easily proven with mechanically-educed examples. Moreover, various tales in the Canterbury Tales direct our attention to the most trouble­ some problem in literature— closure and its attendant tension— a claim which could not be made for the Monk1s Tale. As the pilgrims who tell tales appropriate to the occasion close their works, they usually create the feeling that they have said more than they mean. As the earnest pursuit of idea is conducted under the demand of game— a demand, by implication, that the literature reflect upon the common life or that the interpretation of it convey a common sense— seams show. But Chaucer does not use narrative and interpretive difficulty to criticize his characters in an obvious, "satiric" way— though the three estates satire, as LL Jill Mann points out, is clearly the analysis upon which he builds. Using the story contest as the means of motivating his pilgrims to tell stories, he lets them move the comparative structure forward, developing an idea of morality that is compli­ cated and diversely informed.

Vt Chaucer and the Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973)* PP- 15-16. Chapter Eight Canterbury Tales III:

Pious Tales and Dirty Jokes

The tales told on the way to Canterbury which I have classi­

fied as "proper" have in common the problem of difficult trans­

formation. But it should be noticed that the appellation "proper

tales" is not meant to have a satiric sense. Indeedf the Canterbury

Tales, taken as a whole, would not be the great poem that it is

were it not for a governing idea of propriety. This idea of propri­

ety is not to be confused with an idea of simple piety, of course.

As we have noticed, Chaucer showB a certain readiness to let the

demands of experience ohallenge complacent Christianity. The

propriety I have in mind (I think Chaucer had it in mind too) was a vision which circumscribed the uneducated Harry Baillys and the mildly crooked physicians— a way of viewing life which separated

men from their professions. Here piety identifies men with what

they do and say. Surveying humanity, Chaucer looks for newness.

He is often disappointed; men are too often what they do and say.

But the propriety which Chaucer exhibits is a philosophical propriety.

Lines less experimental than these can hardly be imagined:

This child with pitous lamentacioun Up taken was, syngynge his song alway, And with honour of greet processioun They carien hyra unto the nexte abbay.

179 His mooder swownynge by the beere lay; Unnethe myghte the peple that was theere This newe Rachel brynge fro his beere. (VII, 621-627)

Payne's point, when he argues that the Prioress's Tale is part of an experiment, is that Chaucer brings together a wide range of 1 styles and poetic ideas. The Prioress's Tale, in itself, is not experimental. But the fact that it comes between the tale told by the Shipman and the Tale of Sir ThopaB should suggest a certain experimental temperament to us. The Prioress's Tale presents perfectly pious feelings in a well-formed structural dynamic. But it is precoded by a tale that views man quite cynically and it is followed by a tale which seems to imply indifference to the very idea of meaning in literature.

Regarding the ending of the Prioress's Tale. Carolyn Collette has said that"the effect, not the cause, is central; our attention iB . . . directed to the physical, the emotional, rather than to ? the grand conception behind the action of the tale." But the fact is that causal relations are strong in the tale. The boy learns his Alma redemptoris and, as a result, is saved when

Satan takes possession of the Jews and causes his throat to be cut. Like the Physician's Tale and the Man of Law's Tale, the Prioress's

Tale is built upon an analytical constitutive structure. It is remarkably different, however, inasmuch as it develops a natural,

The Key of Remembrance, p. 170. 2 "Sense and Sensibility in the Prioress's Tale." ChauR, 15 (1980), 1W. entirely predictable response. Like the Second Nun*a Tale, the

Prioress’s Tale gives u b an analysis which implicates the powers

of heavent and then it follows that analysis with a miraculous

event. As if to underscore the idea of causality, the narrator

has Mary place a grain— as Paul Beichner has shown, a medicinal

grain— on the little clergeon's tongue, making him more capable of 3 sustained singing.^ This addition to the legend elaborates causal

relations without challenging, in any sense, the analysis offered

in the tale proper. Unlike the Physician*s Tale, which closes

without use of the obviously available supernatural machinery—

Hanson's opinion, at any rate— the Prioress’s Tale is a direct, uncomplicated presentation of an analytical constitutive structure

the materials of which are reviewed under the force of a consequential constructive structure.

It is not insignificant, I think, that Chaucer achieves the sort of criBp closure he achieves in the Prioress’s Tale, where

divine intervention makes resolution of the problem developed in the constitutive structure possible. As we have seen, Chaucer seems

to have had difficulty in moving out of an analytical constitutive structure which he has elaborated on the side of signification and into a closural structure which does not trivialize or invalidate his premise. In the Prioress’s Tale, closure does not invalidate the terms of the analysis, since the world is allowed its limited powers.

^Paul E. Beichner, "The Grain of Paradise," Speculum. j6 (1961), 506-307. But we might observe that the end of the tale takes us over into the realm of semiology, to the exclusion of phenomenology. The power of prayer, illustrated in a particular context, is asserted without much regard for ideas of natural law, though the detail of the grain does remind us, as Beichner points out, of natural mater­ nal love. In her reading of the Second Nun's Tale, a story we might quite naturally associate with the Prioress*a Tale. Sherry L.

Reames has noticed that Chaucer followed Jacobus deVoraigne in a general simplification of the material. The Passio S. Caeciliae.

Reames points out, is rich in Augustinian explanation; it emphasises the rational connectedness of the conversions. But Jacobus, Chaucer's principal source, emphasizes "supernatural power at the expense of 4 human understanding." Keeping his categories separate, Chaucer recognizes the pull toward resolution through supernatural means in a tale that consistently refers to the extraordinary category of sainthood. If the endings of the Second Nun's Tale and of the

Prioress's Tale are troubled, they are troubled because we know that they represent but one-half of the basic, foundational analysis upon which Chaucer's work, taken as a whole, stands. These two tales force us to trace motions that obey extraordinary, not ordinary, rules of causality; and there is a feeling of structural anemia. The transforming structure, weak phenomenologically, strikes us as less than full. Beichner reminds us of the grain the Hiller has Absolon put on his own tongue (I, 3690). We are prepared, Birney argues, for

L "The Cecilia Legend as Chaucer Inherited It and Retold It: The Disappearance of an Augustinian Ideal," Speculum. 55 (19^0), 39* 183

Alyson's practical joke through details that show Absolon to have

an oral fixation. Like the pious tales told by the Second Nun

and the Prioress, the scurrilous tale told by the Hiller— and the

tales told by the Reeve and the Shipman are to be included with

it— comes to a well-wrought crisis and denouement. Just as Chaucer

shows himself to be in perfect control of materials when he gives

himself over to complete acoeptanoe of supernatural explanations, when he gives himself over to complete acceptance of natural

explanations, he has little narrative difficulty. Chaucer's analytical turn of mind, then, serves him well as he creates a pastiche of varying styles and perspectives which, for the time being, we are not regarding as a single poem.

Having told a tale in which resolution is achieved through the operations of natural necessities— "Nicholas was risen for to pisse," "And with his ax he smoot the cords atwo,/ And doun gooth al"— the Hiller reinforces awareness of the constitutive structure!

Thus swyved was this carpenteris wyf, For al his kepyng and his jalousye; And Absolon hath kist hir nether ye; And Nicholas is scalded in the towte. (I, 3850-385*0

Like the Knight's Tale, the Hiller's Tale moves forward aB a demands d'amour; but, unlike the case of the Knight's Tale, a vividly physical January-Hay opposition, not a vague•Venus-Hars opposition, supplies the foundation. In achieving closure, the Killer does not need to employ the energies resident in the foundation material, sb the Knight doee, because his interest is not in a 18 * basic idea, but, rather, it is in the physical energies of the

participants in his demande d'amour. By separating those participants, giving them markedly different approaches, the

Killer is able to move quite smoothly into a consequential closural structure. The constructive structure of the Hiller's Tale can be complementary to the constitutive structure. As we saw in reading the Knight'b Tale, considerable effort was made to generalise the referential value of Palamon and Arcite, but little attention was paid to making the two men, as men, specifically different. Birney has accurately summarised the difference between

Absolon and Nicholas as the difference between the inhibited small­ town dandy of infantile temperament and the uninhibited free g spirit capable of uncomplicated expression.

The analytical constitutive structure of the Miller's Tale might well have more meaning, more semiology, than first appears, as Paul A. Olson has shown. In its double opposition Olson has found a triadic pattern— the carpenter referring us to the sin of avarice, Nicholas referring us to lust, and Absolon referring us to pride— and he notices that the Parson predicts, in his treatise, that the proud will be befouled (X, 191), the avaricious will be robbed (X, 193), and the lecherous will be burned (X, 210). Olson adraitB that the Hiller is "far from being a philosopher," but he maintains that our sense of justice done at the close of the atory is deepened by reflection.^ Robin derives satisfaction from

^Earle Birney, "The Inhibited and the Uninhibited: Ironic Structure in the Hiller's Tale." Neophil. ** (19^0), 33^-336.

^"Poetic Justice in the Miller's Tale." HLQ. 2* (1963), 233-31*. 185 contemplating an end-state in which physical entities suffer; he is aware of his analytical constitutive structure in phenomenological terms. Olson compares the portraits which Robin presents at the beginning of his story to the portraits Chaucer presents in the

General Prologue, and he makes the accurate observation that in the Hiller's Tale what characters do is in perfect accord with what 7 they are. The Killer has a perfect grasp of character types, it seems. But his ideas about his characters are probably not as full as the ideas Olson's associations suggest. The Miller remains in one place; his vision does not necessitate our seeing wider implications. If he makes a contribution to the cloud of meaning hanging over the pilgrims, it is precisely because his tale is self-sufficient. It communicates a perfectly vulgar idea of justice, and it moves characters about according to their specific, limited, psychosomatic natures.

The motive of the students in the Reeve'b Tale shifts when they lose the first struggle— to get the measure of flour due them— and they look for consolation in some act of revenge. What makes the tale interesting is the fact that by succeeding in their effort of revenge, Aleyn and John succeed in getting, not only revenge, but double revenge; and, in getting the four due them, they get a cake. These active characters out of the bourgeois

7Ibid.. p. 228. 186 French tradition are eminently veil-suited for a work which is built upon a consequential constitutive structure. Hart, in an essay published early in the century, finds unity of action comparable to what we would expect to find in a "modern" short g story. However, Hart's observation about the handling of point of view in the tale should suggest that the identification of structural dynamic ought to be approached with caution:

It differs from the modern short story chiefly in its lack of unity of point of view. It should be the clerks' story, yet the action is not always seen through their eyes, but often through the eyes of Simkin, or of his wife.9

When I argue, in the first part of this study, that a literary structure imitates a consciousness, I seem to imply that the point of view in a work of fiction, often conceived of as merely an aspect of style, determines the primary structure— the constitutive structure--of a work. The fact is that the problem of a story, determinant of itB constitutive structure, becomes a consequential structure when the point of view of a character who has conceived of a means of pursuing a goal is established. (With good reason, we are annoyed when an author, after having established a point

g Walter Morris Hart, "The Reeve's Tale: A Comparative Study of Chaucer's Narrative Art," PMLA, 23 (1908), 42-43.

9Ibid., p. 43. 187

of view implying a consequential constitutive structure, allows the point of view to change; we have the sense that the author doesnot know what he is doing. In some narratives (most of Chaucer's),a divided point of view suggests the analytical constitutive struc­ ture. To prove that the constitutive structure of the Reeve's

Tale is a consequential structure* we would have to show that by means beyond the apparent management of point of view Chaucer establishes a problem of causal relations.

We might notice that the Reeve's Tale begins in a way which * suggests an analytical, not a consequential, constitutive struc­ ture :

At Trumpyngtoun, nat fer fro Cantebrigge, Ther gooth a brook, and over that a brigge, Upon the whiche brook ther stant a melle; And this is verray sooth that I yow telle: A millere was ther dwellynge many a day. As any pecok he was proud and gay.

Greet sokene hath this millere, out of doute. With whete and malt of al the land aboute; And nameliche ther was a greet collegge Hen clepen the Soler Halle at Cantebregge; Ther was hir whete and eek hir malt ygrounde. (I, 3921-3926, 3989-3991)

We seem to have the "natural" order— beginning at the beginning, everything having an important place in the analytical structure.

Hart argues, however, that in adding the fact of the manciple who has become sick to his source material— a fact which creates the problem of Simkin's outrageous boldness (I, 3992-3999)— Chaucer creates a sense of mission for the two clerks.^0 Moreover, Hart argues, two clerks now become necessary in a contest against the

1®Hart, p. 1*f. 188 miller, since his manner of thievery is based on the principle that one man cannot watch both the hopper where the grain goes in and 1 1 the trough where the flour is collected. To Hart's treatment of the establishment of a problem in the tale we might add the observation that the Reeve's point of view is established before the tale proper begins. Symkyn is described as the target of an effort of revenge at the outset. Ve see a similar circumstance at the beginning of the Hiller's Tale, but other factors do not combine with it to narrow the point of view down to the suggestion of a consequential constitutive structure— the development of a single motion.

I appreciate the Reeve's Tale for the sense of developing transformation which derives from moments when the strategies of the contestants break down. The sly clerks must chase the mare through the fen (I, *f0?9 ff) { the wife has to get up and go out in the middle of the night, creating an opportunity for John, Aleyn having taken his (I, 1*192-^227); the moon provides the wife with a target, never mind what it is (I, *+293); the cake is conveniently behind the door, where the appreciative daughter said it was (I,

*011). Accidents interrupt strategies, separating the characters in their own surprised reactions, giving personalities to the two clerks, who would like to be mere functions in the completion of motions. Finally, just as Robin's attempt to summarise the effect of the actions he has described reminds us that his story

11 1 'ibid. 189 is founded upon an analytical structure, Oswald's attempt to give

a summary which relates Robin to Symkyn reminds us that the story

has been about the punishment of Symkyn: "A gylour shal hymself

bigyled be" (1, VJ21).

The tales of the Hiller and the Reeve may be viewed as self­

reflexive in a general way: these oharacters show the degree to

which they are matter-bound precisely because they are able to

tell smoothly-developed, well-closed dirty jokes. But in the rela­

tionship between the Friar and the Summoner we find that a Bimilar

bondage widens in implication, recalling the essential division which makes pilgrimage a necessity in the first place. In a sense, the transformation which closes the Friar's Tale may be termed "exoessive." In order to have the consequence of the summoner's engagement in mutual tutorials with Satan's henchman, the Friar has to make knowledge in the workings of

Hell more important to the summoner than it would be to the typical rapacious summoner— as that type is characterized in general terms, at any rate. The summoner has a utilitarian motive for wanting to travel with the devil, but the questions he asks explore, in an academic way, the nature of Satan and the features of his life.

This exploration is the analytical spine of the work. Ve learn, along with the summoner, about the subtlety of fiends, and it might be argued that the consequence deriving from the analysis develops in a perfeotly reasohable way. The summoner is so interested in seeing how Satan pursues his business that he fails to see the danger hanging over him when the carter's innocent intentions oause his cart and horse to be spared. The summoner beoomes inattentive 190 when he is dealing with the old woman. Now* of course, his cruelty—

the quality which makes comparison with the fiend for the average

summoner fitting and logical comes out— ‘manifests itself fully*-

The structural opposition which develops lies in the fact that,

while an inherent quality makes the summoner a good companion for

the fiend in a general way, the fiend has been pursuing a specific

strategy with the specific end of capturing the summoner. In the

closural transformation, the fiend's consequential structure dominates. But in order to achieve the transformation, the Friar has to make the summoner, whose evil consists in his complete selfishness, suffer the consequence of having become academically detached from affairs at hand. The Friar's Tale has the defect of many jokes which make a consequence grow out of circumstances which would senm to deny its possbility. When the Friar tells us that tho summoner ho will tell us about had a reputation for subtlety, ho is preparing us for a story about a summoner who wants to know more. But in order to execute closure, the Friar has to emphasize the moral quality which ultimately made companionship with a fiend logical— and all the information the fiend provides becomes irrelevant. There are two reasons for the defect in the Friar's Tale.

In the first place, there is the hatred for the Summoner. The Friar is so very eager to inflict pain that any means at all which would get the average summoner packed off to Hell is acceptable. The other reason that the Friar in able to move from an analytical structure which gives his sunmoner an academic character to a consequential structure which makes the summoner 191 thoughtless and brutal is that the Friar uses his own analytical

proclivity in creating the constitutive structure— not the sort

of subtlety which the summoner was supposed to have, utilitarian

intelligence— but detached interest, the pursuit of wisdoia for its

own sake. However, having olaimed that the ending of the Friar1s

Tale is one characterised by a kind of excessive transformation, I

must add the observations that the story has compactness and that

its ending does not necessarily falsify the structure upon which it is built— if we can conceive of a particular summoner who is

both eager to learn and stupid enough to forget a lesson immediately

after he has gotten it.

That friars are ready to claim wisdom such as we find in the

Belf-portrait given by the Friar's fiend is implicit in the

reaction to the Friar'a Tale that we get from the Summoner. The

Summoner makes the point that in order for the Friar to lay down

such a constitutive structure he would have to incriminate himself;

This Frere bosteth that he knoweth hello, And God it woot, that it is litel wonder; Freres and feendes been but lyte asonder. (Ill, 1672-167*0

But just as the Friar*s drive to achieve a transformational close which condemns another leads him to overlook faults in the Friar himself, so the Sumooner's drive to achieve a transformational close which discharges his wrath leads him to overlook hie own defect. The analytical transformation that doses the Summoner's Tale confirms the charge that the close of the Friar's Tale implies.

So ignorant is the Summoner— his lack of academic ability is well 192 established in the General Prologue— -that he overlooks the serious

implications of the consequential structure which is the constitutive

structure of his own tale. Whereas the Friar developed semiology

at the expense of phenomenology (the idea that summoners and

fiendB belong together is argued without regard for the problem of consistency in characterization), the Summoner develops

phenomenology without apprehending semiological demands when

it comes to closure.

To effect transformation, the Summonor must use the medium of wrath, a quality no more implicated in the idea of the presump­ tively wise friar, a friar who makes the workings of the unseen the subject of much pretentious ohatter, than the idea of academic detachment was implicated in the idea of the brutal, heartless summoner. The Summoner uses the anger of Thomas to anticipate an analytical development, ono in which the justifiable, tersely expressed wrath of Thomas is contrasted with the unjustifiable, righteously expressed wrath of the friar. An analytical transform­ ation is applied to what has indeed been a consequential structure.

But as in the Friar*s Tale, we find an improbability— when the friar gropes about in Thomas's pants. This reflects the eagerness of the teller to get to the point— that all the friar's presumptive knowledge about the workings of the supernatural is worth no more than a fart. This is the reward earned by the friar'b manipulation of the sick man— an equation narratively similar to the moment when the summoner refuses to relent and thereby seals his fate. But the transformation worked on a consequential structure is here a kind of excessive transformation, for just as the ending of the Summoner*s Tale overlooked the principle of characterisation implied

by the phenomenology of the constitutive structure, here the

ending overlooks semiology of the constitutive structure. To

attribute wrath to the friar is to skirt the issue of knowledge

raised by the claims of the friar. The fart is a natural enough

consequence, when one is dealing with an angry, sick man who is

capable of little more, but the fart does not answer the- claims of

the friar about the process he is engaged in. It is, rather,

exactly the sort of reaotion one would expect from the character a of the Summoner, a wrathful, thoughtless man.

When the friar of the Summoner1s Tale comes to the lord for a judgment, he is asking for an analysis which counters the analysis offered by Thomas. He would like to have his claim of special connection between the workings of God and the workings of his order confirmed; but the lord insists upon overlooking the question of the semiology of the analysis. Rather, he concentrates on the phenomenology, manifesting the point of view of the Summoner.

The possibility offered by the lord's wife— that a churl will behave like a churl— implies a criticism of the Summoner, for everything in the story is the product of his imagination. But insisting that we dwell upon the unpleasantness of the phenomenon in question, the 6ummoner lets Jankin deliver the final analysis— what amounts to a consequential reversal of an analytical problem. With his imagination able to devise a mechanism for dealing with the problem,

Jankin reflects the praotical perspective unburdened by ideas which we saw in the Hiller and the Reeve. Indeed, the very idea of finding semiology in an analytical structure— act and act 19*» requited— is satirized in Jankin's winning of the new coat.

What counts in the world of the Summoner— and in the world of the Friar, too— is the acquisition of power. At issue is winning, not the rational humility which is prerequisite to making a good * pilgrimage. Defects in the tales these two tell reflect this fact.

But it could be argued that the defects I discuss are subtle compared to the difficulties I find in my discussion of the Knights Tale and the Han of Law's Tale— stories that are meant to appeal to a double appetite for earnest and game. There is compactness and neatness about the endings of tales told by the

Friar and Summoner, however troubling those endings might be to more devout pilgrims. If we relax our demand for truth in characterization, the tales of the Friar and the Summoner may be seen as well-made little traps that invite enjoyment in terms of the forced closure we associate with all dirty jokes. They achieve a kind of perfection in their very defiance of truth, and they help to fix the tellers in their moral positions. Change is not anticipated.

The typical fabliau structure that we see in tho Miller's

Tale, but in a less elaborated form, is to be observed in the Shipman's Tale. There is a lascivious wife, a somewhat blind merchant, and a wily clerk. It may well be, as Janette Richardson has argued, that a serious meaning develops in the poem as sex, trade, diet, and beastiality all become related ideas through 195

the handling of the imagery; 12 but the emphasis in the tale is on

the achievement of consequential transformation. In this three-

contestant event* it appears* for a time* when Daun John tolls the merchant that he has returned the money* giving it to the wife,

that the cleric has won. A twist comes at the end* when a certain

equivalence in the relationships between the wife and the husband

and the wife and the cleric is communicated: the consequence of

whoring is more whoring. With the Hiller* the Reeve, the Summoner*

the Friar, and the Cook, the Shipman takes his place. For him*

pilgrimage is an occasion for recreational story-telling. His tale

does not imply a state of mind capable of being moved by the motion

of pilgrimage.

An interesting debate develops in the criticism of the

Merchant's Tale. Bertrand Bronson looks at the prologue to the

tale and finds that the character of the Merchant himself has

an effect that alters what he feels must have been in its original 13 conception a light, mirthful tale solidly in the fabliau tradition.

Certainly* the Merchant is not a happy man:

"Wepyng and waylyng, care and oother sorwe I knowe ynogh, on even and a-morwe," Quod the Marchant, "and so doon other mo That wedded been." (IV, 1213-1216)

E. Talbot Donaldson* concentrating on the texture of allusion

12 ''The Facade of Bawdry: Image Patterns in Chaucer'b Shipman's Tale." ELH, 32 (1965)» 30^-308. ^"Afterthoughts on the Merchant's Tale." SP, 58 (1961), 596. 196 and imagery in the tale itself, argues that the Merchant uses the tale to communicate an utterly depraved view of life. The two critics agree on the point that there is something dirty, or dirtied, about the Merchant's Tale, though they have different ideas as to why. The explanation I would like to offer is a structural explanation, and I mention Bronson and Donaldson because I think that their arguments can be comprehended in the terms of my analysis.

Bronson traces the motion of the story in a way which suggests emphasis on the consequential constitutive structure:

The preposterouBness of the denouement is sufficient notice that we are back in the cloud-cuckoo-land of the Fabliau, where sentiment is merely irrelevant— as ill-bestowed as it would be on an animated cartoon. For anyone to suppose that May's self-defense could be intended or expected to be received as damning evidence of the "dobleness" of women,--as an honest though satirical indictment— must be reckoned one of the stranger aberations of critical judgment.*^

Bronson's position amounts to a rejection of the analytical constructive structure, which culminates in a comparative treatment that relates May to Proserpine, a deity capable of giving to all women an ability by means of which they can best all husbands— the ability to dream up quickly an alibi (IV, 226*1-2267). Donaldson's criticism doeB more to help the reader seo how

"The Effect of the Merchant's Tale," in Speaking of Chaucer (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), pp. 31P? 5. 15 ^Bronson, p. 593. 197 Chaucer's Merchant attempts to prepare us for the closural trans­

formation. Donaldson is impressed by the reference to the story of

Adam and Eve which is used in introducing January's unhealthy

aspiration:

Mariage is a ful greet sacrement. He which that hath no wyf, I holds hym shent; He lyveth helpless and al desolat,-- I speke of folk in secular estaat. And herke why, I sey nat this for noght, That womman is for mannes helpe ywroght. The hye God, whan he hadde Adam maked, And saugh him al allone, bely naked, God of his grete goodnesse Beyde than, "Lat us now make an helpe unto thiB man Lyk to hymself"; and thanne he made him Eve. (IV, 1319-1329)

Donaldson is struck— as every reader ought to be— by the juxta­ position in the poem. The Merchant ironically suggests that decrepit January suffers from the delusion that he is called upon to re-enact the beginning of human procreation. The old man is foolish enough to wonder if the bliss he anticipates in marriage precludes his entrance into heaven, after the end comes:

How sholde I thanne, that lyve in swich plesaunce As alle wedded men doon with hire wyvys, Come to the bliBBe ther Crist eterne on lyve ys? (iv, 1650-1652)

January identifies himself with all married men, an anticipation of

Pluto's identification with all men when he intervenes on their behalf. With Donaldson, I would stress the importance of a construc­ tive structure that both contrasts "tendre youthe" and "stoupyng age" and satirically relates the foolishness of the old man to the 198 general motives of men.

The result of the dynamic of the Merchant'a Tale is that we are made tofeel man's capacity for self-deception. When the blind

January is made to sing a parody of the Song of Songs (IV, 21J8-2148) and the narrator characterizes his words as r,swiche olde lewed wordes" (IV, 2149), we are made to feel that the Merchant has, as

DonaldBon says, "succeeded in dirtying the theological basis on 16 which marriage was said to rest." Relationships between men and women make men capable of the most obvious folly. The Merchant amplifies what is, as Bronson argues, typical fabliau material, but in forcing the January/Pluto association, he makes a statement of general despair. Like other pilgrims who have achieved closure through failure, willful or otherwise, to rocognize complete realities, the

Merchant suggests a sense of spiritual immobility.

Unlike the proper tales, the pious tales and dirty jokes show disregard for the problem that is central in Chaucer--the problem of reconciling observation and ideal knowledge through narrative dynamic arising from structures which are phenomenologically and semiologically full. The pious tales and dirty jokes may well seem to be among the moBt satisfying in the collection; for closure does not have to take into account, in the case of the pious tales, developed phenomenology and, in the case of the dirty jokes, ultimate meanings.

But the whole enterprize we call the Canterbury Tales is built upon an acute sense of the need to circumscribe, even though they seem to demand separation, two contrasting perceptual categories.

^Donaldson, p. 44. Chapter Nine Canterbury Tales IV: Confessions

When the Friar lets the Wife of Bath know that she need not

dress up her material with the quotation of so many authorities,

he is objecting to pretense, of course ("Us nedeth nat to speken

but of game" /ill, 127^7 )* ^ut a structural reason for the objection may also be found. And just as we saw a moment in the

text wh(en the author shifted the principle of characterization

in order to effect transformation in the case of the Nun's Priest's

Tale, in the case of the Wife of Bath's Tale we find a moment at which a shift occurs. It occurs when the Wife has the knight mention the embarrassment to his family that marriage to the old woman of low degree will bring to his family (III, 1101).

What follows is a long passage— what the Friar objects to— in which the old woman shows, in the manner of one interpreting an

exemplum, the evils of pride (III, 1106-1206). Actually, the knight's crime has been that of brutally dominating a woman, and

the ultimate end of the story is that a woman craftily dominates the man. In the symmetry of the analytical constitutive structure of the story, we have the lustful knight against a defenseless maid; this opposition is followed by the situation in which the knight has no strategy other than the passive strategy of going about asking for answers to his question. When the knight finds himself pronouncing nuptials with the old crone, we see the opposi­ tion of former vital strength and present impotence, anticipation of death. Nothing about the knight's life plan produced this

199 200 opposition. It simply occurred. The consequence, finally, is

that the knight, faced with choosing between two unacceptable alternatives, surrenders his will. This surrender marks the abso­ lute reversal of his initial character trait, tut the lesson

that the knight has learned— women want to dominate their lovers and husbands--is the medium by means of which a consequential transformation can be effected. Suddenly, the old woman becomes a beautiful young lover— a faithful one, too— and this change is due to the final consequence, that the knight will give in completely.

When the old woman invokes authorities in order to show that pride of social place is a bad thing, it is as if she is closing analytically a consequential tale which ha3 culminated in the marriage: here we see what such pride can lead to. hut the knight's strategy has been an essentially passive one, as I have suggested, and what is wanted in the consequential close to an analytical structure. By giving the old woman a great deal to say about what we are meant to take as a consequential structure, however— a semiologically weaker structure— the Wife is attempting to give moral color to her point of view. This i3 a distortion. The tale she has told has its semiological roots, not in the realm of moral choice, but in the realm of opposed powers. It is a distortion to try to make the knight's plight a function of a judgment and a specific plan. The Friar notices that the Wife has told a very amusing story, but he draws our attention to the irrelevance of the moral coloring. And yet, the long series of authorities does have a function. Picking up on what was really an irrelevant remark by the knight, it wears him down; the very 201 repetitiveness and inapplicability— what really bothers the knight

is that the possibility of vital marriage is gone— help to tire

the knight, help to bring him to the point where he is ready to

surrender his will completely. By means of an ending which might

be viewed as an excessively developed consequential structure—

a closural structure treated bb though it required a closural

structure— the Wife attempts to alter her audience's perception

of events. This is in perfect keeping with the prologue to her

tale, in which Bhe invokes authority to justify wh'at is pure lust.

The Pardoner shares with the Wife a readiness to deceive through literary means. Preaching against the pursuit of money, he pursues money. But his deception goes farther. When the

Pardoner turns to his audience and demands that they pay him for their salvation, he is attempting to supply an analytical close to what might appear to be a consequential structure: here the pursuit of money has led to eternal damnation; give up your money and you will be saved. But instead of telling yet another little tale suggesting that the pursuit of gold ends in eternal damna­ tion, the Pardoner has managed to create a story which makes pursuit of gold incidental. The Pardoner would have us believe that his constitutive structure is a consequential structure, when in fact the constitutive structure of hie tale is analytical.

The last part of the story, the part in which the killing ta&s place, purports to show the evil to which the pursuit of gold leads. But we should recall the fact that the three young men set out in pursuit of Death. Pursuit of gold becomes only 202 the means through which they eventually achieve their goal. It is worth noting that the Pardoner begins his tale with a catalogue of sins, any one of which might have yielded the same result, the achievement of dying. It is also worth noting that the young men are three in number, that they represent a sort of confused trinity, since they have no distinct offices as they undertake their project of saving the world. Ve notice that the mission the young roisterers embark upon is a worthy one, then. They have seen enough dying. One of the young men urges his friends on:

Herkneth felawes, we thre been al ones; Lat ech of us holde up his hand til oother, And ech of us bicomen otheres brother, And we wol sleen this false traytour Deeth. (VI, 696-699)

Naturally, they find themselves like the knight in the Wife of

Bath’s Tale finds himself— looking about in a disorderly fashion for the solution to their problem. We have, then, the sort of passive strategy which characterizes visionary literature. The young men are in effect waiting for Death to find them. Here, then, is the melancholy view of life which makes the quest for salvation a ridiculous affair that always ends in a return to the tree where Adam lost his innocence and, in the impenetrable mystery of things, his life, too. But the vision in the Pardoner's Tale overturns the vision in Qenesis, even while it connects loss of innocence to loss of life. For it makes the effort to eat of the Tree of Life preoede the fall from innocence* Finally, the universe itself must be "quitted" for the offence it has oommitted against us in making us capable of wanting to live 203

forever without providing visible means. So the outside of the

Pardoner's Tale connects with the inside. The Pardoner tells his

tale in order to cash in on man's longing. But the tale itself

acknowledges the universality of the longing; in telling his tale,

the Pardoner admits that he understands that the longing precedes

everything else. When the Pardoner confesses his sins, he

confesses to the recognition manifested in the constitutive structure

of his tale— an analysis the spirit of which the host apprehends

correctly when he says that he has had enough of angry men. Both the Pardoner and the Wife deliver confessions disguised

as boasts, though there is the important difference that the Wife attempts to put a respectable face on her cupidity with the

quotation of authorities and the appeal to Nature. Finally, as

the Wife's tale shows, all that the Wife believes in is power.

Finally, as his tale shows, all the Pardoner believes in is pain.

The confessions of these two characters contrast, then, with the oonfession of the Canon's Yeoman. Like the Wife and the Pardoner, the Canon's Yeoman delivers a preamble in which he reveals what actual activities he has been involved in. But the Canon's Yeoman does not brag, and what most strikes us about him is that he is, just at thiB moment, a man without a profession. The Wife of Bath is a professional hypocrite— one who goes to Jerusalem and oomes back refreshed, ready to ride another unfortunate man into the ground; her pilgrimage to Canterbury is part of the ongoing process, and the coming back is as important to her as the going out. Similarly, we oatoh the Pardoner at a moment that merely represents or summarises an ongoing career. But the Canon's 20k Yeoman is out of a job. His confession is a raflactlon on a

past career, and now' all that can matter to him is the going out,

the pilgrimage.

The tale that the Canon's Yeoman tells is, in itself, a

story built upon a consequential structure. It traces the motion

of a particular confidence trick played upon a naive priest.

Necessarily, the trick depends upon the deft management of an

alchemist's machinery, and so we find a preoccupation with mechanism

and material in the Yeoman's introduction to the tale. In the

tale itself, we see an attempt to move in the direction of an analytical close. Having provided a good deal of the detail which would enable us to picture the scenes of the story proper,

the Yeoman makes the claim that the canon of his tale is not to be confused with his former employer and 1b probably the most skillful confidence man in the class to which the former employer belongs. The canon of the Yeoman's Tale is subtle enough to infect a whole town, be it Rome, Alexander, or Troy; he is a hundred times aa subtle aB the Yeoman's former employer. Ve have the impression, then, that we are seeing in operation the epitome, the greatest of the class, and his operations are especially representative. We are encouraged, then, to get a general perspec­ tive on the alchemist's project, but as the story is told, attention is given to details. The semiological value of the confidence game becomes a question. Ve anticipate an analysis. The tale ends with surprising simplicitys the priest delivers the forty pounds, and the canon disappears. The Yeoman has told u b , of course, that his purpose is 2 0 5 the simple purpose of exempluo writing:

And nathelees yet wol 1 it expresse, To th'entente that men may be war therby, And for noon oother cause, trewely. (VIII, 1305-1307)

But the use of an epitome and the claims about the power of alchemy to destroy lives suggest the possibility of expanded analysis. The canon of the Yeoman's tale cannot turn into the

Devil himself, but a homiletic epilogue can be used to connect the strange history of the supposed "philosopher" to the domain of knowledge, knowledge of man's intrinsic and extrinsic limitations.

Moral purpose fulfilled, the warning having been given, the

Yeoman can now discuss ultimate meanings.

Alchemy must be viewed as a science which recalls the Fall; for if men possessed the philsopher's stone, the Yeoman tells us, they would worship it instead of Christ and they would rely upon their own lore to achieve what they desire. Such knowledge would not be knowledge of good and evil, of course; so the comparison to the pride of Eve is not exact. The tree which more closely resembles the alchemist's goal Is the one which offers life, in fact. For just as man would gladly find the fruit which would enable him to avoid the consequence of living a fleshly existence, so man would gladly find the Elixer. Disappointment, of course, results. Ve have seen the disappointment of the Pardoner as it is represented— disguised vulnerability. In the case of the

Yeoman, however, we find a clear statement of disappointment.

He knows why his face is the color that it is, and he acknowledges his responsibility. He will spend his life working off his debt. 2 0 6 And unlike the Pardoner, who seeks to use his disappointment, the

Yeooan would like to end what has become an ongoing chain of

predation.

The literary problem with which Chaucer contends throughout

his career occurs repeatedly in the Canterbury Talest Btory tellers

can tell what happened or they can show an understanding of what

values are represented in events, but, when they attempt to

project a balanced view of life— a mix of earnest and game— ,

they can seldom put the two forms of intellection together. When

the Yeoman delivers his heart-felt confession and the motive of

winning the audience's approval and a dinner slips out of view,

one begins to feel that the event of the pilgrimage approaches the

meaning which has been assigned to it by tradition. As many readers

have noticed, the event of the pilgrimage is presented in a

confused, fragmented fashion. It is even difficult to trace the

events of the story through references to landmarks, though some

success can be achieved working along those lines. What the

Canterbury Tales is, on the constitutive level, is an analysis.

Systematically it presents the plight of man: real marriage is seldom what it is supposed to represent, bullies and lechers too often prevail, the priestly class is not what it should be. But by using the Canon's Yeoman to summarise an honest and profoundly disappointed point of view, Chaucer finds a way to disengage his collection from the constructive transformation originally promised— the story contest culminating in the dinner— and he finds a way to anticipate a consequential transformation which his 207 8eQse of limitation to empirical modes of knowing would not permit him to picture but his sense of ultimate realities requires him to express.

As the Parson speaks, the cloud of meaning which has been building from the start of the journey now rains down upon a line of figures, some of whom have shown a readiness to move out of the places their pasts would assign them, some of whom have not. The phenomenological strength of Chaucer's analysis lies in the very fact that the characters are not easily assigned to places on an ethical continuum; their semiological value is less than clear. But in the lack of clarity the possibility of motion, of salvation, is implied. Fidelity to nature is required of an artist whose sensibilities are conditioned by a philosophical tradition which separates categories of knowing from categories of being. But in giving us some characters whose singleness of literary purpose suggests fixedness, if not in those characters at least in the sort of consciousness they represent, Chaucer is able to refer to the spiritual landscape upon which the pilgrimB move. Chaucer anticipates a complete transformation.

It may seem that Leff's way of characterizing Chaucer's age in general— empiricism ends in fideism-*‘Characterizes Chaucer himself especially well. However, we ought to exercise caution if the idea of associating Chaucer's realism with skepticism occurs to us. If we consider the manner of the Corpus Christi plays— the speech of the tormentors in the Towneley Buffeting Play, the famous characterization of Hak and his wife in the Second Shepherd's Play— it oust seem to us that the Christianity of Chaucer's age expressed a very inclusive urge. In the little ballad Judas, a work which humanizes a man whose evil derived, according to scripture, directly from Satan, we have seen an example of this inclusive urge. Moreover, we have seen how grounding for that urge might be found in scholastic tradition: nothing is in the mind which has not been in the senses, but everything in the world, in one way or another, reflects the unseen perfections of Qod. LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED

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