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Piers Plowman THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO PIERS PLOWMAN EDITED BY ANDREW COLE AND ANDREW GALLOWAY Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 130.132.173.181 on Fri Nov 21 02:24:17 GMT 2014. http://universitypublishingonline.org/ebook.jsf?bid=CCO9780511920691 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs,UnitedKingdom Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107401587 ⃝c Cambridge University Press 2014 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2014 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc AcataloguerecordforthispublicationisavailablefromtheBritishLibrary Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman / edited by Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway. pages cm. – (Cambridge Companions to Literature) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-00918-9 (hardback) 1.Langland,William,1330?–1400?PiersPlowman. I.Cole,Andrew,1968– editor of compilation. II. Galloway, Andrew, editor of compilation. pr2015.c27 2013 821′.1 – dc23 2013039685 isbn 978-1-107-00918-9 Hardback isbn 978-1-107-40158-7 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 130.132.173.181 on Fri Nov 21 02:24:17 GMT 2014. http://universitypublishingonline.org/ebook.jsf?bid=CCO9780511920691 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 3 STEVEN JUSTICE Literary history and Piers Plowman Literary history examines how works emerge from the conditions they inherit from older works, and how they in turn set the conditions of later ones; it is a history internal to literary composition and notionally distinct from its place in cultural and political history. Any work is conceivable only against a background of context and expectation, established by works already extant, which shapes style, structure, form, and conceptual presup- position for literary performances – that, indeed, defines what is “literary.” Such expectations can be constraints, but also questions or provocations, embodiments of what has already been accomplished and therefore starting- points for what has not: ambitions already realized imply and help formulate others. So it is useful to regard every literary work as an answer to ques- tions implicitly posed by what preceded it and a source of new ones posed to what follows. These questions and answers, like all real questions and real answers, are partly open, undetermined (if they were not, the ques- tions would answer themselves). To write such a history means discerning the questions and the answers; this effort requires interpretation, which includes doubling or repeating the interpretation of predecessors that later authors have undertaken. Thus described, literary history may sound trivial almost by ambition; while one of literature’s claims on the attention is its ability to evoke and embody what lies beyond its mechanisms – to make another life, another time, seem drastically present – this inquiry worries about the mechanisms’ internal history. But these mechanisms are instruments of practical and speculative reason, by which experience can be construed for thought and thoughts rendered available to experience. To understand them is to under- stand something about understanding itself, about how it is derived, pack- aged, communicated, and used; it is also to appreciate how complex is the enterprise of apprehending things past. This may still seem thin gruel. But if literature can add anything to what can be known of history by other means, it does so by virtue of being literary. Understanding what its 50 Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 130.132.173.181 on Fri Nov 21 02:24:31 GMT 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9780511920691.005 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 Literary history and Piers Plowman properties entail, discerning their internal logic, is prerequisite to grasping what they do and do not communicate. Clarity on that distinction can pro- vide new material for studying the past; it also offers some indemnity against swallowing its fictions. Piers Plowman and earlier literary history AfullaccountofPiers Plowman’s literary history would trace all the fila- ments of literary accomplishment that funnel into it and all of those that diffused back out, and would be unbearable to writer and readers both. In so short a space as this, even a superficial survey is impossible (and Chapters 10 and 11 below on the poem’s reception make it partly redun- dant). Instead, this chapter outlines the central problem of its literary history and the logic that makes it so. This problem touches upon the very desire, just mentioned, for poetry to be more than poetry. Piers Plowman offers an interesting challenge to literary history because it has regularly convinced its readers that it has no part in such a history, that it is something more than art. Almost from the moment of its appearance, the poem was treated more often as a document than as a literary artifact, and in some ways still is. One of the work’s first interpretations was that of English rebels against the organization of justice and of agricultural production in 1381;lettersoriginatingamong them counted “Pers Plouȝman” among their number, and bade him “go to his werk.” (If the account offered in Chapter 11 is correct, then this conclusion is wrong, and vice versa.) Like many readers who followed, theirs was not a failure to understand the poem but a choice to make it other than a poem – in this case, a language for the moral economy of rural self-government.1 In a different context but with a similar effect, Robert Crowley, printing the poem in the Protestant reign of Edward VI, declared the author a reformer who, like John Wyclif, “doeth moste christianlye enstruct the weake, and sharply rebuke the obstinate blynde.”2 The wry recent comment that “life would be much simpler if one could show that Wyclif . was the unknown author of Piers Plowman”showsthatmany still think of it as a tract for and symptom of its times.3 Subtler readings, including some of the best in the criticism, assume that the poem’s difficulties are not created by it for its intellectual or artistic ends, but for it by ideology’s contradictions, theology’s puzzles, or the brutalities of political domination; its difficulties, then, are taken as the honorable scars of violent encounter with something tougher or realer than art. But while readers and scholars join in wanting to find something more exigent than poetry behind Piers Plowman’s manic energy, they chronically 51 Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 130.132.173.181 on Fri Nov 21 02:24:31 GMT 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCO9780511920691.005 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 steven justice differ over what that was. The feeling that the poem has encountered some- thing that overwhelmed its design arises not because one can see anything that obviously did so, but because the poem conveys the sensation that something has. That is, making the reader feel the presence of a history that has broken the poem’s design is one of the most complex accomplishments of that design. How is this a question of literary history? A contrast with Chaucer will clarify. That he marks a new generation in a cosmopolitan literary history, that he follows upon Dante and Petrarch – and with them upon Jean de Meun, and with them all upon Ovid and Virgil – are points he treats as givens. Courtship performed, in all relevant senses of the noun, governed (sometimes tyrannically, as The Legend of Good Women’s prologue attests) by convention, he treats – at least until writing the Canterbury Tales – as poetry’s given matter; Chaucer’s poems achieve their novelty through performance of derivation, citation, and allusion. This literary agenda is clearest when derivation and citation themselves become indirections, as when Troilus and Criseyde deliberately misidentifies its source (conjuring “Lollius” from Horace) and transparently mischaracterizes its process (translating “every word” [1.394–7]). Books, in a tradition self-aware and coherent, form the substance from which Chaucer’s poems arise and to which they look to return: they originate from books (the Metamorphoses in The Book of the Duchess,theAeneid in The House of Fame) and hope to join them (the classical “makyng” catalogued in the Troilus’s envoy [5.1789]). Even the reader new to Piers Plowman can see that it works differently. It seems at once incompletely literary and oppressively textual. It is saturated with writing. The Latin words and phrases and lines, marked in manuscripts by script or rubrication and in modern editions by italics, are ubiquitous, scoring the surface of the text with their own. But books,asobjects,donot appear.4 Texts do, as units cut loose from context and intruding upon the poem rather than shaping it. They befall its action and thought in unantici- pated and unanticipatable encounters. Texts are persons you meet (B.4.143), landmarks you pass (B.5.567), destinations you come to (C.18.4); things you might build on (B.1.86 and elsewhere) or pull from a bag and eat (B.14.47– 50); instruments you can blow and the breath you blow them with (B.5.506– 7); mute objects (C.2.39); warning signs (B.5.461).5 They appear as bodies foreign to the poem, not discursive models it has internalized – things it meets with rather than things it thinks with.
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